Paranoia (33 page)

Goddard didn’t look at all happy, which was understandable. In fact, he looked fairly upset, so I added, “I’m sorry. I know this must come as a shock.” The cliché just came barreling out of my mouth. “I don’t really understand it, myself.”

“Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” Goddard said.

I shook my head. “Pleased? No, I just want to get to the bottom of—”

“Because I’m disgusted,” he said. His voice shook. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? What do you think this is, the goddamned
Nixon White House?
” Now he was almost shouting, and spittle flew from his mouth.

The room collapsed around me: it was just me and him, across a four-foot expanse of desk. Blood roared in my ears. I was too stunned to say anything.

“Invading people’s privacy, digging up dirt, getting private phone records and private e-mails and for all I know steaming open envelopes! I find that kind of underhandedness reprehensible, and I don’t ever want you doing that again. Now get the hell out of here.”

I got up unsteadily, light-headed, shocked. At the doorway I stopped, turned back. “I want to apologize,” I said hoarsely. “I thought I was helping out. I’ll—I’ll go clear out my office.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, sit back down.” The storm seemed to have passed. “You don’t have
time
to clear out your office. I’ve got far too much for you to do.” His voice was now gentler. “I understand you were trying to protect me. I get it, Adam, and I appreciate it. And I won’t deny I’m flabbergasted about Paul. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, and I prefer the right way. You start monitoring e-mails and phone records and then you find yourself tapping phones, and next thing you know you’ve got yourself a police state, not a corporation. And a company can’t function that way. I don’t know how they did things at Wyatt, but we don’t do ’em that way here.”

I nodded. “I understand. I’m sorry.”

He put up his palms. “It never happened. Forget about it. And I’ll tell you something else—at the end of the day, no company ever failed because one of its executives mouthed off to the press. For whatever unfathomable reason. Now, I’ll figure out some way of handling it. My way.”

He pressed his palms together as if signifying the talk was over. “I don’t need any kind of unpleasantness right now. We’ve got something far more important going on. Now, I’m going to need your input on a matter of the utmost secrecy.” He settled himself behind his desk, put on his reading glasses, and took out his worn little black leather address book. He looked at me sternly over his reading glasses. “Don’t ever tell anyone that the founder and chief executive officer of Trion Systems can’t remember his own computer passwords. And
certainly
don’t tell anyone about the specific type of handheld device I use to store them.” Looking closely at the little black book, he tapped at his keyboard.

In a minute his printer hummed to life and spit out a few pages. He reached over, removed the pages, and handed them to me. “We’re in the final stages of a major, major acquisition,” he said. “Probably the most costly acquisition in Trion history. But it’s probably also going to be the best investment we’ve ever made. I can’t give you the details just yet, but assuming Paul’s negotiations continue successfully, we should have a deal ready to announce by the end of next week.”

I nodded.

“I want everything to go perfectly smoothly. These are the basic specs on the new company—number of employees, space requirements, and so on. It’s going to be integrated into Trion immediately, and located right here in this building. Obviously that means that something here has to go. Some existing division’s going to have to be moved out of headquarters and onto our Yarborough campus, or Research Triangle. I need you to figure out which division, or divisions, can be moved with the least disruption, to make room for . . . for the new acquisition. Okay? Look over these pages, and when you’re done, please shred them. And let me know your thoughts as soon as possible.”

“Okay.”

“Adam, I know I’m dumping a whole lot on you, but it can’t be helped. I need you to call it as you see it. I’m counting on your strategic savvy.” He reached over and gave me a reassuring shoulder squeeze. “And your honesty.”

60

Jocelyn, thank God, seemed to be taking more and more coffee- and little-girls’-room breaks the longer she worked for me. The next time she left her desk, I took the papers on Delphos that Goddard had given me—I knew it had to be Delphos, even though the company’s name wasn’t anywhere on the sheets—and made a quick photocopy at the machine behind her desk. Then I slipped the copies into a manila envelope.

I fired off an e-mail to “Arthur” telling him, in coded language, that I had some new stuff to pass on—that I wanted to “return” the “clothing” I’d bought online.

