Balance of Power Shifted (32 page)

As I thought about these developments, Matt
asked, “What base are you talking about?”  Steve jumped in before me and said “Picatinny Arsenal, you know their research and development base up in Rockaway Township.”  Agent Morgan looked at me and said “Mr. Carter I think this is a great idea and you should take advantage of it.  One last thing, we are putting around the clock coverage on Mr. Bates.”

Steve drove the Hummer for Fiona and
me to the hospital.  We were not able to see Bill because we were not his immediate family, but Iris and Julius had done a good job collecting information.  Iris’s two daughters were married and lived halfway across the country, which is why she was acting like, well like a mom.  She had tightness in her face that belayed the positive spin she was putting on Bill’s condition.  “It was bad,” she said.  Soon after arriving they decided to drill two holes in his skull to help relieve the pressure caused by the ugly wound to his head.  He had also needed immediate surgery to remove his spleen perforated by a projectile from the blast.  Two broken ribs and numerous deep lacerations and punctures rounded out his list of injuries.”  Iris added, “He is in coma from his injuries, but they have also drugged him to remain in a coma until he starts to stabilize.”  “Iris,” Fiona said, “did anyone contact his parents yet?  “I was able to contact his father in Florida and he will be here on an early flight tomorrow and his mother should be here in an hour or so.  She lives in Harrisburg Pennsylvania and is driving to the hospital.”

Steve was grabbing me by my bicep to get my attention and I had been ignoring him until he dug in tighter. 
“Mike, Jeremy made me promise to get you to the base as soon as possible.”  “I cannot leave Bill like this,” I said as my voiced cracked.  “Yes you can Mike and you have to,” a voice said from behind me.  Turning around I saw it was Ty and another Clavis employee as well as local police officer.  “These two will stay here and protect Bill and we will rotate others as needed.  I have two cars downstairs that will escort you to the base where Jeremy will meet you tomorrow morning and fill you in on the intel collected to date.”  The day’s events caught up with me in a rush, as the adrenalin hit finally wore off.  Fiona had to literally put an arm around me to prevent me from toppling over and looking at Iris I said, “please keep us updated with any change to Bill’s condition and thanks Iris.”  She then steered me with Steve’s help out to the Hummer and with one Clavis sedan in front and one in the back of us, drove the 30 minutes to the base.

Mike
was in a fog for the most of the ride, but came out of it when they reached the main gate for the base.  He had a very early memory of his father taking him here when he was a kid for Armed Forces day.  Even as a young kid he was suitably impressed with the fly byes overhead and the tanks and other cool military stuff.  After showing their identification, Bill and Fiona received base identification that had been prepared earlier.  Steve then drove them to their small house, which was right along the base golf course.  Fiona and I spent an hour decompressing in the living room of the house.  Someone had graciously stocked the refrigerator so we were snacking on some fresh fruit, which I dug into when my stomach remembered it had not eaten all day. 

Fiona sensed that I was having trouble dealing with Bill’s injuries as well
as trying to avoid not sticking my head in the sand in response to the attacks.  She coaxed me along to start talking through things we needed to do.  By the time we hit the sack around midnight, I had stopped feeling sorry for myself and became angry that the parents of our receptionist Pam would have to bury their daughter.  I got angrier about the possibility of losing Bill and the audacity of our unknown enemies that they thought they could stop or control something that was so beneficial to humankind and our planet in the name of greed and power.  I said to Fiona before crashing “I’m going to escalate getting Electricus out to all parts of the globe and tomorrow we will figure out how to do it.”

