Trading Reality (48 page)

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Rachel.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes. About Richard’s death. And the boathouse fire. And Doogie’s death. I think I can guess the connection.’

‘What?’ I asked excitedly.

‘It’s to do with information,’ she said. ‘Richard had some information, and he was murdered for it. But the murderer left some of the information behind, so he had to burn down the boathouse to destroy it.’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

Rachel continued. ‘Then Doogie discovered this information. And he was killed.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘So why did someone try to kill us as well?’

‘We must have it too.’

I thought it through. ‘You could be right. But what is this information?’

Rachel sighed. ‘I don’t know. We know it’s important; Doogie said it could ruin FairSystems. We can assume we have it, we just don’t know its significance.’

‘What about that list of companies the SEC gave us?’

‘I thought of that. We know Richard had the list. And, as you say, we’ve got it now. But we don’t know that Doogie had it. And it’s information that the authorities themselves hold.’

We sat in silence for a long while. The more I thought about Rachel’s theory, the more it seemed to make sense. So what had been in the boathouse, then in Doogie’s possession, and now was in ours?

I remembered the fire in the boathouse. All those papers burning. Me scrambling out with Richard’s computer clasped to my chest.

‘Richard’s computer!’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Whatever this information is, Richard might have made a note of it in a file in his computer. Have you looked through all his files?’

‘Only some of them. I didn’t have time to look through everything. There’s an awful lot of it.’

‘Well, I bet it’s there somewhere. The fire was supposed to destroy the machine, but I saved it. Then, when Doogie broke into the factory, he downloaded the file from the computer and discovered something. He must have used it to blackmail someone else, and so he was killed. And now we have it, right there in your office!’

‘Let’s go!’ said Rachel.

I drove quickly into Glenrothes. Rachel powered up Richard’s machine. ‘Hah! You were right. The hard disk has been reformatted.’

‘How could that happen?’

‘Doogie must have left a time bomb hidden in the machine. Everything would look normal for a period of time, say a week. Then the time bomb would instruct the computer to reformat the hard disk.’

My heart sank. ‘Does that mean we’ve lost all the data?’

‘It means that the data in there was important enough for someone to erase it.’

‘But can we recover it?’

Rachel smiled, and reached into the bottom drawer of her desk. She pulled out a small cassette. ‘A back-up tape.’

She disappeared, and came back a moment later with a tape-streamer, a device which would enable her to reload the information on to Richard’s computer. In a few minutes, it was all there.

Rachel called up the list of directories. Half of it was gobbledygook to me. ‘Let’s focus on the word-processing files. We can forget the others,’ she said.

Rachel called up the sub-directories in the word-processing directory. There were six of them. Each one contained dozens more files.

‘Whew!’ I said. ‘Have you checked all these?’

‘No. Just those in the FAIRSYS and PLATFORM sub-directories.’

‘Well, you can bet Doogie checked them all. Come on. Let’s get going.’

We went through every file in detail. Many were boring: bill payments, letters to insurance companies, that sort of thing. Some were fascinating. Richard had had a habit of writing notes to himself on certain topics, and saving them, to be altered or added to later.

One of these was headed ‘Baker’. I was right! Richard had suspected that David Baker had been working with Onada.

‘Do you think that’s it?’ asked Rachel.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We suspected it, but it would be news to Doogie. And he could have caused us some damage with the information. He could have tried to blackmail David with it.’

‘But would it have been enough to kill for?’

I thought about it. ‘I doubt it. David knew we suspected him anyway. I can’t see why he, or anyone else would kill Doogie for this. No. Next!’

There were a number of files relating to BOWL. Richard had obviously been worried about Doogie and his activities. Still nothing there.

One note related to the motorbike accident. It was a memo to Willie. But there was nothing really new in it. Besides, Doogie had probably seen it already when he had stolen the original Bergey letter.

I reread Richard’s analysis of FairSystems share price movements. There was quite a lot of background material that he hadn’t shown us before. It took time to go through it all.

