by Susan Wolfe
Maybe she could make a career out of introducing herself to this guy. “I’m Georgia Griffin, about the ’401 patent. You have a minute?”
“That again?” he said. “I’m afraid I’m in a . . .”
“No problem,” the man said hastily, standing up. “I was done for now, anyway.” He motioned her into his vacated chair with an exaggerated sweep of his arm, his eyes locked onto hers just a moment too long before he turned and left.
“Fine,” Archie said cheerfully, waving her in. “Hope you don’t mind the smoke.” Were those flakes of tobacco that were stuck on his yellow teeth?
“Mind if I close the door?” The rollaway bed was still there, being gassed within an inch of its life. “I wanted to talk to you about the stuff Ken and I have been doing with the ’401. We’re desperate to get that patent issued in time for our SAP case, and it sort of seems like you don’t even think it’s a problem.”
“I’m glad you came to discuss this with me,” he said, gesturing for her to sit as smoke spiraled slowly into the air above his desk. “See, when you’ve had my education and experience, you realize it isn’t any big deal. The patent office loses applications all the time.”
Georgia paused, considering. His red lips were curved in a patient smile, waiting for her slower mental faculties to catch up. “Isn’t a big deal to whom? I mean, it might not be a big deal from the perspective of the patent office, but shouldn’t we take Lumina’s perspective? Ken and Paul Holder think it’s a big deal.”
“I know, and I’m very disappointed in them. I thought they were grown men.”
Had this imbecile ever gotten a point in his life? “Maybe they’re afraid we’ll lose the patent case.” She paused again, while he continued to smile patiently. The guy’s confidence was as unassailable as Napoleon’s. “Actually, I find it frustrating to be the one trying to get the patent on time, when it’s your area of expertise.”
“Really,” he said, tapping the ash from his cigar. “I just assumed you loved the work. I hear you spend almost all your time on it.”
She searched in vain for some appropriate response, and then gave up. “Right,” she said, standing to go. “Well, I just thought I should mention it, because I didn’t want resentment to build between us.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “No worries. I’m not the resentful type. Glad you stopped by. Feel free to take advantage of my expertise any time.”
A few minutes later she was bent over the bathroom sink, coughing and splashing cold water into her smoke-stung eyes. Well, that was a failure. She now found him even more irritating, and she’d bet her gas money he still wouldn’t remember who she was. Next time she’d introduce herself as Meryl Streep.
So Archie was prized because he related well to software engineers. A vital skill, no doubt. But it seemed safer to drive a hog across a field of land mines than let him be in charge of anything. She just hoped she and Ken had taken control before it was too late.
“Now, why are we here at the Saloon?” Nikki wrinkled her nose as they pushed through the padded, red leather doors into the long, dim room. A back-lit bar spanned the far wall, beyond a bunch of sticky-looking varnished tables, beneath electrical fixtures that gave off flickering yellow light. “Isn’t this the place where Mandy gets drunk sometimes, and dusts it up with her boyfriend?”
“Who?”
“Mandy. That curly-haired brunette who works in payroll and kinda looks like Salma Hayak?” Georgia shrugged and shook her head. “Latina accent?”
“Sorry. Haven’t met her.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m just saying our last destination had more class.”
“True. But Ken thinks I should get to know Archibald better, since we’re working together so much.” She was scanning the tables, trying to find him in the deep gloom. The place felt like it was just heating up.
“Yeah, I heard Archie’s here a lot. There he is. At the end of the bar.” Nikki waved. “I think he’s cute.”
“So was Nero,” Georgia muttered.
“Sorry?”
“I said it’s a good thing we came. He’s all by himself.”
Archibald was stirring his drink slowly and talking to the bartender. “Nikki,” he nodded, smiling. “Here’s a pleasant surprise. Have I met your friend? What’ll you ladies have?”
“Wow, so who else comes here?” Nikki asked after they settled on their bar stools.
