A Tangled Web Page 13

  “Mostly contemporary work. Interesting diversity, each artist and his or her own angle, and very obviously so.” Then she focused on something specific, and he saw the change before she began to speak again. “One of them painted a unique picture, a bit out of place among the other works there. An oil painting, which was also rather unique there. A landscape, looking out from a cliff to a gentle sea. After a storm, you can see that quite clearly. And he put two figures on the beach, in the distance. Hazy, you can’t quite see them. He managed to catch something there, something dreamlike. A bit of magic, I thought.”

  She caught his eyes on her and shrugged, a little embarrassed, he thought. That she’d exposed something of herself to him?

  “It was just a painting. He’s a good artist, much of what he does is nice.” She dismissed it and moved on, eager to steer his attention away from her. “By the way, Muriel has asked me to join her at the children’s hospital tomorrow, for the collective birthday party she’s throwing the inpatients there. She’s short of volunteers, apparently everyone is coming down with that stomach virus. I’ll probably be gone most of the day.”

  He watched her as she walked away from him again.

  Tess was exhausted the next evening, but pleased. Even with the shortage of volunteers, the party, a huge birthday party for dozens of children, Muriel’s idea to make them smile, even if wasn’t really their birthday, was a success. She was also late, so that she didn’t make it to dinner with her husband. He hadn’t been there that morning, either, and so technically they did what they had never done until then when her husband wasn’t away in one of his foreign subsidiaries—they missed a day in which they should have had a meal together as per their contract. But then things were different now, she mused as she let a hot shower wash the day away. They were different now.

  And, she thought as she was coming down the stairs on her way to the library, the attorney who had drafted that contract, Robert, had been there in the second half of the day, having also been asked by Muriel to help. That had to count for something. She smiled to herself. Who knew she would rather have had dinner with the man she had married.

  When she had returned, Graham had told her that Mr. Blackwell was in a conference call in his den, and when she found the library empty, she supposed that’s where he still was. She entered the silent room and walked straight to her favorite reading chair, where the book she’d been reading lay. She sat down, her feet comfortably tucked under her, reached for the book on the table beside her.

  And stopped.

  On the wall she was facing, would always face sitting the way she always did, some bookshelves had been removed. In their place hung a painting, a dreamy oil painting of a cliff overlooking a gentle sea, with two hazy figures standing close together on the beach.

  She stood up and walked over to it slowly.

  “You bought it,” she said, knowing he was there, had entered the library behind her.

  “It’s yours,” he said. “I just thought this was the perfect place for it, for you.”

  Her eyes were glued to the painting. “Mine,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  A long moment passed without a reaction from her, and suddenly Ian felt like a damn fool. Theirs was a strict arrangement, his doing, and he had become slack in keeping to his own restrictions, his own rules on how to handle this, handle her. But she certainly hadn’t, in fact she still kept her distance, had never stopped pushing him away. And yet here he was, giving her this painting just because of the way she had spoken about it, the emotion he had seen in her. He had wanted to give it to her, wanted to make her happy. Had expected, he supposed, a smile, excitement, whatever he had seen in women he had dated when he had chosen to give a gift, a jewel—that was always what they wanted. She was different, she would not go for such things and he wouldn’t give them to her, not offhandedly, she was different for him, too. And so this opportunity, so rare, to know that he could give her something that would please her, was for him priceless.

  And she wasn’t even dignifying him with a word, a look. Anything. Uncertain of himself, surprised into protecting himself, into having to hide emotions he hadn’t expected, he was about to speak, to tell her that if she did not wish to have the damn painting she could return it herself. That she need not worry, her discomfort with him was noted, the contract would be kept, he would not make the mistake of making such a gesture again, they would go back to the way things has been at the beginning. He would—

  All thoughts and intentions disappeared, every notion he had of being able to even begin to anticipate her, use comparison to others he’d had in an attempt to figure her out, it all disappeared when she did turn to look at him.

  Her eyes were full of bewilderment. And something else, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on. When she spoke, he had the feeling she hadn’t intended to say what she did, but her surprise, the emotion, had gotten the better of her.

  “No one has given me a present since . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  He made the connection immediately and spoke even as some, albeit too few of the pieces of the puzzle that was his wife fell into place. “Since your parents died.”

  The slightest hesitation, then finally she nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just didn’t expect this. Thank you.”

  “No, please, don’t apologize. You’re very welcome. I’m glad you like it.” Glad couldn’t even begin to describe what was going through him.

  “I love it,” she said softly, looking back at the painting. “And it’s perfect where it is. You thought of that, too.”

  He himself was taken now, with the effect this was having on him. She, was having on him.

  “May I ask you something?” His voice was soft.

  She nodded, her eyes on the painting.

  “You can easily afford this painting now. Why didn’t you buy it for yourself?”

  The eyes that turned to look at him were baffled.

