When she wasn’t focused on Erica, Sheila watched Roy. He never once took his eyes off Erica. Erica made eye contact with Roy at least twice as often as she did with Sheila, which left no doubt who Erica was really talking to. Sheila didn’t mind, that much. She was a little surprised a female CEO would do that, though it was standard behavior for the male CEOs who pitched to them. But there were the savvy few who homed in on Sheila as much as they did on Roy during pitch meetings.
“Okay. We’ll take a break, and then I’ll give you a tour.”
* * *
Tony was called upstairs to the HR office to sign yet more papers and tried not to be annoyed. She was in her second week at GHS and working as hard and as fast as she could to absorb the details of her new job, so this was an unwelcome interruption.
Heather, the HR manager, as chirpy as ever, handed her a multipage document. “Non-disclosure agreement.”
“I think I already signed this.” Tony tried to keep her tone neutral.
“Yes, but this is a new version, and Erica wants me to use it. Sorry for making you sign twice.”
Tony knew she ought to read it over thoroughly, but she wasn’t in the mood, and she wanted to get back to the lab and back to work. She’d signed an NDA at the biotech company she used to work at and was familiar with them and what they said. It was common for companies to not want to let their technology out and to keep employees from talking about it in public or to competitors.
Tony riffled through the pages, noting a paragraph that read, “EMPLOYEE shall not mention the name of COMPANY on social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and SnapChat, nor disclose to friends or family members that EMPLOYEE is working at COMPANY.” Huh? That was strange. The level of security Erica imposed was higher than any she’d ever experienced, but she accepted that Erica had her reasons. She scrawled her signature on the last page and handed it to Heather.
Tony passed the ladies’ room on her way to the stairs down to the laboratory area. For the sake of efficiency, she decided to stop in before she returned to the lab.
* * *
Sheila left her security-guard shadow outside the door of the bathroom. If Erica was concerned with security, she might want to employ female guards, who could actually enter the women’s restroom with their charges. Sheila could be whispering information into her phone while she was supposed to be urinating or fixing her hair. She stopped at the mirror to examine her hair, and it was fine. She kept it chin length, and it didn’t need attention. It was a nice bronzy, dark red. Sheila ascribed to the maxim that lesbians needed above all to have good haircuts rather than elaborate hair styles.
Sheila wouldn’t have had much to report or anyone to transmit secret information to if she did succeed in obtaining any. Leonardo resembled a blocky, silvery-gray box. Not the standard “black box” but its equivalent. Nor would Sheila have understood if she’d been shown its innards. Erica had led Sheila and Roy on a lightning walk-through of what she called the wet lab area. This meant the lab where chemistry was done with liquid reagents, hence “wet.” Sheila knew nothing about laboratories and wouldn’t know if they were building a smart bomb or curing cancer. The function of the engineering lab was clearer. The devices were under construction and undergoing testing there. Erica stood proudly in front of a real Leonardo and showed how blood samples in microcap tubes were taken and then fed into the device, and results were returned.
“We want people to put them in their homes.” Erica patted Leonardo as though it were a beloved pet.
“Why Leonardo?” Sheila asked.
“Because, you know, da Vinci was a great painter but also an inventor.”
Sheila trusted Erica’s employees were up to the tasks she’d assigned them to. The technical resumes of the managers, listed in the prospectus, certainly looked impressive.
As she stood at the mirror, a dark-haired woman about her age emerged from one of the stalls, smiled at her, and went to the sink to wash her hands.
On impulse, Sheila said, “Excuse me. I see you work here?” Talking to someone was much better than trying to discern anything about GHS at random. Sheila was confined to knowing whatever Erica thought was important to tell her. The front-line staff could be much more informative if asked specific questions. That is, if they would talk.
The woman looked at Sheila for a moment. “Yes. I do.”
“What do you do, eh, Antoinette?” Sheila read the woman’s name tag, which was clipped to the lapel of her white coat.
