Killer Instinct (35 page)

I tried to keep my mind on my presentation and Nakamura-san, not on Kurt’s threats. Or on the police detective who’d left a message. Which, if I allowed myself to think about it, would make me far more nervous than presenting to Nakamura-san.

You’ve got a lot to lose.

You know who I mean.

When I’d arrived home last night, everyone in the house was asleep.

They were all still asleep, naturally, when I left the house at four-thirty in the morning. That was just as well; I might have been tempted to talk to Kate, tell her about Kurt’s threats. Which I most definitely didn’t want to do.

Because I had no doubt that Kurt had somehow rigged Trevor’s car to make it crash.

And I knew he was an extremely dangerous man. Who was no longer my friend.

He’d warned me not to tell anybody my suspicions about Trevor’s car. Not in so many words, but he’d made that clear. He knew I’d tried to get him fired.

No, I couldn’t prove anything, but his threats alone told me he was guilty. Yet what was I supposed to do when the police detective asked me questions about the car crash? Probably the safe thing to do was to say nothing. To tell the detective I knew nothing about it. Strictly speaking, that was true. I had only suspicions. I
knew
nothing.

Because I didn’t doubt that if I talked to the cops, Kurt would find out.

I’ve got a lot of friends in a lot of places.

An hour later I got into the security line. There were other people already in line, probably all flying to San Francisco. Some businessmen and businesswomen, probably going to Silicon Valley via San Francisco because they wanted to arrive earlier than the flights to San Jose. Or maybe they didn’t want to change planes in Phoenix or Atlanta or Houston. Since I travel a lot, I’ve got it down to almost a science—BlackBerry and cell phone in my briefcase, the slip-on shoes with no steel shank, all my metal objects in one pocket for quick removal.

The line moved slowly. Most people in line were half-asleep anyway. I felt like a sheep being herded into the pen. Ever since 9/11, traveling has been a nightmare of taking off shoes and putting stuff on moving belts and getting wanded. There was a time when I loved to travel, but no longer, and it wasn’t just salesman burnout. It was all the security, which didn’t make us any more secure.

I took my laptop out of my briefcase and put it on the conveyor belt, put the briefcase on the belt after it, slipped off my shoes—the lace-up ones were in my overnight bag, since the slip-on ones weren’t dressy enough for Nakamura-san—and put them in the gray Rubbermaid tray. I put my keys and coins in the little coin tray, and shuffled through the metal detector. Passed with flying colors, and smiled at the somber guy standing there. A woman asked me to turn my computer on, which I did.

I padded over to the next portal, one of the new explosives detectors they’d just installed. Stood there while I was hit with a blast of air. An electronic voice told me to move on.

And then, a few seconds later, a high-pitched alarm went off.

One of the TSA security agents grabbed my overnight bag as it emerged from the explosives detector. For some reason, my overnight bag had set off the alarm. Another one took me by the elbow, and said, “Sir, please come with us.”

I was no longer half-awake. The adrenaline had kicked in. “What’s going on?” I said. “There some kind of problem here?”

“This way, sir.”

People in line stared as I was pulled off to the side, behind a tall panel. “Hands in front of you, sir,” one of them said.

I put my hands out. “What is it?” I asked.

No one answered. The other agent passed a metal-detector wand up and down my chest, up the inside of my legs to my crotch and back down the other leg. When he was done, a third guy—a supervisor, I guessed, a thick-necked man with a bad comb-over and oversized glasses, said, “Follow me, sir.”

“I have a flight to catch,” I said.

He led me to a small, harshly lit, glassed-in room. “Sit here, please.”

“Where’s my briefcase?” I said.

He asked for my ticket and boarding pass. He wanted to know what my final destination was, and why I was flying to California and back in one day.

Ah. Maybe it was the one-day trip to California that had aroused suspicion in their pea brains. Or the fact that I’d booked the flight the night before. Something like that.

“Am I on some kind of no-fly list?” I said.

The TSA man didn’t answer.

“Did you pack your bags yourself?” the man asked, not exactly answering my question.

“No, my valet did. Yes, of course I did.”

