Horizon

him this, the freedom he might earn from the telling. It was one gift she could still give him. “All right.”

“I told you what I did Before, right?”

“You were a corporate coach.” The phrase he’d used, on the day they met, as they walked through the streets of Silva, was “career consultant of last resort.”

“Yeah. And I was damn good. You want to know my specialty? Weak guys. Guys who lacked resolve. Guys who were…” Smoke’s expression was pained as he made air quotes around his words: “‘Weak on follow-through.’ ‘Soft leadership.’ ‘Unable to build consensus.’ But those are all just euphemisms, Cass-you want to know what for?”

His self-contempt was as clear as if it was painted on him.

“No balls. Those are all MBA-bullshit ways of saying a guy’s got no stones. And when that happened, they’d bring in the fix-it guy. Me. I charged heaven and earth for my services, but I gave a guarantee-you give me your hopeless case, I give you back a man who can whip it out when he needs to. Six hundred twenty-five bucks an hour, that was my top rate, and there were half a dozen clients in San Francisco who couldn’t get enough of me. Hell, I had a waiting list-seemed like there was no shortage of guys who tended to freeze in the clutch or hide behind the other guys’ skirts.

“What I’d do, I’d get a guy on his own turf. His office, sometimes his house. His club, for the ones who’d made it a little ways up the corporate ladder. See, Cass, they weren’t stupid. They were never stupid. They knew I was there because they were failing, and they wanted to impress me. It was fear, that was what drove most of them, fear that they didn’t measure up, as if my opinion of them mattered at all. But a lot of these guys, their daddies told ’em they weren’t worth shit and they got into the office and all of a sudden the guy in charge can seem damn intimidating. Bring in Ed Schaffer, the guy who listens, and they’d tell me their golf handicap, the women they’d bedded, hell, the car they drove. Take me out and buy me drinks even though their companies were paying me a goddamn fortune. I ate a hell of a lot of rare filet and drank my share of single malt in those days.”

Smoke laughed, a hollow sound that chilled Cass to the core. “I’d listen and drink their booze, and all the time I’m reading them, figuring out where their fear came from. Once I knew that, I had all I needed. I broke them down and built them back up, tore down the fear, taught them to go in for the kill, to man up on the job. ‘There’s a leader inside us all’-that’s what I had printed up on my business cards, Cass, but you know what it really should have said was ‘There’s a scared-shitless fuck inside us all’ and all you get for your six-fifty an hour is learning how to turn that guy into the bully. Go from the stepped-on to the guy who kicks sand into everyone else’s face.

“And the amazing thing was that no one ever figured it out. They loved me. ‘Ed, you’ve changed my life.’ ‘Ed, I feel like I can do anything now.’ I just smiled and bought them a final round and cashed my checks and never told them what they were really feeling was power. I didn’t teach anyone to lead, Cass, I taught ’em to take. To look at the world as their candy store and start turning over the shelves. Hell, I got Christmas cards from guys saying they’d dumped their mousy little girlfriends and finally told their families to fuck off and wasn’t it great, and deep down I knew what I was doing was not something I could be proud of-but I didn’t care. Because I think my biggest client was me. I was never a hopeless case, I wasn’t the class loser or the guy who couldn’t get a date or the one who got stuck in an entry-level job. I was just… unexceptional. But when I hung out my coach sign, it was like telling the world I knew things they didn’t. I liked the mystique. Hell, I used the mystique.”

Cass remembered how Smoke had described his old life: the sports cars, the mountain getaways, the skiing and boating and women. It was hard to imagine the man she knew-so carefully unassuming, so determined to maintain his low profile-in the picture he was painting. But she let him talk.

Chapter 44

“SO AROUND THE holidays a couple years back, I get this call from Travis Air Force Base. You might remember, I told you I used to work in that area, in Fairfield, and drink with some of the guys from the base after work. That wasn’t exactly true. They hired me, on a consulting basis, to come in and work with one of their guys who was losing his shit. Big project, top secret, very hush, I had to sign all these papers and I wasn’t allowed to talk about the project itself when I met with him, only about his job in general terms. The brass was in a tough situation because their leadership on the base had been stretched thin-I mean, it’s not hard to figure out why, now.”

