Hot Shot (53 page)

"Because it's not your company," Susannah retorted.

His arm slashed the air. "It's not going to be yours, either, for very long because it's going up in smoke."

"A chip failure is hardly the end of the world," she countered.

"Oh, no? How many Blaze III's have we shipped since we introduced the machine?"

"Nearly two hundred thousand. But just because we have a bad part in the test models doesn't mean the ROM chip in every HI we've manufactured is bad."

"Wrong again," Sam sneered.

"How can you know that?" she asked. "You can't possibly—"

"They're all bad. Every III we've shipped is going to fail after one thousand hours of use.

Statistically, that'll average out to about a year—less time under office use, more time under home use."

"One year!" She caught her breath while Mitch swore softly. She wanted to reject Sam's conclusion, but she couldn't. He would never have predicted something this dire if he weren't absolutely certain.

She tried to sort through the facts logically. They'd faced recalls before, but never one this massive. She began thinking aloud, hoping to reassure herself as she reassured them.

"It'll be a huge headache, but we can deal with it. Dayle-Wells is a reliable firm. If they've made a bad chip, they'll take financial responsibility for it." In her mind, she was already envisioning the logistics of this kind of recall. Once the outer case was opened, the actual replacement of the ROM chip was a relatively minor procedure. The old one was simply unplugged from its slots and a new one inserted. But the sheer number of machines involved made the recall complex, and it had to be done before the faulty chip physically destroyed the computer by smashing the disk drive head.

"Little Miss Pollyanna," Sam scoffed. "Always looking for the bright side. Well, babe, this time there isn't one. Dayle-Wells isn't responsible for the bad chip. We are."

Mitch's head shot up. Susannah felt as if a cold fist had clutched her spine.

Sam began to pace. "The ROM listing Dayle-Wells received from us was buggy."

Mitch spun around. "That's impossible. We have a dozen safeguards built in to keep that sort of thing from happening."

"Weil, it happened this time. Five lines—just five lousy lines of bum code out of a hundred—but those five lines programmed a time bomb into the machines. Every Blaze III we've shipped will work for exactly one thousand hours, and then it will fail. The disk drive slams its head back and forth. It destroys itself and burns out the power supply.

After that—nothing." His voice had a harsh, raspy edge. "One thousand hours from the date the computer is first turned on, every one of those III's is going down."

Yank spoke thoughtfully. "The first of those failures will be showing up any day now, if they haven't already. Others are going to take years."

Dates and numbers spun like a roulette wheel in Susannah's head. They had charts that were amazingly accurate at predicting computer-use time. At best, they had only a few months to prepare. Once again, she began to think aloud. "We can handle the recall. It'll be expensive—it'll definitely hurt—but it won't kill the company."

"Susannah's right," Mitch said. "We can set up some sort of centralized system. Move a few hundred of our people into temporary service positions and send them out into the field. Thank God it's just one chip. We take out the old one, plug in the new one. We can do it."

Sam hunched his shoulders and turned his back to them.

Yank's voice was strained. "No. No, I'm afraid we can't. Come here and take a look."

With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, Susannah got up from the arm of the couch and walked to the workbench. Mitch fell into step beside her. Sam stayed where he was with his back turned away from them. Whatever Yank was about to show them, Sam had already seen.

Susannah gazed down into the orderly, internal world of the Blaze III. Its microchips were laid out like rows of miniature houses on the neat little village streets of the green printed circuit board. With the tip of a pair of long-nosed pliers, Yank singled out one microchip. Susannah leaned forward to take a look.

"This is the bad chip," Yank said. "Look. It's soldered. The chip is permanently soldered to the board." He paused a moment, giving his words time to sink in. "We can't do a simple little chip swap. This particular part was designed to be permanent. That means we have to replace the whole circuit board on every Blaze HI we've ever made."

Susannah's bones seemed to have lost the ability to support her. She felt as if she had just been punched in the belly. They couldn't afford to replace the circuit board on every machine they had manufactured. The cost would be prohibitive.

