Chapter 30: New Ventures

“What do you mean ‘the French got the process?’” Colonel Conright asked.

We had finished the bachelor party in Vegas, and then had come back to the offices in Stanford. Mike Keller had called us Sunday evening to let us know that three rented SUVs had arrived cross-country at the lab compound and spent several hours cutting through the wall of the shed. They had then managed to blast the safes free from their mountings and manhandle them out of the building and into the vehicles. They left via the access road after sending two men out by foot to tie up and blindfold the guard.

Alison leaned closer to the speakerphone in my office and enunciated carefully.

“They hit our secure document facility in Nevada over the weekend. It looks like they got the working papers from there. Paul believes it will take them a year or so to sort through everything, but we have to assume the French team got what they were after.”

I gave her a wink, as we both knew the original process that could create the stealth coating was not in those files. There was no need to tell the government that; at least, not yet.

“We’re getting ready to fly down to the site, if you care to join us, Colonel,” I said.

“I’m in Colorado at the moment. Can your airstrip handle two jets if I fly over?”

“So long as the ramp was not damaged by them. Once we land, I’ll have the pilot monitor the guard channel. Check with him before landing.”

“Okay. It will take me a couple of hours to get over there.”

“We’ll see you there, Colonel,” I said and ended the call.

“How long before we let them know the truth?” I asked Alison.

“Let’s play it by ear. It would be nice if they caught the man responsible, first.”

“I agree. Shall we go catch a plane?”

We drove out to the San Jose airport where the G-400 was waiting for us. An hour later, we were on final approach to the lab’s field. From the air, it was evident that they had not entered quietly. The back wall of the building had a gaping whole big enough to drive a couple of trucks through.

Once we were on the ground, it was obvious that they had taken the brute force approach to the entire operation. The jagged edge of the hole was melted and there was a clay-like residue on the outlining the burning point in the metal.

“Thermite with a high-temp clay to contain it and keep the glare down on the outside,” Alison said as she looked closely at the edges and the slagged metal that had fallen inside the building.

“I thought Mike said it took them a couple of hours to cut their way in?”

“It would take time to rig this, but only a few minutes to burn through once they ignited it. My guess is they wanted to be in and out pretty quickly once they lit the fuse.”

“How long were they inside?” I asked as we went to the still intact personnel door and entered the building. Alison had warned me away from stepping on any evidence.

“Whew,” Alison said as she stopped me just inside the doorway. “Not long, based on how much C-4 they used.” The distinct smell of explosives hung in the air.

The cinder block wall we had built to contain the safes was a pile of rubble.

“I think we should wait for the Colonel outside.” Alison said. “There isn’t going to be anything for us to sift through in that mess. I’m surprised the walls are still standing.”

We went back outside, and settled down on the ground in the shade of the building. An hour later, an Air Force Learjet landed and taxied toward our plane and the building. A few minutes later, Colonel Conright and a small group of men in desert fatigues deplaned, and joined us by the building.

We tagged along as the Air Force team methodically covered the site and came up with a pretty clear picture of how, and how long, the break-in took. Alison provided them the specifications of the safes and we all concluded that they probably had not damaged the contents with their blasting.

“Do you have an inventory of the documents that were stored here?” one of the men asked.

Alison handed a hard-sided floppy disk to him as she said, “That’s a copy. We’ll hang onto the original. It has the document title, authors, and an identifier. The identifier starts with eight digits representing year, month, and day the document was originally created.”

The man nodded and put the floppy disk into a plastic evidence bag, numbered it, and entered the information into his logbook.

“Your man said this happened early Sunday morning?” the Colonel asked.

Alison nodded and replied, “They grabbed him before leaving, tied him up, and put a loose bag over his head so he couldn’t see anything. He thought he heard three vehicles leave the property, since they had to slow down for the gate. It took him a couple of hours to work loose and call it in.”

“So they most likely had plenty of time to drive into Vegas, and from there, disappear?”

