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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Mentor

The desert trials took place in southeast Arizona, about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. Evelyn had lobbied hard to make this the first trial, to give us a boost of confidence. Our dragons did well in the desert; hell, the original prototype had been created to hunt hogs in the southwest. The Guardian, as it was later named, had proven the most effective population control measure invented. Invasive wild hog populations were down ninety percent. That was good for ranchers and wildlife preserves, though not as good for us. Orders for the Guardian were also down ninety percent from their peak levels.

Yet another reason we needed the contract.

We met in the desert in the high, dry heat of early summer. I thought the heat a good thing. Dragons liked the hotter days in Arizona. Some weeks, we could almost hatch the eggs outside rather than in their incubators. Korrapati and Wong were going to hold down the fort at Build-A-Dragon while Evelyn and I drove up to watch the trials. I’d offered to take us in my Tesla, but she insisted on driving herself.

She knocked on my door at nine thirty, dressed and ready to go. “Are you ready, Noah Parker?”

I checked my watch to be sure I had the time right. “Uh, sure. Let me grab my things.” Truth be told, I’d only just gotten into work and figured we wouldn’t leave until ten, maybe ten fifteen. Why is she here so early?

Ten minutes later, as I sat in the passenger seat of her silver SUV and watched the needle on the speedometer hover one below the speed limit, I understood.

“So, what happened to the car service?” The last time I’d seen her out and about, she had a black sedan with a uniformed driver.

“I still use it sometimes, but I missed driving too much.” She pressed the button to wash her windshield for the third time, then quickly returned her hands to the ten-and-two position. “It helps me think.”

It made me think, too, that it might have been faster for me to walk. “Fair warning, I might fall asleep.”

“Are you tired?”

“It’s been a rough month.” We’d started tackling the next design while we waited for this trial, and meeting the requirements was proving even harder. “These DOD specs are ridiculous. It’s like they make everything hard on purpose.”

“The specs ensure that whatever the contractor supplies will do what they need it to,” Evelyn said.

“I guess. It took a lot longer than I expected, that’s all.” We’d had more than our fair share of overdemanding customers over the years. It wasn’t like this was a completely foreign experience for me. Still, with a Build-A-Dragon retail customer we always had the option of saying no. What were they going to do, find a different dragon manufacturer? Most clients, faced with that choice, found a way to be reasonable. Not so with the DOD, apparently.

“The DOD wants a level playing field. If their bid were a perfect match to what we can already do, it would unjustly favor us.”

“Wouldn’t be the worst thing,” I muttered.

Evelyn checked her mirrors, put on her signal, checked her mirrors again, and eased into the right lane. There were no other vehicles in sight. On one hand, she’d pass a driving test with flying colors. Whereas I probably wouldn’t. On the other hand, we might never actually get there.

“I know some people who work in the defense industry,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sure you do.”

Her mouth fell open. “What are you implying, Noah Parker?”

“You have contacts everywhere.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

I considered it for a moment. She’d built a reputation in academia, moved to big pharma, made the jump to biotech, and then worked her way up to CEO at biotech. While I enjoyed giving her trouble about knowing everyone in tech, it hadn’t exactly harmed her career. “I guess it’s good to network.”

“Network.” She repeated it with disdain. “I never liked that term. I build relationships with good people. Competent people. They can come in handy.”

“How? Our industry is so small and specific.”

“There is more crossover than you realize. We got early access to Switchblades because Robert knew some of the people there.”

“Oh, I remember.” Back in grad school when I was desperate for more computational resources, I’d read a magazine article about Greaves. There was this photo of him in front of his Switchblade servers. There was a microchip shortage at the time and nobody could get Switchblades. The waiting list was a year and a half. Somehow Greaves had gotten stacks of them. “They were one of the reasons I came.”

“And one of the reasons we recruited you, because we actually had the resources to run your simulator on a complex genome.”

“Very true.” Granted, there were other companies that had good setups, but none of them were producing synthetic organisms close enough to human that it could help Connor. I nearly told her about his support group and the other BICD2 patients who were desperate for their own answers. But I bit my lip, because I knew how that would go. Right now it was all-hands-on-deck for the DOD bid.

“And now, my relationships with people in the defense industry may be just as valuable.”

“What have they told you?”

She shrugged. “Apparently, this is similar to every acquisitions process.”

“Yikes.”

“Also, we’ve operated under the assumption that either we will win the DOD contract, or Robert Greaves will. In past acquisitions, there have been multiple winners. Competitors can receive joint awards.”

“Well, that would be a nightmare.” There was no way in hell I’d work with Robert Greaves again.

“There have also been contracts that no one wins. It’s possible they will decide not to acquire dragon technology from either of us.”

“So there are two ways to lose.” I sighed and shook my head. “It’s a wonder anyone gets into defense contracting voluntarily.”

“The money is good.”

