Joseph Finder - Power Play

"That's on Sunday nights, Landry."

I snapped my fingers. "Rats."

"You know what you remind me of? Remember when we went to Norman Lang Motors to buy your Jeep, and we saw that huge black SUV with those opaque tinted windows? Totally blacked out?"

"The Pimpmobile. Yeah, it was a Denali. What about it-I'm a pimp? I'm gangsta?"

"You see a car like that in traffic, and you turn to look at who's inside, but you can't see in. So you stare, longer than you usually might. For all you know, they're staring back at you. But you have no idea who's in there. That's you."

"Ali, I think you've been spending too much time watching Pimp My Ride," I said, suppressing a surge of annoyance. "I'd say I'm more like the sign they had on the Jeep's windshield. Remember what it said?"

She shook her head.

"It said AS IS. Okay? That's me. What you see is what you get. Don't go looking for hidden secrets. There aren't any."

"I think there's a lot more to you than you want me to see."

"Sorry," I said. "Deep down, I'm shallow." I clicked on the TV. "Today's Monday, right?"

You married, Jake?" Latimer said.

"Nope."

"Planning on it?"

"No danger of it happening anytime soon."

"Hope you don't mind me saying, but you should. You need a stable home life if you want to make it in business, I've always thought. Wife and kids-it anchors you. It's a safe place. A refuge when work gets stressful."

"I just drink," I said.

He looked at me keenly for a second.

"I'm kidding," I said. "You got kids?"

He nodded, smiled. "A daughter. Twelve."

"Nice age," I said, just because that seemed like the thing to say.

His smile turned rueful. "It's a terrible age, actually. In the course of a month I went from a guy who couldn't do anything wrong to a guy who can't do anything right. A loser. Uncool."

"Can't wait to have kids, myself," I said with a straight face.

We changed into dinner clothes. Latimer's boxer shorts were white with green Christmas trees and red candy canes on them. "Christmas gift from my daughter," he said sheepishly. He was scrawny, with a smooth, pale, hairless belly and spindly legs. His skin was milky white, like he'd never been in the sun.

He put on gray dress slacks, a white button-down shirt, a black belt with a shiny silver buckle. When he'd finished changing, he took out a BlackBerry from his briefcase. A few seconds later, he said, "Oh, right. I keep forgetting. No signal here. I'm addicted. You know what they call these things, right? Crackberries?"

I'd only heard that about a hundred thousand times. "That's good," I said, and smiled.

"Don't know if you're a gadget guy like me, but here's my latest toy," he said proudly, pulling out an iPod. "Ever see one of these?"

Not one that old, actually. "Sure."

"My daughter got it for me. I've even learned how to download music. You like show tunes?"

I shrugged. "Sure." I hate show tunes.

"Feel free to borrow it whenever. I've got Music Man and Carousel and Guys and Dolls and Kismet. And Finian's Rainbow-you ever see Finian's Rainbow?"

"I don't think I have, no."

"The best ever. Even better than Man of La Mancha. We love musicals at home. Well, mostly it's my wife and I, nowadays. Carolyn only listens to bands with obscene names like The Strokes, I think they're called."

"Maybe I'll take a listen sometime."

"You know, I've always thought that so much of what goes on in the business world is like a musical. A stage play. A pageant."

"Never thought of it that way."

"Much of it's about perceptions. About how we perceive things, more than what's really going on. So Hank and Hugo and Kevin and all those guys look at you and think you're a kid, you're too young to know anything. Whereas in truth, you could be every bit as smart or qualified as any of them."

"Yeah, maybe. So what happens tonight?"

"The opening-night banquet. Cheryl gives a talk. The facilitator gives a rundown on the team-building exercises tomorrow. I talk at dinner tomorrow night. Lot of blabbing."

"What's your talk about?"

"Ethics and business."

"In general, or at Hammond?"

He compressed his lips, zipped up his suitcase, and placed it neatly at the back of the clothes closet. "Hammond. There's a win-at-any-cost culture in this company. An ethical rottenness, sort of a hangover from Jim Rawlings's hard-charging style. Cheryl's doing what she can to clean it up, but…" He shook his head, never finished his sentence.

Latimer was a real type: the clothes, the hair, the packing, everything conservative and by the book. A real rules-loving guy. I guess every company needs people like that.

But I was a little surprised to hear him criticize our old CEO. Rawlings had, after all, named Latimer general counsel. They were said to have been close.

"What's she doing to clean it up?" I said.

He hesitated, but only for a second or two. "Making it clear she won't tolerate any malfeasance."

"What sort of 'malfeasance' are you talking about?"

"Anything," he said, not very helpfully.

I didn't press it. "You think Rawlings encouraged that sort of stuff?"

"I do. Or he'd look the other way. There was always this feeling that, you know, there's Boeing and there's Lockheed; and then there's us. The predator and the prey. We were the little guy. We had to do whatever it took to survive. Even if we had to play dirty."

He was silent. He seemed to be staring out at the ocean.

"The big guys play dirty sometimes, too," I said.

"Lockheed cleaned up their act quite some time ago," Latimer said. "I know those guys. Boeing-well, who knows? But even if Boeing plays dirty, that doesn't justify our doing it. This is something Cheryl's really concerned about. She wants me to rattle some cages."

"That's not going to make you very popular around here."

He sighed. "A little late for that. I'm probably going to ruin some people's dinners tomorrow night. No one wants to hear doom-and-gloom stuff. But you've got to get their attention somehow. Like I always say, pigs get slaughtered."

He went quiet again. Then he said, "Look at this," and beckoned me to the window.

I crossed the room to the window. Off to the left, the sun was low on the horizon, a fat orange globe. The ocean shimmered. At first I didn't know what he was calling my attention to-the sunset, maybe? That seemed somehow, I don't know, sentimental for a guy like that. Then I noticed a dark shape moving in the sky. An immense bald eagle was dropping slowly toward the water. Its wingspan must have been six feet.

"Wow," I said.

"Watch."

With a sudden, swift movement, the eagle swooped down and snatched something up in its powerful talons: a glinting silver fish. Predator and prey, I almost said aloud, but that was just too self-evident to say without sounding like a moron.

We watched in silent admiration for a few seconds. "Boy," I finally said, "talk about symbolism."

Latimer turned to look at me, puzzled. "What do you mean?"

So maybe he wasn't all that insightful after all. "Then again, it's just a fish," I said.

Geoff Latimer announced that he was going downstairs and invited me to join him, but I told him, vaguely, that I had a couple of things to finish up. When he'd left the room, I pulled out my laptop to take another look at those photos of the crash that I'd downloaded on the flight over.

Theoretically, I guess, I was doing it because Hank Bodine had asked me to. But by then I'd become curious myself. A brand-new plane crashes-at an air show, of all places-you can't help wondering why.

And then there was Cheryl's remark, which was pretty much what Zoл had said: What difference did it make, really, what the reason for the crash was? We didn't need to know why it had gone down in order to sell more of our planes. It was, as Bodine liked to say, a no-brainer. Every airline in the world that had ordered the E-336 had to be a little freaked out by the crash.