The bottom of my stomach dropped. I knew he meant Kate.
“And after all I’ve done for you,” he said, and turned. “You disappoint me.”
“Any idea when I can get started on the PowerPoint slides?” Franny asked. “I’ve got three teenage sons who’ll burn down the house if I don’t get dinner on the table.”
“You’d better tell ’em to get takeout,” I said. “Gonna be a late night.”
I could barely concentrate on the PowerPoint slides. Next to Kurt’s threat, they seemed a pointless distraction.
I didn’t get out of the office until almost nine, but before I left I did a quick search for the Special Forces website that Trevor had mentioned. The one where he’d posted a question about Kurt, and someone had answered.
The search didn’t take long. I just put “Kurt Semko” and “Special Forces” in Google and immediately found it. It was a Special Forces “teamhouse,” some kind of a Listserv for former members of the Special Forces and their friends and family. In one area of the site was the “guest book,” where Trevor had posted his question, and I found the reply, from someone named Scolaro with a Hotmail address.
I clicked on the address and wrote Scolaro an e-mail. “What kind of ‘sick shit’ did he get into?” I wrote. “Guy lives next door and I want to know.” I put down an AOL address I rarely used, the initials of my college and year of graduation. No name.
It felt like putting a message into a bottle and hurling it into the ocean. Who knew what I’d get back, if anything-and when, if ever.
My phone had been ringing, but I’d shut off the ringer so I could concentrate, and asked Franny to answer, and only put the call through if it was Kate or Dick Hardy. She didn’t put any calls through.
I closed my office door and said good night to Franny, who was eating a grilled chicken Caesar salad she’d had delivered. A PowerPoint slide was on her big Entronics monitor.
“You like?” she said. “I can do a Teal Taffy double fade, if you want.”
“Nothing fancy,” I said. “Bare bones. Nakamura is probably a ‘just-the-facts, ma’am’ kind of guy.”
“Flash? Swish? Wipes?”
“No thanks.”
“Oh, and you got a call, but I didn’t disturb you for it. Well, you got a bunch of calls, but one I thought you should know about. From the state police. An investigator named, let me see here, Ray Kenyon. He wanted to talk to you. I said you’d gone home for the day.”
“Great. Thanks.”
An investigator.
“Did he say what it’s about?”
“Just left his name and number.” She handed me a message slip. “You want me to put the call through for you?”
“No, thanks,” I said. I put the message in my pocket. “I’ve got to get home. It’s late.”
“That’s right,” Franny said. “You have a pregnant wife to buy pickles and ice cream for. I’ll e-mail you the presentation when I finish. Good luck tomorrow.”
“I’ll need it.”
“You? Why do you think Hardy wants you out there? You’re a star.”
“Did I ever tell you I like you, Franny?”
“No, I don’t think you ever have.”
“Oh. Franny?”
“Yes?”
“Could you do me a favor?”
“Perhaps.”
“Could you take down all those military posters from my office walls? I’m tired of looking at them.”
49
I got to the airport at 4:45 A.M., almost two hours before my flight was supposed to leave. I left my car in the Terminal B garage and went to one of the E-ticket kiosks. The terminal was dark, almost deserted. I found the one open coffee place, got a large coffee and a bagel and sat down on a plastic bucket seat. I took my laptop out of my old nylon briefcase-I’d left the English briefcase, the one Kurt had tampered with, back in my office-ponied up the eight bucks for WiFi Internet access, and checked my e-mail. Went over the PowerPoint presentation. Rehearsed it silently, although I think a cleaning lady looked at me funny when she heard me talking to myself.
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.”