“Yeah, sure. But how good can it really be?”

“Hundreds of billions.”

I don’t think I heard that right. “I think you mean hundreds of millions.”

She laughed. “Noah, a single fighter jet costs more than fifty million.”

“Hundreds of billions, huh?” It was hard to even put a figure like that into perspective. It was the entire revenue Build-A-Dragon had ever made since its founding, many times over.

“That’s only the procurement budget,” Evelyn said. “Less than a quarter of the DOD’s funding.”

“Jeez.” Well, we’d said we wanted deep pockets. They could sure afford dragons if they wanted them. “So, what’s it going to take to really capture a piece of that?”

“Prove that we can deliver what they need, and that we can do so better than our competitors.”

“How are they going to decide?”

“They’ll look at how well we meet the performance metrics. If it’s still close, then I don’t know. It’s up to the acquisition corps.”

“How much do we know about them?”

“Little. I hadn’t met any of them before their visit.”

“Not even Major Nakamura?” Somehow I doubted that. Nakamura was a Japanese surname. Evelyn was Chinese, but they were both smart, ambitious women who intimidated me. There had to be a club.

“I’d heard of her.”

“Big surprise.” I cleared my throat. “So, any insights you can offer?”

“She’s the one we have to win over.”

I was afraid of that.

Her GPS, which she’d muted after its constant barrage of “insufficient speed” warnings, finally flashed a message that we were approaching our destination. The lot itself was a flat rectangle of hard-packed gravel with no painted spaces. Maybe thirty yards across, bounded by the road on one side and a ten-foot chain-link fence on the other. Two weatherworn signs adorned the fence. One just said keep out. The other promised that vehicles parked without a permit displayed would be confiscated. Not towed, not booted until you paid a fine. Confiscated.

“I hope you have a permit,” I said.

She tapped the dashboard, where a two-inch square piece of paper that I hadn’t noticed sat unobtrusively beneath the glass. It bore a large two-dimensional barcode.

“That’s it?”

“That’s what the majors sent me.”

“Hmm.” As barcodes went, it was almost comically oversized. “Oh, don’t tell me.” I leaned forward and craned my neck upward. Yes, there it was, a black speck against the otherwise clear sky.

“What is it?”

“A drone.”

As if on cue, a red horizontal line appeared on the barcode, centered itself, and rotated. It flickered to green for two seconds, then disappeared.

“Good security,” Evelyn said.

“You know what? I’m glad you drove us.”

She laughed, but broke off as the crunch of gravel announced another vehicle arriving. It was a big SUV with dark-tinted windows. The sight of it brought a cold feeling to my stomach.

“I hope that’s our host,” Evelyn said.

“No,” I said. “It’s him.”

I didn’t have to say his name. The driver’s door opened, and there he was. Robert Greaves. A man somehow still fawned over by the business media despite his inglorious departure from Build-A-Dragon. To my great irritation, he looked the same as ever. Same black fitted shirt and sunglasses as always. Same air of easy confidence.

A wave of self-doubt swept over me. It froze me in place. But I’d be damned if I let the guy think he had such an effect on me. I forced myself to open the door, walk around the front of the car, and look him right in the eye.

“Hello, Parker,” Greaves said. He made it sound pleasant, like we were old friends.

I didn’t answer him. To my credit, I also didn’t reply with a rude gesture.

“Evelyn,” he said, with a nod to his former protégé.

“Hello, Robert.”

“You look well.”

“As do you.”

These seemed like polite words, though they were exchanged like the early jabs in a sword fight.

“No driver?” Greaves asked.

“I felt like driving.”

“And you still got here. You must have left at what, eight a.m.?”

Normally I’d have chuckled, but I wasn’t in the goddamn mood. Evelyn didn’t rise to the bait, either.

Our silence seemed to disappoint him. “I wasn’t sure you guys were going to show.”

“Why not?” I asked. Maybe a bit louder than necessary, because he snapped his tinted gaze from her to me.

“Because you don’t really have a chance at this contract,” he said.

I scoffed. We were the company with the reputation and the proven tech. It had to be a bluff. But why does he sound so certain? It irked me. “Last time I checked, it was Build-A-Dragon one, Robert Greaves zero.”

He stared at me for a moment, his face unreadable. “Not sure that’s where the score stands, actually.”

I glanced at Evelyn. Her face, too, was neutral, but she’d clenched her jaw.

Further niceties were interrupted by the arrival of three Army Humvees. They roared up the road and just stopped, effectively blocking both lanes, rather than pull into the lot itself. A soldier in fatigues jumped out and opened the back door of SUV number two. “Dr. Chang!”

“Come on, Noah.” Evelyn shut her car door, activated the alarm, and marched up to the road to the waiting SUV. I followed her, hoping that was what I was supposed to do.

Robert Greaves. Man, I’d forgotten how much I hated the guy.


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Framed