Sending an e-mail from work was, I knew, a risk. Even using Hushmail, which encrypted it. But I was short on time. I didn’t want to have to wait until I got home, then maybe have to go back out. . . .

Meacham’s reply came back almost instantly. He told me not to send the item to the post-office box but the street address instead. Translation: he didn’t want me to scan the documents and e-mail them, he wanted to see the actual hard copies, though he didn’t say why. Did he want to make sure they were originals? Did that mean they didn’t trust me?

He also wanted them immediately, and for some reason he didn’t want to set up a face-to-face. Why? I wondered. Was he nervous about my being tailed or something? whatever his logic, he wanted me to leave the documents for him using one of the dead drops we’d worked out weeks before.

At a little after six, I left work, drove over to a McDonald’s about two miles from Trion headquarters. The men’s room here was small, one-guy-at-a-time, and you could lock the door. I locked it, found the paper towel dispenser and popped it open, put the rolled-up manila envelope inside and closed the dispenser. Until the paper towel roll needed changing, no one would look inside—except Meacham.

On the way out I bought a Quarter Pounder—not that I wanted one, but for cover, like I’d been taught. About a mile down the road was a 7-Eleven with a low concrete wall around the parking lot in front. I parked in the lot, went in and bought a Diet Pepsi, then drank as much of it as I could. The rest I poured down a drain in the parking lot. I put a lead fishing weight inside the can from the stash in my glove compartment, placed the empty can on the top of the concrete wall.

The Pepsi can was a signal to Meacham, who drove by this 7-Eleven regularly, that I’d loaded dead drop number three, the McDonald’s. This simple bit of spy tradecraft would enable Meacham to pick up the documents without being seen with me.

The handover went smoothly, as far as I could tell. I had no reason to think otherwise.

Okay, so what I was doing made me feel sleazy. But at the same time, I couldn’t help feeling a little proud: I was getting good at this spy stuff.

61

By the time I got home there was an e-mail on my Hushmail account from “Arthur.” Meacham wanted me to drive to a restaurant in the middle of nowhere, more than half an hour away, immediately. Obviously they considered this urgent.

The place turned out to be a lavish restaurant-spa, a famous foodie mecca called the Auberge. The lobby’s walls were decorated with articles about the place in
Gourmet
and magazines like that.

I could see why Wyatt wanted to meet me here, and it wasn’t just the food. The restaurant was set up for maximum discretion—for private meetings, for extramarital affairs, whatever. In addition to the main dining room, there were these small, separate alcoves for private dining, which you could enter and leave directly from the parking lot without having to go through the main part of the restaurant. It reminded me of a high-class motel.

Wyatt was sitting at a table in a private alcove with Judith Bolton. Judith was cordial, and even Wyatt seemed a little less hostile than usual. Maybe that was because I’d been so successful in getting him what he wanted. Maybe he was on his second glass of wine, or maybe it was Judith, who seemed to exert a mysterious sway over him. I was pretty sure there was nothing going on between Judith and Wyatt, at least based on their body language. But they were obviously close, and he deferred to her in a way he didn’t defer to anyone else.

A waiter brought me a glass of sauvignon blanc. Wyatt told him to leave, come back in fifteen minutes when he was ready to order. Now we were alone in here: me, Wyatt, and Judith Bolton.

“Adam,” said Wyatt as he gnawed on a piece of focaccia, “those files you got from the CFO’s office—they were very helpful.”

“Good,” I said. Now I was Adam? And an actual compliment? It gave me the heebie-jeebies.

“Especially that term sheet on this company Delphos,” he went on. “Obviously it’s a linchpin, a crucial acquisition for Trion. No wonder they’re willing to pay five hundred million bucks in stock for it. Anyway, that finally solved the mystery. That put the last piece of the puzzle into place. We’ve figured out AURORA.”

I gave him a blank look, like I really didn’t care, and nodded.

“This whole business was worth it, worth every penny,” he said. “The enormous trouble we went to to get you inside Trion, the training, the security measures. The expense, the huge risks—they were
all worth it
.” He tipped his wineglass toward Judith, who smiled proudly. “I owe you big-time,” he said to her.