“It varies a lot,” Archibald said. “I usually count on Charlie and David, but then a lot of other people show up sometimes. Like the two of you, for example.”
“Do a lot of women come here?”
“Enough to keep hope alive.”
“Oh, Archie, don’t pretend,” Nikki chided him with her thousandwatt grin, sipping her wine. “I bet you can get a date whenever you want one. Women just want to take care of you.” Surely that was a joke, so why was nobody laughing?
“To some extent you’re right,” Archibald acknowledged. “Women are such nice people that they’re drawn to hopeless cases. Not exactly the same as romantic interest, though, and I sometimes seem to have trouble telling the difference.”
“Really.” Georgia’s polite tone belied her flash of curiosity. “How so?” They’d gotten their stools just in time. The area around the bar was getting crowded, and the guy behind her kept brushing against her shoulder blades. She wished he’d back up a little.
“Well,” Archibald said, “when I used to work at the law firm, there was this gorgeous secretary named Linda. Linda and I had lunch a few times, and sometimes I went out with her and her friends. Then she started dating some associate, and when I told her friends I missed her, they said it served me right. Said she decided she’d been pining for me long enough. I almost fainted. Pining?? For me?? I had absolutely no idea.”
“Shame,” Georgia commiserated with a slow shake of her head. Somebody jostled against her back again, and smiled apologetically when she turned to glare at him. “Did she end up with the other guy?”
“Married him. I presume they’re living happily ever after. But then another time I had this very sexy woman really coming on to me in a bar, not this bar, one in New York. The place was jammed, and she was right behind my stool. She kept putting her hand on my back, and then on my shoulder, and every time I turned around she’d give me this big, sexy smile. Pretty soon she was practically squirming against me, and when I finally suggested we go back to her place, she threw her drink at me!”
“Ouch!”
“Yeah, it was awful. Tell you the truth, I was so embarrassed I had to find another bar for a while. So I’ve been very careful not to make that mistake again. Here comes David now. Let’s get a table. David! Look! Female companionship!”
“Georgia?” Nikki was waving a hand in front of her face. “Georgia! You with us? We’re moving to a table.”
“Oh. Sure,” she murmured, reluctantly emerging from her mesmerizing vision of Archie undone. She lifted her beer glass, dropped from her stool onto the floor and smiled dreamily as she threaded her way through the bodies, following Nikki deeper into the atmospheric gloom.
After her scare with the creep on Little Portman Road, Georgia decided to treat herself to the profound luxury of a real bed (and locked door!) at Castlekeep Inn for the night. Thankfully they had a room, and at 7:30 she raced upstairs to soak in her tub, periodically adding hot water until her toes looked like ten happy raisins. She dried her hair slowly, and then danced all around her big, private room in the hotel’s frayed terrycloth robe until she flopped into the overstuffed chair from exhaustion. By 8:30 she was bouncing on the queen-sized bed, sniffing appreciatively the faint scent of bleach from the blindingly white sheets. She wasn’t quite ready for sleep. This would be a great time to use her free wi-fi to get some answers about her idea (well, notion really) for the patent case. She got online and went at it.
At 10:00 she set her computer down on the bed and pressed her fingers against her closed eyes. This was about as far as she coul
d go on her own. Her idea actually looked workable to her, but of course she was probably blind to the obvious, insurmountable barrier that was blocking her way. After all, if Lumina could do this for the patent case, wouldn’t their famous patent firm be doing it already?
Well. There were worse things than making a fool of yourself, and one of them was being too chicken to live. If you thought you could make a difference you just went for it, and then learned something if they bothered to explain how stupid it was. In the meantime, what could be better than a glorious night’s sleep, spread out wide in the center of a real bed? She double-checked her alarm, burrowed blissfully into the cool sheets and snapped off the light.
Around 9 a.m. Ken forwarded Quan’s first report that he was in the Seattle conference room with thousands of documents piled on the long table and thousands more stacked in drifts on along the walls. A pleasant young attendant had assured him regretfully that there was no index and was now watching him like a hawk. Must be quite a needle to warrant that much haystack, Georgia thought.
