Killer Instinct (25 page)

I thought: Good God almighty, is this what’s in store for me? Changing diapers on airplanes?

When the mother finished changing the diaper, she scrunched up the old one, reclosed the Velcro tabs to tighten the poop package, then jammed the soiled diaper into the seat pocket in front of her.

Behind me, some of the Entronics guys were getting a little rowdy, like frat boys. I turned around for a quick look. They were laughing loudly as some guy, whose face I couldn’t see, was showing them something in a magazine. Trevor waved the guy over, said something, and both of them exploded in guffaws. The guy punched Trevor lightly on the shoulder and turned around and I could see it was Kurt.

At that moment he saw me and walked down the aisle. “This seat taken?” he asked.

“Hey, Kurt,” I said warily. “What are you doing here?”

“My job. Booth security. Mind if I sit down?”

“Sure, but it might be someone’s seat.”

“It is. It’s mine,” he said, squeezing past me. He turned to the Spanish woman with the baby.
“Buenos días, señora,”
he said in what sounded to me like an awfully good Spanish accent. She said something back. Then he turned back to me. “Cuban,” he whispered. He sniffed the air, caught the diaper aroma. “That you?” He was trying to defuse the tension by cracking a joke.

I smiled to say I got it but it wasn’t funny.

“So, you still don’t want my help?”

I nodded.

“That include information I happened to come across that concerns you.”

I hesitated. Inhaled slowly, then let out my breath even more slowly. I couldn’t let him keep doing this. It was wrong, and I knew it.

But the lure was overpowering. “All right,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”

He unzipped a nylon portfolio and took out a brown file folder and handed it to me.

“What’s this?” I said.

He spoke quietly. “You know that big idea you came up with at Fenway?”

“The billboard thing?”

“Take a look.”

I hesitated, then opened the folder. It held printouts of e-mails between Gordy and Dick Hardy, the CEO of Entronics USA.

“I guess our CEO was in Tokyo for the Global Executive Summary. But he’s coming to TechComm.”

“He never misses it.” I read through the e-mails. Gordy was all excited about a “major idea” he’d come up with, a “disruptive” application of existing technology that could transform Entronics’ position in the global market. Digital signage! He used some of the exact phrases I’d used: “The sunk costs are already budgeted.” And “It will put Entronics on the map in the digital signage industry.” And: “PictureScreen will make existing LED display technology look like JumboTron in 1985.”

“This pisses me off,” I said.

“I thought it might. That broke dick’s not going to get away with screwing you over again.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m not talking.”

“What are you
thinking
about?”

“Nothing. When you’re in combat, you don’t have time to think. You just act.”

“No,” I said. “No favors.”

He was silent.

“I mean it,” I said.

He remained silent.

“Come on, Kurt. No more. Please.”

34

The hotel was a big fancy Westin attached to the convention center. Our rooms all had balconies overlooking Miami and Biscayne Bay. I’d forgotten how much I liked Miami, even though the heat was oppressive in the summer, and I wondered why I didn’t live here.

I worked out in the hotel fitness center and had a late room-service lunch while I did e-mail and returned calls. I checked in with Kate at home and asked how she was feeling, and she said the cramps had gone away so she was a lot better.

TechComm, I should explain, is the big trade show for the audiovisual industry, which is just about as geeky as it sounds. Twenty-five thousand people from eighty countries attend, all of them connected in some way to a multibillion-dollar industry that’s populated by the guys from the Dungeons & Dragons Club in high school. Understand that the highlight of the whole show is not the awards banquet but the “Projection Shoot-out” a big demo of LCD projectors, okay?

At five, I dressed in Miami casual, which meant a nice golf shirt and a pair of pressed chinos, and went down to the big opening reception in Ballrooms B and C. It was the kickoff to the convention. When I got there, I saw that the whole Band of Brothers, plus Gordy, were dressed pretty much the same way as me. There was bad music and decent hors d’oeuvres and drinks. People were getting their badges and program guides and figuring out which seminars and panel discussions they wanted to go to when they weren’t on booth duty. “Principles of AV Design”? “Fundamentals of Video Conferencing”? The hot one seemed to be “The Future of Digital Cinema.”

