Hot Shot

by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

  Hoffman finally raised his head and studied Mitch over the top of his half glasses. Then he shifted his gaze to Susannah.

  "Hello, Uncle Leland," she said.

  Mitch nearly fell out of his chair. Uncle Leland?

  Sam seemed to be as surprised as Mitch to discover that his wife knew Hoffman. Mitch wanted to strangle her for springing something like this on them.

  "Susannah. It's good to see you again." Hoffman's tone was brisk and formal. "Now what can we do for you and your friends?"

  Mitch's stomach sank. Hoffman wasn't taking them seriously at all. He hadn't agreed to meet with them because he was interested in backing SysVal, but merely as a courtesy to Susannah.

  Mitch wanted to bang his head against the table in frustration. He forgot that only a few minutes before he had been worried about the strain Susannah was under. Now he wanted to kill her.

  Susannah was to make the first presentation. She picked up her leather folder and proceeded to the front of the room. She looked so cool and composed that even Mitch, who knew better, was nearly fooled.

  "Gentlemen." She gave all of them a polite smile. "I have to begin with an apology to my business partners for not telling them that we're meeting today before an old family friend. Although Leland and I aren't blood relatives, he was a longtime acquaintance of my father and has known me for nearly as long as I can remember. I didn't tell my partners about this acquaintance because I didn't want them to believe-even for a moment-that an old family connection would make Hoffman Enterprises magically open up its checkbook to SysVal."

  Looking thoughtful, she took a step forward. "If I were a man-my father's son instead of his daughter-this old family relationship would almost certainly work to my advantage. But as a woman-my father's daughter-I find myself at a distinct disadvantage."

  She smiled at Hoffman. "When I was growing up, Leland, you didn't watch me climbing trees and getting roughed up in football games. Instead, you saw me cutting out paper dolls and having tea parties. Although a grown woman stands before you now, in your mind you're undoubtedly scoffing at the idea of putting your money behind someone who once-and it pains me to admit this-came running to you for protection from an exceedingly ugly earthworm."

  The men around the table chuckled, and Mitch felt himself beginning to relax. It was impossible to read Hoffman's expression, but Mitch had to believe that he was impressed by Susannah's good-humored introduction. His admiration for his business partner grew. She was really good at this. As he watched her, he realized that she had actually begun to enjoy herself.

  "Women in the business of electronics are a rare species," she went on. "Ironic, isn't it, since women are destined to become major users of small computers? I regard being a female in this industry as an advantage, since I look at everything from a fresh viewpoint. But if my being a woman bothers any of you, I do offer some consolation." She nodded her head toward Sam and Mitch at the foot of the table, and grinned wickedly, "My partners have more than enough testosterone to put all of your minds at ease."

  Even Hoffman smiled at that.

  Now that she had them relaxed, she launched into her presentation. In her efficient, no-nonsense manner, she offered the business plan they had all labored over for so long, outlining market projections and five-year goals that were aggressive, but credible. As she spoke, her private-school voice and calm assurance gave their renegade company an air of old world stability, despite the fact that Sam had propped his motorcycle boots on the polished tabletop.

  She finished her presentation and returned to her seat. Mitch noticed that the men were looking at the papers in front of them with a bit more interest.

  Sam dropped his feet to the floor and rose slowly from his chair. "There are winners and losers," he muttered. "Fast buck artists, con men, bullshitters." He glared at all of them. "And then there are champions. And do you know what separates them?" He punched the air with his fist. "Mission. Mission is what separates them."

  Brother Love's traveling salvation show was off and running. For the next twenty minutes he paced the room, tugging his necktie loose with one hand, shedding his sport coat with the other, jabbing a hand into the pocket of his jeans only to pull it out and shove it through his hair. With a spectacular display of verbal pyrotechnics and oral gymnastics, he painted a picture of a shining future with a Blaze microcomputer beating solidly as its heart.

  Hallelujah, brother. And amen!

