He had looked at it once. He thought about it most days.
* * *
The man who could save him was named Lin Weiguo.
Bradley had spent a great deal of time in the last eight months learning about Lin Weiguo. He was sixty-four years old. He was, depending on which magazine you read, the fourth or the sixth richest man in Guangdong Province. He had founded Huaxin New Energy in 1997 in a rented shed in Shenzhen with eleven employees and a secondhand chemical mixer he had bought at auction from a bankrupt paint factory. Huaxin now employed sixty thousand people and was one of the three largest battery manufacturers on earth. One of Bradley's board members had once described Kincaid Grid Storage's relationship to Huaxin as that of a small planet orbiting the sun, with the important difference that the sun had never heard of them.
The sun had heard of them now.
Tariffs had done it. Tariffs and politics. Huaxin wanted, needed, a factory on American soil, and it would much rather buy one than spend five years and two billion dollars building one from scratch. And Bradley's factory in Fremont, whatever else was wrong with it, and a great deal was wrong with it, was permitted, built, connected to the grid, and staffed by four hundred trained workers. It was underused, poorly run, unfinished and drowning in debt. But it existed.
For eight months the two sides had negotiated through lawyers and bankers and consultants. The shape of the deal was clear enough. Huaxin would take a majority stake. It would bring its own engineers and its own production lines. Kincaid Grid Storage would survive as a name and as a minority partner. Bradley would, if he was lucky and careful, keep his title, a seat on the board, and what remained of his dignity.
Today, for the first time, Lin Weiguo had agreed to meet him in person.
If Huaxin walked away, the red number would reach zero, and he would call the lawyers.
At 6:40 a.m., while he was still standing at the kitchen island, his phone rang. It was Owen.
Owen Pratt was twenty-eight, his executive assistant, earnest and anxious and very good at his job. He had a habit, when he was stressed, of pushing his glasses up onto his forehead and leaving them there, so that over the course of a bad day they slowly migrated up into his hair. Bradley could tell how a day was going by where Owen's glasses were. This morning, before Owen had even spoken, he could hear in his voice that they were already up past his eyebrows.
"It's Grace," Owen said. "She's in Vancouver. The fog's grounded everything on the coast. Every flight. She can't get here."
Bradley swore, once, with feeling.
Dr. Grace Liu was the best English–Mandarin business interpreter on the West Coast, and possibly in the country. She was about sixty, small and silver-haired and terrifying. She charged four thousand dollars a day. She had interpreted for two U.S. secretaries of commerce and the chief executive of Apple. She had spent the last two weeks preparing Bradley for this lunch, and on the first day of their preparation she had looked at him across his own conference table and said, Mr. Kincaid. If you say the words "win-win" in front of Chairman Lin, I will get up and walk out of the room. And so will he.
"Find someone else," Bradley said.
"I've called eleven agencies," said Owen. "Eleven. There's one woman in San Jose who's available. She does legal depositions. She's never done business, never done anything at this level, and she can't get to the Presidio before two."
"Lin will have his own interpreter."
"Zhou. Yes. But Grace said—"
"I know what Grace said." Grace had said, among many other things, Never rely on the other side's interpreter. Never. Their interpreter works for them. Everything you say will be passed through their ears first.
Bradley stood at the island with the phone at his ear and looked at the red number. The city below him was disappearing into fog.
"The restaurant," he said.
"What?"
"The Glasshouse. Teddy, the manager. He's got a big staff, he's got a kitchen. Somebody back there speaks Chinese. They always do. A cook, a busboy, somebody. Call Teddy. Tell him we need someone who speaks Chinese to sit at the end of the table and help me follow what's going on. Help with the food, the wine. Keep Lin comfortable. Just until the San Jose woman gets there."
There was a pause on the line.
"Bradley," Owen said carefully, "a busboy isn't an interpreter."
"I don't need an interpreter," Bradley said. "I need a pair of ears. Call Teddy."
Owen called back eleven minutes later.
"Teddy has someone," he said. "A server. He says she's excellent."
"She," said Bradley. "Is she Chinese?"
There was a short pause on the line, the length of a breath.
"He says she's fluent," Owen said. "He says she grew up there."
Bradley exhaled. For the first time since 3:15 he felt something in his chest loosen by a quarter turn.
"Good," he said. "Good. Tell Teddy to seat her at the end of the table on Lin's side, where she can hear everything. And tell him I'll take care of her. Whatever she normally makes in a day, I'll triple it."
He showered. He shaved, carefully, twice. He put on the navy Brioni suit, the one he had bought for the Aspen talk and had not worn since, because he could not look at it without seeing it on fire. It still fit. He was almost disappointed. He put on a white shirt, open at the collar, no tie. Grace had been very clear about the tie. Chairman Lin thinks a man who wears a tie to lunch is a man who is worried about being taken seriously. Don't give him that.
Then he opened the top drawer of his dresser and took out the brick.