If I’m alive, I’ll be more than happy to. I nodded.
“Take off your shirt.”
I did. He taped the transmitter to the small of my back with a wide adhesive tape he wound around my chest. It was so sticky it was sure to rip out my chest hair when I removed it.
“Is he going to spot your backup team? Don’t forget, he’s a pro.”
“So are they.”
I took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. “Is this going to work?”
“The transmitter’s going to work fine. Everything else-well, that depends on you. Whether you can pull it off. And that’s what scares the shit out of me.”
“I can do it,” I said. “Is there, like, a panic button built into this?”
“We’ll be monitoring the transmission. If you need us, just say something. Some phrase we agree on. And we’ll come running.”
“A phrase. How about, ‘I’m not getting a good feeling about this’?”
“Works for me,” he said. “Okay, then. We’re good to go.”
It took me another forty-five minutes to get ready for my meeting with Kurt. I parked in back of a 7-Eleven that was closed and worked out of the trunk of my car.
The Entronics building was mostly dark, with a scattering of lights in the windows. Cleaning people, maybe. A few office workers who kept very late hours the way Phil Rifkin once did.
I saw that the lights were on in my corner office on the twentieth floor. I’d turned them off when I left for the day. The cleaning staff usually came through around nine or ten, so it wasn’t them. Not at one in the morning.
It had to be Kurt. Waiting for me.
62
Fifteen minutes before one in the morning.
I arrived at my office a quarter hour before the time we’d agreed to meet. I set down my gym bag and my briefcase as I entered. The lights were already on. So was my computer.
Kurt had been using it, I assumed, but for what?
I went behind the desk to look at the monitor, and I heard Kurt’s voice. “You have something for me.”
I looked up. Nodded.
“Let’s make this fast.”
I stood still, looked in his eyes. “What’s my guarantee Graham’s going to be where you say he is?”
“There’s no guarantees in life,” Kurt said. “I guess you’ll just have to take me at my word.”
“What good is this thing to you anyway?” I asked. “It’s just a piece of scrap metal.”
“It’s worth nothing to me.”
“So why are you willing to deal?”
Last-minute hesitation. Happened all the time in my business. How many prospects had suddenly developed a case of jitters just before signing on the dotted line? Usually when I saw it coming I’d head them off by throwing in some unexpected bonus, some pleasant surprise. It almost always worked. But you had to anticipate it.
“Why? Because I’d rather keep it out of the cops’ hands. Not that I couldn’t handle it if I had to. Not that my buddies on the force might not happen to ‘lose’ a piece of evidence against me. But I’m a thorough guy.”
“Who says the cops are even going to know what this is?”
He shrugged. “They might not. You’re right.”
“They might not even know it’s from a Porsche.”
“That kind of shit they can figure out. All it takes is one smart forensic guy to find traces of mercury or whatever’s on there. Or the pattern of breakage-I really don’t know. I don’t care. But why take the chance? When you and I can come to terms. And both of us live happily ever after.”
I nodded.
Got it.
That was enough. That was as much as I was going to get, and it was enough to incriminate him.
“I’m taking a huge chance,” I said.
“Life’s a risk. Hand it over.”
I was silent for a long time.
True sales champions, Mark Simkins said, can sit there quietly all day if they have to. It’s not easy. You want to say something. But don’t! Keep your mouth shut.
When enough time had passed, I picked up the gym bag, unzipped it. Pulled out the piece, which I’d wrapped in plastic and duct-taped up.
Handed it over to him.
“Good,” he said. He picked at the duct tape, unraveled the layers of plastic from the steering shaft. He threw the plastic onto the floor, held up the twisted thick steel rod with a U-shaped joint at one end. Weighed it in his hand, admiring it. It was heavy.
“All right,” I said. “Where’s Graham?”
“You know where the old General Motors assembly plant is.”
“On Western Ave., a mile from here or so?”
“Right. That vacant lot there.” He handed me a small key. To the trunk, I guessed. “Funny how your life can depend on a little piece of metal,” he said. He walked slowly to the big glass window.
“Like a round of ammunition. It can save your life.” Now he was looking out the window. He swiveled around. “Or it can kill you.”
With that, he swung the steering shaft at the window.
The glass exploded with a loud pop, a million shards showering all over the carpet. “Cheap-ass tempered glass,” he said. “Contractors should have at least sprung for laminated, building this nice.”
“I’m not getting a good feeling about this,” I said to the hidden microphone.
Get the hell up here now, I wanted to shout.
“Jesus!” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing?”
Cold wind whipped into the office, a smattering of raindrops.
“Okay,” he said. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Sudden rise to the top. All sorts of pressures on you, trying to save the division-you didn’t know the whole thing was a trick. High-level games. You found out the truth, and it was too much.”
I didn’t like the way he was talking, but I knew what he was up to.
“Now a hundred fifty people are going to hit the unemployment lines because of you. Yeah, lot of stress on you. You’re going to lose your job too, and your wife’s pregnant. So you do the only thing that makes sense. In your desperate condition. You’re going to jump. It’s a good day to die, don’t you think?”
The wind was sluicing through the office, blowing papers around, knocking picture frames off my desk, off the credenza. I could feel the spray of cold rain.
“Speak for yourself,” I said.
I reached into the gym bag, pulled out Kurt’s Colt pistol. An army-issue semiautomatic.45.
Kurt saw it, smiled. Went on talking as if I were pointing a finger at him. “You’ve left a suicide note,” he said calmly. “On your computer. Happens more and more often these days.”
The gun felt heavy in my right hand, awkward. The cold blue-black steel, the rough grip. My heart was knocking so hard my hand was twitching.
“The cops can hear every word we’re saying,” I said. “I’m wired, my friend. Your suicide ruse isn’t going to work. Sorry.”
Kurt seemed to be ignoring me. “One-handed grip?” Kurt said, surprised. “That’s not easy.”
I brought my other hand up so I was holding the gun with both hands. I shifted my hands around, moved my fingers, tried to find a two-handed grip that felt natural.
“You’ve apologized to your wife and your unborn daughter. That’s what the amnio results said, by the way. A girl. Congratulations.”
For a second he almost stopped me. I froze for an instant. But then I went on.
“Like Phil Rifkin’s bogus ‘suicide,’” I said. “He didn’t hang himself. You garroted him, then made it look like a hanging.”
Kurt blinked. His smile diminished, but only a little.
“Because he caught you coming into the Plasma Lab. To do something to the plasma screen Trevor was demo’ing at Fidelity. You didn’t expect him to be in on a Sunday. You didn’t know the strange hours he kept.”
“Please tell me you didn’t just figure that out,” Kurt said.
“I think I’ve known it for a while. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.”