No Way Back (12 page)

‘That’s why I said, don’t get too comfortable. I’m not sure I can make this work.’

My wife looks up at me. Her face takes on a new hardness, like chiselled stone. ‘Jimmy,’ she says. And she stares for a long time, as if sizing me up. ‘You
have
to
make this work. This is your last chance.’

I think about her words. What
is
she saying, exactly? That this is the last chance I will be given in the technology industry?

Or that this is the last chance
she
is going to give me – that after being dragged across the country three thousand miles, after having her life uprooted with some vague promise
of a new start – that she has finally had enough, and that she is done with me?

Either way, does it matter? ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I understand.’

‘You
have
to make this work,’ she says again, and then goes on cooking dinner, staring at the chicken, not looking up at me again for some time.

The next morning, I arrive in the office early, so that I can continue investigating the thief in our midst.

By now, the priority overnight package that I sent to ‘International Tradeshow Services’ – or at least to the commercial mailbox rented by that fictitious entity – has
arrived.

I open a web browser and Google the street address that Joan gave me for International Tradeshow Services: 15266 Collier Boulevard, Naples, Florida, 34119. Google returns a half-dozen companies
sharing the exact same address. A plumber, a dog-walking service, an architect, a time-management consultant, and two corporations of unspecified trade. All reside at 15266 Collier, in different
suite numbers. My suspicions are confirmed: it’s a commercial post office box facility – a Mailboxes Etc., or similar chain.

I pick up the phone, dial information, and ask for Mailboxes Etc. at 15266 Collier, in Naples. The operator, a helpful woman no doubt speaking to me from sultry Bangalore, explains that there is
no Mailboxes Etc. at that address, but there is a Postal Plus. Would I like that number?

Yes, I certainly would.

The operator reads the phone number and connects the call. The line rings three times. A man eventually answers. ‘Postal Plus,’ he says, sounding aggrieved.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘It’s me – from International Tradeshow? I’m expecting that important FedEx from Tao Software. Has it arrived?’

‘Just put it in your box.’

‘Damn it,’ I say. ‘How many times do I have to go over this with you? I want all FedExes forwarded directly to me. Didn’t we talk about this already?’

‘No.’

‘You have my address on file, don’t you?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Let me guess. You probably lost that, too. Why aren’t I surprised? Last time you gave my FedEx to the goddamned dog-walkers.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘Do you know
where to send it or not?’

A brief pause. I picture a man flipping desperately through a little box of handwritten index cards. He says finally: ‘56 Windmere Avenue, on Sanibel, right?’

‘That’s right,’ I say, and scribble the address on a sheet of paper. ‘Send it right away. Thank you.’ I hang up.

So: at 56 Windmere Avenue, wherever that is, I’ll find the employee who has been stealing from Tao. What will I do when I learn his identity? I’m not sure. At a minimum, I’ll
try to recover the money. If it means jail time for the perpetrator, so be it.

I stand up, fold the paper with the Windmere address, and slide it into my pants pocket. I am about to leave the office, to continue my investigation, when Dom Vanderbeek appears in my
doorway.

‘You ready?’ he asks.

‘For what?’

He smiles. It’s the mean smile of a school bully about to hang the weak kid by his underwear in a locker. ‘We’re on,’ Vanderbeek says. ‘Twelve o’clock sales
meeting at Old Dominion Bank. You still want to come, don’t you?’ Almost a taunt. Just yesterday I told Vanderbeek to set up a meeting with any retail bank that would be able to sign a
cheque for a half-million dollars. And I insisted that I should come along to run the meeting.

‘I’ll come,’ I say.

‘Great,’ Vanderbeek says. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you in action.’

Desperate times call for desperate measures, do they not?

What else but a desperate measure could you call this: Asking Randy Williams, my moronic Engineering VP, and Darryl Gaspar, his long-haired programmer, to come along on a sales meeting to Old
Dominion Bank, in Tampa – the sales meeting upon which the entire fate of Tao Software now rests?

I ask them to bring a demo of P-Scan. This, it turns out, is just Darryl’s beat-up laptop computer, and an old digital camera. The set-up performed adequately two days ago, so I’m
hoping lightning can strike twice.

