Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [148]
Kahn nodded, wiping the sweat from his cheek. “And then we say Sanders made the changes at the plant? He’ll deny that he did.”
“He won’t even know. Remember. He’ll be gone by then, Arthur.”
“And if he isn’t?”
“Trust me. He’ll be gone. He’s married, has a family. He’ll go.”
“But if he calls me about the production line—”
“Just evade it, Arthur. Be mystified. You can do that, I’m sure. Now, who else does Sanders talk to there?”
“The foreman, sometimes. Jafar. Jafar knows everything, of course. And he’s one of those honest sorts. I’m afraid if—”
“Make him take a vacation.”
“He just took one.”
“Make him take another one, Arthur. I only need a week here.”
“Jesus,” Kahn said. “I’m not sure—”
She cut in: “Arthur.”
“Yes, Meredith.”
“This is the time when a new vice president counts favors that will be repaid in the future.”
“Yes, Meredith.”
“That’s all.”
The screen went blank. There were white streaking video lines, and then the screen was dark.
“Pretty cut and dried,” Fernandez said.
Sanders nodded. “Meredith didn’t think the changes would matter, because she didn’t know anything about production. She was just cutting costs. But she knew that the changes at the plant would eventually be traced back to her, so she thought she had a way to get rid of me, to make me quit the company. And then she would be able to blame me for the problems at the plant.”
“And Kahn went along with it.”
Sanders nodded.
“And they got rid of Jafar.”
Sanders nodded. “Kahn told Jafar to go visit his cousin in Johore for a week—to get out of town. To make it impossible for me to reach Jafar. But he never thought that Jafar would call me.” He glanced at his watch. “Now, where is it?”
“What?”
On the screen, there was a series of tones, and they saw a handsome, dark-skinned newscaster at a desk, facing a camera and speaking rapidly in a foreign language.
“What’s this?” Fernandez said.
“The Channel Three evening news, from last December.” Sanders got up and pushed a button on the tape machine. The cassette popped out.
“What does it show?”
Cindy came back from the copying machine with wide eyes. She carried a dozen stacks of paper, each neatly clipped. “What’re you going to do with this?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“But this is outrageous, Tom. What she’s done.”
“I know,” he said.
“Everybody is talking,” she said. “The word is that the merger is off.”
“We’ll see,” Sanders said.
With Cindy’s help, he began arranging the piles of paper in identical manila folders.
Fernandez said, “What exactly are you going to do?”
“Meredith’s problem is that she lies,” Sanders said. “She’s smooth, and she gets away with it. She’s gotten away with it her whole life. I’m going to see if I can get her to make a single, very big lie.”
He looked at his watch. It was eight forty-five.
The meeting would start in fifteen minutes.
The conference room was packed. There were fifteen Conley-White executives down one side of the table, with John Marden in the middle, and fifteen DigiCom executives down the other side, with Garvin in the middle.
Meredith Johnson stood at the head of the table and said, “Next, we’ll hear from Tom Sanders. Tom, I wonder if you could review for us where we stand with the Twinkle drive. What is the status of our production there.”
“Of course, Meredith.” Sanders stood, his heart pounding. He walked to the front of the room. “By way of background, Twinkle is our code name for a standalone CD-ROM drive player which we expect to be revolutionary.” He turned to the first of his charts. “CD-ROM is a small laser disk used to store data. It is cheap to manufacture, and can hold an enormous amount of information in any form—words, images, sound, video, and so on. You can put the equivalent of six hundred books on a single small disk, or, thanks to our research here, an hour and a half of video. And any combination. For example,