“Who knows? As usual, it’s totally top secret. Very few get into her inner circle. And since the demise of Mr. Connaught, that inner circle is even fewer.” He grinned at me knowingly.
I gave him my best dumb blonde look, pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Oh come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know.”
“Know what?”
“About Nat and Mr. Connaught. Everyone knew.”
That’s not what Carrie had told me.
“Knew what?” I persisted. “I’ve been holed up in my office. And I’m not exactly best friends with Nat. What are you talking about?”
He looked at me for a few moments, probably trying to decide if he had said too much.
“I’ve probably said too much.” I had read his mind. “Nat and Mr. Connaught were an item. He was your ex-husband, wasn’t he?”
I nodded.
“You seem more his type than Nat. None of us could figure out the attraction. Nat’s nickname is the Ice Queen.”
I smiled. I had already given her that moniker myself.
chapter twenty
“She strikes me as very focused. Someone who takes her work very seriously,” I said.
“Her work is her life. That’s one of the reasons we all found it so surprising when she and Mr. Connaught started seeing each other.”
It seemed obvious that most people knew about the affair, despite what Carrie told me. I wanted to question Ben about Tommy and Nat, but I needed to do it discreetly. I was in the executive offices now, not the secretarial pool and although I was sure the upper echelons of corporations had their fair share of gossip, I wasn’t sure if executives kept their juicy morsels among themselves.
“What could possibly have been the attraction?” I pondered out loud. “I can’t picture those two together. Tommy was so loose and easy going. Natalie Scott strikes me as someone so uptight you could bowl with her shit.”
Did I just say that out loud? I looked over at Ben and he was trying very hard not to laugh.
“She’s that, I’ll agree,” Ben said. “They worked very closely on that project of hers. Mr. Connaught used to get right in there with his shirt sleeves rolled up. We all worked long hours and he was often there with us, programming, throwing out ideas. Part of the team. I suppose all those long hours spent together just led to the two of them hitting it off.” He shrugged his shoulders and sipped his coffee. “Go figure.”
“Yeah, go figure,” I agreed. “What was the project all about?”
“Well, it’s still top secret. I could tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you.” He leaned across the table and pointed his finger at me, like he was shooting a pistol. “Bang bang.”
“Very funny. Just tell me what the project was about,” I insisted in an exasperated tone.
“Well, I guess now that you’re the CEO, I can spill my guts. This secret’s been such a burden to carry around,” he said very seriously. He hung his head.
My heart raced a little. Maybe this was the break I was looking for. Some solid information. I looked around me to see who our table neighbours were, and realized we were the only ones left in Starbucks.
“So spill your guts,” I urged him in a near whisper. He lifted his head and he had a huge, shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
“Gotcha!” he exclaimed.
“Ha ha,” I deadpanned. Ben was turning out to be just a little juvenile. I was suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue and decided to pack it in for the evening.
“Thanks for the coffee. I just realized how tired I am.”
Ben grabbed my hand and pulled on it.
“Come on Kate. Sit down. Joke’s over. Okay?”
I sat down reluctantly.
“Just tell me about the project, will you? I’ve enjoyed our joking, but now I’m tired. If you don’t want to tell me, I’ll get the info somewhere else.”
“Okay, okay. It was a subcontract for a bio-medical engineering company. We were developing an interface device for one of their projects. The company is called Global Devices. Global ended up losing too much money before they could get their product to market, so they just closed it down. It was as simple as that.”
“What was their product?”
“An artificial kidney.”
“An artificial kidney? You’re kidding me again. I’ve read about artificial hearts, and there’s one company up in Canada that were leading the way in that area, but artificial kidneys. Wow. Very Star Wars.” A low wattage light bulb was turning on in my head.
Ben shook his head. “Nope. I’m deadly serious. There are dozens of bio-medical companies out there in the race to develop artificial organs. A couple of companies have introduced artificial hearts and others are close to animal trials on other organs. If someone can come up with a plastic heart, why not a kidney? There are more people on waiting lists for kidney transplants than heart transplants.”
“But what about dialysis? Isn’t that, in a sense, an artificial kidney?”
“Sure it is. But in this day and age, the medical engineers think we can do better for kidney patients. If you’re a patient on dialysis, you are literally tied to the dialysis machine. Most patients have dialysis three times a week, and most of them have to go to a hospital or a clinic to receive the treatment,” he explained. “Global Devices was developing a kidney that could be implanted into the human body.”
The Van Buren Health Centre was world renowned for research and transplants. Tommy was murdered behind the Van Buren Health Centre. The light bulb in my head was functioning now but only giving off about forty watts.
“Explain to me how computers are used for this sort of thing.”
Ben was in his element now and eager to teach me. “Well, because the organ is artificial, the brain and central nervous system obviously can’t give the organ any signals on how to work. The organ recipient has to be hooked up to a computer, outside the body, that gives the artificial organ, in this case the kidney, the signals it needs to operate properly. These computer units are about the size of a cell phone and can be clipped on to the person’s belt. It sends signals to the artificial kidney through radio waves, so there are no wire hook ups. Amazing, right?”
