45. Un-Ionized

45

Un-Ionized

NICOLE LAMB

“No way,” Nicole said, sitting in her office chair as her entire lab, accounting, and legal department filed into her office.

Arvind and the other traitors must have narked to the rest of the office about the secret back hallway to get into the lab office corridor, which meant the rest of the staff were going to sneak in and raid the vending machines up here, too.

“This was your idea,” Afifa said to Nicole. “I wouldn’t have even thought of it.”

“I am in research and development,” Nicole insisted. “I researched and developed this, and then I handed it off. Someone else needs to market and sell it to Last Chance, Inc. There is no flippin’ way I’m going in there with their representative, whoever that is.”

The lies stuck in her throat. She knew exactly who would be in that room, and she didn’t want to see him.

Selma braced her hands on Nicole’s desk and leaned over it at her. “Look, I don’t care if you need to strap on one of these swords or whatever, but screw your courage to the sticking place and go in there and fight for us.”

“Don’t quote Shakespeare at me. Shakespeare isn’t going to work.”

Selma turned to the other twenty people in the office. “Anybody else going to go in there and negotiate for us?”

Nobody uttered a dang word. Cowards.

Finally, Arvind said, “I can’t. English isn’t even my first language.”

“You were born in Irvine. You can negotiate as well or better than I can.”

“No, I can’t. I really can’t. I have anxiety.”

“You call anxiety a ‘white-people problem.’ Besides, I’m an engineer. Engineers are notoriously bad at talking to people.”

“You’re not,” Afifa said.

Arvind reached over, grabbed her hand, and tugged, making her bend over to not be pulled out of her chair. “Come on, boss. We need you.”

“Any of you can do this. Selma, I nominate Selma. You were pre-law for a while before you went into materials science.”

“I changed my major because I can’t talk in front of people,” Selma told her.

“Plus, she’s on the reduction in force list. It’ll look like she’s just trying to save her skin instead of speaking for the group,” Arvind said.

Nicole glared up at Arvind. “Conveniently, that lets you out, too.”

He grinned at her. “Yup. Up and at ‘em, tiger. Let’s go.”

That’s how Nicole found herself propelled at the head of an overeducated and very ruly mob walking down the staircase, their shoes echoing on the cement like herds of horses thundering through the desert.

Afifa told her, “We put their delegation in conference room two because it’s the larger one.”

“Delegation? I thought it was one representative!” Nicole hissed at her.

“Too late to back out now,” Arvind muttered, shoving her through the conference room door and closing it behind her.

Three men sat on the other side of the conference table.

Morrissey Sand.

Some guy she didn’t know.

And as she’d absolutely expected, Kingston doggoneit Moore.

Her heart clenched just breathing the same air he was.

Nicole looked him right in his bright blue eyes. “Fancy meeting you here, silent partner.”

Kingston’s shut-tight expression didn’t change. “It’s good to see you.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at a golf show in New York City?” she demanded.

He looked down at his hands lying on the conference table.

That conference table. Right there, where his hands were resting, in the middle of that long side of the table.

Yep.

He said, “We’re flying back this afternoon. I’ll be at the show for Friday and the weekend.”

“On Last Chance’s private plane.”

“Yes. The plane is Last Chance’s private plane.”

“Yeah. Huh.” Nicole turned around and shoved the door open, startling Arvind and twenty other people lurking out there.

She grabbed Selma by her wrist and yanked her inside. “If I have to negotiate with these jerks, you have to take notes. We need a record of this meeting.”

Selma scooted around and sat at the far end of the table, half-sideways, her thumbs at the ready on her phone. “Okay, I’m video-recording it.”

Kingston’s gaze followed Nicole as she stomped into the room and sat across the table from the three stupidly handsome men.

She tried not to look at Kingston. Every time she did, flashes of him laughing with his head on a white pillow, walking with her barefoot on beaches with his hand holding hers, and that obsessed sharpness in his blue eyes when he took off her clothes dominated her thoughts.

Her body dissolved with longing, wanting to drift across the table as mist and touch him.

“Thank you for coming, Ms. Lamb,” Kingston said.

Nicole ignored that and glanced at Selma. “Attendees at this meeting are Nicole Catherine Lamb, designated representative of Fairways and Greens Un-Ionized.”

“I thought you formed a union, and this was a union negotiation,” Kingston said, frowning at the paperwork littering the table in front of him.

“It is. Unionized and un-ionized are spelled the same way. Since the union started with the engineers and scientists in the lab core, its name is a science joke.”

