The Closers (3 page)

A handful of companies have chosen to seek private backing instead of relying on the government or universities. Bronson explained that the decision makes the company more nimble, able to move quickly with projects and experimentation without having to seek government or university approval.

"The government and these big universities are like battleships," Bronson said. "Once they get moving in the right direction, then watch out. But it takes them a long while to make the turns and get pointed the right way. This field is too competitive and changes too rapidly for that. It's better to be a speed boat at the moment."

Non-reliance on government or university funding also means less sharing of the wealth as patents in the area become more valuable in years to come.

Several significant advances in the development of molecular computing have occurred in the last five years, with Amedeo Tech seemingly leading the way.

Amedeo is the oldest company in the race. Henry Pierce, 34, the chemist who founded the company a year after leaving Stanford, has been granted numerous patents in the areas of molecular circuitry and the creation of molecular memory and logic gates- the basic component of computing.

Bronson said he hopes to now level the playing field with the funding from Tagawa.

"I think it will be a long and interesting race but we're going to be there at the finish line," he said. "With this deal, I guarantee it."

The move to a significant source of financial support- a "whale" in the parlance of the emerging-technologies investment arena- is becoming favored by the smaller companies. Bronson's move follows Midas Molecular, which secured $16 million in funding from a Canadian investor earlier this year.

"There is no two ways about it, you need the money to be competitive," Bronson said. "The basic tools of this science are expensive. To outfit a lab costs more than a million before you even get to the research."

Amedeo's Pierce did not return calls but sources in the industry indicated his company is also seeking a significant investor.

"Everybody is out hunting whales," said Daniel F. Daly, a partner in Daly & Mills, a Florida-based investment firm that has monitored the emergence of nanotechnology. "Money from the hundred-thousand-dollar investor gets eaten up too quickly, so everybody's into one-stop shopping- finding the one investor who will see a project all the way through."

Pierce closed the file, the newspaper clip inside it. Little in the story was new to him but he was intrigued by the first quote from Bronson mentioning molecular diagnostics. He wondered if Bronson was toeing the industry line, talking up the sexier side of the science, or whether he knew something about Proteus. Was he talking directly to Pierce? Using the newspaper and his newfound Japanese money to throw down the gauntlet?

If he was, then he had a shock coming soon. Pierce put the file back in its place in the drawer.

You sold out too cheap, Elliot," he said as he closed it.

As he left the office he turned off the lights by hand.

Outside in the hallway, Pierce momentarily scanned what they called the wall of fame. Framed articles on Amedeo and Pierce and the patents and the research covered the wall for twenty feet. During business hours, when employees were about in the offices, he never stopped to look at these. It was only in private moments that he glimpsed the wall of fame and felt a sense of pride. It was a scoreboard of sorts. Most of the articles came from science journals, and the language was impenetrable to the layman. But a few times the company and its work poked through into the general media. Pierce stopped before the piece that privately made him the most proud. It was a Fortune magazine cover nearly five years old. It showed a photograph of him- in his ponytail days- holding a plastic model of the simple molecular circuit he had just received a patent for. The caption to the right side of his smile asked, "The Most Important Patent of the Next Millennium?"

Then in small type beneath it added, "He thinks so. Twenty nine-year-old wunderkind Henry Pierce holds the molecular switch that could be the key to a new era in computing and electronics."

The moment was only five years old but it filled Pierce with a sense of nostalgia as he looked at the framed magazine cover. The embarrassing label of wunderkind notwithstanding, Pierce's life changed when that magazine hit the newsstands. The chase started in earnest after that. The investors came to him, rather than the other way around. The competitors came. Charlie Condon came. Even Jay Leno's people came calling about the longhaired surfer chemist and his molecules. The best moment of all that Pierce remembered was when he wrote the check that paid off the scanning electron microscope.

The pressure came then, too. The pressure to perform, to make the next stride. And then the next. Given the choice, he wouldn't go back. Not a chance. But Pierce liked to remember the moment for all that he didn't know then. There was nothing wrong with that.

The lab elevator descended so slowly that there was no physical indication it was even moving. The lights above the door were the only way to know for sure. It was designed that way, to eliminate as many vibrations as possible. Vibrations were the enemy. They skewed readings and measurements in the lab.

The door slowly opened on the basement level and Pierce stepped out. He used his scramble card to enter the first door of the man trap and then, once inside the small passageway, punched in the October combination on the second door. He opened it and entered the lab.

The lab was actually a suite of several smaller labs clustered around the main room, or day room, as they called it. The suite was completely windowless. Its walls were lined on the inside with insulation containing copper shavings that knocked down electronic noise from the outside. On the surface of these walls the decorations were few, largely limited to a series of framed prints from the Dr. Seuss book Horton Hears a Who!

The secondary labs included the chem lab to the left. This was a clean room" where the chemical solutions of molecular switches were made and refrigerated. There was also an incubator for the Proteus project which they called the cell farm.

Opposite the chem lab was the wire lab, or the furnace room, as most of the lab rats called it, and next to it was the imaging lab, which housed the electron microscope. All the way to the rear of the day room was the laser lab. This room was sheathed in copper for

1 | , i i added protection against intruding electronic noise.

The lab suite appeared empty, the computers off and the probe stations unmanned, but Pierce picked up the familiar smell of cooking carbon. He checked the sign-in log and saw that Grooms had

signed in but had not yet signed out. He walked over to the wire lab and looked through the little glass door. He didn't see anyone. He opened the door and stepped in, immediately being hit with the heat and the smell. The vacuum oven was operating, a new batch of carbon wires being made. Pierce assumed Grooms had started the batch and then left the lab to take a break or get something to eat. It was understandable. The smell of cooking carbon was intolerable.

