Chapter 4

Having the contract with the Military Department opened so many doors for new business that I was absolutely awed. Several of the largest suppliers to the military wanted us to check out their company to see if anyone was padding the payroll or stealing some other way.

Now this was a little harder to do, since many companies did not do all of their business by computer, and some that did were not fully hooked to the internet. That meant that I could not move in and check them out without physically visiting their location. The first time I tried visiting a customer's site, I got the bum's rush because they couldn't believe that someone as young as I was could possibly be the person sent to review their computer system.

I was really pissed, but the situation was salvaged when I was finally able to put a call in to the company CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and had him explain the facts of life to the officious underling who was blocking my entrance to the company's front door. Well, I got in, but I never did get any real cooperation from that division of the company, and I found out why—they were stealing money right and left by padding payrolls and purchase orders that really didn't exist. It took me about 20 minutes to find that the officious oaf who had given me a hard time had walked off with slightly over $23,000 in the last three months. I stopped my search long enough to place another call to the CEO and get the oaf arrested. After that was done, I found that another $174,000 had been stolen by eight other individuals.

I know, this seemed like a lot of money to me, too, but the division was doing on the order of $5,000,000 per month in sales to the military and had 900 employees in that one plant. So, it was sort of small potatoes to the overall operation, but still, there was the principle of the thing.

I told of my adventure to Sam Anderson, and he explained why I was given a hard time. Primarily, I had shown up at the plant in casual dress: a tee shirt, khaki cotton slacks, and running shoes. He pointed out that I had looked like a common laborer and was not dressed to impress anybody. Probably, nobody had noticed my apparent age because they were all locked onto my clothes. On top of everything else, dressing like that to call on a customer was insulting to the customer.

He suggested that I should dress like a business man in a conservative outfit, something like his suit: bright green tunic with orange sleeves. A mauve shirt and orange tie would go well with the ensemble. Green pants with an orange stripe down the leg and black shoes would complete the outfit. He felt that black socks would also be appropriate.

I took him at his word and dressed like that for my next business call. No problem, the receptionist greeted me just as she would any other business man. I was treated with respect by everyone I met, and I had no trouble. It may have helped that I did not find anything naughty, much less crooked, on the company's computer. All-in-all, it was a pleasant visit, and I learned a lot toward establishing favorable customer relations.

That was pretty much my uniform for all of my future business calls, and my wives even commented how nice I looked in the ensemble. I did note that tastes in conservative clothes had taken a drastic twist in the last 200 or so years!

Confidential Investigations, LLC had turned a corner in the past year or so. I did not recognize it at the time, but we had become a force in business and industry. I still made customer calls to make sure that I was current on all of the business computer trends, but I was spending more and more time in administrative details as the company grew. We were now boasting six buildings on our campus, and we had over 500 employees. We simply had gotten too big to be any fun any more. I asked our lawyer, Tom Elliot, what to do and he suggested that I admit that the company had gotten too big for me. He said that I needed to hire some professional administrators and such to look after the day to day operation of the company and go back to R&D (Research and Development) where I was most happy.

He said that I would still be available for the major decisions, but I could shuck the every day trivia onto people who enjoyed that sort of thing. He recommended a head hunter (personnel recruiter) who was familiar with the kind of problems I had and would be able to find us the kind of people we needed. It turned out that I was real good at taking good advice, especially when it reinforced what I already wanted to do, so I contacted the head hunter and explained my problem. He found the people I needed within six months, so I was able to relax and enjoy life again. My wives and kids immediately noticed the improvement in my attitude and rejoiced with me.

I rocked along for another year, enjoying the things that riches could do for my family and generally having a ball working on far out ideas for computer programs. Willy was two years old and Hank was one. Willy was becoming conversational and Hank was starting to get a command of simple sentences. Suzy, Hazel, and I hoped that this was a manifestation of a high IQ. Surely, they would be at least as smart as their parents!

Hazel had cut back to working only a half-day shift, and she and Suzy worked out a schedule in which Hazel showed up for work in the morning and Suzy worked in the afternoon. That way, one or the other of them was always with the babies. We considered it an ideal compromise, and I even started spending more time at home to be with the kids.

My home computer was networked with the ones at work over a secure line. I knew that it was secure because even I could not hack into it, and I knew all of the safeguards. Thus, I was able to do more of my work at home, and I loved the ramifications of this. I, too, started going in to the office only half a day, sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon. Rarely, I would spend a full day at the office or at home, but usually I split my time between the two.

This relaxed schedule actually seemed to improve my productivity, which made me happy. The professional managers were OK with my strange work habits, so everything was working out well. I had some real sharp programmers working with me, so I was able to get a program into workable condition, and a team of programmers would take it over and debug and polish it to a fully useful form. We were able to turn out new security and fraud detection software every 10 or 12 months. That rate was going to make us the equivalent of a new Microsoft, and we were starting to roll in money.

Somebody at the CIA (yes, they were still around and going strong) had a bright idea. They wanted me to try to hack into the central computers of foreign countries to see what their intentions were toward North America. The Chinese had always been somewhat antagonistic toward NA, so they were the ones that the CIA was particularly interested in.

I agreed to take a look, but without making any promises. The catch was that all of their data was written in Chinese, of course, and it was highly encrypted. With my latest snooper programs, I was able to break into their computers and download their data files, but I couldn't read Chinese, so it was especially difficult to break their encryption.

I finally wound up having to write a program to translate Chinese into colloquial English. Damn! That was difficult. On top of everything else, there were three dialects of Chinese that I had to work with. It took a lot of us a long time to work this out, but the CIA folks agreed that the translation program, alone, was worth all of the work that we had put into it.

Anyway, we finally got back to the original question of breaking the Chinese encryption, but they had tumbled to my work somewhere along the line and changed the encryption scheme. Luckily for me, somebody had either blundered or had made a deliberate effort to make this encryption easier to break. Whatever the reason, my programs were able to translate the files as fast as the Chinese converted them.

Oh, shit! The Chinese were not going after NA, but were drawing a bead on Greater Australia. This was not a conventional military operation, but an economic one. The idea was that they would drive the GA currency down in value on the international markets and buy their way into control of the country. They were after energy, and the original Australia, as a result of the disaster of 2039, was now the primary source of solar and wind-generated power. The great desert of the Out Back was nearly carpeted with solar panels and windmills, and the Chinese had developed a way to transmit the energy by radio waves at high efficiency and low cost. This, coupled with their own geothermal sources would give them a lock on low cost energy for the foreseeable future. And electrical energy was power, pun intended!