Paranoia (29 page)

And if Wyatt was right that Project AURORA was made up of a bunch of companies Trion had secretly acquired, then the solution to the mystery of AURORA had to be here.

These cabinets were unlocked, too, another stroke of luck. I guess the idea was that if you couldn’t get into Camilletti’s back office, you weren’t going to even get near the file cabinets, so to lock them would be a pointless annoyance.

There were a bunch of files here, on companies Trion had either acquired outright or bought a chunk of or looked at closely and decided not to get involved. Some of the company names I recognized, but most I didn’t. I dipped into a folder on each company to try to figure out what it did. This was pretty slow work, and I didn’t even know what I was looking for, really. How the hell was I supposed to know if some small startup was part of AURORA, when I didn’t even know what AURORA
was?
It seemed totally impossible.

But then my problems were solved.

One of the corporate development drawers was labeled
PROJECT
AURORA.

And there it was. Simple as that.

51

Breathing shallowly, I pulled the drawer open. I half expected the drawer to be empty, like the AURORA files in HR. But it wasn’t. It was jam-packed with folders, all color-coded in some way I didn’t understand, each stamped
TRION CONFIDENTIAL
. This was clearly the good stuff.

From what I could tell, these files were on several small startups—two in Silicon Valley, California, and another couple in Cambridge, Massachusetts—that had recently been acquired by Trion in conditions of strictest secrecy. “Stealth mode,” the files said.

I knew this was something big, something important, and my pulse really started pounding. Each
page
was stamped
SECRET
or
CONFIDENTIAL
. Even in these top-secret files kept in the CFO’s locked office, the language was obscure, veiled. There were sentences, phrases, like “Recommend acquire soonest” and “Must be kept below the radar.”

So the secret of AURORA was here.

I didn’t really get it, much as I pored over the files. One company seemed to have developed a way to combine electronic and optical components in one integrated circuit. I didn’t know what this meant. A note said that the company had solved the problem of “the low yield of the wafers.”

Another company had figured out a way to mass-produce photonic circuits. Okay, but what did that
mean?
A couple more were software firms, and I had no idea what they did.

One company called Delphos Inc.—this one actually seemed interesting—had come up with a process for refining and manufacturing some chemical compound called indium phosphide, made of “binary crystals from metallic and nonmetallic elements,” whatever that meant. This stuff had “unique optical absorption and transmission properties,” its disclosure statement said. Apparently it was used for building a certain kind of laser. From what I could tell, Delphos Inc. had effectively cornered the market on indium phosphide. I was sure that better minds than mine could figure out what massive quantities of indium phosphide were good for. I mean, how many lasers could anyone need?

But here was the interesting part: the Delphos file was stamped
ACQUISITION PENDING
. So Trion was in negotiations to buy the company. The file was thick with financials, which were just a blur before my eyes. There was a document of ten or twelve pages, a term sheet for the acquisition of Delphos by Trion. The bottom line seemed to be that Trion was offering
five hundred million dollars
to buy the company. It looked like the company’s officers, a bunch of research scientists from Palo Alto, as well as a venture-capital firm based in London that owned most of the company, had agreed to the terms. Yeah, half a billion dollars sure can grease the skids. They were just dotting the
i
’s. An announcement was tentatively scheduled for a week from now.

But how was I supposed to copy these files? It would take forever—hours of standing at a copy machine. By now it was six o’clock in the morning, and if Jock Goddard got in at seven-thirty, you’d better believe Paul Camilletti got in before that. So I really had to get the hell out of here. I didn’t have
time
to make copies.

I couldn’t think of any other way but to take them. Maybe move some files from somewhere else to fill up the empty space, and then . . .

And then raise all kinds of alarms the second Camilletti or his assistant tried to access the AURORA files.

No. Bad idea.

Instead, I took a key page or two from each of the eight company files, switched on the copying machine, and photocopied them. In less than five minutes I replaced the pages into the file folders and put the copies into my bag.

