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Kenji was the king of long-suffering sighs. “Why must you people always do things the hard way? Fine, then. Proceed at your own risk.” He tapped on his tablet. “FYI, I’m adding a line item to the budget for dealing with the fallout of this. Let’s call it the Fake Sterling Chase Escape Fund. We can use it to buy champagne when we toast you successfully evading the wiles of a con man… Or, alternatively, buy you a ticket to Central America so you can paraglide into an active volcano to cheer yourself up after it all ends in disaster.”
I opened my mouth to retort that I’d need no such thing when I heard a rap on my office door.
“Hey, hey!” Austin Purcell, Sterling Chase’s head of development, breezed in, his brown hair sleek and tidy, his smile bright. “Bash, do you have time for a quick chat?”
“Hey, yourself.” I gave him a genuine smile and gestured him toward the unoccupied seat in front of my desk. “Come in. Sit.”
“Mr. Purcell, Mr. Dayne doesn’t have an appointment with you on his calendar.” Kenji had dialed his chilly politeness up to a level that would give polar bears frostbite.
Austin shrugged good-naturedly. “Since he was supposed to be out today, I thought maybe his schedule would be open. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask. But I can come back another time if you’re busy.”
“Kenji, it’s fine,” I said, waving a hand. “I’ve got a few minutes. I planned to call Austin this morning anyway.”
Kenji sniffed, plainly displeased when Austin stretched out his long legs in the chair beside him.
I smothered a grin. For all his flawless efficiency, Kenji tended to be fairly easygoing with most people—a requirement, working for my friends and me—but there were a couple of people the man simply never seemed to warm to. Landry was one. Strangely enough, Austin Purcell was another.
He claims he’s just passing by when his office is at the other end of the building. He lies in wait for you in your office in the morning, ready to ambush you with overly sweet coffee and enthusiasm. No one should smile with so many teeth. He takes liberties, Sebastian!
Personally, though, I liked Austin a lot. We weren’t close outside of work, but he was dedicated to his job as head of development, his team loved him, and Clarissa, our CEO, considered him her right-hand man. When he’d first started, we’d actually clashed a little—before Austin, I’d been the one taking meetings with potential clients on behalf of Sterling Chase’s board of directors, and though I’d been the one to initiate the change, I’d also struggled to give up control, especially to someone I’d seen as needlessly risk-averse.
Then Austin had executed the first of his drive-by “hey, hey” conversations.
Trust me to manage this, Bash,he’d said. You’ve done an amazing job during your time as the face of the company. But if you want Sterling Chase to grow, to be famous for anything besides the Emergency Traffic Control launch, we can’t simply follow your whims anymore when deciding which projects Sterling Chase will acquire. The more successful our project launches, the bigger our profit—which will keep the company’s owners happy—and the better our reputation, which will attract even better projects to us in the future. Projects that deserve your passion and expertise.
He’d been right. Thanks to his tireless work, I’d scaled back my public involvement in the company and focused my attention on one or two of Sterling Chase’s projects each year where I could really dig in, help fledgling entrepreneurs hone their visions, and then bring them to life.
There were times when I almost felt bad that Austin and Clarissa didn’t know the truth—that my four mostly silent partners and I were the founders and owners of Sterling Chase and the creators of the ETC program—but telling them would be a decision all five members of our brotherhood would have to make unanimously, and none of the others knew Austin and Clarissa as well as I did.
Instead, I showed Austin my trust and friendship in other ways, like respecting his position as head of development and supporting his projects as much as I could.
“I spoke to Clarissa yesterday,” I told him. “She’s going to be at least another week in Sierra Leone since the launch of the digital education venture hit another snag.”
Austin grimaced. “It’s always the ones that seem simple…”
“True story. But—” I let my grin build slowly. “—she wanted to make sure I knew how impressed she was by your work on the MRO project. She said your team’s just waiting for clearance from the folks in Legal so you can move into beta testing and that you’d already found a municipality willing to test it for us, too? Fucking amazing.” I leaned back in my chair.
Austin’s ruddy face went even redder at this praise. “It just hits different when the project you’re working on is an invention you came up with yourself. When the patent is going to be in your own name. This one’s special to me.”
I nodded in total understanding. That had been one of the reasons I’d talked my friends into expanding Sterling Chase as a startup incubator, even after we’d gotten our windfall. I’d seen the importance of a company that would offer support and resources to inventors and entrepreneurs when launching products that would hopefully go on to improve people’s lives.
I thought it said a lot about our company when an employee like Austin, who’d been working on his brilliant MRO plan in his free time for years, decided to bring it to Sterling Chase for development.
“And it’s gonna net us a tidy profit on this thing once it hits the market. I think there are many avenues we can explore with this, also. Like the insurance component—higher reimbursements for companies with this technology in place, for example. But really, once we open this up to the marketplace, it can be used in many ways. The potential ROI is…Sorry.” Austin gave me a sheepish look and shifted in his seat. “I’m getting carried away. First things first—beta testing. Not sure if Clarissa mentioned to you that Upper Valley County in Virginia is the municipality that’s willing to test it?” He pulled his phone from his pocket, consulting his notes. “They’re going to install the system in all of their vehicles by the end of the week—”
“Did you consider my suggestion about the satellite uplink?”
A shadow of something passed over Austin’s face, and his smile turned wry. “Bash. We’ve talked about this. The kind of uplink you suggested would cost at least five times as much. That means the budget just to test it would be astronomical, and when we tell the buyers what their investment would be to run it? Nobody’d be able to afford it.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Then let’s work harder. Let’s develop new technology and bring the cost down.” But I had to remind myself this was Austin’s project, not one of the ones I was personally managing, so I sighed and nodded. I had to remember I was scaling back. That meant trusting Austin to manage things his own way. Letting go still wasn’t easy. That was one of the reasons I’d tried distracting myself with adventure travel recently. Maybe I needed an even bigger distraction.
“For a guy with a business degree, you’re very idealistic, and I love that about you. But we’ve gotta be logical since we operate in the real world.” Austin’s teasing grin was back, taking the sting out of his words, telling me that he didn’t begrudge my control-freak tendencies, and encouraging me to smile with him. “Remind me again why a bunch of savvy operators like the folks who founded Sterling installed a bunch of idealists and dreamers onto the board of directors?”
I gave a half chuckle. “Austin, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But go on. What’s the next step, after the system is installed?”
“Right, yeah. So, Legal’s getting us final approval before the beta program can go live,” he said earnestly. “There are a few i’s to dot and t’s to cross, but it should be out of our hands late next week, and I’m thinking I’ll do a celebratory lunch for the team. Jonas is working on pricing models now, and even though it’s a bit premature, I think…”
Austin droned on about cost/income projections, but despite my interest in the project, I found my gaze straying over his head to the picture on the wall screen, my focus stolen by a pair of big brown eyes.
