The God Patent (33 page)

Several weeks later, for no reason he could decipher, Dodge awoke confused. Something was missing, or maybe not, but he sensed that cards were being dealt. He went into the kitchen and before grinding his coffee, connected his laptop to the Internet. It wouldn’t connect to the Creation Energy website, so he surfed to the National Engineering Group site. A press release in huge font
greeted him: “The National Engineering Group expands alternative energy research to include propulsion technology based on vacuum fluctuation energy extraction.”

NEG stock was up fifteen points, almost 20 percent. A link to an article at MarketWatch said the stock was riding the announcement of a deal for exclusive rights to “new technology being developed by an obscure university in West Texas” that had the potential to “change the way we think about energy.”

He danced into the kitchen and poured a celebratory jigger of whiskey into his morning coffee.

He turned the kitchen TV to Bloomberg. A woman yelled into the camera. “Already riding their deal for new technology, we just got word that NEG has been awarded a contract by the Department of Defense. A huge surprise to the market, investors are guessing that NEG could overtake Northrop Grumman in rocket-propulsion technology. It’s a big
could
right now, and details of the technology are sketchy. NEG officials are acting more cautious than their investors, but if the market believes the technology can end dependence of the world economy on fossil fuels, the stock should double today.”

Trailing phlegm-riddled laughter behind, Dodge skipped into his office and added three zeros to the counteroffer.

The phone rang just before ten. Dodge checked the caller ID—it was from a Texas area code—picked up the phone and said, “What have you got? And it better be good, because right now, I’m getting all I need from Bloomberg.”

“It’s crazy around here—closed the gates to the university and canceled classes.” It was Mabel, secretary to Foster Reed and mother of Dodge’s current favorite informant. “Dr. Reed and Reverend Schonders were fixing to meet with the press up until a herd o’ Yankees showed up in black trucks.”

The phone beeped, and the call waiting ID indicated Emmy’s office number at Cal. Dodge said, “I’ll call you back,” and connected to Emmy.

“I heard National Engineering on NPR,” she said. Then the Vietnamese kid interrupted. Dodge could tell it was Tran by the complete lack of any accent. Emmy came back on the line, her voice cold: “Those two patents have disappeared from USPTO-dot-gov.” Away from the phone, Dodge heard her say, “Search for them in cache. Find them now.” Then into the phone, “I’ll call you back.” She hung up.

Dodge dialed a Texas number. Dale Watson answered. “Still haven’t gotten the check, Nutter.”

“Give me your account number, and I’ll wire a thousand right now.”

“Account number? US mail’ll do fine. Just get it here.” The line went dead.

Dodge put $500 cash in an envelope, stamped it, and attached it to the outside of his mailbox with a clothespin. The phone rang as he walked back in the office.

It was Emmy. “Dodge, helping you scheme is anathema to me.” She went quiet, as though fighting an internal battle. But she was on the phone. Dodge knew he’d already won.

She finally spoke. “I called our Department of Energy rep, the man who reviews our funding each year. Even he can’t access information on this technology.” She spat the word
technology
. “
I
am the only one who knows anything about it. Plus, just like the patents, Reed’s dissertation has disappeared from the web—hang on a sec.”

Dodge heard her talking to Tran. She came back on. “It gets weirder. Tran found the dissertation cached on three nodes, but when he went back, they’d disappeared. Same story with the patents. Someone is scouring the web to remove all documentation
of this nonsense—which, under other circumstances, I’d favor, but this time, it’s like a military-industrial complex conspiracy.”

Dodge said, “And I’m sitting on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow…”

“I’m going to post Reed’s dissertation on the Lawrence Berkeley Lab website and send an e-mail to Bob Park at the University of Maryland—he’ll blow the whistle on them. Every physicist in the world will be attacking this thing within an hour.”

“Emmy!” Dodge yelled into the receiver. “Dammit, no. Stop right now. You’re approaching this all wrong.” He switched to a relaxed tone. “Just let them go for a little while, short their stock first, let them capsize under the weight of their own bullshit.”

“Dodge, shut up.” Emmy kicked into a voice that Dodge barely knew—quiet, soft, and demanding. “I am not going to allow ignorance to overwhelm reason. The press must be educated and these cozeners brought to justice.”

