The Survivors (22 page)

“Why give this to me?”

“Like I said, it's just a suggestion.”

I shook my head. I wasn't buying anything that simple.

“I don't want any problems to surface for Eric now. I figure the faster you find what you're after, the faster you'll leave him alone. Pete Sorensen may have the answers you want, and if he doesn't, I think he'll point you in the right direction. You win, I win.”

“Thanks.” I put the paper on my desk. “I'll check into it.”

The intercom buzzed, and Tori's voice cracked over the speaker. “Your nine o'clock is here.”

“I need to keep on schedule,” I said. We stood up and shook hands. “Was that the only reason you came here? To get me to stay away from Eric?”

She looked at the corner of the room, avoiding my eyes. “I could have phoned you for that. Cass told me if we didn't come to talk to you, she'd run away.”

“Does she talk about running away a lot?”

“Three or four times a week.”

“Has she ever done it?”

There was a mist of tears in her eyes. “Not yet.”

“Good for you,” I said.

She was fighting the tears so hard all she could do was nod. She hurried out the door, then stopped in the reception room, juggling her purse, her keys, her sunglasses, and her phone. Something slipped, and she dropped them all.

TWENTY-ONE

A
t noon, I grabbed a cab to Tim Regis's office. Tim's law firm, Davies-Shackleton, was in a brand new building two blocks from Ford's Theater. The architect had gone for an ultramodern look, likely to compensate for the buttoned-down atmosphere of a building full of lawyers. D-S was one of the Washington legal behemoths, with over eight hundred attorneys. Tim said he knew a few of them—slightly.

His office was on the seventh floor, not a corner space yet, but close. His administrative assistant, Jenny, showed me in and asked what I wanted for lunch. Tim was already eating. I'd been through this routine before. Every day, the firm served a free lunch in the lawyers' conference room. By noon, most of the good food was gone. “Whatever's left,” I said.

“Good choice.” Jenny looked at Tim. “Anything else for you?”

He was taking a bite of a foot-long sandwich. “Some pasta salad would be good.” He rattled his empty can and yelled after her, “And a diet ginger ale!”

“Diet?” I said.

“Every journey begins with a first step.”

Tim had been the starting left guard at Southern Cal. He had a choir-boy face, with curly blond hair and still a bit of pink in his cheeks. His body was more like the Hulk. Even though he was constantly eating (and most of it not healthy), he kept his weight at a steady two-seventy. When we played racquetball, which we did at least once a month, I couldn't see a spot of fat on him except for two tenderloin-sized love handles. He claimed he kept those only because his wife liked them.

“So, you want to talk about Braeder Design Systems?” he said.

“What did you find out?”

He tossed me an accordion file and picked up his phone. “Alan-a-Dale!” he said into the mouthpiece. “It's Regis. Stop by my office, will ya?” He sucked on his teeth while he listened to the reply. “Sure I mean now. You can bring your lunch if you want.” He dropped the phone back on the cradle. “Damned associates. They're all wimps these days.”

I shuffled through the papers in the file. There were a dozen Braeder annual reports and magazine articles from
Business Week
and
Forbes
and the
Economist
. There was a profile of Ned Bowles from
Time
titled, “The Visionary.” At the bottom of the pile was a memo: “Braeder Design Systems, Inc. Initial Public Financings.” Glancing through it I could see lots of dates and numbers. Eric Russo's name popped out at me a few times.

I heard footsteps behind me and Tim said, “Cal, this is Alan Dell, one of our merry men. He works in government contracts, and I asked him to brush up on Braeder for us. He wrote that memo you've got in your hand.”

Dell was tall and pale, and I put him somewhere in his late twenties. He nodded to me but didn't offer to shake hands.

Tim said, “Meet Cal Henderson, one of my oldest friends. Be careful what you say. He's a shrink, and he's writing it all down.”

Dell smiled nervously and folded himself into the chair next to me.

“OK,” Tim said. “Tell us everything.”

