He held his drink upright with his elbow braced on the arm of the chair and swirled the ice around the glass, studying me while he continued studying his options.
“Thanks for the lesson, George. People would pay a lot of money for wisdom like that.”
“They do.”
“I’ll start paying when you tell me something I don’t already know.”
“You’ll be able to afford that when I make you a rich man,” he said with a soft smile. “Well, not rich exactly, though wealthy enough to allay any financial concerns, which by my reckoning should be considerable.”
Okay, I thought. That I didn’t know. It must have showed on my face.
“Don’t tell me Jason didn’t mention the intellectual property dispute we’re wrapped up in. The one we’ll apparently have to settle, which of course is tantamount to admitting we’ve lost.”
He had. Jason Fligh was the only friend I still had on Con Globe’s board. We’d kept in sporadic touch since I left the company. He’d told me that Con Globe and the people who bought my division had been sued by a group of employees—mostly design engineers and bench researchers—who challenged the clause in the company’s standard employment agreement dealing with patent rights on products developed on the job. We’d always assumed you signed all that away when you joined the firm, but an entrepreneurial spouse of one of my engineers—a legal expert on intellectual property—had apparently found a gaping loophole. The net result would likely be a nice hunk of dough distributed to some of the people I used to work with.
Jason called me when he heard about the lawsuit, but I had to disappoint him. The severance agreement I’d signed would trump anything in a potential settlement. I asked him not to tell me what that meant financially. I didn’t want numbers like that rattling inside a brain already overloaded with regret and self-recrimination.
I told as much to George Donovan.
“I know that, Sam. But what you
This is the sort of thing I’ve always detested. That skip of the heart you feel when some manipulator sneaks around your natural defenses and triggers a flood of hope and expectation. The killer emotions. The greatest peril to the healthful cynicism that sustains life. The last guy in the world I wanted this from was George Donovan.
I took a deep breath.
“God preserve me, George,” I said. “But I don’t want your fucking money. I do carpentry now for a guy named Frank Entwhistle. So far I haven’t seen strings attached to what he pays me. That’s my wealth in the world. I don’t have shit but I don’t owe anybody anything.”
“Including your daughter?” he asked.
That was the other thing I really detested. Being threatened with guilt. Especially since I had nothing to feel guilty about, except almost everything I’d ever done in my life. Especially when it came to my daughter.
“Looks like you could use another scotch,” I said. “Don’t get up. I’ll pour.”
I needed something to cover my reaction, though it probably wouldn’t work. I’d never underestimated George Donovan before, and it was good to remind myself not to start now.
I topped us off and sat back down.
“I’m getting this vague feeling you want something from me,” I said to him. “I don’t know. Call it a sixth sense.”
He let a pause collect in the air before answering.
“I do. I have a personal situation. One I can’t entrust to people inside, or outside, the company, however competent. To even speak the words necessary to explain the situation is a grave risk.”
“Hence all the carrots and sticks.”
“I know you’re indifferent to the fortunes of the firm, but I’ve stayed abreast of you. Jason Fligh, in fact, has kept me filled in, as a way of expressing his displeasure at the way he thinks you were mistreated. In analyzing my options, it dawned on me you’d be the perfect person to call on for assistance. Amusing notion, don’t you think?”
“No kidding.”
“I still believe it’s true, despite Mr. Ackerman’s dismal failure. Assuming your fabled talent for self-destruction hasn’t completely overwhelmed your common sense.”
Big assumption. I really didn’t give a crap about his money. But I did give a crap about my daughter. She was a full-grown adult supporting herself in the City. She’d never asked her parents for money, but if she did, it would have to come from her mother. I know it’s old-fashioned, but that bothered me.
“Okay,” I said, “let’s hear it.”
“There’ll be conditions.”
“You’re right. These are the conditions. You tell me what’s really going on and I’ll spring Ackerman. Though we keep the gun and the bullet it fired, which is safely lodged in my ceiling. You tell me what you want from me, and if I can do it, you release my royalties without qualification. If I can’t, everything goes back to the way it was and you leave me alone forever.”
He smiled. “Here I am giving you lessons on negotiation.”
“Yeah, I wrote the book on it. It’s called
He looked like he was still deliberating, but the climate in the room told me he was ready to get down to business.
“Very well,” he said, as if this was all my idea. “It’s rather simple, actually.”
“So am I. What is it?”
“I’ve lost my girlfriend and I need you to find her.”
“You’re serious.”
He looked at me like a boa constrictor who’d just noticed somebody’d dropped a mouse in his aquarium.
“Deadly serious.”
THREE
I HAD A LOT OF DIFFERENT TITLES when I worked for the company, but my job was basically to figure things out. First as a field engineer with the operating units, diagnosing process and equipment failure. I loved that job. Not for the big hairy catastrophes; those were relatively easy. But for the subtle ones, the failed efforts to optimize, or improve efficiency, or repurpose operations. The tricky stuff that usually had everybody stumped.
I loved walking onto a site, looking up at the gigantic cracking towers and smelling the fragrance of partially remediated sulfur and complex hydrocarbons. The look of confusion and near panic in the eyes of the plant operators and engineers—some filled with hostility toward the asshole from White Plains, whom they assumed was just another ambitious prick fresh out of the corporate grooming salon. What they got was a lot more complicated, but sometimes a lot more dangerous in the long run.
Whether this was adequate preparation for the project George Donovan had in mind was yet to be proven.
“Just give me the whole story,” I told him. “Don’t make me fill in the holes.”
He sighed.
“It all sounds so dreary and predictable. We hired a consultant to help with strategic planning. They assigned a woman who’d worked with us years before, when she was barely out of business school. A brilliant, attractive woman. We spent a lot of time together and you won’t believe me when I say I’ve never done anything like it before, in all my years, despite the ongoing opportunities. I don’t flatter myself to think it’s my beauty and charm. I know it’s just money and power. Nevertheless, this particular woman was different. More exotic, more intelligent, more powerfully compelling in her own right. And there I was approaching that now-or-never age. It all conspired to produce the inevitable.”
I looked around for a pad and pen to write things down. With all the craziness and adrenaline poisoning, I wasn’t about to trust my memory.
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Iku Kinjo. You may remember her. She remembered you.”
I did. Like he said, brilliant and compelling. I could see her sweeping into my office on slender legs and an
