“I guess we’re more like scorpions in a bottle.”
He nodded. “Look. So we were on this armed reconnaissance mission outside Musa Qalay, in Afghanistan, right? Going after one of the anticoalition militias. A split team, so I was in charge. We had a couple of GMVs. Nontactical vehicles, I’m talking.”
“GMV?” Military guys speak a foreign language. You need a simultaneous translator to talk to them sometimes.
“Modified Humvee. Ground Mobility Vehicle.”
“Okay.”
“Suddenly my GMV’s struck head-on by machine gun fire and RPGs.” He made a slight grimace. “Rocket-propelled grenades, okay? Shoulder-launched antitank weapon. It was an ambush. My vehicle was hit. We were trapped in a kill box. So I ordered the driver-my good buddy, Jimmy Donadio-to floor it. Not away from the ambush, but right toward the machine-gun emplacement. Told the guy on top to start firing off the.50 cal, just unload it on them. You could see the bad guys slumped over the machine gun. Then my GMV got hit with another RPG. Disabled it. The vehicle was in flames, okay? We were screwed. So I jumped out with my M16 and just started firing away at them until I was out of ammo. Killed them all. Must have been six of them.”
I just stared at Kurt, rapt. The scariest thing I ever faced in my line of work was a performance review.
“So let me ask you something,” Kurt said. “Would you do that for Trevor?”
“Fire at him with a machine gun?” I said. “I fantasize about that sometimes.”
“You get my point, though?”
I wasn’t sure I did. I poked at the Bloomin’ Onion but didn’t eat any. I already felt queasy from all the grease.
He looked like he was getting ready to leave. “Mind if I ask you something?”
“Go for it.”
“So when we were in country, our most important weapon by far was always our intel. The intelligence we had on the enemy, right? Strength of their units, location of their encampments, all that. So what kind of intel do you guys collect on your potential customers?”
This guy was smart. Really smart. “They’re not the enemy,” I said, amused.
“Okay.” A bashful smile. “But you know what I mean.”
“I guess. We gather the basic stuff…” I paused for a few seconds. “To be honest, not much. We sort of fly by the seat of the pants, I sometimes think.”
He nodded. “Wouldn’t it help if you drilled down? Like the way you’re getting dicked around by Lockwood Hotels-like, what’s really going on there?”
“Would it help? Sure. But we don’t have any way of knowing. That’s the thing. It’s not pretty, but that’s how it is.”
Kurt kept nodding, staring straight ahead. “I know a guy used to work in security for the Lockwood chain. He might still be there.”
“A security guard?”
Kurt smiled. “Pretty high up in corporate security, at their headquarters-New York or New Jersey, whatever.”
“White Plains, New York.”
“Lot of Special Forces guys go into corporate security. So why don’t you give me some names, some background. Tell me who you’re working with. I’ll see if I can find anything out for you. A little intel, right?”
Kurt Semko had already surprised me a couple of times, so maybe it wasn’t so far-fetched, I figured, that this tow truck driver who’d been kicked out of the Special Forces might be able to get the lowdown on Brian Borque, the Vice President for Property Management at Lockwood Hotels. It made sense that there’d be a network of ex-Special Forces officers who now worked in the private sector. Why the hell not? I gave him a bit of background and scribbled Brian Borque’s name on a napkin. Kurt had an e-mail address, too-I guess everyone does these days-and I wrote it down.
“All right, man,” Kurt said, getting up and putting a big hand on my shoulder. “No worries. I’ll give you a call if I find anything out.”
It was pretty late by the time I got home, driving the Geo Metro that Enterprise Rent-A-Car had brought over that morning. Kate was asleep.
I sat down at the computer in the little home office we shared to check my office e-mail, as I always did before I went to bed. Internet Explorer was open, which meant that Kate had been using the computer, and out of pointless curiosity I clicked on “Go” to see where she’d been browsing. I wondered whether Kate ever looked at porn, though that seemed awfully unlikely.
No. The last place she’d been was a website called Realtor.com, where she’d been looking at houses in Cambridge. Not cheap ones, either. Million-dollar, two-million-dollar houses in the Brattle Street area.
Real estate porn.
She was looking at houses we could never afford, not on my income. I felt bad, for her and for me.
When I signed on to my office e-mail, I found the workup I’d done on Lockwood, and forwarded it to Kurt. Then I scrolled quickly through the junk-health-plan notices, job listings, endless personnel notices-and found an e-mail from Gordy that he’d sent after hours.
He wanted me to “drop by” his office at 8:00 tomorrow morning.
8
The alarm went off at 5:00 A.M., two hours earlier than usual. Kate groaned and rolled over, put a pillow over her head. I got up as quietly as I could, went downstairs, and made the coffee, and while it was brewing I took a quick shower. I wanted to get into the office a good hour before my interview with Gordy so I could go over my accounts and get all the numbers in order.
When I got out of the shower, I saw the light in the bedroom was on. Kate was downstairs at the kitchen table in her pink bathrobe, drinking coffee.
“You’re up early,” she said.
I gave her a kiss. “You too. Sorry if I woke you.”
“You were out late.”
“The softball game, remember?”
“You went out for drinks afterward?”
“Yeah.”
“Drown your sorrows?”
“We won, believe it or not.”
“Hey, that’s a first.”
“Yeah, well, that guy Kurt played for us. He blew everyone away.”
“Kurt?”
“The tow truck driver.”
“Huh?”
“Remember, I told you about this guy who gave me a ride home after the Acura wiped out?” It wiped out by itself. I had nothing to do with it, see.
“Navy SEALs.”
“Special Forces, but yeah. That guy. He’s, like, the real thing. He’s everything Gordy and all these other phony tough guys pretend to be. Sitting in their Aeron chairs and talking about ‘dog eat dog’ and ‘killing the competition.’ Only he’s for real. He’s actually killed people.”
I realized I was telling her everything except the one thing I was most anxious about: my interview with Gordy in a couple of hours. I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell her. She’d probably just make me more nervous.
“Don’t forget, Craig and Susie are going to be here in time for supper tonight.”
“It’s tonight?”
“I’ve only told you a thousand times.”
I let out a half groan, half sigh. “How long are they staying?”
“Just two nights.”
“Why?”
“Why what? Why just two nights?”
“Why are they coming to Boston? I thought L.A. was God’s country. That’s what Craig’s always saying.”
“He was just elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers, and his first meeting is tomorrow.”
“How could he be on the Harvard Board of Overseers? He’s a Hollywood guy now. He probably doesn’t even own a tie anymore.”
“He’s not only a prominent alum but also a major contributor. People care about things like that.”
When Susie met Craig, he was just a poor starving writer. He’d had a couple of stories published in magazines with names like TriQuarterly and Ploughshares, and he taught expository writing at Harvard. He was kind of snooty, and Susie probably liked that, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to live in genteel poverty, and I think he figured out pretty quickly that he was never going to make it in the literature business. So they moved out to L.A., where Craig’s Harvard roommate introduced him around, and he started writing sitcoms. Eventually he got a gig writing for Everybody Loves Raymond and began making serious money. Then, somehow, he created this hit show and overnight became unbelievably rich.