We take Vanderbeek’s car. It is a stylish BMW 7 Series sedan. Sticker price: $80,000. I can’t help noticing these sorts of things, with the mysterious corporate embezzler still in
the back of my mind.

Vanderbeek drives the way he talks, smoothly and authoritatively, weaving through highway traffic, ignoring the people around him, pushing them aside and slicing into their lanes. The drive
takes just over ninety minutes. I spend much of the time role-playing with Vanderbeek, learning the names of the people who will attend the meeting: Samir Singh, Old Dominion’s VP of Consumer
Privacy; Stan Pontin, their CTO; maybe even (although this is not confirmed) Sandy Golden, Old Dominion’s CEO.

The agenda for the meeting, I explain to my colleagues, is simple. We will tell Old Dominion that P-Scan is almost ready for commercial release. We will say that Tao wants to deploy the software
in a handful of retail bank branches, as a pilot project. We will require a $500,000 commitment from Old Dominion, which will be used to fund final development of the software, and pay for setting
up the software in the banks. In exchange, Old Dominion will buy a small piece of Tao Software.

Because we will deploy our astounding technology in Old Dominion’s branches – and not branches owned by its rivals – Old Dominion will garner all the favourable media attention
that is sure to come from the project. Even better, Old Dominion will share in the profits when Tao sells its product to Old Dominion’s competitors. (Nothing delights an executive so much as
discovering a way to have his competitors pay him money.)

That’s the plan, anyway. It is, I must admit, a long shot. But if we can somehow pull it off – if we can somehow convince Samir Singh, Stan Pontin, and Sandy Golden to write a cheque
for $500,000, Tao will gain a few additional weeks of life. Even better, with a modest success to our credit, we may then be able to convince Tad Billups and Bedrock Ventures to sink another five
or ten million into Tao.

We arrive in Tampa at eleven thirty. We park in the underground garage below Old Dominion’s headquarters, a tall round office tower that looks like a mirrored cigarette. We take the
elevator to the fifteenth floor.

The elevator empties into an executive suite, which was clearly designed to convey a message to visitors. The message goes something like this: ‘If you did not choose retail banking as
your profession, you chose incorrectly.’

The reception area has plush carpet, thickly upholstered chairs, and a cherry-wood table polished to high gloss. On the table, industry trade rags have been carefully fanned out:
American
Banker
,
CTO Magazine
,
Retail Branch Specialist
. Perhaps not surprisingly, their pages seem virginal, untouched.

A little before twelve, we’re led into the conference room. The receptionist is a young blonde girl who surely can’t be older than twenty. Nevertheless she’s a pro – when
she observes our laptop computer and camera, she offers us a few minutes to set up our presentation before she calls in her bosses. She shows us the power outlets hidden beneath the table, points
to the video input jack, and presses a button on the wall. A large projector screen descends from the ceiling with a motorized whir. Then she smiles and leaves. I’m pretty sure the Christians
saw a similar smile from the centurions as they were led to the Coliseum stage entrance.

Randy and Darryl plug the digital camera into the laptop port. They boot the computer. They’re quiet and nervous. Maybe they’ve never been on a sales call before? Vanderbeek, in
contrast, has that delighted, expectant look you see on the face of a fight fan just before a heavyweight bout. He knows he’s about to see a knockout – of me, no doubt. He glances at
his big Rolex, as thick as a money roll, as if he can’t wait for the bout to begin.

After a few minutes, two men enter the room. They have that hurried, distracted air of executives trying to show that they are too busy to stay for long, and so we ought to prepare ourselves for
their imminent departure. Both men are far younger than I expected. One, a handsome dark-complexioned Indian man, must be in his early thirties. He introduces himself as Samir Singh. The other
– blond, with stylish wire-framed spectacles – introduces himself as the Chief Technology Officer, Stan Pontin. The two of them standing together look like a welcoming committee at a
college fraternity. I have a disconcerting realization: it wasn’t long ago that I was the youngest man in any business meeting. Now I’m the oldest. Time marches on.

