Then the waiter's hand slipped. The neck of the bottle struck the glass and tipped it over. Wine splashed on the tablecloth, speckling Barlow's starched white shirt.
"Hey, what the hell?" Barlow cried.
"I sorry," the waiter said, taking Barlow's napkin and daubing at his shirt. "I very sorry."
"For Christ's sake, you clumsy ox!"
The waiter kept blotting his shirt.
"Will you get the hell out of here?" Barlow snapped at the kid. "Get your goddamn hands off my stomach."
The waiter looked like he wanted to flee. "Upton," I said, "it's not his fault. I must have knocked into it with my elbow."
The waiter glanced quickly at me, not understanding. He couldn't have been twenty, had an olive complexion and close-cropped black hair.
The manager came out of the kitchen with a small stack of cloth napkins. "We're so sorry," he said, handing a few to Barlow and laying the others neatly over the stained tablecloth. "Pablo," he said, "please get Mr. Barlow a towel and that spray bottle of water."
"I don't need a towel," Barlow said. "I need a new shirt."
"Yes, of course, sir," the manager said.
As Pablo the waiter left, I said to the manager, "It wasn't Pablo's fault. I hit his glass with my elbow."
"I see," the manager said, and kept blotting.
Cheryl watched with shrewd eyes. After a minute, she said: "Well, at least Hammond would never do something so stupid as to use chicken rivets, of course."
I glanced at her quickly, then caught the sharp edge of Hank Bodine's menacing stare. "Well, actually, we did," I said.
"We did…what?"
"Put chicken rivets on all the wing control surfaces. Other places, too."
"Wait a second," she said. She sat forward, intent. If this was performance art, she was Meryl Streep. "Are you telling me our SkyCruiser team didn't know this might cause a serious problem?"
The frightened waiter returned with a stack of neatly folded white towels and handed them to Barlow. "I said I don't need any damned towels."
"Excuse me," I said to Cheryl. Then I touched the waiter's arm. "Mira, este tipo es un idiota," I said softly. "Es solo un pendejo engreнdo. No voy a dejar que te meta en problemas." The guy's a jerk, I told him. A pompous asshole. I'd make sure he didn't get blamed for it.
He had an open, trusting face, and he looked at me, surprised. Maybe even relieved.
"Gracias, seсor. Muchas gracias."
"No te preocupes."
"You speak fluently," Cheryl said.
"Just high school Spanish," I said. I didn't think she needed to know that my "teachers" were a couple of cholos, or at least Latino gangstas-in-training, at a juvenile detention facility.
"But you've got the idiom down well," she said. "I spent a few years in Latin America for Boeing." She lowered her voice. "That was sweet, what you just did."
I shrugged. "Never liked bullies," I said quietly.
She raised her voice again. "You're not seriously telling me that we made the same stupid mistake, are you?"
"It's not a matter of being stupid," I said. "It was a judgment call. Remember a couple of years back when Lockheed built the X-33 launch vehicle for NASA?"
She shook her head.
"They made the liquid fuel tanks out of composite instead of aluminum. To save some weight. And during the tests, the fuel tanks ripped apart at the seams. A very public disaster. So our people looked at that, and said, man, throw in some rivets just in case the adhesive fails like it did with Lockheed."
"'Our people.' Meaning who? Whose…'judgment call' was it? Some low-level stress analyst?"
"I'm sure the decision must have been made at a higher level than that."
"How high a level? Was it Mike Zorn?"
"No," I said quickly.
"Surely you know who made the decision to put in the…chicken rivets?"
"I don't really recall."
"But the name of the engineer who signed off on it is a matter of record, isn't it?" she said. "I'll bet you've got the spreadsheet on your computer. With the CAD number, listing the employee number of the stress analyst who stamped and signed off on the chicken rivets." She smiled thinly. "Am I right?"
Man. She knew a hell of a lot more than she was letting on. The guy who signed off on all the wing drawings was a stress analyst who'd been with Hammond for more than fifteen years, a very smart engineer named Joe Hartlaub. I remembered how he argued, long and hard, against putting rivets through the composite skin. Remembered the e-mails between him and Mike Zorn. Zorn took Joe's side-then Bodine jumped in and overruled them.
Bodine, who'd been building metal airplanes for decades, considered composites "voodoo." And he had the power to overrule both Zorn and the stress analyst. Bodine was the boss. He always won.
"I'm sure one of our stress analysts stamped the drawings, but it couldn't have been his decision," I said. "It would have had to be made at a higher level."
"By whom?"
"I don't know."
"Surely you do."
"I don't want to speculate," I said.
"Meaning that you know and won't tell me?"
"No. Meaning I'm not sure."
"Probably an old-line metal guy, as you put it. Right? A senior executive?"
I shrugged again.
"Because now it's clear, based on what happened in Paris, that the wings are going to have to be scrapped and rebuilt from scratch. A design change, partial-scale integrated testing, tooling and fabrication and touch-and-gos. Which will delay the launch of the SkyCruiser by six months, even a year."
"That would be a disaster. A delay like that, we could lose billions of dollars."
"And if we sell planes that we know to be defective, we're criminally negligent. So we don't have a choice, do we? Which is why I want to know who made that idiotic decision that's going to cost us so dearly."
My theory was right. She was determined to use the Eurospatiale crash to undermine Hank Bodine, then get rid of him. And I'd just gotten trapped in the maws of that battle.
I just nodded.
"Well, I intend to find out who it was," she said. "And when I do, I will cut him out like a cancer."
23
The waiters cleared away the bowls and the gold-rimmed service plates and began setting out a battalion of fresh silverware and steak knives with curved black handles and sharp carbon-steel blades.
Then the food came. And came. And came.
Raw oysters served with a pungent ponzu sauce. Tiny braised wild partridges seasoned with juniper berries on a bed of cabbage laced with tiny cubes of foie gras. Sautйed rapini and black-walnut-filled Seckel pear and cipollini coulis. Saffron-buckwheat crepes with a ragout of lobster and chanterelle mushrooms. Saddle of venison stuffed with quince. Ya de ya de ya.
Of course, I didn't know what half the stuff was, so I studied the menu like a lost tourist clutching a street map. I was full before the main course, and I didn't even know what the main course was.
At the foot of the table, Bo Lampack, the guy who looked like Mr. Clean, stood up and cleared his throat. The hubbub didn't subside until he clinked on his water glass for a good fifteen seconds.
"I don't know, think there's enough food here tonight?" he boomed. "Might have to go out to McDonald's for a Quarter-Pounder later on, huh?"
The laughter was boisterous.
"Oh, yeah, right. No restaurants around here for a hundred miles. So I guess you better eat up, folks. Hey, I'm Bo Lampack, from Corporate Teambuilders. Your team-building coordinator. As most of you remember, since I worked with most of you adventurers before." He paused. "Then again, alcohol does kill brain cells."
More raucous laughter.
He looked sternly around the table. "And after that banquet on the last night…" He paused again, and let the guffaws crescendo. "…I'm surprised you gentlemen have any brain cells left."
He surfed the waves of laughter like a pro. "Looks like we got some ladies with us this year, huh? Two beautiful ladies. You ladies think you can keep up with all these tough guys?"