“Emmy, what about Ryan? If you’re successful, Ryan won’t have a chance in hell. With his last hope gone”—he paused for effect—“would you blame him if he goes back to meth?”

“Oh, please. You can still get your settlement. Ryan will be fine.”

“Not if you blow the lid off,” Dodge said. “Not much to settle for once everyone knows the real value of the patents.” He waited for her to respond. His confidence grew with every second of her silence.

A minute passed, and in a voice much more familiar to Dodge, she said, “How long will it take for you to get a settlement?”

“Well, the price just went
way
up, but I suspect they know it. Give me a week.”

“Someone will find a copy of that dissertation, and it won’t take long for the American Physical Society to take a position.” She stopped, as though thinking about it, and then chuckled
with no mirth. “Okay, you’ve got a week. Dodge, you better help Ryan. I’m watching you.”

“Of course I’ll help him.” Dodge hung up the phone and waited.

Half an hour later the phone rang again.

“Jeb Schonders here. Mr. Nutter?” He paused, but Dodge didn’t reward him with a response. “It’s time we had ourselves another meeting.” Schonders spoke slowly and sounded comfortable, too comfortable. “This time, how about we do it in my neck of the woods—Monday in the big D? We need to settle this thing straightaway and, one other thing, Nutter, I advise you not talk to anyone until after our meeting.” The sound of Jeb’s laughter turned Dodge’s stomach. He had to find out what cards they were holding.

Dodge stood and forced a smile. “Why wait until Monday? I’ve seen the news, and I’d like to help you out. I can be in Dallas tomorrow.”

“Mighty neighborly of you,” he said. “How about you leave your client back there in California so as to keep the meeting short?”

Dodge hesitated. Something was missing. “Jeb that sounds just fine. Better not to bother Mr. McNear—why, just this morning he was telling me how much he’s looking forward to putting this behind him.”

Schonders laughed. “I’ll have someone pick you up at the airport.”

Maybe he was just anxious to settle before the pot grew too rich.

“I sure appreciate your southern hospitality, but you don’t need to go to any trouble. My people in Dallas will make arrangements. Only thing I need from you are directions to the best barbecue in DFW.”

D
odge paused at the mirror on his way out of the hotel room. He should have gotten a haircut, but the suit, a black three-piece Italian with gray pinstripes, fit perfectly. It even narrowed his waist.

He walked into the Chase Center lobby at 8:30 a.m. and bought a double espresso from a woman working at a cart. Masses of curly chestnut hair framed her made-up face. He sat on a couch with a good view of the Elm Street entrance and held the
Wall Street Journal
in front of him.

Just before he’d left Petaluma, Dodge had sent an e-mail to Jeb Schonders telling him to reschedule the meeting for ten instead of nine because of the two-hour time difference. Of course, the time difference also meant that Schonders wouldn’t get the message until this morning, and then, only if he bothered to check his e-mail.

Fifteen minutes after he got his coffee, at 8:45, Dodge watched Jeb Schonders and Blair Keene walk in together. Perfect, he thought, Schonders hadn’t gotten the e-mail, and it should throw them off-balance. Schonders had on beige snakeskin boots, a ridiculous cowboy hat, and the brown suit that emphasized his girth. Keene complemented his navy-blue suit with black cowhide boots but no additional stupid relics. After they got on the elevator, Dodge relaxed and read the paper for
an hour before heading up to the twentieth floor to the suite of a law firm associated with Blair Keene’s firm.

A receptionist who looked like a clone of the woman at the coffee cart led him to a conference room. Dodge knocked—dum da da dum dum, dum dum—before walking in. “Good morning, gentlemen.” He emphasized his West Coast accent.

In addition to Schonders and Keene, there was a third man. “Alan Royce—good to know you.”

Keene stood and offered his hand. Dodge gave him a firm shake and Keene said, “We asked Mr. Royce to help out. He’s a patent attorney with lots of experience in the telecom corridor just north of here, where Mr. McNear and Dr. Reed worked when they wrote the patents.” Keene sat down and Royce stood.