I was done, and it was time to get the hell out of here. Lifting a single slat in the front office window blinds, I peered out to make sure no one was coming.

By quarter after six in the morning I was back in my own office. For the rest of the day I was going to have to carry around these top-secret AURORA files, but that was better than leaving them in a desk drawer and risk having Jocelyn discover them. I know it sounds paranoid, but I had to operate on the assumption that she might go through my desk drawers. Maybe she was “my” administrative assistant, but her paycheck came from Trion Systems, not me.

Exactly at seven, Jocelyn arrived. She stuck her head in my office, eyebrows up, and said, “Good morning,” with a surprised, meaningful lilt.

“Morning, Jocelyn.”

“You’re here early.”

“Yeah,” I grunted.

Then she squinted at me. “You—you been here a while?”

I blew out a lungful of air. “You don’t want to know,” I said.

52

My big presentation to Goddard kept getting postponed and postponed. It was supposed to be at eight-thirty, but ten minutes before, I got an InstaMail message from Flo telling me that Jock’s E-staff meeting was running over, let’s make it nine. Then another instant message from Flo: the meeting shows no sign of breaking up, let’s push it back to nine-thirty.

I figured all the top managers were duking it out over who’d get the brunt of the cuts. They were probably all in favor of layoffs, in some general sense, but not in their own division. Trion was no different from any other corporation: the more people under you on the org chart, the more power you had. Nobody wanted to lose bodies.

I was starving, so I scarfed down a protein bar. I was exhausted also, but too wired to do anything but work some more on my PowerPoint presentation, make it even slicker. I put in an animated fade between slides. I stuck in that stick-figure drawing of the head-scratching guy with the question mark over his head, just for comic relief. I kept paring down the text: I’d read somewhere about the Rule of Seven—no more than seven words per line and seven lines or bullets per page. Or was it the Rule of Five? You heard that, too. I figured Jock might be a little short of patience and attention, given what he was going through, so I kept making it shorter, punchier.

The more I waited, the more nervous I got, and the more minimalist my PowerPoint slides became. But the special effects grew cooler and cooler. I’d figured out how to make the bar graphs shrink and grow before your eyes. Goddard would be impressed.

Finally, at eleven-thirty I got a message from Flo saying I could head over to the Executive Briefing Center now, since the meeting was just wrapping up.

People were leaving as I got there. Some I recognized—Jim Colvin, the COO; Tom Lundgren; Jim Sperling, the head of HR; a couple of powerful-looking women. None of them looked very happy. Goddard was surrounded by a gaggle of people who were all taller than him. It hadn’t really sunk in before how small the guy was. He also looked terrible—red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes, the pouches under his eyes even bigger than normal. Camilletti stood next to him, and they seemed to be arguing. I heard only snatches.

“. . . Need to raise the metabolism of this place,” Camilletti was saying.

“. . . All kinds of resistance, demoralization,” Goddard muttered.

“The best way to deal with resistance is with a bloody ax,” said Camilletti.

“I usually prefer plain old persuasion,” Goddard said wearily. The others standing in a circle around them were watching the two go at it.

“It’s like Al Capone said, you get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone,” said Camilletti. He smiled.

“I suppose next you’re going to tell me you’ve got to break eggs to make an omelet.”

“You’re always one step ahead of me,” Camilletti said, patting Goddard on the back as he walked off.

Meanwhile I busied myself hooking up my laptop to the projector built into the conference table. I pushed the button that lowered the blinds electrically.

Now it was just Goddard and me in the darkened room. “What do we have here—a matinee?”

“Sorry, just a slide show,” I said.

“I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to turn off the lights. I’m liable to fall fast asleep,” said Goddard. “I was up most of the night, agonizing over all this bushwa. I consider these layoffs a personal failure.”

“They’re not,” I said, then cringed inwardly. Who the hell was I to try to reassure the CEO? “Anyway,” I added quickly, “I’ll keep it brief.”

I started with a very cool animated graphic of the Trion Maestro, all the pieces flying in from offscreen and fitting perfectly together. This was followed by the head-scratching guy with the question mark floating above his head.

