He rubbed his chin. “What is your feeling?” he asked.
“I think it’s worth the risk,” I said. “I think I can make this work. But I want you to know that there’s this chance. Like I said, it’s the only way I can see, and I will work my ass off to make it work without any damage. But it’s never been done before, it’s a little crazy, and I won’t know for sure until it’s done. And I don’t want to end up playing truth or dare with Bernadette if I’m wrong.”
He stared at me for a minute, just about as hard as I’ve ever been stared at. “Tell me,” he said at last.
I told him. He focused on me with total intensity, interrupting only once for what was a pretty good question. I laid it all out for him, and yeah, it sounded even crazier saying it out loud in this room. But he listened, and I gave it to him. I showed him some of the research papers I’d gone through. I told him how I thought they would work for this.
He interrupted again. “You have someone specific in mind?”
“I do,” I said. I showed him the name, the bio, the list of impressive papers. He nodded and waved me on.
I went on. I gave him all the detail I thought he would need. When I was done, he got up and walked over to the fireplace. He stood there looking into the flames for a long time. Finally, he turned and looked at me and nodded once. “All right,” he said. “I’ll wire you the money.”
“One more thing,” I said. He raised an eyebrow. I finished my drink and put the glass down on the coffee table. “I’m going to need a special kind of diversion,” I said.
25
Professor Lakshmi Sabharwal was impressed. Not by the man standing there in her laboratory at Pitt. In spite of what looked like a very nice suit, he was nothing much; in his fifties, a sizable paunch, and a large red nose with a mole on the end. His “hair” was an obvious toupee, too perfect and too dark for someone his age.
And his business card was no big deal, either. She’d never heard of North American Innovation Industries, and the name L. Foster Hargrave was just as meaningless.
But the check . . . That was impressive.
He’d come in and introduced himself and said he’d read a couple of her papers. He even quoted one, “The Absorption of Polymer-Based Solutions into Semi-Porous Surfaces.” And he’d put a check down on her worktable.
It was a cashier’s check, made out to her personally, in an amount that made her dizzy.
Not that she was motivated by money; she wasn’t. If she had been, she probably would have gone to medical school, like her parents had suggested. Like her brother had done; he drove a brand-new Mercedes, a new one every year. Lakshmi herself drove a four-year-old Toyota. She didn’t care, and she didn’t care that she made an annual salary less than one-quarter of her brother’s. No: What motivated Lakshmi Sabharwal was her research. And a check this size . . .
It was enough money to fund her research for at least two years.
The research was what she lived for. It was all that mattered. Since her first science fair project in middle school, Lakshmi had been hooked. Not on the results, although of course it was always nice to come up with something. But the process itself, the long hours in the lab, the dozens of repetitions, each with a small new variable—she found it endlessly fascinating, and far more fulfilling than anything else she knew of.
That included personal relationships; Lakshmi was unmarried. She was extremely smart, she was confident, and she could have made an excellent match anytime. But that would interfere with her work.
That work had led her here, to Pittsburgh, and a tenure-track position at the university. And at first, she’d been able to pursue her research into polymers just as she liked. But the funding dried up, and the pressure grew for her to move on to something else. Polymers were not sexy this year. And so she’d had a great deal of trouble getting anyone else to see how vital it could be to perfect a multiuse plastic solution with a built-in time stamp that could permeate and preserve any surface it could penetrate. Maybe the attention and acclaim—and the all-important funding—were withheld because she was a woman, or because her name didn’t sound “American.” Well, it was. She was a third-generation citizen and just as American as anybody else—she’d even been a cheerleader in high school. But the way things were nowadays, anybody who looked like her and had a name more complicated than Smith—
Forget it. Not important. This man Hargrave obviously didn’t care about anything but results. Those, she could deliver. “Let me understand your parameters,” she said. “You want a polymer solution to be applied to a surface— Oh! Very important—what is the composition of this surface?”
Mr. Hargrave nodded affably. “Let’s assume it’s plaster,” he said.
“Aha,” she said. “Well then . . . hmp. And when the solution dries, it has to be flexible?”
“That’s correct.”
“In what sense of the word—that is, just how flexible must it be?”
“Flexible enough so that it can be rolled up like a yoga mat,” Mr. Hargrave said.
“Yoga mat,” she muttered, wondering if he was making some sort of joke about her ethnicity. She decided it didn’t matter. With a check that big, he could make any joke he wanted. “Well then. Plaster is semiporous, which means that—no, no, that’s ridiculous . . . Flexibility is completely—aha! If we add a cross-linking agent? Yes, yes, I think so . . .” Professor Sabharwal was not aware that she was speaking aloud as she rambled through her initial thoughts, until Mr. Hargrave interrupted her.
“You think so?” he demanded. “You think you can do this?”
The professor blinked at him. “It’s never been done before,” she said. “But it is theoretically possible, yes.” And then, seeing the check again, she gave him her best, most dazzling smile. “Some very interesting possibilities,” she said. “But very difficult.”
“I don’t give a shit about interesting,” Hargrave said in his gruff and gravelly voice. “Or difficult. Can you do it?”
Professor Sabharwal frowned and pushed the glasses up on her nose. “Well,” she said. “If I start with a silicone-based liquid with a low viscosity—as I have already done in small amounts in the laboratory—and as I said, add the cross-linking agent . . .” She frowned harder and pushed a strand of hair off her forehead. “Then when you pour the solution onto the horizontal surface—”