Joseph Finder - Power Play

Bross didn't even seem to notice me standing there. "You read that bullshit e-mail Cheryl sent around this morning?" he said in a low voice. He wore a black Under Armour T-shirt, tight against his broad, flat torso like a superhero's costume. "All that crap about 'guiding principles' and 'a culture of accountability'?" He stared at Bodine, appalled. I couldn't believe he was dissing the CEO so brazenly, and within earshot of the others.

Hank Bodine smiled, shook his head, unreadable.

Bross went on, "Like she's our den mother or something?"

Bodine just winked, and said, "Guess we didn't have any guiding principles before. You know Jake Landry?"

"How's it going?" Bross said without interest. He gave me a quick, perfunctory glance before turning back to Bodine. "Where's Hugo?"

"He should be here any second," Bodine said. "Flying in from D.C."

"So Cheryl didn't fire him yet, huh?"

"Cheryl's not going to fire Hugo," Bodine said quietly. "Though by the time she gets done with him, he'll probably wish he got fired."

They didn't explain, of course, but I knew they were talking about Hugo Lummis, the Senior VP of Hammond's Washington, D.C., Operations. In plain English, he was our chief lobbyist. Hugo was a Southern good ol' boy, a real Capitol Hill creature. Before Hammond hired him, he'd been a deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and before that he'd been chief of staff for some important Republican congressman. He was on back-slapping terms with just about everyone in Congress who counted.

There were rumors around the company that he'd done something funky, possibly illegal, to land Hammond a big Air Force contract a few months ago. But just rumors-there'd been no charges, nothing concrete. Now I wondered whether that was why the girl from Corporate Security to whom Zoл had talked had been ordered to search through Bodine's e-mails.

"She's just gonna let him twist slowly in the wind, huh?" Bross said.

Bodine leaned close to Bross and spoke in a low voice. "What I hear, she's hired one of those big Washington law firms to do an internal corporate investigation."

Bross stared. "You're shittin' me."

Bodine just looked back.

"You got to stop this," Bross said.

"Too late. It's already wheels up."

"Hank, you're the only one who can persuade this chick you don't shit where you eat."

I was sort of embarrassed to be standing there listening to their conversation. But I guessed that, to these guys, I was just some functionary so far down the totem pole I might as well have been below ground. Since Bodine had reassured himself that I wasn't part of Cheryl's faction, I clearly wasn't a threat. He hadn't even bothered to explain to Kevin Bross who I was or why I was here.

"Well, my daddy taught me never to talk that way to a lady," Bodine said. He smiled and winked again. "Anyway, what I have in mind doesn't involve persuasion."

My cell phone rang. I took it out of my pocket and excused myself, though the two men barely realized I was leaving.

"Hey," Zoл said. "You having fun yet? Let me guess. You're kissing butt all over the place, sucking up a storm, and you're already the new golden boy."

"Something like that." I stepped outside the terminal building and stood in the sun, admiring the gleaming Hammond plane.

"Are you talking to anyone, or are you standing by yourself, too proud to hang with your superiors?"

"You got something for me, Zoл?"

"I just talked to a reporter from Aviation Daily about that plane crash. He said it was a composites problem that caused the whatchamacallit to break off."

"The inboard flap. What kind of composites problem, did he say? A joint?" I felt the sunshine warm my face.

"Do I look like an engineer to you? I can't even figure out my TiVo. Anyway, I took notes and put it in an e-mail to you. I also attached some close-up shots of that piece of the wing."

"Great, Zo. I'll download them after we board. Thanks."

"De nada. Oh, and, Jake?"

"Yeah?"

"The Aviation Daily guy also told me that Singapore Airlines just canceled their deal with Eurospatiale. Like, they totally freaked out over the crash."

"Really?" That was a major contract. Almost as big as the Air India deal. "Is that public information?"

"Not yet. The reporter just got the news himself, and he's about to put it on their website. So no one else knows yet. You're, like, fifteen minutes ahead of the curve."

"Hank Bodine's gonna squeal like a pig in shit."

"Hey, Jake, you know-you might want to tell him yourself. Break the good news."

"Maybe."

"You're hesitating. You don't want to look like you're sucking up. Yeah, well, you might want to start making friends with all the big dogs. Especially since you're about to spend a long weekend with them. You're probably going to be doing 'trust falls,' you know."

"In that case, I'm likely to get a concussion."

"I hear you."

"Okay, I'll break the news to Bodine. And thanks again. I owe you one."

"One?" Zoл said. "One squared, more like."

"That's still one, Zoл."

"Whatever."

I clicked off and headed back inside.

A big, rotund bald man with large jug-handle ears pushed through the glass doors of the terminal right in front of me. Someone called out to him, and he replied in a booming voice with a Southern accent, erupting in a big, rolling laugh. He started hailing people as if this was a frat party, and he was the rush chairman. His double chin jiggled. He wore a silvery gray golf shirt stretched tight over an ample potbelly.

This had to be the famous Hugo Lummis, our chief lobbyist. The man Cheryl Tobin was hanging out to dry, according to Kevin Bross.

He went right up to Bodine and Bross. I hung back a bit. Lummis checked his watch, a huge, extravagant-looking silver thing not much smaller than a Frisbee. Then Bross checked his watch, too, a gold thing just as big. They seemed to be concerned about the time, which I didn't quite get. Who cared what time we got to the offsite?

As I came over to Bodine's rat pack, Bross, who had a Klaxon voice you could pretty much hear anywhere, said, "IWC Destriero." Lummis rumbled something, and Bross went on, "Got it in Zurich in December. World's most complicated wristwatch. Seven hundred fifty mechanical parts, seventy-six rubies. Perpetual calendar with day, month, year, decade, and century."

So they were comparing wristwatches. "In case you forget which century you're living in, that it?" Lummis shot back. "Twenty-first, last time I checked, unless that watch of yours knows different."

"The moon phase display is the most precise ever made," Bross said. "Split-second chronograph. The tourbillon has an eight-beat-per-second escapement. Take a listen-the minute repeater chimes every quarter hour."

"Excuse me," I said. I tried to catch Bodine's eye, but he didn't see.

"That would drive me crazy," Bodine said.

Lummis held up his own watch, and announced: "Jules Audemars Equation of Time skeleton. Grand Complication."

"How the hell can you tell time on that thing?" Bodine said. "I just want to know what time we're going to leave already."

"No one's going anywhere until Cheryl shows up," Lummis said. He looked at his wrist Frisbee. "I guess Cheryl's gotta make an entrance. Fashionably late. Being the CEO and all."

"Nah," said Bross, "women are always running late. Like my wife-it's always hurry up and wait."

Bodine was smiling faintly, neither joining in their mocking nor disapproving of it. "Well, the plane's not gonna leave till she gets here," he said.

Hugo Lummis noticed me, and said, "Wheels up?"

"Excuse me?" I said.

"We about ready to leave?"

"I-I don't know."

He squinted at me, then guffawed. "Sorry, young man, I thought you were a flight attendant." The men around him laughed, too. "It's the tie."