“That’s what I would do,” Alison said. “They might have had to hole up for a while to cut the safes open, but we don’t have any identifying information to base a search on.”

“Well, I’ll contact some of our assets overseas, and see if we can get eyes on the guy at Aerospatiale. He’s going to have to review the materials, at some point.”

“But how many other eyes will read them first?” I asked. “Some of those papers have not been filed yet. I’m going to have to begin publishing things now, just to protect our other processes.”

“I can’t let you do that for the stealth coating,” the Colonel said.

I shook my head, hoping I was pretending annoyance well. “Fine, I won’t publish that process. That application process was not filed, here; but, I need to get on the record with a lot of the other stuff.”

“How long can you give us?” he asked.

I tried to look thoughtful.

“Wednesday. Dr. Wilkerson and I will file patents on our other materials processes day after tomorrow. If you can recover the safes, intact, we’ll hold off, but if they’ve seen or read any of the papers, I need to file first to protect myself and my property.”

“But not the stealth compound?”

“Everything but that one,” I said.

He sighed as he said, “I guess that’s as good as I can get.”

“It is. Keep in touch, but plan on my walking a huge collection of patent filings into the U.S. Patent Office in two days.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything stupid or risky like that, again,” Jeryl said as I finished telling her our devious plan to let some of our secrets out.

“I won’t,” I said. “At least I don’t plan on giving anything else of proprietary content to the government that would put me in such a bind, again.”

She sighed and glanced back down the plane to Anna and Ali sitting on the couch before looking back at Alison and myself.

“Alison, I want you to promise the same thing. Just because I give you two permission to fool around at Matthew’s bachelor party, doesn’t mean I want you taking silly risks. What if those guys had jumped you as soon as the safes were delivered?”

“Alison had a team in the hills for just such a scenario,” I interjected.

Jeryl shook her head at me and then sighed again.

“So, it’s all done, now?”

“Almost. Alison, how long before your guys contact the French DGSE?”

“Monday,” she said. “We’ll give them just enough information to roll-up the man at Aerospatiale. Of course, they’ll copy all the files before returning them.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Why tip them?” Jeryl asked.

“I want there to be no doubt in our government’s mind, that copies of the files have been made by at least one foreign agency. Even if it’s cataloged as ‘evidence.’ I want them to believe the secret has been let out.”

Alison was nodding. “It is the only way to make the real secret safe. So long as everyone is trying to get the coating application process using these longer nanotubes, they won’t be trying to break into our facilities.”

“Won’t they be back for the application process?”

I shook my head as I said, “Dr. Wilkerson and I planted some careful clues that should make them believe Lockheed has that process.”

“Which they do, since you sold it to them,” Jeryl finished.

“Exactly. Even if they tried to grab me to teach them the process, it won’t work with the longer nanotubes.”

“It’s now a double-blind. All of the parts look real, but they won’t work together.”

Jeryl did not look convinced.

I jogged past the construction equipment at the lab site and headed toward the guard shack at the edge of the property, about a mile away on the dirt road. I figured I was two miles into the six-mile loop I had planned. It was a beautiful morning in the autumn desert of eastern Nevada. The sun was just lightening the east, playing softly across the red, yellow and gray landscape dotted with silver-green sage and light brown brush. It was a totally different fall color palate than the rich foliage we had over the weekend in Maine.

Kelly and Matthew had gotten married without a hitch and then had flown off to use our place in St. Lucia for their honeymoon. Jeryl, Alison, Ali, Anna and I had returned to Utah and then I had flown down to the lab complex for meetings with our architect and builders. We had moved four mobile homes onto the property for temporary housing, but it was a little too rustic for a baby. Once permanent buildings were in place, they would come for a visit. In the meantime, I was enjoying the solitude of the desert and getting in some distance running and thinking.

In the two weeks since the break-in, we had flattened the lab building and were pouring a bigger slab. It would become a hangar of suitable size for two G-400s along with storage for critical spare parts. We were also laying out footings for an attached office and bunkhouse for any flight crews laying over at the lab.

