The Capitol Game (20 page)

They watched until Perry’s car disappeared into the streets of Trenton.

Reinforcements arrived promptly at noon. Another bus pulled up and disgorged a squad of CG chemists and metallurgists, technical experts brought in to assess Arvan’s breakthrough and decide on the fastest, most efficient way to kick it into production. They crowded into the small conference room and began studying the blueprints for the precious polymer. They had been given three principal questions to answer: How much of the polymer should be manufactured here? How much could be shifted to other plants, in other states, in order to build broader political support? How fast could it be jammed into mass production?

Meanwhile, the consultants on the shop floor began breaking the production teams into new units, breaking apart teams that had operated together for years. It was all part of the standard shock treatment. Sow confusion and fear, upend the old ways, disorient the workers, humiliate the supervisors, divide and conquer.

By close of business they would know who to lay off; by dawn the next day, a squad of guards would be posted at the doors, gripping clipboards with the names of those who would be allowed to enter and those who would be coldly sent home, permanently.

The hatchet men from human resources were given a fairly
light objective: eliminate fifty percent of the workers and ninety percent of the supervisors, who were considered too set in the old ways.

Of course, not a dime would be paid to those they dismissed. Not a cent of the promised severance packages.

Of course, this would incite the usual flood of lawsuits and occasional picketing over broken promises.

And of course, CG’s lawyers would employ their usual tactics to drag out the cases for years, filing motions, pushing extensions, stonewalling for all they were worth.

Eventually, CG would settle for half of three months’ pay to anybody financially able or stubborn enough to cling on that long. But statistically, they knew only four out of ten employees had the resources to hire a lawyer; only one out of those four had the angry persistence to battle it out to the bitter end.

Day three, one of CG’s many former senior government officials would be dispatched on a fast trip to Trenton for a pointed, one-sided chat with the mayor and city council. The economics of keeping the plant in Trenton looked dire, he would warn them with an appropriately grim and regrettable look. Poor schools, high personal and business taxes, dangerous streets. Not a good combination, he would say, frowning tightly.

The Capitol Group also happened to own another chemical company, a recently modernized plant with plenty of room for expansion, one situated in a nice, lovely, leafy community with first-rate schools and safe streets. It was located in Tennessee, where the politicians were friendly to businesses and understood the need for generosity.

The business logic of shuttering the archaic Trenton plant and shifting the entire operation to shinier Tennessee was nearly irresistible. A war was being waged back at headquarters. The accountants were well armed, loud, and pitiless. Their main concern, really their only concern, was with the numbers. The financial logic screamed for consolidation; it would reap a thousand economies and savings. The senior leaders of CG were humanists, though, and horrified at the thought of heaping more damage on
an already depressed town, though they found it hard to argue against the numbers.

If, on the other hand, the city fathers could find it in their hearts to cough up a few generous tax concessions, perhaps the carnage could be avoided. The humanists needed something, a weapon to curb the hard appetites of the number crunchers.

A complete tax holiday for five years would go a long way.

Further, he would warn them, there would be some necessary personnel “dislocation”—as polite a way as possible to say mass firings—and CG expected the local politicians to ignore the complaints.

Agnes Carruthers was the first casualty. She was seated behind her desk, in the same lumpy old chair she had occupied for thirty-two years, through good times and bad, tending to her boss’s every whim and need. She knew the company inside and out. She knew all the suppliers and all the customers, could nearly recite from memory the birthdate of every employee. She prided herself on being a mother figure, figuratively and literally, as all three of her children now worked at Arvan. Lawrence, her husband, had as well, before he passed ten years before, God bless him.

A courier walked in, dropped an unmarked envelope on her desk, and briskly departed. Agnes took a long sip of her tea and opened it: “You remember yesterday when I asked you, Do you know who I am? I’ll tell you. I’m the new owner of this company. Collect your things and get out. You’re fired.”

The takeover was a godsend for Mitch Walters. For two days he was a hit on all the business shows, who were enchanted with the concept of a thin coat of paint that could deflect a rocket. Mitch was hazy on the particulars—frankly, he had no idea how the polymer worked—but huffed and bluffed his way through.

A telephonic board meeting was held four days after the takeover to confirm the purchase and plot the next steps.

Walters plunged into the call with an overly generous narrative about how his personal intervention “defanged an unexpected
Hail Mary pass by Perry Arvan” and “salvaged the deal that nearly slipped out of Wiley’s grip.” He was vague on the details. Nobody bothered to ask him to elaborate. In Walters’s case, it was better not to ask, they all knew.

He was followed up by the chief financial officer, a thickset, brainy accountant named Alex Ringold, with a serious manner and droll voice, who bluntly confessed the bad news. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had slowed into grinding contests. From their very profitable starts they had bottomed out into slow-motion battles of attrition that were dramatically eroding the company’s earnings. Few of CG’s defense companies had any upward momentum—Humvees were still selling briskly to replace those that were blown up, as were select electronic products—but the month before the Pentagon had canceled a large artillery program, as well as an order for three additional battleships. And now a big-ticket future fighter program for the flyboys was hanging in doubt. CG was the lead contractor on two of the three programs, and a healthy contributor on the third.

The loss of the artillery and the battleships alone would cost CG many billions in future revenue. The pain, though, was being felt across the board. Military munitions, contract services to the troops, maintenance contracts for tanks and Bradleys that were no longer seeing much use—all were sinking and not likely to see any improvement in the near term. The latest analysis projected only nine percent growth in profits, which incited a disgruntled chorus of angry groans and curses from the board.

