“It was about four,” Terrell said. “A new wave was taking over the company, led by a man named Francis Dolorman. They got Randy’s ear and twisted his thoughts around. He wouldn’t listen to me anymore.”
“You were on a first-name basis with Krayman?”
“We were friends, Sandy, and that made leaving him all the harder. It became one long guilt trip, especially when he dropped out of sight.”
“Have you spoken to him at all in the last five years?”
“I’ve tried to reach him, but either he doesn’t want to hear from me or someone else doesn’t want him to. I think he’s in trouble.” Terrell paused and began toying with the grass near his knees. “I think maybe Dolorman and his cronies ‘arranged’ Randy’s disappearance so they could run his companies as they saw fit.”
Sandy felt her pulse quicken, surprise mixing with excitement. “You’re saying they kidnapped him.”
“At the very least.”
“My God … but why? What could they hope to gain?”
“Plenty. I’ll have to backtrack a little for you to understand. I knew Randy Krayman better than anyone. I knew what made him tick, what he loved and what he loathed. And what he loved most of all was America. I know that sounds trite, but it’s true. This guy loved his country obsessively and would literally lose sleep over his fears that it was being mismanaged and mishandled into oblivion. People just didn’t understand what was going on, he thought; they had to be educated, informed, even controlled, if that’s what it took.” Terrell found Sandy’s eyes. “Controlled through the media. This goes back almost twenty years. Krayman started buying television stations, and when cable came along, he got in on the ground floor. He figured if he owned a major affiliate in every state, maybe even a network, he could go a long way toward influencing public opinion and with the help of cable, eventually create public opinion.
“It didn’t work, Sandy. Sure, he swayed a few elections his way. Probably won himself a lot of support, too, in addition to making a shitload of money. But what he really wanted was to have his voice be the only one America listened to, sort of an omniscent Paul Harvey telling people to stand by for lots more than just news. When his plan to control television stations and networks didn’t go far enough toward accomplishing this, he began to look elsewhere for the means. We’re going back ten years now, not long before I left.”
“What he ended up finding has something to do with the Krayman Chip, doesn’t it?”
“Everything.”
“And he sold the chip for a fraction of its production costs.”
Terrell looked surprised. “How’d you learn that?”
“Spud Hollins. Remember him?”
Terrell nodded. “Poor bastard. One of the many Krayman Industries chewed up and spit out when Dolorman and his gang first began to assert themselves.”
“Your former boss paid him sixty million for a bankrupt business. Why feel so bad for Hollins?”
“Randy paid him because he felt guilty, because he knew what he had done was wrong but that didn’t make it any less necessary to accomplish what he wanted.”
“Then you’re confirming that COM-U-TECH plagiarized Hollins’s discovery and marketed it as the Krayman Chip.”
“If that’s the scoop you’re looking for, Sandy, your vision is too narrow. It’s old news. Nobody cares anymore.”
“But the chip was part of a bigger plan, wasn’t it, Simon? Krayman wanted his chip in every piece of telecommunications equipment. Why?”
Terrell shrugged. “I wish I could tell you for sure, Sandy, but I can’t. It was around that time that Dolorman grabbed hold of Randy’s ear and convinced him to shut me out. Randy was more obsessed than ever at that point, willing to stop at nothing to have the country running the way he wanted it to. His intentions were good, really they were.”
“You know what they say about the road to hell, Simon.”
“Sure, but it wasn’t Randy who was walking it, it was Dolorman and his cronies. They were pulling the strings and Randy was letting them.” A pained look crossed Terrell’s face. “I saw less and less of Randy in those days. Eventually I was reassigned, but I stuck it out in the hope I could save him from the people around him as well as from himself. I was his friend. I had to try. But Dolorman turned him against me. He caught Randy at his weakest moment and exploited it to the fullest. We didn’t talk much those last few months, and when we did, the things Randy said truly scared me.”
“What kind of things?”
“All vague. I don’t remember any of them clearly. The common theme was that it seemed he had finally found a way to get what he wanted.”
“Control of American public opinion?”
“More like control of the entire country. Dolorman and his gang had put him on to something, and all I know for sure is that its origins were connected somehow to the Krayman Chip.”
“When was the last time you spoke to Krayman?”
“About six months before he dropped out of sight, I managed to make contact. He was talking crazy. They were getting close, he said, but it was wrong. All wrong. That’s his phrase, not mine. He said he was going to stop them before it was too late … and then he conveniently disappeared.”
“You’re saying Dolorman and his people killed Krayman?”
“Or kidnapped him and kept him prisoner.”
“But you never told anybody about that or your fears concerning the Krayman Chip.”
“Who was I going to tell, Sandy?” Terrell challenged, frustration mixing with fear in his voice. “Dolorman was running Krayman Industries and he’d inherited all the power that goes with it. There are lots of folks on the Krayman payroll who don’t draw a regular paycheck, if you know what I mean. Randy kept key officials and politicians in his pocket and you can bet Dolorman switched them into his five years ago. The list keeps growing all the time. The little guys they picked up early have grown into big guys by now. With the kind of power Krayman Industries wields, it wouldn’t be beyond them to own a president someday. I didn’t like the odds of going up against that kind of power, not without Randy to back me up.”
“But that didn’t stop you from speculating on what they were up to, did it?”
“I spent lots of sleepless nights. Still do. Coming here didn’t erase the past, it just dulled it a little. Computer electronics have always been my thing, Sandy. That’s what brought Randy and me together in the first place and in the end it was probably what split us apart. The implications of the Krayman Chip were all pretty frightening, but some of them stand out.”
“I’m listening.”
“It gets a little complicated and technical. And the key comes down to changes in society itself. The computer is now the axis around which everything else spins. We’ve become an information-oriented society instead of an industrial one. It would be too trite to call what’s going on now the information revolution, but the ramifications of the changes taking place are not unlike the ones suffered during the industrial revolution.”
“Suffered implies pain, Simon.”
“A poor choice of words on my part. The computer has far more good points than bad. It certainly has simplified a lot of lives and a lot of businesses. Like I said, though, times are changing. It’s not so much a question of data processing anymore as data transmissions. The whole national power grid is controlled by computers talking to other computers.”
“Hollins mentioned something like that,” Sandy told him. “He said the Krayman Chip allowed them to do it faster.”
“A lot more than just faster, a hell of a lot more. If you wanted to control the country, telecommunications would be the best way to go about it. Stop the computers from talking to one another or make them say what you want.”