The Edge of Ruin (11 page)

Dagmar’s voice caught on a laugh. “Well, that
is
shocking.”

I held up a hand, but I couldn’t help smiling because I was so relieved. “But wait. It gets worse. I’ve got
five
credit cards, and they’re all maxed out.”

I steeled myself for the reaction, but all she said was, “Well, those we should probably clear. It wouldn’t do for the CEO of Lumina Enterprises to carry such a small amount of debt. When we carry debt, we carry a magnificent amount of it. Mr. Oort … Richard, may I call you Richard?”

“I’d prefer it. And it would be great if you didn’t …” I bit back the rest of the sentence and felt myself blushing.

“What?”

I shook my head. “No, nothing.”

Dagmar leaned back in her chair and regarded me. “I think I know what you were going to say, and no, what we discuss will remain between us.”

“Thank you.”

“As for balancing your checkbook—you’re not going to be a bookkeeper. You have a CFO, chief financial officer, for that.”

“I do know the differences between CEOs, COOs, and CFOs. I worked for a few months in a brokerage firm.” I hated even mentioning it, and I quickly dropped my eyes. This woman saw a little too much for comfort.

“Good, then we’re not starting from nowhere. Anyway, you have Mr. Fujasaki and his staff in Tokyo. Your task is to make the large decisions. You set our course, and it’s my job as the chief operating officer to see that those decisions are carried out. So, now it’s time for your questions.”

“Okay. I looked for an annual report so I could get some sense of the company, I mean what it does. But I couldn’t find one. So I dipped briefly into the books.” Just remembering those lines of numbers made my head hurt. I pressed a hand against my forehead and pushed back my hair. “Wow.”

“A lot of money, no?”

“A lot of money, yes.”

“And you wouldn’t find a report. Lumina Enterprises is that very rare beast, a privately held company. It has controlling interests in companies that are public companies, but the core company is required to report to no one. Our only contact with the wider public is that we pay taxes. As for what we do … Mr. Kenntnis’s interests were in cutting-edge technology—biotech, high tech, private space ventures, open source code, alternate energy sources. Education—we fund pure science projects such as CERN, endow university science departments. And alleviating poverty, which Kenntnis considered to be the source of many of the world’s ills—war, terrorism, overpopulation, pollution. One-third of our annual income is spent on various charitable efforts—building wells in sub-Saharan Africa, Doctors Without Borders, providing medicines to impoverished nations. It takes a lot of money to do good.”

I’d known all this for weeks. Cross had given me some of the highlights when I’d first met him and Kenntnis, but it hadn’t really registered because it didn’t affect me. Now it sure as hell affected me, and I was the guy who couldn’t balance his checkbook. I’d sometimes wondered what it would be like to be a Warren Buffet or a Bill Gates with the power to literally change lives. Now I had it. Except to keep doing it, this company had to keep making money, and I was the person in charge.

We were doomed.

I picked up a strawberry and brought it toward my mouth, but the smell was nauseating. I pulled it away and started spinning it by the stem. “Now I’m even more intimidated.”

The stem suddenly broke. The strawberry hit the edge of the plate, bounced, and left a smear of red on the etched metal top of the table. I scrubbed away the stain with the tip of my forefinger, contemplated the red-tinged skin, and suddenly saw the blood in the Quincy house again. I jerked my thoughts away, and crashed against the crushing responsibility of Lumina that had been dropped on my shoulders.

“There are real consequences if I screw up.” I gave her a sickly smile.

“So, don’t screw up.” But Dagmar softened it with a smile and then added, “What you told your father about Kenntnis can also be applied to you. He picked you for a reason. He must have had faith in your good sense and your integrity. Listen, you have smart, good people to help you.” She scooted her chair in closer to the table and leaned across, taking one of my hands in hers. “Richard, the secret to running a company is both simple and hard to do. You find people smarter than you, and give them their heads to do their work.”

“And how do I know if they’re good people who I can trust?” It was the million-dollar question.

“You make decisions, and judge from people’s reactions to those decisions if you want to keep that person working for you.”

