The Drucker Proxy Read online

  She closed her portfolio and slipped it under her arm. “You’ve been upfront with me all along, CT. I appreciate that. I don’t know whether you realize how much it takes for a woman, a black woman, to get this far in a glorified construction company. Don’t let the suits and ties fool you. These guys still drive around with hard-hats stashed in their trunks and diesel fuel flowing in their veins. In that culture, women have no place on the job site, and blacks and Hispanics are lowest on the totem pole, one notch below the robots that are starting to show up onsite. So, you see it was not accidental where I sat today.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “I know your roster might already be a little deep on the tech side. Still, I couldn’t help but note you have three women on your board and your management ranks do not all bring to mind a wall of fresh plaster, if you catch my drift.”

  “I do. And we try. It helps having the right people with the right agenda in HR.” He gave her a skewed smile that almost shaded into a wink.

  “I’ve met your wife, remember? At the Construction Tech Xpo in Las Vegas when you first started putting the moves on ModulArch. She is definitely one of the smart ones, someone who knows what she is after and goes for it.”

  “Like you?”

  “I hope so. Look, I have new IT infrastructure proposals to go over, so I better get back to my office. There’s lots to do before Monday morning.”

  “It can wait. Get some R-and-R over the weekend.”

  “Easy for you, maybe, but—”

  “Monday is a new week and maybe a new org chart. Trust me on this. Take the weekend off. You’ll be fine on Monday.”

  She cocked her head and gave him a what-you-talking-about look. “Do I thank you?”

  “No, not yet anyway. But I hope you like your new boss.”

  She narrowed her eyes and nodded. “See you Monday, Mr. Drucker.”

  — 3 —

  Drucker glanced at his smartwatch where an appointment flag was pulsing slowly. Damn. He should never have agreed to the interview. It was that woman—what the fuck was her name?—the one who was chasing some story for some article for some online magazine. Kelsey would know.

  Kelsey Underwood was the guardian at the gate who stood between him and a hostile world and who kept everything on schedule and in place. He was usually good with details, but only if the subject matter interested him, which narrowed the topics to fewer than a handful, starting with making money and ending with making money. In between was sex, but wealth was job one, the means to every end, from the beach house to the wife who would meet him there in a few hours. With wealth came options, he always told his friends, and he had every intention to keep exercising those options as he saw fit.

  He tapped the pulsing icon to acknowledge it and gave the screen a quick finger swipe. “Kelsey,” he said into his wrist, “put my four o’clock in the small conference room and tell her I’m tied up on a call. I’ll be there in ten. Oh, and have the new Existendia proxy papers on my desk to sign.” He gave the twist of his wrist needed to end the message before retrieving his tablet from the podium. There were already several “urgents” and “importants” from ModulArch people. He scanned the sender and subject lines and dragged a couple toward Kelsey’s inbox icon. She was good at reading his mind and knowing just how to handle the annoying day-to-day intrusions without explicit instructions from him. The message from Brad Pomerantz he flagged to handle himself. But not now. Get this woman in the conference room taken care of, then meet Barbra to celebrate.

  It was all happening, for real. My first billion, he was thinking. I’m forty-seven and already made my first.

  — —

  The woman in the conference room was hunched over, squinting at an outsized smartphone as her fingers flew over a foldable Bluetooth keyboard. Her magenta-streaked hair was undercut on the left side, shoulder length on the right, and a diamond stud glinted high on her left cheek. She did not react when Coleman entered.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m Coleman Drucker. You wanted to meet with me?”

  “Yeah.” She kept typing. “Just a minute.”

  Annoyed, he was about to snap that he was busy, and she should reschedule with his assistant, but she folded the keyboard and flipped the smartphone face down. “Sorry about that,” she said, “but even freelance feature writers have deadlines.” She stood and extended her hand. “I’m Dana Carmody.”

  “Ah, right. Oh yeah, I remember. Carmody Central. Funny stuff.” He smiled, thinking of her geeky online comics, some of which had become internet memes.