I thought: And what am I, chopped liver?

“Now, I want you to listen to me very closely,” Wyatt said. “Because the stakes are immense, and I want you to understand the urgency. Trion Systems appears to have developed the most important technological breakthrough since the integrated circuit. They’ve solved a problem that a lot of us have been working on for decades. They’ve just changed history.”

“Are you sure you want to be telling me this?”

“Oh, I want you taking notes. You’re a smart boy. Pay close attention. The age of the silicon chip is over. Somehow Trion’s managed to develop an optical chip.”

“So?”

He stared at me with boundless contempt. Judith spoke earnestly, quickly, as if to cover over my gaffe. “Intel’s spent billions trying to crack this without success. The Pentagon’s been working on it for over a decade. They know it’ll revolutionize their aircraft and missile navigation systems, so they’ll pay almost anything to get their hands on a working optical chip.”

“The opto-chip,” Wyatt said, “handles optical signals—light—instead of electronic ones, using a substance called indium phosphide.”

I remember reading something about indium phosphide in Camilletti’s files. “That’s the stuff that’s used for building lasers.”

“Trion’s cornered the market on the shit. That was the tip-off. They need indium phosphide for the semiconductor in the chip—it can handle much higher data-transfer speeds than gallium arsenide.”

“You’ve lost me,” I said. “What’s so special about it?”

“The opto-chip has a modulator capable of switching signals at a hundred gigabytes a second.”

I blinked. This was all Urdu to me. Judith was watching him, rapt. I wondered if she got this.

“It’s the goddamned fucking
Holy Grail
. Let me put it to you in simple terms. A
single particle
of opto-chip one-
hundredth
the diameter of a human hair will now be able to handle all of a corporation’s telephone, computer, satellite, and television traffic at once. Or maybe you can wrap your mind around this, guy: with the optical chip, you can download a two-hour movie in digital format in
one-twentieth of a second
, you get it? This is a fucking quantum leap in the industry, in computers and handhelds and satellites and cable TV transmission, you name it. The opto-chip’s going to enable things like this”—he held up his Wyatt Lucid handheld—“to receive flicker-free TV images. It is so vastly superior to any existing technology—it’s capable of higher speeds, requiring far lower voltage, lower signal loss, lower heat levels. . . . It’s amazing. It’s the real deal.”

“Excellent,” I said quietly. The import of what I’d done was beginning to sink in, and now I felt like a damned traitor to Trion—Jock Goddard’s own Benedict Arnold. I had just given the hideous Nick Wyatt the most valuable, paradigm-shifting technology since color TV or whatever. “I’m glad I could be of service.”

“I want every fucking last spec,” Wyatt said. “I want their prototype. I want the patent applications, the lab notes, everything they’ve got.”

“I don’t know how much more I can get,” I said. “I mean, short of breaking into the fifth floor—”

“Oh, that too, guy. That too. I’ve put you in the fucking catbird seat. You’re working directly for Goddard, you’re one of his chief lieutenants, you’ve got access to just about anything you want to get.”

“It’s not that simple. You know that.”

“You’re in a unique position of trust, Adam,” put in Judith. “You can gain access to a whole range of projects.”

Wyatt interrupted: “I don’t want you holding back a single fucking thing.”

“I’m not holding back—”

“The layoffs came as a surprise to you, is that it?”

“I told you there was some kind of big announcement coming. I really didn’t know anything more than that at the time.”

“‘At the time,’” he repeated nastily. “You knew about the layoffs before CNN did, asshole. Where was
that
intelligence? I have to watch CNBC to find out about the layoffs at Trion when I’ve got a mole in the fucking
CEO’s
office?”

“I didn’t—”

“You put a bug in the CFO’s office. What happened with that?” His overly tanned face was darker than usual, his eyes bloodshot. I could feel the spray of his spittle.

“I had to pull it.”

“
Pull
it?” he said in disbelief. “Why?”

“Corporate Security found the thing I put in the HR department, and they’ve started searching everywhere, so I had to be careful. I could have jeopardized everything.”

“How long was the bug in the CFO’s office before you pulled it?” he shot back.