Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Mondays were straight CEO days, when what he had to do was the big-issue stuff: legal battles, major purchaser relations, regulatory lobbying, strategic planning, new technologies, energy market analysis. He was good at that stuff-better than Dad had been, certainly-but he looked forward to the end of the week when his role changed with his clothes and he conducted his round of site inspections. He agreed with Garrett's idea that for a family-owned company to succeed the boss had to stay in touch with conditions on the ground. It was how you earned the loyalty of the troops, maintained morale and motivation, kept a real sense of the men, machines, and mountains of rock that lay behind the figures. Donny made a point of dragging some of the number crunchers along with him, just to get their scrawny asses off their chairs and remind them what it really meant to dig coal out of the goddamned ground.

And of course there were also the special projects that needed hands-on supervision, where leaving things to middle-management intermediaries would risk inconveniences and indiscretions.

The sight of the Maynard building began to really get on his nerves, and Donny turned away. Checking his watch, he found that he had less than twenty minutes before he had to leave for the lunch meeting with the audit team. A bilious, burning sensation nagged under his breastbone, chronic heartburn or acid reflux or whatever. Stress related, his doctor insisted. To which Donny had replied, "Tell me something I don't know." Hung in gilt frames on the inner wall, the three oil portraits of his forebears stared back at him, and the eyes of his father seemed to meet his with a glint of contempt. "You're a worrier," Dad had always told him. "Can't be a nervous Nellie in this business. Gotta grow a thick skin."

Garrett certainly hadn't been a worrier. He'd been a man of action. Old school: decisive, blunt, charming as hell, bulldog persistent, clever but not given to deliberation or self-criticism. Dad had neither understood nor accepted the growing complexity of the energy industry and the politics that went with it. Back in the 1890s when Great-grandfather McCarty had started out, even in 1964 when Garrett had taken over his father's holdings, the landscape had been pretty wide open. The rules of the Wild West still pertained, strong guys could still make the rules for themselves and their companies as they went along. If you ruffled some feathers, got some people's backs up, so be it and devil take 'em, you slugged it out and the best man won. But it wasn't that way anymore. Energy sources had diversified, coal had lost market share, margins had shrunk. Regulations had proliferated, citizen action groups had weighed in, the Indians had gotten restless, and politics with the big oil and nuke guys had gotten complex and devious: your good buddies one minute, competitors who would stick a knife in your back the next. Plus technology was changing so fast that by the time you finally decided to invest in the latest equipment it had already been replaced on the cutting edge by something even glitzier, more efficient, and more costly.

Donny looked over the audit materials he'd be reviewing today, increasingly distracted by the gnawing under his ribs. He hated the sensation, but he'd learned to make use of it: The heartburn was often an indicator that something was on his mind and needed attention. So what was today's trigger?

Simple: Julieta. That was it. What was she up to? Because, parapsychologist or no parapsychologist, Julieta didn't just visit the mine for the fun of it.

Garrett's portrait caught his eye, and he could almost hear his father's derisive voice: Worrier! To which Donny replied, Yeah, Dad, I'm a worrier. Partly because you left me with so many things to worry about. One of them being your sweet ex-wife and all the crap that came with.

A knock sounded at the door to the outer office, and after a pause the heavily paneled walnut slab swung open. Nick Stephanovic poked his blunt head in.

"Sahib," Nick said. "Just to let you know I'm ready when you are." He extended a thick wrist and tapped his watch.

"Hey, Nicko," Donny said. "I'm almost there. Come in for a minute. Shut the door."

Nick stepped inside, swung the door shut, and stood waiting with his hands folded in front of him. His ancestors were immigrants who had come to cut timber and lay railroads in the 1880s and had stayed to work in the mines that had flourished throughout the region. His Czech blood notwithstanding, he had the classic pug nose of the shantytown Irish tough, and though when in Albuquerque he wore a suit expensive enough for a CEO, it tended to cling to his broad shoulders and bulky upper arms and did nothing to conceal what he really was: bodyguard, personal assistant, driver, confidential consultant, and odd-job man. Among the rules Garrett had instilled in Donny from childhood was that you had to build a core of absolutely loyal retainers around you. In Donny's experience, there was no such thing as absolute loyalty-human sentiment being almost infinitely malleable, offered the right persuasions-but Nick came close. He was forty-nine, and Donny had inherited him as his right-hand man, along with the rest of the company, when Garrett had died.

Nothing would surprise Nick. After working for two generations of McCartys, he knew just about everything about McCarty family business, and what he didn't know he'd been given to surmise.

Donny rolled down his shirtsleeves, took his jacket from the coat-rack behind his desk, slipped it on, shot his cuffs. He went back to sorting papers, taking his time, letting Nick wait as he thought things through.

"Nick," Donny said finally, "remind me when we found those mutes out at Hunters Point-what was it, last year? Year before?"

"What the hell?"

"You remember our unannounced visitors to the site the other day? Mrs. Ex-McCarty and friend?"

"That's what that was about? Mutes?" Nick grinned incredulously.

Donny shrugged. "Supposedly. The woman with her claims to be a paranormal researcher. I've checked her out, she seems legit- for a purveyor of bull, anyway. I agreed to meet her tomorrow to talk about mutes. Like I'm some kind of expert."

"Why meet with her?"

Donny put the last of the papers into his briefcase and snapped it shut. He felt a hard smile on his lips. Because, he told the portrait of his father, there's more than one way to skin a cat. Sometimes it's better not to just bulldoze your way through. Sometimes you want subtlety, Dad. Finesse. "Call it counter-intelligence," he told Nick.

Nick nodded, knowing what he meant: trying to figure out what Julieta was up to. "Last year. Spring. Two cut-up horses, over in the eastern end of Area Eighteen."

"Anything strike you as coincidental about that location?"

Nick's face changed, amused contempt for Julieta giving way to a thoughtful look and then a dangerous glower that Donny savored.

"Oh" was all Nick said.

They didn't say any more as they went through the outer offices, tossed a wave to the secretaries, and walked out to the elevator. They waited in silence, but once the doors had shushed shut, Donny turned to Nick. "So what's your day like?"

"I got a couple of items, but they can wait if you've got something more pressing."

"This Dr. Lucretia Black, 'Cree' Black. From Seattle. I need to find a photo of her from somewhere. Make sure we're talking about the same person before I meet her."

"Okay. What else?"

"Supposedly there's something oddball happening at the school. That's what Julieta implied, and I also got one of those tantalizing wee-hours phone calls from our good friend, suggesting she knew of goings on there that might be of interest to us. It'll take the usual teasing out and flattery and playing games. But my thought here is, if Julieta has in mind making problems for us, I'd like to have something we can throw right back at her. Give her grief in return."