Desperate Measures

“Again, be specific.”

“I thought perhaps I’d arrange for your men to trap me on one of your yachts. I’d blow it and myself up. My body would never be found. Presumably sharks and other scavengers would have eaten what was left of me. Of course, I wouldn’t actually have been on the yacht. But your men, having watched the explosion from another yacht, would testify that they’d seen me go aboard.”

Sloane’s voice trembled with enthusiasm. “It might work.”

“One of my yachts?” Gable squinted. “You imagine expensive ways to disappear.”

“Another factor that makes it convincing. Given the magnitude of your property loss, the police wouldn’t think that you were involved.”

“He has a point,” Sloane said quickly.

Gable scowled at his fellow grand counselor, then redirected his calculating gaze at Pittman. “Forgive my colleague’s outbursts. He’s forgotten one of the primary rules of negotiation. Never let your opponent know your actual opinion of his argument.”

“I thought we were here to be candid,” Pittman said.

“Then why haven’t you yourself been completely open? You expect me to believe that after you pretend to commit suicide you’ll disappear forever and we’ll have nothing to fear from you.”

“That’s right,” Pittman lied.

“What guarantees do we have?”

“I told you. I want to live. I don’t want to be hunted anymore. I want to be left alone.”

“Under an assumed name.”

“Yes.”

“With Ms. Warren.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps in Mexico. Perhaps farther south. In a country where the economy is such that a million dollars is worth considerably more.”

“Yes.”

“And after the barrage of telephone calls last night,” Gable asked with irritation, “how do you intend to protect us from the other people who-thanks to you-have acquired knowledge of our private affairs?”

“Your daughter, for example?”

“In particular.”

“Those phone calls were staged to get your attention,” Pittman said. “To put pressure on you so you’d agree to this meeting. To make you want to end this before it spreads any farther. The truth is, your daughter doesn’t know anything for certain. If you agree to my terms, I’ll go back to her and-”

From somewhere in the house, a phone rang, the faint sound echoing.

Pittman glanced past Webley toward the hall as the phone rang a second time.

“It’s not important,” Gable said. “The fax machine in my home office is on a line that’s separate from the main telephone line. That’s what you heard, the fax machine. Two rings and it answered.”

Pittman nodded. “If you agree to my terms, I’ll go back to your daughter and behave irrationally enough that she’ll lose faith in my credibility. My apparent suicide will make her even more skeptical about me. She’ll be forced to conclude that her accusations, based on what I told her, are the nonsense you say they are.”

“I like it,” Sloane said eagerly. “It makes sense. It can get us out of the mess we’re in.”

“Winston.” Gable’s aged eyes flashed. “Your persistent outbursts force me to violate protocol. I have never before done this in a negotiation. But you leave me no choice. I must ask you not to interrupt me again.”

“But-”

“Winston!” Gable’s chest heaved, the effort of emotion having an obvious weakening effect on him.

Sloane looked abashed and lowered his gaze toward his hands.

Gable’s breath rate subsided. He composed himself and studied Pittman, frowning. “So you restricted the information that you gave to my daughter.”

“That’s right.”

Gable shook his head in disagreement. “I suddenly have doubts about you.”

“Doubts?”

“To enlist my daughter’s aid, it isn’t logical that you would have held back. To make your strongest case, you would have told her everything you know. I’m beginning to worry that all of this has been needless. What exactly do you know? What are we buying? What precisely is worth one million dollars and two passports?”

“Duncan Kline was an instructor at Grollier Academy.”

Gable raised his bushy white eyebrows and gestured for Pittman to continue.

“He liked to gather the brightest students around him,” Pittman said. “He persuaded them to join him in small study groups. He nurtured them.”

“Of course. Nurturing is something that a good teacher does automatically.”

“But good teachers don’t molest their students,” Pittman said.

Gable’s face became rigid, his wrinkles deepening.

“Duncan Kline carefully prepared his few chosen students,” Pittman said. “It took time and devotion, painstaking kindness and delicate reassurance. At last he made himself so necessary in their lives, so essential to their emotional well-being, that they found themselves incapable of resisting his advances. You and the other grand counselors, all of you were molested by him. It’s affected you ever since.”

Gable kept staring, his wrinkled features reminding Pittman of a crust of mud that was cracking.

“Molested?” Gable asked. “You honestly think I’d go to all this trouble to hide the fact that we were molested as students at Grollier? Which we were, by the way.” Gable raised his face to the beamed ceiling and burst out laughing, his feeble Adam’s apple bobbing, his bony throat sounding as if gravel were stuck in it. At once he seemed to strangle on his laughter. In pain, he lowered his face, tugged out his handkerchief, and coughed repeatedly into it. His pale face turned red from effort. The spasms slowly subsided. “Of course we were molested.” He swallowed and put away his handkerchief. “If you revealed that information, I could easily turn it to my advantage, eliciting sympathy from the media. In America today, there is no such thing as shame, only prurience and pity. You know nothing that threatens me, Mr. Pittman. You’re wasting my time.”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“Oh? Are you suggesting that you have information of more substance to share with us?”

Pittman’s chest ached, swollen with pressure. His heart pumped faster. He had hoped that Gable would take for granted that Pittman had discovered his secret. An open discussion, in which Gable revealed details that he assumed were shared knowledge, had been part of Pittman’s strategy. What he hadn’t counted on was that Gable, the lifelong negotiator, wasn’t about to acknowledge any information unless Pittman volunteered it first.

8

Sweat rolled down Pittman’s back. Paradoxically cold, the sweat stuck his clothes to his skin, making him shiver, although he fought not to show it. Okay, he told himself nervously, you came here because you felt your best weapon was your ability to interview somebody. Well, it’s time to prove how good you are. Let’s see you interview a world-class negotiator.

He turned toward the wall-length window, straining to concentrate, composing his thoughts. Sunlight gleamed into the room, making him squint. Nonetheless, he was able to focus on the fir trees beyond the window, amazingly green and clear, preciously beautiful, given his proximity to death. At the bottom of the wooded slope beyond the house, distant golfers took advantage of the pleasant April day. A man in a golf cart drove past a sand trap, toward where his ball had landed near the wall that separated Gable’s estate from the golf course.

Pittman stared at the sand trap, and again he couldn’t help being aware of the bitter irony that a week ago his nightmare had begun near a golf course and now was about to end near another one.