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Hayden saw Peter’s face cringe. The lawyer speak had started. Translation: Cannondale, through his company, Lyrical, would take an initial 30% stake in Cheyenne, and no doubt, one day soon would ultimately own it.

Hayden could tell that Peter’s mind was racing. He was in a sort of trance. A cynical grin spread across the kid’s face that said, “so this is what it feels like to be cut out.” From this point on, the destiny of Cheyenne would be in someone else’s hands, and it hadn’t even really started yet. Hayden tried to put himself in Peter’s shoes. Then, all of a sudden, Peter came alive, as if he suddenly remembered Bertolini’s words.

“How much did you say?” Peter blurted.

“Several hundred million,” Bertolini said, pausing briefly in his legal recitation. Cheyenne’s lawyers talked among themselves. Fingers wagged in the air.

Several hundred million. Damn,
Hayden thought to himself as he looked over at Peter.

Graham Eatwell had what he always had for dinner when he was feeling good about his ability to navigate the world — steak béarnaise, frites, a simple green salad dripping in vinaigrette and a Côte de Beaune.

He had heard whisperings that Cannondale was in Brussels, and that he had eaten at La Truffe Sympatique. Claude, the owner, was a good friend of Eatwell’s. One phone call was all it took to get some clues as to what the dinner was about. In addition, Eatwell had a member of his staff track down details on Cheyenne.

This Yank, Cannondale, clearly had his sights set on grabbing Cheyenne – a
Dutch
company, a
European
company, after all — for himself. And if Eatwell let it happen, a golden nugget of technology born in Europe would be lost to the Americans. Once upon a time, the winds of technological advancement had blown from East to West – from Prague, Budapest, Florence, Heidelberg and Antwerp to the New World. But those winds had changed direction some time ago, and that ate at Eatwell. The things they talked about in Silicon Valley – things he didn’t entirely understand – were now exported the other way - to the Grandes Places of Europe.

Cannondale had taken his 30% investment in Cheyenne. Soon, he would, no doubt, make his play for the whole company and Eatwell would be forced to make a decision. It wouldn’t be easy saying no to Cannondale, but that’s exactly what Eatwell intended to do. He didn’t even need to look at the facts. In this situation, facts were irrelevant.

Eatwell’s speech in Paris had achieved the desired effect, which was to whip up the European business community into a frenzy - to make them feel proud of their creative heritage, and then shame them for having accepted their fate as technological “also-rans” to the Americans. The head of the European Commission — the former Prime Minister of Portugal, José Manuel Barroso – had decided that the European Union was going to take growth and innovation seriously, and Eatwell was going to see that Barroso made good. Eatwell wanted to reinforce the fact that the winds of technological change could once again be reversed.

Bernard, Eatwell’s butler, served more wine as Eatwell watched a woman through his dining room window. She was letting her black Bouvier relieve itself against a horse-chestnut tree out on Avenue Tervuren. Brussels could be dreary, but it was Eatwell’s home now. It had been for a while. He had come a long way from the stone walls of an English boarding school. If there was one thing he had taken with him from those days it was the concept of self-preservation. That lesson had come early, among the fresh faces of the next generation of the entitled. Boys became men and went on to run banks and companies and law firms and rarely spoke of that day when they were introduced to that enduring public school tradition of being bent over and used as toast racks by bullying seniors.

Come to think of it, the concept of self-preservation went back even further for Eatwell, to the days before boarding school, during the war, when, as young boys, Eatwell and his friend, Menno Kuipers, were scooped up by their parents and moved to Bletchley Park.

It was a lonely place, Bletchley, especially for a kid. The adults would disappear for hours at a time to solve their mathematical riddles in rooms where children were not invited. Eatwell and Kuipers didn’t actually mind. It gave them more time to play. But somehow they knew, even at that young age, that they had all been on the side of unquestionable good. It was so binary — good vs. evil, very little grey. What was done to defeat fascism had to be done and the hell with the nasty little compromises. The world had depended on people like their parents. Eatwell and Kuipers had grown up, and now the world depended on men like them.