Ken asked her to join him for Quan’s 3:30 phone call. When Quan came on the line he was breathing hard.
“Quan, what’s goin’ on there, buddy?” Ken called into the phone. “You sound like you’ve been running.”
“I literally just ran away from Burt. He seemed quite angry that I wouldn’t stop and talk to him.”
“Burt Plowfield? What’s he doin’ up there?”
“I’d say several important things. Fraternizing with the enemy. Asking what’s taking so long. And letting me know ahead of time that anything I find is either misunderstood or irrelevant.”
“Sorry, Quan, you had more than enough to deal with today without that guy. Tell us what you’ve found.”
“Well, keep in mind I couldn’t take notes or make copies, but I did jot down a list right before this call.” He described his findings for twenty minutes.
“Okay,” Ken said when he had finished, “first of all, you’ve done an amazing job of organizing your search and your findings. You’re like the guy from The Thirty-nine Steps. Here’s what I think you found:
“First, looks like the way they got the Norditch customers was legal.
“Second, they put two Norditch employees on the Futuresoft payroll while they were still employees of Norditch. Probably illegal, definitely sleazy, but not in itself the crime of the century.
“But third, the information the Norditch employees brought with them to Futuresoft is clearly illegal. They brought a prototype of a Cordova product that hadn’t been released yet. And confidential pricing information about deals where Cordova was competing with Futuresoft.
“And what’s really bad is that the Futuresoft CEO himself was personally right in the thick of it. He—personally!—set up secret email accounts for the Norditch employees. The obvious reason to do that is to help them funnel stolen information to him without getting caught. Also, he counseled his Singapore employees to clean their drives of any Norditch information ‘just in case.’ We can only presume the ‘just in case’ was to prevent us from finding out what they had.”
He paused a moment, considering. “That’s what I recall. Is it accurate?”
“Yes,” Quan confirmed, “but keep in mind I looked at less than 1 percent of the documents in the room. There may be innocent explanations of some stuff I saw that we don’t know about, and it’s also possible that I misread something in my haste.”
“True. But you didn’t misread everything, and there’s enough in what you found to fuel a great lawsuit if Cordova cares to bring one. The fact is, we’re on notice that Futuresoft has stolen Cordova’s intellectual property.”
“I think that’s right.” Quan’s breath had returned to normal. “And even if the CEO isn’t outright crooked, he doesn’t seem very ethical. How can he explain setting up those top secret email accounts for somebody else’s employees?”
“He was team building,” Georgia offered.
Ken snorted. “He certainly wasn’t doing anything sensible.”
“So, he’s either a crook or as dumb as a sack of hammers,” Georgia summarized. “Is that a person we want on our management team?”
“Sadly, Georgia, that depends on who ‘we’ is. Speaking of which, Quan, have you briefed Burt?”
“No,” Quan said, “I refused to speak to him. I just didn’t have time. I’m sure that’s part of what he’s angry about.”
“Also scared you found something. Tell you what, just head directly for the airport, and I’ll deal with Burt. You’ve done a great job for the company, Mr. Memory. Terrific work.”
“You don’t want me to stay here and continue for at least another day? There are still thousands of unread documents.”
“Unfortunately for the deal, I think we have enough already. Let’s meet tomorrow morning. Safe trip back.”
So was the whole Futuresoft deal dead, she wondered as she headed back to her cube. God, that bed last night had been glorious. She was well rested. The thought of folding herself up into her back seat again tonight seemed a little like being buried alive.
Suck it up. Two more weeks and Katie-Ann would be here, and they’d stretch out in their sleeping bags on a big, wide carpeted floor night after heated night. Hot food whenever they wanted it, without having to worry about whether there would be any mystery meat left by the time she got to the front of the homeless line. No more trying to sit upwind of redolent dinner companions, or avoiding people who chewed with their mouths open. A person could surely manage for two short weeks, with the promise of such luxury so close behind.