I said, “The only thing more dangerous than being in today’s consumer-electronics market is not to be in the market at all.” Now we were in a Formula One–type racecar moving at warp speed. “Because if you’re not driving the car, you’re liable to get run over.” Then a slide came up that said
TRION CONSUMER ELECTRONICS—THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
.

“Adam.”

I turned around. “Sir?”

“What the hell is this?”

Sweat broke out at the back of my neck. “That was just intro,” I said. Obviously too much of it. “Now we get down to business.”

“Did you tell Flo you were planning to do, what the hell is this called, Power—PowerPoint?”

“No. . . .”

He stood up, walked over to the light switch, and put the lights on. “She would have told you—I hate that crap.”

My face burned. “I’m sorry, no one said anything.”

“Good Lord, Adam, you’re a smart, creative, original-thinking young man. You think I want you wasting your time trying to decide whether to go with Arial eighteen point or Times Roman twenty-four point, for God’s sake? How about you just tell me what you think? I’m not a child. I don’t need to be spoon-fed this darned cream of wheat.”

“I’m sorry—” I began again.

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Low blood sugar, maybe. It’s lunchtime, and I’m starved.”

“I can go down and get us some sandwiches.”

“I have a better idea,” Goddard said.

53

Goddard’s car was a perfectly restored 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible, sort of a custardy ivory, beautifully streamlined, with a chrome grille that looked like a crocodile’s mouth. It had whitewall tires and a magnificent red leather interior and it gleamed like something you’d see in a movie. He powered down the cloth top before we emerged from the garage into the sunshine.

“This thing really moves,” I said, surprised, as we accelerated onto the highway.

“Three-twenty cubic inch, straight eight,” Goddard said.

“Man, it’s a beauty.”

“I call it my Ship of Theseus.”

“Huh,” I said, chuckling like I knew what he was talking about.

“You should have seen it when I bought it—it was a real junk heap, my goodness. My wife thought I’d taken leave of my senses. I must have spent five years of weekends and evenings rebuilding this thing from the ground up—I mean, I replaced everything. Completely authentic, of course, but I don’t think there’s a single part left from the original car.”

I smiled, leaned back. The car’s leather was buttery-smooth and smelled pleasantly old. The sun was on my face, the wind rushing by. Here I was sitting in this beautiful old convertible with the chief executive officer of the company I was spying on—I couldn’t decide if it felt great, like I’d reached the mountaintop, or creepy and sleazy and dishonest. Maybe both.

Goddard wasn’t some deep-pockets collector like Wyatt, with his planes and boats and Bentleys. Or like Nora, with her Mustang, or any of the Goddard clones at Trion who bought collectible cars at auction. He was a genuine old-fashioned gearhead who really got engine grease on his fingers.

He said, “You ever read
Plutarch’s Lives?
”

“I don’t think I even finished
To Kill a Mockingbird
,” I admitted.

“You don’t know what the devil I’m talking about when I call this my Ship of Theseus, do you?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Well, there’s a famous riddle of identity the ancient Greeks loved to argue over. It first comes up in Plutarch. You may recognize the name Theseus, the great hero who slew the Minotaur in the Labyrinth.”

“Sure.” I remembered something about a labyrinth.

“The Athenians decided to preserve Theseus’s ship as a monument. Over the years, of course, it began to decay, and they found themselves replacing each rotting timber with a new one, and then another, and another. Until every single plank on the ship had been replaced. And the question the Greeks asked—it was sort of a philosophers’ conundrum—was: Is this really the Ship of Theseus anymore?”

“Or just an upgrade,” I said.

But Goddard wasn’t joking around. He seemed to be in a serious frame of mind. “I’ll bet you know people who are just like that ship, don’t you, Adam?” He glanced at me, then back at the road. “People who move up in life and start changing everything about themselves until you can’t recognize the original anymore?”

My insides clutched. Jesus. We weren’t talking Buicks anymore.