I planned on having the actual lab about two miles past the airstrip, just over another small ridge in the landscape. It would be visually screened from the runway and include significantly stronger security than we had put in originally. A collection of six small houses suitable for guests or us would be spread along the ridge beyond the lab. Carl McArthur had driven down to begin site surveys and sketching out his ideas for the ‘cabins’, as he called them. Each would be made of native masonry or adobe, so I did not think of them as ‘cabins’, but he has his own ideas and definitions.

I waved at the guard in his shack and turned just soon enough to keep the sun out of my eyes as I headed back down the dirt road.

I smiled as I approached the hangar area and saw Donna jogging toward me. She turned when we met and fell in beside me for the jog back to the temporary buildings. It was the second morning she had joined me. She said she could do the full six miles, but felt four was good enough since I ran her ragged the rest of the day anyway. We covered the two miles in just less than fourteen minutes and then walked around the trailers to cool down.

Alison came out with a cup of coffee in her hands and a smile as we completed our second circuit of the trailer.

“Did you have a nice run?” she asked Donna.

“I did, but he definitely pushed me,” she replied.

“It’s good to push yourself. You’re too young to get lazy,” she said with a smile.

“Are you saying you’re too old to keep up?”

Alison laughed. The two of them had fallen into an easy teasing routine over the past week as they interacted. They were sharing an adjacent trailer while Sanford and Carl were in mine. I knew she had another team in the hills, somewhere, ‘training’ as she said, but I hadn’t seen them yet.

“Morning brief after breakfast?” I asked before their joking around got too serious. I knew Alison could get touchy about her age sometimes, even when she hid it.

Donna nodded. “Or, over breakfast, if you’d like.”

“No. Let’s eat, and then get the day started. Is Carl up?”

Alison nodded. “He’s having coffee inside. He wanted to get to the cabin sites early, so will probably head over there soon. Sanford will go with you. I’m taking the jeep to check on the perimeter today.”

“Alone?” She was always careful, but the harsh landscape was not something to take too lightly.

“Mike Keller is joining me. I’ll pick him up at the guard shack.”

I nodded and headed inside for a quick shower. I waved at Carl on my way past the small kitchen. He barely looked up from his sketchbook. Five minutes later, he was gone, and I was whipping up some breakfast. Donna came in just as I served up two plates of bacon and eggs with toast and a cup of coffee.

“Thanks, boss,” she said as she sat at the table and grabbed a plate of food.

“No problem.”

We ate together quietly, and she then helped me clean up. Finally, over a second cup of coffee, she pulled out her stack of notes for the morning brief.

“Okay, here is the run-down. The office has received the last receipts from the patent office for your filings with Dr. Wilkerson. We have also received several inquiries about licensing already. We’re holding those until Kelly returns from her honeymoon.”

I nodded. I had suspected several companies were watching our filings.

“DigiNet has purchased facilities in San Francisco and we should start laying cable next month. The first major leg will be San Francisco to San Jose, via Stanford. We’ll then follow the Union Pacific right-of-way to Salt Lake City. Sheryl is working on the right-of-way agreements for the coastal route as well, to run a line down to Los Angeles and San Diego, but we probably won’t start that leg until the spring.”

“Why delay?” I asked.

“Corning doesn’t have enough fiber capacity for us, right now. They’ll have a new production facility coming online in January, and should be able to meet our needs, then.”

“Okay.”

“The southern leg will then come up to Las Vegas, and eventually connect to here, and then on up to Salt Lake City. That will give us a western loop to allow continued transmission even if one segment gets cut or goes down.”

“We’ll follow that with a northern loop up to Seattle, right?”

“That’s the plan.”

She flipped pages after giving me a second to ask any other questions.

“Jeryl closed the Nike re-signing deal yesterday. It looks like you have a new five-year term with them including a pretty hefty pricing increase, for which they get first right of refusal on the use of your materials portfolio for sporting goods.”

