CHAPTER 3: THE DESPERATE BEGGAR
By Wednesday morning, two days after the collapse, Vanguard Analytics was a ghost town.
The plush, open-plan office space on the twentieth floor of the financial district tower stood eerily empty. Row after row of high-end dual-monitor workstations sat dark. The custom espresso bar was unmanned. The sleek glass whiteboards were covered in half-erased neural network diagrams that no one left in the company knew how to interpret or execute.
Out of a company of sixty employees, thirty-nine engineers had officially tendered their resignations on Monday evening and started work at Nexus Systems on Tuesday. The remaining twenty administrative, marketing, and sales personnel were actively filing for unemployment, as Vanguard’s corporate payroll account had been completely frozen by a San Mateo court order.
Inside Julian’s sprawling corner office, pizza boxes, empty coffee cups, and half-drained glasses of expensive scotch cluttered his mahogany desk. Julian had not left the office building in forty-eight hours. His eyes were bloodshot, his beard stubble was dark and unkempt, and his once-immaculate designer suit was crumpled and stained.
Across the room, Serena was frantically packing her designer leather handbag.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Julian’s raspy voice cut through the silence.
Serena stopped, not bothering to look at him. “I’m leaving, Julian. My attorney called me an hour ago. The SEC wants to interview me regarding the financial projections we sent to OmniTech last month. I am handing over all email correspondence and removing myself from this trainwreck before I end up with an indictment.”
“You can’t leave me!” Julian shouted, slamming his hand onto his desk, knocking over a crystal glass. “You were the VP of Strategy! You helped draft the pitch deck! You told me we could push Maya out without any pushback!”
“I trusted you!” Serena yelled back, her voice shrill with anger. “You told me you were the mastermind! You told me she was just some socially awkward coder who did what she was told! You lied to me, Julian! You don’t know how to code, you don’t own the patent, and you don’t even have enough money in your corporate account to cover this month’s rent for this ridiculous office!”
She grabbed her coat, zipped her bag shut, and looked at him with sheer contempt.
“Have fun in bankruptcy court, Julian,” she spat, and walked out, slamming the heavy glass door behind her.
Left completely alone, Julian sank into his leather chair. The silence of the abandoned floor pressed in on him like a crushing weight. His phone on the desk buzzed continuously—calls from furious venture capitalists, process servers, media reporters, and land developers.
He picked up the phone with trembling fingers. He didn’t answer any of the incoming calls. Instead, he opened his contacts, scrolled past dozens of high-profile Silicon Valley names who had all blocked his number over the last forty-eight hours, and tapped on a contact he hadn’t called directly in over three years: Maya.
At the high-tech, high-security headquarters of Nexus Systems in Palo Alto, I was sitting in a state-of-the-art laboratory, watching our engineering team deploy the newly upgraded core kernel onto a clean, secure cloud cluster.
My private phone buzzed on the desk beside me. I looked at the screen.
Julian Vance Calling.
I let it ring three times before picking it up and placing it on speaker.
“Julian,” I said calmly, continuing to monitor the compilation code scrolling down my primary screen.
“Maya… oh god, Maya, please don’t hang up,” Julian’s broken, desperate voice came through the speaker. He sounded like a man drowning in deep water. “Please, just talk to me for five minutes. I’m begging you.”
“I am listening, Julian. You have four minutes,” I replied coldly.
“Maya, I was wrong. I was so, so wrong,” Julian stammered, his words spilling out in a chaotic, pathetic rush. “Serena… Serena manipulated me! She got into my head! She made me think I needed to change the corporate image for the OmniTech deal! It was all her idea, Maya! The termination letter, the severance package, the divorce papers—she pushed me into all of it!”
I let out a soft, amused hum. “Julian, you are a thirty-four-year-old adult man who willingly signed a fraudulent asset transfer document and handed your wife of seven years a $25,000 severance paper in a VIP alcove while drinking champagne. Blaming your mistress for your own greed and stupidity is remarkably pathetic, even for you.”
“Maya, please!” Julian sobbed openly now. “The SEC is going to charge me! OmniTech is suing me for $75 million! My investors are threatening to file criminal fraud charges! The bank frozen my personal accounts because I put up my Vanguard stock as collateral for my private loans! I’m going to lose the house in Atherton! I’m going to lose everything! I’ll go to federal prison!”
“I know,” I said softly. “I’ve been reviewing the legal court dockets. You are in very serious trouble.”
“You can fix this, Maya!” Julian pleaded, his tone shifting into a terrifyingly hopeful pitch. “You have the power! You own the IP! If you just sign a retroactive licensing agreement… just a simple document saying Vanguard had authorization to negotiate the deal… OmniTech will drop the suit! The SEC will close the investigation! We can sell the company, take the $500 million, and we can start over! I’ll give you eighty percent! Ninety percent! I’ll step down as CEO! I’ll do whatever you want!”
I stopped typing on my keyboard. The silence on my end of the line was absolute.
“Julian,” I said, my voice dropping an octave, carrying the full, unyielding weight of every single night I had spent alone in a server room while he was out spending my hard-earned money. “Do you remember what you said to me on Friday night at the gala?”
Julian swallowed hard, unable to speak.
“You told me that I was just the backend bug-tester,” I recalled with chilling precision. “You told me I didn’t fit the corporate image anymore. You told me to take my desk plants and go back to freelancing.”
“Maya, I didn’t mean—”
“I spent seven years of my life building the foundation of your success, Julian,” I interrupted smoothly. “I gave you my intellect, my youth, my loyalty, and my love. And the very moment you thought you had achieved ultimate wealth, you discarded me like trash in front of the entire tech industry.”
“Maya… please…” he whispered.
“You aren’t calling me right now because you are sorry for what you did to me,” I concluded cleanly. “You are calling me because you are terrified of the consequences of your own actions. You don’t love me, Julian. You never did. You just loved the life my brain bought for you.”
“Maya! Don’t do this! I am your husband!” he screamed into the phone.
“Not anymore,” I said. “My divorce attorney filed the formal dissolution papers this morning. And unlike your $25,000 insult, I am claiming fifty percent of all non-IP marital assets, including the Atherton mansion, the Ferrari, and your private investment accounts. Have a good afternoon, Julian.”
“Maya! MAYA! NO—”
I tapped the screen, ending the call, and permanently blocked his number.
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