In the summer of that year, bioterrorists attacked livestock in the U.S. and Asia; by fall there were reports of dead livestock on every continent. Overseas travel was halted and remote nations began to go dark, and skirmishes escalated and nuclear tensions were on the rise. Banks began to fail and currency was devalued worldwide.

“My guy Charlie-Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Benson, right out of central casting, looked like he’d been painted in his uniform by Norman Rockwell-he had somehow risen to be the number-two guy on the base. Only, the top guy, he got called to Wright-Patterson after the Christmas strike. Charlie was losing his shit because he had personnel problems, discipline problems, protesters every day right outside the gates. They send me in and for a while things are going okay. At first he’s just repeating everything I tell him to say. We take a tough stance, zero tolerance, a civilian guy misses a shift because his wife’s injured in a protest at a bank, we can him. We go out into the protesters one day with tear gas-next day it’s rubber bullets. The shit was hard-core, Cass, and it didn’t even matter because the media had bigger stories than a few tree huggers getting their feelings hurt.

“Only Charlie-he surprised me. He may have been the only guy I ever worked with who wasn’t a coward. He just wanted to think everything to death. How he got that far in the military I’ll never understand, because old Charlie’s response to everything was to commission studies and conduct interviews and draft plans. And he didn’t really have a taste for power, either. His heart wasn’t in it. At first he went along with what I told him to do because he was worried about his job. But as the country fell apart and we started hearing from the top brass less and less, he began to push back. He didn’t want to act, he wanted to wait. ‘Let’s see what the outlook is in six weeks,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s not respond out of panic,’ that was one of his favorites. Made me fucking nuts.

“I guess by then I figured this was the last big job I’d have until things sorted themselves out. It might sound funny but I wasn’t too worried about my own future. I had my place in the mountains, it was well stocked because we were always having power outages up there anyway. Nobody really believed this was the end of the world back then, more like a hell of an inconvenience that might wipe out the underclass and decimate a few island nations no one had ever heard of.

“So one day we get this order. The K734IV order, the one that went to all the bases around the country. By then I was reading Charlie’s mail before he did, confidential and otherwise. There’s about three hundred pages of scientific crap about the plant, but all we were concerned about was the flight schedule and maps. It’s a direct order, there’s no decision to be made.

“Except that the order has an attachment for bases in California only. Says how down in UC-Colima, they’ve developed this second strain that appears to boost immunity. They’re making it available on an optional basis, recommending a seed mix that includes two percent of this strain, which has some long name with initials and numbers, just like kaysev did back then. There wasn’t time to get approval in any other state. And on the back page there’s a test schedule and you can see they haven’t done even a quarter of the tests, and the results of the ones they have are either blacked out or marked ‘inconclusive.’

“So Charlie, he gets on the phone with the other guys, in Beale and Edwards and so forth. He wants to know what they’re thinking of doing. Now this is exactly the sort of behavior we’ve been working on for a month now, how he’s going to be accountable, immediate and decisive. A-I- D, that was his acronym, and I made him repeat it every morning when we started the workday. So when I hear him dicking around, should we do this, should we do that, I pretty much lose my shit. ‘This is where you take charge,’ I tell him. ‘This is where you come out strong, make a name for yourself.’ I ask him if he wants to go back to driving a desk in a cubicle when this is all over, or if he wants to be remembered as the guy who saved California’s ass-at least, a few more asses in his region than elsewhere.

“And still he fights me. There wasn’t enough testing, the results are inconclusive, the blacked-out data is troubling, blah blah blah. I’m ready to deck the guy myself. We’ve got a 4:00 p.m. deadline to make the decision, and by three o’clock all the other bases have checked in as no. They all lack the balls-at least,