To her relief, the worst of her nightmares hadn't come true-the crates that held what Sam called "Susannah's Goddamn Folly" were undamaged, and he began unpacking.

She concentrated on how great his rear end looked when he bent over instead of on what he was saying. The booth had ended up costing nearly a thousand dollars-far more than they could afford. But she had wanted them to look like a much larger company than they were, and so, over Sam's strident objections, she had ordered it built. If she was wrong, she would have to shoulder the blame alone.

But as it turned out, she wasn't wrong. By noon the next day, several hundred people were wandering through the exhibits, and all of them were drawn to the SysVal booth. While the companies surrounding them displayed their products on crudely draped card tables bearing identical white tagboard signs printed with the company's name, SysVal showed off its machine in a brightly colored booth with dramatically angled walls and the company name spelled out in illuminated crimson letters. Only MITS, the manufacturers of the Altair, and IMSAI, their closest competitor, had more elaborate displays. Without a word being spoken, Susannah's booth made SysVal look like the third largest single-board computer company exhibiting, when in fact they were one of the smallest. Her triumph made her feel wonderfully cocky and full of herself.

Toward the end of the first day, she glanced up and saw Steve Jobs standing in front of their machine. Since their situations were similar, she had been interested in watching the two Steves-Wozniak and Jobs-as they tried to stir up interest in their Apple single-board computer.

Jobs was only twenty-one and Woz twenty-five, and like her own partners, neither was a college graduate. Compared to Steve Jobs, however, Sam was a fashion plate of respectability. Jobs was unkempt and unwashed, with dirty jeans and battered Birkenstock sandals. Sam had told her that he was a vegetarian and a Zen Buddhist who had traveled to India in search of enlightenment. He was still thinking about returning to become a monk.

Instead of looking at the computer they had on display, Jobs was studying Susannah's booth. He and Woz were selling their Apples from a card table on the other side of the convention hall. She watched Jobs as his alert eyes took in the multicolored backdrop and the brightly lit name. He knew the SysVal operation was just as small and eccentric as his own, but he could see that they had made themselves appear bigger and more important. He looked at Susannah, and she felt a moment of recognition pass between them-a moment that leaped across the barriers separating a San Francisco socialite and an unkempt Silicon Valley hippie. Jobs understood what she had done. She suspected that the little Apple Computer Company-if it survived-would never again make the mistake of showing up at a trade show with their wares displayed on a card table.

Late Monday night, after the trade show had closed, Susannah, Sam, and Yank left Atlantic City and headed for the Philadelphia airport with fifty-two new orders in their pockets. Their success had even made Yank talkative, and they boarded their flight with a sense of celebration.

As Sam slid into his seat, he pulled a copy of the Wall Street Journal from the seat pocket in front of him. "Now that I'm going to be a tycoon, I'll have to change my reading habits," he joked. He made a great play out of opening the newspaper and busily arranging it in front of him. He was trying to be funny, but Susannah couldn't manage much more than a polite smile. She had seen her father's head buried in the same newspaper too many times.

An array of feelings, bittersweet and painful, swept over her. Several moments passed before she realized that Sam had fallen silent next to her. She glanced over and saw that his face had grown rigid.

"Sam?"

He abruptly folded the paper and stuffed it under his arm. "We've got to get off the plane."

"What?"

"Come on."

"Sam?"

"Hurry. They're getting ready to close the door."

His air of urgency alarmed her, and she found herself rising from her seat. He planted his hand in the small of her back and pushed her ahead of him. "Sam? What are you doing? Where are we going?"

He directed her past a stewardess. "We've got to get off. Hurry up."

She glanced over her shoulder at their partner, who was still seated, his eyes vaguely puzzled beneath his glasses. "What about Yank?"

"Somebody'll take care of him."

Within minutes, Susannah found herself standing in the boarding area while her few remaining clothes took off for San Francisco. Three hours later, she and Sam were on their way to Boston in search of a man named Mitchell Blaine.

Blaine lived in an expensive English Tudor located in Weston, one of Boston's more prestigious suburbs. The afternoon sun filtered through the maple trees and sparkled on the ivy that climbed the walls of the house. As Susannah and Sam walked up the antique brick pathway toward the front door, she found herself hoping that the owner was on vacation in Alaska someplace. Although that certainly wouldn't stop Sam. He would probably insist they board the next plane to Fairbanks.

On the flight to Boston, she had studied the article in the Wall Street Journal that had caught Sam's attention, and she'd learned as much as she could about the man they had come to see. Mitchell Blaine was one of the wunderkinds of Route 128, the high-tech area that had formed around Boston and was the East Coast counterpart to California's Silicon Valley. A midwesterner by birth, he had a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State, a Master's Degree from MIT, and an MBA from Harvard. But it was his ability to combine technological know-how with a wizardry for marketing that had made him a multimillionaire.

During the late sixties and early seventies, he had quickly risen through the ranks of several of Boston's most aggressive young high-tech companies and at the same time wisely taken advantage of their early public stock issues to begin amassing his personal fortune. By 1976 he had a reported net worth nearing five million dollars-insignificant compared to the world's great fortunes, but respectable money for someone who'd been orphaned at the age of seven. Business analysts had targeted him as one of the bright new leaders who would direct the course of high-tech industry as it moved into the 1980s.

