Jeff finds himself in Silicon Valley where he is asked to investigate claims by a gregarious Frenchman that his neural network electronic technology actually works. He meets up again with the enchanting Nancy, the FBI agent he had worked with in Atlanta where they fell in love while he was still married, and again in Washington DC Kathy puts romance back into Jeff’s life as he finds himself hounded by financially-desperate Europeans so determined to push their questionable technology―men so desperate that they will stop at nothing, even Jeff’s murder. The excitement will make the reader gasp, tragedy will make the reader cry, romance will make the reader sigh.
Chapter 19 of Silicon Gulch: The Frenchman is a fraud!
Thursday, 11:22 AM: The Frenchman is a Fraud!
Nancy and Jeff meet with Gerard and his assistant. Jeff shows the Frenchman algorithm formulas for neural networks, and the Frenchman finally admits that the patents were his brother's! He is a complete fake! Then Nancy and Jeff plan their alternatives from this news ...
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- Chris Lamela
Author contact: chris@chrislamela.com, 707-566-8790 PST
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Thursday,
11:22 AM:
The Frenchman is a Fraud!
"Tim,
do you have anything else for us?"
"We are still trying to trace the recipient of the call to Europe.
A cell phone to a land line is nearly impossible with the phone network
technology we have now, the call kind of disappears on the other end, but we're
working on it."
"See what you can come up with. So what do we have to do to turn
the latest Sherlock plan into reality?" Nancy said almost to herself.
"The question is do we contact this Uncle Mondo ourselves, or let
him get to us?" Arnie pondered.
"We need to figure out first how we want to paint us." Jeff
spoke out. "If he thinks that the only thing I am was a target, then I
look innocent. If there is some weird hit-man code of ethics thing going then I
would like to think that he will be suspicious of Mikl and Gerard. I mean, how
could I be to blame if I was the target?"
"Yeah, Jeff, this is good." Nancy furrowed her brow, "That
means if he contacts the other two, they will of course try to throw you under
the bus. But he probably doesn't care about the hit. He only cares about his
nephews. So the bad guys are going to try to get him to finish the job, but he
may not want to. It wasn't his hit!
He only wants to find out where his nephews are, when he finds out they were
killed all he will want to do is to find who is responsible. But you can't be responsible. You were only the
target!"
Arnie leaned back looking to the ceiling, back to the room, "This
is great! So we wait for him to call Jeff after our bad guys give him up. Jeff
and Nancy arrange a meeting. You tell him that his nephews were killed by the
cops, strongly suggesting that our bad guys knew that they were going into a
trap!" He shook his head slowly, looking to Nancy and Jeff, "Boy you
two, you are really going to have to play that meeting carefully."
Jeff nodded slowly, "That meeting will have to be a work of art!"
Nancy looked at her watch, "Hey, show time, we need to get over to
the Merdian to meet the Frenchman."
Arnie stood up, "Okay, anything else? No? Okay, we've got things to
do! Come on people, let's move!" The room rose. Arnie turned to Jeff and
Nancy, they stood, "You two, be careful. These Frenchmen are not to be
trusted."
Jeff laughed at that reminding him of a line from the movie The Princess Bride, "It's that line
again like we talked about in DC! Remember, that line I've known too many Spaniards? In DC it was too many Iranians!"
Jeff laughed.
"Exactly!" Arnie laughed slapping Jeff on the shoulder, "Only
this time I've known too many Frenchmen!" all three laughed together.
They turned toward the door when Nancy pointed down at the table in
front of Jeff, "Don't forget your note there."
Jeff turned to the table. There was one of the mystery notes. He picked
it up, turned it over to look at the Jeff
and the heart in blue ink, Nancy peering over his shoulder. Jeff glanced at
her seeing a curious face, without a word tucking it in with the growing stack
of love notes into his inside-left coat pocket, Nancy again shaking her head
with a frown.
A minute later they were driving out of the parking lot. Jeff glanced at
the Pepper Mill seeing Ted standing near the front door, his arms outstretched
holding Mary's hands. There was a gentle aura surrounding the two, like a
bubble. Jeff smiled as they faded into the distance, the car driving away until
they were around the corner.
"So you reserved the room?"
"I reserved it and the room next to it today and all day tomorrow.
Parlor three."
"Wow, that must have been expensive."
He smiled turning to her, "I didn't say I was paying."