The next morning Steve came by with a few items from the base commissary and some basic clothes like his and her khakis and his and her golf shirts
.  After changing, Steve brought us to the place he had been working from the last 2-weeks.  We were told that this was the only work area building we were allowed to enter on the base.  It was an older brick building that may have been a motor pool at one time.  They had a number of Humvees and one large open truck, which the soldiers were working on.  Off to the side, I could see custom Power Pad assemblies under construction and modifications made to fit Humvee dimensions.  One Humvee looked in a more advanced state than the other vehicles and appeared modified to have a protective shield over the Power Pad.  Steve saw me looking that way and said, “It didn’t take you long to scope out that modification.  That is a high impact resin that could deflect most projectiles under a 50 caliber.”  Another civilian walked over and said, “They decided to stick with a dual electric motor solution to provide drive redundancy, but the electric motor selected was a motor specially built for the military by General Electric.  The total gross weight of the vehicle will be 340 pounds lighter than the predecessor.”  Hi, I am Ravi said the person throwing all the information my way.”  “Mike Carter” and pointing to Fiona, “and this is Fiona Paschel “I finished.  “Welcome” Ravi said and added, “I’m the lead project manager on this for the Army and specialize in field logistics.  Your discovery has essentially resulted in the government throwing all my work for the last 5 years into the proverbial trash can and we couldn’t be happier,” he said with a wide grin.  Ravi pointed to the back of the bay, where I could see a demo setup similar to the one we used in our showroom to demonstrate a field installation of the Power Pad.  “Mr. Carter, with your company’s product we could literally setup a command post in minutes and run indefinitely.  Amazing, simply amazing” he rambled.  “I guess Steve can handle the logistics of getting you established in your offices in the rear there, so I’ll leave you alone for now, but would like to spend a few minutes with you on how you protect the reproduction of the Electricus organism when you have some time.”  Throwing out “definitely Ravi” Fiona and I followed Steve to the offices.  “Don’t mind Ravi” Steve said, “He is an excitable person and one of the top in his field and knows how to think out of the box.”

The offices were basic but functional.  The Army had already installed special network connections that only allowed Internet access to a visitor’s network and they made a special allowance for us to tunnel securely back to our network using our own laptops.
  This also allowed us to tap into the functions of our voice over IP phone system back at the home office.  No one else would know we were not calling from the office.  We were about 15 minutes away from our crisis team meeting, which we had agreed to hold every four hours during the workday using our teleconference service.  Julius had sent out a couple of text messages over night and this morning saying that Bill’s condition had not changed.  I quickly scanned through my corporate emails and discovered an interesting one from Charles Knight of Global Oil Corporation.  In his email he states that he is representing a consortium of energy based companies and wished to speak with me in person.  He left his phone number and message to call him anytime 24 hours a day.  I motioned for Fiona to come over and look at the email.  After giving her some time to digest it, I said, “well what’s your take on it?”  Taking her time before answering she said, “I think they are going to offer to buy Efficio or at a minimum try and lock up exclusivity for Electricus for a long period of time.”  “I’m in agreement with your thinking I said, however I’m leaning to purchase since that will allow them to suppress it for as long as they need.”  “What would you do if they throw out an offer you can’t refuse?” Fiona asked with a pensive frown making her brow furrow as if she would be crushed if I told her the answer she did not want to hear.”  “I hope that’s a rhetorical question,” I said and did not answer further.  For purposes of privacy, we both put our headphones on and used the software based phone to call into the meeting.

The meeting started off on a somber note as I had
asked to have Iris and Julius give an update on the Bill as well as provide information on Pam our receptionist and Jason the Clavis security guard.  A couple of the team where going to represent Efficio at Pam’s services and Jason’s body would be shipped back to his parent’s in Las Vegas.  Neither Amy nor Jason was married or had children, which were minor blessings.  Business then moved on to personnel issues.  All of the R&D staff had volunteered to keep working and do it at the showroom which Sean relayed this with pride in his voice. 