They didn't look at each other. Susannah stared down at the circuit board, Mitch at the litter of tools on the workbench. Silence ticked away like a doomsday clock. All of them knew that Yank had just pronounced their death sentence.

Chapter 28

The four of them sat silently around Angela's kitchen table. Mitch held his reading glasses between his fingers and folded one stem in and out. Sam rolled an empty can of Coke between his open palms. Susannah rubbed her right temple with the pad of her thumb. She had just done the unthinkable. She had made the phone call that shut down the Blaze HI assembly line.

Yank stared off into space. He had taken himself to a place so far away he might not have been with them at all.

Mitch finally spoke. "I can't even conceive of how many hundreds of millions this is going to cost."

No one said anything. Even a giant company like IBM or FBT would have difficulty recovering from this sort of financial catastrophe, and a young company like SysVal simply didn't stand a chance.

Susannah's hand curled into a fist. If only
some
of the III's had been bad, they could have handled it, but the fact that the machines they had shipped last week, yesterday, the ones that had come off the line that very morning—the fact that
all
of them were bad—made the situation so hopeless her mind could barely absorb it.

Yank slowly re-entered their world. "Who wrote the bad code?"

The Coke can slapped between Sam's palms. "I don't know for sure. My guess is that it was one of the engineers who was working on the instructions for the chip. A guy named Ed Fiella. He only worked for us about six months, then he quit."

"Did you try to find him?"

"Yeah, but he disappeared, so I let it go. I couldn't ask too many questions or people would have been able to figure out that something was wrong."

"No one else knows about this?" Mitch asked sharply.

Sam shook his head. "Until today, I was the only one who had all the pieces."

Susannah rubbed the pulse in her temple. "How could you keep something like this secret?"

"I used a couple of independent engineers in Boston to run a few tests, some guys in Atlanta—people who weren't likely to bump into each other while they were out jogging.

And I didn't let any of them know this involved anything more than a couple of prototypes."

Yank looked searchingly at Sam. "You realize that these failures aren't accidental.

Everything happens too specifically. The machine works for a thousand hours and then it stops. And when it fails, it does it spectacularly. All that noise—the disk drive banging.

That's too bizarre to be accidental."

"You're saying someone—this Fiella, probably—deliberately planted a bug in the ROM

chip?" Susannah asked.

Sam nodded. "Just five lines of code, but that's all it took."

"We have so many checks and balances built into our procedures," she said. "A test team, code reviews among the engineers. How could this happen?"

"Maybe Fiella somehow managed to switch the listings at the last minute." Sam walked to the refrigerator and pulled out another Coke. "You know, I'm almost glad you found out. I was getting tired of having all of you look at me like I was Benedict Arnold or somebody."

Mitch slipped his glasses back on. "This is why you started pressuring the board to sell the company."

"If Databeck buys SysVal," Sam said, "the board swap is their problem. We're out clean and we have the money in our pockets to start a new company. Databeck is a big conglomerate. The loss will hurt them, but they can stand it."

"There are laws against that kind of thing," Susannah said wearily. "Once those machines start to die, they'll sue us for fraud."

Sam slammed his unopened Coke can down on the counter. "No they won't. That's the beauty. It'll be months before we see anything more than a few isolated failures, and I haven't left any loose ends. They couldn't even come close to proving that we had any previous knowledge of the defect."

Susannah dropped her eyes to the tabletop. "So we dump the company on them, take the money, and run."

"Something like that," Sam replied with a shrug.

She looked up from the table and stared him straight in the eye. "That's shit, Sam. That's really shit."

He gave her the black scowl he always used whenever she uttered a vulgarity. She looked away in disgust.

Mitch's tone was cool and impersonal. "We at least need to discuss the possibility of selling out to Databeck."

Susannah felt a prickling along the back of her neck, and she turned toward him angrily.

"The only way Databeck will buy SysVal is if we don't tell them about the bug."