“Amazing,” I agreed, “but a little scary. Artificial hearts, artificial kidneys. What’s next? An artificial brain?”
He laughed. “Probably not impossible, but highly improbable. Today that is. Who knows where we’ll be in fifty years with computers?”
“Well, I don’t know if I want to live long enough to see an artificial human brain. Sounds like something out of a cheap movie.” I shuddered at the thought. “So how far along were we in the software development before the plug got pulled?”
Ben shrugged. “The project was almost done. Remember, Phoenix was doing just a portion.”
“Which portion?”
“The remote signaling. We were developing software to enable the computer outside the body to give the remote signals to the chips embedded with the artificial organ.”
“So the company just ran out of money? Totally? Did they go tits up?” I grimaced inwardly as I said that. I made a mental note to start cleaning up my gutterisms, as my mother called them. I have to start acting more ladylike, more CEO-like.
“No, they’re still around. They just ran out of funding for the development of the artificial kidney.”
I was a little puzzled. “So Phoenix Technologies just gets cut out of the contract?”
“It’s part of the research and development world. Happens all the time. No big deal. “
“And this was Nat Scott’s pet project,” I stated. “How did she react when the contract was cancelled?”
“She blew a gasket. I heard she was throwing things around her office. Mr. Connaught was in there calming her down. She left the building and didn’t come back for a week. Word was she was on a holiday. Yeah, right,” he said.
Oh, the girl has a temper. “How long ago did all this happen?” I asked.<
br />
“About a month or six weeks ago, I think,” Ben said. “When Nat came back from her vacation,” he mimed finger quotes when he said vacation, “she and Mr. Connaught were no longer a couple.”
No doubt, I thought. The Tommy I knew would never put up with temper tantrums or hissy fits.
chapter twenty-one
Ben’s short lesson on artificial kidneys had me intrigued and wondering if somehow the work Phoenix had been doing with Global Devices was tied to Tommy’s murder.
I spent the better part of the next day finding out as much as I could about artificial organs. The internet was a great help and I was amazed to find out that not only were hearts and kidneys viable organs to implant in the body, but researchers were developing artificial livers, lungs, stomachs, pancreases and urinary bladders.
My research led me to a biography about the man the medical community had christened the “father of the artificial organ”. Dr. Willem Kolff was born in Holland and is credited with inventing the first artificial kidney during the Second World War using sausage casings and orange juice cans. He and his colleague Dr. Robert Jarvik are credited as the inventors of the first artificial heart that was implanted in a human.
Dr. Kolff’s early invention using the sausage casings, orange juice cans and a washing machine, led to the modern dialysis machine. In his first experiment in 1938, Dr. Kolff filled sausage casings with blood, then somehow expelled the air in the casings, added some urea (a kidney waste product), and agitated the contraption in a tub of salt water. Within minutes all the urea had moved into the salt water. The next device consisted of one hundred and forty-five feet of sausage casing wrapped around a wooden drum immersed in a salt solution. The patient’s blood was drawn from the wrist artery and fed directly into the casings. The drum was constantly rotating, removing the impurities from the blood. Okay, so far so good, I was understanding the basics.
And then the story got really good. Dr. Kolff used a design copied from the water pump coupling found in Ford motor engines to get the blood safely back into the patient. Voila! The concept for dialysis was born.
Unfortunately, the first fifteen patients placed on the machine died. By 1945 Kolff had made several more modifications to the machine and was using blood thinners to prevent coagulation of the blood. The first person to survive after being on the machine was a woman, in a coma from kidney failure. The machine worked its wonders and when the patient came out of the coma, her first words were “I’m going to divorce my husband”! She lived another seven years after receiving the treatment.
Dr. Kolff sent a prototype of his machine to doctors in New York City in 1947 and eventually the machine was improved to such a level that it was used regularly by people whose kidneys had failed. Today in the United Stated, tens of thousands of people undergo dialysis treatment three times a week. Many of them are waiting for a kidney transplant. Dr. Kolff moved to the U.S. in the fifties and went on to invent membrane oxygenators for bypass surgery, which eventually became the artificial heart, and worked on artificial eyes, ears and limbs.
I called Ben Tucker and asked him how much he new about the artificial kidney project. He told me that I knew as much as he did because he had pretty much told me everything the other night at Starbucks. I didn’t press him. Carrie told me that the artificial kidney project had been code named the Arapaho Project and she gave me a list of the people who had worked on it. Nat Scott was the project leader (in addition to her role as Vice President of Research and Development) and there were fifteen employees listed as team members. Tommy’s paper file was not very thick and contained very little information. When I asked if Tommy kept files on his computer at the office Carrie said she wasn’t sure. We turned on his desk computer and after putting in the password (which Carrie knew) we surfed around a little and discovered nothing. Apparently Tommy used his office computer for email only and there was nothing else stored or filed on it.
