by Bryan Devore
After learning from Darryl Mitchell about Jack Ross’s bankrupted company, Seaton had come to follow up personally on the new information. According to Mitchell, Dr. Winston Sharpe, the head researcher for Jack’s company, who had later testified against Jack, had taken a job with an X-Tronic subsidiary in Portland. Sharpe must surely hold the missing piece to the puzzle surrounding the fall of Jack’s company.
The jet’s tires compressed on the wet asphalt, and the engines roared in reverse thrust, shaking the cabin and pulling Seaton forward in his seat. The world passing by outside the window began to slow. After coming to a stop, Captain Steiner opened the cockpit door and entered the cabin.
“Bit of a rough landing, Captain,” Seaton said.
“Yes, sir. But I saved you twenty minutes by cutting along the river. The tower recommended circling up around the west end of the city because Mt. Saint Helens had been showing some activity in the past few days, and they’re concerned she just may go up again. I told them I could bank the jet above the river gorge and slide in at a safer altitude from the east. The tower was fine with that as long as I was—most pilots wouldn’t have tried it.”
Seaton smiled. “That’s why you’re my guy, Captain Steiner—you’re a hell of a pilot, and you know what you can and can’t get away with in the air.”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Steiner said with a grin. “Just trying to prepare myself for the day you ask me to do something really crazy.”
“I appreciate that,” Seaton replied. “Let’s just hope I never have to ask. At my age, you start to get concerned about the odds finally catching up,” he said with a grin. “Now, Marcus,” he said, switching gears and turning to his bodyguard, “let’s go see this Dr. Sharpe. It’s time for me to find out the truth about Jack’s company.”
The Range Rover climbed through the hilly streets of Portland. It was late enough on this rainy night that hardly a soul could be seen.
“We’re almost there,” the driver said, pulling into the underground garage of a massive twenty-story building.
“This is a residential building?” Seaton asked. Something didn’t feel right. The absence of other vehicles in the parking tunnel made the place feel more like an abandoned factory than a luxury condominium complex.
“No, sir. This building houses the research labs for Acheron Technology. Acheron is a partially owned subsidiary created by RSA after X-Tronic acquired RSA last year. This place is strictly for R and D activity. The scout team tried to contact Dr. Sharpe at his home, but we were told that he’s working at Acheron tonight. Apparently, he’s heading a research project that needs to perform some upgrades to the corporate servers overnight. I don’t know any of the details about the upgrades.”
Seaton thought for a moment. Two weeks ago, he had never heard of Acheron Technology; now he was looking for its head researcher of a software development program that had been kept under wraps for more than a year. The more he learned about the numerous side businesses his sons had started, the more it unsettled him. He could feel his plans for X-Tronic slipping away. And now it may well be too late to undo his mistakes, to fix the instability that had developed in the company over the past few years.
“And you’re sure Dr. Sharpe is here?” Seaton asked the driver.
“That’s the information I have, sir.”
The Range Rover stopped in front of three elevator doors at the far side of the tunnel. As Seaton and Marcus got out, the bell dinged and a big man in a business suit stepped from an open elevator. He waved at Seaton.
“Mr. Seaton,” he said, “I’m Hayden Sorenson, head of security. Dr. Sharpe is waiting in the executive conference room on level eighteen. I’ll take you to him.”
Seaton felt a little alarmed to be inside a $400 million research division of his own company, which he had not even known about.
“This way, sir,” Sorenson said as they stopped on the eighteenth floor.
Clearly, they were in no ordinary office. The inside of the building had been gutted to make room for the large research apparatus and equipment sealed inside glass rooms. Seaton was surprised to see that the hallway split into a large circle, which left an open rotunda looking down onto a lower floor. He realized that the space had been designed to operate factory-style research equipment—something he had seen only in some of China’s top research institutions when he toured Hong Kong last year with a group of U.S. technology executives. He had no idea that X-Tronic had developed the same advanced system of laboratory work in a downtown corporate setting—indeed, he had thought the technology still two or three years away for his company.
“What is this place?” Marcus asked.
Seaton stopped by the rotunda’s opening and leaned on the banister to look down at the research floor. Two young women were hunched over computer terminals, while an older man ran through a data checklist on the inside panel of a giant server sitting in the center of the room. Next to the server was a glass room, where a bundle of network cables snaked into a device that looked like a large copier-printer. Another research programmer fed a bin of paper into the device before returning to the two women to look at the computer monitors.
“What are they doing?” Seaton asked Sorenson.
“I’m afraid that’s a question you’d better ask Dr. Sharpe.”
Seaton had to bite back the impulse to demand an answer here and now, but he realized it would be best to wait a few more minutes for the complete story. Stepping back from the banister, he shot Marcus a quick glance to communicate his growing concern, then followed Sorenson along the corridor.
They stopped in front of two cherrywood double doors. “He’s in here, Mr. Seaton. I’ll be outside if you need anything.”
Inside, they saw a tall man with close-cropped gray hair standing at the far end of the room, facing away from them with his hands clasped behind his back. A colorful sign on the side wall near the entrance showed the logos of X-Tronic and Cygnus mounted side by side. They were linked, as if already joined in a single company.