Dagmar released my hand, leaned back in her chair, and excavated the center ring of a cinnamon roll, popping the gooey chunk of dough into her mouth. She reminded me of a cat, comfortable, secure, and maybe a little bit complacent. She had me pegged as young and insecure. I wondered if that would change when I pulled out the sword. Or would she just add
nut
to the equation?

“Okay, I’m going to take your advice.”

“Excellent.”

“Starting with you.”

“All right,” but she sounded uneasy. I wondered what she was seeing in my face.

“So, it’s pretty clear to me that you don’t actually know the true purpose of the Lumina.”

“I take it you do?”

“Yes.”

She leaned back and opened her arms in an expansive gesture. “Enlighten me, please.”

The gentle sarcasm was drilling onto a nerve, but I gritted my teeth and plowed on. “The company’s just a front.”

She laughed. “A front. Well, that’s an interesting theory. What was Kenntnis doing that I didn’t know about? Something naughty, I hope.”

I hated that humoring tone, and how she was turning something deadly serious into a joke. I used the edge of the table to help lever myself to my feet. The laugh stuttered to a stop in the back of her throat as I stared down at her.

“No, something dangerous. Lumina was founded to combat magic, religion, superstition, and ignorance. And Kenntnis dedicated his life to it.”

“Magic,” Reitlingen said in an amused tone. “Well, it looks like he won that one.”

“I’m going to let that go because you don’t understand, but you will in a few minutes. One of my … associates said that I need to be certain of all my employees. I don’t care about their honesty or yours, for that matter. You can all rob me blind, but I have to be sure that none of you will become a conduit for magic, or that you’ll be ensorcelled and turned against me.”

“All right, this has become silly and annoying—” and her voice had lost its jocularity.

“I am serious,” I snapped. “Deadly serious.”

I decided it was time for showing and not telling, so I drew the hilt of the sword out of the pocket of my bathrobe. The sunlight was beating on my back and head, and I felt sweat, born out of heat and nerves and annoyance, beginning to trickle down over my ribs with that horrible crawling sensation as if small insects are on your skin.

The chair shrieked across the stained concrete floor as Dagmar thrust it back and jumped to her feet. Fear tightened her features. “You will sit back down, and I am going to call your father,” she began in a tone of voice that reminded me of animal trainers.

“Fine. Go ahead. He’ll back me up. He’s already submitted himself to this. All of my family and friends have. Now I’m asking … no, demanding, that you do so as well.” I thought I had matched her tone of snapped command, but I wasn’t sure.

“What happens if I refuse?” Dagmar asked.

Best to keep it simple. “I’ll fire you.”

Shock flickered across her face, followed by alarm and then rage. She finally got a smile pasted back into place and said with forced lightness, “Maybe I better find out what you’re going to do before I refuse. It might be quite painless, although I’m guessing it’s pretty eccentric.”

“It’s not painless, but I can’t predict how much pain you’ll feel. The amount of pain seems dependent on how much magic you possess,” I said, and wished I hadn’t added the last sentence.
Keep it simple. Keep it simple.

Dagmar stood dithering. I could see her trying to decide if she’d humor me, send for my father, or just call for commitment papers right now. Sometimes a demonstration can save a thousand words. I swept my hand away from the base of the hilt. There was the strange basso
thrum
that shook deep in your chest and laid a pressure against the back of your eyes. Dagmar pressed a hand against her chest and took several gasping breaths.

“You’re not having a heart attack,” I said gently.

She looked up, and her eyes widened at the sight of the sword I was now holding. I took an instant to contemplate the long black blade filled with distant glittering lights that flowed up and down its length. Whenever I was in the presence of powerful magic, the lights would come out of the blade and form a spinning nimbus of light around the sword and even around me.

“And no, you’re not hallucinating. I really am holding a sword.” I felt like such an idiot just saying it. For, like, the millionth time I wished that Kenntnis could have recast his weapon into something less silly, archaic, and clichéd. But maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t turned it into a gun. Then I would have been saying,
I’m going to shoot you with this gun.
Instead of saying, “I’m going to touch you with the sword.” Her eyes widened, and I hurried to add, “Just with the flat side of the blade.”

She started backing away. “No, no, I don’t think you are.”