“Everything?” Dell didn't know how to handle Tim's banter.

“Let's start with the year Braeder went public,” I said.

Dell said, “They seemed to come out of nowhere. They were just a little company focused on mid-level optics and solar panels. Their biggest contract was for surveyor's transits for the Army Corps of Engineers. Then in less than a year—” He plucked one of the annual reports from the accordion folder. “They got six big deals, all military, all high-end.”

“Such as?” Tim said.

“Braeder developed early generation digital imaging components for reconnaissance and combat planes. The one that got all the press was a smart-weapon interface targeting system.”

Tim held his hand up. “Hey, Harvard grad. I'm a football player. Keep it in English, please.”

“A camera system that guides a bomb accurately,” Dell said.

Tim winked at me. “Sounds like the bad guys in
RoboCop
.”

Dell looked suspiciously at us. He'd obviously never seen
RoboCop
.

“What about the stock issuance?” I said. “When Braeder went public.”

“Braeder needed to expand,” Dell said. “Those six contracts had short fuses. They sold stock in three lots, forty million dollars each. By the end of the next year, they had signed ten more contracts with the Army and Air Force, and the stock had tripled in value.”

“And everybody got rich,” Tim said.

Jenny bustled in carrying two paper plates and a diet ginger ale under her arm. She handed me mine—pastrami on rye, better than I'd expected—and set Tim's on his desk.

“This is three bean salad,” he said.

“That's all they had,” she said.

He pulled a long face.

“So don't eat it,” she said, smiling at Dell and me.

Tim watched her leave. “So how was it that Braeder suddenly took the military contracting world by storm?”

That was just the question I was going to ask.

Dell folded his hands in the air like a praying mantis. “That was unusual. Normally defense contractors grow slowly. It's all about developing contacts, getting the brass and bureaucrats to trust you. Braeder jumped right over that step.”

“Did they hire any new personnel?” I asked.

“They opened a new research facility with some topflight engineers,” Dell said. “But that wasn't until after they got those six big contracts.”

“What about new patents?” I said.

Dell looked carefully at me for the first time. “Good question. Braeder held eight optical design patents, going back years. They filed for fourteen new patents in the half-year period before those big contracts were signed.”

Tim whistled. “Were they for parts of that bomb-guidance thingy?”

“Mostly, yes,” Dell said. “The optical components.”

Tim poked at his three bean salad with a plastic fork. “So suddenly Braeder got awfully smart. Fourteen-new-inventions smart. Enough to put them up in the big leagues.” He tossed the fork down. “Patent applications need to be filed in the name of the individual inventor, don't they? Did you check to see whose name was on those new ones?”

Dell nervously plucked at his chin. “No, I didn't.”

“Put that one on your to-do list,” Tim said.

Dell shot a quick glance at me. “Is there a client number I can bill this time to?”

Tim had his foot on his desk, and he pulled it off with a thump. The look on his face was downright menacing.

Dell sputtered, “It's OK . . . I can put it down to professional development . . . or not at all.”

“Good idea,” Tim said.

Dell checked his watch. “Joy Saldhi is waiting for me. We have to make a conference call. My memo lays out everything I found.” He started to get up.

I said, “I heard Braeder had legal problems about the time it went public. Lawsuits, and a company lawyer got in trouble with the Bar Association. Did you turn up anything about that?”

“No, but—” Dell held out the annual report. “Every one of these has a section on litigation. It describes any major lawsuits Braeder was facing.” He flipped through it and handed it over. “There, see?”

“I'll take a look at it.”

He glanced at the door, longing to get away.

“Just one more question,” I said. “How's Braeder doing now?”

“Their stock price is up twenty-two percent in the last twelve months. Kind of a miracle, given the way the economy's been.”

“What's the secret of their success?” Tim said.

“Another big contract. Braeder is putting together a new cybersecurity program for the Department of Defense. There'll be new encryption systems, hacker-proof software for every branch of the military, new hardware for field communications. That's just the tip of the iceberg.”