CHAPTER 10
Quan and Georgia were helping Ken finalize his Futuresoft presentation to Roy when Zack stuck his head in Ken’s office.
“Ken, did you tell Archibald Moss to get involved with the Western Analytics lawsuit?” Western Analytics was a patent case Georgia had nothing to do with. Zack’s buzz cut looked the same, but something about him was different.
“No,” Ken replied. “Does he think I did?”
“Western Analytics missed a discovery deadline last week. I just called their lawyer because I hadn’t heard from them, and they said they’d already agreed with our general counsel to stop all discovery.”
“That’s ridiculous. I haven’t even talked to them.”
“I know you haven’t. They worked it out with our ‘general counsel,’ Archibald Moss.” Zack used his middle finger to push his glasses up his nose, and she realized that was the difference. His contacts must be hurting him, because he was wearing thick black-rimmed glasses.
“You gotta be kiddin’ me. How did they even find Archie?” Ken trapped a sigh in his puffed-out cheeks. “Would you ask Maggie to see if she can get him on the speakerphone? Excuse me a minute, guys.” He set down his pen and rubbed his fingers across his closed eyes.
It was so quiet while they waited that they could hear employees cut their engines as they arrived in the parking lot. Morning sun had reached the edge of Ken’s conference table, and was spreading its slow stain across Quan’s notepad and up the side of his paper coffee cup.
Maggie put Archibald through. “Hey, Arch. I’m here with Zack Stern. He just got off the phone with . . . who was it, their general counsel? Zack just got off the phone with the general counsel of Western Analytics. Did you tell him we agreed to stop all discovery in our patent litigation?”
“No. I did say that it made sense to stop fighting, because we were all grown men.”
Ken exchanged a pointed glance with Zack as he said to the phone, “Did you put anything in writing?”
“Not unless it’s on a bar napkin somewhere.”
“You met him in a bar?”
“Yeah, down at the Saloon.”
He touched his canary yellow bow tie as he leaned closer to the speakerphone. “Did you tell him you were Lumina’s general counsel?”
“Certainly not.”
“Why do they think you’re the general counsel?”
“How sho
uld I know? Must be my regal bearing.”
He glanced quickly at each of them in the room. “Archibald, you shouldn’t even be talking to the lawyers at Western Analytics about the patent case.”
“I disagree. I have a broad mandate to manage our intellectual property here at Lumina, and this lawsuit is impeding the free and unfettered development of our software.”
“But it’s not your mandate to decide or communicate litigation strategy.”
“Never said it was.”
“Okay. If you run into those guys at the Saloon again, could you please not talk about the patent litigation?”
“Too restrictive.”
“If anybody from Western Analytics tries to reach any agreement with you, will you refer them to Zack?”
“More than happy to.”
“Thanks, Arch. See you later.” He punched the off button. “Zack, you know how to deal with this, but let me know if I can help.”
“Thanks.” Zack put his hand on the door handle, but then turned back. “Ken, do we need man-on-man defense for this guy?” Well, exactly. Archie’s behavior was about as predictable as a grapefruit squirt.
Ken smiled ruefully. “He does seem to get around, doesn’t he?”
“Wouldn’t our jobs be a lot easier if we got him under control?”
Georgia leaned forward to hear the answer.
“They probably would, Zack, if we could do it. But how? Archibald’s a good person, but he’s also an out-and-out anarchist. I think he’s just our cross to bear.”
Zack used his middle finger to push his glasses up his nose again. “He’s going to make a mess we can’t fix one of these days. I think maybe he already did with the ’401 patent.”
“He’s pretty destructive, I’ll grant you that. Wish I knew a better answer.”
Georgia leaned back. She wished he did, too. Ken’s passive acceptance was sort of embarrassing.
“By the way, Georgia,” Ken said as Zack left, “did you ever talk to Archie about the lost patent?”