Petrie, Nick - Peter Ash 06 - The Breaker by Petrie Nick

Author:Petrie, Nick [Petrie, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller, Mystery
ISBN: 9780525535478
Google: Wu8OEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B0871LJT36
Goodreads: 53231852
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
Published: 2021-01-12T06:00:00+00:00

38

SPARK

By the time Spark’s electric skateboard got her to Kiko’s place in Tippecanoe, it was after midnight. His two-bedroom cottage was no bigger than her apartment, but it had a four-car garage in the back. A classic south side bachelor pad.

Spark didn’t walk up the long wheelchair ramp to the house. She hadn’t talked to Kiko in a couple of years, and she didn’t want to hear his lectures. She also didn’t want to put him at more risk than she had already, just by coming here. But the truth was that she had nowhere else to go, at least not yet.

At the far end of the garage, she punched a four-digit number into the keypad screwed to the siding, and felt a wave of relief when the door rolled up on its track. She’d been afraid that Kiko had changed the code. He’d been really upset.

She’d met Vincent Holloway via email when she was seventeen, after he’d sold his company and was back at Caltech doing research. She was just a teenager with an idea for a battery, and he’d coauthored a paper about carbon-ion electrical storage. Once he’d learned that she wasn’t a university research fellow or a corporate vice president, he hadn’t been interested in a conversation.

So it came as a surprise when he emailed her again out of the blue three years ago. She was still living in her parents’ basement, and her idea had turned into a prototype. She hadn’t published in any of the journals, but apparently he’d had a professional connection to one of her mentors who’d mentioned her project in passing.

Holloway was going to be in Chicago for a conference. He’d become a tech investor, looking for the next big thing. Did she want to meet for coffee?

Of course it was flattering. Of course she’d said yes.

If she’d been worried about anything, it was that he was going to try to get her back to his hotel room. But he never touched her. It wasn’t that kind of rape.

Instead, he’d taken her ideas.

After an hour’s conversation at Coffee Lab in Evanston, he’d offered her a hundred thousand dollars for a look at her lab notes and an independent assessment of her battery prototype. After that, if the technology proved out as promised, he’d provide funding to spin up a real lab and hire some PhDs to help her develop a commercial model. She’d have a salary of two hundred thousand dollars a year to start, with more to come. She could pay off her parents’ house.

Before all of that, though, he wanted her to sign a sixty-page contract, along with a nondisclosure agreement. To protect them both, he’d said. Spark could read a mass spectrometer result, but this contract was utterly incomprehensible. His name wasn’t even on it. It was a totally different company.

Her professor friends said she really needed to understand what she was signing. She talked to a dozen different lawyers, hoping to get an English translation of the contract,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.