Captain of Industry Read online

  Gross, he was zooming in.

  She turned her back and glanced at her own phone. Annemarie hadn’t answered her text from earlier saying she would be at the hospital after she sat in for Annemarie at two meetings. It was to be hoped that the patient was sleeping. She’d gotten an update from the efficiently sassy Nurse Jackson just as she went off shift and knew that all vitals were improving. Sleep while the heavy-duty antibiotics did their work was the best thing.

  Her coffee name “Geeky” was called by the barista and when she turned with her cup Mr. Loafers was giving her the “do I know you” look. She stared back. All short-haired lesbians look alike, dude, but if you click her boobs again you’re going to be wearing my espresso. Fortunately he found something else to occupy his eyes.

  When she was in San Francisco she liked to get her own coffee on the way to the office. The ritual allowed her to do her daily attempt at cooking, and few places were as anonymous. She was stirring in just the right amounts of cocoa and cinnamon when she heard Jennifer’s voice.

  See what happens when you think about her? Poof! She materializes.

  Jennifer’s face filled the flat-screen TV mounted to the far wall. The camera made the most of her expressive eyebrows and dark eyes, simple pearl earrings in delicate earlobes, red-tinted full lips and a classic cameo choker around her smooth throat before zooming out again. One of the show’s hosts, all blond and giggles, asked, “How did you know you were a star? What was that like?”

  “I still don’t feel like one.” Jennifer’s modest shrug appeared genuine.

  “You’ve been acting for twenty years.”

  “Mumble when you say that!” Jennifer rolled her eyes at the small studio audience, drawing laughs. “It still feels unreal sometimes. I’m working more than ever. I really can’t say when I knew I’d leveled up, so to speak. Except maybe the time they removed the ‘don’t make eye contact’ rule from my contracts. I mean, I no longer had to avoid making eye contact with the stars. And I realized that meant I was one of the names in other people’s contracts, telling them they weren’t supposed to make eye contact with me.”

  “What did that feel like?”

  “It seemed so weird at first. You see people duck out of your line of sight, or they realize they caught your eye and look like you’re about to get them fired. But then I was lucky enough to be on a huge, huge film with Hyde Butler—the second one we did together. There were sometimes fifty, sixty extras in a single scene. For all of them, that’s a moment. I was thrilled to be on the same set with him, anyone would be. Who wouldn’t want a selfie or an autograph or just to say a few words? But that would totally ruin the shoot schedule if thirty-forty people did that every day.”

  “Is it true that you two were an item at one time?”

  “No truth to it whatsoever.” Jennifer smoothed the front of what looked like a velvet dress in a stunning shade of violet. There was lace all around the neckline, like something out of Jane Austen. Her thick, blue-black hair was pulled back from her face with glittery clips. To Suzanne, she was the picture of relaxation and poise, even though just doing the time math, Suzanne could imagine how grueling it had been to get to New York for the appearance last night, then up again for another one.

  The bubbly blonde was saying, “So come back after the break. Jennifer Lamont is going to give me a lesson on how to defend myself in the zombie apocalypse.” A commercial for tooth whiteners began to play.

  Her phone buzzed. Annemarie texted, “The beeyotch was on my TV while I was eating. Bet you watched.”

  She sighed. “It was on at Java Stop. Not like I could turn it off. I needed coffee.”

  The reply was quick. “We need to talk.”

  Terrific. It was a mild spring morning in San Francisco, with no sign of fog. The kind of day where she’d order in sandwiches and those who wanted to would camp out on the steps near U.N. Plaza to bask in the sunshine as they ate. Instead, she was going to get a lecture from Annemarie that she’d heard before.

  She didn’t need to hear it again. The airport had been goodbye, even if Jennifer was all over the TV and web. That would stop. Meanwhile, she should leave with her coffee and not stand around watching.

  Too late—the commercials ended and the cheerful blonde was back. The cameras were trained on the space where musical acts sometimes performed, but instead of a band set up there was a fencing practice dummy to one side. Jennifer and the host were both holding long, slightly curved weapons. The host was in a thin little short-skirted dress and wearing spindly heels. Jennifer’s dress, on the other hand, sleekly fell to midcalf where it brushed the tops of modestly-heeled leather boots. She looked even taller, and, well, damn. The outfit was demure and dangerous all at once. Was this what she wore on the TV show?

  “I’m not a real zombie killer,” Jennifer was saying. “I just play one on TV.”

  “How do you make it look so easy?”

  Jennifer sighted down the length of the blade, then casually swung it in a tight figure eight. “It’s a lot like playing tennis. You have to pay attention to blade position and angle, extend your arm while keeping in balance, and always follow through.” As she spoke, Jennifer slow-motioned her way through each action. “Put it all together and you get this.”

  She was a sudden blur, a whirl of rippling skirts and supple knees, light flashing on her blade. Suzanne knew better than anybody that Jennifer was as strong as she was graceful. She shouldn’t have been amazed to watch her spin and lunge, twirl again and then freeze, her blade a quivering inch from the practice dummy’s neck.

  It was a move Legolas would envy. Suzanne was not just amazed, she was awed.