“I feel safer already,” Tim muttered. He waved him on his way. “Give Joy-Joy a kiss for me.”

Dell wrinkled his nose in disgust. There would be no kisses for Joy-Joy.

“Sorry about that billable-hours crap,” Tim said after he was gone. “Like I said, wimps.”

“It's OK. I didn't mean to take up anybody's time.”

“Anybody's but mine?” He laughed easily. “Just teasing. Don't worry about Dell. He's the golden boy of government contracts. He doesn't need more billable hours. A personality, maybe. I can lean on him later, get him to do some more checking.”

“Hold off on that. I've got somebody else I want to talk to first.”

“Who's that?”

“I think it's one of those government watchdog groups. It's up in Georgetown. I hear they've got all the dirt on Braeder.”

“Suit yourself.” He went back to playing with his salad. “So this is about your mother?”

“She worked for Braeder. I found out recently she was fired three months before she killed herself. Somebody told me she got in trouble because of some designs taken from the company. At this point, it's just a lot of information to sift through.”

He came and sat next to me, where Dell had been. “How are you doin' with all this?”

“OK, I guess.”

“You guess?” He nudged my hand. “I haven't seen your wrist looking so bad since sophomore year.”

I'd had a bad patch that year, nearly had to take a semester off. Tim had been through it all, keeping our dorm manager out of my hair, reeling me in from three different blackouts. He even sat in on my classes to take notes for me. And here I was asking for more favors.

“What does Felix have to say about what you're doing?” he said.

“He's not happy about it.”

He frowned into my eyes. “Ditto on that one from me, buddy.”

I sighed, and he grinned and slapped me on the knee. “Enough of this maudlin junk. You gonna eat that sandwich?”

TWENTY-TWO

A
s I got off the elevator back at my office, a man was limping down the hall. His hands were covered with grease. He was past me before the patch on his shirt registered: “Mario's Locksmith.”

“Did you get the locks changed?” I said as I stepped through the door.

Tori was standing beside her desk, twisting so she could look at her backside. There was a greasy handprint a couple of inches south of her left cheek.

“Jeez,” I said. “I just saw him.”

“Snuck up behind me, the little monkey.” She gave a deadly smile and ground her stiletto heel into the carpet. “I think I broke his toe.”

“I'd love to see the worker's comp claim he's going to file.”

“That kind of thing happens almost every time I ride the Metro at rush hour.” She frowned at me. “What is it with you men, anyway?”

I put my hands meekly in my pockets. “I dunno.”

She shook her head and handed me a couple of message slips and a page printed from the computer. “These came in while you were gone.”

The printout was a photograph of a man I didn't recognize, talking to two other men who had their backs turned to the camera. “What is this?” I said.

“Cass Russo e-mailed it to you.”

“Dammit. She was going to show me this picture on her phone. I told her I didn't want to see it.” I tossed it in the wastebasket.

Tori cocked her head, expecting an explanation.

“She was eavesdropping on her father. Some man came to their house last night, and they talked about me. That must have been him in the picture, with Eric and Griffin O'Shea.”

Tori giggled. “Somebody's got a crush on you.”

“A crush on anybody who'll pay attention to her.”

I turned to the message slips. One was from Scottie, just checking in. He wanted to know what time we could talk today. For a while at least, I was going to be his best friend again.

The second message was from Howard Markaris. On the line for “Company” Tori had written “VP Braeder.”

“Who is he?” she said.

“A pretty big deal. He was going to meet with Jamie Weston today to talk about Scott Glass and me. I guess Weston gave him my number. How did he sound?”

“An old fox, phony and full of himself. I gave him a little Bette Davis and he didn't notice at all.”

Tori could do a bang-on impression of Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Lauren Bacall, and a dozen other old starlets. She was a hit at parties—but then she would have been a hit if she stood in the middle of the room doing nothing.

“He wants me to meet him at Off the Record at five thirty?” I said.