“Not just sportswear?”

“Nope. Evidently, they want to try CRP-2068 for skis and in protective gear.”

“Tell them to try a helmet made with CRP-2068 and lined with the Diamond Skin material. They may need a conventional polystyrene for some additional cushioning, but it should be a good combination.”

Donna made a note.

“We should also shop that idea out to defense contractors for other helmet types.”

“I’ll make a note and see if Candace has any contacts in those areas,” she said.

“You saw the progress of the hangar and are spending the day on the housing and labs here, so we’ll skip those. Schedule-wise, you’re set for the rest of the week here. We’re still trying to find a time for you and Tom to get together.”

“Do we know what he wants to pitch me yet?” Our schedules had been too hectic to catch up yet, but I knew his contract was up now that his television special had aired.

“He just asked for an hour with you, at your convenience.”

“See if he can meet in Park City. Buy him a ticket if you need to. I’d like to spend next week at the house in Deer Valley. Jeryl and I talked about it last weekend.”

“Okay,” she said as she made several notes. “That means we’ll need to move a few meetings we were arranging.”

“With who?”

“The computer industry. Jobs, Gates, Ellison, McNealy, and Morgridge. They’ve heard you are behind DigiNet and want a meeting to discuss plans for the future.”

I smiled as I commented, “I wondered when they would take notice. I’m glad I didn’t bet anyone. I thought we’d have a year to lay cable and prepare.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can all see just far enough into the future to know what a digital network could mean. They are going to try and buy in on the ground floor, if I have any guess.”

“Will you let them?”

I could hear the concern in her voice. DigiNet was her and Sheryl’s baby in many respects.

“It depends on the offer. How are the cash flow projections for the build out looking?”

“Good. We’re within ten percent of plan and about six weeks ahead of schedule.”

“Would more capital speed things up?”

“Not right now. The bottleneck is fiber capacity. More capital isn’t going to speed up Corning’s production.”

“What about building out local loops or data hubs in major metro areas?”

She looked thoughtful for a minute. “That is in phase two of the plan, and will be capital intensive unless we partner with someone. We were looking at the Baby Bells to tie into their facilities.”

“Before we get the meeting scheduled, work out some alternatives of building out the infrastructure ourselves. If these guys want in, that is the pitch we’ll make them; create a different kind of digital phone and cable offering.”

“Cable?”

“In the raw sense. We would sell a digital pipe to the door of a business or residence and they could pipe whatever they wanted over it; data, voice, television, or anything else.”

“But the existing cable companies have the content tied up,” she countered.

“For now. If we can find a viable business model based on phone and data, the content will follow sooner or later.”

I could see the wheels turning. After a minute, she nodded, made a note, and then looked up again.

“I think we’ll push that meeting back until after Thanksgiving. We’ll need some more time to prepare if that’s our pitch.”

I shrugged. “Okay. Keep me briefed on your thoughts, but set the meeting when you and Sheryl are ready, not just because they want a meeting. Anything else for the schedule?”

“Nope. I’ll sort out a time for Tom, and you can have the rest of your day tramping through the dirt with Carl,” she said with a smile.

“Ha! I know you’ll be out there with us before the day is over.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you and Sheryl will want to have some say in at least one of the cabins, since you’ll be frequent visitors out here.”

She frowned, shook her head and said, “I guess that’s true. I hadn’t really thought about getting any say in what gets built.”

“We’re all going to be working here, so we all get some say,” I said as I took a sip of my coffee. “I just get the final say,” I added with a grin.

Ten minutes later, Donna dropped me off at the end of the dirt road, where we planned on building. Then she took off in a small cloud of dust for town. She had some temporary office space to use for calls around the country, until we got phone service put in someplace besides the guard shack.

I walked along the ridge line to where Carl was sitting in a boulder, sketching in his book.

“How goes it, Carl?” I asked as I approached.

The older architect looked up and grinned. “Fabulous. How adventuresome do you feel?”