  “That was all a youthful brain fart. I string for the LA Times these days. And I’m working on a long piece for Harper’s. That’s why I’m here.”

  “And this piece for Harper’s, it’s about developments in the construction industry?”

  “Not really. I understand you own a piece of Existendia.”

  “That’s not …” He was about to say it wasn’t true, but changed his mind. “That’s not public knowledge. And not for disclosure. If you’re here to discuss my personal investment strategies, I think we can probably cut the interview short. Very short.”

  “Well, I hope we can keep talking. And maybe you don’t know that LATech Online reported on your investment over a year ago. I’d call that public knowledge.”

  “Okay, didn’t know that.” It wasn’t true, of course, but he always preferred for others to think he knew less than he did. “So, right, I bought a piece of Existendia. I’m very future-oriented; my portfolio reflects that.”

  “You and a lot of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seem to have common interests.”

  “This is Santa Monica, not Santa Clara.”

  “Geography doesn’t define culture, Mr. Drucker. The Valley, Seattle, Boston’s Technology Archipelago atop the new harbor barrier crescent—it’s all one big boy’s club, the inroads of the last decade of female empowerment notwithstanding. There’s still a glass ceiling, even if in high-tech it’s Lexan. So, Mr. Drucker—”

  “Cole. You can call me Cole, provided you get to the gist of this interview.”

  “The gist, Mr. Drucker, is that I’m interested in the quest for immortality and its associated illusions.”

  “Talk to your priest. Or your spiritual guru. Whatever. I’m just a glorified software engineer, despite the title on my office in the C-suite. I figure out better ways to connect and use internet-connected devices. And better ways to make money from those devices. Now I’ve got a company to run, a company that just tripled in size. Which you would know if you read LATech Online, since they’ve lately been all over us with their derisive drivel about …” He was interrupted by the tickle on his wrist. Kelsey was trying to reach him with something urgent. “Look, I have to go. I think that will have to do. I’ll get one of the guys to show you out.” At the door, he paused without turning. “Good luck with your piece.”

  — —

  In his outer office, he smiled at Kelsey. “Thanks for rescuing me. What’s up?”

  “That’s what. I figured you didn’t really have the time for the charming Ms. Carmody.”

  He gently lifted her hand from the keyboard wrist rest in front of her and bent to kiss it. “You are so good, an absolute mind reader.”

  “I am. And that’s why you’ll be giving me a fat raise after the reorg.”

  “There you go again, reading my mind.” He glanced at the time. “You better ping Barbra that I might be late.”

  “Already done. She’s finishing up and will meet you at the beach house. Anything else?”

  What Cole was thinking could get him in trouble. From where he was standing, he had a good view down her dress. He made a show of looking at the spreadsheet on her monitor, but figured she had probably noticed. “No, nothing now.”

  “Very well, then.”

  She had noticed, of course, and he knew it. He also knew that if he followed up with anything other than a nod and a grunt, he could be staring down allegations of sexual harassm
ent from Kelsey—maybe worse from Barbra, who drew the line at workplace shenanigans. He struggled to keep a lid on his impulses, but the urges were always there nonetheless. Barbra might be the wet dream of half the men in the company—and maybe no small number of the women—but Cole was a sensation seeker at the core, always in pursuit of something new. Gwen, with her horse stables up in Topanga, was new. It would go nowhere, he was certain, but just the thought of her riding at his side, her ponytail bobbing in the wind, shortened his breath.

  “Ah, I’ll see you on Monday, Kelsey. Barbra and I are—”

  “Off to the beach house for the weekend. I messaged the house earlier to crank the A/C up and to do inventory to make sure the fridge and bar have been restocked.”

  “You are amazing.” He bowed, figuring that was an inoffensive gesture.

  She grinned and turned back to her spreadsheet.

