Slattery gave a tiny shake of his head, as if silently cuing her to stop asking.
"What are you telling me?" she said.
"I mean-well, actually, you don't."
"I don't what?" Cheryl said.
"Don't have signing authority," Slattery said. "Not at that level. Not for a one-off cash transaction of that magnitude, anyway."
Cheryl's cheeks immediately flushed. She pursed her lips. "I see. Then who does?"
"I do, of course," Slattery said. "And the Treasurer. The General Counsel, and the Controller. Latimer, Grogan, and Danziger."
"And Hank, I assume."
He nodded.
"Anyone else?"
"No."
"I see," Cheryl said.
"Did I just hear what I thought I heard?" Bross said, his mouth gaping. "You actually don't even have the power to stop us from wiring out the funds, do you? Since you don't have the power to authorize it."
Cheryl looked at him for several seconds, her nostrils flaring. "Perhaps not. But I'm the CEO of this company, Bross. And if I hear any more of your insubordination, you're going to be cleaning out your office."
"If any of us survive," Barlow said.
"We're not wiring a hundred million dollars to these criminals," Cheryl said. "It's as simple as that. Whether or not I have the technical authority to sign off on a payment of that size, the fact remains: I will not allow it."
"Cheryl, please," said Slattery. "We all know what he's going to do if we refuse. Please."
"Once we give in to this extortion, it'll never stop," she said. "I'm sorry."
"You know," Barlow said, "I don't think you have the power to stop us. Am I right, Ron?"
Slattery glanced anxiously from Cheryl to Barlow, then back again.
Cheryl examined the rope around her wrists. "Ron," she said in a warning tone, without looking up.
"Cheryl," Slattery said. "I-" Then he met Barlow's hard gaze, his raisin eyes. "Yes," he said. "Basically that's right."
Still studying the rope, Cheryl said softly, "I expect more than that from you, Ron. I expect your complete support."
Slattery turned to her, but she didn't look up. "I'm-I'm sorry, Cheryl. Forgive me. But this is just-this happens to be the one case where we disagree. We really have no choice but to give the guy the money he wants. But-"
"That's enough, Ron," Cheryl said, cutting him off. You could almost see the icicles hanging down from her words. "You've made yourself clear."
I saw the tears in Ali's eyes and felt the bad wolf start to stir.
35
Correct me if I'm wrong, Cheryl," Kevin Bross said, "but aren't you the reason we don't have a choice?"
Cheryl gave Bross a quick, cutting glance, then looked away. "I think we're done with this discussion," she said.
"We've just begun," Bross said. "Tell them, Ron. Tell them about the security measures you were pushing for. Which Cheryl turned down."
Slattery's sallow complexion immediately colored, but he said nothing.
"Oh, really," Cheryl said.
"Ron?" Bross prompted.
Slattery blinked rapidly, remained silent.
"Go ahead, Slattery," Hank Bodine said. "Let's hear it."
Slattery looked first at Bodine, then at Cheryl, and he said, "It's just that-I had my team draw up a plan to implement much stronger security on the company's website. I was concerned about, you know, hackers from Lithuania or Ukraine being able to get in and do all kinds of damage. Or steal code and blackmail us. This kind of thing happens to U.S. companies all the time now."
"Are we seriously going to rehash all of this now?" Cheryl said. "This is neither the time nor the place-"
"I think this is the perfect time and place," Bodine said, cutting her off.
"I wanted us to install a multilayered access platform," Slattery said. "Change the whole access infrastructure so we had the ability to turn off most functions for anyone who accesses the Hammond system remotely. Especially treasury functions."
"Plain English, please," Bodine said. "You're losing us."
"As I told you then," Cheryl said, "we have executives all around the world who need constant access to our entire system."
"They still could have had access, Cheryl. I wanted the ability to block the finance portals to outside access. All treasury information, all code repositories. No movement of money off campus."
"This is past history," Cheryl said. "We went back and forth on your proposal, and in the end I decided it was too complicated and too cumbersome to implement. And too expensive."
"So you killed Ron's plan in order to save money," Bross said. "And now look at how much money we're about to lose because of you."
Cheryl gave Bross a poisonous look. "Not because of me," she said. "I want to be on the record here-I'm absolutely opposed to giving in to this extortion."
"If it weren't for you," Bross said, "we wouldn't even be able to give in to the extortion. This whole nightmare didn't have to happen."
Cheryl looked down, shook her head. She looked as if she was doing everything she could to restrain herself from lashing out.
"Does the board of directors know about this?" Barlow said.
Slattery was silent.
"They will," Bross said. "They're going to hear about how your mismanagement not only cost the company a hundred million dollars but put the lives of every single top executive at risk. I'd call this an egregious breach of fiduciary duty. Hank?"
"As soon as this is over," Bodine said, "they're going to hear all about it. And then it's not Kevin Bross who'll be cleaning out his office. It's gonna be a no-brainer."
36
Hank," I said, "how about we spare the office politics and concentrate on trying to get out of here alive?"
Cheryl ran a fingernail back and forth in the gap between two floor planks. Ali tried to hide a smile. A couple of the others sneaked glances at me-admiring glances, I thought: no one ever expected me to talk back to Hank Bodine.
I didn't know how he'd react, and at that point I didn't particularly care. But after a few seconds he said: "We don't have a choice but to pay the goddamned ransom."
"I'm not sure that's true," I said. "Cheryl's right: If we give in too easily to Russell's demands, there'll be no reason for him not to keep jacking the price up. If I were in his position, I'd probably do the same thing."
She glanced up at me warily. Her long coral fingernail had dislodged a tiny gray burrow of dust and earth.
What I didn't say, of course, was that I didn't really care how much money Hammond Aerospace paid out in ransom.
"Yet we can't just say no. Because whoever these guys are, you don't carry weapons like that if you're not prepared to use them."
Cheryl arched a quizzical eyebrow. "So what are you suggesting?"
I turned to Slattery. "What's the account number?"
"Which account number?" Slattery said.
"If you want to access our cash management accounts at the bank, you've got to know the account numbers, right? Or at least one of them. You have them all memorized?"
Slattery looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "Of course not. I keep a list in my office…" His voice trailed off as it dawned on him. "But not here. Yes." He nodded.
"There you go. You need to call in to the office to get those numbers. Right?"
"Excellent," Cheryl said.
"You think he'll let me make a call?" Slattery asked.
"If he wants his money, he will."
"What good does that do us?" Bross said. "That buys us maybe five minutes. That's pathetic."
"It gets him on the phone with one of his assistants or his secretary, Kevin. And then maybe Ron can communicate that everything's not okay here."
"Oh, sure," Bross said. "Right. Russell's going to just stand there while Ron asks his secretary for our bank account numbers, and says, 'Oh, by the way, I've got a gun to my head, so you might want to notify the police.'"
"There's something called a duress code," I said to Bross. I kept my tone calm and reasonable-but condescending, as if explaining to a particularly slow child. "A distress signal. A word or phrase that sounds perfectly normal to Russell but actually alerts whoever he's speaking to that something's wrong. It's like a silent alarm."