  Her phone buzzed.

  Annemarie again. “That’s YOUR neck, dude.”

  Suzanne headed for the street, not sure why what she’d seen left her so unsettled. It wasn’t Annemarie’s suggestion that Jennifer would figuratively decapitate her again. They had no plans to see each other and that was that. It was just that Jennifer had been, for those two seconds of dervish energy, not a Jennifer that Suzanne recognized. At all.

  ACT IV

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  “Arguments against?” Suzanne glanced at the legal team’s side of the conference table. “Kay? Vara?”

  Kay made a concessionary gesture. “I’ve already said my piece. I’m not happy about the renewal clauses.”

  Vara seemed equally resigned. “You’ve heard our input. The device itself is promising but we are not in a strong enough position to reap the benefits if it becomes highly profitable.”

  Annemarie looked up from her doodling across the top of the presentation deck. “If it makes it past trial they’ve already said they’ll consider going open source. Share the patent.”

  “That may be,” Kay answered. “But those good intentions are not in this agreement. We want the world to share in this battery—”

  “Energy storage medium,” several voices from around the table corrected.

  “Energy storage medium,” Kay amended. “It’s not a battery, I really do get that. Regardless, given the level of our participation I don’t believe we’re offering enough to bring them back to the table later to honor that ideal.”

  “I tend to agree with you,” Suzanne said. “I’m afraid if we go back to them with revisions now, they’ll head to another source of capital, one that won’t even care about a more altruistic outcome down the road. At least we’ll try.”

  Manuel clicked his pen open and closed before tossing it on the table. “Let’s not act as if our own financial interests are completely secondary. I don’t think we should miss out on the profits and exposure. Period. End of story. It could be hugely good for our bottom line and it’s a great product to add to our history of picking winners.”

  Bickering broke out as it usually did. Their investment review meetings practiced creative dissent with a passion. Suzanne didn’t know if it was the baking hot weather lately or something else that had left her feeling cranky and
tired for the past few weeks. This kind of deal was what CommonTech did best, but she wanted to be anywhere but here. Maybe she ought to have teleconferenced and stayed home. A dip in the pool would be heavenly.

  Annemarie wasn’t chiming in, which wasn’t like her. Then again, she’d been trying to be less alpha female since the health scare in the spring. She detested delegating, but was practicing it more.

  Suzanne waved a hand and all the side conversations wound down. “We should go ahead. I’m going to kick this back to your team, Rosie. You’ve done a great job. I don’t see why you shouldn’t take it the rest of the way. Report back only if a magnitude of something changes. And that, my friends, is the last item on the agenda. See you all next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.”

  The room slowly cleared, but she stayed where she was because Annemarie didn’t get up either. When the door closed she asked, “What?”

  “Are you tired?”

  “I’m something. Not tired. But something.”

  “I’m wondering why we’re doing so many things the hard way.”

  Suzanne was surprised. “What do you mean?”

  “Trying to do good and run a smart, profitable business at the same time. I don’t mean we shouldn’t try. Every business should try.” Annemarie chewed on her little fingernail. “After Earth Tides failed so spectacularly, you know, we have to try harder.”

  That bruise didn’t need anyone poking it to feel sore. “And?”

  “Almost half the initiatives we back fail—because we take risks, and we should. But wrapped up in every failure is something good we hoped would come of it. So that dies too. And you know, lately, that’s been depressing the hell out of me.”

  “I think you’re on to something,” Suzanne admitted. “CommonTech is humming along the way we built it to. We now ask ourselves where the good of all humankind is for everything we do, or we try to. But it feels…unsatisfactory, I guess.”

  “When I was in the hospital, the longest three days of my life, I thought about what would be left if I’d died.”

  “You’ve contributed to a lot of change,” Suzanne protested.

  “I know.” Annemarie waved one hand dismissively. “But it’s nowhere near what I feel I could do.”

  Suzanne paced in front of the conference room windows as they talked. She knew exactly what Annemarie meant. They both worked long hours and had massive resources at their disposal. CommonTech Foundry, the company’s foundation arm, was making improvements to resources in schools. Many of the clients they’d invested in donated significant proceeds or product to underserved communities. But it still didn’t feel like enough.

  “Like Rosie’s project today,” Annemarie went on. “The urban upscale market will eat up that sleek little unit. It solves the electrical deprecation for new solar storage, increasing efficiency even in old installations. Companies like us will want the cleaner power supply and we’ll pay for it. But if our clients don’t decide to share the patent, where does that leave developing countries? They could build their own if they had the design, but they can’t afford to buy it. So they won’t. The global digital divide gets worse.”

  “Same for rural communities here at home. We’ve been after the stable power supply issue for years.” She gazed out at the South of Market skyline. The sky was low and silvery with heat. It was still ten degrees cooler here than at home in La Jolla, and it was only just past Memorial Day.

  Annemarie sighed. “Trying to do it through new innovations isn’t fast enough. Clearly, not fast enough, because here we sit, still not sure the next breakthrough will make any difference to people who couldn’t afford the last big breakthrough.”

  Suzanne went still. “What if…”

  “What?”