One of the board members, a garrulous former secretary of state with strong Texan roots and a gargantuan ego to match, roared, “What the hell, what do we gotta do? Maybe we’ll start another war. Iran could use a healthy ass-kickin’. That’d be a good war, and a long one.”

This coarse strategic insight caused an onslaught of light laughter. It wasn’t at all clear he was joking, though. Two months before he had authored a red-meat editorial in the
Wall Street Journal
that argued the same case, that if Iran wanted nuclear weapons so much, well, we should send them a few of ours, free of charge.

Ringold waited till the chuckling died down and said, “So as you can see, the timing of the Arvan takeover is a financial boon. The idea is to get it under contract and into production at the earliest date. Mitch, is it possible to have an impact this fiscal year?”

“That’s the whole point,” Walters announced, bubbling with enthusiasm. “We should see an eight to twelve billion pop, maybe as early as next year.”

A nice one-two punch; it was apparent that he and the CFO had colluded on this conversation.

“You’re sure that’s not exaggeration?” a voice asked, a high-pitched twang they all recognized as Ryan Cantor, the son of Billy Cantor, the aging former president. The old man, they knew, was eavesdropping on another line, leaving the tawdry business negotiations to his middle child. After a long career in politics the old man had his heart set on cashing in—since leaving the presidency he had sold his name to anybody who offered, and now was doing TV pitches for Flagorex, a preventative for premature ejaculation—but had no intention of leaving his fingerprints.

It was the same way he had run his presidency; after four years there was no Cantor Doctrine, no great peace initiative, no treaties, or even a telltale title that identified his tenure. It was all so sad. His years in the Oval Office elicited little historical interest, because, frankly, aside from a devastating recession, nothing of note had been accomplished. In frustration, the president secretly paid a writer to produce a glowing biography—the only one written, complimentary or otherwise—then couldn’t find a publisher willing to print it.

Walters almost chortled into the line. “Oh, no, Ryan, it’s quite real. If we short-circuit the Pentagon procurement process, the cash flow should start pumping in a few months.”

“I know it’ll be a stretch,” the CFO added, doing his part, “but our projections show that a contract inside two months would make a world of difference on the bottom line.”

“How do you intend to accomplish that?” asked another voice in a strong Australian brogue. This was William Haverill, the former Australian prime minister, a charmingly manipulative man
who had left office under an ugly cloud of suspicion. Procurement scams were a field in which he had considerable expertise and success. It was rumored that he and a few close chums had ripped off over two hundred million dollars.

The rumors were flagrantly false—three hundred was more like it.

Nobody could prove it, though; the money disappeared into the black hole of government programs, shuffled back and forth through a dizzying maze of appropriations until all sense of accountability was lost. The cash eventually squirted out the pipeline into a series of amorphous consulting companies, all empty shells registered under a miasma of phony names, then got washed and rewashed in a byzantine tango through countless banks. Haverill was currently living high on the hog in a large, sumptuous chateau in southern France, along with three doting mistresses. The warm weather and sultry beaches reminded him of home. The mistresses made him glad it wasn’t home.

Walters allowed that question to sit for a moment before he suggested, “I propose we put Mr. Secretary himself in charge of that. In fact Dan’s perfect.”

Bellweather, as Walters knew, was not on the line. He was at Walter Reed Hospital at that moment having a hemorrhoid lanced. It was an appointment he had booked only after Walters swore that the telephonic board meeting was meaningless and missable: a pro forma discussion, nothing more. The trap was laid, now the time had come to snap it shut. Walters was tired of Bellweather, tired of his “oversight,” tired of the board’s watchdog looking over his shoulder and second-guessing his every move.

“You think that’s a good idea?” another voice asked.

“You kidding? He’s a highly respected former secretary of defense. A living legend. He can—”

“Are you there, Dan? Are you listening?” another voice broke in, a provincial British accent this time; obviously the former defence minister.

“No, he’s at a doctor’s appointment,” Walters informed the voice, swallowing the urge to unload the degrading details—at
that moment Bellweather was probably bent over a metal table, howling his guts out, with his naked butt up in the air as an Army doctor stabbed and prodded at his best side.

The same voice, with typical British dryness, observed, “Well, uh, about Dan, he might not be the right sort for this job.”

“No?”

“I seem to remember that he wasn’t all that popular or admired when he was secretary.”

“There’s an understatement,” another voice chimed in quite loudly, now that it was clear Bellweather wasn’t listening. The boys at the top were quite competitive. “He was hated. Absolutely detested. One hundred generals threatened to resign in protest over his behavior.”

“What was that about?” the former Australian prime minister asked. He loved nothing more than hearing tales of political scandal.

“Well, it wasn’t any one thing. He shifted a few big Army programs to friends. Covered up several scandals, ignored billions in cost overruns, saddled the Army with some horrible programs. All deals he cooked up with old cronies on the Hill. Then in a tragic effort to refurbish his image, he got 160 soldiers killed—”

“Ah, yes, I remember that. The Albanian fiasco. That was Dan’s watch?”

“Sure was. What a farce. We had to apologize to Albania for allowing our troops to bleed and die on their soil.”

“Not to worry,” Walters quickly reassured them all. “Today’s generals and admirals were young lieutenants and captains back then. They remember nothing about those problems.”

“As they say, time cures all ills,” Haverill noted with a hearty chuckle—it was his favorite mantra, and they all laughed. He was ensconced in France with his mistresses and away from his wife and two children, because if he set foot in Australia he would likely be thrown in chains. But like all politicians he was an incurable optimist. With time and enough money thrown at the right public relations firms, his rumored crimes would be pasted over or forgotten. That, or the statute of limitations would run out
and he could return home, the beloved old man, the prodigal son back from the lam.