  — —

  In executive parking, a man in a blue service uniform was sitting in Cole’s Tensora, talking into the air. “Hey, I know I was supposed to swap cars by four, but the freeway was a parking lot. I had to go surface streets. Then there was the stop at the shop. Der! Plus, the damn rent-a-cop at the gate here gave me a hard time.” He looked up to see Coleman standing beside the car, hands on hips, eyes narrowed. “Shit, gotta go. The man’s here.” He thumbed the button on the steering wheel to cut off the call.

  “Ola. Er, hello, sir. I’m Hernandez, uh,”—he looked down at the clipboard on the passenger seat— “Mr. Drucker. I’m here with the loaner for you for the weekend. We got, lotsa calls, you know, service requests, so we couldn’t get to your car as fast as we could, you know.” He nodded over his shoulder. “That’s your loaner car there. It’s the new NX. It’s what they call a preproduction model. We thought you might like, you know, to see what you think of it.”

  Coleman shook his head in bemused impatience. The guy was acting like a parody of a dropout car jockey.

  “Go ahead and get in. It’s already keyed to your passcard. I just gotta finish some, like, paperwork here.”

  Coleman turned to check out the copper-and-silver Tensora blocking the exit. “So that’s the new NX, eh? Okay. I’ll give it a try.”

  He slipped in and tapped an icon on the screen. The top of the car split into four pieces to do a speedy and near-silent imitation of a Hollywood-style transformer as the roof segments disappeared into the body.

  “Well, that’s cool.” He backed up, spun the wheel, and stepped on the accelerator. The car shot toward the rear gate of the campus.

  Glancing at the rearview screen, he noted the man in the coveralls now had his head buried under the open hood of his Tensora. That struck him as strange, but the beach—and Barbra—were waiting. He waved his passcard in the air as if announcing his presence to a gathering crowd, and the back gate opened just in time for him to slip through without having to touch the brakes.

  — 4 —

  Traffic had been so bad that his own long driveway gave Cole the first opportunity to floor the NX. It plastered him to the seat. Then, just as he was about to grin with the pleasure, the autopilot cut in and applied the brakes to keep him from driving through the back wall of the garage. The momentary rush started him thinking about Gwen and the road up to Topanga, but he was already committed to a celebratory weekend with Barbra. That should be good. From the beginning, Barbra had been good in the sack, and she understood the art of expressing gratitude.

  He hopped out of the car without opening the driver-side door. The house recognized him and opened the door from the garage for him. “Tandi,” he said to the house. “I’ll take a glass of the Willamette Valley viognier-gewürtz, please. Send it to the deck. Well chilled, of course.”

  “Right away.”

  — —

  The doorbell surprised him. The house would have let Barbra in and would have sent away almost anyone else. He turned his phone right-side up to see who was at the door. Magenta hair. What the …? What did the woman want, and why had Tandi not sent her packing? He studied her face on his phone. The door cam was not flattering, but he had to admit she was cute. What was she, maybe mid to late twenties? Young, obviously a bit on the wild side, what with the hair and the hardware. That could be a good sign.

  He glanced at the time-date banner on the top edge of his phone. Knowing Barbra, she wouldn’t get home for another couple of hours. He was all too keenly aware that she was becoming even more serious about the business than he was. Her stake dictated by the pre-nup was a lot smaller than his, which meant she had to work that much harder.

  The door chime sounded again. Persistent little bitch. Okay, let her in and see if you can get her out of her pants in time for a quickie before Barbra arrives. It could be risky, but that would just make it all the more exciting.

  “Tandi, let her in and have her wait in the foyer.”

  Drink in hand, Cole took his time getting from the deck to the front of the house.

  “Ah, the charming and persistent Ms. Carmody. How did you persuade the house to pass your button-pushing through to actually ring the bell?”

  “You ought to be able to guess that, Mr. Drucker. It’s—”

  “Cole, call me Cole. Please.”

  “The Internet-of-Things, Cole. Everything’s connected and always listening. You just have to know how to talk to the stuff.”

  “You’re kidding. Not my house. It’s a Drucker Technologies fully integrated smart house. We have the best tiered security in the business.”

