thought of them like that at the time, always trivialized the significance of anything suspicious that crossed her desk — could be routinely explained away.
'Well, I'm sure that's his reputation among sour-grapes competitors, and his adversaries in protracted political battles,' Kirsten said, more sharply than she'd intended. Charming as he was, Max's cockiness had irritated her. 'Otherwise…'
'Actually, I was thinking of the class-action lawsuit against him a couple of years back,' Max said. 'You remember it?'
As one among an army of publicists who'd worked to stem the tide of bad press arising from that affair, Kirsten had remembered it all too well. Because Caine's new operating system was second only to Microsoft Windows in popularity — and catching up fast — it was common practice for software manufacturers to provide Monolith with pre-release versions of their products for compatibility trials. This was a mutually beneficial, even crucial, arrangement, since an operating system was useless without programs that could run within its graphic environment, and a program was dead on the shelf unless supported by one of the three standard operating systems.
The problems occurred when Monolith began patenting and marketing software that the developers claimed was nearly identical to the beta programs they'd sent out for evaluation. Their charge was that Caine's techies had lifted their intellectual properties, made minor changes to their graphic interfaces and proprietary architecture, and then stamped a Monolith logo on the retail packaging. In essence, that Monolith had rapaciously stolen their products and sold them as its own.
Sitting across from Max in the restaurant, Kirsten had put down her glass and leaned forward, her arms folded on the table.
'You certainly must know the matter was resolved out of court,' she said.
'With a huge cash settlement from Caine.'
'That isn't the same thing as an admission of guilt.
When you're a public figure, it's sometimes worth a great deal to get an issue out of the spotlight. Especially when the alternative is to let it drag on and become an impossible distraction.'
Max had spread his hands. 'There are other bones to pick with Caine. His flagrant disregard of the OECD anti-bribery convention, for instance.'
'You just said it yourself, Max,' she said. 'It's an international convention, not a formal treaty. Meaning that it has no teeth. It's hardly a crime or a sin for Marcus Caine to exploit the gutlessness of its signatories… especially the French and Germans, who until last year were giving tax deductions to companies that exchanged cash payoffs for foreign contracts.'
She paused, took a breath. 'For God's sake, I'm not going to sit here and defend everything my boss does professionally. Nor can I vouch for what he's like personally. But he's the first man to own a truly interactive cable television network with affiliates on four continents, which makes him an entrepreneurial genius from my standpoint. If his competitive methods are occasionally ruthless, than so be it. What counts to me is that they're legal—'
'Or at least have never been conclusively proven to be illegal'
'— and that he pays his employees very, very well,' she'd gone on, speaking right through his interruption.
'I'd point out that there's real merit to the old cliche about money not being everything, but that would be kind of a cliche in itself,' Max said. He gave her a tight smile. 'Wouldn't it?'
She looked at him with an odd mixture of consternation and amusement.
'Tell me, Max,' she said. 'Do you extend your services to UpLink for free? Troubleshooting around the world like a knight errant in Roger Gordian's holy crusade to link all of humanity with cellular phones and wireless faxes?'
If not for Max's frank, earnest look, what he'd said next might have caught her altogether by surprise. As it was, it instantly made her regret her sarcasm.
'Roger Gordian is a great man, and I would lay down my life to protect him,' he'd said simply.
Whammo.
Now, looking back at that night, she recalled nearly being blown off her seat by those words. Somehow, their incredible strength and conviction bulldozed through her remaining emotional barriers, and caused her feelings for him — feelings she'd believed, or wanted to believe, consisted overwhelmingly of physical desire — of lust, leaving aside the delicate frills and flowers — to soar toward honest-to-God romantic love at warp speed. That had been a new and startling emotion for her, and she hadn't quite known how to handle—
A voice from the doorway suddenly intruded on her thoughts. ' Wah! Excuse me, Miss Chu. Thought everybody go home. Come back later or not?'
Kirsten had identified the cleaning woman by her Singlish even before she looked up to see her head poking through the door. When she'd first returned to Singapore after completing her education at Oxford, Kirsten's ears had been forced to undergo a crash readjustment to the local patois, an idiosyncratic hodgepodge of English, Hokiien Chinese, and Indian phrases that jangled unharmoniously in the air wherever she went, and seemed especially favored by working-class immigrants from neighboring islands and the Philippines.
Perhaps, she thought wryly, this was because they enjoyed watching upscale kiasu suffer migraine attacks while deciphering the latest term that had been added to the mix.
'No, Lin, that's okay.' She clicked her computer into its preset shutdown routine and turned it off. 'I was just wrapping up here.'
The door opened wider and Lin clattered in with her cart.
'Why you work so late, lah? Is Friday night, should go out, get away from office.' She winked. 'Where your handsome American?'
Kirsten smiled, reached for her briefcase, and put the CD-R into an interior pocket — right beside the digital audio recorder on which Max would find a little something extra that was bound to make him ecstatic.
'Actually, the handsome American and I are planning to meet at his hotel and then dance away the night at Harry's,' she said. And, as far as she was concerned, drink it away too. After turning the information she'd uncovered over to Max, information that might bring down a company that had been more than generous to her with its professional advancements, and that the group-centered Eastern traditionalist in her insisted was deserving of her loyalty, come hell or high water, she would need a whole lot of something potent to wash away the bad taste in her mouth.
'You have nice time,' Lin said, a grin breaking across her broad face. 'Promise tell me about it Monday, lah?'
Kirsten snapped her briefcase shut.
'As much as I can without shaming myself,' she said.
Blackburn hastened up Scotts Road toward the Hyatt, his shoes slapping the pavement, navigating his way through thick city traffic, hordes of department store shoppers, and countless tired and slightly buzzed office workers making their post-cocktail-hour migrations home. It was seven o'clock in the evening, but the sun was only beginning to lose some of its solid-feeling intensity. Perspiring heavily, his shirt already wet as a sponge, he felt in desperate need of a shower… ah, yes, great way to start the weekend. Worse, he had arranged to meet Kirsten at six, and while he had called her on his cell phone to let her know he'd be late, it bothered him that he was running even later than anticipated. That she would be alone with the hottest of hot potatoes in her possession, waiting for him to show and take it from her hands.
She deserved better from him.
Most frustrating for Blackburn was the fact that he had started out with ample time to spare, having caught a lift to the bus terminal in Johor Bahru with a member of his security team, and then hopped the JB-Singapore express heading across the causeway. In the past, he'd found this to be a fast and hassle-free means of transportation from the mainland — far better than driving one of the company Land Rovers — since the buses had their own designated lanes and normally bypassed the customs posts where trucks and automobiles would get bottlenecked for lengthy stretches of time. However, tonight everything on the bridge, including public and private buses, had been subjected to exhaustive checkpoint procedures, causing delays in both directions. And though no one conducting the inspections had bothered to explain the reason they were taking place, many of his fellow passengers were convinced they were tied to the Kuan Yin affair that had been monopolizing the news broadcasts
