Timeline

"ITC Research."

He identified himself, then said, "I’m calling about your missing employee, Joseph Traub."

"One moment please, I’ll connect you to our director of human resources."

He then waited on hold for several minutes. Muzak played. He cupped his hand over the phone, and as casually as he could, said to Beverly, "Are you free for dinner, or are you seeing your granny?"

She continued to write, not looking up from the chart. "I’m seeing Granny."

He gave a little shrug. "Just thought I’d ask," he said.

"But she goes to bed early. About eight o’clock."

"Is that right?"

She smiled, still looking down at her notes. "Yes."

Wauneka grinned. "Well, okay."

"Okay."

The phone clicked again and he heard a woman say, "Hold please, I am putting you through to our senior vice president, Dr. Gordon."

"Thank you." He thought, Senior vice president.

Another click, then a gravelly voice: "This is John Gordon speaking."

"Dr. Gordon, this is James Wauneka of the Gallup Police Department. I’m calling you from McKinley Hospital, in Gallup," he said. "I’m afraid I have some bad news."

Seen through the picture windows of the ITC conference room, the yellow afternoon sun gleamed off the five glass and steel laboratory buildings of the Black Rock research complex. In the distance, afternoon thunderclouds were forming over the far desert. But inside the room, the twelve ITC board members were turned away from the view. They were having coffee at a side table, talking to one another while they waited for the meeting to begin. Board meetings always ran into the night, because the ITC president, Robert Doniger, was a notorious insomniac and he scheduled them that way. It was a tribute to Doniger’s brilliance that the board members, all CEOs and major venture capitalists, came anyway.

Right now, Doniger had yet to make an appearance. John Gordon, Doniger’s burly vice president, thought he knew why. Still talking on a cell phone, Gordon began to make his way toward the door. At one time Gordon had been an Air Force project manager, and he still had a military bearing. His blue business suit was freshly pressed, and his black shoes shone. Holding his cell phone to his ear, he said, "I understand, Officer," and he slipped out the door.

Just as he had thought, Doniger was in the hallway, pacing up and down like a hyperactive kid, while Diane Kramer, ITC’s head attorney, stood to one side and listened to him. Gordon saw Doniger jabbing his finger in the air at her angrily. Clearly, he was giving her hell.

Robert Doniger was thirty-eight years old, a brilliant physicist, and a billionaire. Despite a potbelly and gray hair, his manner remained youthful  –  or juvenile, depending on whom you talked to. Certainly age had not mellowed him. ITC was his third startup company; he had grown rich from the others, but his management style was as caustic and nasty as ever. Nearly everybody in the company feared him.

In deference to the board meeting, Doniger had put on a blue suit, forgoing his usual khakis and sweats. But he looked uncomfortable in the suit, like a boy whose parents had made him dress up.

"Well, thank you very much, Officer Wauneka," Gordon said into the cell phone. "We’ll make all the arrangements. Yes. We’ll do that immediately. Thank you again." Gordon flipped the phone shut, and turned to Doniger. "Traub’s dead, and they’ve identified his body."

"Where?"

"Gallup. That was a cop calling from the ER."

"What do they think he died of?"

"They don’t know. They think massive cardiac arrest. But there was a problem with his fingers. A circulatory problem. They’re going to do an autopsy. It’s required by law."

Doniger waved his hand, a gesture of irritable dismissal. "Big fucking deal. The autopsy won’t show anything. Traub had transcription errors. They’ll never figure it out. Why are you wasting my time with this shit?"

"One of your employees just died, Bob," Gordon said.

"That’s true," Doniger said coldly. "And you know what? There’s fuck all I can do about it. I feel sorry. Oh me oh my. Send some flowers. Just handle it, okay?"

At moments like this, Gordon would take a deep breath, and remind himself that Doniger was no different from most other aggressive young entrepreneurs. He would remind himself that behind the sarcasm, Doniger was nearly always right. And he would remind himself that in any case, Doniger had behaved this way all his life.

Robert Doniger had shown early signs of genius, taking up engineering textbooks while still in grade school. By the time he was nine, he could fix any electronic appliance  –  a radio, or a TV  –  fiddling with the vacuum tubes and wires until he got it working. When his mother expressed concern that he would electrocute himself, he told her, "Don’t be an idiot." And when his favorite grandmother died, a dry-eyed Doniger informed his mother that the old lady still owed him twenty-seven dollars, and he expected her to make good on it.

After graduating summa cum laude in physics from Stanford at the age of eighteen, Doniger had gone to Fermilab, near Chicago. He quit after six months, telling the director of the lab that "particle physics is for jerkoffs." He returned to Stanford, where he worked in what he regarded as a more promising area: superconducting magnetism.

This was a time when scientists of all sorts were leaving the university to start companies to exploit their discoveries. Doniger left after a year to found TechGate, a company that made the components for precision chip etching that Doniger had invented in passing. When Stanford protested that he’d made these discoveries while working at the lab, Doniger said, "If you’ve got a problem, sue me. Otherwise shut up."