Dodge shook his hand and said, “Good to have
you
here—should make this meeting a lot shorter. Thanks for coming.”

Schonders remained seated and held his arm across the table. Dodge barely closed his hand around Schonders’s—the dead-fish shake to counter Jeb’s not standing. Dodge said, “I trust you received my message regarding the rescheduling?”

Keene cut Schonders off. “No problem. It was nice to sleep in.”

Dodge took a chair across from the patent attorney, Royce, and set out a legal pad and three wooden pencils. Royce began by criticizing the three cases that Dodge had presented in the first meeting. Of course, these were the weakest of the dozen cases he’d uncovered. Dodge nodded like an idiot and pretended to be surprised that they had found flaws. Royce followed with descriptions of cases that he thought were “similar in nature to Mr. McNear’s situation” where juries had decided against the inventor. Dodge took Royce’s files as they were offered, skimmed them, asked open-ended questions, and encouraged Royce to expand on case law. Dodge affected a confused expression and
waited with his pencil poised, like a novice taking notes. The longer Royce talked, the further he veered from the letter of the law and the closer he got to its spirit. For Dodge, it was like sitting on three aces, waiting for the fourth.

As Royce went deeper and deeper, Dodge watched the others. Keene folded his hands behind his head. Schonders kept checking his watch as though he had another appointment.

About forty-five minutes in, Dodge said, “Mr. Royce, I certainly appreciate your help.” He shuffled the files that Royce had handed him and pretended to review his notes. “You’ve clarified an awful lot.”

Royce motioned to Keene, who said, “Terrific! You understand that—”

“I’m still confused about a couple of things.” Dodge wound his face into a big, confused Colombo-style furrow. “In that first case, didn’t you say that the jury denied the inventor’s claim on the basis that the company provided his lab, and without all that expensive equipment, he’d have never come up with it? And in that second case, didn’t the jury decide that the company’s interests outweighed the inventors? But just now you said that patent law was developed to protect the intellectual property for the inventor. Isn’t Ryan McNear the inventor? And he didn’t even use a lab at GoldCon—”

“The law says that the company is the inventor. You see, once the engineer takes employment, the company who
pays
him has the rights to what he does under their employ. It’s called work for hire.”

“Huh. Why is Ryan’s name listed first on the one patent, second on the other, and GoldCon Corporation is listed third on both?”

“Well, Dr. Reed and Mr. McNear were the inventors, but the invention is owned by the company.”

“So, Ryan’s the inventor, and patent law was developed to protect the inventor, unless he worked for a company?” Dodge stared at the file and waited for someone else to speak. Royce started to break the silence, but Dodge interrupted on the first syllable. “So the money that GoldCon paid Ryan McNear and Foster Reed is the total compensation for their invention?”

“That’s right. You see, the day they came to work for GoldCon—and it’s standard industry procedure—”

“Even when GoldCon didn’t pay Mr. McNear what they promised?”

“I beg your pardon?” Royce glanced at Keene.

“I said, GoldCon did not pay Mr. McNear what was promised.”

“Do you have documentation of that?”

“No,” Dodge said, relishing his own voice, “but you do.”

Royce looked confused.

Dodge indicated Royce’s briefcase. “Of course, you have the signed patent waivers and copies of the award checks.”

Royce opened a file and set the waivers on the table along with documents that both Ryan and Foster had signed when they received the bonuses. He said, “The revenue derived from the invention is owned by whoever owns the intellectual property. As you can see, Ryan McNear released his rights to the patents twice.”

Dodge lifted the signed receipts for the bonuses that GoldCon had granted Ryan and Foster. There were two for each patent, one for the patent submission and one for the bonus when the patents were granted. “Notice that each inventor was granted five hundred dollars when the patents were submitted but only twenty-five hundred when the patents were granted.” Dodge unwound his brow and waited two beats. “See how the awards were given in full for submission but split when the patents
were granted?” Then he made an assumption. “If you check the original memo defining the patent bonus award program, you’ll see that the inventors were promised five hundred on submission—which they each received—and five thousand if the submissions resulted in patents being issued. The patents were issued, but GoldCon split the award between the inventors.”