“So it was you,” Morrissey said, unsmiling. “I am not at all surprised.”

“We’d been talking about a union before Last Chance bought Sidewinder. You guys have to state your names for the record.”

Morrissey regarded her with his pale blue, almost gray eyes. “Morrissey Sand, attorney at law and partner at Last Chance, Inc.”

The other guy on the end said, “Jericho Parr, partner at Last Chance, Inc.”

Kingston didn’t take his eyes off Nicole. “Kingston Moore.”

“And your position,” she told him, her jaw barely moving.

Then he looked down at the table. “Partner at Last Chance, Inc.”

“Yeah,” Nicole said. “Partner.”

“Wait,” Selma said, pointing her finger across the table. “He’s not our new sales guy?”

“No,” Nicole told her, “and he never was. He was on our payroll somehow, but he was a viper in our midst. He was spying for Last Chance the whole time.”

“It wasn’t like that,” he said.

“You thought you were so cool, playing undercover boss while deciding who would lose their jobs, but you made some mistakes.”

“The email account for the second email,” Kingston said. “I figured it out that night, but it was too late.”

“Yeah, once you sent the second email from your Last Chance partner account, kingston moore at last chance inc dot com, the ISP made it easier to trace you as a partner. We had info in fifteen minutes.”

“I was careless.” Kingston looked straight at her. “I was distracted.”

“And then you made another mistake,” Nicole said. “You sent those layoff emails on Monday, but you didn’t file the paperwork with HR to lay people off until yesterday afternoon, Wednesday. We filed our union paperwork with the state Tuesday morning, and the IFPTE recognized us that afternoon as a chapter.”

“The International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers is a union for scientists,” Morrissey said, nitpicking. “The admin, accounting, and legal staff wouldn’t be covered.”

“Sidewinder has been declared an R&D and materials science company for union purposes,” Nicole told him. “Our other staff is covered by the same union. You don’t want to negotiate with five different unions, do you? Because we will totally talk to each other.”

“No,” Kingston said. “We accept Fairways and Greens Un-Ionized as the union representing Sidewinder’s employees.”

“And that means you have to negotiate in good faith,” she told them.

“We know labor law,” Morrissey said, his tone sharp.

“Looks like you didn’t get your Bloody Mary this morning,” Nicole said to him. “I was reading it into the record.”

Kingston quietly placed his hand on the table in front of Morrissey, who rolled his eyes. “Nicole, let’s negotiate in good faith.”

“Okay,” she said. “First order of business: layoffs. No layoffs until January at the earliest.”

“We can’t delay it that long,” Kingston said. “The second round should have been in July, and I delayed it for no good reason. This company is falling apart. If we don’t reduce costs now, Last Chance will have to liquidate Sidewinder.”

“Threatening to close a company when the workers join a union violates the National Labor Relations Act. We will report any unfair labor practices to the National Labor Relations Board, and to reiterate, we are recording this meeting.”

Morrissey muttered, “She’s right.”

“Sidewinder’s finances have been precarious,” Kingston said to Nicole, “and that’s a generous way of describing them, for years. We aren’t closing to avoid unionizing. We might have to close the company because even one more hit would mean insolvency.”

“The NLRB won’t see it that way,” Nicole said.

Morrissey said under his breath to Kingston, “The absolute last thing Last Chance or Sidewinder needs is an NLRB investigation.”

Kingston interlaced his fingers and leaned forward. “Sidewinder has to be solvent now. Last Chance has been pouring money into it, hoping for a miracle turnaround that didn’t happen. The situation is desperate. The layoffs are necessary.”

Something wasn’t making sense. “Why did you think ‘a miracle’ would happen when you bought the company? It’s been puttering along with the same cash flow for years.”

The other guy, Jericho Parr, spoke up. “We were misled by the former owner on two fronts. First, he didn’t disclose a lien against the company that we discovered only after the sale.”

“That’s not our problem. Sue him for fraud,” Nicole said.

“It’s too late for that and won’t fix the bottom line,” Jericho said.

“And what was the other thing?” she asked.

Kingston said, “Joe Flanagan said that several innovative new products along the same line as the Scimitar Edge lob wedge were ready for commercialization.”

“No, they weren’t,” Nicole scoffed. “You know that. They’re not even close, and they sure as heck weren’t close to commercialization in March.”

