need to,” he said. “There are, what? A dozen independent agencies and more than forty under the UN’s umbrella, but Knight Air has contracts with only a handful of those. Pathways has the rest locked up, some thirty altogether. Your competition is killing you there. “
Douglas gave a rueful nod. “Yeah, we’re Avis, they’re Hertz.”
“With more aggressive marketing,” Adid began, then had a sneezing fit. Muttering “This damned dust,” he pulled a bottle of nasal spray from his pocket and tilted his head back to clear his nostrils. “I was going to say, with better marketing, you will not have to settle for second place.”
Fitzhugh protested that he’d done all he could, extolling the virtues of Knight Air’s larger and faster planes, offering generous “commissions” on sales.
“Ah, my friend the Ambler, I know you have, but you are the operations manager. Marketing should not be your department. So I am proposing that it’s time for the company to hire a marketing director.”
“Great idea,” Douglas said. “Got anyone in mind?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. I had a discussion with him last week. A man named Timmerman. He is now director of flight operations for the UN, but he wishes to quit and is interested in going to work for you. Or may I say, for us.”
Douglas flinched and shook his head, “Wrong guy. Completely the wrong guy.”
“Yes, you had some problems with him sometime in the past. He told me about that.”
“And did he tell you that I was the next thing to a hijacker?” Douglas’s tone indicated that he was still wounded by the remark. “That’s what he told everyone else around here.”
“There is an Arab proverb—eli fat mat. The past is dead. It is dead for this Timmerman; let it be dead for you.”
“Just how did you and that Dutchman get together?”
“I keep these and these open.” Adid pointed at his eyes and ears. “He could be of great benefit to us. But you are the managing director. I can only offer my counsel. It is your decision.”
“What the hell does Timmerman know about marketing?” Douglas asked, scowling.
“He doesn’t need to know anything. He has been here with the UN for a long time. He is personally acquainted with the heads of each one of those forty agencies—”
“And he can use his influence to steer them our way,” Fitzhugh said, venturing to interrupt.
With an inclining of his small aristocratic head, the Somali acknowledged that Fitzhugh had it right. “You could easily double your UN contracts. With intelligent management, you could take most of them and, who knows, all of them away from Miss Whitcomb.”
Douglas’s scowl faded. An alert expression came to his face, so that, with his raptor’s nose, he resembled a perched hawk when it spots prey in the grass below. And this must have been the reaction that Adid, that canny judge of men, meant to provoke by referring to Tara by name rather than to her company’s name or to some abstract term like “your competitor.” He knew that Douglas viewed Knight Air’s competition with Pathways as more than a business rivalry; it was a duel between Tara and himself.
“Of course, you would need more equipment,” Adid went on. “I’ve researched the market. There are three planes for sale, two Andovers for three hundred thirty thousand each and a Polish Let for one hundred thousand. At the moment, retained profits are not sufficient to purchase these aircraft, so I would put up the capital.”
There was the big news, and if any resistance to hiring Timmerman remained in Douglas, that overcame it. He looked at Fitzhugh and flicked his eyebrows. “The big mo, my man. We’ll crush her.”
“Crush her?” Fitzhugh said, alarmed. Aside from his liking for Tara, he realized that crushing her, were it possible, could affect his personal life. She and Diana were friends. “Why should it be necessary to crush her?”
“The Sudan market is saturated,” Adid answered. “I see no room in it for two cargo airlines.”
“I’ve never thought of Sudan as a market.”
“You should change your thinking. What did you call the football pitches where you made your famous name? Grass?”
And the dark eyes, those pinpoint black holes that took everything in and gave nothing away, released a little something for a change—an intention. It was only a flash, but Fitzhugh saw it, and he mentioned it to Douglas after they saw Adid to his quarters.
“I think our Somali friend wants more than to be our venture capitalist,” he warned. “First