The Fool's Run by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

of names and job titles.
    "That's as up-to-date as we can make it. It was good last week." She looked a bit haggard. For the first time I noticed the fine lines near the corners of her eyes, incipient crow's-feet.
    "Frightened?" I asked.
    "No, no. I'm a believer," she said, looking up at me. "But there will be problems. They're inevitable. We have a lot of complicated operations in our business. I've learned one thing about them: something will go wrong. Nothing ever works out quite the way you wanted it to. Nothing. With this operation, the consequences of error could be severe."
    We talked for another minute, then she led the way back to the stairs and we circled down the staircase to the front entry. The chauffeur was waiting there with a package wrapped in brown paper.
    "What's that?" Maggie asked.
    "A painting from the waiting room," the chauffeur said. He handed it to me. "Mr. Anshiser said you should look at it while you think." He spread his hands in a gesture of incomprehension. "I don't know what it means. That's just what he said."
    The picture, even with the thick fruitwood frame, was light in my hands. A Whistler.

CHAPTER 5
    With the Whistler under my arm, I decided against another night in Chicago and had the chauffeur drop me at O'Hare. On the flight back to St. Paul I thumbed through Dillon's report.
    Whitemark headquarters, which included design and research facilities, were in Virginia, outside Washington. The company's main assembly plants were in North Carolina. If I took the job, we'd work out of a Washington suburb, so we'd be in the local call area of the Whitemark computer center. The report listed the names of the company's top officers, manufacturing personnel, and engineers. I made a note to call Bobby with the list.
    Whitemark was founded by an eccentric electronics enthusiast named Harry Whitemark in the mid-twenties. Originally, the company manufactured radios. It barely survived the '29 crash, and in the thirties went into avionics. During World War II, the company rebuilt civilian planes as specialized light observation aircraft. When Korea came along, it refitted helicopters with special radio gear needed for medivacs and the increasingly complex ground-air networks.
    Whitemark got into the fighter business almost by accident. In the seventies, the company found itself without a dominant stockholder, and Whitemark execs liked it that way. Nobody interfered with them, but there was one large fly in the soup.
    The company was undervalued and cash-heavy, a sitting duck for a takeover. They looked for a way out and found a lowbrowed ne'er-do-well named Winton Woormly IV.
    Woormly had inherited a majority holding in a medium-sized aviation company. The company specialized in jet trainers and small ground-support aircraft, marketing them in third world countries that couldn't afford the big stuff. Woormly was smart enough to understand that, if he tried to run the company himself, he'd screw up and lose it. Besides, he wasn't interested. He was interested in single-malt Scotch, ocean racers, polo, trout fishing, and young boys, in that order.
    Whitemark offered him a deal; they'd give him a big lump of cash, a special issue of stock, and a place on the Whitemark board. In return, Woormly would turn over his controlling interest in the aviation company. Woormly jumped at the deal. He wound up with a title and more money than he could spend. Whitemark got a major stockholder who wasn't interested in running the company and whose stock holdings would scare off pirates. They'd also stripped themselves of excess cash, which made them a less inviting target.
    The Woormly buyout was a success from the start. The two companies matched up well. There was always a demand for the ground-support planes. Then came the Hellwolf concept. Whitemark started lifting its eyes to the big leagues.
    There was much more in the report: details on the Hellwolf, speculation about flight trials and cost overruns, arguments in