His attitude surprised me. “What do you mean?”

“I came up with an idea for the cabins that I want to run by you. It’s quite a bit different from what I had in mind before, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. I think you will as well.”

I climbed onto the boulder beside him. “Tell me about it.”

He flipped his sketchbook around and opened to a surprisingly detailed drawing of the ridge where we were sitting.

“I want to give each place this view,” he said as he waved to the shallow valley to the southwest of our position. “But I don’t want them to be spoiled by the silhouettes of the other cabins.”

I nodded as he flipped the page, to show me a pretty good approximation of what the ridge would look like from the valley floor. Situated in widely spaced sites were terraces and windows poking out of the slope of the ridge.

“By going down, instead of up; I can make each cabin have a unique, unobstructed view. We’ll also get some significant thermal efficiency. During the heat, it will naturally cool the spaces and in the winter, it will insulate and warm them.”

“But you won’t have much natural light,” I said.

“Yes, and no. I’ll make them longer and a little narrower to maximize the terrace length and then use some skylights on the back slope for the inside of the buildings. That gets me to the other opportunity.”

He flipped the page again and showed me a rough cutaway of the ridge. “We’ll need to excavate for utilities anyway, so I thought we could use precast concrete piping for underground access to each cabin in addition to their individual private entrances.” He flipped the page again. “We could extend the piping on one end to give you access to your lab space and on the other for the utility runs.”

I picked up the book and looked more closely. I flipped the page to a topographical map of the ridge and saw his rough outline of the six cabins and the lab space on the reverse slope.

“The lab isn’t underground, is it?”

“No, that would be too expensive and delay the building too long. It is set into the reverse slope, but I think we’ll make its floor level with the flooring of the pipe, so you could run a golf cart through the pipe way if you wanted to.”

I got up and walked along the ridge for a short distance. Carl followed me.

“I like the idea,” I said finally as I scanned the valley. “But won’t we tear-up a lot of the landscape building it?”

Carl shook his head. “It’s a risk, but I think I know the crew that can do the job with minimal impact. I’ll need a full soil analysis and probably a couple of cores before I know for certain, but I think this could become a very special place for you.”

I thought about it a little longer. Carl had been given free reign on the house in Deer Valley and not disappointed me. Finally, I nodded. “Let’s go ahead and develop the idea further; but so far, I like it, and I trust your instincts.”

The older man beamed at me and whipped out his sketchbook again.

“Because each cabin will be carefully positioned, they will all be unique, at least from a design and layout perspective.” He sat on another convenient boulder and motioned me over.

“The ridge to valley distance is greatest at this end, so this cabin will be three floors. I think it will be your house here. These stair-stepped terraces will give you plenty of outdoor use space as well as opening the interior to plenty of natural light. Since it’s on this side of the natural bend in the ridge, no one else will be able to see your terracing.”

He flipped to another page. “As we move along the ridge toward the shallower end of the valley, the structures will switch to two and then single stories, but all will have an outdoor space.”

I continued to let him show me his sketches and point out landscape details that he wanted to take advantage of. By the time Donna returned in the jeep to take us back for lunch, I had an excellent picture in my head of what my genius architect wanted to build.

“Tom, it’s good to see you again,” Jeryl said as Sheryl escorted him into the office in our Deer Valley home. We had been enjoying the late fall weather, admiring the first fall of snow while sitting together in front of the small fireplace. Anna had just taken Ali for her afternoon nap.

“Likewise,” Tom said as he gave Jeryl a quick hug and shook my hand.

“Sorry it took so long to get this scheduled,” I said. “We’ve been on the road a bit.”

“No problems,” he said as he sat down.

“So what can we do for you?” I asked.

He smiled and looked as nervous as he had the first time he broached the topic of doing a documentary on me.

“I want to make you an offer, and ask a favor,” he said finally. “In the documentary, you mention the state of education, and the need for our students to be given opportunities to learn from their mistakes, rather than being handed solutions.”

