Colin Harrison - Afterburn

"That's the end of my part of the conversation," Martha said. "I'm going to let you and Charlie have a few minutes." She left the room.

He pulled his chair a little closer.

"Hi." Pamela Archer smiled, eyes bright.

She's looking at me like I'm a goldmine, he thought. "Miss Archer, I know this interaction is a bit strange."

"Presumably for you, too."

He nodded.

Her eyes were worried. "How many responses to the ad did you get?"

"More than a hundred. We're still getting them."

She blinked anxiously, color blotting her neck and cheeks. "How many so-called finalists are there?"

"Nine."

"How many have you spoken with?"

"Six, including you."

She played with her hands in her lap. "It's a pretty crazy way to make a baby."

"Yes."

"You already have children?"

He nodded.

"Why another, if you don't mind me asking?"

Charlie eased back. "The other women have asked the same question. I guess the reason is that my family is sort of dying out. My son died years ago and my daughter has fertility problems."

She looked into his face with sadness. "But you would never see the child."

"I know."

"That would be, maybe, painful?"

"Maybe. But knowing a healthy child was-"

The door opened. Martha poked her head inside. "Charlie, you have an urgent call."

Oh, Ellie, he said to himself as he walked down the hall toward Martha's private office, please not Ellie.

"Mr. Ravich, this is Tom Anderson in Shanghai," came a squeaky voice when Charlie picked up the phone. "Your secretary gave me this number. I don't think we've met, sir. I'm the assistant construction engineer on your factory. I've got bad news."

"Where's Pete Conroy?" barked Charlie, angry that he'd been scared.

"Down south trying to line up our concrete supply for the next month. He's asked me to call you because I'm on-site."

He stared west through Martha's window, thirty stories up, high enough to see the planes swinging around into LaGuardia. "Tell me the problem."

"We've had a construction stoppage, sir. Let me explain that. We had a laborer killed in a scaffolding accident yesterday. A terrible thing, but in fact it was his own fault. We have scaffolding accidents every day in Shanghai. The Chinese don't have the same sort of standards-"

"It's all bamboo poles and ropes."

"Right. So the municipal authority has shut us down. I came in this morning and saw the site posted. Had a hell of an argument with them, but you can only push so far. We couldn't get our steel in today, I had to get the trucks parked at one of our other sites, but this creates a risk. Good Japanese steel disappears in this place if you don't get it in within a few days. I've made what inquiries I can with the interpreter, and I plan to take the local codes inspector out for a drink tonight to find out what I can, but he's in the pocket of the big guys."

I could land that, he thought, watching a 747 bank over Brooklyn. Like parking a bus. "How legitimate is the shutdown? They have a case?"

"All the scaffolding is subcontracted to one of the same three companies, which in turn are owned, or controlled, I should say, by the municipal authorities." Anderson was getting his words out quickly, like a kid losing air. "I mean, there are several hundred major construction sites and thousands of smaller ones. I think it's one of two things. Either there's a war going on between the scaffolding companies, and one of them got one of their municipal people to order our shutdown-"

"That's the first scenario, what's the next?"

"It may be that the scaffolding companies are just trying to shake down the Western companies more than usual."

Ming! Charlie thought. I have dinner with Ming tonight. "When will you know?"

No answer. A stalling pause. "It takes a little time, in my experience."

"That answer is a torpedo, Mr. Anderson. That answer sinks my boat."

"Okay, yeah, I'd say a week or two. But when the site isn't active, your workers go somewhere else, and it takes a while to get the crews back up. You have to reacquaint everyone with the project. Get the materials moving in sequence again, things like that. The project will slow maybe three or four weeks or more if we don't get this thing resolved fast. Plus, we are moving toward the rainy season, and the plan was to get the site enclosed before then, start in on the gross electrical."

"So what are you doing?"

"I've shifted about half the crews to another site and I'll park them there for a few days, just to keep them together, but that becomes an extraordinary expense over the contracted bid, so I need to get-"

"Yes," Charlie interrupted. "Fine, approved. That's-what? — only a couple of hundred thousand, but that doesn't get us back up and going. We need some answers from the municipal people. What about that guy, the subdeputy mayor for the special economic zone? I just saw him a couple of weeks ago. We got along fine. We had a few drinks, in fact. He could straighten this out."

"I can't call him, Mr. Ravich. He's too high up," Anderson explained. "It would take a couple of weeks to work that out through intermediaries. They know I'm just the construction manager. Pete Conroy is in Shenzhen, can't get away. The principal architects do have that Swiss guy-"

"No, no, he'll just piss them off. He's too abrupt. Too German. They know he hates them."

"You said it, not me."

Ming's bank had an office in Shanghai, and Charlie would have to be careful about how he described the factory's progress. If Ming had doubts, he could run someone over to the site in a taxi and have a report in an hour. On the other hand, the problem didn't sound very bad yet. Maybe it was better not to meet the subdeputy mayor.

"What about the guy who runs the scaffolding company?" Charlie asked.

"I can set that up."

"Do it."

They would sit down in the Peace Hotel overlooking the Huangpu River, drink some bad Chinese wine, and get the thing worked out. You needed the personal connection in this situation. Someone with gray hair who could make a toast.

"All right," he told Anderson. "I'll be there Friday afternoon, your time. I'll be at the Peace Hotel. But I'm going to call you tonight, my time, to go over this."

"I hate to say it, but this is probably the best thing."

"Meanwhile, maintain some activity at the construction site."

"You mean make it look active?"

"I mean make it look fucking busy."

"So excellent to see you again, Charlie." Mr. Ming nodded slyly as he slipped his soft fingers into Charlie's bony paw a few hours later. The restaurant was packed. Swell place, twenty-dollar appetizers. In the corner, Barbara Walters, pretending you didn't notice her. Toupee-to-implant ratio almost even. "You look very healthy after your visit to Hong Kong."

"I had a good trip."

"Profitable?"

Did Ming know about his speculation on the death of Sir Henry Lai? What didn't he know? "Yes."

Charlie nodded sternly to the maitre d', and he and Ming were conveyed to Charlie's table, past other businessmen being tortured by their moneylenders, past the piles of cheese and vegetables and aging Italian waiters who could discern the relative power of their clientele with the same dispassion they imposed on cuts of steak-and present the check accordingly. Dinner will run five hundred dollars, thought Charlie, as much as Dad made in a month at my age.

Mr. Ming accepted his napkin, then lifted his eyes. Again the fox's smile. After they ordered, he asked, "How is business?"

"We're on track for the next quarter."

"How is the plant construction going?"

"Some delays. The usual stuff."

"How worried are you about Manila Telecom?"

"Worried," said Charlie. "Worried enough."

"Let me show you how worried we are." Ming slipped his hand into his coat. He handed Charlie the sheet. "This is a report generated by our investment division. We have started to examine the telecom supply business as a whole." Teknetrix's market share and supplier relationships have been eroded by Manila Telecom's recent surge, but this trend may be only temporary, as its product development is first-rate and its marketing systems highly developed. Yet Teknetrix remains a viable takeover candidate by a telecom-supplier competitor of equal or greater size because of its superior applications for WAN internetworking interfaces, Internet service provider (ISP) servers, multiplexers, digital access and cross systems, channel banks and cellular base stations. The company is quite an attractive target.