She laughed, they drove back over the freeway on their short drive to
the Merdian. "Fair enough, I think the government can pick up the tab. I'll
stop at the desk and arrange that when we get there, we should have plenty of
time."
A few minutes later Nancy walked away from the Merdian's front desk
having taken nearly twenty minutes talking with the clerk, "Okay, all
taken care of." She looked at a few pages in her hand, "You would not
believe the bill for all that mess you made yesterday."
"I made?"
"Okay, we made, is that
better?" She looked down at what Jeff could see were pages of an itemized
bill. "Almost fifteen thousand dollars, and that's not even the final
bill."
"Well let's just hope that we
don't make any more messes!"
She laughed, "Hey, the week's not even over yet, so there's no
telling what kinds of messes we can
still make!" she laughed again.
"No no no, no more messes like that one!"
She nodded, "Agreed." She looked down at her watch, they
walked toward the meeting rooms entrance, a minute later they walked into the
same room that had Jeff's twin
sitting in the dark only twenty four hours earlier, that he had been naked in
with Paula twenty four hours before that. Wow,
what a room!
The room was like yesterday with a small table draped in table cloth,
four chairs.
"Look at this! These guys were fast! Hard to believe that they
fixed this up so fast. This room was destroyed!" He looked down at the
carpet where there had to be pools of blood seeing only brand-new carpet, he walked
up to the door on the right to turn the knob. It was locked. "I need to
get this unlocked, this door saved my life yesterday."
"Hold on," Nancy laid the papers in her hand on the table
pulling at a business card stapled to them, pushed buttons on her phone asking
to have someone come unlock the door. She stuffed the papers into her purse
sitting down in a chair on the right side away from the front door.
Jeff glanced at his watch seeing it was three minutes past eleven o'clock.
He sat down next to Nancy. A minute later a man in a hotel uniform walked in
saying he'd been asked to unlock the door walking over to the door with a key.
Jeff stood up walking to the door, opening it. He stood back in surprise
to see a bare-topped table in the next room with two men wearing headphones
sitting in front of a dark blue metal box and a tape recorder. One of the men
looked up, waved to Jeff who turned around to Nancy, "Did you know we have
guys in here recording this?"
"Of course," she replied casually.
"Oh, well then." Jeff gave a small wave back to the
head-phoned men closing the door looking down at his watch, seeing that it was
eight minutes after eleven.
"Well, it will definitely be the Frenchman by himself. Maybe with his
little lackey."
Nancy glanced at her watch, "Fabulous, of course you can tell that
because they are late!"
"Yep!" they both laughed together, combining the humor of the Frenchman
being late with Nancy's famous Yep! from
Atlanta.
Jeff reached for his folio,
opening it to show the outline of the agenda for this meeting which she
approved after scribbling one change. He closed the black leather folio. The
room was quiet. They both sat in thought for ten full minutes followed by a few
minutes of idle chit-chat. Finally she turned to him, "We need some time
to talk. I don't want to do it right now. Maybe this afternoon. I have some
time at two."
His concerned face turned to her, "What about?"
"About you."
"Me?"
She nodded her head, "There's a lot of people worried about you."
"You mean like Arnie?"
"No, not Arnie. Other people.
Important people."
"Other people? Important people?"
"Yes, the important ones."
"Important ones? Who can be more important than Arnie?"
She laughed shaking her head, "Oh, Jeff, so lost in the trees."
Jeff frowned at lost in the trees thinking that's the second time that was said
about him since last night. Ted had used the same term while they sat outside
the restaurant last night. But he was talking about how Jeff was maybe walking
around confused among the trees? He tried to remember. How could he be lost in
anywhere, and why had two people just told him he is lost in the trees?
"What do you mean, lost in the trees?"
"Look not now, we need to stay focused. This afternoon when you can
pay attention to me, to only one thing. Then we can talk. But not now. We need
to get through this."
A knock sounded at the door. Jeff stood up, walked to the door glancing
at his watch which said eleven twenty-two. Ah yes, the Frenchman without Mikl―Gerard's famous French fifteen
minutes.
Jeff opened the door, the Frenchman nearly burst in with his sidekick
Thomas Gilbert following meekly. "So good morning to you both!"
Nancy stood walking up to the Frenchman, "Sorry, but we need to
know there's no weapons here." She grabbed him by the shoulders, spun him
around with his back to her, quickly working her hands around and down his body
she spun him again toward her, pulling open his coat patting each side. "You
too," pointing to Thomas who submitted to the same.
