Strong Light of Day (7 page)

“I'm glad to see we've got a packed house today, ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the cluster of faces and frames squeezed into the hotel ballroom's tightly packed chairs, the shareholders he'd made rich who'd booed his entry. “And I appreciate the opportunity to address you, although I wish I could do it one stockholder at a time to better explain how Dane Corp is affecting, sometimes dramatically, your everyday lives.”

He paused long enough to meet as many stares as he could, doing his best to ignore the smattering of fresh boos that resounded, and to ignore the one-legged young man at the same time.

“You sleep on mattresses treated with a Dane Chemical solvent to repel bedbugs,” Dane continued, his long legs aching from standing for practically two days straight doing damage control. “You drive cars made safer by the new air bags Dane Technology invented. You talk on phones and communicate on the Internet more clearly and safely because of Dane Advanced Electronics. The food you eat costs less because of the advances in farming made by possible by Dane Petrochemicals and Dane Pharmaceuticals. We are in the business of giving back—primarily to you, our shareholders.”

“Then give me back my leg!” the kid yelled up at him, and the crowd roared with delight, cheering and applauding as he waved his prosthetic lower leg in the air at the foot of the stage.

He was probably in his midtwenties but his long, shaggy hair and soft, buttery features made him look young enough to pass for high school. Almost immediately, dark-suited members of Calum Dane's private security force stormed down both aisles. But Dane held them back with a simple gesture of his hand while he moved to the front of the stage to address the protester personally, seeing the headlines that would surely result if he let his security team have its way.

“What's your name, son?”

“Brandon McCabe.”

“How'd you lose your leg, Brandon?”

“You took it from me. And I'm not your son.”

Dane crouched in front of the protester so they were face-to-face. “By me taking your leg, I assume you're referring to the unfounded claims that one of our pesticides caused cancer.”

“It's not unfounded. This is living proof of that,” the young man added, addressing the crowd more than Calum Dane as he pumped the air with his leg. “My epithelioid sarcoma is living proof of that.”

“Not according to a joint investigation conducted by the EPA and FDA.”

“Bullshit. And that's what the investigation amounted to: bullshit.”

“I'd ask you to watch you language, young man.”

“You didn't ask me if I wanted to get cancer. There was no warning label on whatever it was that gave it to me, just all those reports I read later about people getting the same or similar disease, all linked to a pesticide your company produced.”

“And that has now been removed from the market on a purely precautionary basis. We take our role and our responsibility at Dane Corp seriously, son.”

“I'm not your son.”

“No, you're not; my boy died serving in Afghanistan. If he'd lived he'd be about your age now. A land mine took his leg, too, along with pretty much everything else.”

“Shit happens, man. I should know.”

“It happens to everyone,” Dane said, stopping short of mentioning his other son, who a court order prevented him from seeing. “And Dane Corp is in the business of making sure it happens less. You may not believe this but, thanks to us, your food is safer than it's ever been. When you travel, you're safer than you've ever been. And if, by chance, you work around hazardous or toxic materials, you're safer because of the improvements we've made in the protective gear you wear. We are in the business of making your life better.”

“Not all the time,” said Brandon McCabe.

 

13

N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY

Dane stood back upright and moved to address the rest of the crowd, turning his back on the kid who was becoming a royal pain in the ass.

“You can't ignore me!”

“Yeah, yeah!” parts of the audience barked, supporting Brandon McCabe, as more boos and catcalls echoed.

“I'm not, and I'm not going to ignore
you,
either,” Dane told the audience. “You know the two most valuable commodities on the planet? Food and water. Maybe not now, or in the immediate future, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.”

The crowd quieted a bit.

“If we can't find better, more efficient ways to grow food, as much as half the world's population will be starving before the end of this century. Think about that. And think about this: on average, a quarter of crops worldwide are currently lost to pests, mostly insects. Eliminating the loss of that twenty-five percent would be enough on its own to reduce hunger and starvation by half.”

Dead quiet now; not a single sound of protest resounding.

Dane seized the moment to swing back toward the protester, his big hips swiveling so suddenly, and the motion so abrupt, that the young man lurched back from the stage and almost fell over.

“This young man, Brandon here, believes that our efforts in that regard made him sick, even though there's nothing to scientifically back up his claims. But it's still enough to make lesser companies think twice about the risks they're taking and rethink their priorities. Not so at Dane Corp. At Dane Corp we know the ability to succeed comes from not being afraid to fail. We take risks so you can enjoy the fruits of our labors in your wallets and the world can enjoy them in their next meal, next fill-up, next doctor's checkup, or next drink of water. Our goal is to leave everything behind better than it was when we found it. That includes the environment.”

Calum Dane stopped there. He could see the attention of the audience was still rooted on the young man now standing on one leg with his prosthetic leg tucked under his arm. Dane never had a chance today. All the great news he had to report on increased profits and the bottom line of Dane Corp fell on the deaf ears of investors, some of whom had seen triple-digit returns on their original investments.

Maybe he should show them the scar on his back from when a well cap blew out into it. How about the nose that was still bent, and the capped teeth, from when a horse he was trying to break to earn money as a teenager kicked him in the face? Or the cigarette burn marks left on his arm during one of his drunken dad's rages about the unfairness of the world. His old man had beaten him good, and Dane was convinced that, in the end, it had toughened him up and helped define all the success he'd achieved. Who could blame him, then, for taking a belt to his own boy, the younger, ne'er-do-well one, who needed it more than mother's milk?

Apparently, lots of folks, including his wife, who'd now won full custody—awarded it by a pissant judge who would've fit in just fine among the collection of commoners squeezed into the chairs before him, who thought Calum Dane was somehow beholden to them.