“Oh, sorry. Who are you?” Antoinette asked suspiciously.
This was interesting, but it jived with Erica’s concern with secrecy. Sheila approved of that response.
“I’m Sheila Garrison, and we, my father and I, are thinking of investing in the company. I want to know if you like working here. I won’t ask you to reveal details that will get you in trouble.” Sheila formed what she hoped was an ingenuous expression.
Antoinette’s guarded demeanor softened. “Oh, yeah. I mean, I just started a couple weeks ago, but sure. So far I love it.”
“That’s wonderful. I’m glad to hear it. That reassures me.”
This was a tiny opinion sample, but it was still meaningful. Sheila had had enough practice in the past couple of years asking this question, and she could tell if the employee she questioned was lying. The element of surprise helped prompt a truthful response. Antoinette was looking closely at her, seeming curious and open to further conversation. She said, “I hope you’ve gotten a good impression of us.”
Sheila laughed. “Oh my, absolutely. Your CEO is persuasive, to say the least, and she tells a compelling story.”
“Oh, good. You probably know that companies like this need a lot of money to get going.”
“Yes, I do. We’re venture capitalists. That’s our business,” Sheila said, then laughed lightly.
Antoinette’s eyebrows went up. “Wow. Great.”
They stared at one another for a moment. Antoinette was cute and almost certainly a lesbian. She had short black hair, and under her lab coat she wore a black polo shirt and blue jeans, plus immaculate white sneakers. Then Sheila remembered she’d come in with a purpose, and she needed to get on with it before that security guard got antsy.
“Sorry. I must be going, but thanks for talking with me.” Sheila ducked into a toilet stall and heard the bathroom door shut as Antoinette left. The afterimage of Antoinette stayed with her for the rest of the day, popping in and out of her mind.
* * *
As Tony sat at her lab bench reviewing the protocol Abe had given her to execute, she had difficulty concentrating. She was picturing how the woman from the restroom looked—dark-red hair and sparkling, amused brown eyes, and she looked at Tony like she already knew everything about her. This was nuts because she rarely noticed a woman’s appearance. She didn’t consider herself that shallow, and she wasn’t a flirt. In fact, she didn’t think they’d been flirting. It was a pleasant, brief exchange but no more. She had work to do, and she had to get a grip.
To succeed at this research, she first had to demonstrate her proficiency at performing the tests as described. She was experienced, but Tony didn’t like to take anything for granted. She wanted to be perfect.
Then she could dive into development. The vague directions she’d received from Abe were, “We’re going to scale the immunoassay down, way down.” He meant that they would perfect the test to work successfully on a much smaller volume. Tony was aware of the two-drop rule. Erica said that two drops of blood was all they would draw, and an unknown number of routine blood tests would be done on those two drops. A drop of fluid was approximately fifty microliters; hence, one hundred microliters would be their working volume. Since standard blood draws could go up to ten milliliters, about two teaspoons, this would be an interesting process. Tony was working on only one type of test, and doctors routinely ordered many others, depending upon what diagnoses they were considering. Hundreds, really. But Erica had been granted a patent
for the Leonardo that would be able to perform these tests on the specified volume of blood sample.
“Good thing I like challenges,” Tony said under her breath as she labeled the wells on her plate.
It was a simple enough assay, and Tony finished the setup and put the plate into the incubator. She had fifteen minutes to wait. At her desk, she reread the final steps: adding the enzyme and then reading the color change. Tony wondered if she’d ever see that woman from the restroom again. It wasn’t likely, because it felt like a random encounter, but that was disappointing. Very disappointing. Tony’s timer dinged, and she returned to her lab bench to finish her test.
* * *
“The last thing I’d like to do is demonstrate how the device works,” Erica said. “If you’re willing, I’d like you to have your fingers pricked, and I’ll have you tested for Vitamin D levels.”
Sheila and Roy looked at each other, and Sheila nodded and said, “Sure. That would be great.”
