• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The engineer said that would be fine. “Good,” Rick answered. He went on, “Larry wanted you to know he’s having a problem retrieving his email. Instead of sending the stuff to his regular account, he arranged with the hotel’s business center to set up a Yahoo mail account for him. He says you should send the files to larryrobotics@yahoo.com.”

The following Monday morning, when Larry walked into the office looking tanned and relaxed, Jessica was primed and eager to gush over Rick. “What a great guy. He took a bunch of us to lunch, even me.” Larry looked confused. “Rick? Who the hell is Rick?”

“What’re you talking about?—your new business partner.”

“What!!!???”

“And everybody was so impressed with what good questions he asked.”

“I don’t know any Rick ...”

“What’s the matter with you? Is this a joke, Larry—you’re just fooling with me, right?”

“Get the executive team into the conference room. Like now. No matter what they’re doing. And everybody who was at that lunch. Including you.”

They sat around the table in a somber mood, hardly speaking. Larry walked in, sat down and said, “I do not know anybody named Rick. I do not have a new business partner I’ve been keeping secret from all of you. Which I would have thought was obvious. If there’s a practical joker in our midst, I want him to speak up now.”

Not a sound. The room seemed to be growing darker moment by moment.

Finally Brian spoke. “Why didn’t you say something when I sent you that email with the product specs and source code?”

“What email!?”

Brian stiffened. “Oh ... shit!”

Cliff, the other engineer, chimed in. “He gave us all business cards. We just need to call him and see what the hell’s going on.”

Brian pulled Out his palmtop, called up an entry, and scooted the device across the table to Larry. Still hoping against hope, they all watched as if entranced while Larry dialed. After a moment, he stabbed the speakerphone button and everyone heard a busy signal. After trying the number several times over a period of twenty minutes, a frustrated Larry dialed the operator to ask for an emergency interruption.

A few moments later, the operator came back on the line. She said in a challenging tone, “Sir, where did you get this number?” Larry told her it was on the business card of a man he needed to contact urgently. The operator, said, “I’m sorry. That’s a phone company test number. It always rings busy.”

Larry started making a list of what information had been shared with Rick. The picture was not pretty.

Two police detectives came and took a report. After listening to the story, they pointed out that no state crime had been committed; there was nothing they could do. They advised Larry to contact the FBI because they have jurisdiction over any crimes involving interstate commerce. When Rick Daggot asked the engineer to forward the test results by misrepresenting himself, he may have committed a federal crime, but Rick would have to speak with the FBI to find out.

Three months later Larry was in his kitchen reading the morning paper over breakfast, and almost spilled his coffee. The thing he had been dreading since he had first heard about Rick had come true, his worst nightmare. There it was in black and white, on the front page of the business section: A company he’d never heard of was announcing the release of a new product that sounded exactly like the C2Alpha his company had been developing for the past two years.

Through deceit, these people had beaten him to market. His dream was destroyed. The millions of dollars invested in research and development wasted. And he probably couldn’t prove a single thing against them.

Sammy Sanford’s Story

Smart enough to be earning a big salary at a legitimate job, but crooked enough to prefer making a living as a con man, Sammy Sanford had done very well for himself. In time he came to the attention of a spy who had been forced into early retirement because of a drinking problem; bitter and revengeful, the man had