"They have a lot more resources than we do," he said calmly. "There's a slim possibility that they could save SysVal. We already know that we can't."

Her skin felt cold. Mitch was going to betray her, too. Her friend had become a stranger.

She thought she knew him so well, but she hadn't known him at all. Feeling as if she had just lost something precious, she turned toward Yank. When she spoke, her voice trembled. "Yank, what do you think?"

He returned to her from a very distant place. His eyes met hers and his expression was deeply troubled. For a moment he did nothing, and then he gently, almost accidentally, brushed the tips of her fingers with his own. They tingled slightly, as if she had been touched by a greater power. "I'm sorry, Susannah," he said softly. "I'm still processing the information. I'm sorry, but I'm not ready to offer an opinion yet."

"I see."

"I'm not offering an opinion, either," Mitch said firmly. "I'm merely pointing out that we need to discuss all the options."

She didn't believe him. Mitch was a black-ink man, a homebred, bottom-line capitalist.

They could discuss all the options in the world, but in her heart of hearts, she was certain he would eventually side with Sam.

Sam began to pummel them with facts and figures. Mitch grabbed one of Angela's scratch pads and took copious notes, filling up one page and then quickly flipping to the next.

Susannah listened and said nothing.

Eventually her silence grew oppressive to Sam. He planted the flat of his hand on the table and leaned down. "We've already seen what happens when we splinter, Susannah.

For chrissake, we have to work together on this as partners. We have to speak with one single voice."

"And I'll bet you think that voice should be yours," she snapped.

"That's crap, Susannah. Why don't you stop taking potshots for a while and start acting like a team player?"

"All right." She stood up and walked over to the kitchen counter. "All right, I'll be a team player. I'll reduce all this discussion to one simple question—the only question. Are we going to tell Databeck about the bug or not?"

Mitch looked down at his notepad and drew the outlines of a box. He traced the border over and over again with his pen.

As always, Sam declared a spade a spade. "Databeck would snatch that offer back in a second if they knew about these machines. Unless we keep quiet, there isn't any offer."

"Then that makes our decision simple, doesn't it? Are we liars or aren't we?"

Mitch slammed down his pen. "Susannah, I have to tell you that I resent your condescending tone. You don't have any special pipeline to heaven."

"We had a mission," she said, her voice catching on the last word. "We set out on an adventure together, and we've always been true to it. We didn't lie. We didn't cheat or steal or take shortcuts. And we made money beyond our wildest dreams. But making money was never what the adventure was about. It was only part of it. The adventure was about pushing ourselves and finding our own excellence."

Mitch stood up. "Those are wonderful words, but we're trying to decide the future of thousands of people here."

"They're not just words!" she exclaimed, her heart pumping in her chest, as she tried desperately to make them understand. "We've been put to the test."

Mitch made a dismissive sound and scowled.

"People are put to the test everyday," she declared. "Just not as dramatically as it's happened to us. A clerk puts too much change in your hands. Do you give it back? A friend tells a racist joke. Do you laugh? Are you going to cheat on your taxes? Water down the liquor? When does a person take a stand? When do we say, 'Stop! That's enough! This is what I believe in, and I'll stand by it until I die.'"

The corners of Sam's mouth twisted sardonically. "Don't you love this? Listen to the rich girl talk. Only someone who has never been poor could be so morally pure."

The muscles in the back of her neck ached with tension and her palms were damp as she pleaded with them to understand. "Don't you see? We've slammed right up against the morality of our own lives."

"This is business," Mitch said. "We're merely discussing a business deal."

"No," she retorted. "It's a lot more than that."

He gazed at her with a combination of pain and wonder. "You want us to hang on even if those beliefs are going to take us on a death ride?"

"Yes. Yes, I do." She walked closer to him, until only the corner of the table separated them. "Ever since I was born, people have been telling me what the rules of life are. My grandmother, my father." She gazed over at the man who was still her husband. "And you, Sam. You, most of all. But none of those definitions ever seemed quite right to me.