Jeff expected Gerard to insist on them showing they were unarmed but
either the Frenchman didn't care or he didn't want to challenge them. Jeff
reached down patting the little steel parcel in his right outside coat pocket.
"Let's sit down, gentlemen," Jeff pointed to the two chairs
opposite them at the short rectangular table with the white table cloth neatly draped
over it.
Their guests sat on the left side of the table, Jeff and Nancy sat
facing them. Jeff pulled his leather folio toward him ceremoniously opening it.
"So I thought we would start with a discussion about your technology. You
see, I know a little about neural network technology," turning to Gerard's
tilted head looking puzzled back at him, "I thought that it would be
useful for Nancy to understand this better so when she speaks to the general that
she will be better prepared."
"I should have thought to bring literature," Gerard turned to
Thomas, "why didn't you bring literature with you?" Thomas shrugged.
He turned to Nancy in with a slightly condescending tone, "This is very
complicated technology."
"It can't be that complicated if a gunnery man from the French army
can understand it, now can it?" Nancy's voice laced with scorn was like a
huge hand held up to the Frenchman's chauvinistic face.
Jeff smiled at Gerard, "Tell
us about the radial basis functional algorithm."
"Oh, it is very complicated,
you would not understand."
"Gerard," Nancy said exasperated, "We both have masters
degrees. We're smarter than some gunnery guy from the French army. I think we
can figure it out." She glowered at him, "Just tell us."
A scornful flash crossed Gerard's face, he worked to control himself. "The
radial basis function is a type of learning algorithm. This technology is
called compound classification." He went on to tell how is learns the same
way a child learns. First by seeing an example then getting a description of
it. "Like a face. I see a face for the first time, the next time I see the
same face I recognize it. If I see a similar face I may make a mistake and
think that it is the first face. But someone will say, no, that is not the same
face. I then will learn the difference between the first face and the second
face. It will in fact improve my accuracy for recognizing the first face again.
This is the basis of the learning algorithm. The technology uses what we call
neurons. It is possible to recognize a face with as little as thirty of our
neurons."
"And once one neural network learns a pattern, that can be
transferred to other neural networks electronically," Nancy replied. "Can
it use any other algorithm other than radial basis function? I mean RBF has
limitations, right?"
"That's a good question, Nancy," Jeff interjected before Gerard
could answer, unbelievably impressed that Nancy knew about this at all. "The
limitations of RBF are caused by the Euclidian distance from the center. The
challenge is that it has to learn a vast amount of information, thousands of
times more than a paltry thirty neurons," glancing dismissively at the
Frenchman.
"Specifically, I believe this technology is limited because it
cannot perform a polyharmonic spline," turning to Gerard, his jaw hanging
at the words flowing from Jeff's mouth. "Isn't that right, Gerard?"
Again before Gerard could answer Nancy looked to Jeff continuing, "But
Jeff, voice and that kind of complex recognition requires nonlinear system
integration. This technology is limited to time series predictions."
"You know, Nancy, I think you've hit on it, I mean we could
probably get away with multi-quadric for simple image recognition and tracking
applications, but this technology probably can't even do gaussian." Jeff
turned to Gerard casually, "Gerard you must have something to say about this."
They both glanced to each other, expressions showing the delight they
were having. It was almost as much fun as last night when they danced around
the hit-man murder plot with the two men holding the maypole verbally dancing around
them.
"I did not know that either of you knew about this technology. How
do you know this?"
Jeff laughed, "Gerard, please, if we are going to endorse this
technology we've at least got to be able to manage the first five minutes of
questions, don't you think? So we need to know the answers to these questions."
Gerard stuttered.
"So can you comment on what Nancy just said about the limitations
of RBF?"
The Frenchman sat stunned at how this meeting had so quickly developed.
Jeff could easily see that this man who was so used to controlling
conversations around him was at a loss to get his arms around the unfolding
events here.
"Gerard? Your comments? Explain the difference between polyharmonic
spline and implementing gaussian algorithms for Nancy."
The Frenchman sat silent. Thomas began fidgeting, looking anxiously to
his boss waiting for a confident answer to emerge.
This guy doesn't understand a word
I am saying!
"Gerard, you do know what
we're talking about here, right?"
Jeff suddenly flashed on that feeling he had last night that he was
looking at some character in the wax museum with the face on the other side of
the table in perfect frozen terror.
