Joseph Finder - Power Play

"I wish I could help you," Slattery said. "But my hands are tied."

If that was his attempt at black humor, no one laughed.

I said, "You want me to call one of them over here to retie you?"

Cheryl shook her head. "The less we have to do with them, the better. I'll get used to it. Hopefully this isn't going to be too long." She paused, looked at me, spoke quietly. "How's Hank?"

Bodine lay on the hard floor, dozing. His closed eyes were bruised and bloodied, his face a patchwork of red and white: Travis, who I had become more and more certain was Russell's younger brother, had thoughtfully taped up some of the more serious wounds with strips of white adhesive tape and a variety of Band-Aids he'd found in a first-aid kit.

I doubted she actually cared, but I said, "He might have a concussion. A broken nose. Maybe a broken cheekbone, too."

"My God."

I smelled her perfume, strong and unpleasantly floral, like a funeral home.

"Could have been a lot worse."

"We have to get the word out," she said. "Somehow we have to tell the outside world what's going on."

I didn't think our captors could hear us. Russell was outside somewhere, and his brother, Travis, was patrolling the room, his gun at his side, a good distance away. The blond crew-cut lunk was upstairs grabbing loot. The other two-Buck, the vaguely sinister black-goateed one, and Verne, ex-con and speed freak, were at the far end of the room.

"How?" Kevin Bross said. "You have a sat phone you're not telling us about?"

Cheryl glared at him. "No, I don't have a satellite phone. But the manager has one. He keeps it locked in his office. I know, because I've used it." She glanced at the stone wall that made up one side of the fireplace. "Maybe one of us can sneak over there."

Bross snorted.

Upton Barlow straightened his shoulders. "Now, isn't that interesting," he said with heavy sarcasm. He'd eased one of his shoes off with the other. I could see his Odor-Eaters insole. "And I thought we were all supposed to be 'offline,' as you put it."

"One of us had to be reachable, Upton," Cheryl said icily. "I am the CEO, after all."

"Hmmph," Barlow said. One little syllable conveyed so much-ridicule, skepticism, condescension.

Cheryl turned slowly to face him. "I wouldn't get too high-and-mighty if I were you, Upton," she said. "Wasn't it you who made Russell an offer-put the whole ransom idea in his head? Brilliant."

"That idea was already in his head," Bross said. "He and his thugs broke in here to rip us off."

"Forgive me for my clumsy attempt to save your life," Barlow said, his syrupy baritone dripping with contempt. "Or maybe you've forgotten that he was pointing a gun at your face at the time? I should have let him pull the trigger."

"Cheryl," said Lummis, "he was about to kill you and me both."

"And wasn't it you who told him about our K &R insurance?" Cheryl turned to face Lummis. "In violation of our strict secrecy agreement with Lloyds of London? Do you realize the policy becomes null and void if you reveal its existence to anyone outside the executive council?"

Lummis's plump, pink cheeks were slick with sweat. "Good God Almighty, I'd say this qualifies as a situation of extreme duress."

The fact that we had a kidnap-and-ransom insurance policy was news to me, too, but I didn't get what the big deal was about revealing its existence. So what? Would knowing about it encourage potential kidnappers to escalate their demands? Hammond Aerospace was a multibillion-dollar company with very deep pockets anyway; who cared whether some insurance company paid us back?

"Hey, folks, let's all just count to ten," said Bo Lampack. The red mark across his face had begun to fade. "I know tempers are short, but we need to work together as a team. Remember, if we all row together, we'll get there faster."

"Oh, Christ," said Kevin Bross. "Where'd this knucklehead come from?"

Lampack looked bruised. "Hostility's not productive."

"In any case," Cheryl said, "it would be grossly negligent of me as CEO to allow us to give in to this extortion. I have a responsibility to protect the corporation."

Lampack, ignored by everyone, now just watched in sullen defeat.

"You have a responsibility," Barlow said, "to protect our lives. The lives of the people who run this company."

"We wouldn't be in this position if it weren't for your negligence," Bross said to Cheryl.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Cheryl snapped.

"You know exactly what I mean," Bross said.

I caught Ron Slattery giving Bross a quick, furtive look. Annoyed, maybe, or warning: It was hard to tell. I wondered what it meant.

Then Slattery said, in a reasonable voice, "Cheryl, you know, we lost a whole lot more than that last quarter on the telecom satellite we're building for Malaysia, right? If we have to take a hundred-million-dollar charge for an extortion demand, or ransom, or whatever we call it-"

"Which I'm sure is covered by our K &R insurance anyway," Lummis put in.

Cheryl was shaking her head. "This is not how it works, Ron. You should know as well as anyone here. In Latin America, when the secuestradores kidnap an American executive, they never get more than thirty percent of their initial ransom demand. It's expected. If you pay them any more, they'll think they didn't ask enough."

"Well, Danziger handles all the special risk coverage for me," Slattery said. "I don't really get into the weeds."

"The point is, this guy's demanding a hundred million dollars-now," she said. "But the moment we go along with him-the moment we agree to wire out a hundred million dollars-he's going to think, Well, why stop now? If a hundred million was that easy, why not a billion? Why not four billion? Why not demand every last goddamned dollar we have in our cash reserves? And then what do we do?"

I nodded; she was right.

"We don't know that, Cheryl," Slattery said. His glasses were smudged, the frames slightly askew. "He's not necessarily going to escalate his demands. I don't think we have any alternative but to give him the hundred million and take him at his word."

She shook her head. "No, Ron, I'm sorry, but one of us has to say no, and that's got to be me. We're going to hang tough. Refuse to give in to his demands."

A panicked expression flashed across Slattery's face, then disappeared. But he said nothing. You could see his loyalty warring with his survival instinct. Russell had promised that he'd be the first to be killed if we didn't cooperate. Yet he was Cheryl's man, the only one here who owed his job directly to her. Her only ally on the executive council. Except for maybe Geoff Latimer; but La-timer seemed to be the sort who was quite careful not to take sides.

"She's going to get us all killed," Bross said, shaking his head.

"How easy it must be for you to issue orders," said Upton Barlow. "After all, you're not the one he's going to shoot first if we don't cooperate." His eyes shifted from Cheryl to Slattery. He'd sensed Slattery's panic the way a dog smells fear. He'd seen daylight between Cheryl and her toady, and he was determined to widen the crack.

"Oh, come on," Cheryl said. "These buffoons aren't actually going to kill anyone. They're trying to scare the hell out of us, and I can see it's working like a charm on you men. But Russell's not going to carry out his threats."

"Oh really?" Bross said. "And what makes you so sure of that?"

"Human nature," she replied brusquely. "I can read people. They may be thugs, but they're not murderers."

"Oh, Jesus Christ," Bross snapped. "These are a bunch of trigger-happy outlaws with guns. You are so out of your league here, Cheryl."

I agreed with Bross, but I wasn't going to say so. I didn't particularly like the woman, but I sure wasn't going to join the other piranhas circling her because they smelled her blood in the water.