But Sir Neal’s wiki page made him out to be the opposite of Caroline’s assumptions. She spent three hours in the enormous Victorian expanse of the college’s library reading the billionaire’s background and profile. First of all, he was seventy-six, more than twenty years older than Caroline’s outside estimate. He came from nothing in what amounted to the lower middle class in India. Or was that lower middle caste?
Born Neelam Harshadvarnum Guhathakurta, he began working as a telephone lineman in Hyderabad and eventually started his own private contracting firm doing work for the government post office that oversaw India’s infant phone service. By the Eighties, he was CEO and owner of a multi-national communications and entertainment empire under the umbrella of Gallant Ltd. He made nickels and dimes bringing phone, satellite, and cable service to the poorest corners of Asia and Africa.
Lots of nickels and dimes. Lots of rupees.
By the Nineties, he had the position and the capital to go all-in on web-based businesses and services, and his fortune built exponentially. He currently owned controlling interests in hundreds of tech companies, including search engines and word-processing programs for languages as varied as Hindi and Hmong, film and television production companies, real estate, construction, shipping, and energy.
There was scant information on his private life beyond the fact that he was very generous with charitable funds from a dozen foundations with offices all around the world. Not a word about parents or relatives other than wives and children. Nothing in his background displayed any kind of interest in the high sciences or even a curiosity about scientific applications beyond how they applied to profit generation. Even the technology he owned was merely purchased by him or created by brilliant and talented men and women under his employ.
What was his interest in Caroline’s work? Or in Morris’?
He left her no business card. She had no idea how to reach him. But she wanted to at least speak to him and assure him that her theories were provable, and she was fully committed to them. The fact that he had the last word, this jumped-up little manipulating smarty-pants, galled her and she would not allow it. As a know-it-all herself she was always rankled by other know-it-alls. She would tell him in no uncertain terms that she was not for sale and neither was her brother, and she wished that, if he was seeking to prove her life’s work wrong, he could buy his help elsewhere.
Caroline called the general number for his London offices and fully expected a runaround after being asked politely to remain on hold. She was taken aback when Sir Neal himself came on the line within twenty seconds.
“Ms. Tauber, I was hoping you would phone.”
He sounded pleased to hear from her in an open and friendly way that blunted the outrage she’d worked so hard to torque up before calling.
“Were you?” was all she could manage.
“I deeply apologize for offending you. It was not my intention. The one facet of scientific minds that I always fail to take into account is the passion you feel for what, to all of us unenlightened, appear to be only cold, sterile calculations. I wished only to offer a playful challenge. Believe me when I say that I deeply believe in your work and am prepared to make my commitment clear to you in a very tangible way.”
Listening to him, she could fully understand how he brought himself up from stringing line under the equatorial sun to a suite of offices overlooking the Thames.
“I have only one question for you, Sir Neal,” she said.
“Please,” he answered.
“Why would you be willing to spend potentially millions on my wild theories?”
“Curiosity,” he said without hesitation. That was enough for her.
“And you bought that?” Dwayne said.
“I know now it was bullshit,” Caroline said. “I know now that Morris and I were used. Harnesh held all our dreams out in front of us and gave us a chance to prove our life’s work.”
The sun had gone down behind the Rockies, and they ordered pizzas up to the room. Jimbo was napping on one of the beds, a can of Coors precariously balanced on his chest.
“People like us live on grants and gifts,” Morris said. “Here was a guy willing to foot the whole bill with no end of funding and no hard deadlines.”
“So, why boot you when your work proved itself out?” Chaz said.
“I can’t figure that one out for the life of me,” Caroline said. “If he was going to take the Tauber Tube away from us, there’d be a transition period. We never even presented our results or provided a demonstration. We can’t even publish now without access to the Tube and the permission of the Gallant Corporation.”
“And he’s still interested in your work,” Dwayne said. “He bothered to cart it all off.”
“Who built the compound for you?” Jimbo said without opening his eyes.
“Sir Neal hired local contractors,” Morris said. “They built the huts to our specifications. The Tesla Tower we put up ourselves as well as shielding the reactor building and burying the Tube chamber in dirt to insulate it. Parviz and Quebat did all that.”
“And where are our runaway Iranian friends?” Dwayne asked.
Parviz and Quebat were Iranian nationals brought into the country illegally to run and maintain the baby nuclear reactor that powered the Tauber Tube project. When the project was shut down the pair had cut a hole in the side of the container building and loaded the reactor onto a semi and took it who knows where.
“I have contact with them through a throwaway cell they gave me before they left,” Caroline said. “I don’t know where they are, and I don’t ask.”
“Why’d you ask about who built the compound?” Chaz