"You are the inventor of
this, aren't you? These are such simple questions, Gerard."
Gerard sat speechless.
Jeff suddenly felt like he was getting blisters on his hands from the
maypole ribbon. He was getting a little tired of dancing around this frozen
face. He glanced to see Nancy's patience wearing thin, back to the Frenchman,
now feeling like he was doing nothing but sitting there getting older.
Suddenly it flashed into Jeff's brain!
Oh my god!
He is not the inventor!
Jeff
turned to Nancy, their eyes met.
She figured this out!
Their eyes locked, two sets of eyes surrounded by astonished faces!
Nancy turned to Jeff, "I don't know Jeff. If he can't answer these
simple questions I really wonder about if I can endorse this even with his five
million dollars. I mean somebody at DOD is going to want to talk to the inventor."
She turned to Gerard. "You are
the inventor, are you not?"
Gerard looked back and forth between the faces before him. "Yes.
Yes." He stuttered, "I am…yes I am…yes I am the inventor."
Nancy looked him straight in the eye, "Then tell me what a thin
plate spline algorithm looks like." She took Jeff's folio ripped the
agenda page off, turned the folio toward Gerard handing a pen toward him looking
sternly into Gerard's eyes. "Show me."
Beads of sweat poured off the Frenchman's forehead as he reached
tentatively taking the pen from Nancy's fingers.
He sat silently looking down at the blank page.
"Here, let me help!" Jeff pulled back the folio, spun it
around scribbling a long formula across the top of the sheet. "And
another," he filled the line below that with another formula. "And
how about this little beauty," his pen sailing across the page jotting a
complex formula, "Wow, I just can't get enough of this!" He carefully
wrote a fourth long formula across the page. He spun the folio around pushing
it back to the Frenchman.
"We will make it easy, Gerard. Point to the multiquadric. That is
of course your only answer to ill conditioning which you certainly know is when
the neural network learns the wrong information.
So point to the multiquadric."
The Frenchman sat frozen.
"Come on, Gerard, there are only four formulas there, you have a
twenty-five percent chance!" Jeff turned to Nancy, "I mean, if the
lottery had a twenty five percent chance of winning, I would sure play, wouldn't
you Nancy?" She nodded in mock enthusiasm.
Thomas looked to his boss with stark amazement at what he was witnessing
suddenly shouting, "What is this Jeopardy?
Is he supposed to answer this in the form of a question?"
Jeff turned to Thomas admiring that he was trying to save the ass of his
boss, but couldn't help but want to drive the stake into the heart of this haughty French prick.
Jeff turned away from Thomas, "I might as well be writing in
Chinese here, huh Gerard? You have no idea what these formulas are, do you?"
He turned to Nancy, "So Nancy, it looks like we are being asked to
endorse a technology that was, what, ripped off?"
"No, Jeff," she scowled with a wink to him, "you are
being too hard on the man. I mean think about all the times when you were in
graduate school," looking to Gerard she spoke to Jeff, "getting your masters degree," turning back to
Gerard "how you would go into a
test only to draw a complete blank. Unexplainable. You studied like crazy, did
the practice exam, all the homework, I mean you walked in so prepared. But as soon as the professor slapped the test in front
of you―BANG!" her hand slapped the table for emphasis, the Frenchman
jumped. "I mean that could happen, right? So maybe that's what we have
here." She turned to Gerard, "Right Gerard? Blank?"
"Yes, yes, that is it!" he stuttered. "Of course. Like
you said, all prepared and then the test. Then blank. Yes! That is what is
happening here!" He frantically tried to engineer a smile only to have
more sweat pour from his face.
Jeff and Nancy turned to him menacingly. Silently. The Frenchman looked
down at his hands as though intently in thought, like he was trying to remember
something.
Pretending to be recalling this critical information.
Realizing he was exposed.
"So, does Mikl know this?" Nancy queried. "Does he know
you are a fraud?"
In a soft voice so quiet they had to lean forward to hear Gerard answer,
"He thinks I am the inventor."
"And you're not." Jeff stated flatly.
"I worked with the inventor."
"Who was the inventor, Gerard?"
"My brother."
"Where is your brother."
"He is dead."
"How did he die?"
"An automobile accident."
"How long ago?"
"Two years ago."
"What was his name?"
"Gaston."
