The Darkfall Switch (14 page)

‘N-no! Not on the phone. I’m due to meet a customer downtown late this afternoon. Can I meet with you at, say, one o’clock?’

‘OK. Come to the Brown Palace coffee shop. We can talk there.’

There was a short silence, and then Matthews asked, ‘Joe Worzniak won’t be there?’

‘No. He’s checking out soon. He’s flying back to Washington.’

Foster hung up the phone and looked at it thoughtfully.

‘What’s up?’ Janet asked.

‘That was PPD’s software development manager,’ he replied. ‘He
wants to talk to me about something. Something he didn’t want to discuss on the phone.’

‘Oh?’ It was her turn to raise her eyebrows. ‘That’s strange.’

‘Yes it is. What can he want to say to me that he couldn’t say yesterday? Or on the phone just now?’

With that unanswered question hanging in the air, she finished dressing and he went down to reception, where he’d arranged to say goodbye to Worzniak. The American’s bags had been loaded on to the luggage trolley already and a porter was standing by to take him to a waiting cab.

The farewell was cursory. Cold. Neither man really liked the other, nor was there any trust between them. The day before, as they had been leaving PPD’s offices, the American had made it quite clear that Foster was interfering in things that could be of no real value or interest.

Now they shook hands and Worzniak went out to his cab. Foster waited a few minutes, until the cab had disappeared from view, and then went back to his room. He wanted Janet to share this beautiful city with him.

After touring the shops they returned to the Brown Palace and sat down in the coffee shop where they were joined by Joel Matthews at precisely one o’clock. He was carrying a slim brown document case under one arm. Foster introduced Janet. The red-haired man accepted Foster’s offer of a coffee and, as he sipped it he hesitantly began to tell his story.

‘Doctor Foster,’ he started nervously, ‘what I’m going to tell you may turn out to be nothing at all. I could be guessing. P-putting two and two together and getting five.’

‘Never mind, Joel,’ Foster reassured him. ‘Tell me anyway. Let me be the judge.’

Matthews took a deep breath and looked nervously around the room before speaking. ‘It all started a few years back,’ he said, ‘when we were just starting up the business. Frankly, we were struggling for work then. There were lots of well-established competitors in the field, and although we had a great system, we had no t-track record. We were all getting pretty depressed. Zak’s inheritance was holding us up, but it couldn’t last forever. We all knew that.

‘And then Joe Worzniak came in. He appeared out of nowhere; took a look round the offices – we had a small downtown place then – and
when he’d seen everything he said he could get us US Government support.’

‘What kind of support?’ Foster asked.

Matthews’ response was nervous. ‘A d-development contract. A big one.’

Foster was puzzled. What was so important that the American Government should want this start-up company to develop something in the power-generation field?

‘At that stage,’ Matthews said, ‘the rest of us were suddenly cut off from the discussions. Zak and Joe went into closed sessions. They went on for days.

‘And when they finished … you know, Doctor Foster, Zak was a different guy. It was like someone had recharged his battery. He’d gone from being battered and depressed to having new hope. He was really lit up.’

‘He never told you what it was about?’ Janet asked.

Matthews looked at her and then returned his attention to Foster. ‘No. Just said it was a big one. That it would change everything for us. He said the government had decided that American industry should be supported. Especially high-tech ones like ours. He said Worzniak had asked if there was something we felt was too expensive to develop by ourselves, that the government could support. Preferably a silver bullet – a killer idea that would put us at the top of the world.

‘Zak told them about his ideas for remote diagnostics. We’d thought about it a lot, but it was going to be very expensive to develop and with no work coming in we were running out of money.’

‘So it wasn’t anything new to you.’

‘No. But it was something we’d only talked about. Suddenly, it seemed that Zak had been able to convince Joe Worzniak that it was a much more developed concept than it really was. And Worzniak was willing to buy in.’

‘And he did?’ Foster asked.

‘You bet! Within a few weeks we’d taken on the new offices and a factory – the one you saw yesterday – and began hiring.’

He glanced around again. ‘And that’s when the guys in grey appeared.’

‘Guys in grey?’ Foster queried.