Eatwell was a heavyweight in Brussels, and Kuipers had become the Minister of Transport and Waterworks in the Netherlands. Waterworks dealt with the more technical aspects of the country’s complex system of dikes and canals. It was a seemingly mundane corner of the Dutch bureaucracy, but the dossier was broad and powerful. It branched out to technology, transportation, trade, and international law of the sea. Cheyenne’s technology would, no doubt, fall under Kuipers’ umbrella, and that made Graham very happy indeed.

How fantastically strange life is,
Eatwell thought to himself – to think that he and Kuipers would again be on the same side of good, as they had been when they were young boys.
How utterly sublime
it was that he and his old Bletchley playmate would again have the opportunity to defeat a common foe, in this case Cannondale – who he would take particular pleasure in taking down.

Tomorrow, Eatwell would ring Kuipers. He wanted his friend to be prepared. More important, he wanted to hear the resolve in Kuipers’ voice – a resolve that both of them would need in order to stand up to Cannondale. Eatwell wanted to know that Kuipers still felt as strongly as he did about this experiment called the European Union.

“Your dinner, sir,” Bernard announced.

“Thank you, Bernard.”

“Shall I pour?”

“Yes. And pour a glass for yourself.”

“Sir?”

“Join me, Bernard. Eating alone is so dismal.”

Bernard poured the wine, wiped his hands on his apron, and drew the chair at the far end of the long table from Eatwell. They chatted. The meat was good with the creamy béarnaise. It was all good, save the loneliness.

They had all left his life, one by one — his parents, his colleagues at Downing Street. All had gone on to fame or faded obscurity. He was okay with it, though. He had found that life was a bit that way, a series of decks on a cruise ship. Some decks were music and laughter and drink. Some were reserved for pondering. Still others, like the captain’s bridge, kept the vessel on course. That’s where Eatwell saw himself firmly perched at this moment in time, at the helm. Yes, Europe needed him to make the right decisions, however unpopular. He would not shun his responsibilities in carrying this vessel called the European Union to port. Problem was, he wasn’t entirely certain where that port was.

“Bernard, what say you of the Canary Islands this time of year?” Eatwell said, making himself a perfect mouthful of steak, a couple of frites, salad, and a daub of béarnaise at the end of his fork.

“Good weather right about now, I imagine, sir.”

It was going to be all right. Eatwell would see to it.

Cheyenne was humming. Timmermans and his CFO, Michelle, had taken it public in the Netherlands. It was now trading as an American Depository Receipt (ADR) on the Nasdaq in New York, which allowed Americans to purchase shares. The company didn’t have customers yet, but the stock had almost doubled on the promise of riches alone.

Timmermans was spending almost all of his time negotiating endless partnership agreements between Cheyenne and municipal water suppliers throughout Europe to allow communications signals to flow through their systems. Peter had swallowed his pride from the experience with Cannondale in Brussels, and had spent the winter and summer cobbling together the necessary land and water-based technology. He was now supervising a series of tests. For his first test, he had chosen to send a scanned photo of a crotch shot from the Kamasutra to a fellow grad student back in Groningen. Peter hooked up his computer to the water device with three assistants looking on. There was much rejoicing when he hit “Send.” Within a minute, the friend in Groningen sent back an email that simply said, “Ouch.” It wasn’t quite, “Come here, Watson, I need you,” but it was good enough for Peter.

They were at the helm of pushing the concept of two cans and a string out further than anyone ever had. The media had already put them on the cover of
Wired Magazine.
In addition,
BusinessWeek, The Financial Times, Le Monde,
and the
Economist
had run major stories
.
There would be talk shows and girls, and hopefully, lots of money. But before any of that could happen, they needed to finish the testing.

The second test involved audio. For this, Peter bought a list of email addresses from a guy who created mailing lists of people who regularly bought CDs online. Peter had zoned in on a select group of people and contacted them to see if they would participate in the trial in return for free Cheyenne service for a year when the system was fully operational. To his amazement, the majority of them said yes.

