“Where are you, honey?”
“I’m sitting on the waterfront. The Star Ferry just pulled out, going over to Kowloon. There’s a big cruise ship in the harbor. It’s beautiful, Dave.”
“I remember some of it. Have you seen the Coopers?”
“Not yet. They know I’m here. I’m invited to dinner with them.”
“Has Chen come onto you yet?”
“Sort of.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to use your own good judgment, as I said before.”
“Get me a full report on Drake, Dave. Send it to me e-mail. The address will be at the hotel. We can trust the Mandarin Oriental to be confidential. Be a little careful, but I think we can count on confidentiality.”
IV
His report came through the next day and was handed to her by the hotel. It read:
Willard Drake has formed a corporation, as you supposed—Drake Research Services, Incorporated. He is in search of money. He intends to keep control, but he has put out shares of stock to people who are willing to invest in him.
If Malloy was an egomaniac about Sphere, he was nothing compared to this guy. It’s going to be his way or no way. He’d rather lose the thing than give away any control. We will have a problem with him. You may want to suggest something else to Chen.
Janelle returned to the waterfront, which she had come to love—in fact, she had learned to love Hong Kong—and pondered on what she would do. Drake was the only investment she really had in mind.
That night she had dinner with Jerry and Len Cooper at Mozart Stub’n, a distinguished small Austrian restaurant not far from their apartment.
“That is a beautiful dress,” Jerry said to her.
“Thank you. A gift from Mr. Chen.”
It was a blue cheongsam, this one only knee length, with of course the skirt split to her hip. It was embroidered with gold and silver thread. She wore no panty hose or stockings under it, only a pair of white bikini panties.
“You are forming an alliance with Chen, aren’t you?”
“It’s possible.”
“If we risked that, he’d eat us alive. He’s a predator, Janelle.”
“You are lucky he doesn’t want your company. I think he’d take it if he did. The money on The Peak is awesome.”
“Well … he’s not the only billionaire up there.”
“I think,” said Len, “that we Americans had better be giving close attention to our own interests, before the Chinese come to dominate the world’s economy.”
“They’ve got a long way to go before they do that,” she said.
V
With Janelle in Hong Kong, Dave decided to see if he could do anything about Tabatha Morgan. He had a little investigating done and found out where she lived and where she usually ate. She favored an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side and ate there two or three nights a week—always alone. He visited the place on a Monday night, and she was not there. He laid a fifty-dollar bill on the maître d’, and on Wednesday evening the man called to say that Miss Morgan was in the restaurant. He went there, and the maître d’ identified her for him.
“Oh,” he said as he walked past her table, ostensibly on his way to a table of his own. “I believe you are Miss Tabatha Morgan.”
She looked up. She was a thickset woman, not very attractive but not repulsive, dressed in a green knee-length dress that showed too much of her heavy legs. She laid a frowning, skeptical eye on him.
“And you are?” she asked.
“I believe you know my name. I’m Dave Shea.”
“Aahh … Mr. Shea. I have looked forward to meeting you, though in very different circumstances.”
“So I am told. Would you mind if I joined you, so we can talk a bit?”
She shrugged. “I suppose not. Why not?”
She was having a drink, apparently Scotch. He sat down and gave the waiter an order for a Beefeater martini on the rocks.
“You have met two of my wives—in those very different circumstances you mentioned. I do wish you hadn’t had Janelle handcuffed. It upset her terribly.”
“The marshals did that when they served the arrest warrant. I had nothing to do with it.”
Dave smiled. “I hope you won’t mind my saying that’s a little disingenuous. You could have had them removed when she first entered your office.”
Miss Morgan returned the smile, weakly. “Well … sometimes it helps.”
“Of course. It frightens them. Of course, it didn’t frighten Alexandra. She’s been locked up and chained up so much that she’s almost used to it.
“Anyway, I believe you called both my wives tough bitches. And maybe they are. What other impressions did you form?”
“They’re both smart as hell.”
“Well, Alexandra—”
“I know. Fit of jealousy.”
“She’s a fine woman. Ukrainian. We went there and visited Kiev, where she grew up. It’s a damned tragedy, if you don’t mind my telling you, that she did what she did and got herself where she is.”
“I guess, uh, that you’re the smart one.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I do what I have to do to avoid being what I was born as.”
“You’ve covered your tracks admirably. So far I’ve been frustrated in trying to track down just what you are up to.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe there are no tracks to cover?”
Miss Morgan sighed. “Why so many trips to Zurich? Why do you go to Hong Kong?”
“Miss Morgan, I am an investment banker. I advise other people on how to invest their money. I am always looking for something promising. Not everything is to be found in the States. You can check with Harcourt Barnham. I recommended many European companies as likely subjects for investment. I am doing the same at Banque Suisse. And Hong Kong is a very promising place for careful investment.”