Didn't they know he'd started with nothing? Grew up dirt poor, the son of migrant sharecroppers who moved from shack to shack wherever and whenever they could find land to work? Calum Dane had never spent a full year in the same place until high school, had gotten used to lugging his records home under his arm when the time came to hand them over at whatever school came next.

What would these people think if they knew how other kids had made fun of how he smelled, or that day's clothes, dirtied by yesterday's work in the field after he got back from school? He'd pick or plant, hoe or rake, dig or flatten, all the time imagining himself as the person giving the orders instead of taking them. He'd saved every penny he'd ever earned, starting back then, to buy a whole bunch of Texas land everyone else thought had been bled of oil. Dane had bought the land for pennies on the dollar, the owners walking away figuring they'd just conned a big, dumb hick. Then, not long after, both slant and horizontal drilling came into vogue, and those thousands of worthless acres laid the foundation for all his success and the basis of his fortune.

What had Brandon McCabe done, besides lose a leg to cancer? And what was Dane supposed to do about it? He'd already withdrawn the pesticide in question from the market, replacing it with one that came with a significantly smaller profit margin to the point where he was actually losing money by doing everything he could to keep families like the one-legged kid's fed. Calum Dane wished he'd lost his tongue instead, pictured himself yanking it out of Brandon McCabe's mouth with a pair of pliers.

“Who of you out there can feel their bellies rumbling with hunger?” Dane heard himself asking the audience, unsure himself where this was going when no hands went up, as expected. “Nearly half the world would be raising their hands now. At Dane Corp we are committed to eradicating hunger.”

A smattering of applause followed his thinly veiled stab at self-justification.

“We are committed to making food more safe, wholesome, and plentiful than it's ever been before.”

A slightly louder ripple of applause.

“And at Dane Corp, as you can find in that prospectus I can see lots of you holding on your lap, we are committed to doing all that while still making our investors money in the process.”

Much louder applause, even a few cheers.

“So, folks, this may seem like no more than a shareholders meeting, sure. But it's actually plenty, plenty more than that. Because you
are
Dane Corp. And when
we
do good by the world,
you
do good by the world. Think about that the next time you open a dividend check, and remember that money came from doing good, from putting more and better food on the table, cheap and better oil in your tank, and energy to run this big world that's plentiful and cheap, too.”

His final words were drowned out by applause that grew louder as plenty of the shareholders in attendance at the annual meeting leaped to their feet. In that moment, Calum Dane forgot all about Brandon McCabe and the prosthetic leg he was holding like some trumpet of truth. The kid was gone, and the ballroom was his to own again.

Until the kid wasn't gone anymore. Dane glimpsed him reaching into his hollow limb and coming out with handfuls of tiny pieces of plastic that looked like the remains of a child's toy.

For good reason. Because the pieces were the sliced-off legs of toy soldiers. Dane could see the little foot poking out from painted-on army pants on one that landed on the stage and skittered close to him.

“Now everybody can have a severed leg of their own,” Brandon McCabe called out, hurling a final handful of the things out into the audience which gobbled them up, hooting and hollering all over again. “Difference being you didn't have to have yours amputated.”

And then the kid went hopping up the center aisle of the ballroom, propelling himself along from chair back to chair back. He stopped at the very back of the hall, close to a set of open double doors, and shot Calum Dane the finger.

“Good thing you didn't take my hands, too!” he shouted to the delight of the crowd, and then hopped out the door.

But Dane wasn't watching anymore. His attention was claimed by a big, rough-hewn man not unlike the man he'd been maybe twenty-five years before, when he'd had no debt, responsibility, or cripples stalking him. The man stood rigid, stiff and board straight just offstage, entirely out of view of the audience. He'd stopped just short of the light radiating down onto the stage floor, as if its brightness might burn him and he preferred the shadows instead.

Dane joined him in those shadows, suddenly glad to be out of the light and all it revealed.

“Talk to me, S.,” he said to the man, using the man's first initial, as had long been his custom, trying to beat back the hammering in his chest.

“The situation in Texas has been contained, sir,” reported Sev Pulsipher. “The operation was a success.”

“Thank God,” Dane said, feeling his breathing steady itself. Then he noticed the big man's taut expression. “What else you got to tell me?”

“There's been a complication.”

“I don't understand, if you got all the kids.”

“Turns out we didn't, sir.
That's
the complication.”

 

14

A
RMAND
B
AYOU,
T
EXAS

Houston PD was holding two boys from the Village School at the visitors' center located just off the entrance to the grounds. That's all Caitlin knew as she approached: two boys, no further information provided.

Law enforcement officials had already begun to cluster around the one-story building, a majestic A-frame structure built out of trees cut from these very grounds. Those officials found themselves battling for space with all manner of television and print reporters, who'd turned the parking lot into a staging ground for camera trucks and prep areas for the on-air personalities to grab whoever they could for an interview.

“Man oh man,” Tepper groused. “I miss the days when we had three channels and UHF was the new big thing.”

“Long gone and forgotten by nearly everybody else, Captain,” said Caitlin.

“That's the problem with this world. People take progress for improvement, when I'm of the opinion we're going backwards in more ways than forwards.”

They eased their way through the growing swarm, avoiding the microphones, cell phones, and recording devices thrust in their faces when reporters spotted their Texas Ranger badges. For his part, Tepper bummed a pair of filterless cigarettes off a newsman Caitlin recognized as an on-air reporter since she'd been a little girl. She thought she remembered him interviewing her grandfather at a Fourth of July celebration, when his hair had been black instead of silver.

Her and Tepper's badges were enough to get them into the visitors' center without having to flash their IDs. They were directed toward a back office, where she glimpsed a pair of youthful figures beyond a half-wall of glass, her angle precluding view of their faces.