“Phil.”
“Yes.”
“.Jesus.”
“Does this change your plans?” Fernandez said.
Sanders had been considering that. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think Garvin would have fired him later in the day, anyway.”
“You sound confident.”
“Yeah. I got some ammunition last night. And I hope more today.”
Cindy came in and said, “Are you expecting something from KL? A big file?”
“Yes.”
“This one’s been coming in since 7 a.m. It must be a monster.” She put a DAT cartridge on his desk. It was exactly like the DAT cartridge that had recorded his video link with Arthur Kahn.
Fernandez looked at him. He shrugged.
At eight-thirty, he transmitted Bosak’s memo to Garvin’s private fax machine. Then he asked Cindy to make copies of all the faxes that Mohammed Jafar had sent him the previous night. Sanders had been up most of the night, reading the material that Jafar had sent him. And it made interesting reading.
Jafar of course was not ill; he had never been ill. That had been a little story that Kahn had contrived with Meredith.
He pushed the DAT videocassette into the machine, and turned to Fernandez.
“You going to explain?” she said.
“I hope it’ll be self-explanatory,” Sanders said.
On the monitor, the following appeared:
5 SECONDS TO DIRECT VIDEO LINKUP: DC/M-DC/C
SEN: A. KAHN
REC: M. JOHNSON
On the screen, he saw Kahn at the factory, and then a moment later the screen split and he saw Meredith at her office in Cupertino.
“What is this?” Fernandez said.
“A recorded video communication. From last Sunday.”
“I thought the communications were all erased.”
“They were, here. But there was still a record in KL. A friend of mine sent it to me.”
On the screen, Arthur Kahn coughed. “Uh, Meredith. I’m a little concerned.”
“Don’t be,” Meredith said.
“But we still aren’t able to manufacture to specs. We have to replace the air handlers, at the very least. Put in better ones.”
“Not now.”
“But we have to, Meredith.”
“Not yet.”
“But those handlers are inadequate, Meredith. We both thought they’d be okay, but they aren’t.”
“Never mind.”
Kahn was sweating. He rubbed his chin nervously. “It’s only a matter of time before Tom figures it out, Meredith. He’s not stupid, you know.”
“He’ll be distracted.”
“So you say.”
“And besides, he’s going to quit.”
Kahn looked startled. “He is? I don’t think he-”
“Trust me. He’ll quit. He’s going to hate working for me.”
Sitting in Sanders’s office, Fernandez leaned forward, staring at the screen. She said, “No shit.”
Kahn said, “Why will he hate it?”
Meredith said, “Believe me. He will. Tom Sanders will be out in my first forty-eight hours.”
“But how can you be sure-”
“What choice does he have? Tom and I have a history. Everybody in the company knows that. If any problem comes up, nobody will believe him. He’s smart enough to understand that. If he ever wants to work again, he’ll have no choice but to take whatever settlement he’s offered and leave.”
Kahn nodded, wiping the sweat from his cheek. “And then we say Sanders made the changes at the plant? He’ll deny that he did.”
“He won’t even know. Remember. He’ll be gone by then, Arthur.”
“And if he isn’t?”
“Trust me. He’ll be gone. He’s married, has a family. He’ll go.”
“But if he calls me about the production line-”
“Just evade it, Arthur. Be mystified. You can do that, I’m sure. Now, who else does Sanders talk to there?”
“The foreman, sometimes. Jafar. Jafar knows everything, of course. And he’s one of those honest sorts. I’m afraid if-”
“Make him take a vacation.”
“He just took one.”
“Make him take another one, Arthur. I only need a week here.”
“Jesus,” Kahn said. “I’m not sure-”
She cut in: “Arthur.”
“Yes, Meredith.”
“This is the time when a new vice president counts favors that will be repaid in the future.”
“Yes, Meredith.”
“That’s all.”
The screen went blank. There were white streaking video lines, and then the screen was dark.
“Pretty cut and dried,” Fernandez said.
Sanders nodded. “Meredith didn’t think the changes would matter, because she didn’t know anything about production. She was just cutting costs. But she knew that the changes at the plant would eventually be traced back to her, so she thought she had a way to get rid of me, to make me quit the company. And then she would be able to blame me for the problems at the plant.”
“And Kahn went along with it.”
Sanders nodded.
“And they got rid of Jafar.”
Sanders nodded. “Kahn told Jafar to go visit his cousin in Johore for a week to get out of town. To make it impossible for me to reach Jafar. But he never thought that Jafar would call me.” He glanced at his watch. “Now, where is it?”
“What?”
On the screen, there was a series of tones, and they saw a handsome, dark skinned newscaster at a desk, facing a camera and speaking rapidly in a foreign language.
