Disclosure (45 page)

On the screen, Arthur Kahn coughed. “Uh, Meredith. I'm a little concerned.”

“Don't be,” Meredith said.

“But we stil aren't able to manufacture to specs. We have to replace the air handlers, at the very least. Put in better ones.”

“Not now.”

“But we have to, Meredith.”

“Not yet.”

“But those handlers are inadequate, Meredith. We both thought they'd be okay, but they aren't.”

“Never mind.”

Kahn was sweating. He rubbed his chin nervously. “It's only a matter of time before Tom figures it out, Meredith. He's not stupid, you know.”

“He'l be distracted.”

“So you say.”

“And besides, he's going to quit.”

Kahn looked startled. “He is? I don't think he-”

“Trust me. He'l quit. He's going to hate working for me.”

Sitting in Sanders's office, Fernandez leaned forward, staring at the screen. She said, “No shit.”

Kahn said, “Why wil he hate it?”

Meredith said, “Believe me. He wil . Tom Sanders wil be out in my first forty-eight hours.”

“But how can you be sure-”

“What choice does he have? Tom and I have a history. Everybody in the company knows that. If any problem comes up, nobody wil believe him. He's smart enough to understand that. If he ever wants to work again, he'l have no choice but to take whatever settlement he's offered and leave.”

Kahn nodded, wiping the sweat from his cheek. “And then we say Sanders made the changes at the plant? He'l deny that he did.”

“He won't even know. Remember. He'l be gone by then, Arthur.”

“And if he isn't?”

“Trust me. He'l be gone. He's married, has a family. He'l go.”

“But if he cal s 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 wil be repaid in the future.”

“Yes, Meredith.”

“That's al .”

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 eventual y 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 cal 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'l 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'l 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 stand-alone CD-ROM drive player which we expect to be revolutionary.” He turned to the first of his charts. “CD-ROM is a smal 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 smal disk, or, thanks to our research here, an hour and a half of video. And any combination. For example, you could make a textbook that combines text, pictures, short movie sequences, animated cartoons, and so on. Production costs wil soon be at ten cents a unit.”

He looked down the table. The Conley-White people were interested. Garvin was frowning. Meredith looked tense.

“But for CD-ROM to be effective, two things need to happen. First, we need a portable player. Like this.” He held up the player, and then passed it down the Conley-White side.

“A five-hour battery, and an excel ent screen. You can use it on a train, a bus, or in a classroom-anywhere you can use a book.”

The executives looked at it, turned it over in their hands. Then they looked back at Sanders.

“The other problem with CD-ROM technology,” Sanders said, “is that it's slow. It's sluggish getting to al that wonderful data. But the Twinkle drives that we have successful y made in prototype are twice as fast as any other drive in the world.

And with added memory for our packing and unpacking images, it is as quick as a smal computer. We expect to get the unit cost for these drives down to the price of a video-game unit within a year. And we are manufacturing the drives now. We have had some early problems, but we are solving them.”

Meredith said, “Can you tel us more about that? I gather from talking to Arthur Kahn that we're stil not clear on why the drives have problems.”

“Actual y, we are,” Sanders said. “It turns out that the problems aren't serious at al . I expect them to be entirely resolved in a matter of days.”

“Real y.” She raised her eyebrows. “Then we've found what the trouble is?”

“Yes, we have.”

“That's wonderful news.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Very good news indeed,” Ed Nichols said. “Was it a design problem?”

“No,” Sanders said. “There's nothing wrong with the design we made here, just as there was nothing wrong with the prototypes. What we have is a fabrication problem involving the production line in Malaysia.”

“What sort of problems?”

“It turns out,” Sanders said, “that we don't have the proper equipment on the line.

We should be using automatic chip instal ers to lock the control er chips and the RAM cache on the board, but the Malays on the line have been instal ing chips by hand. Literal y pushing them in with their thumbs. And it turns out that the assembly line is dirty, so we're getting particulate matter in the split optics. We should have level-seven air handlers, but we only have level-five handlers instal ed. And it turns out that we should be ordering components like hinge rods and clips from one very reliable Singapore supplier, but the components are actual y coming from another supplier. Less expensive, less reliable.”

Meredith looked uneasy, but only for a moment. “Improper equipment, improper conditions, improper components . . .” She shook her head. “I'm sorry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you set up that line, Tom?”

“Yes, I did,” Sanders said. “I went out to Kuala Lumpur last fal and set it up with Arthur Kahn and the local foreman, Mohammed Jafar.”

“Then how is it that we have so many problems?”

