Freedom [211]
And then Kenny Bartles called with the news that he was selling RISEN and its contracts to a friend of his in Florida. Had already sold them, in fact. “Mike’s going to call you in the morning,” Kenny said. “I told him he had to keep you on till August fifteen. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to replace you after that anyway. I got bigger and better fish to fry.”
“Oh yeah?” Joey said.
“Yeah, LBI’s willing to subcontract me to procure a fleet of heavy-duty trucks. Not a job for the squeamish, and a lot better bread than bread’s been, if you know what I mean. It’s easy in, easy out—none of this bullshit with quarterly reports. I show up with the trucks, they cut the check, end of story.”
“Congratulations.”
“Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Kenny said. “I could still really use you there in D.C. I’m looking for a partner to invest with me and make up some of the shortfall I’m looking at. If you’re willing to work, you could pay yourself a little salary, too.”
“That sounds great,” Joey said. “But I have to go back to school, and I don’t have any money to invest.”
“OK. Sure. It’s your life. But how about a smaller piece of the action? The way I read the specs, the Polish Pladsky A10 is gonna do just fine. They’re not in production anymore, but there’s fleets of ’em standing around military bases in Hungary and Bulgaria. Also somewhere in South America, which doesn’t help me. But I’m gonna hire drivers in Eastern Europe, convoy the trucks across Turkey, and deliver ’em in Kirkuk. That’s going to tie me up for God knows how long, and there’s also a nine-hundred-K subcontract for spare parts. You think you could handle the spare parts as a sub sub?”
“I don’t know anything about truck parts.”
“Neither do I. But Pladsky built a good twenty thousand A10s, back in the day. There’ve gotta be tons of parts out there. All you gotta do is track ’em down, crate ’em up, ship ’em out. Put in three hundred K, take out nine hundred six months later. That’s an eminently reasonable markup, given the circumstances. My impression is that’s a low-end markup in procurement. No eyebrows will be raised. You think you can get your hands on three hundred K?”
“I can hardly get my hands on lunch money,” Joey said. “What with tuition and so forth.”
“Yeah, well, but, realistically, all you gotta do is find fifty K. With that, plus a signed contract in hand, any bank in the country’s gonna give you the rest. You can do most of this stuff on the internet in your dorm room or whatever. It sure beats working the dish belt, huh?”
Joey asked for some time to think it over. Even with all the takeout and taxis he’d indulged in, he had $10,000 saved up for the coming academic year, plus potentially another $8,000 available on his credit card, and a quick internet search turned up numerous banks willing to make high-interest loans with small collateral, as well as multiple pages of Google matches for pladsky a10 parts. He was aware that Kenny wouldn’t have offered him the parts contract if finding the parts were as straightforward as he’d made it sound, but Kenny had made good on all his RISEN promises, and Joey couldn’t stop imagining the excellence of being worth half a million dollars when he turned twenty-one, a year from now. On an impulse, because he was excited and, for once, not preoccupied with their relationship, he broke his phone silence with Connie to solicit