Page 9 of Takeover-
Chapter Two
Michael tookoff his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The numbers and letters on his screen kept blurring into each other. Sleep would have helped, but he hadn’t had the time for more than three or four hours a night since he had come back.
The price of a week away from work should not be two weeks of sheer hell. But here he was. He picked up Sam’s cuff link and rolled it between his fingers. Some of the stiffness between his shoulders eased. At least he had that night to remember. The taste of Sam’s skin, the sound of his abandonment when he came, and the way his tight ass had milked Michael’s cock—that memory kept him from going apeshit all over the office.
The problems had started on the plane when he’d turned his computer back on. Damn the in-flight wireless because e-mails hadpouredin. Not even a day after he’d left—and of course he’d been dumb enough to tell his coworkers he’d be out of contact—that asshole Vince had instigated a release of routing software for a cellular backhaul customer. As VP of Engineering, Vince had the authority to fire the guy Michael had left in charge. Frank bent to Vince’s will and certified the release as tested.
Theyhadtested the release before Michael left, but there had been so many problems with regression, integration, and interoperability, he’d thrown the whole lot back to development with a laundry list of bugs to fix, but Vince only ever saw testing as the bottleneck to release.
Once Michael had left for the tropics, Vince broke the bottle and let the release go out into the wild, with disastrous results. Three customers put the code into production and their networks went down. Support was swamped with angry calls 24-7. Vince blamed test for not doing their jobs and Taylor, the CEO, called a meeting and threatened to fire everyone in test—including Michael—until one of the other test engineers, Jennifer, had shut Vince and Taylor down.
God, part of him wished he had been here to see that. At five foot nothing, she’d climbed up onto a table with a fist full of e-mails and the voice of an opera singer. The truth of Vince’s doings came out and that had opened the floodgates. Eventually Steve from development admitted they were still working on the bugs and that the code had huge issues.
By the time Michael had stepped off the plane in Pittsburgh, both Vince and Taylor had been sacked, the angry customers had been downgraded to the last stable release, and the board of directors was ready to hang Michael for having the audacity to go away for a week of vacation, as if the entire episode had been his fault.
He didn’t even bother reminding the board if they’d left Michael as VP of Engineering and Test, the whole episode wouldn’t have happened in the first place, but no, they’d demoted him after he’d been left high and dry by Rasheed and Susan.
The board had brought on Taylor and Vince over Michael’s objections.
Fucking suits.
How long would he pay the price for having trusted his former friends and cofounders—and in Rasheed’s case—former lover? He’d stayed, despite them selling the company out from under him. Oh, he still had some shares, but not nearly the portion he should have had as the third founder—hell, he wasn’t even considered that. Just employee number three, Susan and Rasheed’s first hire.
Bullshit. All of it. He should have left when Susan and Rasheed fled to California to play family, but he couldn’t let what he’d worked so hard for shrivel and die and leave his team behind with no continuity, no transition. So here he was, three years later.
Michael set the cuff link down in front of his monitor. He hadn’t been this angry since they’d left.Shit. The past was unchangeable. Focus on the now.
Wasn’t much better. Today, the crappy code Vince had released was decidedly less messy but still not working correctly. Worse, the board was bringing in a new CEO to “fix” things. Like that would happen. Taylor had worked outsowonderfully. This time, they hadn’t even asked for Michael’s opinion.
Probably because the new suit would take all their hard work and turn it into a lovely pile of cash for the board. Sell the company—that’s what the board members wanted—get a stable release, get some cash for the intellectual property, and get out. Never mind all the folks who’d lose their jobs and years of hard work for a pittance.
Damn, he sounded bitter. Michael scrubbed a hand over his face and put his glasses back on. Time to think about retiring. Or perhaps changing careers to something that didn’t keep him up until four in the morning or give him ulcers. Fly back to Curaçao and find Sam.
Except those people he hired—the ones who trusted him—they’d still be here. And those early designs still bore his name, even if he’d been sanitized out of the official history of Four Rivers.
Sam? Sam was long gone. A memory, like everything else.
Michael’s computer chimed at him.
New mail. Another meeting, this one a one-on-one with the new suit later in the afternoon.
Apparently, he was some super-amazing technical snot of a CEO who liked to get his hands dirty. He’d been scheduling meetings all morning with everyone. There was a meet-and-greet at eleven, then meetings, meetings, and more meetings.
“Yes, I’ll accept the meeting request from S. Randell Anderson,” he muttered at the screen, then clicked send.
He glanced at the time. Fifteen minutes until the meet-and-greet. He probably ought to head to the lunchroom now and get a seat in the back before they were all taken.
He hadn’t bothered to search for info about the suit because everyone else on his team had. Undergrad in engineering at MIT, an MBA from Yale. Anderson had bailed out a dozen failing companies and turned them either into thriving businesses or sweet fruit to be plucked and devoured by a larger company. He had a good track record. Some said he was honest and fair. Others that he was ruthless and driven.
Michael snorted at that. He’d never met anyone at the executive level who didn’t lie through their teeth, even the few he’d counted as friends. He suspectedruthless and drivenwere closer to the truth.
He pushed himself away from the computer and headed toward the back of the office.
The lunchroom walls and floor were dotted with primary colors like some kid’s crayon box, but it was the only space in the office large enough to hold all-hands meetings. People had already claimed most of the seats in the too-bright room. Some folks, mostly marketing, sat in close to the front. Several more employees were scattered at the lunch tables. Michael joined his team against the large windows in the back of the large, echo-prone room, but didn’t sit, though folding chairs had been set out from the rack that sat in the back. Instead, he leaned against the windowsill and waited, watching the door.
No sign of the new CEO or of William Vandershoot, the head of the board. They must be holed up somewhere. Maybe nursing jet lag.
Ganesh from development weaved his way through the tables to join Michael. “Hey, when this is done, can you help me with that bug you sent? I can’t seem to reproduce it on my environment.”