  When it was all over, Mitch was exhilarated. His intuition had been right and he hadn't needed to speak at all. Together, Susannah and Sam had formed exactly the company image he wanted to present-rock-solid respectability countered with outrageous razzle-dazzle. Only a fool could resist them, and Leland Hoffman was no fool.

  Although it would be several days before Hoffman got back to them, at least they knew they had given him their best. They went to Mom & Pop's that night to celebrate. Sam immediately claimed Victors, a new high-tech target game that all of them, with the exception of Yank, had decided was the best video game ever made.

  Sam called her over. "Come on, Suzie. Cheer me on." Her earlier resentment had dissolved, and she went to join him. He kissed the corner of her mouth without taking his eyes off the screen. "I've got a good game going here. Give me a couple of minutes and then I'll let you play."

  She slid behind him so that her breasts were pushed up against his back, and propped her chin on the top of his shoulder while she watched him maneuver the joystick. Her high-tech, whiz-bang husband. Her body began to feel hot, the way it did before they made love. She slipped her hands down onto his upper arms, conscious of the movement of his muscles on the controls through the sleeves of his T-shirt. Sometimes he made her feel as if she was tottering on the edge of a deep precipice. What if she fell off? Would he be the one who would catch her or the one who had pushed her? It was a disconcerting thought, and she shook it off.

  Mitch was playing Space Invaders at the next machine.

  Releasing Sam, she stepped over to watch him. He glanced longingly toward the Victors game. "Is Sam about done?"

  "Forget it. I'm next."

  "Are you open to negotiating for position?"

  "Unless you're talking diamonds, forget it."

  Mitch smiled. "At least I don't have to beat off Yank, too. I can't understand why he won't play Victors. He loves good video games."

  "Who can understand what goes through Yank's head?"

  Just as she spoke his name, the restaurant door opened and he walked in. She looked more closely and then let out a soft, incredulous exclamation. Distracted, Sam glanced up. "Jesus…" he murmured.

  Mitch had fallen into a disbelieving silence.

  Although Yank was walking toward them, he wasn't the one who had caught their attention. Instead, it was the woman sashaying at his side who had temporarily stunned them into speechlessness. She was a traffic-stopping redhead with crimson lips, elaborate makeup, and leopardskin pants that looked as if they had been tattooed on her hips. Overshadowing all that jutted a pair of breasts so spectacular that only a miraculous feat of engineering seemed to be holding them within the confines of her gold tank top.

  "Maybe she's his wet nurse," Susannah whispered, unable to take her eyes off the monumental mammaries.

  "Are you kidding?" Mitch whispered back. "He'd suffocate to death."

  Yank walked up to them and nodded. He refused to have anything to do with the day-to-day business operations of the company; typically, he didn't ask about their meeting with Hoffman Enterprises, but about a problem they'd been having with their keyboards. "What'd the manufacturer say, Sam? Did you talk to them?"

  "Uh… static." The woman's presence seemed to have robbed Sam of his capacity for coherent speech.

  Yank looked irritated. "Of course it's static. We've known that for weeks. What do they intend to do about it?"

  "Do?"

  Susannah stepped in and extended her hand to Yank's companion. "Hi, I'm Susannah Faulconer."

  "Ki
smet," the woman replied in a breathy, affected voice.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Kismet Jade. My numerologist picked it out. You're a Sagittarius, aren't you?"

  "Actually, no." Susannah quickly introduced her partners, but Kismet barely spared them a glance. She was too busy cantilevering her left breast over Yank's upper arm.

  "I'm hungry, Stud Man," she purred. "You gonna buy me something to eat, or do I have to work for my dinner?" She gave him a wicked, moist-lipped smile that clearly indicated exactly what sort of work she had in mind.

  Yank calmly adjusted his glasses on his nose. "I'll be happy to get you something to eat. The pizza is excellent, but the burgers are quite good, too."

  "Stud Man?" Mitch muttered at Susannah's side.

  "I ordered some pizzas," Susannah said quickly.

  Kismet walked two vermilion fingernails up the length of Yank's arm. "Play Victors with me while we wait."