  “The possibility never occurred to you, did it?” he answered himself. “To buy this, to buy something for yourself.” Something permanent, something to put in a home. Her home.

  She turned away again but not before he saw the pain and knew he’d hit the mark. He didn’t push further, not wanting her to back away, couldn’t bear having her hiding from him again.

  Couldn’t bear to lose her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Tess didn’t see her husband for much of the rest of the week, and when she did see him again, she was sitting in the library when he walked in. He’d obviously just arrived and had come straight there. He was still dressed in a suit, both it and his shirt looking as if he'd just put them on. Meticulous, but then everything Ian Blackwell wore was custom tailored.

  Looking at him, at the way he held himself, the way he came to stand now, leaning on the back of the sofa he usually sat on when he was here with her, she could see why so many feared him. He was the formidable Ian Blackwell through and through, the man she had first met at InSyn.

  And right now his eyes were as cool as they were the day they had first looked into hers.

  “I have a . . . let’s say, interesting problem,” he said, contemplating her. His voice was low, and carefully controlled.

  She put her book aside and waited. It hadn’t been this way with him for quite a while now.

  “InSyn's effectiveness is down seven percent.”

  She nodded. She now knew what this was about. “A further seven percent, you mean,” she said. “Since I left, and despite your decision not to dissolve it but instead to have the new transition team help it stand on its feet again. A total of sixteen percent since you took it over.”

  “And you’re not at all surprised. So you knew it would happen. Damn it, you knew.” Ice-cold anger ruled the gray in his eyes.

  Her first thought was to answer the accusation with a reminder that it was he who had told her that she was no longer an employee of InSyn and that she should stay away from it. But that wouldn’t be right,
not anymore. She knew now why InSyn was important to him, and the reason she knew was because so much had changed between them since that day.

  And so instead she chose to take her place beside Ian Blackwell in one more way. “Are you talking to me as your wife now, or as a former employee of InSyn?” she asked evenly.

  “I'm talking to the Tess Andrews who fought me in InSyn's basement that day,” he retorted.

  She nodded. That made it easier. “You only lost a further seven percent because you kept Jayden. What you failed to do was replace me.”

  “You.”

  “Yes.”

  She meant it. There was nothing arrogant, nothing condescending about what she was saying. She was simply stating a fact.

  “Explain.”

  She disregarded the angered tone. The important thing was that he was finally ready to listen to what she had to say about InSyn, and that she could help him with it. “In the time Davis was the administrative head of the transition team, she made arbitrary changes in InSyn. She didn't care about the company, and she didn’t bother to learn it. She was there to mold it into what she thought you wanted.”

  “That's not how I work.”

  “That's how she worked. Seeing her with you that day, she was obviously out to impress you.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don't sleep with my employees,” he said, irritated.

  “Who you sleep with is your business as long as you keep it discreet. That's what your contract says, remember?” It just came out. She didn't mean to say it, had no idea where it came from.

  Yes, she did. She had wondered about it, more recently. Wondered with a pang she wasn't supposed to feel and that she had meant to keep to herself.

  She missed the flicker of surprise in his eyes at what she’d said, and at the way she’d said it.

  She breathed in. “I'm sorry,” she said, raising her eyes to his. “That wasn't fair.”

  That surprise in his eyes she didn’t miss. She hurried on, focusing on what she knew how to handle. “Look, you didn’t dissolve InSyn, you left it as is. And you replaced the administrative transition team with a good team, one that has improved InSyn’s administrative side immensely. It wasn’t that well run for a while before, we all knew that. And then you appointed the head of that team to InSyn’s interim CEO until you see how things work out with it, which is perfectly understandable.

  “InSyn's employees saw this. They also saw that their integration into Pythia Vision as its subsidiary, rather than just a part-time contractor, is giving them a new focus, practical applications to work on. An outlook InSyn had begun to lose simply because it was reaching a final milestone in its development of the algorithmic platform for the human-machine interface, one that the founders couldn’t take them beyond—it’s ready for the practical implementation, which you’re giving them under Pythia Vision and the Alster virtual interface. So they're more confident now in their future.”

  “But?”

  “Your second transition team didn’t undo all of Davis's changes.”

  “Perhaps it agreed with some.”

  “It saw that InSyn was calming down. Cooperating. It didn’t want to make more changes that might rock the boat again.” She paused and considered him. “Okay. InSyn developed the ability for human intelligence and machine intelligence to work hand in hand. For that you basically need three things—the machine learning capabilities, the human reactions and practical responses, and the interaction between the two, which requires balancing assimilation and reaction times in order to facilitate the interaction of machine logic with human experience. These are InSyn’s three main work teams, who have created three sets of algorithms that together form the platform, the theoretical interface.

  “But InSyn also needs data experts. The people who in the beginning analyzed and modeled data, predicted from it, and prescribed situation-relevant impacts and responses—for the learning algorithms, and who later factored in the data related to the human operators working alongside the machine—for the balancing algorithms.

