Hot Shot

Others are going to take years.'

Dates and numbers spun like a roulette wheel in Susannah's head. They had charts that were amazingly accurate at predicting computer-use time. At best, they had only a few months to prepare. Once again, she began to think aloud. 'We can handle the recall. It'll be expensive-it'll definitely hurt-but it won't kill the company.'

'Susannah's right,' Mitch said. 'We can set up some sort of centralized system. Move a few hundred of our people into temporary service positions and send them out into the field. Thank God it's just one chip. We take out the old one, plug in the new one. We can do it.'

Sam hunched his shoulders and turned his back to them.

Yank's voice was strained. 'No. No, I'm afraid we can't. Come here and take a look.'

With a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, Susannah got up from the arm of the couch and walked to the workbench. Mitch fell into step beside her. Sam stayed where he was with his back turned away from them. Whatever Yank was about to show them, Sam had already seen.

Susannah gazed down into the orderly, internal world of the Blaze III. Its microchips were laid out like rows of miniature houses on the neat little village streets of the green printed circuit board. With the tip of a pair of long- nosed pliers, Yank singled out one microchip. Susannah leaned forward to take a look.

'This is the bad chip,' Yank said. 'Look. It's soldered. The chip is permanently soldered to the board.' He paused a moment, giving his words time to sink in. 'We can't do a simple little chip swap. This particular part was designed to be permanent. That means we have to replace the whole circuit board on every Blaze HI we've ever made.'

Susannah's bones seemed to have lost the ability to support her. She felt as if she had just been punched in the belly. They couldn't afford to replace the circuit board on every machine they had manufactured. The cost would be prohibitive.

They didn't look at each other. Susannah stared down at the circuit board, Mitch at the litter of tools on the workbench. Silence ticked away like a doomsday clock. All of them knew that Yank had just pronounced their death sentence.

Chapter 28

The four of them sat silently around Angela's kitchen table. Mitch held his reading glasses between his fingers and folded one stem in and out. Sam rolled an empty can of Coke between his open palms. Susannah rubbed her right temple with the pad of her thumb. She had just done the unthinkable. She had made the phone call that shut down the Blaze HI assembly line.

Yank stared off into space. He had taken himself to a place so far away he might not have been with them at all.

Mitch finally spoke. 'I can't even conceive of how many hundreds of millions this is going to cost.'

No one said anything. Even a giant company like IBM or FBT would have difficulty recovering from this sort of financial catastrophe, and a young company like SysVal simply didn't stand a chance.

Susannah's hand curled into a fist. If only some of the III's had been bad, they could have handled it, but the fact that the machines they had shipped last week, yesterday, the ones that had come off the line that very morning-the fact that all of them were bad-made the situation so hopeless her mind could barely absorb it.

Yank slowly re-entered their world. 'Who wrote the bad code?'

The Coke can slapped between Sam's palms. 'I don't know for sure. My guess is that it was one of the engineers who was working on the instructions for the chip. A guy named Ed Fiella. He only worked for us about six months, then he quit.'

'Did you try to find him?'

'Yeah, but he disappeared, so I let it go. I couldn't ask too many questions or people would have been able to figure out that something was wrong.'

'No one else knows about this?' Mitch asked sharply.

Sam shook his head. 'Until today, I was the only one who had all the pieces.'

Susannah rubbed the pulse in her temple. 'How could you keep something like this secret?'

'I used a couple of independent engineers in Boston to run a few tests, some guys in Atlanta-people who weren't likely to bump into each other while they were out jogging. And I didn't let any of them know this involved anything more than a couple of prototypes.'

Yank looked searchingly at Sam. 'You realize that these failures aren't accidental. Everything happens too specifically. The machine works for a thousand hours and then it stops. And when it fails, it does it spectacularly. All that noise-the disk drive banging. That's too bizarre to be accidental.'

'You're saying someone-this Fiella, probably-deliberately planted a bug in the ROM chip?' Susannah asked.

Sam nodded. 'Just five lines of code, but that's all it took.'

'We have so many checks and balances built into our procedures,' she said. 'A test team, code reviews among the engineers. How could this happen?'

'Maybe Fiella somehow managed to switch the listings at the last minute.' Sam walked to the refrigerator and pulled out another Coke. 'You know, I'm almost glad you found out. I was getting tired of having all of you look at me like I was Benedict Arnold or somebody.'

Mitch slipped his glasses back on. 'This is why you started pressuring the board to sell the company.'

'If Databeck buys SysVal,' Sam said, 'the board swap is their problem. We're out clean and we have the money in our pockets to start a new company. Databeck is a big conglomerate. The loss will hurt them, but they can stand it.'

'There are laws against that kind of thing,' Susannah said wearily. 'Once those machines start to die, they'll sue us for fraud.'

Sam slammed his unopened Coke can down on the counter. 'No they won't. That's the beauty. It'll be months before we see anything more than a few isolated failures, and I haven't left any loose ends. They couldn't even come close to proving that we had any previous knowledge of the defect.'

Susannah dropped her eyes to the tabletop. 'So we dump the company on them, take the money, and run.'

'Something like that,' Sam replied with a shrug.

She looked up from the table and stared him straight in the eye. 'That's shit, Sam. That's really shit.'

He gave her the black scowl he always used whenever she uttered a vulgarity. She looked away in disgust.

Mitch's tone was cool and impersonal. 'We at least need to discuss the possibility of selling out to Databeck.'

Susannah felt a prickling along the back of her neck, and she turned toward him angrily. 'The only way Databeck will buy SysVal is if we don't tell them about the bug.'

'They have a lot more resources than we do,' he said calmly. 'There's a slim possibility that they could save SysVal. We already know that we can't.'

Her skin felt cold. Mitch was going to betray her, too. Her friend had become a stranger. She thought she knew him so well, but she hadn't known him at all. Feeling as if she had just lost something precious, she turned toward Yank. When she spoke, her voice trembled. 'Yank, what do you think?'

He returned to her from a very distant place. His eyes met hers and his expression was deeply troubled. For a moment he did nothing, and then he gently, almost accidentally, brushed the tips of her fingers with his own. They tingled slightly, as if she had been touched by a greater power. 'I'm sorry, Susannah,' he said softly. 'I'm still processing the information. I'm sorry, but I'm not ready to offer an opinion yet.'

'I see.'

'I'm not offering an opinion, either,' Mitch said firmly. 'I'm merely pointing out that we need to discuss all the options.'

She didn't believe him. Mitch was a black-ink man, a homebred, bottom-line capitalist. They could discuss all