Chad had stuffed his girlie pix inside a copy of Fortune, and I’d left them bundled together when I put them into the file. The issue dated to before the economy’s collapse: there was an article on the high demand for luxury goods and the way you could make the middle class feel they were part of the hyper-wealthy elite. Another teaser claimed that Fortune had tested the iPhone against all comers. A third asked, “Will a change of owner change Achilles’ fortunes?”
I had removed the girlie magazines and was thumbing through them looking for Alexandra Guaman’s face, wondering if I would recognize it floating airbrushed above improbable breasts, when I did a double take on the Achilles headline. I had read it online when I was looking up background on Tintrey.
I went back to Fortune to reread the story. Tintrey had acquired Achilles, the maker of body armor, when it became obvious that the war in Iraq was going to last for a long time. Achilles had been developing nanotechnology, using particles I’d never heard of and wasn’t sure I could pronounce. Inorganic, fullerene-like nanostructures. They apparently were “gallium-based,” whatever that was, and stronger than steel. In a photograph of one of the particles blown up a few hundred times, the stuff looked pretty much like the cement they were pouring into potholes on the Kennedy Expressway.
Achilles had been losing money; R & D doesn’t come cheap. Fortune had a lot to say about shortsighted corporate policy that let Wall Street’s insatiable demand for current-quarter profits block long-term development strategies. Anyway, the long and the short of it was, Tintrey bought Achilles, which was bleeding red ink too fast to fight off a hostile takeover bid.
Jarvis MacLean’s first order of business was a campaign to sell Achilles shields to the Department of Defense. Some Achilles staffers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed concern that Tintrey was marketing a product that wasn’t ready for full-scale production. Yet the new owners had spent almost ten million dollars on building a PR campaign.
“When you’re making a new product, why worry about graphic design? Why not put the money into hiring a good science team?” asked one former member of the R & D staff.
Indeed, Tintrey has been downsizing the R & D division since acquiring Achilles. “They have a great product in place. We need to focus now on getting it into the hands of our troops, not on endlessly refining it,” said Gilbert Scalia.
As head of Tintrey’s Enduring Freedom Division, it’s Scalia’s job to outfit the nine thousand Tintrey employees in Iraq and to provide matériel to the U.S. Armed Forces deployed around the world.
A year after acquiring Achilles, Tintrey has already changed the profit picture at the division. Maybe the new publicity did the trick.
The magazine showed some of the PR materials, including the Achilles logo: a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis. This was the design on the black mitt I’d found in Chad Vishneski’s duffel. And it was the design Nadia Guaman had been painting on the Body Artist.
I read the article through carefully twice, curled up on the couch in my client corner with the dogs at my feet. I learned a bit about the structure of fullerene nanoparticles, at least, I learned they were named for Buckminster Fuller, but not much else.
The article had been important to Chad Vishneski, important enough that he kept it alongside his girlie magazines. And he’d cut holes in one of the armor mitts. But why he’d done it would have to wait until he regained consciousness—or Sanford Rieff at Cheviot labs found out a dramatic secret about the shield.
Neither John Vishneski nor Tim Radke had ever heard Chad talk about the armor. But Chad’s squad had been killed around him: that was when he lost the equilibrium that carried him through his first deployments. Maybe he blamed Tintrey for the failure of their armor in protecting his men and was savaging their equipment as a way to vent his feelings of helplessness.
I called Vishneski. He’d had to go to a jobsite, a building far enough along that they were working on the interior, but he said Chad’s status continued to improve.
“The docs are all pretty optimistic. He hasn’t been speaking anymore, at least, he hadn’t before I left this morning, but he’s restless in a good way, they say. The police have been around some, wanting to know if he’s well enough to go back to prison, but that Dr. Herschel, she’s a pistol, isn’t she? She told them where to get off.”
I silently blew Lotty a kiss. “No strangers have come around to try to see him?”
“Not that I know of. But I’ll talk to Mona. Of course, we don’t know who his friends are, so they’d all be strangers to us. But, like I said, some of my buddies are hanging around. They’ll let me know if anyone comes calling.”