He studied the menu.
“I recommend the veal,” she said. “I eat here often.”
“I’ll do what you suggest.”
“Hong Kong must be an interesting place,” she said. She had finished her drink and signaled the waiter to bring her another one.
“It’s fascinating,” he said. “You should make a point of going there sometime.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “A little difficult to do on the salary of an assistant district attorney.”
He grinned. “Maybe you should become an investment banker. It’s not too late for a career change. And I imagine you’ve learned a lot about the business during the course of your investigations.”
“It would be a scandal,” she said. “I could be disbarred, maybe even prosecuted for going to work in the business I’ve been investigating.”
“I would judge you’ve got the guts for it,” he said.
He continued to tell her stories, impress her, flatter her in a very subtle way. As only Dave could.
Two hours later they arrived at the door of her apartment. She had invited him to come in for a drink.
Things went on from there. Half an hour later she was nude, and shortly they were in bed. They got up eventually and returned to the living room. He relaxed in a corner of the couch, and she put her head down on his chest.
“No man has ever done that for me,” she whispered. “I’ve been abused but never made love to.”
“Shame,” he said. “You deserve it.”
“For my oversized titties?” she asked.
“No. You’re not the conventional beauty, but you’re an intelligent and loving woman. In my book that counts.”
“You came to the restaurant looking for me, didn’t you?”
“How could I have done that?”
“You’ll have to forgive me for being suspicious.”
“Tabby … your career is being suspicious.”
“Will we see each other again?”
“I hope we will.”
“Until Janelle c
omes home.”
“Well … it will be more difficult after that.”
VI
The night after she had dinner with the Coopers, Janelle had dinner with Chen Peng. To her surprise, he had a luxurious suite in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, and he welcomed her there. That she was the only guest was significant, she imagined. He had no bar in the suite, just ice buckets chilling champagne—Dom Pérignon.
He poured champagne and toasted her. She returned the toast.
She was wearing the blue cheongsam he had given her.
“Dinner will be brought in,” he said. “I was wondering, though, if you might first allow me to share with you one of the Glorious Postures.”
“I have to confess I am intrigued.”
“Notice the chair,” he said, pointing to an oddly shaped piece of furniture. “It is for one of the postures.”
She frowned at the thing. It was elegantly upholstered with shiny red silk. Two wooden rods or posts stood up from one end of it.
“How does it work?”
“You put your hips over the end and make yourself comfortable with your upper body relaxing on the shallow slope that leads down to the nest of pillows. Then I will move your legs outside the posts. This leaves you with your bottom up in the air and your parts spread wide. With you in that position I can achieve very deep penetration. I can assure you delicious sensations and total satisfaction.”
“I’m not tied to it or anything?”
“Of course not. Nothing like that.”
“I suppose I must take off my clothes.”
“Only your panties. I will take them before I spread your legs.”
“Peng … All right. I am fascinated by the idea.”
She pushed her hips against the chair and let her body slide down toward the pillows. The device was softly upholstered and not at all uncomfortable.
In fact he asked her, “Are you quite comfortable? Not strained?”
“I’m all right.”
“Then have I your consent to take down your panties and spread your legs.”
“Yes …” she murmured.
He gently pulled down her bikini panties and knelt and slipped off her shoes so he could get the panties past them. Then he carefully lifted each leg and put her knees outside the posts.
“Are you quite all right? Are you quite comfort able?”
She turned, looked at him, and nodded. He was taking down his pants. She smiled feebly. “I must be a hell of a sight,” she muttered.
“You are an exquisitely beautiful sight,” he said.
He entered her slowly, and he was entirely right that the chair put her on an angle to receive him deeply. He did not thrust into her. He just slid back and forth, and she had the impression that he was rotating his hips. She began to understand that this was not going to be over in a few minutes. The Glorious Posture was designed to make the act last a long time.
Her tension grew. The sensations became more and more intense. From the sound of his breathing, she understood that his were, too. She reached an orgasm, as complete as any she had ever known. But it was not over. He hadn’t had his and was apparently holding back to keep the thing going. She came again. Her muscles contracted on him and tightly made him reach his climax. He pulsed, and she felt his warm, slippery ejaculate spurt into her. He moaned. So did she.
Very considerately, he took a wad of tissues and wiped her clean. Then he offered his hand and helped her up from the chair.