The inaugural audio file, T. Rex’s “Bang a Gong,” was sent to a 20-year-old girl named Karin, who worked in her father’s insurance company in Maastricht. “Ladies and gentleman,” Peter said as he was about to hit the button, “I give you T. Rex.” His assistants tittered. The girl reported having some difficulty detaching the file, which they identified as a problem with her computer.

Dozens of albums followed. They downloaded Elvis collections to a fry cook in Tilburg. They sent Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Live at Gruene Hall” to an accountant in Haarlem. They sent John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” to an artist in Breda. Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” went to a builder in Apeldoorn. A secretary in Rotterdam had requested “Trafalgar” by the Brothers Gibb. Peter guessed that the woman must have just had a bad break up, because that album contained what was, in Peter’s mind, one of the better bust up songs of all time: “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.” Peter began to hum as he sent the file, and then stopped himself.
Shit, I’m a saddo
, he thought.

He moved on to the next portion of the testing — data. He chose material from authors who tended to write long — Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gibbon, Vidal, Faulkner. Then came the granddaddy of them all — the complete unabridged edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It worked beautifully, even as a handful of bearded ethical hackers that Peter had contracted attempted to bring down Cheyenne’s network.

The final test was video. For this, Peter chose one of his favorite movies of all time — “True Grit” with John Wayne. “It’s going to be hard to squeeze a man of the Duke’s stature through a water pipe, but here we go,” Peter said to one of his assistants. Another assistant began a drum roll. Another made an embarrassing attempt at whooping like a cowboy. “Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch,” Peter shouted as he hit the button.

It was the kind of moment that geeks live for and non-geeks shake their heads at. Peter was proud. The conviction he felt began to surge from some darkened place within him. He was pretty sure that he had a hard-on.

They were ready, or at least getting close. The tests were telling them what they needed to know. The glitches were being addressed, at least the ones that they could predict. It would only be a matter of time before they were ready to put the first satellite in the sky. The satellite would fill in the gaps in the network where signals could not flow through municipal water supplies, or act as a backup when terrestrial signals failed. Cheyenne’s system would not function without a satellite. They needed one fast.

A satellite was important for two other reasons: one, to create the kind of momentum that would make Eatwell and the European Commission think twice before rejecting Lyrical’s eventual acquisition of Cheyenne. Two, rumor had it that N-tel, the state-run Dutch telecom carrier, was working hard on a technology that also promised to deliver unlimited bandwidth to the masses, although the scope of its technology was unclear because N-tel was keeping it under tightlyguarded wraps.

Under normal circumstances, it could take a year for delivery of a new satellite. Cheyenne didn’t have that kind of time. They needed a satellite now. Aaron could live with a refurbished bird. He told Timmermans to make the necessary calls to get the ball rolling. 

A Swiss banker named Otto Jagmetti who was fond of wearing bowler hats and fob chains had read about Cheyenne’s need for a satellite to fill the bandwidth gaps on its network. He offered his help to Timmermans in securing a Russian-made satellite supplied by a firm called Riga-Tech in Moscow. Riga-Tech had just what they

needed – a satellite that had been purchased by another company a year earlier, but the company was having financial problems and had decided against a launch. The satellite was sitting in storage. It was Cheyenne’s if they wanted it. Deal.

Timmermans put a down payment on the satellite on behalf of Cannondale. They would pay the rest upon launch. But getting permission to beam signals down to the Netherlands and other parts of Europe was a different story. Civil servants like the Dutch Minister of Waterworks still held the cards on that one.

Gazing out the window of his office near the Paradeplatz onto Lake Zurich, Jagmetti was relishing the middle man deal he had just brokered between three Cold War remnants – an insecure Russia desperate to regain its place in the world, an envious Europe trying to jump start an innovation culture, and a cocky America that still held the marbles.

And in completing the deal, he had also managed to please a new client – one that was so mysterious that Jagmetti referred to him in his own mind only as “the Client.” The Client had expressed a strange interest in knowing when the next communications satellite might be launched over Europe. The Client was precise. He wanted to know when and where. Jagmetti was happy to provide the Client details based on what he knew from his dealings with the Russians and Cheyenne, but he remained curious why the Client wanted to know so much about a communications satellite.