For a moment she looked confused, and he was ready to end it there. But she popped a palm off her forehead. “Oh, you mean Mrs. Warbitcher.”
“Yeah, I guess. How much do you remember about her?”
“A lot. Too much. Our most high-maintenance account.”
“I heard from someone that she had Parkinson’s.”
“Only later. She was just very, well, let’s say demanding.”
This didn’t match what Charles had told him, about a sweet, naive old lady who had entrusted Jack with everything. Maybe it was a matter of perspective. “In what ways?” he inched forward and asked.
“What way wasn’t she? She thought that bundle of dough gave her the right to be that way. She’d had a miserable life, and after the money came in, took it out on everybody. Drove Jack and me crazy.”
“I heard she went on a long cruise.”
“Oh that.” Su Young laughed. “What a relief. For us, I mean. I’m sure it was miserable for the cruise line.”
“Then she disappeared, right?”
“Someplace in Greece, I think.”
“Any idea what happened to her?”
“My guess would be the crew tossed her overboard. I hate to speak ill of the dead, but she really was a demanding bitch.”
“That bad, huh?”
“I could tell you stories for an hour.”
“What did Jack do when she disappeared?” he asked, before the stories could start.
“He, or maybe the firm, hired some private detectives. For good or bad, she was our client. Jack insisted on it.”
“Was she ever found?” Morgan asked.
“What’s this got to do with Jack’s background check?” She was staring at him with growing suspicion now.
“Just following up on something somebody mentioned. Please bear with me.”
“No, she wasn’t found.”
“And this was right around the time Jack left the firm?”
“I suppose it was around then.”
“Why did Jack leave?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“We did. I’m corroborating. Please answer.”
Su Young pondered this for a moment, as though she had never considered the question. “You know what I thought? I don’t think he was
“Wanted to make more money, huh?”
“No. I mean, I guess who doesn’t, right? Just, well, it wasn’t a nice place to work. Cutthroat, dog-eat-dog. Plenty of backstabbing and unhappy people.”
“Did Jack have any problems with the CEO?”
“You mean Kyle?”
A quick nod. “I heard they were at each other’s throats.”
“No, he… well, they all loved Jack. He brought in so much money, the big shots pretty much left him alone. Even gave him a million-dollar bonus when he walked out the door. Should’ve been a lot more, given what he did for them, you ask me.”
Morgan had a long list of questions left to ask but it would be a waste of time to prolong this. Jack’s more questionable activities evidently did not make it down to the secretarial level, which came as no surprise. Morgan put down the baby and stood. He straightened his jacket, then slapped his head. “Oh, one last question.”
Su Young was already out of her chair and moving for the child he had just put down. The kid was making fast tracks for the hot radiator in the corner, but she snatched him off the floor just in time.
As nonchalantly as possible, Morgan asked, “Do you remember who introduced Jack to the firm? They must’ve been close. Another Princeton grad, I think.”
“Tough question.” She paused for a moment. “All the Wall Street firms are loaded with Ivy studs. But Jack was always pretty close with Lew Wallerman. I think they knew each other before.”
Morgan thanked her, then walked out and closed the door quietly behind him. He stopped for a moment on the porch, withdrew the copy of Primo’s personnel chart, and began running his finger down the page, scanning for Wallerman.
The thirtieth line down, there he was, listed as working in wealth management, just like Jack.
“You’re Charles, and I got you,” he said out loud, and laughed.
19
By the second week of January, polymer-coated vehicles of all sorts were flying off the line. Humvees, Bradleys, M1 tanks, even the newest addition to the combat fleet, the Stryker, were lined up bumper-to-bumper to get a lifesaving face-lift. Fights broke out between the crews as they jockeyed to be next in line; the alternative was a long wait in a country where bombing had become the national sport.
FOB Falcon; Camp Graceland; Rasheed Airbase; Camp Cuervo; Engineer Base Anvil; Camp Whitford; Camp Whitehouse, FOB Rustamiyah, Baghdad-all had painting facilities that were beehives of activity. Converting the same crews who had been armor-plating the vehicles into painting teams proved to be kid’s play.
Even after spreading the chemical production around five different facilities located in five different states, the frenetic effort to supply sufficient quantities of the polymer fell abysmally short. Five or six large batches arrived in Iraq improperly mixed and had to be dumped, late at night, into nearby Iraqi rivers. Every other day, it seemed, the painting in Iraq ground to a halt. Quality control was another problem. Complaints poured back to the Pentagon about slipped schedules, shoddy workmanship, and the slapdash, miserably managed nature of the entire operation.
The leaders of CG weathered the storm of criticism the same way they had withstood the old chorus of complaints about its uparmoring program, a program that had also experienced notable problems. They ignored it. Frankly, it came as little surprise. The same inept managers oversaw the polymer application, the same lackadaisical crews worked three-hour shifts, stole off for long lunch breaks, and retreated to their air-conditioned trailers by three every afternoon for prolonged happy hours.
CG fell back on the tried-and-tested excuse that it was hard to hire good people for long-term duty in a scary war zone. What they wouldn’t admit was the bigger truth: in an effort to pump up profits, at the pitiful wages they were offering, nobody with half a brain would consider working for CG in Iraq.
After a while, once the noise grew too loud, CG shipped over a few new bodies and added night crews who quickly adopted the local work habits and managed to produce only a minor improvement.
But the results were spectacular, if you ignored the occasional blemish. In the first month, out of twenty attacks, only three coated vehicles were destroyed by roadside bombs. In each case, as investigations later revealed, the cause was faulty workmanship; CG’s coating crews had somehow, incredibly, overlooked the need to paint the whole vehicle.
To manage the finances of this exploding new company, CG assigned a veteran CFO, a carefully chosen executive well seasoned in defense contracts, who promptly handpicked a team of cutthroats with similar backgrounds. Military contracting officials were notoriously overworked and outnumbered, and often were far less skilled than their private-sector counterparts. CG’s team knew all the tricks, and took them to the max.
They padded the hours, added hundreds of ghost workers on the ground, jacked the cost of materials and production facilities through the ceiling, and double-billed as often as they thought they could get away with. And why not? The risks were almost inconsequential; in the unlikely event they were caught, a light slap on the wrist was the worst they could expect. The polymer was far too vital for the Pentagon to even consider anything as drastic as a punitive cancellation.
