The call. Of course. It had been there all along, a hibernating
backup plan, but William had simply ignored it. There had been no
reason to notice it. His old friend calling just to say hello, to
ask for a few notes, all along up to his old playful tricks.
Could it be possible? Were they really onto something? Something
that William could perhaps enlist to save ICP from the switch
Matthew Locke had just thrown?
Jones. That was the mistake he had allowed Matthew to make. A
mistake that would now work in his favor.
Perhaps you were right, Matthew, William mused, sliding his
fingertip to an appended e-mail file. He opened it and searched
for Matthew's very first message to him after the board meeting
in which Jones had been voted out of Wallaby. There it was.
Though Matthew had tried to persuade Jones to stay on at Wallaby,
his exact words in the message were, "We'll succeed regardless."
You may be right, Matthew, William thought silently. He slid his
fingertip over to a tiny card-file icon on the screen, typed
"Holmes" on the keyboard and tapped the find icon.
He tapped the phone icon and the Joey's modem dialed Byron
Holmes's telephone number. As he waited for his old friend to
answer, he stared at his fingertip resting comfortably on the
trackpad. A sudden awareness hit him as if somehow he had just
solved a puzzle that had been silently challenging him for a long
time, that Wallaby without Peter Jones was as unsound as a the
Joey without its sleek intuitive trackpad.
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