“Really?”
“Corporate grant,” says Harry. “A big one. And there’s more. This same company made a job offer to Jordan about a month before she was killed.”
My eyebrows arch.
“Word around the lab was that it was a point of friction between her and Crone. The offer was for big bucks. I don’t know the details. We’re looking for documents. I’ve got a subpoena out to the company to get what I can. According to one of the lab techs, Jordan was letting it be known that they’d offered her multiple six figures to jump from the lab and come on board with the company.”
“Maybe they made overtures to Crone as well?”
“That was the problem. They didn’t.”
Pieces are starting to snap into place.
“If we know about this, you can be sure Tannery knows as well.”
“You think he’s plying this road, job jealousy?” asks Harry.
“You heard what he told us when we visited him at his office. They were checking out some other angle as to motive.”
“You think that’s it? The job offer to Jordan?”
“That, and perhaps she was taking some items of value with her.”
“Like what?”
“Like the papers Crone says she stole, and the grant money that Cybergenomics was pouring into Crone’s center.”
“Holy shit,” says Harry. “You think so?”
“Think about it. She takes working papers from his office. He goes ballistic. She does everything to get him off her back. She doesn’t need him anymore. She knows what he knows about the project. If she goes to work for Cybergenomics, why would they pay twice for the same research? His funds are going to dry up overnight.”
“There’s a motive for murder,” says Harry.
I nod.
“You think Tannery knows what’s in those papers?”
“I know one thing. We don’t.”
“Maybe it’s just what Crone’s been saying all along,” says Harry. “Maybe they did have professional differences.”
“Where does Epperson fit into all this?”
“I was getting to that,” says Harry. “It’s only surmise, and it only comes from one of the assistants, the guy I talked to over coffee. But according to him, Epperson may have joined Crone’s group as part of a package along with the Cybergenomics grant. Nobody seems to know for sure, but he came on board about the same time.”
“A consultant?”
“Not that I can tell. He seems to have been a salaried employee of the university from the time he went to work there. More like a corporate mole, if the guy I talked to is right.”
“Do we know Epperson’s salary, at the U?”
Harry looks up from his papers, quickly getting to the same place I am. “If he took a big cut in pay to go to the university, you think there might be a reason?”
“Possibly. Maybe stock options. If Crone’s team is developing something hot, and this company, Cybergenomics, has a vested interest, they might send Epperson over to mind the store. To make sure that the research takes the right direction.”
“And make sure nobody else horns in,” says Harry.
“If he was their man in Crone’s shop, stock options would ease a cut in pay, and ensure his loyalty.”
Harry mulls this over. “Interesting you should say that.”
“Why?”
“Epperson has this passion. The only thing anybody seems to know about him. He has an addiction.”
“What’s that?”
“Stays up nights researching. Comes to work bleary-eyed and takes frequent breaks to get to his laptop. Seems he lives to trade on-line.”
Saturday morning and its bright and sunny. I can think of a thousand places I would rather be. Instead, Harry and I are planted next to a musty set of code books in our library at the office. We are here to meet with Robert Tucci who has flown in from San Jose up in Silicon Valley for a conference.
For months Tucci has been just a voice on the phone. Today, for the first time, I have the benefit of seeing a face as we speak, judging what kind of a witness he might make if I have to use him at trial.
He is bald. A ragged fringe of black hair droops over his ears. Tucci has the look of some seventeenth-century notable, short and fat with chubby little fingers. There is a shadow of dark beard submerged just beneath the surface of his face that gives it the kind of bluish pallor you would expect to see on some ancient oil portrait hanging in a European gallery. This is appropriate, for some consider Tucci to be the Galileo of modern electronics.
He is seated in a chair across the library table from me with shelves of legal volumes behind him finishing off the backdrop so that I can imagine this painting come to life as he speaks.
I have hired him to lead us through the no-man’s-land of science, the maze of molecular electronics, genetics and nanorobotics that Crone and Tash will not discuss.
Harry asks him if he’s ever written about the specific fields we are dealing with.
“Not for publication,” says Tucci. “I’ve prepared some memoranda for internal use by R and D units inside corporations. But that’s another matter,” he says.
Tucci is one of the leading lights in the field of high tech, a writer and theorist who is reputed to have had a major hand in the development of the silicon chip. He’s been published in every major professional journal in the country and holds dual doctorates in physics and biology. Best of all, he has written a number of articles in the general press for the unwashed masses, in major national magazines and newspapers. He is possessed of that special gift for explaining things scientific to people like Harry and me, who are still grappling with the magic of fire.
“This memorandum you’ve written, research and development for the corporations,” says Harry. “Would any of it be helpful for our purposes here?”
“It might. But I couldn’t give it to you. It’s proprietary information.” What he means is another corporate stone wall, trade secrets. This seems to be an article of faith within the field, making me wonder if these guys sleep with computer disks between their knees at night protecting this stuff.
“Been there,” says Harry.
Harry has spent two weeks scoping out the Internet and ravaging university libraries for anything, scholarly articles or news pieces, that might offer a clue as to what Crone and his compatriots are working on. He has found nothing.
Tucci tells us that we’re not likely to. “The science is cutting edge. You won’t hear about it in the popular press until there’s a major breakthrough. By then, the company that controls the process will be throwing patent parties. They’ll have it locked up.”
“What exactly is the process?” I ask.
“A major scientific merger,” he says. “A kind of synergy.”
“Of what?” says Harry.
“On the scientific level you’ve got nanotechnology and molecular electronics, with genetics being the software used to program the whole thing.
“At the commercial level you’re talking ‘pick and shovel’ companies, the genetic start-ups that sell devices for generating genetic data. Software companies that specialize in peddling vast amounts of data involving genetic information to the drug companies. And finally you have the giant pharmaceutical companies trying to cash in on new modalities of treating diseases. It’s what some are calling the genetic gold rush. And there are, conservatively speaking,” says Tucci, “hundreds of billions of dollars at stake.”
This catches Harry’s attention; I can see his eyes light up. He’s wondering how he can invest.
“It all started with gene sequencing, mapping the human gene. The genome project?” He looks at us as if perhaps we haven’t heard of this.
“They’ve mapped it. They’re working out the fine wrinkles as we speak. The question now is how to use it. Which genes on which chromosomes cause breast cancer, or lupus.”
“Or Huntington’s chorea,” I say.
“Precisely,” says Tucci.
“The theory, and it’s more than that now,” says Tucci, “is that electronics can play a part in this. It has been proven that electronic circuitry can be taken down to the molecular level, submicroscopic electronic circuits that can be introduced into living organisms. A kind of cellular computer chip. It’s believed that this is one way to code and carry genetic information.”