His hair, perfectly styled, blew lightly in the wind. His neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard was lightly frosted with glistening white crystals. He huddled over a can of Sterno, smiling with his perfect teeth gleaming. He was wrapped in a high-end parka and visibly equipped with ropes, hooks, and other climbing gear, all glinting with newness and quality.
“Day three on the mountain,” Dick Joplin said into the camera. “At this elevation, the wind is biting.” As he said this, the gusts picked up briefly, as if on cue, tousling his bangs. “It’s impossible to keep my beard from freezing. I will crest the summit sometime in the next few days. I hear the view across the Mahalangur is spectacular.” He gave a trademark wink to the lens. “That’s assuming, of course, that I make it. One wrong step, and as they say, ‘Kay Sarah, Sarah!’ I’ll see you at the top!”
He held the smile for a three-count, then reached over and shut off the camera.
“That felt good,” he said, slipping off the parka and brushing the plastic chips from out of his beard. “Can someone shut that damned fan off?” he demanded sharply, sending a young intern tripping and sprawling to comply. Joplin tossed the parka and gear into a pile, which was quickly snapped up by another lackey with dreams of being noticed for superior servitude.
He ejected the SIM card from the video camera and tossed it to the third intern who caught it greedily. “Be sure to get the effects right on this. Get some steam coming out of my mouth when I talk, some good snowfall going—but not too much snow. I don’t want to be whited out. I don’t want to see any pixels, either.”
“Yes sir,” the intern replied sharply. But Dick Joplin, world traveller, high adventurer, and CEO of Maidenhead Industries, was already out the door.
As Joplin swaggered down the hallway from his personal filming studio to his penthouse office, young men and women parted like the Red Sea to allow the boss an unobstructed path. He pretended not to notice, but he loved the adulation. He basked in the awe they projected, all of these little people who lived for a nod from the great Dick Joplin. The right glance, the right word, and he could make or break their careers in whatever field it was they worked in.
And that field could be anything. That was the beauty of Maidenhead—it did a little bit of everything. If the technology sector was down, the transportation sector would pick up the slack. If healthcare hit a snag, entertainment would push a little harder.
Life was good. At least it had been. The grand plan had worked great—until everything started to bottom out simultaneously. Against all odds, over the past several months Joplin found himself getting closer and closer to the unfathomable idea of bankruptcy. Not that he let on, and not that anyone in his accounting department was allowed to breathe a word of it without facing a mountain of litigation for violating their stringent confidentiality agreements.
So life had to continue to be good, and he would continue to keep up his public image as a carefree, devil-may-care, danger-skirting celebrity. Only one man knew the depths of Joplin’s financial woes, the same man who claimed he held the key to Joplin’s financial salvation—for a price. And Dick Joplin would sell his soul to the devil himself to get his life back before anybody else could learn he did not have one.
“Your two o’clock is waiting in your office, Mr. Joplin,” said the pretty blonde secretary with the tight blouse and the name he had forgotten. He flashed her his brilliant smile, saw her perfectly surgically-sculpted breasts rise a bit as her breath caught. He nodded in lieu of saying “Thank you” before he pushed through the oversized double doors of his private office.
Two of his high-backed chairs were occupied, their backs facing him. Past them, the 90-inch plasma screen was tuned to one of the cable news stations, where the blonde anchor named Tegan Riley gave a perky-but-stern recitation of the day’s events.
“America’s infrastructure in decline,” she intoned. Her eyebrows were dramatically arched, her lips giving just the hint of a smile, leaving the viewer wondering whether the news was good news or bad news. “With two bridges self-destructing in as many weeks, both Democrats and Republicans have shifted the narrative of their campaigns toward these transportation disasters.”
The camera cut to a haggard-looking woman who spoke in loud bursts as two men in dark suits and sunglasses flanked her, arms ready to catch her as though she might fall at any moment. “These catastrophic failures are, we’re told, the result of destructive bacteria running rampant in our rivers. If proven, this would stand as damning testimony to the failed policies of environmental deregulation that my opponent wants more of,” she said in a voice like cracking glass. Then, with a blink, she shifted into a southern drawl that contrasted sharply with her New York upbringing. “Is that what we want? Dirty water? I mean, we know that the Republicans don’t know what to do with bridges. They either jam them with traffic, or build them to nowhere.” This drew a moment of nervous laughter from the few dozen people crowded in front of the podium, prompted by a wave from the palsied hand of her frail husband, who sat behind her, guiding the audience’s responses.