‘Yeah. That’s the nickname we gave them. We being the rest of the
guys who’d been in the original start up. Th-these guys, they were given special offices with extreme security at all the access points. Card readers and so on. None of us could get in. They were like a separate company inside ours. They’d set up meetings and work with us on the interfaces, but that’s all.’

Foster interrupted. ‘Interfaces? Then they were computer people.’

‘Yes, sir. Definitely. Or at least, most of them were. But the computer guys were real smart, Doctor Foster. Our guys were good, but these people could run rings round us. Fact is, none of us liked them. Their project offices were sealed off from the rest of the building.’ He looked hard at Foster before adding, ‘And the thing they were working on was the Darkfall project.’

‘Really!’ Foster exclaimed, his heartbeat rising at the sound of that name. ‘And it was remote diagnostics? Like Zak said?’

Matthews shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s what we were told. Certainly all the data on the operation of the plant was fed to the modules they were developing, for each contract we engineered. Yes, it could have been remote diagnostics. But several of us were suspicious. It didn’t seem right, somehow.’

‘But you worked with these guys in grey all right?’ Foster asked.

‘In a way, yes. But they always kept any dialogue short. They didn’t say anything too much at work and they didn’t mix with any of us socially. They even lived together, away from the rest of us. They rented a big house near Boulder somewhere. Anyways, none of us could find out what was happening, but Zak said everything would be OK. And he was right, because then the contracts began to roll in. It’d been tough when we first started; we had no track record in the industry and the customers were wary of us as new kids on the block. But after these guys appeared the work started to pour in. The first contracts were in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia. Then it spread quicky: first Europe, then South America, then the Far East. The contracts were coming in so fast we had trouble handling the workload.’ He hesitated before going on, ‘But there’s another strange thing, Dr Foster: these guys . . they set the prices.’

‘What?’ Foster exclaimed. ‘I thought you said they were technical.’

‘I did. But Zak said they had commercial people in the team too.’

‘Stranger and stranger!’ Foster observed.

‘Right on! As I said, the enquiries sure started coming in from all
round the world, very quickly. Zak said the government was helping us get off the ground, pulling strings – but every time we were bidding on a job, we had to give out system-build configurations to the Darkfall guys and they’d come back with prices.’

Foster sensed an unspoken detail. ‘And?’

Matthews stared at him. ‘The prices were incredible.’

‘Low?’

‘Fantastically! At first we figured they’d made a boner, but Zak said it was OK, to build the bid document on those prices.’

‘So, naturally, the work came in. You were undercutting the competition.’

‘You bet! As I said, we could hardly handle the jobs, they came in so fast.’

‘And you still have no idea of what the Darkfall Switch was?’ Foster asked, searching Matthews’ face for a reaction that might indicate that he knew more than he was telling. But there was nothing.

‘Absolutely not, Doctor Foster,’ Matthews said, with an air of frustrated desperation in his voice. ‘Nobody outside the project knew anything about it. All we knew was that they were developing some sort of complex subroutine. Zak said it was a revolutionary development in remote diagnostics, that it would give us such a competitive advantage that we’d become the number one in the business.’

‘How?’

Matthews shrugged. ‘No idea.’

‘But it must have had interfaces with your systems,’ Foster commented.

‘Yes, it did. As I said, we fed data to the subroutine.’ He looked at Foster and added, ‘But there was this strange thing: our systems had to take commands from it.’

Foster was amazed. Remote diagnostics was all about asking questions, not taking orders.

‘Strange, I agree,’ he said. ‘But still you didn’t know what this Darkfall thing did?’

‘Nope. Oh, we all made guesses, and Zak said that, by accurately diagnosing the performance of the plant on a second-by-second basis it enabled the systems to improve plant efficiency. And he said it would enable the plants to operate even more efficiently and cleanly.’

Foster considered these statements. He could understand the idea. By
continuously adjusting the operation of the power station in response to complex measurements and calculations, it should be possible to achieve improved efficiency – allowing the owners to increase their profits – and to reduce pollution, which would appeal to the green lobby.

‘But why keep that secret from you guys?’ he asked. ‘That’s all good stuff.’