  “Fully integrated, that’s the operant term. Everything in the whole place is on the network, Wi-Fi linked and internet connected. The more complicated the system, Mr. Drucker, the more holes there are to plug. No tiered security can protect everything against a determined hacker. Determined. That’s me.”

  “Cute. That’s cute. You are, too, I might add. But you gotta tell me how you did it? What did you breach.”

  She grinned. “I should make you work to get it out of me, but it was really too easy.”

  “What if I ply you with one of the very best white wines from the Willamette Valley?”

  “Ply away.”

  “Tandi, bring another glass of the viognier-gewürztraminer out to the deck. Now, Ms. Carmody, how did you do it?”

  “The doorbell. I didn’t have to hack the whole system, just bypass the intercept on the ring-through. It’s a factory-set code that nobody thinks to change, since who would ever think of a ringing door chime as a security threat.”

  “Wow, now that’s fuckin’ clever. You just earned yourself a glass of wine and a private one-on-one with Santa Monica’s latest billionaire. Follow me out to the deck.”

  “Really? Suddenly you’re a billionaire? I would have pegged you as a few zeroes short of that club.”

  “Ouch. Don’t tell me you don’t know about the merger, the new Drucker Unified. It was in your own mag, LATech Online.”

  “Not my mag. Like I told you. I do read it, but I don’t write for it.”

  “And here we are.” He waved to make the slider open for her. “Isn’t the view magnificent?”

  “Nice. But it’s the same damn rising ocean as your neighbors see, at least until you all get washed out into it by the rising seas.”

  “Yeah, but none of them have a Drucker Technologies home. And none of them are being interviewed by the amazingly clever and terminally attractive Dana Carmody, who is not above hacking into a supposedly secure system just to get an interview. So what is this really about?” He swiveled a deck chair so he could see her and watch the incoming tide at the same time.

  “As I said before, I’m working on a piece about men—and a couple of women—who are desperate to outscore the actuarial tables—by big margins. Rumor has it that you have some opinions about some of these people and their investments in immortality. Take Craig Freiburg, for—”

  “Freiburg is an idiot. He’s old and scared. When he was younger, he was into wheatgrass and calorie restriction, oxygen therapy and cleansing
fasts. Didn’t buy him much. He still earned his quadruple bypass at fifty-four and two rounds of chemo at sixty. Have you seen the man? He’s not even seventy and already looks like death on a beanpole. Now that he can hear the Grim Reaper scything toward him through the fields of his wheatgrass, he’s all in to hedge his bets.”

  “You’re saying?”

  “Cryonics is a crock, the biggest sucker bet ever on offer.”

  “How is that?”

  “None of these guys who have purchased perpetual preservation at three hundred below zero have thought through the end game—Freiburg included. Their fantasy is that science will someday be able to revive them and cure whatever disease or fix whatever trauma killed them. But why? Why would some future society want to go through what is almost certain to be an immensely complicated and surely risky and expensive process of trying to revive some old and ailing relic whose knowledge and abilities, even if they can be recovered, will be hopelessly out of date?”

  He took a sip from his Riedel glass and savored the floral spice of the wine. “Mmm. An amazing and daring blend. Not one of my wineries. Not yet.” He set the glass on the teak-top table beside his chair. “None of us is irreplaceable, Ms. Carmody, or even ultimately all that important. Even genius is cheap. Something like 150 million geniuses are born every year. Why would we, in the future, squander scarce resources on bringing back some decrepit egotist from the technological dark ages when we have an endless supply of new recruits?” He noticed her hand in her pocket. “You taking notes?”

  “Mind if I tape this?”

  “Be my guest. I’ll just rant on.” He took another sip. “Since 1967, when Dr. James Bedford became the first man to be put into cryonic suspension, thousands of sad cases have had their bodies frozen. Even more pathetic are the hoards who can’t afford the whole-body freeze and opt for the cheaper option of beheading before the iceman cometh. They’re deluded. I’m sure you remember the mess with that Italian doc and his head transplant debacle.”

  She nodded. “But medical science keeps progressing. Someday we will almost certainly see a successful full-body transplant.”