Philip Haley’s office was as utilitarian as the rest of the floor, with a long metal lab table for a desk and a minimum of chairs. It was a workspace, not a room for high-level meetings, or investor schmooze sessions.
“Phil will be with you in just a minute. He’s getting changed,” my guide said in a whisper, as though we were standing in a chapel. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”
She didn’t want to get me anything, I could tell. But then, I didn’t really want anything, either. “Thanks, I’m fine.”
Philip Haley walked into the room. The secretary looked like she wanted to genuflect. Haley was a remarkably handsome man in a very masculine way and he gave off the kind of charismatic glow that you see in some actors or politicians. He had large blue eyes, like that kid in A Christmas Story, and at some point he had spent a lot of money on dentistry.
“You’re Virgil’s man,” he said, extending a well-manicured hand. We shook. His grip was strong, but he didn’t push it. He wasn’t trying to prove a thing. “Thank you, Kirsten. Let them know downstairs we’ll have a visitor in . . .” He checked his watch—a no-nonsense Tag Heuer. “. . . fifteen minutes.” He turned back to me. “I’m late. I know. Forgive me. I will explain later, if there’s time.”
There was nothing of South Carolina low country in his voice. He must have worked hard at that at some point in his life.
“Actually, I had just arrived.”
“Good. Good.”
“Pretty Spartan surroundings,” I said once we had settled into two straight-backed chairs that practically screamed, Don’t get comfortable!
“I spend money on security and research. Everything else is a waste. If I have the product, and can keep the Chinese from stealing it, it will sell and we’ll make money.”
He wasn’t bragging. He was supremely confident, but without a hint of arrogance. I thought of mentioning the upkeep on the riding stables, but accepted that his wife’s lifestyle and his business standards might be viewed as entirely apart.
I thought he might respond to the most direct approach. He did not like to waste time any more than money. Neither did I.
“Virgil was afraid they might have charged you by now.”
“I will testify early next week. If it becomes necessary. I expect all of this to go away.”
“You think they’ll let you walk?”
He scowled. “I’m being set up.”
“You’re saying that you did not trade shares of your own firm based on nonpublic information using a secret offshore banking account.”
“Exactly.”
“And you expect me to take that on faith.”
“Take it any way you want. It’s the truth. My lawyer arranged a lie detector test and I passed. I am innocent.”
All it takes to pass a lie detector test is a total disregard for the truth or the consequences of one’s actions. Sociopaths passed them all the time and innocent people failed almost as often.
“Then let me hear you say it,” I said. “Say the words.”
He scowled again. “I had Kirsten look into your history. Why does Virgil have your confidence?”
“I fix things. I find things. If you violated securities laws, broke trust with your investors, and pocketed a few bucks in the process, there’s only so much I can do to help you. My advice? Cut a deal.”
“But I didn’t do it!”
“Even if that’s true, it might still be worth your while to cut a deal. These people don’t believe in the concept of innocence. And fairy tales just piss them off.”
“This is what my lawyer has been saying all along. Is this Virgil’s response, too? I ask him for help and he sends you to deliver his message?”
“Nope. I’m a bit of a loose cannon. I speak for myself. And I’m still waiting for you to say the magic words.”
“I said I didn’t do it.”
“Repeat after me. I did not trade shares . . .”
“Why don’t I have you tossed out of here?”
“Because if you really didn’t do it, if you really are innocent, then I’m your guy. I’m good at what I do and I don’t quit. But if I think you’re too dumb to tell me the truth, I will be wasting my time, and I’d rather be taking my son to the playground.”
He took his time thinking it through. “Come on,” he said, standing up. “I’ll give you the backstage tour.”
I stood with him, but I made no move to follow. “I really do want to hear you say it.”
He cleared his throat, looked me in the eye, and said, “I did not trade shares of this company—or any other—based on privileged, nonpublic information. I do not have a secret offshore bank account.”
I believed him. “Well, all right, then. From here on, I’ve got your back. Let’s see your operation.”
There was another scanner inside the elevator. Haley went first.
“Just look into the viewer and try not to blink. The doors won’t open until we’ve both been scanned.”
I looked in and blinked. I blinked a few times. The doors opened anyway. I thought they would.
There was a brief hiss of moving air and I felt my eardrums pop.
“We keep a slight negative pressure in the immediate environs outside the lab,” Haley said. “Sorry. I should have mentioned it. Some people find it painful.”
“Negative pressure? Won’t that help your experiments escape to the outside world where they will destroy all life as we know it?”
He smiled indulgently, but without humor. “Our algae are rather fragile. They were all designed in a lab environment. Contaminants could easily undo months of research.” He punched buttons on a security pad in the door and it slid back with a whoosh. We stepped into the lab.