‘Beat me then and it beats me now,’ Matthews said. He seemed calmer now, as though the act of talking to Foster, and knowing that he understood and sympathized, had taken a burden off his shoulders. ‘Zak said he’d let us all in on the details when the project finished. He said it was so revolutionary that it had to be kept a very tight secret, so that our competitors were kept in the dark.’

Foster stared at him. What Matthews had told him wasn’t enough. Technically, he understood what he had been told but still, something was missing.

‘And you’re absolutely sure that you never found out what the Darkfall Switch was?’

Matthews looked nervously around the room again before answering. ‘No. But I did manage to get some information that could give some clues,’ he said. ‘I told you how we’d all been ordered to keep out of the Darkfall project office. The security there was very tight anyway, but that was what interested me. I guess I saw it as a challenge. Then, one day Zak left his keycard on his desk when he went out. He was taking some VIP clients out for dinner and I guess he didn’t want to have the thing with him. Either that or he just forgot. Anyways, I went into his office to pick some stuff, and I found it lying on his desk.’

Foster could imagine Matthews’ state of mind at the time: curiosity, coupled with fear and nerves.

‘So you went in?’

‘Yes. Everybody else had left, so I had the place to myself. I figured Zak might come back if he wanted the keycard, but I knew that when he took customers out to dinner they generally went to a strip joint afterwards. Spent a couple of hours there. So I picked up the card and went in.’

‘What did you find?’

‘I couldn’t get into most of the machines there; they were
password-protected
. But one was still running – the guy’d left it on without logging out. Stupid! I knew I wouldn’t have time to start digging around much,
so I dumped all the likely-looking folders on to a disk. Then I quit, put the keycard back exactly where I found it, and went home.’

Foster looked at him. ‘You kept the disk?’ he asked.

‘Yup! I looked at the folders on it when I got home, but didn’t get anywhere much. And then you came by. I guessed you’d be able to spend more time on it, away from those guys.’

Foster could feel excitement rising in him. This could be exactly what he needed. ‘You brought it with you?’ he asked, trying to suppress his excitement.

Matthews hesitated briefly, then said, ‘Yes I did. But before I hand it over, I need your word, Dr Foster. I need to know you’ll be straight with me.’

‘That I won’t tell your company’s competitors?’

‘Yes. That’s right. You see, all this could turn out to be quite innocent. It really could be only what Zak said: a system for using remote diagnostics to improve efficiency and performance, and to reduce pollution.’

‘You’re right, Joel,’ Foster said in a reassuring tone. ‘And of course I’ll keep it secret. If it turns out to be completely innocent I’ll just tell you, and that’ll be the end of it. I swear it.’

Matthews took a quick glance around again before picking up his document case and extracting a disk wallet from it. He handed it to Foster.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘I’ve kept a copy, but every folder’s there. I’ve had a look and I’m sure you’ll find everything you need.’

‘Thanks,’ Foster said as he took the wallet. He extracted the shining silver disk and looked at it, wondering what secrets it held. ‘Have you got a business card? I’ll email you my findings.’

‘Sure,’ Matthews said, extracting a card from the document case. ‘I’ve written my home email address on the back. Use that. It’ll keep all of this away from Zak and his pals.’

Mattews had carefully obliterated his office email address. Clearly, he wanted to be very sure that his colleagues weren’t accidentally tipped off about his treachery.

Joe Worzniak shifted uncomfortably in the bench seat at the airport. His flight had been delayed and he had the boring prospect of staying out here for another two hours before leaving for Washington.

The enforced delay had given him time to think about Foster and his incessant, intrusive curiosity. It was a pity the Englishman had such good connections with the British Government. Without those connections, he could have been easily shut out.

Something deep in Worzniak’s brain was nagging at him. It was a vague suspicion and the longer he waited there, the more it grew and developed. He was convinced Foster was up to something.

He looked at his watch and performed a mental calculation. There was just enough time to do a bit of discrete spying and then get back to catch his flight. It could be quite abortive but, who knows? He might find out something. Abruptly, he made up his mind and stood. Before he had left for the airport he’d returned his rental car to the downtown location and taken a cab, so now he went to the waiting zone and found another taxi.