Part Eight: The Conspiracy

Doug was an experienced employee. He did not query what’s right and what’s wrong in the company. He attended the office on time, left before 8.00 pm if he needed to, get trained, recruited new sales staff, worked well with the rest of the company to fulfill his duties.

A month had gone passed. Doug was starting to feel the heat on chasing the business deals when Sue left the company. Though it was not a difficult job for him to make cold calls, he had a little uneasiness inside his mouth when he started the call script: “Hello, I am Doug from Original Software Company. We are a software developer and ……..” He managed to get few meetings setup and met with a few customers from the third week onward.

He could count seven face-to-face meetings and more than three dozen telephone discussions. He did a small analysis on the hit rate and marketing information. The company was little known and far from registering a small fraction on the market share amongst the competitions. A few customers hinted there might be “dirty linens” in the firm which imprinted low rating in the Suppliers’ Performance Rating Board published monthly by the Sun City Trade Department.

Doug met the boss on the Monday morning in the fifth week. He wanted to present his score card and issues so that they both can find ways to resolve soon. The boss’s door was closed. Someone was inside speaking to the boss. Doug knocked on the door once and waited. “Hey Doug, come in. I was about to call for you. This is Mr. K, a very bright software security expert from Commerce Bank. K has 15 years experience on writing security software to fight credit card fraudulence. We got to know him from the introduction of that engineer who wanted to claim USD230,000.”

Doug looked at the man sitting with his legs opened and leaned on the chair in a laid-back manner. In his mid 40s, he had a beer stomach and bored head. One could tell that this man was also a smoker from his tainted teeth.

As a polite business gesture, Doug held his hand out to Mr. K, but Mr. K was just smiling. He did not shake hand with Doug.

“Mr. K will be working with us to jointly develop a new set of codes for credit card fraudulent detection. I think we can make lots of money with this new application.” The boss was cheering. Doug asked for more details on the JV plan but he saw that k was uncomfortable with sensitive questions: what’s K’s involvement in the software development? Who owns the system? How are we going to test it from beginning to the proto-type model? The boss stopped Doug. He simply said, “Mr. K is now working for Commerce Bank. He will be working at the back stage, but he will supply the raw software from what he has on hand.” Was this lawful? Why did we engage in the arrangement? What was the profit sharing agreement? How did we avoid legal implication in case the Commerce Bank poked its nose to investigate the software when it was launched? There were just too many uncertainties in Doug’s mind.