Joseph Finder - Power Play

"I think this is the perfect time and place," Bodine said, cutting her off.

"I wanted us to install a multilayered access platform," Slattery said. "Change the whole access infrastructure so we had the ability to turn off most functions for anyone who accesses the Hammond system remotely. Especially treasury functions."

"Plain English, please," Bodine said. "You're losing us."

"As I told you then," Cheryl said, "we have executives all around the world who need constant access to our entire system."

"They still could have had access, Cheryl. I wanted the ability to block the finance portals to outside access. All treasury information, all code repositories. No movement of money off campus."

"This is past history," Cheryl said. "We went back and forth on your proposal, and in the end I decided it was too complicated and too cumbersome to implement. And too expensive."

"So you killed Ron's plan in order to save money," Bross said. "And now look at how much money we're about to lose because of you."

Cheryl gave Bross a poisonous look. "Not because of me," she said. "I want to be on the record here-I'm absolutely opposed to giving in to this extortion."

"If it weren't for you," Bross said, "we wouldn't even be able to give in to the extortion. This whole nightmare didn't have to happen."

Cheryl looked down, shook her head. She looked as if she was doing everything she could to restrain herself from lashing out.

"Does the board of directors know about this?" Barlow said.

Slattery was silent.

"They will," Bross said. "They're going to hear about how your mismanagement not only cost the company a hundred million dollars but put the lives of every single top executive at risk. I'd call this an egregious breach of fiduciary duty. Hank?"

"As soon as this is over," Bodine said, "they're going to hear all about it. And then it's not Kevin Bross who'll be cleaning out his office. It's gonna be a no-brainer."

Hank," I said, "how about we spare the office politics and concentrate on trying to get out of here alive?"

Cheryl ran a fingernail back and forth in the gap between two floor planks. Ali tried to hide a smile. A couple of the others sneaked glances at me-admiring glances, I thought: no one ever expected me to talk back to Hank Bodine.

I didn't know how he'd react, and at that point I didn't particularly care. But after a few seconds he said: "We don't have a choice but to pay the goddamned ransom."

"I'm not sure that's true," I said. "Cheryl's right: If we give in too easily to Russell's demands, there'll be no reason for him not to keep jacking the price up. If I were in his position, I'd probably do the same thing."

She glanced up at me warily. Her long coral fingernail had dislodged a tiny gray burrow of dust and earth.

What I didn't say, of course, was that I didn't really care how much money Hammond Aerospace paid out in ransom.

"Yet we can't just say no. Because whoever these guys are, you don't carry weapons like that if you're not prepared to use them."

Cheryl arched a quizzical eyebrow. "So what are you suggesting?"

I turned to Slattery. "What's the account number?"

"Which account number?" Slattery said.

"If you want to access our cash management accounts at the bank, you've got to know the account numbers, right? Or at least one of them. You have them all memorized?"

Slattery looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "Of course not. I keep a list in my office…" His voice trailed off as it dawned on him. "But not here. Yes." He nodded.

"There you go. You need to call in to the office to get those numbers. Right?"

"Excellent," Cheryl said.

"You think he'll let me make a call?" Slattery asked.

"If he wants his money, he will."

"What good does that do us?" Bross said. "That buys us maybe five minutes. That's pathetic."

"It gets him on the phone with one of his assistants or his secretary, Kevin. And then maybe Ron can communicate that everything's not okay here."

"Oh, sure," Bross said. "Right. Russell's going to just stand there while Ron asks his secretary for our bank account numbers, and says, 'Oh, by the way, I've got a gun to my head, so you might want to notify the police.'"

"There's something called a duress code," I said to Bross. I kept my tone calm and reasonable-but condescending, as if explaining to a particularly slow child. "A distress signal. A word or phrase that sounds perfectly normal to Russell but actually alerts whoever he's speaking to that something's wrong. It's like a silent alarm."

"You got a better idea, Bross?" Bodine said.

"Yeah," Bross said. "Keep it simple. These are hicks with guns. All we do is tell him we can't wire money from any computer outside of Hammond headquarters. The way it should be. The way it was supposed to be."

"No," I said. "You don't want to bluff him like that. If he's done his homework, he'll know that's not true."

"Most of us didn't know if we could or not," Barlow said. "Why should he know any better?"

"And what if he has a source inside the company?" I said. "We sure as hell don't want to get caught lying to him. Do we, Ron?"

Slattery didn't reply. He didn't have to.

"Let's not find out the hard way what he knows and what he doesn't," I said.

"Then we just pay it," Bross said.

"And after we pay the ransom," I said quietly, "what makes you think these guys are going to just let us go?"

Bross started to reply, but stopped.

"They're not wearing masks or hoods," I said. "For all I know, they're using their real names. They're not concerned about being identified. Why do you think that might be?"

"Oh, Jesus," said Barlow, realizing.

"There's only one possible reason," I said. "They don't plan to leave any witnesses."

Cheryl's fingernail came to a stop. Lummis exhaled audibly, tremulously.

"I don't have any duress code worked out with my office," Slattery said.

"Just say something unexpected," I said. "Something off. Something that might alert someone who knows you well enough that you're in trouble."

"But what about Grogan and Danziger?" Slattery turned to me. "For all I know, one or both of those guys has our account numbers memorized. They might think they're being helpful and volunteer the information to Russell, then there's no phone call."

I nodded. "We have to get to them, that's all. Make sure they know the plan."

Grogan and Danziger were sitting on the other side of the river-stone fireplace, twenty or thirty feet away. The fireplace jutted out a good six feet. They were so far away that we couldn't even see them.

The only way to speak to them was actually to get up and move around the fireplace to the other side. But the moment one of our kidnappers saw anyone attempting that…

"This is idiotic," Bross said. "All this 'duress code' crap. It'll never work."

"If you have another idea," Slattery said, "let's hear it."

Then the front door banged, and Russell entered.

A few months after I got to Glenview, a new boy was admitted to D Unit. He was a scrawny little kid named Raymond Farrentino, in for dealing drugs. He was fifteen but looked twelve, and his voice hadn't even changed yet. He looked like a girl: long eyelashes, a delicate nose. He spoke with a stammer. His laugh sounded like a cartoon woodpecker.

Someone gave him the nickname Pee Wee.

I became his protector, for no reason except that he had no one else, and I felt bad for him. He was easy prey. He couldn't fight. I knew how that used to feel.

But Pee Wee returned the favor many times over. He was smart and clever, and he quickly had the place wired. He figured out how to defeat the electronic door locks on the cells so we could get out at night. He studied the guards' schedules and knew when the halls of D Unit were unwatched, when they went out for a smoke. He devised a method to get drugs inside: He convinced one of the kids to get his brother to stash drugs inside tennis balls and toss them over the fence into the wooded area near the carpentry shop, where they could be retrieved easily. If you wanted to get or hide contraband, like cigarettes or booze, you'd turn to Pee Wee for advice.