“Unfortunately, there was a series of bad judgment cal s in setting up the line.”

Meredith looked concerned. “Tom, we al know that you're extremely competent.

How could this have happened?”

Sanders hesitated.

This was the moment.

“It happened because the line was changed,” he said. “The specifications were altered.”

“Altered? How?”

“I think that's something for you to explain to this group, Meredith,” he said.

“Since you ordered the changes.”

“I ordered them?”

“That's right, Meredith.”

“Tom, you must be mistaken,” she said cool y. “I haven't had anything to do with that Malaysia line.”

“Actual y, you have,” Sanders said. “You made two trips there, in November and December of last year.”

“Two trips to Kuala Lumpur, yes. Because you mishandled a labor dispute with the Malaysian government. I went there and resolved the dispute. But I had nothing to do with the actual production line.”

“I'd say you're mistaken, Meredith.”

“I assure you,” she said coldly. “I am not. I had nothing to do with the line, and any so-cal ed changes.”

“Actual y, you went there and inspected the changes you ordered.”

“I'm sorry, Tom. I didn't. I've never even seen the actual line.”

On the screen behind her, the videotape of the newscast began to play silently with the sound off. The newscaster in coat and tie speaking to the camera.

Sanders said, “You never went to the plant itself?”

“Absolutely not, Tom. I don't know who could have told you such a thing or why you would say it now.”

The screen behind the newscaster showed the DigiCom building in Malaysia, then the interior of the plant. The camera showed the production lines and an official inspection tour taking place. They saw Phil Blackburn, and alongside him, Meredith Johnson. The camera moved in on her as she chatted with one of the workers.

There was a murmur in the room.

Meredith spun around and looked. “This is outrageous. This is out of context. I don't know where this could have come from-”

“Malaysia Channel Three. Their version of the BBC. I'm sorry, Meredith.” The newscast segment finished and the screen went blank. Sanders made a gesture, and Cindy began moving around the table, handing a manila folder to each person.

Meredith said, “Wherever this so-cal ed tape came from-”

Sanders said, “Ladies and gentlemen, if you wil open your packets, you wil find the first of a series of memos from the Operations Review Unit, which was under the direction of Ms. Johnson in the period in question. I direct your attention to the first memo, dated November eighteenth of last year. You wil notice that it has been signed by Meredith Johnson, and it stipulates that the line wil be changed to accommodate the labor demands of the Malay government. In particular, this first memo states that automated chip instal ers wil not be included, but that this work wil be done by hand. That made the Malay government happy, but it meant we couldn't manufacture the drives.”

Johnson said, “But you see, what you are overlooking is that the Malays gave us no choice-”

“In that case, we should never have built the plant there,” Sanders said, cutting her off. “Because we can't manufacture the intended product at those revised specifications. The tolerances are inadequate.”

Johnson said, “Wel , that may be your own opinion-”

“The second memo, dated December third, indicates that a cost-savings review diminished air-handling capacities on the line. Again, this is a variance in the specifications that I established. Again, it is critical-we can't manufacture high-performance drives under these conditions. The long and the short of it is that these decisions doomed the drives to failure.”

“Now look,” Johnson said. “If anybody believes that the failure of these drives is anything but your-”

“The third memo,” Sanders said, “summarizes cost savings from the Operations Review Unit. You'l see that it claims an eleven percent reduction in operating costs. That savings has already been wiped out by fabrication delays, not counting our time-to-market delay costs. Even if we immediately restore the line, this eleven percent savings translates into a production cost increase, over the run, of nearly seventy percent. First year, it's a hundred and ninety percent increase.

“Now the next memo,” Sanders said, “explains why this cost-cutting was adopted in the first place. During acquisition talks between Mr. Nichols and Ms. Johnson in the fal of last year, Ms. Johnson indicated she would demonstrate that it was possible to reduce high-technology development costs, which were a source of concern to Mr. Nichols when they were meeting at-”

“Oh Christ,” Ed Nichols said, staring at the paper.

Meredith pushed forward, stepping in front of Sanders. “Excuse me, Tom,” she said, speaking firmly, “but I real y must interrupt you. I'm sorry to have to say this, but no one here is fooled by this little charade.” She swept her arm wide, encompassing the room. “Or by your so-cal ed evidence.” She spoke more loudly. “You weren't present when these management decisions were careful y taken by the best minds in this company. You don't understand the thinking that lies behind them. And the false postures you are striking now, the so-cal ed memos that you are holding up to convince us . . . No one here is persuaded.”