They’d seen the engineering department and a couple of prototypes of the Leonardo devices. An earnest engineer described how they fed blood samples into Leonardo and how precisely programmed, miniaturized robots inside it performed the same tests as humans did in laboratories, either commercial labs or hospital clinical labs. Then Leonardo returned a little printout with the numbers.
They weren’t shown the interior of Leonardo, but Sheila reckoned she wouldn’t know what the heck she was looking at anyhow. Erica said this was a working prototype of what they were in the process of developing.
Erica called in a technician, but she helped Roy and Sheila with their finger sticks herself and popped the microcaps in a slick-looking box that the technician whisked away, presumably downstairs to the lab or wherever the test would be run.
The three of them chatted while they waited, and twenty minutes later, the technician returned with their results. Sheila was impressed, though she didn’t know what to make of her Vitamin D number.
“It’s something to not have to endure that big needle stuck in my arm,” she told Erica, who beamed.
“Isn’t it? I don’t know anyone who likes that, even if they don’t faint like my sister does if she has to get her blood taken.”
“What’s the timeline before you can commercialize?”
“Sometime in the next eighteen months.”
“I thought you said three years when we had our first meeting,” Sheila said.
Erica didn’t blink. “Oh, yes. I try to be conservative, but it’s going to be much sooner. I’ve got teams of people working twelve hours a day.”
“Don’t mind Sheila. She likes to burrow into details,” Roy said. “She’s not trying to trip you up.”
Sheila was mildly put off by her dad’s comment, but she couldn’t get into it with him. Not the time.
As he shook Erica’s hand, Roy said, “You’ll hear from us soon. It looks good. We have a few more inquiries to make.”
In the car on their way back to the office, Sheila said, “Dad, we’ve talked before about you making comments about me to clients.”
He was driving and didn’t take his eyes off the road, but he frowned and looked abashed at the same time.
“I forgot. It wasn’t important. Erica didn’t mind.”
“I mind, Dad.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll watch that. Don’t get mad at me.” Truly, sometimes Sheila felt like her dad was a little kid and she was the parent.
“Okay. I’m not mad. You think this is a go?”
This time, he turned to meet her gaze. “Yes. Don’t you?”
“It looks super, but what do we really know about medical blood testing? Are those the inquiries you were going to make?”
Roy said, “Nah. I just made that up. We don’t have to know everything. She said she’s hired the best scientists and engineers she can find, and she trusts them. My gut says yes.”
“Right. Your famous ‘gut feeling.’” Sheila flashed on Antoinette. She was one of those scientists, obviously, based on her white lab coat. A nerd probably. Her slight awkwardness telegraphed that message, even if she didn’t sport glasses and a bad haircut. Sheila berated herself for thinking in stereotypes. Antoinette had short, precisely cut black hair and dark, almost black eyes, a mellow voice, and a serious demeanor. Sheila generally liked the technical types, but one of her two dates had been with a software engineer, who, while attractive, had launched into a jargon-filled monologue over dinner. Nerdiness was good, up to a point. What would Antoinette be like in a social context? Sheila liked how serious she was, but at the same time, her eye contact was excellent, and her smile was genuine.
“What else do we want to know?” she asked.
“I’ve got all I need. What about you?” Roy grinned, seeming satisfied.
“It seems like you’ve made up your mind. I don’t see any red flags, honestly, and even if the income projections are a little high, we’ll see a monumental ROI within five years. Based on the market share they can steal away from Lab Corps and Quest Diagnostics, it’ll be stratospheric.”
“I know, dear. That’s how I see it. Let’s get together tomorrow and calculate the exact terms for our investment, send Erica a preliminary offer, and then go out for a drink.”
* * *
Tony liked to be at work exactly at seven in the morning. This made for a long day since she had to catch Caltrain’s bullet train by six fifteen a.m. She had no plans to move to Palo Alto, though, because finding apartments there was harder than finding them in San Francisco.