The scene then switched to a jammed sports arena, where the wind blew unflatteringly through the long wispy locks of the Republican candidate, a political outsider and current darling of a growing grassroots movement. “What, a few bridges fall down, and they want you to believe some germs ate them? That doesn’t even make sense! What should have happened was the bridges should have been built right in the first place. When I’m elected President, we’ll rebuild those bridges, and we’ll build more bridges. Believe me. They’ll be huge and beautiful. People will come from hundreds of miles just to drive across these bridges. You’ll see.”
“Now, I thought the news wasn’t going to give a shit about those bridges,” Joplin said amiably, standing in the middle of the room.
“No,” said a man sitting in one of the room’s two occupied chairs. “What I said was that nobody would connect the bridge collapses to being anything other than a natural occurrence.” The man swiveled the chair around to face Joplin, smiling a practiced, disarming smile that put Joplin’s own polished charm to shame. He was a handsome fellow, and his face emanated a youthful energy that bordered on boyish. In fact, the only flaw in his entire, well put together package, was his hand—or rather, its absence. Where it should have been, the gentleman sported a shiny rounded hook instead of a more traditional prosthetic.
“That foxy newsbabe is certainly paying a lot of lip service to a natural disaster,” Joplin replied. He made sure to keep his tone level and cordial, even when he disagreed with Khan, the only name the hook-handed man had ever given him.
Khan’s smile never faltered. “Nothing makes bigger headlines than an unexplained mystery,” he said. “With no evidence, they’ll come up with their own explanations.”
Joplin made his way to his mahogany desk. He ran his fingers across the surface, relishing the seamless surface and unbroken wood. Part of his routine with new visitors was to tell them what he had to go through to have the desk carved from a single slab of mahogany, harvested from deepest Africa. Only one lady, a prospect Joplin was recruiting for Maidenhead Pharma, ever spoke up to say that mahogany trees grew in South America. Joplin had simply smiled and nodded at her, and let the conversation wrap up quickly. Five minutes later, she walked out the doors of Maidenhead, unaware at the time that not only would she not get the job she was interviewing for, but would also never obtain any other employment commensurate with her Ph.D. in botanical sciences. She was ultimately forced to take a job spritzing plants in the garden center at a suburban discount store. Her story was one told in hushed whispers throughout all the Maidenhead entities.
“Still,” he continued, “won’t they dig too much as the plan unfolds?”
Khan chuckled. “Oh, I’m sure someone will,” he said, absently running his fingers over the curve of his hook. “But there’s absolutely nothing in the demolition to prove the acts are deliberate. Most investigators will have no choice but to accept the polluted water theory.”
“About that,” Joplin said. “How the hell are you taking them down, anyway? You’re not using explosives. You aren’t knocking them down with anything. And we both know it’s not space aliens.” He grinned at the man with the hook. “That was pretty good, by the way. Something else I don’t know how you pulled off, let alone why you didn’t just eliminate the old egghead straight out.”
The man with the hook put his arms behind his head and reclined confidently. “Professor Sweet is still a valuable asset to the company,” he said. “A discredited crackpot can still make you money, and God knows you can’t be shutting off any avenues for that, can you?” Khan paused to let the thought sink in. “The less you know about how the sausage is made, the better for you,” he continued. “Suffice it to say, my associate is a man of many unusual talents.” He put his right hand on the shoulder of the figure next to him, who was still facing the television screen. A gentle tap, and the second chair slowly spun to face Joplin. The man seated there seemed to look through Joplin, a placid expression on his face, thin lips pressed together, blue eyes unblinking, his sandy blondish hair neatly combed to the side.
Joplin nodded toward the stranger. “Key Peso,” he said, enthusiastically. Getting no response, he tried again with the same aplomb. “Bone journal.”
When the man remained unresponsive, Joplin turned back to Khan. “How do you say ‘Hello’ to this guy?”
At this, the man with Khan turned his head with a sudden, measured jerk, eyes focused straight into Joplin’s. His thin lips, never losing their seemingly permanent benign smile parted for the first time since Joplin had entered his office.
“Hello is all right.”