Not quite into the lab. We were in a glass-enclosed corridor that ran down the center of the building. On either side of us, figures in white protective suits briefly looked up from their work, then ignored us. Green slime had them all enthralled. There were vats of it and small dishes of it. Green was the only color in the room, otherwise everything was white.
“Is this what they mean by green technology?” I asked.
“Very funny,” he said, though it was obvious he didn’t think so at all. “What do you know about Arinna? Our work?”
“I did do some homework,” I said, which was true as far as it went. “You grow algae and turn it into biofuel. How am I doing?”
“I came to algae late. There are people in Europe and out west who were working on it long before I got involved. But most of my competitors come from chemical engineering backgrounds. They see energy produced from algae as an alternative to solar panels. The problems they see are ones of increasing efficiency through better use of structural materials.”
“I’m a math guy. I never took an engineering course in my life.”
“Not important. Engineering is important, but it’s not the answer. It’s limited. Eventually, inertia wins. Let me ask you this. What do these three things have in common? A simple battery, a can of gasoline, and a lump of coal.”
“It’s easier to talk about what makes them all different,” I said.
“Yes, yes. But the point is that they are all ways of storing energy. When you need some energy, you can plug in your battery to run an electric motor, or burn some coal to boil water for a steam engine, or explode some gasoline in the engine of your car. All energy systems are similar in that energy needs to be both stored and released again when needed. And every system is limited by its own parameters. Efficiency, as we view it in the twenty-first century, must also address refuse, be it dross, residue, or effluvia.”
“Batteries? Aren’t batteries clean?”
He wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Filth. Poisonous semiprecious metals that cannot be intelligently recycled. Acids leaking into groundwater. Batteries are forever. You’re better off with nu
clear waste. At least that has a half-life.”
“I see.”
“And the damn things are heavy. You can’t change that. You may be able to make them marginally more efficient, but don’t expect to fly to Tokyo in a battery-driven commercial airplane. You would need to rewrite all the physics books first.”
Haley led me back down the corridor and out to the elevator. “Will it be green?” I asked. “I mean, sustainable? Clean?”
He spread his fingers and waved his hands. “Buzzwords. Pop media. Listen. I will make it simple. What are the two main problems with solar energy?”
“I don’t know. It still costs too much to be competitive?”
He shook his head. “One. Once you have collected the energy, you still need to store it. You need to turn lights on when it’s dark outside. You still need to run your microwave on rainy days. We’ve already covered batteries. They are not the answer.”
“I can see that.”
We didn’t have to go through the same security measures on the way out. Haley pushed a button and the elevator door slid open.
“Two,” he continued. “Solar energy is limited. Only so much of it reaches the earth’s surface. Much of it is reflected off our atmosphere, which is a good thing. Otherwise we would all have been baked into ashes before we evolved beyond seaborne amoebae. But the amount of energy that actually reaches the ground is a limited figure—quantifiable, but definitely limited. The closer to the poles you are, the less solar energy hits the surface. Smog deflects it and absorbs it. So does dust. The Sahara gets an average of more than twice what we get here in New York. So efficiency matters, but only up to a point. Chemical or mechanical systems will only be able to reach a certain level of productivity. After that, modifications to improve efficiency will, almost by definition, become too expensive to pursue.”
“Are we back to nuclear?”
He ignored me. “And much of the energy comes in a form that we can’t use. It comes in wavelengths—colors—that do us no good. It is not readily transferable. The usable band is less than half the total.”
“Infrared?”
He nodded excitedly—his pupil had said something intelligent.
“This is why algae makes so much sense. You agree?”
I didn’t see, but I kept it to myself. “I’m still listening.”
“Algae grow with sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. One of your ‘greenhouse gases’ according to the popular press, though carbon dioxide is quite natural and very necessary to life on this planet.”
Someone had made an attempt to make the office rooms a bit more presentable, clearing the conference table of litter and straightening some of the chairs. My bet: It wasn’t the ice lady.
“There you go,” I said. “Water. Another limited resource.”
“Yes, but algae actually love dirty water. Briny is best. Clean water is a limited resource. Salt water constitutes over seventy percent of the surface area of the planet. Not a problem.”
I was starting to see it. “And carbon dioxide is fairly abundant.”
“Well, yes. Not always in optimal concentrations, but, yes. Algae remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, takes briny, undrinkable water, and mixes them together to form an oil that is combustible and that requires little processing to turn it into biodiesel. The algae also create proteins that can be used for animal feed, and excrete carbohydrates—sugars—which can be processed into ethanol.”
We settled into the chairs in Haley’s office. There was only one picture in the room—a framed photo of his wife that sat next to his computer monitor. Haley saw me looking and turned it, possibly unconsciously, so that it faced him alone.
“What’s the catch?” I said. “There’s got to be some reason we’re not all doing this already. Where does oil have to be trading before this becomes competitive?”