“Each project office is responsible for keeping the official files for their projects,” Carrie told me. “Before I worked for Mr. Connaught, I worked on one of the R and D teams as the project administrator. We had to keep really good files because a lot of the work we do is on medical devices. Our files have to be ready for audit at any time by the FDA - the Food and Drug Administration. We kept all of the research notes, results of tests and any trials, stuff like that. Do you want me to ask for the files on the Arapaho project?”
“No. No thanks Carrie.” Until I understood how things worked around Phoenix I wasn’t about to go upsetting any apple carts. I hadn’t received the warmest of welcomes so far from the staff. Admittedly, I hadn’t been expecting marching bands and group hugs, but I also hadn’t expected some of the icy attitudes either. I guess I didn’t know what to expect. Everything had happened so quickly. One day I was working in a law office as a legal secretary and then poof! the next day I was in charge of my own company. I guess if I was being fair, I should give the staff the benefit of the doubt and give them some time to get to know me and accept that Tommy was gone. But I didn’t have any feelings of fair about Nat Scott.
chapter twenty-two
Saturday morning I checked out of the hotel and moved into Tommy’s apartment. Correction: my apartment. I couldn’t very well justify spending scads of the company’s money on a first class hotel when I had 7,000 perfectly acceptable square feet of living space available to me on Central Park. The Upper East Side. The enormity of it all and the overwhelming notion that I owned property in Manhattan, and on Fifth Avenue was a little outside my realm of reality. Tommy had died and I was an instant millionaire. I had trouble breathing whenever I thought about how much my life had changed in such a short period of time. This was not a situation that gave me any happiness, just truckloads of daunting responsibility.
Today though was not a day for self-doubt or a pity-party. I had given myself a tough talking-to the night before and had decided to get on with what needed doing. I had been in emotional limbo since finding out about Tommy’s death and had been floating through each day, barely making a dent in what needed to be done. I had to move on and make some huge decisions.
Did I want to stay on as Chair and CEO of Phoenix Technologies? Did I want to live in New York?
I had spent my entire adult life living in Toronto, which is a big city by Canadian standards. In fact it was Canada’s largest city. But New York City was so huge, I wasn’t sure if I could live there.
My gawd, there was so much to think about. Did I need a work visa? What would I do with my apartment in Toronto? If I moved to New York, would I have to give up saying eh? Could I get Ron McLean and Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night on any of the American TV networks? Could I get used to four downs in American football? How would I cope on Labour Day weekend if the Toronto Argos and Hamilton Tiger Cats game wasn’t televised in New York?
And who was I fooling? Being CEO of a publicly-traded company took a lot more experience than I had or could probably learn fast enough. I was surprised that the share price of Phoenix hadn’t hit rock bottom with Tommy’s death and the shareholders finding out that a secretary was taking over.
If I stayed in New York, what would happen with Jay? He was on the fast track with his new company and although he was in New York now, he was only here for training. His full-time job was back in Toronto. Our relationship could probably not survive with us living in two cities. My past experience with Tommy in this regard was probably a good yardstick.
I loved Jay and I wanted to be with him. He had told me he loved me but did that mean he was committed to a long term relationship? There was six years difference in our ages and although Jay always told me he didn’t care about that, I wondered if the upheaval in my life was going to fit in with his career and his plans.
Staying in the Big Apple, staying with Phoenix, staying with Jay - it was all eating at me. It was no wonder my stomach was constantly upset. So last night I gave myself a verbal shit-kicking and made some d
ecisions.
I was almost positive I could give New York and Phoenix Technologies a chance. What the hell. If Tommy thought I could run the company, I’d at least try for him. New York wouldn’t seem so enormous and so scary for me if I settled in for a while, so I decided to get out of the hotel, which felt so temporary, and move into the apartment.
I’ll be honest. The thought of moving into the apartment scared the crap out of me. The lump on the side of my head was gone but the memory of being cold-cocked upside the head was still very fresh in my mind’s eye. No one liked being scared and it made me mad to think about being vulnerable.
Feeling scared and feeling vulnerable were wasted emotions as far as I was concerned. I would have to do something about it and learn to defend myself, especially since there had been no breaks in Tommy’s murder or my mugging in the apartment.
Jay was waiting under the awning of the entrance to the apartment building when Lou pulled up in the car. My heart did a couple of flips and I smiled when I saw him standing there. Jay was good looking, by my standards, standing a little over six feet. His brown hair was wavy, cut short but not too short, and he had beautiful green eyes. He smiled widely back at me when the doorman opened the car door.
We held hands in the elevator on our way up to the apartment and didn’t say anything until the doorman had loaded all of our suitcases into the lobby of the apartment.
“Shall I put the suitcases in the bedroom, Miss?” he asked.
I peered at his name tag. “No thanks Albert. We can manage just fine.” He nodded and backed out of the lobby, closing the door quietly behind him.
Jay took me in his arms and hugged me tightly. I hugged back, with all my might. His embrace felt so good. We hadn’t seen each other in days, and when I had called him last night from my hotel, I asked him to move into the apartment with me.
“At least move in for the rest of the time you’re here in New York for your training. Why stay in that little walk up apartment?”
Monahan 02 Artificial Intentions Page 12