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GABE
At my office, I reviewed reports and sales data. Then I had a long telephone conference with Kami. I’d asked her to work on several new agreements recently, and we needed to review them, to make sure the details were in place. After we hung up, I knew I could move forward with my plan—the part involving Lauren’s second act. I didn’t see a way to stop the sale of Paragon, but that didn’t mean the game was over.
I wanted to take Li Na down. I couldn’t do it alone, but I could help Lauren do it.
Now I just had to convince her that she should.
The week had dragged—I felt sick, almost hungover. My brothers had been gone on surveillance, tracking down leads, and there’d been no further contact from Li Na. She was letting Lauren sweat it out. Seeing Wesley had been a punch in the gut; I winced every time I thought about him, how pale and shrunken he’d looked. Dr. Kim said he’d stabilized, but I wondered how much more Wes’s body could take.
Allen Trade was right: that Zhao woman did have a lot to answer for.
But how could I make her answer? Even though she’d hurt people I loved, she was no more real to me than a smooth voice on the other end of a line, a sender of curt texts. I thought about what Levi had asked me: what made Li Na Zhao tick?
I did a Google search and pulled up the most recent pictures of her. I considered the woman who’d ripped my world apart: long dark hair, bright lipstick, an immaculate, slim-fitting suit. Li Na projected style and confidence in her press photos. But who was she, really?
And why was she so certain that she could get away with murder, kidnapping, and intellectual property theft on such a grand scale?
I did a little more digging. She’d gotten married when she was twenty-five and divorced ten years later. Her ex-husband was a doctor. He’d gone on to remarry, have a child, and was still practicing medicine, as far as I could tell. Chinese social media was different from the American version, so I got a little lost as I looked online. Dave had had the foresight to install beta translation software on my laptop; he’d written the code himself, and I hoped to Christ it worked right.
I texted Dave and Leo. Please do a social media analysis on LNZ and her ex-husband. Send it to me soon. If a
nyone could piece together something useful, it’d be our IT experts.
I read up on Jiàn Innovations. The company had enjoyed robust growth since its formation. However, its sales were primarily Chinese. I’d known from the beginning that Li Na wanted to increase her global market share. There was no better person to steal from than Lauren, who’d had overnight international success.
Overnight international success seven years in the making.
I read some more, looking at the practice of IP theft in China—it was big business. Everyone who worked in Silicon Valley was aware of the ongoing security threat, but now that I was dealing with it personally, I saw how real the damage was. We were about to lose a billion-dollar technology because of Chinese government-sanctioned hacking. From all accounts, the government was aware of, and even participated in, the hacking of North American technology. From what Levi had told me, they’d been completely uncooperative with the NSA and the FBI—Li Na was free to proceed as she wished.
But although Li Na had successfully hacked Lauren, she still couldn’t make the patch work. Even with a legitimate sale on the horizon, Li Na was worried she couldn’t re-create the patch’s success, and keep it up and running, without the help of Paragon’s most valuable asset—Lauren herself.
That was why Li Na had resorted to kidnapping. She needed to have personal leverage in addition to all the material she could steal. She knew even when she owned the company outright, and had all the correct specs, the patch’s technology was so sophisticated, so advanced, she would still need Lauren to hold her hand through the process of getting production and distribution started. Taking Hannah had been the best way to ensure Lauren’s performance.
Li Na was biting—hard—the hand about to feed her a feast.
She must have run out of options to be this desperate. But what, exactly, was she desperate for?
My phone buzzed with a text from Dave. LNZ has no social media—she’s completely off the grid. Her ex looks dull. He’s a GP, remarried, and all he does is post pictures of his daughter, who is admittedly pretty cute. He works at a foreign-run hospital in Shenzhen. Do you want me to dig into him further?
No, I wrote back. My instincts, which always served me well, told me that the ex-husband remained of little interest to Li Na. She seemed completely focused on her company and her ambition.
This troubled me. If she didn’t love anyone, there was no one we could kidnap to hurt her—not that we would do that, but still. She seemed impenetrable. Levi said that we needed to play offense, but what sort of run did you take at a person without any personal connections?
An economic one, stupid.
I turned the idea over in my mind. To me, greed was a weak motivating factor. I didn’t believe that Li Na was taking these extraordinary measures because she loved money. She was smart enough to know that you couldn’t take it with you.
I scrolled through Jiàn’s website, looking at their press releases. They were frequent, mostly boring financial posts. But in the past year, there were several, more colorful entries about the new technology Jiàn was working on acquiring. These reports included projections that Jiàn Innovations would become an “international leader in cutting-edge technology” and would “help establish Shenzhen as the world’s biotech economic and innovation epicenter.”
Li Na was bragging about what stealing the patch would do for her company and her city.
International leader…establish Shenzhen… Something clicked with me.
One of the things I’d learned from dealing with distribution partners all over the world was that every country had a different culture, a different set of values, and a different way of doing business. When I’d started Dynamica, I had to study the business practices of each country we dealt with. China was enormous, so there were cultural fluctuations within the country itself. Getting familiar with the ins and outs of each region made doing business there easier.
Still, there were unifying themes throughout the vast country, like the importance of showing respect to your business partners and associates. Respect was a recurring theme in China’s business landscape. A concept tied to the importance of respect was “face”—somewhat similar to the Americanized “saving face.” In Chinese business culture, face meant that you were respected. The way I understood it, it was like your social currency, your standing in the opinion of your peers.
In China, face was extremely important, especially to someone who cared only about their business.
