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  The American, Max Blackburn, didn't stand a chance.

  No more than the crew of the ship had stood one…

  Not the slightest chance in the world.

  Chapter Two

  PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA

  SEPTEMBER 15, 2000

  When Roger Gordian was thirteen years old, he built a tree house in a scrub lot where he'd often gone to play with his friends. As originally conceived, it was to have been a lookout against adults who came within homing range, and a refuge from older children who were potential troublemakers. He'd sketched out the blueprint for it himself, and realized those plans with the help of his two best pals: Steve Padaetz, his next-door neighbor, and Johnny Cowans, a fidgety little kid who'd been nicknamed "Clip" for no reason anybody could remember. At one point, Roger had considered fortifying their tree house against marauders with a ring of elaborate booby traps, but none of the dozen or so he devised ever got beyond the planning stage. Truth be known, the boys hadn't really expected a raid of any kind — that had just been a fanciful notion, something to enhance their frolics with a tingly edge of secrecy and adventure. There were very few kids in the neighborhood whom they considered enemies, and even fewer who were interested enough in their whereabouts or activities to hassle them.

  Or so the boys thought, anyway.

  The ladder and tools they'd used to construct the tree house had come from Roger's parents' garage. Steve had gotten the actual building materials from the hardware store/lumberyard owned by his dad, although Roger never really got around to asking whether they were obtained with Mr. Padaetz's knowledge or consent. Somehow it didn't seem important at the time; the boys had needed little to complete their hideaway besides some two-by-fours, a few sheets of wood siding, and a box of nails, the unexplained absence of which would hardly have been enough to put Padaetz Home Improvements, the biggest family-owned business in Waterford, Wisconsin, on the financial skids.

  The Sentry Box, as the tree house came to be called, had been at the center of the three boys' lives for an entire summer, beginning shortly after they got their final-quarter sixth-grade report cards, and ending a couple of weeks before the opening bells of junior high rang out. During the two hot, dreamy months that stretched between, they had idled away the daylight hours in and around it, swapping baseball cards and comic books and bad dirty jokes, poking around the woods, and conducting fruitless searches for the Indian arrowheads that, at least as schoolyard mythology had it, littered the undeveloped fields of Racine County.

  Sometime in late August, the boys had started fashioning what was to have been an outdoor gymnasium in the patch of grass directly below the tree house, using some additional lumber they'd managed to scavenge together over the long season. There were still two weeks to go before classes resumed, and they figured they had over a month beyond that until the weather got too cold for them to mess around outdoors after completing their homework and chores. They had built horizontal and parallel bars, and begun work on an exercise horse… but their expansion was abruptly aborted when the raid they'd once half-worried about became a devastating reality.

  The kids — teenagers, really — responsible for marring that idyllic period were Ed Kozinski, Kenny Whitman, and Anthony Piatt, who was Kenny's third cousin and bore an attitude of perpetual, surly belligerence that marked him as someone to avoid at all costs. Perhaps two years older than Roger and his friends, this ghastly trio had never before taken the slightest notice of them, concentrating instead on acts of petty vandalism, finding ways to filch beer and cigarettes from local groceries, and making crude advances to girls who, by and large, pretended they didn't exist. Somehow Anthony had learned about the tree house, and had gotten the idea that those girls might be more accepting of him and his cohorts if they had a nice, private, tucked-away spot where they could all go to get drunk and make out.

  The moment that thought reared itself from the bottom sludge of Anthony's mind, the Sentry Box was effectively lost to the younger boys; they had wandered out to the tree house one morning and found Kenny and company occupying it like counterparts from some science-fictional negative universe. Their outdoor gym-in-the-making had been ruined, the pieces of wood they'd used to build their apparatus scattered about the field. The words "Jive Palase" were spray-painted across two sides of the tree house in huge, bright red letters, the second half of its new name unintentionally misspelled in what would have been a comical twist had the circumstances surrounding it not been so painful. To Roger Gordian, it felt almost like a desecration.

