Free Bandwidth by Angus Morrison

you’re ready to pull the trigger. And, oh yeah, Terry. One more thing.”
    “What’s that, Aaron?”
    “Let’s do it at the Savoy.”
    “The Savoy in London?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Like the old days?”
    “You got it.”
    “Why the Savoy, Aaron?”
    “I always liked those little sandwiches without the crusts that they serve at high tea.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

    For over 2000 years, the Netherlands had been trying to fashion a country out of the sea with a series of dikes, polders and windmills. Today, it was twice the size of New Jersey, and was essentially a delta comprised of silt from the mouths of the Rhine, Waal, Maas, Ijssel and Schelde Rivers. The average elevation of the country is 36 feet. When a plane
    lands at the Amsterdam airport, Schiphol, it is hitting the runway at six feet below sea level.
    The 12th province of the Netherlands, a place called Flevoland, was carved out of the sea. It is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
    And so, Elliott Pettigrew — part pitbull, part lobbyist, part Louisiana Good ol’ boy, and Aaron’s man in Washington — thought it fitting that the Netherlands was the birthplace of Cheyenne.
    Aaron had sent Pettigrew to Amsterdam to meet with Kuipers at the Ministry of Waterworks. Aaron thought it wouldn’t hurt to butter up the Dutchman before Lyrical and Cheyenne made the acquisition public.
    Tech rags had spilled endless ink about Cheyenne’s technology. European futurists were brimming with excitement about the impending possibilities of unlimited bandwidth delivered, not by thousands of miles of unused fiber that had been hastily put in the ground by the world’s telecom companies, but rather through a completely new and promising technology. Meanwhile, the rumors about the Dutch national telephone company, N-tel, developing a type of rival technology continued to swirl despite the fact that Cheyenne’s technology was considered to be in a league of its own.
    Even before Cannondale had become interested in Cheyenne, Timmermans and Peter had secured Kuipers’ permission to use the Dutch national water system to send data on a trial basis – a decision for which Kuipers still punished himself. Kuipers hadn’t really understood Cheyenne’s technology. He thought he was helping the small Dutch company get a head start. But of course, that was all before Cannondale entered the picture.
    Now, the headlines blared about how Cheyenne had secured a satellite. The upstart was on its way. But what was done could be undone. Kuipers had the power to be a kingmaker, and like Eatwell, he sure as hell had no intention of crowning Cannondale.
    Kuipers’ Amsterdam office was located at 156 Beatrixstraat. The lobby was a combination of brushed steel, pine tables, trendy halogen lamps and fresh tulips. “Euro-crap,” Pettigrew muttered under his breath.
    “Meneer?” a short-haired, middle-aged woman said from behind the lobby desk.
    “Elliot Pettigrew to see Mr. Kuipers, please.”
    She picked up a phone, whispered something into it, hung it up and pointed to the elevators with an attitude that grated on him. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was that he disliked about her. It was a sort of continental arrogance he sometimes felt when he was in Europe.
    “Third floor,” she said sternly.
    “You don’t get laid much, do you?” Pettigrew mumbled incomprehensibly, turning to enter the elevator.
    Pettigrew took a seat in Kuipers’ waiting room. It couldn’t have been more different from the lobby. It had an old-school, Napoleonic grandeur that momentarily sent Pettigrew back to the big houses of his childhood in New Orleans. On one wall was a framed copy of Vermeer’s “The Art of the Painting.” Another painting was filled with Reubenesque nymphs frolicking near a pond with a grinning goat in the background. Not bad, Pettigrew thought.
    He could just see into Kuipers’ office from where he was sitting. There were