Everyone else was working out of
his or her home offices and there were no critical issues.  Sean had volunteered to handle what to do with our building.  As of this morning, the investigators had not yet released it to us, which also meant the municipal inspectors have not been able to get inside to look at the integrity of the building.  As we wrapped up our checklist, I dropped the news on our team about the Charles and the consortium and the gist of Fiona and my speculation.  I decided to ask the team this question and set it up by first stating, “I know Bill cannot tell us what he would think about this potential proposal, but due to the danger regarding our company who of you would endorse a sale if offer was put on the table.   Well for the next minute and a half, a raucous outburst of comments assailed the listeners.  As I keyed into some of the comments the smile on my face grew which I think was contagious since Fiona had the same smile on her face.  OK, OK everyone calm down, calm down.  As the voices died down I summarized by saying, “I guess the answer is no then.”  Last item on agenda is security.  I have a phone call with Clavis in 25 minutes from now.  Iris and Julius, do you have time to join Fiona and me on the call I asked?”  “Certainly Mike” came back the response.  “Look for the invite from me in about a minute then,” I followed.”  “One last thing everyone, I am so glad and proud to be working with all of you.  Many of you I have known personally over the years and others only recently, but your dedication to the success of this company and what we can do for other’s is unbelievable.  Thank you.”

Halfway around the world sat General Hu Jiabao in his plush office located deep in a government building in Beijing.  The general was smiling to himself and as he thought about China’s emergence on the economic scene over the last decade.  The General himself played a huge part in the success, however only a handful of the senior leadership where aware of him or even his little know office of ‘Patents and Trade.’ 
Years ago, the Chinese leadership had gotten together and had decided to follow thinly veiled aspects of capitalism in an effort to build their own economy. 

There were a number of initiatives started at that time, but only one had the level of success of his organization.  Hu’s loosely defined charter
states, ‘do whatever is needed to become a manufacturing and technology world leader.’  Interpreting this to mean beg, borrow and steal the intellectual properties of others, Hu sent out his emissaries all over the world to take on positions in many of the largest corporations and siphon off knowledge.  His team was drilled in special training to circumvent data and physical security controls and had encrypted channels to communicate back to the motherland on.  The stolen intellectual property was then sent to different organizations back here in China to try and leverage the stolen information to make Chinese products.  These same groups also used reverse engineering to try to recreate almost anything.  Most of the world looked the other way since they did not want to alienate China and lose access to emerging Chinese markets especially when China held debt on many western countries including the United States.  Hu laughed at the thought of the mighty US bowing down to China due to a multi-trillion dollar debt owed.

The General stopped smiling as he thought about his next challenge.
  His leaders where very concerned about the lack of control on one key resource which was energy.  Lack of ready supplies and higher prices were starting to affect China’s ability to expand as well as set manufacturing prices that were attractive to most countries.  They were also tired of dealing with a bunch of annoying little countries with obnoxious leaders that had control of oil.   The emergence of Electricus could be a huge opportunity for China to make them energy independent, however there was concern that such cheap energy would open the doors for other countries that had a cheap labor force to start becoming manufacturing hubs.  China was not the only country with a workforce that would work for a pittance a day and at the same time throw Mother Earth under the bus in an effort to save money and time not implementing environmentally responsible manufacturing plants.

In order for China to maintain a stranglehold on manufacturing, his leadership wanted him to steal Electricus and if possible make sure there was no competition.
  The news had been showing pictures of the Efficio building all day and the scars caused by the rocket attacks.  General Hu realized he had to hurry, since it was obvious others were very interested in Electricus.  Calling in his aide, he issued the order to execute the plan code named Volt.  His agents in the US would receive their new orders shortly.  He was somewhat disturbed by the lack of intelligence they were able to obtain to date.  One problem was that it was start-up company with limited exposure, but it also had a tight lipped group of senior management that were mostly in their 20’s and had known each other before Efficio was created.  They also had excellent cyber security practices better than most US government institutions.  As good as the General’s team was Efficio’s security had already detected them due to a ‘honey pot’ decoy system plied with bogus information that they had fell for and hacked.  We will see the General thought, we will see.