  Watching Roger and his companions from the entrance, Anthony sat with his legs swung out over the side of the box, a Parliament in his hand and a contemptuous grin on his face. The comics, trading cards, and everything else Roger's group had hoarded inside it had been unceremoniously dumped, and lay among the welter of beer bottles, empty potato chip bags, candy wrappers, and crumpled cigarette packs on the ground beneath it.

  Roger and company barely had time to register what had happened before they were pelted with a fusillade of stones from their own lookout post. They had briefly considered taking a desperate stand against the invaders, but then one of those whizzing rocks had struck Clip dead center in his forehead and he'd dropped into the dirt, howling at the top of his lungs, blood streaming into his eyes from a wound that would later require four stitches and a tetanus shot. Roger had known then that he'd been beaten; worse, he had known it was no contest, and felt crushingly ashamed of his defenselessness. The other boys were bigger, meaner, and tougher than anybody in his little group. And they had been ready and waiting for a fight.

  As Kenny's gang had begun climbing down the tree after them, Roger and Johnny had helped Clip to his feet and fled the scene.

  It had been Gordian's first experience with a hostile takeover, and four decades and change later, the memory still stung.

  That the sting seemed especially acute tonight was quite understandable, given the distressing little bulletin his visitor had just delivered from the Wall Street front.

  "We went back there maybe two, three months later," he said now, finishing his story. "By then Kenny and his parents had moved out of town, and his cousin was, I don't know, just sort of neutralized without him. Anyway, we returned and found the tree house destroyed, same way the gym had been. Boards sticking out of the snow, nothing intact. I don't know if it had been deliberately trashed, or if the numbskulls that moved in on us brought it down out of carelessness and stupidity. Doesn't matter, I suppose. What does matter, and what still bugs me whenever I remember this sorry little episode, is that I surrendered the tree house to those punks in the first place. Let them take something that was mine, something I'd built from scratch, without a fight."

  Charles Kirby looked at Gordian a while, and then drank some of his scotch and soda. It was nine o'clock at night and he was exhausted and jet-lagged after a long flight from New York. Still, he had joined Roger in the book-lined study of his Palo Alto home because he'd felt the news he was carrying was too important to wait until morning.

  Gord not only paid the law firm of Fisk, Kirby, and Towland a handsome retainer for their advice and representation in corporate affairs, he was also a close personal friend. When Kirby had learned that the Spartus consortium, UpLink International's largest shareholder, intended to sell off its twenty-percent interest in the company, he'd immediately known what it augured, and had decided to fly out and tell Gordian about it face-to-face.

  Studying Gordian's troubled features, he knew he'd made the right decision. A lean, graying man of forty-five with intelligent blue eyes, jutting cheekbones, and lips so thin that even his broadest smiles seemed wan, Kirby was wearing a dark-blue worsted suit over a white dress shirt that had lost its necktie, and been unbuttoned at the collar, somewhere around cruising altitude… a sartorial anomaly Gord had remarked upon the moment Kirby arrived at his house. Chuck, you're the most fastidious dresser I've ever met The guy who sent me illustrated instructions on making a Windsor knot
, and taught me that it was traditional for the bottom of a sport jacket to line up with the knuckle when your hands are straight down against your legs. The tieless look gives me an idea something's wrong. Big-time.

  Accurate enough, Kirby thought, sipping his scotch.

  "Well, at least the creeps didn't get to enjoy the place for long," he said from the plump leather chair opposite Roger. "Bet you ten to one they never got any girls up there with them either."

  "Nice try, Chuck. But let's not skirt the issue," Gordian said. "I'm a grown man, for godsakes. You'd think I could do better than to make the same mistakes that I did when I was still looking ahead to peach fuzz and my first kiss."

  "Gord, listen to me—"

  "I want to know how I could have been blindsided. How I could leave myself open to having somebody try and grab UpLink right out from under my nose."