  “In essence, they, the data function, they are the foundation of InSyn’s work in that they’ve participated from the beginning in all aspects of the development, and have worked with all of InSyn’s teams over time as these teams were formed and developed. But today they’re also best positioned to look from above at the integration of the three parts of the theoretical interface.”

  “Jayden. You.”

  “Yes. Jayden taught me everything he knew, and later on he made sure I continued to progress with InSyn alongside him.”

  Ian nodded. What she was telling him was putting their first meeting in context. He understood more now. Not enough, but a bit more.

  “The problem is that to an outsider who doesn’t get the work behind InSyn, what we, the data function, did was less obvious. Davis saw the three teams working in their designated spaces on the upper floors, while we did most of our work apart from them, and she didn’t understand that that’s because by then we had our hand in everything. If on the day we met you saw Jayden sitting alone in the basement talking to a team on an upper floor, that meant there was a flaw in the interface—that day it was a mismatch in a balancing algorithm that meant the human operator couldn’t ‘talk’ to the machine in a way that the machine could grasp it. You weren’t there for the beginning of the conversation, when the human reactions team had been a part of it, too. Both teams knew to turn to him, they knew he would see the problem faster than they would because he sees it all, has seen it all from the beginning. He and I, we had eyes on everything. We could see flaws they didn’t, help them fix them, run prescriptive analysis—suggest solutions and tell them their impact.”

  “You were both a fundamental and an integrative component.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then I took you out of InSyn.”

  “And Jayden alone isn’t enough. Even together, he and I were no longer enough in the advanced stages InSyn’s theoretical interface is in. And he certainly can’t be enough with the work InSyn is now doing with Pythia Vision, moving into the interface implementation stage and gearing up toward the development of entirely new complex applications. He's been brainstorming with me ever since I came here,” she finally told him. “But it's not nearly the same as being there, working with him full time.”

  “What do I do?”

  She stood up and walked over to him, coming to stand on the other side of the sofa. “A few months after Pythia Vision gave InSyn its first project, I chose three people from across the company, one from each team. I trained them in a way that would ensure that together they could do what Jayden and I did, and work as efficiently as we did, under Jayden’s guidance. I chose people who, with what Jayden and I would teach them, and with the know-how they’ve accumulated in their time at InSyn, would be able to both solve any type of problem with the algorithmic platform as it is implemented and to proactively suggest new ideas to improve the resulting interface, take it forward in the years ahead, and make it the most competitive, flexibly implementable interface there is.”

  He remembered the added workstations in the basement. “You essentially put together a forward-looking team that would accompany the integration of the theoretical interface’s three components and its subsequent implementation as an actual interface in varied applications.”

  “Exactly. But Davis didn't get what we did. She didn’t expect the added team when she got to InSyn, and she refused to listen when we tried to explain to her its importance, that the change was needed now that Pythia Vision would need InSyn to help it build an adaptable, integrated interface. She sent the three people I’d chosen back to their original teams, and what we did fell apart. And so did the theoretical interface’s integration.”

  “And the new transition team didn't restore them to the positions you’d created for them.”

  “That’s right, they missed that. And later, when Jayden tried to talk to your interim C
EO, he didn’t listen either. InSyn was finally behaving better, and he thought that all its problems were fixed and that if Pythia Vision will need anything there to change, it will ask for it. But Pythia Vision is smart enough to give InSyn the freedom it needs.”

  “And you couldn’t intervene, because you’re Ian Blackwell’s wife.”

  She nodded. “InSyn’s strength is its people, and if you want it to succeed, you need to let them be. Let them do their work the way they know best.”

  He didn’t tell her that this was exactly what the head of Pythia Vision’s Overarching Projects Integration Team had told him after that last meeting they had. The man had also said that InSyn’s people were worth every bit of trouble.

  “Okay,” he said. “What would you do if you were me?”

  “Let Jayden put our team back together. And let him know that you're not going to touch it again, or better, let me tell him. He'll believe me. And then just leave them all alone, let InSyn and Pythia Vision do the work, they’ll be fine. If you do that, InSyn will know you’re listening, it will trust you, and you won’t have to worry about it again.”

  “And Jayden can deal with these three people of yours, work with this team like you both did?”

  “He knows how to handle them.”

  “Like he handled you?”

  “No one handles me.” Her voice was quiet.

  “Yes. I should know that by now.” He considered her. “Mrs. Blackwell, why didn't you tell me?”

  “I tried to. On the jet.”

  The day they got married. He remembered. They hadn't talked then, they had fought, and he’d had no inclination to listen to her. “I'm listening now.”

  “And you can turn InSyn around now. When you fix what was done to it, it will be the perfect component for the plan you have for it. It will be more, much more. I’ll help.”

  He nodded, his gaze thoughtful. “At least now I finally understand what you did at InSyn.”

  “You do the same thing.”

  “Sorry?”

  She smiled. “How did you choose InSyn?”