The Destroyer - 66 - The Destroyer 066 - Sue Me by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

Author:Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir [Murphy, Warren & Sapir, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp Action
Publisher: PINNACLE BOOKS
Published: 2010-03-19T14:53:31+00:00

Chapter 7

Nathan Palmer spot­ted the full ex­tent of the dis­as­ter first. Riz­zu­to was on the scene in Gup­ta. Riz­zu­to could talk spar­rows out of trees and he had bril­liant­ly won over the gov­ern­ment with well-​placed lav­ish gifts, lined up the vic­tims, and had one of the great­est neg­li­gence cas­es of all time aimed at one of the rich­est chem­ical com­pa­nies of all time. Ev­ery­thing seemed per­fect.

And then the lit­tle hor­ri­ble fact of the pal­try val­ue of life in the third world reared its hor­ri­fy­ing head, and Palmer was so pan­icked he can­celed a date for the evening and called in Schwartz, who had to pry him­self away from his stock­bro­ker.

It was they, not their me­chan­ical ge­nius Das­trow, who had made the hor­ri­ble mis­take. He had done ev­ery­thing right, as al­ways.

Schwartz was so fu­ri­ous when he en­tered their plush Cen­tu­ry Park City of­fices that he al­most broke the glass case pro­tect­ing the Desk.

“Dis­as­ter in Gup­ta,” said Palmer.

“I should hope so. That’s what we make mon­ey on. We’re go­ing to make a for­tune.”

“That’s what we’re go­ing to go to the clean­ers on,” said Palmer.

“You called me away from the one stock-​mar­ket trans­ac­tion that can make up for a life­time of loss­es to make me lis­ten to your pes­simism?”

“Arnold, I prob­ably saved you from bankrupt­ing your­self for the rest of your nat­ural life. What do you think hap­pened in Gup­ta?”

“We start­ed one of the great­est neg­li­gence cas­es of all time. We signed up an en­tire city as clients. We’ve got two thou­sand, two hun­dred and twen­ty deaths of heads of fam­ilies, at least sev­en thou­sand chil­dren de­prived of their lives, twen­ty-​four hun­dred moth­ers whose love and sup­port will be de­nied en­tire fam­ilies, to say noth­ing of a slew of healthy young able-​bod­ied young men and beau­ti­ful young wom­en who will nev­er bear chil­dren or en­joy the loves and lives of fam­ilies,” said Schwartz. “And I’m not count­ing the in­cal­cu­la­ble grief. Riz­zu­to is go­ing to have those ju­ries at­tach­ing ev­ery sin­gle as­set of In­ter­na­tion­al Car­borun­dum . It’ll be come-​and-​get-​it day.”

Nathan Palmer shook his head sad­ly.

“There are two kinds of peo­ple in the third world. There are the hand­ful who run things. They’re very rich. Each of their lives is worth a for­tune. But they don’t need lawyers be­cause they are the courts. They are the army. They are the gov­ern­ment. And they al­ready take a rake­off from any in­dus­try that has a hope of sur­viv­ing. These peo­ple are the mon­ey. Then there are the cit­izens of their coun­tries, the ones these peo­ple at­tend the pricey con­fer­ences about.”

“Yes,” said Schwartz, ad­just­ing his cuff be­cause it had ac­ci­den­tal­ly cov­ered his gold Rolex.

“What do you think the val­ue of a hu­man life is in those coun­tries?”

“You just can’t put a price on a hu­man life,” said Schwartz an­gri­ly. “You’ve got to es­tab­lish his earn­ing pow­er. What he means to a fam­ily. A cor­po­ra­tion. Lots of things go in­to de­ter­min­ing the val­ue of a hu­man life.”

“In dol­lars and cents, Arnold,” said Palmer. “What do you think we’re talk­ing about per head?”

“That’s dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out.

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