Final Target

CHAPTER 54

C an you come to the lab?”

“When?” Gage asked, swinging his legs over the edge of his bed. He smiled to himself. The excitement in Blanchard’s voice dissipated the gloom that had enveloped Gage during the sleepless night.

“Now’s a good time.”

“Who is it?” Faith asked, propping herself up on a pillow.

Gage covered his cell phone’s mouthpiece. “It’s Blanchard.”

“Unless he’s invented a perpetual motion machine, I’m not sure what excuse is good enough for waking me up at…at…”

“Five-fifteen.”

“So, can you make it?” Blanchard asked.

“Sure. Forty-five minutes.”

Instead of heading north to Berkeley, Gage took the tunnel toward the Central Valley, then looped back over the hills. Only after he was sure he’d shaken any surveillance he might have picked up after his meeting with Smothers did he drive toward the campus.

The professor was waiting at the entrance to the concrete and glass Cory Hall at UC Berkeley when Gage arrived.

“Matson is an idiot, a greedy idiot,” Blanchard said. “The detector video amplifier is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.” He peeked out toward the dark campus, and then headed down the hall toward the lab. “If any of these nerds get here early, just say you’re my nephew from…where do you want to be from?”

“Tulsa. I’d like to be from Tulsa.”

“Okay, you’re my nephew from Tulsa. What’s your name?”

“Elmore.”

“What about your last name?”

“Blanchard. I’m from your side of the family. Did you forget or are you just embarrassed?”

“Embarrassed? Never. Even as a small child I was proud of you…Little League and all that.”

Gage gave him a thumbs-up. “I think we got the story down.”

Blanchard led Gage to a computer monitor, then spread his hands as if introducing Gage to a dear friend. “Look at this.”

Gage stared at meaningless oscillations with equally obscure labels, “Pulse Response,” “Rise Time,” and “Fall Time,” all measured in nanoseconds.

“I’d like to meet the team that designed this device. It’s pure genius,” Blanchard said. “Say you installed one like this in a submarine periscope. You could see a sardine do a backflip ten miles away.”

Blanchard punched a couple of keys, and a moving bar graph appeared on the screen.

“And footprint, talk about footprint. This draws so little power, you could run it off of a hearing aid battery.” Blanchard grinned. “Well, maybe not. I exaggerate when I get excited.”

“How much is it worth?”

“I could sell the design to Vidyne Industries for ten million by lunchtime. They’d just need to market a couple hundred of the devices and they’d have made their money back, including production costs.”

Gage found himself nodding slowly. “That’s it. That’s Matson’s exit strategy. The government seizes all his stock fraud profits, and he slips away with SatTek’s intellectual property while no one is watching.”

“And there’s also the low-noise amplifier. I imagine that’s worth a helluva lot, too.”

Blanchard glanced down at the monitor. “The funny thing is that Matson could’ve legitimately made a bundle on this if he was just patient and knew how to market it.”

Gage shook his head. “No. SatTek would have made a bundle. All he would’ve gotten was a salary and maybe a Christmas bonus, and only got those until the board members realized that they could find someone better.” He paused, trying to figure out how to set a trap for Matson and drive him into it. “I think it may be time to apply the stick.”

“Or perhaps the carrot?”

Gage looked over and smiled. “Professor Blanchard, you have an evil mind.”