He nodded. “We were misled.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have been misled. You should’ve done a site visit or asked R&D about anticipated release dates, not just taken Joe Flanagan’s word for it.”

“Did you take a vacation in early March?” Kingston asked her.

“Yeah. My college friends and I go down to Cabo every year for spring break. We never got to go while we were in college because we were studying for midterms.”

The three Last Chance guys eyed each other.

Kingston said, “My site visit was the first week of March. We met with a white guy named Bode Shultz.”

Nicole rolled her eyes so hard she thought she might sprain her eyeballs. “Bode was let go two weeks after I got back because he couldn’t do the work. He was a Level-Three Technician and a suck-up. A real sucker for people in authority. He would have said anything Joe told him to.”

Kingston leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers into his eyes. “Sorry, guys.”

Morrissey clapped him on the shoulder but spoke to Nicole. “All right, Joe Flanagan’s fraud isn’t your fault, but now it’s all our problem. What are we going to do now?”

They were tag-teaming Nicole, and she didn’t have any backup. Selma was curled up in the chair like someone might hit her with a club, but she held her phone steady to capture everything that was said.

“Okay,” Nicole said. “No matter what has happened in the past, we need to negotiate in good faith now. So, there are no layoffs, and Kingston has to delete the specs and plans he stole off my laptop.”

Jericho raised an eyebrow. “What?”

Morrissey shook his head. “That wasn’t stealing. Trust me, I’m a lawyer.”

“No, Kingston stole them,” Nicole said, raising her voice because she was right. “They were my thoughts, my plans, my ideas and experimental models, and he stole them.”

“That laptop itself and all intellectual property you produce during your contracted employment are the sole property of Sidewinder Golf, and we own Sidewinder Golf,” Kingston said evenly. “I recovered intellectual property that was not uploaded to the company’s cloud servers as your contract specifies it must be.”

“You didn’t have the right!” she gasped. Stealing them was such a violation.

“I did, and I do. Morrissey looked over your contract and our purchase agreement with Joe Flanagan. You should retain counsel if you need the work-for-hire sections of your contract explained to you.”

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but it’s generally the way business works. We pay you a salary at risk to develop ideas, and the company then owns the patents on those ideas. If you want to go it alone, you have to start your own company.”

“Maybe I will,” she said, refusing to acknowledge that her nose was burning inside.

“Anything you wrote down, tested, or thought of while under contract is Sidewinder’s property,” he said gently. “In another situation, if you quit a job and immediately started a competing company with a novel idea, your previous company would sue you for the patent, and they’d win easily. I’ve seen it happen.”

“That’s not fair,” she said, feeling her best ideas slip away.

“I’m sorry it happened that way,” Kingston said, “but they always were company property and should have been in the cloud backup. I asked you to hand them over more than once.”

“You were a random new sales guy.”

“I’m going to use them to save Sidewinder. They won’t be forgotten. You will be credited on the patents and marketing materials. It would be great for the company if you were the face of R&D for promo.”

Nicole shouldn’t be whining about her own petty problems, anyway. This negotiation was for all of them to save people’s jobs, not her own grievances. “In any case, this is a union negotiation. I reiterate our demands: no layoffs.”

“We have to cut staff,” Kingston said, leaning forward and bracing his arms on the table.

“Fine,” Nicole said. “I’m the highest-paid employee at Sidewinder, even more than the lawyers. I’ll quit. You don’t even have to offer me a package. That’ll cut the bottom line.”

Kingston literally blinked. “You can’t.”

“Absolutely, I can. I can find a job and start next week. I’ll go build nuclear war machines. Probably not at Electric Boat in Connecticut, though. Maybe I’ll go to Virginia.”

“Of all the top talent we need to retain, you are at the top of the list,” Kingston said.

“Hire someone else.”

“Nicole, you designed those clubs. No one else knows them like you do.”

“So you need me,” she said, verifying.

“Yes,” Kingston said. “I need you.”

“Sidewinder needs me,” she said.

“—Yes.”

“Then that’s my price. No layoffs, and I won’t quit for thirty days.”

“A year,” Kingston said.

Morrissey said under his breath to Kingston, “Final tallies are December twenty-eighth.”

That was weird. “Two and half months,” she said. “Thanksgiving.”

“Six months,” Kingston said. “No layoffs, and no one quits until the end of the year. Full staff.”

“First, you want to get rid of a bunch of people. Now, you want to lock everyone into their jobs.”