Nancy looked to the ceiling trying to remember, "The patents were
in the name of G. Pallot. But the G is
Gaston, not Gerard! Perfect! It would have been a perfect theft if you only
actually knew something about neural
networks!" She laughed, "You busted yourself!"
"You ripped off your own brother," Jeff shook his head sadly. "Your
own brother!"
"It was his life work. It would die along with him. I did it so
that he would leave a legacy." There was the tiniest tone of redemption in
the thick French voice floating across the table.
Jeff looked at this man with a disgusted scowl, "How can you leave
a legacy when someone else claims all the credit? You just plain ripped him
off. And you did it all for money. Pure greed." He shook his head, "I
can't imagine what Mikl is going to say when he finds out. How much money has
he paid you these two years? Eleven million dollars!"
The Frenchman hung his head again.
"Oh man, is he going to be pissed," Nancy smiled to Jeff
shaking her head. "So pissed."
Nancy and Jeff flopped back in their chairs. The room was perfectly soundless.
Jeff looked to Thomas who sat with an absolutely blank expression, stunned at
this revelation, hopeless that he would try to defend his boss again.
They sat in that hushed room for what felt like an hour. Images circled
slowly in Jeff's brain, he was tired of the game here. He expected to look down
to his hands to see them torn and bleeding from the maypole ribbons. Looking
down at his hands he only saw fingers looking back up to him waving little
hellos that everything was fine in finger-land. He smiled at how these ten
little players would rather be running around the room like little Roger Rabbits making fun of the portly
figure with the confused face sitting in front of him.
Finally Nancy spoke, "So you have nobody to improve the technology.
Does it work at all?"
Gerard nodded, "Yes, in tightly controlled tests we have been able
to make it do basic tracking."
"Gerard, what is the algorithm you are using? It's thin plate
spline, isn't it?" Jeff's resigned voice made his fingers happy that he
wasn't going for another turn around the mocking maypole. No more bloody fingers!
Gerard nodded his head uncertainly.
Jeff reached across the table pointing to the first formula he had
written, "That is the formula for thin plate spline, Gerard. Look at it."
Gerard did not raise his eyes.
"I told you to look at it!"
Gerard raised his eyes to the line on the page that Jeff was pointing
to. "You can see that it is the simplest equation on the page. It only has
two elements." Jeff pointed to
the bottom line he had written, "That is the multiquadric." He pulled
his left hand back, laid it on top of his right hand before him. "I wouldn't
even bother to show you a polyharmonic spline. Your stupid head would probably
pop off," he sat back with a disgusted tone.
"Gerard," Nancy spoke, "thin plate spline can't do
simultaneous learning. It can't. If it is watching a tank at a certain angle
and the picture changes so we go from the top of the tank to looking at the
side of the tank the tracker will lose the object. It will lose lock so the
object will effectively disappear. Isn't this right?"
Gerard sat uncertain.
Jeff suddenly started feeling sorry
for this fraud.
There must be a pony in here
somewhere!
"Gerard, this field is growing by leaps and bounds. What would it
take for you to get Bowman from MIT or Spresky from Cambridge?"
The Frenchman didn't answer, kept looking down at his hands.
"Gerard, if you could give us assurances that you had people like
that on the project we might find ways to gain some time for you." Jeff
had no idea why he was trying to help this man.
"I am ashamed at what has happened here," the Frenchman spoke
in the tiniest voice, so faint it was barely audible.
"Gerard, what do you want us to do? Do you still want us to make
the endorsements?"
Jeff knew the answer would be yes, if for no other reason so Gerard
could keep his mouth attached to the Mikl teat from which money flowed like
water into his insatiable lifestyle.
Gerard sat frozen.
"Come on, man, throw us a bone here!" Jeff was losing patience
with this pompous pretender.
"Yes," Gerard's voice seemed to show hope emerging. "Yes,
if we could find others to help us we could advance the technology."
Nancy glanced to Jeff, to Gerard, "Gerard, we need a few minutes in
private, can you and Thomas step out so Jeff and I can talk? Please go away
from the room, sit in the lobby or bar or somewhere, but we need privacy. Your
company may depend on this."
He started to stand, poking Thomas who was still sitting motionless like
he was sleeping with his eyes open. They stood, turned silently, leaving the
room, closing the door behind them.