“My God,” Marcus said, “this place isn’t owned by just X-Tronic. Cygnus is a part owner.” Turning to his boss, he said, “Mr. Seaton, we’re inside the enemy’s camp!”
34
“WHAT THE HELL is going on here?” Seaton demanded of Dr. Sharpe, across the conference table. Sharpe stood motionless while Seaton paced back and forth like a caged panther. “I have so many questions, I don’t even know where to begin!” he said in a commanding voice.
Sharpe stood with his hands still behind his back, waiting patiently for a chance to respond. “I’ll tell you anything I can, Mr. Seaton,” he finally said.
“You’ll tell me everything!” Seaton yelled, slamming his palm on the conference table. “What happened to Jack Ross? What happened to his company in the end? It collapsed because of the failed test results of the software glitches for your star program, right?”
“The Redshift Project—yes, that’s correct.”
“You testified that it couldn’t work, that it couldn’t be completed, isn’t that right?”
“That’s what I testified, Mr. Seaton. You know this already—it’s public record.”
“Was it true?”
“Of course it was true . . . at the time. I’m a researcher, Mr. Seaton. I’m not going to perjure myself, and I’m not going to lie to you.”
“C’mon,” Seaton replied. “I have all the pieces to the puzzle: Jack Ross’s indictment, his company’s bankruptcy, your mysterious Redshift Project and its failure, your testimony at the hearing, and your subsequent acceptance of a position with Acheron Technology. I just don’t know how the pieces fit together yet . . . but you do.”
“Mr. Seaton, you don’t know what you think you know. Things aren’t what they seem.”
“Then why don’t you just tell me how things are? My God, man, you worked with Jack. You know he didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
“It could have been avoided,” Sharpe said reasonably. “Jack could
have avoided all of it if he had just listened to me.”
“What happened, Dr. Sharpe? This is the only time I’m going to ask you nicely. Tell me everything now, or I’ll get the authorities involved to the full extent of the law.”
Sharpe raised his chin a notch—the proud intellectual who refused to be intimidated by a power establishment of inferior minds. “I did nothing illegal, Mr. Seaton; you can rest assured of that. Jack was pushing for the development of our Redshift Program. We were working on a groundbreaking combination of software codes and linking algorithms that could read a scanned document with a fourth-generation artificial-intelligence demand program. We were trying to upload readable data from documents into a user-friendly analysis and data-processing function.” His eyebrows rose, and he half smiled, as if he now expected Seaton to give him an award for his achievement. “The technology had the promise of giving corporations a program whose operating system could process scanned images as regular data, depending on a particular company’s industry.” He raised his index finger. “For example, the program could be customized for a large heath care provider, in which the scanned patient charts from hospitals could be uploaded automatically into the company’s data and billing files. The program would focus on and detect patient information, such as name and address, and also specific billing information for the accounting records. This could eliminate millions of data entry jobs for large corporations across the globe. That was the Redshift Project, Mr. Seaton. It had the potential to be one of the most groundbreaking business software programs introduced in the last five years, and it would have made Jack Ross a billionaire.”
“But you had some bugs you couldn’t get worked out,” Seaton sneered.
“It’s more complicated than that. We had some serious problems with the development of the software, it’s true. The system worked only eighty percent of the time. The other twenty percent resulted in corrupted data transfers from the scanned documents. We were still developing the AI process of identifying various combinations of handwriting so that the system could learn to distinguish symbols over time, just as a person does, but these were problems that I believed could be solved given the right resources. But Jack didn’t want to do what was necessary to allocate those resources. I felt we needed to partner with a larger software corporation to obtain the funds necessary to finish developing Redshift. Jack refused that suggestion and insisted on a ridiculous plan to raise twenty million through a new stock offering. It was a ridiculous idea—twenty million wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough funds to resolve the problems.”
“But you solved that problem, didn’t you, Dr. Sharpe?” Marcus put in. “You found another way to get funding to complete your research.”
Seaton understood where Marcus’s question was going. “You contacted X-Tronic, didn’t you, Dr. Sharpe? You contacted X-Tronic on your own to make a deal.”
“He contacted both X-Tronic and Cygnus,” Marcus said, remembering the dual logo outside the conference room.
“I contacted more than just X-Tronic and Cygnus, but it was those two companies that had the most interest in moving forward with a joint venture project. Oh, yes, at first they individually tried to outbid each other for complete control of Redshift—Mr. Seaton, you should have seen how aggressive your own sons were during the negotiations. But in the end, neither company wanted to take on the entire risk of the project. You see, we could not guarantee success in solving Redshift’s problems . . . not until now.”
“Not until now?” Seaton asked. “That’s what we saw in the rotunda coming in—that was Redshift. You’ve completed it?”
“Nearly.”
