House Justice by Mike Lawson Read Free Book Online Page A

the company’s CEO, Andy Bollinger, had pretended to be shocked.
    So now he sat alone on that wet, sandy rock and pondered the train wreck that his life had become. He was thinking the smart thing to do would be to walk into the ocean—and just keep walking until he disappeared. And for what must have been the millionth time he askedhimself the question
How could this have possibly happened
? How could he have gone from the golden boy he’d once been to being the target of a federal espionage investigation?
    Marty Taylor didn’t look like a computer geek. He looked like a surfer, a Viking surfer. He was thirty-five years old, had long blond hair, blue-green eyes, and a dimpled Kirk Douglas chin. His stomach was flat and his arms and chest were well muscled because these days he spent more time exercising than he did working. When he was twenty-two, there was a picture of him on the cover of
Rolling Stone
playing beach volleyball. At the time, he’d already been getting a hundred marriage proposals a week, but after
Rolling Stone
put him on the cover in nothing but swim trunks and sunglasses, the number tripled.
    He and his cousin Gene started Taylor & Taylor in Gene’s basement. They worked twenty-hour days, took speed to keep going, and pot to come back down. Their initial interest was in games and they thought they might be the next Nintendo or Atari, but somehow they vectored from the games themselves into gaming peripherals—mouses, joysticks, virtual-reality gaming gloves—all those computer control devices that let you maneuver the gun-toting, bloodthirsty, animated maniacs in the games. The funny thing was, the military actually approached
them
; it had never occurred to him and Gene that there could be a military application for their work.
    The modern soldier was raised playing computer games, and the technologies they were developing could be used for controlling things like Predator drones, mine-detection robots, and the navy’s unmanned, deep-dive recovery vessels. And somehow they beat out the giants like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and got a lock on a megabucks Pentagon contract, and when they expanded into missile guidance systems they got an even bigger chunk of the military market. They’d been magic back then, and when they took the company public they made a ton of money—an
obscene
amount of money.
    They set up Taylor & Taylor similar to Microsoft and the other big outfits, although they were nowhere as big as Microsoft. A boardof directors was formed with a bunch of wise old heads, guys who’d retired from Intel, the military, JPMorgan Chase, places like that. Gene became chairman of the board and CEO of the company. Marty’s title was chief technical officer, which really meant that he could continue to do what he’d always done—dink around with the geeks and develop new gadgets—and he really didn’t have anything to do with running the business.
    Things went great for almost ten years—and then Gene goes and kills himself in a freak scuba-diving accident. Following his cousin’s death, Marty, being one of the company’s founders and its largest shareholder, became chairman of the board—a job he knew he was in no way equipped to handle. He didn’t have Gene’s business skills and the last thing he wanted to do was worry about the financial shit, which he didn’t understand and which bored him to tears. So the board hired a CEO away from Coca-Cola, a guy that was a hot-shit in the business world—but the soda guy turned out to be a disaster. He was a control freak who couldn’t relate to the geeks and the free-for-all attitude that existed in cutting-edge technical companies and he drove off half the talent. When the company’s stock started to fall like a wingless jet, the board fired the soda guy and got another CEO: Andrew Bollinger. Bollinger was supposed to be a wizard when it came to breathing life into dying companies—but the wizard turned out to be the worst thing