Monster: Tale Loch Ness by Jeffrey Konvitz

Author:Jeffrey Konvitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780345294470
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 1982-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

The day after the commission had adjourned, Whittenfeld called another meeting of the senior staff and announced he would be spending the following two weeks—while they were waiting for the tribunal report—at company headquarters in New York, planning for the expected resumption of operations. He briefly reviewed responsibilities and duties to be undertaken by the staff in the interim, and, satisfied his operating orders were understood, left Scotty Bruce in command while investing Pierre Lefebre with veto power over most nontechnical decisions.

After the meeting, Whittenfeld explained the rationale behind his orders to Scotty in private—there were enemies everywhere, and it was essential that Lefebre be left with significant latitude and control. Scotty objected, but when Whittenfeld refused to budge, Scotty decided not to press Whittenfeld into an explosive response. He also decided not to confront the man, who was still visibly on edge, about the control hose section. Christ, only a lunatic would think that Whittenfeld would admit to subterfuge and murder, assuming those acts had actually been committed.

Frustrated, he almost quit his job but stopped himself. Hell, he'd quit the NFL only to leave others behind to wage the battle. And he'd vowed after that experience never to quit a difficult situation again, a decision that had propelled him into countless entanglements and had kept him involved long enough in each to have tasted success or pink-slip failure.

No, he would stick this out, especially with the specter of the Phoenix incident staring him right in the eye, reminding him that Max Furst might well have been wrong about the hose and that Furst's death might have been an accident, after all.

The Phoenix incident had been the final straw, the fatal crusade that had gotten him booted out of his last job and into private consultancy. The Phoenix was a drill ship. At the time of the incident, it was stationed off the coast of northern California in a highly controversial lease territory. Shortly after he took command, a senior company manager, who was involved in the Phoenix program, died in a suspicious car accident. A short time later, Scotty was approached by a group of environmentalists who claimed the executive had been murdered after discovering falsifications in the company's original environmental impact reports. The environmentalists claimed the company had hidden information that not only projected the possibility of a major environmental catastrophe but also the inevitability of a dangerous accident aboard the drill ship due to unstable underlying gaseous formations. Convinced of the plot's authenticity by intracompany memos obtained by the environmentalists, he led a rebellion. The drill ship was shut down, and the state of California began an investigation, which ended in disaster. The memos were discredited, discovered to have been forged. The death of the executive was conclusively shown to have been an accident. And he was shown to have once again followed his wild instincts, thereby causing the loss of millions of dollars.

That Geminii had hired him after the Phoenix incident had never ceased to amaze him.

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