We go through all the mathematical permutations of shaking each other’s hands, sit down across the conference table from each other, and slide business cards back and forth. They skim over
the table surface like air-hockey pucks. Stan Pontin arranges our cards into a neat row in front of him, makes sure the top edges are perfectly aligned. Staring at the cards, he says that Sandy
– he means his boss, the CEO, Sandy Golden – will try to join the meeting, if he can. ‘If he can’ is sales-meeting code for: If you guys prove to me and Samir that you
aren’t assholes.

I say that sounds wonderful, and hopefully Sandy can make it.

They nod.

Finally, with introductions out of the way, and the visiting team’s expectations suitably lowered, I kick off the meeting by saying, ‘So let me tell you why we’re
here.’

I cut right to the chase. There’s no point in labouring it. Either the gamble will work, or it won’t. Business isn’t like making love to a woman, where your chances improve the
slower you go. The pros and cons are right there in front of you. Either the pluses outweigh the minuses, or they don’t. An extra hour of bullshit up front won’t get you laid.

I start speaking as if I’m at a dinner party, recounting an amusing tale that I am confident will delight everyone. I’m the new CEO at Tao, I say, and I’ve been hired to
‘turbocharge’ Tao’s performance. I give a sidelong glance at Vanderbeek, to see his reaction to this bit of bravado. But he keeps a pleasant half-smile on his face, and
doesn’t react.

I continue my pitch. Tao originally designed its technologies for the consumer market, I say, but we’re moving aggressively into a new vertical – retail banking. Within a year,
Tao’s P-Scan technology will be in use at most retail banks across the country. It’s a passive identification and security system. It keeps track of anyone who enters a retail branch
– from employees to customers. The technology is so important, and improves account-holder security to such a high degree, that soon almost every bank will use it. In fact, there’s a
good chance the federal government will
require
its use, in all retail branches, for the purposes of AML compliance.

I pause, let this scenario sink in. It’s preposterous, really, and I almost feel embarrassed saying it out loud, but what the hell. It’s our one shot.

I continue. We’re looking for one bank, I say, just one, that wants to share the spotlight with us. The bank that we choose – whichever it turns out to be – will bask in the
initial press frenzy that’s sure to accompany the introduction of P-Scan. Americans love new technology. And what’s more, this bank will be paid royalties by all of its competitors when
those other banks are required to use P-Scan. And, oh yes (almost offhandedly) – this bank will invest $500,000 in Tao, up-front, in order to seal this win-win deal, and become our equity
partner.

I stop talking, and let the two young men from Old Dominion digest this. There’s a long silence. As I sit, I have a vision, that both Samir Singh and Stan Pontin will burst out laughing.
They will slap the table with their palms and guffaw at the outlandishness of my proposal: that Old Dominion pay a half-million dollars to some chicken-shit start-up with a meth-addict CEO on loan
from the treatment centre.

But nothing of the sort happens. Instead, they nod respectfully at me, as if my proposal is quite reasonable and is exactly what they expected.

Then they turn to each other. Samir speaks, and at first I think he’s talking to his colleague, but the words are really meant for me. ‘Yeah, that sounds about right,’ he says.
‘We’ve been anxious to roll something like this out. We’re playing catch-up in the Georgia market, after the SunTrust merger.’ He turns to me. ‘We’ll roll it out
there, first. Metro Atlanta.’

‘Yeah, it’s perfect,’ Pontin says. ‘Exactly what Sandy wants.’ He has the earnest, guileless face of a technologist. It’s a face that says: Surely
there’s an answer, somewhere, if we only put our minds to it! He adds: ‘And that five hundred thousand dollars isn’t a problem. It’s well within our budget. We can get that
done ASAP.’

Then that’s it. No point in continuing the pitch. When someone agrees with you, and tells you they will give you everything you asked for, and more, you get out – fast – before
they can change their minds.

‘Excellent,’ I say. ‘Well, then.’ I rise from my seat.

Samir also stands. He looks down at my business card. It was actually Charles Adams’s business card, but I’ve crossed out the old CEO’s name, telephone, and email and replaced
them with my own. Classless, I guess, but there wasn’t enough time to order reprints before the meeting. Samir says: ‘Jim, I’ll have our corporate counsel get in touch this
afternoon. His name is Mark Sally. He’ll email you an MOU. We can get this done by the end of the week.’