After a couple of hours, we broke for coffee. Then back to the machine. The most obvious file names had yielded nothing, so we tried the others. Notes to Keith and Rachel. Negotiations over the lease for the factory. The odd letter to me. Letters to my father. Formidable to-do lists. We were beginning to give up hope.

Suddenly, there it was in black and white.

We knew. But we had to decide what to do with our knowledge. We didn’t have absolute proof, and there were large gaps to be filled. I didn’t want to go to the police yet. I was weary of their tendency to use information just to generate more questions. We needed to give them the answers. So Rachel and I devised a plan. It would require effort, and it would be a diversion from Project Platform, but if it worked it would all be worthwhile.

We called all the major shareholders to announce a demonstration of Project Platform in one week’s time. We contacted Wagner, Jenson, Hartman, my father and Sorenson. I wanted to leave out Karen, but Rachel said it was important she was there too, for completeness’ sake, and persuaded Willie to call her.

To my surprise, she said she’d come. The only refusal was Hartman. There was no point trying to persuade him.

The demonstration would take place at a virtual meeting, with the attendees in two locations, at Jenson Computer in Palo Alto, and at our factory in Glenrothes.

A dozen people, led by Rachel, worked round the clock. Keith and Andy flew over to California to prepare everything at that end.

A week later, we were ready.

‘Please put on your headsets.’

We did as Rachel had asked. We were all sitting round the polished mahogany table in the virtual office: Jenson, Wagner, Sorenson, my father, Karen, Willie and I. The likenesses were very good. We had been photographed beforehand, with a number of different expressions, and those images had been fed into the computer. A small camera in the headset would tell the computer which expressions to use in the virtual world. The room was the same one I had seen before, when Rachel had first shown me Project Platform. It was a large office with views over a gleaming city stretching away to sea and mountains in the background.

We all looked round the room, getting the feel of the experience. For a second, my eyes met Karen’s in the virtual world. Both of us quickly turned away. We had ignored each other entirely before the demonstration, and I wanted to ignore her now. I wished Rachel hadn’t insisted on her coming.

‘Hi, Geoff,’ Sorenson waved to my father and smiled.

‘Evening, Walter, or should I say good morning?’ replied my father. ‘What time is it here anyway?’

Good question. It was seven o’clock in Glenrothes, and eleven o’clock in the morning in Palo Alto. What time was it in virtual reality?

‘Let’s compromise,’ said Rachel. Although no one could see her in the virtual world, we could all hear her voice. ‘How about three p.m?’

There were chuckles round the table.

‘What are these headsets for, Rachel?’ asked Scott Wagner. ‘They look like hair-dryers to me. You can’t possibly be intending to use them commercially.’

‘Aren’t these the old models?’ asked my father. ‘I remember the first system Richard rigged up had headsets like these.’

‘They are indeed,’ said Rachel. ‘The new system is particularly sensitive, and these headsets give a much better idea of the exact positioning of the head than the standard electromagnetic headsets that we normally use now. But don’t worry, Scott, the modification to our lightweight virtual glasses is almost complete.’

This was a lie, but fortunately they seemed to believe it. Everyone was wearing bulky electronic helmets, which covered most of their heads. They were connected to the VR computer by mechanical arms. It was true that this style of headset was sometimes used for greater accuracy, but our virtual glasses would have done fine. In fact, unknown to the others, I was wearing a pair. They would allow me to flip from the virtual world to the real one at will.

I flipped them up now. Beside me were Karen, my father and Willie, all in their headsets, and Rachel, sitting at the computer from where she would control the demonstration. On a small TV screen next to her, I could see the conference room at Jenson Computer, where Jenson, Wagner and Sorenson were all plugged into their bulky helmets. Keith, Andy and a Jenson engineer were grouped round a computer terminal there, and I could just see a couple of security guards standing by the door.

I flipped back to the virtual office. Everyone was waiting.

I cleared my throat. ‘First of all, I would like to thank you all for coming,’ I looked round the table. ‘We thought it important that our major shareholders could get a preview of this project. I’d like to thank Scott, in particular, as the representative of the public shareholders.’