He left the wire lab and closed the door. He went to a computer next to one of the probe stations and typed in the passwords. He pulled up the data on the switch tests he knew Grooms had been planning to conduct after Pierce had gone home early to set up his phone. According to the computer log, Grooms had run two thousand tests on a new group of twenty switches. The chemically synthesized switches were basic on off gates that one day could- or would- be used to build computer circuitry.

Pierce leaned back in the computer seat. He noticed a half full cup of coffee on the counter next to the monitor. He knew it was Larraby's because it was black. Everybody else in the lab used cream but the immunologist assigned to the Proteus project.

As Pierce thought about whether to continue with the gateway confirmation tests or to go into the imaging lab and pull up Larraby's latest work on Proteus, his eyes drifted up toward the wall behind the computers. Scotch-taped to the wall was a dime. Grooms had put it up a couple years earlier. A joke, yes, but a solid reminder of their goal. Sometimes it seemed to be mocking them. Roosevelt turning the side of his face, looking the other way, ignoring them.

It wasn't until that moment that Pierce realized he wasn't going to be able to work this night. He had spent so many nights working in the confines of the lab suite that it had cost him Nicole. That and other things. Now that she was gone, he was free to work without hesitation or guilt and he suddenly realized he couldn't do it. If he ever spoke to her again, he would tell her this. Maybe it would mean he was changing. Maybe it would mean something to her.

Behind him there was a sudden loud banging sound and Pierce jumped in his seat. Turning around and expecting to see Grooms returning, he saw Clyde Vernon come through the man trap instead. Vernon was a wide and husky man with just a fringe of

hair around the outer edges of his head. He had a naturally ruddy complexion that always gave him a look of consternation. In his mid-fifties, Vernon was by far the oldest person working at the company. After him Charlie Condon was probably the oldest at forty.

This time the look of consternation Vernon carried was real.

"Hey, Clyde, you scared me," Pierce said.

"I didn't mean to."

"We do a lot of sensitive readings in here. Banging the door open like that could ruin an experiment. Luckily, I was just reviewing experiments, not conducting any."

"I'm sorry, Dr. Pierce."

"Don't call me that, Clyde. Call me Henry. So let me guess, you put out a 'be on the look out for' on me, and Rudolpho called it in when I came through. And that made you come all the way in from home. I hope you don't live too far away, Clyde."

Vernon ignored Pierce's fine deductive work.

"We need to talk," he said instead. "Did you get my message?"

They were in the early stages of getting to know each other. Vernon might be the oldest person working at Amedeo, but he was also the newest. Pierce had already noticed that Vernon had difficulty calling him by name. He thought maybe it was an age thing. Pierce was the president of the company but at least twenty years younger than Vernon, who had come to the company a few months earlier after putting in twenty-five years with the FBI. Vernon probably thought it would be improper to address Pierce by his first name, and the gulf in age and real-life experience made it difficult to call him Mr. Pierce. Dr. Pierce seemed a bit easier for him, even though it was based on academic degrees not medical ones. His real plan seemed to be to never address him by any name if possible. To the point it was noticeable, especially in e-mail and telephone conversations.

I just got your e-mail about fifteen minutes ago," Pierce said. "I was out of the office. I was probably going to call you when I got finished here. You want to talk about Nicole?" "Yes. What happened?"

Pierce shrugged his shoulders in a helpless gesture. What happened is that she left. She quit her job and she, uh, quit me. I guess you could say she quit me first."

"When did this happen?"

"Hard to tell, Clyde. It was happening for a while. Like slow motion. But it all sort of hit the fan a couple weeks ago. She agreed to stay until today. Today was her last day. I know when we brought you in here you warned me about fishing off the company dock. I think that's what you called it. I guess you were right."

Vernon took a step closer to Pierce.

"Why wasn't I told about this?" he protested. "I should've been told."

Pierce could see the color moving higher on Vernon's cheeks. He was angry and trying to control it. It wasn't about Nicole so much as his need to solidify his position in the company. After all, he didn't leave the bureau after so many years to be kept in the dark by some punk scientist boss who probably smoked pot on the weekends.

"Look, I know you should have been told but because there were some personal issues involved I just... I didn't really want to talk about it. And to tell you the truth, I probably wasn't going to call you tonight, because I still don't want to talk about it."

"Well, we need to talk about it. She was the intelligence officer of this company. She shouldn't have been allowed to just waltz out the door at the end of the day."

"All the files are still there. I checked, even though I didn't need to. Nicki would never do anything like you are suggesting."

"I am not suggesting any impropriety. I am just trying to be thorough and cautious about this. That's all. Did she take another job that you know of?"

"Not as of the last time we spoke. But she signed a no-compete contract when we hired her. We don't have to worry about that, Clyde."

"So you think. What were the financial arrangements of the separation?"

"Why is that your business?"

"Because a person in need of finances is vulnerable. It's my business to know if a former or current employee with intimate knowledge of the project is vulnerable."

Pierce was beginning to get annoyed with Vernon's rapid questioning and condescending demeanor, even though it was the same demeanor he treated the security man with on a daily basis.

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"First of all, her knowledge of the project was limited. She gathered intelligence on the competitors, not on us. To do that, she had to have a sense of what we're doing in here. But I don't think she was in a position to know exactly what we're doing or where we are in any of the projects. Just like you don't, Clyde. It is safer that way.

"And second, I'll answer your next question before you ask it. No, I never told her on a personal level the details of what we are doing. It never came up. In fact, I don't even think she cared. She treated the job like a job, and that probably was the main problem with us. I didn't treat it as a job. I treated it like it was my life. Now, anything else, Clyde? I want to get some work done."

He hoped camouflaging the one lie in verbiage and indignation would get it by Vernon.

"When did Charlie Condon know about this?" Vernon asked.