“As I mentioned, sunlight is limited—finite. You cannot improve your per-acre energy capture by increasing sunlight. So where do you get increased efficiency? Most of the industry is taking an engineering approach, improving their technology. Most of them are using a very commonly found algae. It is much more efficient than corn or sugar beets, and it is easily replaced in case of catastrophic die-offs—algal crashes—due to drought, or predators, or too little sunlight for extended periods. However, the theoretical best, the ultimate, that current systems could hope for would be a return of approximately eight thousand barrels of diesel and four or five thousand barrels of ethanol. That’s per acre.”
I ran some numbers in my head and whistled. “Not too shabby.”
“Indeed,” he said. “But suppose you could quadruple your production per acre?”
“But you can’t. You said it, sunlight is finite.”
“Sunlight is finite, yes. But remember, the algae only capture a percentage of it. And can only process up to a certain percentage of what is captured.”
“And that’s where you come in. ‘You’ being Arinna.”
“Arinna bioengineers more efficient algae. Producers who use our algae will have fewer pool crashes, capture a wider range of available light, and process a much higher percentage of that light energy into fuel. And our product actually captures more carbon dioxide than the burning of the fuel releases. The holy grail of biofuels.”
“How close are you?”
“We have a product that performs flawlessly in the laboratory. It has done quite well in our research farm in Arizona.”
“Where do you get water in Arizona?”
“There’s plenty of water. It’s just not fit for consumption—filled with salts and minerals. But it’s perfect for our needs. The air is cleaner than we would like, but every site is a trade-off to some degree. But location is not really our concern. I’m not a farmer. I just want to sell my superior product to farmers.”
“So, you don’t need my help there.”
He did finally smile at one of my feeble jokes. “I am at a loss as to why I need your help at all, Mr. Stafford. I have explained to my lawyer that I am innocent. Eventually, investigators will discover who is promoting this scheme.”
I was stunned. The man was certainly intelligent—a genius—and experienced. “Didn’t you go to Virgil Becker for help?”
“Virgil is our banker. His firm took us public. Of course I spoke with him about the situation. But I made it clear to him that there is no cause for concern. I am innocent and that will be demonstrated.”
I am often amazed at how remarkably stupid some smart people can be. In most of those cases, I could see the underlying cause—usually arrogance or inflated sense of privilege. But Haley should have known better. For the first time, I began to doubt him.
“Mr. Haley. You say you know my history. You know part of it. I went to prison. But I’ve been out for a while and I’ve managed to help some people out of serious jams. I helped Virgil after the mess his father left him. I can help you. But if you’re only telling me part of the story, you are tying my hands. Understood?”
He didn’t like it. He did the scowling thing again.
“I’ve been set up,” he said finally.
“So be it. Who would do this? Do you have any enemies?”
He gave a short, unamused laugh. “Hosts. I am decidedly from the wrong background. Despite that, I am successful and I married a beautiful, wealthy woman.”
“All right. So you have lots of enemies because you married the only remaining heir to a Gold Coast fortune and you live in a castle. But somehow, I don’t see some jealous polo-playing twit running this kind of scam just to put you in your place. Sorry.”
He almost blew up at me. I could see it coming and he pulled back. He thought for another moment.
“The Chinese. They’ll do anything to stop me. To keep my product off the market. If they can’t steal it. They’ve sunk trillions into battery power; they can’t afford to have
me beat them.”
That struck me as possible. It was also paranoid, delusional, and racist. But as the Chinese had already hacked into the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Pentagon, I supposed that I would have to treat it seriously.
“What do your IT security people say?”
He glowered. “I will not use firm assets or personnel in what is essentially a personal matter.”
“Okay, but they must have given an opinion.”
“I have not asked.” He was past the slow-rolling boil, but not quite to the point of screaming with released steam.
“All right,” I said. He was stonewalling, but I wasn’t going to let it get in my way. “I know people who can look into it. Or at least steer me in the right direction.” I had remained in touch with a young computer whiz, now attempting to better himself by studying law at Yale. If he couldn’t help, he would know someone. “I was thinking someone closer. A family member. Senior staff. A board member. Someone with clout and connections—and money.”
He cleared his throat a few times as he fought for control. He was again very much in control when he finally answered. “Arinna has a small board. My wife and me; Chuck Penn and Harve Deeter are the moneymen; Helen Ward, from Teachers’ Retirement—our corporate conscience; and Don Kavanagh, our general counsel. Virgil usually sits in with us—the firm owns a large block of nonvoting shares. I get along well with all of them. I respect these people and would want you to treat them as they deserve.”
Charles Penn was a big fish—a whale. A multibillionaire with interests in everything from start-up tech companies to minerals mining. Harvey Deeter was an oilman and even wealthier. Helen Ward had referred to me in the press as “just another small-time crook” when I had been convicted. I didn’t think she would take my call this time around.
Long Way Down Page 6