  Kirby drained his scotch, lowered the glass, and rattled the melting ice cubes inside it.

  "You want me to sit here watching you bash away at yourself?" he said. "I wasn't aware that was part of our professional arrangement, though I can check with my partners to be absolutely certain."

  "Could you really?"

  Kirby frowned at his sarcasm.

  "Look," Gordian said. "I've established my organization in dozens of countries, placed my employees at extreme risk in some of them, lost good people in others. If I can't learn my lessons, can't compete when the stakes are high, I shouldn't be fooling around in the big leagues."

  Kirby sighed. Granted, they were looking at a very serious problem, but Gordian ordinarily wasn't the sort of man to let self-pity and defeatism through the door no matter how hard they tried shoving their way in. What the hell was wrong with him? Could this be a kind of delayed reaction to the encryption-tech controversy… a case of the psychological bends after finally coming up from leagues underneath it?

  Kirby thought about it a moment, and supposed that might be the case, considering how long it had dragged on and the flak Gordian had taken because of his public stance against the new government export policies. Maybe the operative factor here was exhaustion, and Gord was simply tapped out from waging too many battles on too many fronts at once. Maybe. And yet he couldn't help but feel that something else was eating away at him, as well.

  "I won't deny you were vulnerable, but why blame it on recklessness?" he said. "You've had a lot of strains on your financial resources lately, ranging from some outlays that were merely unavoidable, to others that you couldn't have anticipated without a crystal ball."

  Gordian's peremptory look told Kirby he didn't need to be further reminded. In that way the two men were alike: They made their points with a minimum of words. And besides, both of them had done the arithmetic many times over. There had been the huge price tag of manufacturing, launching, and insuring the constellation of low-earth-orbit, Ka-band satellites needed for UpLink's orbital telecommunications network, the multimillion dollar cost of rebuilding the Russian ground station after it was nearly leveled by a terrorist attack the previous January, and the simultaneous expenses of getting the ground stations in Africa and Malaysia fully operational.

  An ambitious program of corporate initiatives, to be sure. But Gordian's diversification from the defense technology that had earned him his fortune, while to some extent spurred by military downsizing, was not essentially profit-motivated — and that had always impressed the hell out of Kirby. Gord was not an ego-driven person. Nor was he an acquisitive one. Having made enough money to last him ten lifetimes, he could have done what a lot of fabulously rich men did and rested on his laurels, gone on long cruises to warm places, turned to breaking Guinness world records, whatever.

  More than anything, though, Gordian had a heartfelt desire to help create a better world, and believed to his core that the problem of eliminating global tyranny and oppression required communication-based solutions. Having grown up in an era of Berlin Walls and Iron Curtains, he was convinced that nothing — neither military buildups, nor leadership summits, nor treaties — had done as much to bring those Cold War barriers down as information seeping through their cracks. Information, he believed, was the ultimate key to personal and political freedom. His goal, his vision, was to provide that key to the broadest number of people he could imagine… which, Kirby supposed, made him a pragmatic idealist. Or was that oxy moronic?

  Now Gordian began to speak again, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped together.

  "Make no mistake, Chuck, I'm not second-guessing my business decisions with regard to the company's expansion," he said. "But I do fault myself for not preparing a defensive strategy against a shark attack. And it isn't as if I haven't had good counsel. You've advised me time and again to implement staggered terms of office on the board of directors. My friend Dan Parker, the congressman, tried to persuade me to lobby more forcefully for specific anti-takeover legislation in this state. I did neither."

  "Gord—"

  Gordian raised a hand to silence him.

  "Hear me out, please. As I said, this isn't just a mea culpa," he went on. "A minute ago, you said something about my needing a crystal ball to predict what's happened. Well, in a way, I had one. I don't think Spartus putting its stake on the market comes as a total shock to either of us. Look at the articles in the Wall Street Journal The endless commentaries on those CNN and CNBC financial programs. Every aspect of my company's operations has been subjected to criticism and ridicule, a great deal of it originating from a single source. Is it any wonder the value of our stock has gone into the sewer?"