And then, four days earlier, his meteoric career had come to an end. In a tersely worded one-paragraph press release that had sent industry analysts reeling, he had announced his retirement from the business world. He was only thirty-one years old.

The article had given no explanation for his decision, but that hadn't stopped Sam, who had immediately invented his own. "The man's bored, Susannah. He's only thirty-one. He wants a challenge. SysVal is going to be just what he needs."

Try as she might, she could find no evidence in the article to support Sam's conclusion. The article told the facts about Blaine's life but nothing about the man himself.

She caught his arm as they approached the front steps of the house. "Sam, this is awful. We have to call first."

"And give him an opportunity to brush us off? Not a chance. Besides, you don't think we can just ring up information and get Mitchell Blaine's private phone number, do you? It was hard enough for you to find out where he lived."

She didn't want to think about how embarrassed she had been to rouse one of FBT's Boston executives out of bed at six-thirty in the morning with a preposterous story about needing Blaine's address for her father's social calendar. "We can't just show up on his doorstep," she insisted. "It simply isn't done."

Sam jabbed the door bell. "If you're afraid you'll get kicked off the Social Register, it's too late. Our little escapade on your wedding day took care of that."

"Damn it, Sam!"

"Wow. Miss Goody-Goody is swearing. She's going to have to sit in the corner." He punched the door bell a second time.

He was being unbearably nasty, but she understood him well enough to suspect he was merely trying to distract her from the fact that he knew she was right.

"What are you going to say to him? How are you going to explain our presence?"

"I'm not. You tell him who you are and get us in the door. After that, I'll do all the talking."

That was what she had been afraid of.

He rang the bell several more times, but nothing happened. "No one's here, Sam. Let's forget-"

"Just keep ringing, damn it!" He disappeared around the side of the house.

She violated every rule of etiquette she had ever learned by ringing two more times. Just as she was turning away, Sam reappeared. "There's a television on in the rear of the house. Let's go."

"No, Sam! It might be the maid."

"He's here. I know it."

She stumbled over a sprinkler head as he dragged her through a hedge of yews. A shaded flagstone patio lay directly in front of them. As they stepped up on it, a security alarm went off.

"We're going to get arrested!"

"Not until we've seen Blaine." Without releasing his grip on her, Sam steered her across the patio to the back door and began to pound it with his fist.

"Hey, Blaine!" he shouted. "I know you're in there! I want to talk to you. I've got Susannah Faulconer here. FBT Faulconer. Joel Faulconer's daughter. She doesn't like being left on the goddamn doorstep. Let us in."

"Shhhh!" she hissed. "Be quiet! Will you be quiet!" She imagined Blaine huddled inside his house in terror while he waited for the police to rescue him from the madman who was storming his house. "He's going to think we're here to murder him!"

No sooner had the words left her mouth than one of the patio doors slid open and they had their first sight of their quarry.

In those initial few seconds, Susannah came to the rapid conclusion that Mitchell Blaine probably didn't care whether he was about to be murdered or not. As Boston's young high-tech marketing whiz stumbled out onto the patio, she realized that he was too drunk to care much about anything.

Even drunk, he was formidable. She had been around the exclusive brotherhood of powerful corporate men all her life, and although Blaine was only thirty-one and obviously not at his best, she knew at once that he was a member in good standing. But if she had been pressed to define exactly why she was so certain, she would have had difficulty. Members of the brotherhood reveled in their power too much to drink to the point of oblivion, as Blaine had done. And although he was wearing the proper uniform-a custom-tailored white dress shirt and well-cut gray trousers-the garments looked as if they had been slept in.

His straight, sandy hair was conservatively cut by a barber who had been well-trained to meet the precise requirements of the brotherhood. But the regulatory side part was uneven, and instead of being combed neatly back from his forehead, the hair at the front tumbled forward in a manner acceptable only after a set of tennis.

His body wasn't quite right, either. Although he was imposingly tall, his build was a bit too muscular for a member of the corporate elite and his abdomen a little too taut. But the directness in those wide-spaced, light blue eyes was familiar, as well as the chilling contempt in his blunt, slightly irregular features.

She caught her breath as Blaine came toward Sam. "Get the hell off my property."

Sam formed the peace sign, a gesture that would have amused Susannah if she hadn't been so appalled at the rudeness of their intrusion. "We just want to talk," Sam said, refusing to back off by so much as an inch. "We've come a long way to talk to you."

"I don't care how far you've come. You're trespassing, and I want you out of here!" Blaine took an uneven step forward.

Sam was starting to get angry, managing by some incredible sleight-of-mind to turn himself into the wronged party. "Listen. We've busted our asses finding you, and the least you can do is hear us out."

"The least I can do is kick you out of here."

Gathering her nerve, Susannah pushed herself between Sam and the formidable Mr. Blaine. "Let's go inside and I'll fix you a cup of coffee, Mr. Blaine. You look like you could use it."

"I don't want any coffee," he said with angry precision. "I want another drink."

"All right," she replied stubbornly. "I'll fix you some coffee to go along with your drink."

Fortunately, the relentless whine of the security alarm had begun to bother him even more than their presence. He turned back toward the house, and at that moment she knew why she had recognized him as one of the elite brotherhood of the powerful. Even though he was staggeringly drunk, he had been able to dismiss them with cruel accuracy as persons of no consequence to him.