“You will personally stay for six months,” Kingston said, “which is March of next year, and this whole company goes on wartime footing until New Year’s. We make sure the Rattler line inventory is delivered to the big-box retail golf stores by Halloween.”

What on God’s green— “The what? We can’t manufacture big-box retail quantities of the Rattler line in a month and deliver it. That’s crazy-talk.”

Morrissey asked him, “How much of an investment will Last Chance have to put up for that?”

“That’s the deal,” Kingston said to Nicole. “If we can’t cut the denominator, we have to increase the numerator by a lot. Every employee has to pull their weight and then some. I’m not talking about going to China and working on the assembly line?—”

A chill passed over her spine. “It’s Dali Manufacturing, isn’t it? You retained Dali.”

He pressed his lips, then said, “They have the capacity. No one else does.”

“They’re going to swipe our intellectual property. Your IP, as you insist, because it’s not mine, it’s yours.”

“It’s our only shot at the company surviving. That’s what it’s going to take to save Sidewinder Golf. The Rattler line goes to retail, and the Legendary line becomes our high-end, and I mean very high-end, line that goes on order right now with delivery by Thanksgiving.”

Jericho looked across to Morrissey, who wore a shocked scowl like he’d seen a zombie company shamble across the table, and he asked, “A new elite-level line going into production, too? How much is that going to cost Last Chance?”

Nicole stopped short, the word Legendary echoing in her head. “You want to call it the Legendary line.”

Kingston sighed. “It’s a great name. If Sidewinder’s marketing department doesn’t love it, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

“And the prototype names, the Excalibur, the Vorpal irons?”

“And the Khanda putter. We’re keeping your names. We can make great golf clubs to live up to them, but it will take work. To avoid layoffs, we have to make both those things happen at the same time.”

“I’m telling you right now, that timeline is insane,” she said. “The only reason we got the Scimitar Edge out so quickly was because everything went perfectly. There were no snafus, which never happens.”

“We need it to happen again.”

“You’re delusional.”

Jericho’s spreadsheets rattled as he sorted through them. “We didn’t account for a mass-market product and an elite-level product going from dev to commercialization. The start-up costs for two product lines are going to be astronomical.”

“If those Rattler clubs need any modifications for mass manufacturing—” Kingston said to Nicole.

“Oh, they will. They definitely will.”

“And if there are changes needed for the Legendary line as we’re commercializing them?—”

“I’ll say it again. Those designs aren’t ready.”

“—you need to be here to work on those changes. Six months. Please, Nicole. Sidewinder can’t live without you.”

His voice choked in the last part of his sentence.

Nicole looked up at him.

Kingston was staring at her, his blue eyes wider, vulnerable, and he was half-leaning on the table. “It will be a challenge like no other. You’ll probably never see anything like it again in your professional life.”

“Yeah,” she said, frowning at her fingers knotted together. “It would be.”

“I will personally buy you any sword you want in the whole damn world if we pull this off. I will ask the King of England if he will sell us the knighting sword he uses at investitures, King George the Sixth’s Curtana, and I will buy it for you.”

“You don’t know the King of England,” Nicole said, her tone hopefully conveying her obvious dubiousness.

“I know people who do,” Kingston said.

“Who?” Jericho asked him.

“That alumnus who teaches that one-credit pragmatic world politics seminar in the summer every other year,” Kingston told him. “Arthur Finch-Hatten.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jericho said. “That guy. There’s a rumor that the real reason he?—”

“But Nicole,” Kingston turned back to her. “I need you to stay.”

“Seriously, George the Sixth’s Curtana,” she said.

“I will try, but I will get you anything you want.”

Six months of passing him in the hallways, sitting in meetings at this conference table, and trying to figure out whether she should take the elevator or the stairs to avoid him were going to be torture. “Okay, I’ll stay for six months, with a contract for zero layoffs until the end of the year.”

Jericho spoke up, tapping a printed-out spreadsheet covered with green and red flowing numbers. “With the caveat that the Rattler line must be delivered to retailers by Halloween, and the Legendary series beginning delivery to pre-orders by Thanksgiving. Otherwise, the numbers don’t work at all. The math doesn’t math, and we need to close Sidewinder immediately without notice.” He glared at Kingston. “Because we need to stop throwing good money after bad, bet or no bet.”

Bet?

“But it’s a chance,” Kingston said, looking straight at Nicole. “If we pull together, we can save Sidewinder.”

Selma was staring over her phone at Nicole and nodded.

“Yes,” Nicole said. “It’s a chance. We agree.”