  "For the record, my comment related to your expenses, not the devaluation of UpLink shares," Kirby said. "But I agree that the great and exalted financial prophet Reynold Armitage has done a trash-and-burn number on you in the media. If he's the source you're talking about, that is."

  "None other." Gordian folded his hands on his knees again. "Spartus panicked, and though I figured I'd be able to settle their fears when I called them, they can't really be blamed for not buying my reassurances. Tell me the truth, Chuck. Have you ever seen anything like Armitage microanalyzing our 10-K information on the air? And then putting such an incredibly negative spin on it? Because I find it damned curious."

  Kirby didn't say anything, just shook his head. Yes, Armitage was an expert securities analyst, able to sniff the wind for market indicators better than almost any of his peers. What did it matter to the general financial community that he was also a pompous, mean-spirited son of a bitch? Some sons of bitches got listened to without being liked very much — and when Armitage spoke, investors large and small perked their ears.

  Which was understandable, Kirby thought. Since becoming a constant presence on the money shows, Armitage had helped many, many stockholders to better understand the market and choose successful ventures. But he had also occasionally hurt struggling firms with imprudent calls, skewing figures to suit his predictions, baiting corporate leaders, seeming to relish making them look foolish. As Gordian had pointed out, you had to be ready to take your knocks when you were playing in the big leagues. And despite his sudden attack of self-doubt, he was a player.. one of the best. However, what had raised Armitage's campaign against UpLink — and campaign seemed the only appropriate word for it — to an inexplicable level of viciousness was the timing of his disclosures.

  The very day UpLink had released its yearly report to stockholders, Armitage had gone on Moneyline with the firm's 10-K and charged that there were critical discrepancies between the two statements. That had been untrue. Certainly, the reports presented their data in different lights, but annual reports were traditionally intended to emphasize a company's strengths and future goals, while the 10-K form was a dry listing of financial statistics prepared for the Securities and Exchange Commission as a matter of law. By presenting those stats out of context— failing to weigh temporary debts and liabilities against projected venture profits, for instance — one could easily give the impression that a business ha
d gotten into much worse shape than was actually the case. And Armitage had gone a giant step beyond that, exaggerating the significance of every expense, minimizing every gain, and analyzing profit-loss ratios in the worst possible light to depict a company on the verge of ruin.

  Damned curious indeed.

  Still without speaking, Kirby rose, went over to the wet bar in the opposite corner of the room, and refilled his glass with scotch, leaving out the soda this time. As usual, Gordian's mind was hitting on all its well-oiled cylinders. Why the constant attacks from Armitage? As far as he knew, Gordian had never stepped on his toes, never even met the man. Why, then? The question had been buzzing around Kirby's own head for weeks like a nettlesome wasp, and the only answer that came to him amounted to nothing more than a suspicion. It was one he'd hesitated to share with Gordian, feeling it would be rash to do so without any substantiation.

  "Hope you don't mind me helping myself to more of the expensive stuff," he said, turning to Gordian.

  "Get it while it lasts," Gordian said with a grim smile, downing what was left of his own drink, then holding it out toward Kirby.

  Kirby stepped over with Gordian's own favorite Beefeater — and splashed a healthy measure into Gordian's glass.

  Their eyes met then, the look that passed between them lasting only a brief moment. Yet it was significant enough to give Kirby all the confirmation he needed that Gordian was thinking the exact same thing he was.

  It was, he guessed, time they aired what was on their minds.

  "Gord, do you believe this takeover bid was orchestrated?" he asked, the words leaping out of his mouth before caution could prevail. "That Armitage has been going at you with the intention of destroying shareholder confidence and—"

  "And provoking a sell-off," Gordian said, nodding. ' This whole thing reeks of behind-the-scenes manipulation."