They called that one of the ironies of good government.
"What do you want, Mclntyre? I'm busy."
"Sure, I can see that."
A chair scraped on linoleum and Mclntyre's weight made its ricketiness creak in protest as he sat down. A lighter clicked and he smelt cigarette smoke.
"No, I don't mind if you smoke," he murmured.
"Gant, you're a real cure."
Gant turned to face Mclntyre. The man's features, blunt and square, shone with the heat of the room and with some undisclosed satisfaction.
The nose was too small for the size of the face, perched like a sculptor's first, unsuccessful attempt at proportion below narrowed eyes and amid hard, un impressible lines. Gant sat behind his littered desk.
"OK what does the Bureau want? You'd like to pick over my service career, my voting record what?"
Mclntyre shook his head.
"Something more recent, Gant. Something between you and Vance. Vance the crook."
"I was doing my job."
Mclntyre waggled the hand that held the cigarette.
"And got well paid for it."
Gant frowned.
"I didn't seek publicity. I just found out why an airplane crashed, Mclntyre. As a public servant."
Mclntyre removed a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and smoothed it on the desk before turning it so Gant could study it. It was a bank statement.
"See what I mean about well paid? The latest entry…? Drawn on the Vance Aircraft account at First Arizonan. A hundred thousand dollars.
Paid to you, as a public servant."
Gant looked up bleakly.
"You mother."
Again, Mclntyre shook his head.
"It's no frame, Gant. Vance sent you a transfer for a hundred thousand yesterday.
You didn't know? For getting him off the hook with his bankers or is it your cut of the Federal funding we talked about earlier?" He was openly grinning now.
"Jeez, I wouldn't want to have to explain this on TV! You'd be even more coy than you were after you got that plane down." He leaned forward. The Bureau can make a case out of this, Gant one that ties you in with Vance. We'll begin by serving you with a subpoena the Senate Committee will serve you with one, requiring you to give evidence at the hearing into Vance's affairs… while the Bureau keeps on digging. Your grave," he added.
His eyes gloated. Gant knew his own posture was one of defeated truculence, that of the farm boy watching a storm flatten corn defiant only out of complete lack of expectation. Vance always had to prove he had offered you his thanks and you understood he had. The hundred thousand was just that, done without thought of consequence or propriety; a thank you that enabled you to buy things that would remind you of his gratitude.
Barbara's attempt to show concern for him, enquire into his present life, had been just as intrusive, but less damaging. It didn't look criminal. The payment did.
"What can I say?" he bluffed.
"Maybe I've got the lottery ticket somewhere in the apartment?"
"A real cure, like I said." Mclntyre's satisfaction was complete; he could, for once, adopt a moral superiority. Gant had screwed up with a bribe. The man could taste his pleasure. He shook his head.
"It's a long way to fall, hero to cheapskate. To being on the take."
He stood up.
"You can keep the statement. It's a Xerox. Oh, am I going to enjoy watching you fall, Gant!" he announced, his voice like his chest expanding with a kind of perverse pride.
"You'll land harder than you did two days ago and you won't walk away from the wreckage, boy you surely won't!"
He paused at the door, but there were no more words. His triumph was complete enough to ensure a grand exit. Gant watched the door close behind him, then slowly, gently lowered his head into his cupped, waiting hands. Between his resting elbows, the bank statement stared back at him.
"You stupid, stupid bastard," he murmured.
"You made-in-America, top-of-the-heap asshole, Vance…"
The remains of Mclntyre's cigarette smouldered in the tin ashtray which advertised Budweiser Lite, the smoke ascending in the still air of the room like a distress signal from a distant ship. Suddenly, the mummy's corpse of his present was not to be despised like a welfare cheque that would keep him going; help him subsist, together with the food stamps of football games and weekends in the mountains… They would even strip him of the remnants of this life; the job, the pay cheque the remaining reputation. It would all go. There would be nothing to hang on to, nothing… "Yes, I understand. No, it couldn't have been anticipated," David Winterborne concurred, the cordless phone against his cheek, Eaton Square below the balcony.
The French windows were open and the air was still fresh after the early-morning rain.
"Absolutely. No, I don't think the suit has much chance of success, but you'd better talk to the lawyers. Thank you, Al. Keep me informed."
He dropped the receiver on to the chaise-longue, richly carved and brocaded, against the back of which he was resting as he watched the traffic move through the square. One of his more elderly neighbours, the widow of a stockbroker, was walking her ridiculously small dog in the gardens; moving in and out of dappled shadow from the trees. He plucked at his smooth chin with one hand, the other arm folded across the chest of his dressing gown.
Des Moines Instruments, in which Winterborne Holdings was a majority stockholder and which had supplied the fuel computer system for Vance's aircraft, had been calling with angering frequency for the past two days and nights. The untraceable fault in the fuel computer's chips had been found. His eyes narrowed in contemptuous dislike. Vance's former son-in-law had just happened to be a remarkable pilot. Once Vance had survived the crash landing and they had discovered that the fuel was being jettisoned on the computer's command, even though the instruments revealed nothing, Vance had removed Des Moines Instruments from the board, gone to another supplier, exercised his considerable charm and air of authority through the national media and saved his company.
For the moment, at least.
Winterborne glanced at the maid who had brought his breakfast into the drawing room on a tray and was laying it on a table near the second pair of French windows. Beyond her was the door to the library and the fax machines and the VDUs on which, at the press of a few buttons on the keyboard, he could play the newest, the ultimate video game. He could sit before the screen and watch his fortune vanish. Stock in Des
Moines Instruments was down so far it might never recover. Shares in Aero UK were almost worthless and shares in Winterborne Holdings, his conglomerate, had been affected. Not merely scratched, but perhaps even fatally wounded. In forty-eight hours, the conglomerate's total worth had been diminished by seventy million, perhaps as much as a hundred million… and rising.
His aerospace interests in the UK, the US and Europe had, without exception, been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Like some computer virus the doubts and the rumours had spread to contaminate the parent company and his other industrial and construction interests.
His hand shivered on his chin, but he stilled it through an effort of will.
Tim Burton's two 494s were still almost empty, shuttling around Scandinavia, but that was pitifully small comfort. His prospects were, albeit slowly, brightening.
The 494 was a largely rehabilitated aircraft and a cheap one, unlike Sky liner.
He recovered the telephone and dialled a number as he walked to the table. Fraser answered almost immediately.
"You'll need to speak to our man again," Winterborne announced.
"What he did for us with the fuel computer system was clever, but not clever enough."
"Agreed. Couldn't have anticipated—"