Disclosure Read Free

his cel ular phone and cal ed in. His assistant, Cindy Wolfe, answered. “Mr. Sanders's office.”
    “Hi. It's me.”
    “Hi, Tom. You on the ferry?”

    “Yes. I'l be in a little before nine.”
    “Okay, I'l tel them.” She paused, and he had the sense that she was choosing her words careful y. “It's pretty busy this morning. Mr. Garvin was just here, looking for you.”
    Sanders frowned. “Looking for me?”
    “Yes.” Another pause. “Uh, he seemed kind of surprised that you weren't in.”
    “Did he say what he wanted?”
    “No, but he's going into a lot of offices on the floor, one after another, talking to people. Something's up, Tom.”
    “What?”
    “Nobody's tel ing me anything,” she said.
    “What about Stephanie?”
    “Stephanie cal ed, and I told her you weren't in yet.”
    “Anything else?”
    “Arthur Kahn cal ed from KI. to ask if you got his fax.”
    “I did. I'l cal him. Anything else?”
    “No, that's about it, Tom.”
    “Thanks, Cindy.” He pushed the END button to terminate the cal . Standing beside him, Benedict pointed to Sanders's phone. “Those things are amazing.
    They just get smal er and smal er, don't they? You guys make that one?”
    Sanders nodded. “I'd be lost without it. Especial y these days. Who can remember al the numbers? This is more than a telephone: it's my telephone book. See, look.” He began to demonstrate the features for Benedict. “It's got a memory for two hundred numbers. You store them by the first three letters of the name.” Sanders punched in K-A-H to bring up the international number for Arthur Kahn in Malaysia. He pushed SEND, and heard a long string of electronic beeps. With the country code and area code, it was thirteen beeps.

    `Jesus,” Benedict said. “Where are you cal ing, Mars?”
    `Just about. Malaysia. We've got a factory there.”
    DigiCom's Malaysia operation was only a year old, and it was manufacturing the company's new CD-ROM players-units rather like an audio CD player, but intended for computers. It was widely agreed in the business that al information was soon going to be digital, and much of it was going to be stored on these compact disks. Computer programs, databases, even books and magazineseverything was going to be on disk.
    The reason it hadn't already happened was that CD-ROMs were notoriously slow. Users were obliged to wait in front of blank screens while the drives whirred and clicked-and computer users didn't like waiting. In an industry where speeds reliably doubled every eighteen months, CD-ROMs had improved much less in the last five years. DigiCom's SpeedStar technology addressed that problem, with a new generation of drives code-named Twinkle (for “Twinkle, twinkle, little SpeedStar”). Twinkle drives were twice as fast as any in the world. Twinkle was packaged as a smal , stand-alone multimedia player with its own screen. You could carry it in your hand, and use it on a bus or a train. It was going to be revolutionary. But now the Malaysia plant was having trouble manufacturing the new fast drives.
    Benedict sipped his coffee. “Is it true you're the only division manager who isn't an engineer?”
    Sanders smiled. “That's right. I'm original y from marketing.”
    “Isn't that pretty unusual?” Benedict said.
    “Not real y. In marketing, we used to spend a lot of time figuring out what the features of the new products were, and most of us couldn't talk to the engineers. I could. I don't know why. I don't have a technical background, but I could talk to the guys. I knew just enough so they couldn't bul shit me. So pretty soon, I was the one who talked to the engineers. Then eight years ago, Garvin asked me if I'd run a division for him. And here I am.”

    The cal rang through. Sanders glanced at his watch. It was almost midnight in Kuala Lumpur. He hoped Arthur Kahn would stil be awake. A moment later there was a click, and a groggy voice said, “Uh. Hel o.”
    “Arthur, it's Tom.”
    Arthur Kahn