"Yeah." Dice checked his watch again. 7:31. His eyes flicked to the mirror and then to her face again. "I'm Dice," he said, smiling with one side of his face.

"That's nice," she said, and turned and walked away down the bar, slowly.

Dice picked up his drink and had a nice big drink, watching her.

"Sorry I'm so late, Dice, traffic was a bitch tonight." Spider coughed.

Dice twitched. Spider was pissing him off here. This was totally not starting out according to plan. Dice was smooth. Dice was very smooth. "Hey, man, I'm just glad to see you, I was getting worried about you." Dice turned in his seat as Spider sat down beside him. Dice moved ever so slightly away from Spider; Spider needed a haircut, his clothes didn't fit properly. Dice wanted to get this over with as fast as he could. Cobalt-Sixty was a place where People might see him, and he didn't want them to see him with Spider if he could help it.

"How's your mom?" he started.

"You didn't ask me here to talk about my mother," Spider coughed again, then folded his hands on the bar, "What kind of help does this friend of yours need?"

Dice's jaw muscles worked. "Spider, relax, it's a good thing, don't be so uptight. You want something to drink?" Spider's dirty fingernails were creeping Dice out, he stood up and kicked his stool a little farther away from Spider while he snapped his fingers at the bartender. "What'll you have?" he said, turning to Spider.

"Ginger ale."

"Another one of these, a double, and a large ginger ale. Please." Another smile. Dice needed fortifying.

"Actually, Spider, it's not exactly a friend of mine," Dice sat down and dangled his hand from the arm of the stool, facing Spider. Dice enjoyed lying, he thought he was good at it. First, admit you lied to him, he thought, now he'll think he's on the same side of the lie as you are. "It's my cousin at Stanford. My cousin Arthur." Dice did have a cousin at Stanford, in the business school. Second, build your story on the truth, make it so it can check out. Dice couldn't help smiling, Spider was watching his eyes closely. Dice looked right back. Meet his eyes.

"A double Ketle One martini. And a ginger ale." The bartender smiled at Spider long enough for Spider to notice, put a napkin on the bar and his glass on top of it, just in the center, then walked past without looking at Dice and went back to talking to the redhead sitting at the far corner of the bar. Dice drank about a third of his martini. Spider kept his hands folded in front of him.

"Stanford has a huge grant from GE, a grant to study high-growth innovative companies, the want to know what makes them tick, who runs them and how, what the dynamics are. Companies like ZDI. Companies exactly like ZDI. It's a long-term thing, they've been doing it for like fifteen years, like thirty people at any given time. They study the records of the company -- all the records -- and try to find patterns, try to see the factors that make one succeed and another one... not succeed."

"And this has what to do with me?" Spider watched a drop of condensation run down the side of his glass and disappear into the napkin.

Dice took another sip, his eyes on the mirror flicked from the door to Spider's reflection. "Spider, about three years ago Arthur realized they had a major problem. He found out that the records they were getting from the companies had been scrubbed. Sanitized. The important stuff, the very stuff they needed the most, the companies were withholding that from the records they turned over for analysis. Typically it's their trade secrets, their competitive edge, as the companies saw it. But it totally biased the study." Dice took another sip. Appeal to decency. "Spider, Arthur's been trying to get his Ph.D for almost nine years. The program is double blinded -- they have people who clean the identifications, the patented stuff -- they're not interested in the companies' underwear at all -- what they're studying is management behavior. Numbers. Arthur needs something we can give him, and he needs it bad." Dice nodded his head a tiny bit up and down up and down, then shook it side to side once, looking down at the bar. "Here's the deal, Spider, and I want you to know, if you're not interested, I understand, you don't need to make a decision based on Arthur's situation." Dice reached inside his jacket, slowly took out the envelope and put it on the bar.
Spider waited.

"Arthur's grant from GE is a hundred thousand dollars a year. He offered to split it with me if I could get him a dump of everything on ZDIs servers -- everything, including all the backups."

Spider noticed his mouth was very dry all of a sudden, and he reached for his ginger ale.

"Spider, I know you need the money more then I do, so I thought it'd be a good idea to cut you in, in fact, I only want to keep ten percent for a finders fee." Dice pushed the envelope towards him. "Forty-five grand, Spider. I swear to you no one will ever know, it'd cost Arthur his doctorate if it ever came out." Tell him you're at his mercy. Dice watched Spider's eyes play on the envelope, and he waited. Spider put his glass down on the bar. He looked up at Dice.

"I don't like it Dice." Spider's eyes went back to the envelope. Dice knew what to do. He reached for the envelope, and leaned forward as if to stand. Spider was fast, his hand was on the envelope under Dice's. "I don't like it at all."

"Like I said, I understand. We have other options, Spider. If you don't want to help, I understand."

"Why the hell should I trust you, Dice?"
"Spider, I didn't ask you to trust me. I asked you if you want to make forty-five grand tonight. Cash. If you're not interested, don't waste my time here, I got things to do." Tell him something he doesn't want to hear, he'll believe you're leveling with him. Pretend you think he's a player.

"What do I have to do?"

bingo. the eagle has landed.

Dice took his hand off of Spider's. "You know those two extra Dell Blades we got by mistake the other day?" "You know about that?" "It wasn't a mistake, Spider. All you have to do is rack 'em up, back 'em up, and pack 'em up. Inside the envelope is the return manifest. Tomorrow we just ship 'em back. They were sent by mistake. Nobody knows what happened except you and me, and you got forty-five G's to spend, Spider, and I got a bad memory. You could figure out how to spend that kind of money, couldn't you?"

Dice finished his drink. He was feeling very good and right now, and he wanted Spider to get out of his quality world. Spider was looking in the envelope, his mouth open, then closing it and flattening the clip. "Half down, half on delivery." Spider was standing there looking at him. Dice knew that Spider's Visa bill was a little over sixty-seven thousand dollars. Dice snapped at him, "What the hell are you waiting for? Don't you have some work to do?"

Spider nodded, turned and walked to the door, where he paused and looked back in time to see Dice talking to the redhead at the end of the bar. "I'm Dice," he said. She said, "Well, aren't you lucky." She said it with a straight face.

Spider pushed the door open. The envelope was heavy in his pocket.



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