“Was your suitcase out of your possession at any time?”

“My overnight bag? What do you mean, out of my possession? Here at the airport, this morning? At
any
time?”

“At any time.”

“I keep it in my office. I travel a lot. Sometimes I leave my office to go home. What’s the problem? Was there something in it?”

He didn’t answer. I looked at my watch. “I’m going to miss my flight,” I said. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” the TSA man said. “You’re not going to be on that flight.”

I wondered how often this man got to really bully passengers around, really scare the shit out of them. Less and less often, I figured, as we moved farther and farther away from 9/11, when traveling in the United States was sort of like moving around Albania.

“Look, I have a really important business meeting. With the chairman of the board of my corporation. The Entronics Corporation.” I looked at my watch, remembered that Franny had said only one flight would get me there in time for Nakamura-san’s arrival. “I need my cell phone.”

“Not possible, sir. All the contents of your briefcase are being swabbed and inspected.”

“Swabbed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Swabbed for what?”

He didn’t answer.

“Are you at least going to get me on the next flight out?”

“We don’t have anything to do with the airlines, sir. I would have no idea what other flights there are or when they leave or which flights have availability, if any.”

“Then the least you can do is let me use a phone so I can get myself on the next flight out.”

“I don’t think you’re going to be on the next flight out, sir.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?” I said raising my voice.

“We’re not done with you.”

“You’re not done with me? What is this, East Berlin?”

“Sir, if you don’t keep your voice down, I can have you arrested.”

“Even when you’re arrested you’re allowed one phone call.”

“If you want to be arrested, I’d be happy to arrange that.”

He stood up and walked out. Closed the door behind him. I heard it lock. A National Guardsman, crew-cut and bulky and wearing camouflage fatigues, was now standing guard outside the room. What the hell was this?

Another twenty minutes went by. I’d definitely missed my flight. I wondered if another airline had a flight that would get me there close to eleven. Maybe I could floor it and still get to Santa Clara on time. Or just a little late.

I kept looking at my watch, saw the minutes tick by. Another twenty minutes later, a couple of Boston police officers, a man and a woman, came into the room, showed their badges, and asked to see my ticket and boarding pass.

“What’s the problem, Officers?” I said. Outwardly I was calm, friendly. Reasonable. Inwardly I wanted to rip their faces off.

“Where are you traveling, Mr. Steadman?” the man said.

“Santa Clara. I just went through all this with the TSA guy.”

“A one-day trip to California?” said the woman.

“My wife’s pregnant,” I said. “I wanted to get back home so she’s not left alone. She’s confined to bed. A high-risk pregnancy.”

Get it? I wanted to say. Corporate executive, family man, married, wife pregnant. Not exactly the standard profile of an al-Qaeda terrorist.

“Mr. Steadman,” the woman said, “your suitcase tested positive for the presence of C-4. Plastic explosives.”

“
What?
That’s obviously a mistake. Your machine’s screwed up.”

“No, sir,” the male officer said. “The screeners confirmed it by running another test. They took a swab and wiped down the portfolio and ran it through another machine, and that came up positive, too.”

“Well, it’s a false positive,” I said. “I’ve never touched C-4 in my life. You might want to think about getting your machines checked out.”

“They’re not our machines,” the woman said.

“Right. Well, I’m a senior vice president at a major corporation. I’m flying to Santa Clara for a meeting with the chairman of the board. At least I was. You can check all that out. One simple phone call, and you’ll be able to confirm what I’m saying. Why don’t you do that right now?”

The cops remained stony-faced.

“I think we all know there’s been some kind of a mistake. I’ve read about how those three-million-dollar machines can be set off by the particles in stuff like dry cleaning fluid and hand cream and fertilizers.”

“Are you carrying any fertilizer?”

“Does my PowerPoint presentation count?”

She glowered at me.

“You get my point. Machines make mistakes. Now, can we all be reasonable here? You have my name and my address and phone number. If you need to reach me for anything, you know where I live. I own a house in Cambridge. With a pregnant wife and a mortgage.”

“Thank you, sir,” the man said, sounding like he was concluding the interview. They both got up and left me there to cool my heels for another half an hour or so before the TSA supervisor with the comb-over came in and told me I was free to go.