“What’s this?” Fernandez said.
“The Channel Three evening news, from last December.” Sanders got up and pushed a button on the tape machine. The cassette popped out.
“What does it show?”
Cindy came back from the copying machine with wide eyes. She carried a dozen stacks of paper, each neatly clipped. “What’re you going to do with this?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“But this is outrageous, Tom. What she’s done.”
“I know,” he said.
“Everybody is talking,” she said. “The word is that the merger is off.”
“We’ll see,” Sanders said.
With Cindy’s help, he began arranging the piles of paper in identical manila folders.
Fernandez said, “What exactly are you going to do?”
“Meredith’s problem is that she lies,” Sanders said. “She’s smooth, and she gets away with it. She’s gotten away with it her whole life. I’m going to see if I can get her to make a single, very big lie.”
He looked at his watch. It was eight forty-five.
The meeting would start in fifteen minutes.
The conference room was packed. There were fifteen Conley-White executives down one side of the table, with John Marden in the middle, and fifteen DigiCom executives down the other side, with Garvin in the middle.
Meredith Johnson stood at the head of the table and said, “Next, we’ll hear from Tom Sanders. Tom, I wonder if you could review for us where we stand with the Twinkle drive. What is the status of our production there.”
“Of course, Meredith.” Sanders stood, his heart pounding. He walked to the front of the room. “By way of background, Twinkle is our code name for a stand-alone CD-ROM drive player which we expect to be revolutionary.” He turned to the first of his charts. “CD-ROM is a small laser disk used to store data. It is cheap to manufacture, and can hold an enormous amount of information in any form-words, images, sound, video, and so on. You can put the equivalent of six hundred books on a single small disk, or, thanks to our research here, an hour and a half of video. And any combination. For example, you could make a textbook that combines text, pictures, short movie sequences, animated cartoons, and so on. Production costs will soon be at ten cents a unit.”
He looked down the table. The Conley-White people were interested. Garvin was frowning. Meredith looked tense.
“But for CD-ROM to be effective, two things need to happen. First, we need a portable player. Like this.” He held up the player, and then passed it down the Conley-White side.
“A five-hour battery, and an excellent screen. You can use it on a train, a bus, or in a classroom-anywhere you can use a book.”
The executives looked at it, turned it over in their hands. Then they looked back at Sanders.
“The other problem with CD-ROM technology,” Sanders said, “is that it’s slow. It’s sluggish getting to all that wonderful data. But the Twinkle drives that we have successfully made in prototype are twice as fast as any other drive in the world. And with added memory for our packing and unpacking images, it is as quick as a small computer. We expect to get the unit cost for these drives down to the price of a video-game unit within a year. And we are manufacturing the drives now. We have had some early problems, but we are solving them.”
Meredith said, “Can you tell us more about that? I gather from talking to Arthur Kahn that we’re still not clear on why the drives have problems.”
“Actually, we are,” Sanders said. “It turns out that the problems aren’t serious at all. I expect them to be entirely resolved in a matter of days.”
“Really.” She raised her eyebrows. “Then we’ve found what the trouble is?”
“Yes, we have.”
“That’s wonderful news.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Very good news indeed,” Ed Nichols said. “Was it a design problem?”
“No,” Sanders said. “There’s nothing wrong with the design we made here, just as there was nothing wrong with the prototypes. What we have is a fabrication problem involving the production line in Malaysia.”
“What sort of problems?”
“It turns out,” Sanders said, “that we don’t have the proper equipment on the line. We should be using automatic chip installers to lock the controller chips and the RAM cache on the board, but the Malays on the line have been installing chips by hand. Literally pushing them in with their thumbs. And it turns out that the assembly line is dirty, so we’re getting particulate matter in the split optics. We should have level-seven air handlers, but we only have level-five handlers installed. And it turns out that we should be ordering components like hinge rods and clips from one very reliable Singapore supplier, but the components are actually coming from another supplier. Less expensive, less reliable.”
Meredith looked uneasy, but only for a moment. “Improper equipment, improper conditions, improper components . . .” She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you set up that line, Tom?”
“Yes, I did,” Sanders said. “I went out to Kuala Lumpur last fall and set it up with Arthur Kahn and the local foreman, Mohammed Jafar.”
“Then how is it that we have so many problems?”
“Unfortunately, there was a series ofbad judgment calls in setting up the line.”
Meredith looked concerned. “Tom, we all know that you’re extremely competent. How could this have happened?”
Sanders hesitated.
This was the moment.
“It happened because the line was changed,” he said. “The specifications were altered.”
“Altered? How?”
“I think that’s something for you to explain to this group, Meredith,” he said. “Since you ordered the changes.”