Jeff put his finger to his lips, they waited a minute, he got up opening
the door looking both ways to make sure they had gone away from the door. He closed
the door, walked to the table, sat down facing her. Nancy had turned her chair
backward with her legs hanging around the chair's back. Jeff smiled at this
position remembering when they first met at Magic Town in Atlanta with her
sitting like that, her bare legs back then, now covered in black slacks, legs
that extended from her treasure…
"So where they hell did you learn all that?" she laughed.
"Me? I'm an engineer, what
about you?"
She laughed again, "I was up until three this morning on the
internet. I found the MIT library and did nothing but stuff my brain all night
with buzz words. She reached into her purse pulling out a folded, rumpled piece
of paper, "I ate breakfast his morning practicing these words over and
over and over!"
"Okay, I'll admit it, I was up till three also on the MIT site.
Funny, I didn't see you there!" They both laughed out loud. They stopped,
looked around the room, back at each other, busting out laughing again.
"Did you see the look on that face?
What a goddam liar! What a total fraud!"
"So he has been scamming Mikl this whole time. He managed to get
some phony video tape using that lousy thin plate spline algorithm! Hell, my
eight year-old could do that!" He laughed out loud thinking of his son
developing something like this. It could
happen!
"Okay, so what do we have here?" Jeff sat back in thought, "Mikl
has been paying the seed money for Gerard's work which it turns out was done by
his brother. What were the conditions of that happening…I didn't see any
references to the name Pallot anywhere in my research last night. Did he use a
different name?"
Jeff shook his head, "Maybe it was academic work done in Europe, that
wouldn't be in MIT's data. I have heard that they are doing all sorts of
advanced work in Europe, mainly France and Germany. I haven't been tracking
this in particular, but I do know that the number of international patents from
those two countries have like doubled in the last ten years. So it's possible
that if we looked we might have found something."
"I really only looked at the MIT website. You?" She shook her
head that she didn't look beyond MIT either.
"Maybe if we tried the European universities," she wondered.
"I doubt it. The U.S. is so much farther ahead getting things
online. I mean if I cared I could go back and check." He sat back
reflectively.
"Don't bother, we found out what we needed to know. Now we just
have to figure out what to do with this."
"So Gerard buddies up to his brother enough to find out the high
points," Jeff pondered, "Pays someone else to distill the algorithms
onto silicon. That's doable, could have easily done that in PLA."
"PLA?"
"Programmable logic array. It's a silicon device you can program
just like you can program software. It's cool technology that has been around
for a few years. He finds Mikl somehow, I didn't really hear how they met.
Gerard is such a good salesman that he talks Mikl into funding him. They managed
some DOD connections here then using some very basic live demos―which you could
conceivably do even with thin plate spline―along with doctored tapes wins the
eight million in advance research grants. Now if you were actually spending that eight million on engineers instead of your
mistress and first-class everything you could easily move to more sophisticated
algorithms. I believe that this technology can actually work." She looked
at him questioningly, "I do. In fact, I believe this technology can really
advance the state of the art. It could change the world in image technology for
sure, and for voice, it is probably the only
technology that can crack that nut. That is an extremely difficult problem that no other technologies have been
able to crack."
"The problem is that the money is being used for everything but the technology," Nancy
continued Jeff's thought. "And given this crazy Frenchman's track record,
another thirty nine million will be wasted."
"Yes," Jeff shook his head, "because this guy is afraid
to work with people smarter than him, he doesn't know how to manage a company,
and he spends money like it's endless."
"But it's worse than just that Jeff. This man is dishonest, ornery,
and unteachable. He plagiarized his dead brother's work. Unashamed! He is
treacherous. He will do anything to
succeed, even murder!"
Nancy leaned forward over the chair's back, Jeff leaned back facing her,
his legs splayed across each side of Nancy's chair.
Silence.
"Damn, I wish Arnie was here," Jeff complained.
"What would Arnie say?" Nancy wondered. "He would say to
lay the facts out, find alternate paths, then take a vote. Yeah, that's it!"
She pulled Jeff's folio to her, spinning it to face her, the page with Jeff's
formulas along the top lines shining up at her, she flipped the page.
"Help me here." She started writing, in an instant Jeff was
surprised to see eleven items in the list.
"Now the possible paths," he rattled off options, she wrote,
contributing her own. When they were done they had six paths. She pointed to
one with her pen, he frowned, she scratching through it, doing the same for
another until their options were down to four items.
"Okay then, we have four options. The first is to blow the lid off
this whole thing," pointing to the words ARREST EVERYONE.