  "I'm sorry, Kismet, but I don't play Victors."

  Kismet began to pout. "Why not? It's the best arcade game that's come out this year."

  Yank looked genuinely distressed. "I'm awfully sorry, Kismet. I really don't like to play Victors. Sam is our champion. He's the best Victors player you've ever seen." He gave Sam a pleading glance. "Would you mind playing a game with Kismet?"

  "Uh-sure. No problem."

  Mitch abandoned Space Invaders and walked with Susannah to the table. "She certainly is a far cry from Roberta," he said. "Sam's going to have a hard time keeping his eyes on the screen."

  "So would you," she pointed out as they slid into the booth.

  Kismet released a giggling obscenity as Sam annihilated her before she even reached the second screen. She took the quarter Yank handed her.

  Susannah studied them. "Have you spent any time at all thinking about what it will mean if this deal goes through?"

  "That's about all I've done lately."

  "I don't mean the company. I'm talking about how it will change us personally. On paper, anyway, each one of us will be worth a lot of money."

  "I have money now. You've had it before. We know what it's like." She studied Yank and Sam. "They don't." "Nothing ever stays the same, Susannah." "Uhm. I guess you're right." She picked up her beer and took a sip. On the opposite side of the room, Kismet arched her arms around Yank's thin neck, pressed her lips to his, and thrust her long experienced tongue deep within his mouth. Susannah experienced a moment both bittersweet and poignant. Mitch was right. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.

  BOOK TWO. THE MISSION

  We have set out together on an adventure to give the world the best computer humankind can produce. We will support and stand by our products, placing quality and integrity above ail else. We relish the adventure because it gives us the opportunity to put ourselves to the test of excellence.

  Statement of Mission

  SysVal Computer Corporation

  Chapter 21

  The money came rolling in. Slick, green, fast money. Hot money. New money. Money aching to be spent.

  The seventies whirled into the eighties, and the greatest industrial joy ride of the twentieth century picked up speed. Silicon Valley was awash in electronic gold as capitalism struck its finest hour.

  Home video games had already captured the imagination of the American family, and by 1982, the idea of having a computer in the house no longer seemed strange at all. Firms sprang up overnight. Some of them collapsed just as quickly, but others left their founders with almost unimaginable riches.

  In the posh communities of Los Gatos, Woodside, and Los Altos Hills, the electrical engineers stepped out of their hot tubs, stuffed their plastic pocket protectors into Armani shirts, hopped into their BMW's, and laughed like hell.

  By the fall of 1982, the nerds owned the Valley. The bespeckled, pimply-faced, overweight, underweight, dateless, womanless, goofiest of the goofy, were the undisputed, unchallenged kings of the entire freaking Valley!

  Man, it was sweet.

  Yank pulled his Porsche 911 crookedly into a parking space at SysVal's main building and then headed up the walk toward the main entrance. He nodded absentmindedly at the two female account executives who had stopped in mid-conversation as he approached and gazed wistfully at the retreating back of his leather bomber jacket. Once inside the lobby, he determinedly ignored the security guard stationed behind the elliptical-shaped desk.

  Everyone else who worked at SysVal had to show a plastic security badge to be admitted. Even Sam wore a badge. But Yank pretended the badges didn't exist, and Susannah had left orders that the guards were to admit him on sight.

  Logically, he understood that those golden days of Homebrew were gone forever-the days of free and open information, of one for all and all for one. It was September of 1982. John Lennon was dead, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and Uncle Sam had just busted up AT &T. The world was changing, and the Valley was filled with industrial spies intent on stealing the latest American technology and selling it to the Japanese, the Russians, or even a new start-up in the next industrial park. SysVal's astounding success had made it a prime target for those roaches of humanity. Yank understood all that. But he still wouldn't wear a security badge.