She sat at her desk and made a to-do list and read her email. She’d be ready to hit the lab in a half hour. This time of day was quiet in the cube farm because most of GHS didn’t show up until later, and she liked it that way. So far, she also liked her coworkers. Abe, short for Ibrahim, her supervisor, was gentle and encouraging.
She was nearly ready to go into the lab when Abe appeared beside her.
“Hi, Tony. Good morning. Some of us are headed into town for coffee. Do you want to come?”
Tony hesitated, then decided to go. Why not? She wasn’t the most gregarious person and tended to be shy around unfamiliar people, but she knew from experience that the only way to counteract that tendency was to get to know people. She’d had to learn that when she was in her twenties. Going out for coffee with her coworkers was a good idea. She bit back an automatic response of “No. I have to work.”
“Okay. Sure.”
They carpooled from the GHS campus into downtown Palo Alto. Tony liked the suburban vibe there, different from San Francisco’s urban intensity. They arrived at Coupa Café, the “in” coffee joint of Silicon Valley, Tony was told on the ride over. Tony did like coffee, and though the brew at work was okay, better than the usual workplace fare because it was actually drinkable, she was always up for a good cup of café joe. Besides Abe, a member of the chemistry group who was working on different assays and an engineer were there. The GHS structure was odd. All the functional groups had leaders who reported to Erica. The company had no research director and very few people in middle management.
They waited in line and admired the cases of baked goods, chattering amiably. Tony had made her choice, upon the recommendation of Lara from the chemistry group, and happened to look back to the end of the ever-lengthening line. There, staring at her cell, was the woman she’d met in the upstairs bathroom last week. A shock of excitement rattled her, immediately followed by fear. She had a choice. She could do nothing but wait and see if the woman noticed her, or she could walk up to her and say hello. She turned to Lara. “I’ll be right back. Save my place, please.”
It didn’t pay to think about this type of thing too hard because she could easily come up with reasons not to make a move. She felt as though an invisible hand were pushing her.
“Hi. Remember me?”
The woman raised her eyes, clearly startled, but as she apparently recognized Tony, she broke into a smile of pleasure. She wore another simple tailored pantsuit, black, th
is time, with a white shirt, and Tony swallowed, her throat tight with apprehension, though her unusual bravery thrilled her.
“My gosh, sure. You’re Antoinette from GHS. We met last week, in the restroom.” She laughed.
Tony decided not to correct her use of “Antoinette.” Maybe later, if there was a later. She remembers me. Wow.
“Yeah. I wanted to say hello. I’m here with my coworkers.” She gestured vaguely to the people farther along in line.
“Great. This is a terrific place. We have business meetings here sometimes. How’s it going with your new job?
“Oh, it’s going well. You know when you’re new…” Now that Tony was there actually talking to the unknown woman, all her bravado drained away, and she was slipping into inarticulateness, not going to make a good impression.
“I do. I’m Sheila Garrison, by the way. I never introduced myself.” She stuck out her hand and Tony took it. Her palm was smooth and dry, and Sheila didn’t let go of her hand immediately, which further unnerved and pleased Tony.
“Good to meet you. Again. How is the, uh, investing?”
“Oh.” Sheila laughed. Tony and her question seemed to amuse her. “It’s fine. We made a preliminary offer to your boss and are talking to her later this week. I think everything will work out.”
“Fabulous,” Tony said, and she meant it. Then she saw that Lara was almost at the cash register.
“I have to go. Sorry.”
“I understand. Perhaps I can call you sometime, or you can call me?”
Tony could only mutter, “Yeah, okay,” as Sheila scribbled something on the back of a card.
“Here’s my cell. Work number is fine as well. Enjoy your coffee.”
“Thanks.” Tony managed to make eye contact with Sheila before she turned and sprinted to the cash register just in time.
“I got you that almond croissant, right? Who was that you were talking to?” Lara asked as the group settled at a table.
Trade Secrets Page 3