Next was NEGOTIATE. "I don't quite know what this means, though it
sounds like we were actually going down the path of actually helping these guys. God, that loser
sucked us in. Can you believe that?" She laughed poising her pen to it to
scratch it through, but Jeff stayed her hand. "Okay, we'll keep it for
now. The point is that we could actually
fix this whole thing."
He shook his head, "That is, of course, if we cared to fix this whole thing," shaking her head, her pen
still at the ready to scratch through the line.
The third path was described with the word FINESSE. "I think that
means that we just keep working these guys, right?" He nodded.
The last item contained two words, SHERLOCK PLAN. "We know what
this means, right?"
Jeff sat forward to look at the four paths. "So now what, do we
vote?"
"No, this is too big for just the two of us. There is way too much news here. Now we are ready
for Arnie. Hold on." She reached into her purse, pulled out her phone, pushed
two buttons.
"Arnie? Nancy. Listen, there's been a huge development here…yes he's
here…this is more complicated than we thought…yes…yes, a meeting. We'll be done
here in," she looked at her watch, "twenty minutes. We'd like
everyone to meet at one. Yeah, that would be good, we haven't eaten. Okay, see
you at one."
"So what do we tell these guys when they come back in?"
"Actually, let's go find them, it'll be faster." Nancy flipped
Jeff's folio closed, pushed it toward him leaning over to pick up her purse as
they stood, "plus I don't want to have to put my hands on his fat ass
again."
Jeff laughed thinking that he hadn't really noticed how overweight the
Frenchman was, but that obviously Nancy had. "So what do we tell them?"
"Just tell them that we will think about it and have an answer for
them at the noon meeting tomorrow. And try to look cheery. We want these guys
to be really hopeful."
"Hey, with such an entertaining morning how can I not be cheery!"
they both laughed again.
Nancy stood turning to the side door, opening it. "Hey guys, how
did you do in here? Get it all recorded loud and clear?"
"That French guy got a little quiet in there but we got it all
okay. Boy, that was one hell of a meeting!"
Nancy laughed, "It's amazing what happens when you find the tiniest
loose thread, huh? I've been in plenty of these when things just unravel,"
she turned to Jeff who stood to join her at the door, "but I have never seen one little pull and have the
perp come apart like one of those old sock monkeys where the threads just
unravel until you see the mouth disappear, then the face, until there's nothing
but a pile of yarn and two eyes!" They all laughed together, the men
starting unplugging cables, pulling packing cases up onto the table.
"So what did you guys do
with the audio?"
"We cut if off when they left. The tape is already in transcription.
Arnie called to tell us to make sure that the transcriptions are in his hand by
one."
"Thanks, good job guys. By the way, we were surprised to see you
here. We didn't order you, who did?"
"Yvonne. She's ordered us to be ready for thirty-minute on-call
until tomorrow night."
Nancy laughed, "Great," turning to Jeff, "that woman is
amazing. We need to thank her. She takes so much load off of me. She's really
great on the team."
Jeff smiled shaking his head, "All I know about is her sixth sense
when she's playing historian for us. Remember in DC? It's like she knew what we
wanted before we even knew what we wanted."
"Come on," they waved to the men who were just ready to leave
toward their front door, closing the side door. Jeff stepped over grabbing his folio
from the table, a minute later they were in the lobby looking around seeing
Gerard and Thomas with glasses of wine at a front table in the bar. They walked
up with big smiles.
Gerard stood go greet them, "Wonderful! Please sit down and join
us."
They walked up standing over the table, "Listen Gerard," Jeff
smiled, "we need a little time to put this together."
Gerard beamed like a little kid who had just found a dollar under his
pillow that the Tooth Fairy had left. "So you want to help us?"
"Is all the rest of the deal still in place? The agreement? The
money?"
"Yes, yes it is! All the arrangements
have been made!"
"Good, we will have the
final answer which I think you will like when we do this other transaction at
noon tomorrow. We will meet in the same room. Will that work?"
"Wonderful, yes, we will be there tomorrow with our part of the
bargain. Of course you will come with news about how we will work through
this…this little…well you know."
They shook hands all around to big grins, even Thomas' face holding a
relieved smile.
Nancy and Jeff turned walking away from the table, Nancy leaning to him
in a firm whisper, "Final answer
which I think you will like?"
SILICON GULCH!
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