Shoot First(Stone Barrington #45)(12)

“I think you should do some shopping tomorrow,” he said to Veronica.

“You’ve read my mind,” she replied. “How much can I spend?”

“I never thought I’d hear myself say these words, but whatever you like.”

“I never thought I’d hear you say those words,” she replied, “but they sound very sweet.”

“I’m a very sweet guy,” Gino said, as the sommelier tipped more Chateau Lafite 1978 into their glasses.





9




Stone navigated his new boat out of its berth, across Garrison Bight, through Key West Harbor, then turned west, into open water, and pushed the throttles of the Hinckley 43 to 3200 rpms. Soon they were cruising at a little better than 30 knots.

“How long to our destination?” Meg asked from the big, comfortable seat beside him.

“It’s about seventy miles, so a bit more than two hours. The calm seas will keep us fast and comfortable.”

“What’s it like out there?”

“It’s better if you see it for yourself.” Stone tapped in half a dozen waypoints on the moving map before him and engaged the autopilot, which took charge and pointed them at the first waypoint.

Dino and Viv came in from the cockpit. “It’s getting pretty windy back there,” Dino said.

“Grab a beer and make yourselves comfortable in the cabin.”

Stone arranged himself in the helmsman’s chair so that he could see both the moving map and Meg by shifting his gaze. “I’m concerned about you,” he said.

“Oh? Why?”

“Well, I’ve known you for only a few days, but who I’m seeing now is not the happy person I saw earlier this week.”

She sighed. “I’m just afraid that, by paying this . . . ‘extortion,’ as you put it, I’m buying into more problems than I’m solving.”

“That’s often the way it is with extortion or blackmail. It’s very likely that he’ll ask you for considerably more. What hold does he have over you?”

“The keys to the kingdom, you might say. Gino Bellini has what you might call a checkered background,” she said. “He was a troubled youth, spent some time in reform school for hacking and computer theft, and narrowly avoided prison. He was rescued from that life by a mentor, a professor of computer science at Stanford, who got him a scholarship there. He didn’t graduate—he was sucked out of there by a Silicon Valley start-up—not mine, not yet—and he began making more money than he would have ever imagined possible, half a million dollars a year, and more. Still, as I was to learn, he retained that part of his psyche that controlled criminality.”

“He’s a born criminal, you mean?”

“Not exactly. That was learned behavior, I think, but it still seems to remain an important part of the way he thinks. When I let him go and paid him off for his share of the company, I thought that would be the end to it. I mean, even after taxes he was sitting on more than a hundred million dollars. You’d think that would be enough to satisfy him, but no. It chafed on him that I was making more than a billion dollars on the deal, never mind that the concept was mine and that I had secured the financing, supervised his coding, and ran the business, while his job was to sit at his computer and make my ideas work. He still managed to believe that, somehow, I had wronged him, cheated him out of his fair share.”

“I hope you had a good attorney when you were setting up the business and writing employment contracts.”

“Oh, yes, the best legal minds in Silicon Valley were paid exorbitant sums to make sure that a situation like this could never arise.”

“Sometimes good lawyers are worth whatever you pay them,” Stone said, with a little reproval in his voice.

“Oh, I know that, and I don’t question either the quality of their work or what I paid them. I just don’t think they ever realized who they were dealing with in Gino’s case—nor did I, for that matter.”

“A good contract covers legalities,” Stone said. “It’s difficult to predict illegalities, though every attorney tries to. Has Bellini committed any criminal act that you know of?”

“I suspect so,” Meg replied. “I suspect that he’s planted little bombs in our software that can be triggered whenever he likes.”

“Have you caught him at it?”

“My people can’t even find the bombs, let alone prove that he put them there. I think what he’s doing is using a password that he set up some time ago to get into the programs and set off the bombs. And now, because of the deal I’ve made with him, he has the current passwords necessary to do that—the aforementioned keys to the kingdom. He knew the demonstration to the Steele board was coming up and how important that would be to the company’s success, and he’s managed to turn that into fifteen million dollars in his pocket.”

“Will there be other opportunities for him to do that?”

“Oh, yes. We’ll be turning over our prototypes and our software to the State of California and the U.S. government soon, and it’s critical that we get certification from both, otherwise we won’t be able to go into production and do large-scale fleet testing of the vehicles. I’ll tell you this, Stone, in the strictest confidence—last night I was thinking of trying to find someone to kill the man.”