I'd only heard that about a hundred thousand times. "That's good," I said, and smiled.
"Don't know if you're a gadget guy like me, but here's my latest toy," he said proudly, pulling out an iPod. "Ever see one of these?"
Not one that old, actually. "Sure."
"My daughter got it for me. I've even learned how to download music. You like show tunes?"
I shrugged. "Sure." I hate show tunes.
"Feel free to borrow it whenever. I've got Music Man and Carousel and Guys and Dolls and Kismet. And Finian's Rainbow-you ever see Finian's Rainbow?"
"I don't think I have, no."
"The best ever. Even better than Man of La Mancha. We love musicals at home. Well, mostly it's my wife and I, nowadays. Carolyn only listens to bands with obscene names like The Strokes, I think they're called."
"Maybe I'll take a listen sometime."
"You know, I've always thought that so much of what goes on in the business world is like a musical. A stage play. A pageant."
"Never thought of it that way."
"Much of it's about perceptions. About how we perceive things, more than what's really going on. So Hank and Hugo and Kevin and all those guys look at you and think you're a kid, you're too young to know anything. Whereas in truth, you could be every bit as smart or qualified as any of them."
"Yeah, maybe. So what happens tonight?"
"The opening-night banquet. Cheryl gives a talk. The facilitator gives a rundown on the team-building exercises tomorrow. I talk at dinner tomorrow night. Lot of blabbing."
"What's your talk about?"
"Ethics and business."
"In general, or at Hammond?"
He compressed his lips, zipped up his suitcase, and placed it neatly at the back of the clothes closet. "Hammond. There's a win-at-any-cost culture in this company. An ethical rottenness, sort of a hangover from Jim Rawlings's hard-charging style. Cheryl's doing what she can to clean it up, but…" He shook his head, never finished his sentence.
Latimer was a real type: the clothes, the hair, the packing, everything conservative and by the book. A real rules-loving guy. I guess every company needs people like that.
But I was a little surprised to hear him criticize our old CEO. Rawlings had, after all, named Latimer general counsel. They were said to have been close.
"What's she doing to clean it up?" I said.
He hesitated, but only for a second or two. "Making it clear she won't tolerate any malfeasance."
"What sort of 'malfeasance' are you talking about?"
"Anything," he said, not very helpfully.
I didn't press it. "You think Rawlings encouraged that sort of stuff?"
"I do. Or he'd look the other way. There was always this feeling that, you know, there's Boeing and there's Lockheed; and then there's us. The predator and the prey. We were the little guy. We had to do whatever it took to survive. Even if we had to play dirty."
He was silent. He seemed to be staring out at the ocean.
"The big guys play dirty sometimes, too," I said.
"Lockheed cleaned up their act quite some time ago," Latimer said. "I know those guys. Boeing-well, who knows? But even if Boeing plays dirty, that doesn't justify our doing it. This is something Cheryl's really concerned about. She wants me to rattle some cages."
"That's not going to make you very popular around here."
He sighed. "A little late for that. I'm probably going to ruin some people's dinners tomorrow night. No one wants to hear doom-and-gloom stuff. But you've got to get their attention somehow. Like I always say, pigs get slaughtered."
He went quiet again. Then he said, "Look at this," and beckoned me to the window.
I crossed the room to the window. Off to the left, the sun was low on the horizon, a fat orange globe. The ocean shimmered. At first I didn't know what he was calling my attention to-the sunset, maybe? That seemed somehow, I don't know, sentimental for a guy like that. Then I noticed a dark shape moving in the sky. An immense bald eagle was dropping slowly toward the water. Its wingspan must have been six feet.
"Wow," I said.
"Watch."
With a sudden, swift movement, the eagle swooped down and snatched something up in its powerful talons: a glinting silver fish. Predator and prey, I almost said aloud, but that was just too self-evident to say without sounding like a moron.
We watched in silent admiration for a few seconds. "Boy," I finally said, "talk about symbolism."
Latimer turned to look at me, puzzled. "What do you mean?"
So maybe he wasn't all that insightful after all. "Then again, it's just a fish," I said.
17
Geoff Latimer announced that he was going downstairs and invited me to join him, but I told him, vaguely, that I had a couple of things to finish up. When he'd left the room, I pulled out my laptop to take another look at those photos of the crash that I'd downloaded on the flight over.
Theoretically, I guess, I was doing it because Hank Bodine had asked me to. But by then I'd become curious myself. A brand-new plane crashes-at an air show, of all places-you can't help wondering why.
And then there was Cheryl's remark, which was pretty much what Zoл had said: What difference did it make, really, what the reason for the crash was? We didn't need to know why it had gone down in order to sell more of our planes. It was, as Bodine liked to say, a no-brainer. Every airline in the world that had ordered the E-336 had to be a little freaked out by the crash.
So why did Hank Bodine want to know? I had a feeling, based on Cheryl's expression and the way she'd looked at Ali, that there had to be something else going on.
And, of course, I was determined to get to the bottom of that crash. If for no other reason than to figure out what was really going on.
And here was the weird thing: According to one of the reports Zoл had sent me, the E-336 had made maybe twenty test flights before the Paris Air Show. That's the high-altitude equivalent of a new car. When you take delivery of a new car, it's always going to have a few miles on the odometer, from the test drive at the factory to the predelivery inspection at the dealership. Twenty test flights-that was nothing. That was brand-spanking-new.
So there had to be something wrong with the plane, and I knew that the Eurospatiale consortium sure as hell wasn't going to admit it. They'd blame the weather or pilot error or bad karma or whatever they could get away with claiming.
All I could tell from examining the photographs was that the hinges had ripped out of the composite skin of the flap. But why? The hinges were cut into the flap and glued on with a powerful epoxy adhesive. They sure as hell weren't supposed to rip out. After twenty years, maybe. Not after twenty short hops between Paris and London.
For a couple of minutes I stared at the damaged flap, until something itched at the back of my mind. A pattern was starting to emerge. A possible explanation.
I zoomed in as close as I could before the photograph disintegrated into pixels. Yes. At that resolution I could see quite clearly the cracks at the stress concentration points. And the telltale swelling in the composite skin. "Brooming," it was called. It happened when moisture somehow got into the graphite epoxy, which had a nasty habit of absorbing water-sucked it up like a sponge. And that could happen for a number of reasons, none of them good.
Such as a design flaw in the plane itself. Which was the case here, I was convinced.
I knew now why the plane had gone down, and I was certain Hank Bodine wouldn't want to hear the explanation. He'd regret ever asking me to look into it.
Unless…
Unless, say, he already knew the cause and wanted me to find it out for myself. But that was too complex, too convoluted, and I couldn't see any possible logic in that. I wondered whether Cheryl knew more about the crash than she'd let on. Was it possible, I wondered, that she already knew what I'd just found out?