It was just after eight in the morning. I ran to the departure gate and found a U.S. Airways agent and asked her when the next flight to San Francisco was. Or San Jose. Or Oakland.

There was an American Airlines flight at 9:10, she said. Arriving at 12:23. I could be in Santa Clara at 1:00. When the extremely punctual, and very pissed off, Nakamura-san would be sitting in first class on his way to Tokyo.

I called Dick Hardy. In California it was a little after five in the morning, and I knew he wouldn’t appreciate being awakened at home.

“Steadman,” he said, his voice thick.

“Very sorry to wake you, sir,” I said. “But I’m not on the flight to San Francisco. I was detained for questioning. Some sort of huge screwup.”

“Well, get on the next one, for God’s sake.”

“The next one gets me in at 12:23.”

“Twelve twenty-three? That’s too late. Nakamura-san will be long gone. Got to be an earlier flight. He’s arriving at eleven o’clock promptly.”

“I know. I know. But there’s nothing else.”

Now he was fully awake. “You’re standing up Hideo Nakamura?”

“I don’t know what else to do. Unless you can reschedule him—”

“Reschedule
Nakamura-san
? After the way I twisted his arm to get him here for one goddamned hour?”

“Sir, I’m terribly sorry. But all these ridiculous terrorist precautions—”

“God
damn
you, Steadman,” he said, and he hung up.

I walked back to the parking garage, dazed. I’d just blown off my boss and the chairman of the board.

It was unreal, an out-of-body experience.

I kept flashing on the TSA supervisor with the stupid comb-over.

“Did you pack your bags yourself?”

And:
“Was your suitcase out of your possession at any time?”

Was it out of my possession at any time?

Franny saying,
“Kurt was here.”

“Oh?”

“Put something on your desk.”

He knew I was flying to Santa Clara, and he’d been in my office recently, rigging up my briefcase with his little toy confetti bomb. I kept my overnight bag in my office closet.

He’d set me up.

The way he’d set the other guys up. Trevor Allard and Brett Gleason were dead.

And now Kurt had turned on me.

50

My day’s appointments had been canceled, so I drove straight home, steaming mad. Kate was surprised to see me at home. She seemed somber, depressed, remote. She told me that her sister had taken Ethan to the Museum of Fine Arts to look at the mummies, and I gave her the short version of how airport security had detained me for almost two hours on a bogus suspicion that I was carrying a bomb.

She was barely listening, and normally this was the sort of thing that really got her going. Normally she’d be listening with eyes flashing, indignant along with me, saying things like, “Oh, you’re kidding,” and “Those bastards.”

Instead she made little pro forma clucks of sympathy, her mind somewhere else far away. She looked haggard. Her eyes were bloodshot. While I was telling her how Dick Hardy had basically exploded, she cut me off. “You must be so unhappy with me.”

“Now what?” I said. “What in the world makes you say that?”

Her eyebrows knit together. Her face crumpled. Her eyes got all squinty, and her tears began flowing. “I sit here all day like—like an invalid—and I just know how sexually—frustrated you must be.”

“Kate,” I said, “where’s all this coming from? You’re pregnant. High-risk pregnancy. We both understand that. We’re in this together.”

She was crying even harder. She could barely speak. “You’re a senior vice president now. A big shot.” Her words came in ragged clumps, between gasps. “Women are probably coming on to you all the time.”

I leaned over next to her, took her head in my hands, stroked her hair. The pregnancy, the crazy hormones, all this time in bed. She was going out of her mind. “Not even in my wet dreams,” I tried to joke. “Don’t worry about it.”

But she reached over to her nightstand and picked something up, held it out to me without looking.

“Why, Jason? How could you?”

I looked. It was a condom, still in its packet. A Durex condom.

“That’s not mine,” I said.

She shook her head slowly. “It was in your suit jacket.”

“That’s impossible.”

“You dropped your suit on the bed this morning when you were packing. And when I got up, I felt something in one of your pockets.” Her breathing was uneven. “And I—you—oh, God, I can’t believe you.”