  As he headed down the hallway toward the multimillion-dollar lab that had been built especially for him, he had the nagging sensation that he had forgotten something very important. But he dismissed his worry. What could be more important than solving the problem with the trace lines of solder on their new circuit board? They were too close. He had an idea…

  Ten miles away, in the gilt and brocade bedroom of his Portola Valley home, lingerie model Tiffani Wade's carefully arranged seductive pose was ruined by the frown marring her forehead. "Yank? Yank, you can come back in now. I'm ready."

  She called out three more times before she realized that no one was going to answer, then she sagged back into the pillows. "You son of a bitch," she muttered. "You've done it to me again."

  Susannah shut off the Blaze III that rested on the credenza behind her desk and stretched. Somewhere in the building one of the employees fired off an air horn. She barely noticed. At SysVal, people were always firing off air horns or calling out Bingo numbers over the loudspeaker system, just so no one ever made the mistake of confusing them with IBM or FBT.

  As if someone had overheard her thoughts, the loudspeaker began to squawk. "Mayday, Mayday. The Japanese have just attacked the parking lot. All employees driving domestic cars should immediately take cover. This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill."

  Susannah rolled her eyes. God forbid they should ever have a real emergency. No one would believe it.

  SysVal's employees were primarily men in their twenties, and they prided themselves on being bad. In the six years since the company was founded, Sam Gamble's personality had become their model. Even the whiz kids at Apple Computer weren't as raunchy, as brazen, as wild as the rowdy bunch at SysVal. At Apple they held Friday afternoon beer blasts, but at SysVal they showed stag movies, too. The boys of SysVal strutted their stuff-their youth, their audaciousness, their sense of destiny. They were the ones who had made the magical little Blaze available to the world and helped humanity learn the beauty of personal computing. Like their brash, charismatic founder, they were young, invincible, immortal.

  Taking off her glasses, Susannah rubbed the bridge of her nose, then looked across her office at a much-abused dart board with the Apple logo painted on it. She thought about the five of them-Jobs and Woz, Sam, Yank, herself. All of them college dropouts. Freaks, nerds, rebels, and one overly polite socialite. In the five years that had passed since the West Coast Computer Faire, everything they touched had turned to gold. It was as if the gods had blessed them with youth, brains, and unlimited good luck. On paper, anyway, she and her partners were worth over a hundred million dollars each, while at Apple, Steve Jobs was worth more than three hundred million. Sometimes the enormity of their success scared Susannah to death.

>   The battered Apple dart board gave visual evidence of the early rivalry between the two young companies, but in the past few years that had changed. With trie dawning of the 1980s, the Big Boys had finally lifted their heads and realized that they had been left behind. Late in 1981, IBM had introduced the IBM-PC. Apple Computer, in a display of bravado that Susannah still wished SysVal had thought of first, had taken out a full-page ad in the nation's newspapers. The ad said, WELCOME IBM. SERIOUSLY. A paragraph of copy had followed in which the brash young upstarts at Apple had assumed the role of the wise old men of the industry and spelled out for Mighty IBM all of the glories of personal computing-as if IBM were too inexperienced, too stupid, too wet-behind-the-ears, to figure it out for themselves. The sheer audacity of it had kept the business community laughing for months.

  A custom-designed radio-controlled car zoomed into her office, did a three sixty in the middle of her carpet and zoomed out again with no sign of a human operator. SysVal's engineers were entertaining themselves again.

  Rubbing her eyes, she pushed a stray lock of hair away from her face. Her hair was shorter now, cut in a breezy style that feathered around her cheeks and softened the sharp, aristocratic features of her face. Since no important meetings were on her docket for that day, she had dressed informally in a coral cowl-neck sweater and tight, straight-legged jeans. Two slim gold bangles glittered at one wrist and a wide gold cuff hugged the other. The third finger of her right hand sported a two-karat marquis-cut diamond that she had bought for herself. More, she had definitely concluded, was better than less.

  On impulse, she reached for her telephone and dialed the number that connected her directly with Mitch's private office. But before the phone could ring, he walked through her door.

  "Mental telepathy," she said, some of her tension slipping away merely at the sight of his solid, comforting presence. "I was just calling you."