Snatches of conversation wafted by me: “…Native resolution of nineteen-twenty-by-ten-eighty…that four million pixels makes HD video look
soft
…unstable signal environments…totally seamless playback…” Festino told me that NEC was giving away a Corvette and wondered whether we could enter the drawing. Then he said, “Hey, look. It’s Mister Big.”

Dick Hardy entered the party like Jay Gatsby. He was a big, trim man with a big head, a ruddy face, a strong jaw. He looked like a CEO out of Central Casting, which is probably why our Japanese overlords named him to the job. He was wearing a blue blazer over some kind of white linen T-shirt.

Gordy spotted him and rushed over, gave him a bear hug. Since Hardy was a lot taller than Gordy, the hug was comic—Gordy’s arms grabbed Hardy around the belly.

Nerdy or not, TechComm is pretty damned cool. Everywhere the next morning you could see huge screens and displays, multimedia shows of light and sound. Video walls twelve feet high playing movie trailers and commercials. One booth was a virtual-reality simulation of a Renaissance palace you could walk into, all done by hologram. It was magic. The future was on display. People in the rental and staging business were checking out the latest audio-mixing consoles. One company was showing off its wireless digital video broadcast system for the home. Another one was inviting people to try its wireless phone conference system. Yet another had outdoor digital touchscreens.

We had the PictureScreen on display, mounted into a big picture window, along with our biggest and best plasma and LCD displays and our six newest, lightest, and brightest LCD projectors for schools and businesses. I manned the booth a little, greeting walk-bys, but most of the time I was in meetings with big customers. I did two lunches. Kurt and a couple of guys from our facilities department had gotten here early to set up the booth and get it wired and move boxes, and Kurt had spent much of the day hovering nearby, keeping watch on the equipment and especially the unguarded area behind the booth. He’d gotten pretty popular among the Band of Brothers, I noticed.

I didn’t see Gordy much. He and Dick Hardy had a long meeting with some folks from Bank of America. I was perfectly civil to him, of course. He was a scumbag. What else was new? During a break between meetings, Gordy stopped by our booth, glad-handed a little, and took me aside.

“Booya on that Belkin dealership deal,” he said, an arm around my shoulder. “You see the press release Dick Hardy just sent out?”

“Already?”

“Hardy doesn’t waste time. Entronics stock is already trading higher on the New York Stock Exchange.”

“Because of that one deal? That’s got to be a pimple on Entronics’ ass.”

“It’s all about momentum. Who’s up, who’s down. Good timing, too, Entronics announcing the deal at TechComm. Love it.
Love it!
”

“Good timing,” I agreed.

“You know something, Steadman? I’m starting to think I might have underestimated you after all. When we get back, we should get together one of these nights, you and me and the ladies, huh?”

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” I said with a straight face.

Later on, I did the booth crawl, checking out the competitors. People were grabbing freebies all over the place, swag like messenger bags and beach towels and Frisbees. I stopped at the booth of one company that did rotating video displays and weatherproof, 360-degree outdoor LED displays. I’d removed my badge so they’d think I was just another end user. At the booth of a company that sold huge indoor/outdoor LED video screens, assembled from smaller modular panels, I really dug deep, asking a bunch of questions about pixel pitch and color correction. Questions that probably made me seem smart, like the number of nits, which is a unit of brightness, and the pixel uniformity technology. But I wasn’t trying to impress them. I really wanted to know what the competition was up to. They told me their video screens had been used in Sting and Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers concerts.

I checked out the booth of a company called AirView Systems, which sold flight information display systems to airports. They were one of our biggest competitors for the Atlanta airport contract, so I wanted to see what they did. AirView wasn’t a big company, so all the top officers were there schmoozing. I shook hands with the CFO, Steve Bingham, a handsome guy in his fifties with silver anchorman hair, a lean face, deep-set eyes.