TWENTY-SIX
I
JUNE, 1997
Waiters delivered a magnificent Chinese dinner. She had never heard of most of the dishes served that night. They began with fresh prawns mixed into a fruit salad. That was not so unusual, but the next course was shark’s fin soup, which was delicious. After that, egg white served with bird’s nest and crab-meat. Bird’s nest was not, of course, straw and twigs but was the lining of the nest: a soft, moist secretion produced by a bird native to Asia, which the bird used to line its nest. After that they had sauteed slices of sea whelk, which was a marine snail, served with scallops and broccoli. Next they had a fish meat that she could not identify and Peng did not offer to identify, with bits of goose webs mixed in. Peng explained that after a goose was slaughtered they very carefully cut the webs from its feet. The webs were a delicacy.
All this they ate with champagne.
The meal was an adventure.
“I have been looking into your suggestion that we try to acquire control of Drake’s voice-recognition system,” Peng said. “I think you have done me a very great service. I know I don’t have to tell you why it’s so important.”
“Potential,” she said. “It’s something everybody wants to do, and Drake has come closest of anybody.”
“Microsoft,” said Peng. “If we don’t get Drake, he’ll be eaten alive by Microsoft. If we do get him, potentially we could be as big a player in the world computer markets as Microsoft.”
“My husband reports that Drake is a genius and a complete egomaniac. Also, his system is becoming widely recognized, and he is going to be able to get money from various sources. Malloy, in Texas, was cash-hungry. Drake will not be.”
“The Coopers acquired Malloy, didn’t they?”
“They and some Chinese associates.”
“Their success has been modest,” said Peng. “Their profits have been modest. They expected to be bigger than Apple, bigger than Hewlett-Packard, bigger than Dell. Well, they’re not. They’ve found a niche, but they are not a major player in the information industry.”
“I know,” she said. “The Coopers threatened Dave to keep him away from Malloy.”
Peng shrugged. “The Coopers are crude. With you and your husband’s cooperation, we will take over Drake Research Services, Incorporated, before Willard Drake realizes what’s happening.”
II
AUGUST, 1997
Willard Drake was a forty-four-year-old man: scholarly, intense, wiry and always wore jeans. He had solved the problem of taking the time to worry about hair by shaving his head and now had no hair at all. He had been a professor of mathematics and computer science at three universities, until his parents died and left him a little money, which he used to equip a laboratory and devote almost all his time to the research he had begun in university labs. He was an adjunct professor at Stanford University, but he went there only two afternoons a week, to preside over graduate seminars.
His wife was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, eleven years younger than he was. He had met Julie Drake in Jamaica, and after only a few weeks acquaintance they were married. She was black, with a velvety chocolate-brown complexion. Taller than her husband, she carried herself with erect dignity. She wore no makeup. Her hair was cut to a bristly half inch of her scalp.
When she was twenty years old, her parents had sent her to live with relatives in London, where she was educated at the London School of Economics. She spoke with a distinct accent that was a combination of Jamaican and Oxonian.
Drake was a bristly personality, quick to take of fense at anyone who disagreed with him—so much so that some of his colleagues would have liked to see the university terminate him. Others, though, believed it would hugely enhance the reputation of the university’s math and science departments if one of their professors, even if now just an adjunct professor, developed the world’s first true voice-recognition software.
His computer, in the lab he maintained off campus, could recognize some thousand words. What was more impressive, it recognized them when Mrs. Drake spoke them in that idiosyncratic accent of hers. Witnesses to the system had tried speaking to it themselves, using their own natural voices and accents.
“Marry,” someone would say to the computer.
A question would appear on the screen:
Mary? Merry? Marry?
Using a mouse, the witness would move the cursor to “marry” and click. Then he would speak the word again, and it would appear on the screen: marry.
The poi
nt of the program was not just to give the computer commands, but to enable the user to dictate documents.
He was showing his system to several visitors who had traveled from other cities to see it.
A visiting UCLA professor with an accent said, “Villiam iss a good fellow.”
William? Is?
The professor ran the cursor to those words and clicked. His sentence then appeared on the screen: William is a good fellow.
“If you had this program in your office and spoke to the computer a few times,” Drake explained, “it would learn to recognize you and your speech idiosyncrasies, and you would receive fewer and fewer inquiries. That’s a feature I haven’t entirely worked out. But it has learned to recognize two speakers, myself and my wife. She has an idiosyncratic accent, as you have heard, but the system has learned to recognize her. It asks her almost as few questions as it asks me, even though we pronounce words very differently.”
“It iss marvelous,” said the professor from UCLA.
“Well … there is work to be done. But I know I’m on the right track.”
III
Drake sat over dinner that night with Julie and their two children: a boy eight and a girl seven.
“Impressed, then?”
“Impressed. And they understood. They’ll spread the word. Our stock will rise tomorrow or the next day, I am confident.”
“And fall again in a week or so, maybe. Tech stocks are notoriously volatile.”
“You are my financial genius.”
“And you are just a genius, period.”
“I am concerned about Greenleaf. He would love to see the whole thing go to hell.”
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