‘I’m excited to be here,’ Wagner said with a virtual smile.

‘We expect that Project Platform’s power to bring together people thousands of miles apart in virtual meetings like this one will be one of its most popular applications. But the system includes a whole range of other features that we would like to demonstrate. Now to do this, we would like one of you to take a trip through a virtual world. Walter, as chairman, would you do the honours?’

‘I’d be glad to,’ said Sorenson.

‘Good. When we switch to this virtual world, we’ll all be there with you, seeing what you see, and hearing what you hear. But you’ll be in control. You can use the 3-D mouse to navigate through the world, OK?’

‘OK. I’m ready. Run it!’

‘All right, Walter,’ Rachel began. ‘For this demonstration you start off walking through some woods. You can take it from there.’

I was switched into Sorenson’s world. Through a virtual Sorenson, I was experiencing a virtual world which was under Rachel’s control. So was everyone else. Sure enough, there we were in a pine forest. It was sunny, and birds were singing all around us. It felt like a spring day. Sorenson must have moved his mouse, because we began to walk along a path. After a minute or so, we came to a grey stone wall with a large wooden door.

‘Can I go in?’ asked Sorenson.

‘Sure. Just turn the knob,’ said Rachel.

I flicked up the glasses to watch Sorenson in Palo Alto on the TV screen. He looked strange, sitting in his chair, most of his head hidden by the large helmet, turning an imaginary knob with the 3-D mouse in his outstretched hand. But when I flipped down the glasses again, I saw we had entered a tunnel.

It was poorly lit, but I could just make out another door at the end. The door behind us slammed shut.

It was creepy, claustrophobic. A bat suddenly flew into my face, or our face, causing me to draw in my breath. Sorenson hesitated, and then went on. I could hear things scurrying underneath our feet.

‘Hey, this is really good, Rachel,’ Sorenson said. ‘I feel like I really am in a tunnel.’

Rachel didn’t answer.

‘Rachel? Rachel?’

No reply.

Sorenson paused and then went on. Eventually, we came to the gate at the end of the tunnel. He opened it, and we were pushed through with a rush. The door slammed shut behind us.

We were in a graveyard. It was dead quiet. A high wall surrounded us on all sides. Sorenson turned to go back, but he couldn’t open the gate. ‘Get me out of here, Rachel!’

Still no reply.

Hesitantly, the virtual Sorenson moved through the graveyard. The wind rustled through the trees, but apart from that, there was no noise. It was impossible to make out anything more than the shadows of the gravestones and sarcophagi, and the trees surrounding them. There was a moon, but it was dimmed by dark clouds.

Suddenly, I heard a grinding, creaking sound as a stone moved. Sorenson turned to look. A horizontal gravestone slowly lifted up.

Sorenson laughed, but his laugh had just a touch of nerves to it. Good.

The grave was fully open now. A figure climbed out of the ground, and perched on the headstone. It was too dark to make out the features of his face.

Sorenson slowly moved closer.

Suddenly, the wind blew the clouds away from the moon, and the figure was revealed. Sorenson gasped. ‘Hello, Walter,’ said the figure.

‘Richard! What the hell?’ Sorenson turned frantically, and then calmed down, remembering he was only in an electronic demo. ‘Rachel, this is ridiculous. It’s sick. Get me out of here!’

‘You can’t get out,’ said Richard. ‘You’re stuck here, with me. And I would like to talk to you.’

A chill ran through me. Even though I knew I was listening to my own voice, cleverly altered, the figure looked and sounded just like Richard. A torrent of emotions churned inside me. I wanted to speak to him myself; I realised that was one of the things I missed most: the chance to talk to him. I felt a tightening in my throat, and a stinging behind my eyes.

God knows what Sorenson felt. ‘Rachel!’ he shouted. ‘Mark!’ The view began to shake about violently. I realised he must be trying to take his helmet off. I flipped up the glasses again and looked at the TV screen. Sure enough, he was writhing in his chair pulling at the helmet.