  “What if they could afford that last big breakthrough?”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “We buy the patents for single dwelling power storage, the ones that have the sweet spot of being both reliable and affordable, but they’re no longer sexy. Two or three generations in technology back. Then we open source them.”

  “That’s not what CommonTech does. I mean, how do we justify doing that to all of our employee owners? Spending their money for literally nothing? The stock will take a dip, which is going to wig out the analysts about our dividend projections. A lot of people count on the checks.”

  “Easy. We don’t use their money.”

  “The Foundry could do it, I suppose.”

  “No, I don’t want to deviate the foundation from its focus on education.”

  Annemarie’s eyes widened and she slowly grinned. “You mean use our money. Because we’re Two Not Broke Girls.”

  Suzanne laughed. “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Our own foundation.” Annemarie went silent for a long minute, and Suzanne knew to keep quiet. Finally she said, “We can back whatever the hell we want. Tech. Not tech. We’re free from our corporate mission.”

  “We can do big and little things. There are people I think I’d love to work with, but they’re not in tech, and I’ve let that stop me.”

  “Why can’t you and I give out some genius grants?” Annemarie was grinning as she gathered her papers. “I have tingles. I haven’t felt like this in years. Honest, Suze, I was thinking about quitting. It’s not like either of us is here for the money.”

  “It was never just about money.” With a rueful laugh she added, “But money is nice.”

  “When we were picketed after the Earth Tides investment went belly up with those huge losses, I almost got out.” Annemarie had never admitted that before. “But I thought if I took my pile of money and ran, it made what they were saying about us true.”

  “Just in it for the money. Couldn’t care less about anyone but ourselves. Yeah, I remember. Good times.” Suzanne grimaced. “Well,” she went on, “Rosie and Manuel are both ready to take on more. You take the driver’s seat of our new adventure.”

  “You really are serious, aren’t you?”

  “The idea of working on something, being hands-on? I am dead serious. I guess—lately everything feels like a game I’ve mastered and I’m still playing it over and over. No exploits left, no new high score that means anything. A grind.”

  “Are we nuts, though? This is pretty profitable grind and sometimes it is fun.”

  “No, you were right. It’s been a long time since either of us has done anything just for the money.” She broke off. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Just taking in how incredibly elitist and privileged that sounded.” Suzanne turned away from the windows. “Wow. My father’s voice just came out of my mouth. But I can hear him going all Yoda on me.”

  “There is no try,” Annemarie intoned. “Yoda is right. Let’s stop trying and do.”

  Chapter Forty

  Jennifer tucked her car under the awning behind her trailer and reluctantly turned off the air-conditioning. The set of American Zombie Hunters was baking hot, and the sun over the LA basin meant it was going to be a brutal day, and it wasn’t even summer yet. Shimmers of pent-up heat poured out of her trailer door even though it was just past six a.m.

  She tossed her bag inside, waved at the security guard, and turned gratefully toward the cooler confines of the aircraft-sized hangar where all the interior production took place. The large main doors stood open, allowing forklifts to come and go. It looked like another exterior set model was being shoehorned in with the others.

  The hangar’s interior was a maze of modular buildings ranged around the central, larger sets. Her destination was makeup and costume—a mix of trailers and portable buildings. The arrangement was like a Tetris game. Wherever it fit was the best place for it. It had taken her a week to learn her way around. She’d be saying goodbye to all of it soon with only four more days of production left on the season.

  By seven a.m. she was ready for the first series of Unit B’s takes for the day. The frequently used small interior sets, some enclosed in modulars, while o
thers too big for that ranged almost the length of the hangar’s back wall, with hallway sets on the right to create long, moving shots.

  Every set, big and small, was easily accessible to the central wheel of camera and electrical, all of which were surprisingly mobile and temporary. It was very different from her experience with movie sets, where once an electrical supply was taped down it stayed there forever.

  On the far side of the hanger, with a completely different light setup and platform, the green screen loomed. Zombies and those who hunted them could fly—who knew? There was no flying today, at least not for her. AZH was her first long-term practice at wire work, and she’d never been more grateful for dance practice and strength training at the gym.

  Today’s schedule was taxing with numerous scene changes to piece together her squad’s assault on a stronghold inside an abandoned school. The three main stationary sets were all bristling with the usual pretake activity of light checks and mise-en-scène placement.

  She’d learned to stay out of the way of the technicians. Her input was not needed, and it was part of the magic of any set that all these working parts were brimming with experienced, talented people in their own specialties.

  Her arch-enemy on the show had a script in one hand and was running through his blocking. A set carpenter was tacking down a piece of flooring over a drain. The zombie horde, about a dozen extras, was a small hum of chatter that quieted as she approached, then resumed. She gave a friendly wave in their direction.

  “Jennifer, looking ready to work and yet impossibly beautiful at this hour. As always.” Gary Dobliczek joined her at the catering table. He had a bear claw in one hand and a huge mug of coffee in the other. As usual he urged her to have a doughnut and as usual she refused. Egg whites, scrambled, with avocado and chopped tomatoes, was her working breakfast. This morning she’d had time to toast a half an English muffin. “Final countdown. How does it feel?”