I nodded. His editing of the footage had made that nearly a theme in the final cut. It was one of the things I liked most about his portrayal of me.

“I want to create those kinds of opportunities and capture the process on film, but not for a documentary. I want to film a TV series based on a group of students that you two mentor through the process,” he said in a rush.

Jeryl and I exchanged a look.

“Is that the offer or the favor?” I finally asked, with a smile to take any sting out of my words.

“A little of both. I know you don’t seek fame, but you are becoming an icon to our generation. If you talk to a company, Wall Street takes notice. When you launch something new, it is newsworthy, even if most people don’t understand the implications. I know the military listens to you; I just don’t know what all you talk about. You are a mover and shaker, even if you don’t want to believe it.”

I was stunned. Not by what he said, but by the fact that he knew it. Jeryl smiled at me and squeezed my hand.

“The flip side is that you need to start managing your image,” Tom continued. “I’d like to offer you my services, for that. You need a PR representative. I can handle that, while I work on the other project as well.”

That was an easy decision.

“Tom, I’d be happy to offer you the position of Director of Public Relations for our company. Will you take the position if we don’t do your TV series?”

He nodded. “I will, since I need a job, but I’m really serious about the series.”

“Why?”

“You said you want to change the world, but you also said inventions alone, won’t do that. You said you needed to change how people think for themselves, explore the possibilities, and learn from one another. If you just invent and build things, you’ll only be fulfilling half that desire.”

He was paraphrasing me much more succinctly than the ramblings he had filmed, but he was spot on with my thinking.

“Okay, so tell me more about your concept for a show.”

He smiled, glanced at Jeryl, and then dived in.

“We’ll start with a selection process and interview applicants to select eight to twelve individuals for intern roles in your company. Each will have individual and group research efforts in the sciences or business. The internships will run for six months. We’ll record their lab and work space areas along with presentations and your mentoring sessions with them. Each week, we’ll review progress and rank them.”

“Rank them?”

“I need your input, but I was thinking we would measure their progress in terms of attempts at whatever they are developing, and how successful their results are. We’ll also assess their presentations to you two and maybe a guest mentor of some sort. Each week, we’ll end the show with the current and cumulative rankings. At the end of the six months, you’ll make one or two of them job offers. Even people that don’t get an offer from you will have a video resume to use in their careers.”

Tom was proposing a reality television series decades before they became a nationwide craze. He was leaning forward in his chair, waiting for my reaction. I looked at Jeryl.

“What if we include business challenges in the process? I think invention alone won’t hold an audience’s attention long enough to keep your ratings up,” Jeryl said.

“Like what?”

“Well, we could start them with developing a go-to-market strategy for something the company has done. That could build awareness of the product before it’s launch and guarantee a sponsor or two.”

“Do you have something in mind?” I asked.

Jeryl nodded. “The new Nike deal. By the time we could get the show and internships organized, they should have a couple of products at least beyond the early testing phase. Worst case, they should be ready for a new line of Diamond Skin products to launch.”

Tom was nodding his head and grinning. “That would be great. It also opens up the internship pool to a greater audience. Even if they are business focused, learning to try different ideas and apply the scientific method of problem solving would be invaluable to getting people to change how they think.”

Jeryl’s eyes were glittering, and she had the sexy, half-smile on her lips that told me I was going to be doing this, one way or the other, because she liked the idea. I decided to get on board early.

“Okay, I like the concept. Can you flesh it out into a full-blown plan inside of a couple of weeks?”

“I can,” he said. “Why so quick?”

“I’d like you to film our first flight on the GX-3, and it is supposed to be delivered after Thanksgiving.”

Tom’s eyes got wide and he nodded with a grin.

“That’s going to be perfect. The pilot episode can kick off with you flying in your first commercial supersonic business jet, showing what hard work can accomplish.”

“We’re starting to see a lot of interest in DigiNet from other telecom providers,” Sheryl said as part of the morning brief.

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