Then I stopped at the Royal Meister booth, which was larger than ours, and even more decked out with plasmas and LCDs and projectors. The young guy who was manning the booth was all over me, since he thought I was a potential customer. He handed me his business card, wanted to show us the latest and greatest. He could have been me five years ago. He asked for my business card, and I patted my pockets and told him I must have left them back at my hotel room and turned to get the hell out of there, hoping he wouldn’t see me at the Entronics booth when
he
did his booth crawl.

“Let me introduce you to our new Senior Vice President of Sales,” he said.

“Thanks, but I’ve got to get to a seminar.”

“Are you sure?” a woman said. “I always like to say hello to prospects.”

I didn’t recognize her at first. Her mousy brown hair was the color of honey. She’d put highlights in her hair too. She was wearing makeup for the first time.

“Joan,” I said, startled. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Jason,” Joan Tureck said, extending her hand to shake. “I don’t see an exhibitor badge—you’re no longer with Entronics?”

“No, I—I think I misplaced the badge,” I said.

“Along with his business card,” said the young sales guy, now visibly ticked off.

“But I thought you were with FoodMark.”

“This position opened up suddenly, and I couldn’t resist. Meister wanted someone with an intimate understanding of the visual systems space, and I happened to be available. Being a carnivore wasn’t a requirement.”

It made perfect sense that Royal Meister had hired Joan Tureck. In the big battle between divisions, with two megacorporations duking it out over which sales force lived and which died, she was a huge asset. She knew where all the bodies were buried at Entronics. She knew where all our fault lines were, all our weaknesses and soft spots.

“You—you look great,” I said.

“It’s Dallas,” she shrugged.

“So you’ve got the equivalent of Gordy’s job,” I said.

“I wish that were all there was to it. Most of my job these days is taken up with planning for the integration.”

“Meaning what’s going to happen to your sales force?”

She smiled again. “More like what’s going to happen to
your
sales force.”

“You look like the cat that got the cream, Joan.” Old Cal Taylor’s line.

“Strictly two percent. You know me.”

“I thought you hated Dallas.”

“Sheila grew up in Austin, you know. So it’s not so bad. They’ve invented something called air-conditioning.”

“They have great steak houses in Dallas.”

“I’m still a vegan.” Her smile faded. “I heard about Phil Rifkin. That was a shock.”

I nodded.

“He was such a nice guy. Brilliant. A little strange, sure, but he never struck me as suicidal.”

“I never thought so either.”

“Very peculiar. And very sad.”

I nodded.

“I saw the press release Dick Hardy put out. I guess Gordy landed a major deal at the Harry Belkin auto dealerships.”

I nodded again. “That was news to me, too,” I said. “I thought
I’d
done it, but hey, what do I know?”

She drew closer and walked with me out of the booth. “Jason, can I give you some unsolicited advice?”

“Of course.”

“I’ve always liked you. You know that.”

I nodded.

“Get out now, while you can. Before you and all the rest of you are out on the street. It’s much easier to look for a job when you already have one.”

“It’s not a sure thing, Joan,” I said weakly.

“I’m telling you as a friend, Jason. Call me a rat, but I know a sinking ship when I see one.”

I didn’t reply, just looked at her for a few seconds.

“We’ll stay in touch,” she said.

35

When the show was closing for the day, I stopped back in to check in on my guys and see who they’d connected with. Festino had the Purell out and was furiously trying to kill the microbes he’d picked up from the disease-ridden hands of hundreds of customers. Kurt was at work securing the equipment for the night.

“Coming to the big dinner?” I asked Kurt, as he secured the equipment.

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it,” he said.

As I walked back to my room to shower and change into a suit, I saw Trevor Allard standing by the elevator banks. “How’s it going, Trevor?” I said.

He turned to me. “Interesting,” he said. “It’s always nice to run into old friends.”

“Who’d you see?”

The elevator binged, and we got on, the only ones.

“A buddy of mine from Panasonic,” he said.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Mm-hmm.” The elevator doors closed.

“He told me you got the Harry Belkin contract because a whole shipment of Panasonic plasmas were DOA.”

I nodded. I was feeling the usual anxiety, being inside the steel coffin, but now I felt a dread of a different sort. “It’s weird,” I said.