Suddenly she turned and went running out of the kitchen and through the dining room. So much for my being in command of the situation. I let the blade vanish, stuffed the hilt back in my pocket, grabbed my crutches, and started in gimping pursuit. This was the first time I’d really tried to move fast, and it hurt. I felt the tearing in the stitches and the slow warm trickle of blood down my thigh. Yeah, this was going great.

I nearly caught up to her in the living room. Her high heel had twisted on the edge of the Oriental rug, and she stumbled into an Italian inlaid table. Yelping, she clutched at her knee, looked back at me. I advanced, and she limped frantically through the foyer and began punching the elevator button.

Maybe mad pursuit wasn’t the best plan. I stopped under the archway. “Please, wait,” I said in the gentlest, sanest tone I could muster. “Obviously I didn’t explain things very well. Let me—”

Dagmar’s eyes were darting around the foyer. She spotted the door to the stairwell. She ran to it, yanked it open, and vanished down the stairwell. I listened to her footfalls clattering and fading away down the steps. I hoped she didn’t break her neck in those high heels. The elevator gave a gentle
ding
and arrived. I hobbled onto it, and dithered between the button for the office and the button for the lobby. I really didn’t want my father to know how badly I had screwed this up. I’d try one more time to convince her. I punched the button for the lobby.

T
hey were down to a Costco carton of peanut butter and cheese crackers, and had eaten two-thirds of the carton. Grenier’s belly felt like an empty sack, and he was past being embarrassed by his stomach’s angry rumbles. The trip west had taken much longer than anticipated since they had abandoned the interstate system just inside the borders of Oklahoma because of the crowds of people converging on Oral Roberts University. The plan had been to ride I-44 into Oklahoma City and then transfer to I-40 for the drive to Albuquerque, but the interstate heading into Tulsa was like L.A. on a bad day, and Syd had feared the wild, exalted expressions on the faces of the people.

Grenier couldn’t blame him. He’d seen those faces in Serbia and Lebanon, India and Poland, and during government-mandated purges against the religious in China. The Old Ones used religious hatred as fuel for killing because it worked really well, but any kind of fervent, irrational belief that brooked no challenge worked, too. As long as the result was lots of hate, fear, and death, his former masters were indifferent to the source of the conflict.

So to avoid the faithful they had bailed out onto local roads, some no better than farm tracks, and headed south. The vast emptiness of Texas had been a challenge because gasoline was scarce, and the shelves in the groceries of the small towns through which they passed had been very bare. Eventually they quit stopping because of the covetous looks the RV received.

They had driven into the next wave of wild-eyed worshipers around the New Mexico town of Roswell, site of the supposed saucer crash in 1947. A tent city had sprung up in the desert, and everyone was watching the skies. The saucer nuts seemed less prepared than the religious nuts, and they were in a particularly hostile environment. It might be early January and colder than a witch’s tit, but it was still the desert. As they drove past the seething crowds, Grenier could hear the low thunder of drums. It seemed some members of the Harmonic Convergence also believed in aliens. A group of young women were whirling in an elaborate dance at the side of the highway. Multicolored scarves, sparkling with sequins, trailed around them, and they sang in eerie high-pitched voices. The only other sounds that penetrated the windows of the RV were the piercing wails of young children and babies. Too young to be true believers, they just knew they were hungry, thirsty, and cold.

Syd had pressed his foot down on the gas. “What the hell is wrong with them?”

Because Grenier was tired and hungry and scared, he forgot himself and answered. “The gates are opening. It makes it harder for people to separate a fervent hope from an actual fact. And it’s likely they’ll get their wish. Something may come for them.” He swallowed hard, remembering the faces and that now he had to fear them. “It just won’t be what they expect.”

“How to Serve Man shit, huh?” Syd asked, though he had neither expected nor wanted an answer.

They hadn’t stopped in Roswell either.

Now they were driving up a long street lined with strip malls and cheap apartment buildings toward the towering gray granite face of the mountain. High up among the tumbled boulders was a seven-story office building. The western side glittered and sparkled, and it wasn’t just the windows. Grenier realized the wall between the glass was lined with solar panels.