“And so you squeezed Jack out of the project by sabotaging the remaining research to ensure that he wouldn’t be able to raise additional money. You had already had secret discussions with X-Tronic and Cygnus to make sure they would snap up the remains of Jack’s company after the bankruptcy hearing. You arranged to be hired as the head researcher on the project so that you could continue your work with nearly unlimited research funding.” Seaton seethed with anger as he worked through everything that had happened to Jack and his business. “I bet you couldn’t wait to be backed by two of the biggest software companies in the whole country, as opposed to having to scrape by in a small tech start-up company like Jack’s.”
Sharpe ran both hands through his hair and looked as if he might explode. He turned away from the other men, toward the wood-paneled wall, and found himself again facing Seaton, this time through the large mirror in front of him.
“You have no idea the constraints that Jack’s financial limitations were putting on my research,” Sharpe said, no longer able to conceal the frustration still locked in his memory. “Redshift will revolutionize the way corporations capture and process data. The software could potentially replace an estimated ten to fifteen million jobs worldwide within the first year alone. This is the very essence of technological innovation: to replace a human job with a technology that can do it faster, cheaper, and more accurately.”
“And so you had no problem whoring yourself out to the highest bidder,” Seaton said, “leaving poor Jack betrayed and bankrupt.”
“That’s quiet an accusation coming from you,” Dr. Sharpe replied. “Jack and I spoke often. He told me about the circumstances in which he left X-Tronic. I know all about what you did to him twenty-five years ago. And now you have the gall to say I betrayed him? That’s rich.”
Seaton backed away from the table as if his armor had been stripped away, leaving him defenseless in battle. The man had struck the one spot that could still hurt—the Achilles’ heel that still left the billionaire vulnerable.
“Who owns the majority of the Redshift Project?” Seaton asked, blotting out the memories from twenty-five years ago so that he could stay focused on the current problem.
“Acheron Technologies was created by X-Tronic and Cygnus as a separate legal entity after Jack’s company filed for bankruptcy. Acheron is a private company with only institutionally owned shares: half by X-Tronic and half by Cygnus. Neither company is a majority shareholder, so neither X-Tronic nor Cygnus has complete control over the project—it is a true joint venture. Redshift is nearly completed, but no one has complete control over it.”
“But someone will have control,” Seaton said, turning to look at Marcus. “After X-Tronic accepts the takeover bid from Cygnus at the shareholders’ meeting next month, Cygnus will have complete control of Redshift. That’s why Kavanaugh is so desperate to take over X-Tronic. He knows that if he can squeeze me out of the game, combine his company’s resources with X-Tronic’s, and gain complete control of Redshift, he’ll be in a position to make Cygnus the most powerful software company in the world.”
Even as he said this, Seaton was dumbfounded at having been so blind to events at his company. Everything was falling merrily apart. How could he hope to stop something so carefully orchestrated by so many people for what appeared to be years?
He felt a sharp pain in his chest. He must have reacted to the pain, because Marcus suddenly moved toward him.
“Sir, are you all right?”
Seaton nodded as he leaned on the conference table. Sharpe also took a few steps toward him, as if he suddenly wanted to help the man he had been arguing so bitterly with for the past ten minutes.
“Sir,” Marcus said stiffly, “I think you need help. We should go to the hospital. Let me call someone.”
“Don’t you dare!” Seaton said, strength returning to his eyes. “I’m fine,” he added in a softer tone. He turned to Sharpe. “I want to see everything: your research data, your accounting records, even your company e-mail account. And don’t even think about contacting anyone in Denver about this. Let’s get the head system administrator on the phone right now—I want them here in the office within the hour. We’re going to lock down your network to prevent outside access.” His eyes bored through Sharpe. “You report only to me now. You do exactly what I say, and you may just possib
ly avoid jail time.”
Seaton sat at the table and waited while Marcus led Sharpe out of the room to get things rolling, while the head of security waited just outside the door. Seaton had to think. If there was any hope of saving his company, he had no time to spare. But would he have the strength to see the fight through to the end?
35
THURSDAY EVENING, ALASKA walked into the downtown Hyatt. Cold air brushed behind her as she pushed through the revolving doors into a lobby devoted to luxury. Wearing a long, black leather jacket over her clothes, she kept her head lowered, allowing her black hair to fall over the sides of her face, leaving only a glimpse of her nose below big blue sunglasses. She walked toward the reception counter carrying a large briefcase.
“You should have an envelope for me,” Alaska said to the chubby young man working behind the counter.
“Name?” the man asked with a servant’s smile.
“My name’s Alaska,” she answered.
“Last name?”
“Look for Alaska. That’s under the ‘A’s.’”
Stiffening visibly, the man turned and flipped through a shelf under the counter before retrieving a manila envelope with her name printed in large black letters.
Grabbing the envelope, Alaska ripped it opened and found a sheet of paper bearing only the number 2219. She folded the paper and put it in her jacket pocket after sliding the empty envelope back to the man. Then she turned away and walked toward the elevators.
Getting off at the twenty-second floor, she found the room and knocked twice. She saw movement of shadow and light under the door; then a shadow went over the spy hole. The briefcase was heavy, and she tried not to think about its contents. A chain rattled behind the door, followed by the solid thud of the bolt being unlocked. The door opened.
“Here it is,” Alaska said. “Everything he had hidden. It’s all here.”
