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Markham a two-page paper summarising the development team’s progress over the last four weeks and it was obvious he wanted to read it in full, as he sat back in the chair, holding the document out in front of him.
    After a few minutes he put it down, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. ‘This is fantastic, William. I never believed we’d get this far. Good God, it looks like we could have a working prototype inside a couple of months.’
    ‘Yes I know, it’s terrific news.’
    Markham Microprocessors, in common with most of the companies in their field, had grown frustrated by the batteries of mobile devices as they were struggling to cope with the huge loads being placed upon them by high-definition pictures, games, videos, applications and music.
    With the proposed rollout of a 4G network across Europe promising a whole host of new, unheralded but power-hungry services, it was now widely recognised that battery technology had not kept up with other developments in the electronics industry and a crisis was looming.
    A Markham software engineer called Gary Larner, a maverick who walked the thin line between genius and madness, was obsessed with the idea of extracting electrical power from radio waves and given the parlous nature of battery technology, Lawton gave him his head and a large budget to find out if he could do it.
    He didn’t, but using his basic ideas and concepts, the current development team took it much further and now they believed they were on the cusp of producing a working prototype. If successful, mobile devices would never need to be charged from a power socket, as a Markham microchip buried inside would charge it with energy extracted from radio waves in the air. This would not only annihilate one of the major aggravations of modern life, but also turn the company into one of the biggest hitters in the business.
    ‘How are Marta and Sanjay doing? Are you looking after them?’
    ‘They want for nothing. They’re working all the hours on the project as you can imagine, staying late and coming in most weekends, but everything’s fine.’
    ‘Make sure they are, we don’t want them going off the rails like our Mr Larner, do we?’
    He nodded. ‘Of course not.’
    Their discussion came to a natural conclusion ten minutes later and Lawton rose to fix them both a whisky. He handed a glass to Markham and trying to sound as calm as he could, said, ‘who are the Koreans you’ve been talking to?’
    Markham peered at him over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘Didn’t I tell you, William?’
    Lawton shook his head. ‘No you didn’t.’
    ‘I must be getting forgetful in my old age. It’s the Han Industrial Group, a large conglomerate, based in Seoul. They’d heard of us through the Korean shipping group we use to ship the Medusa chip set, Crown Transportation.’
    Lawton nodded.
    ‘Yong Nahm’s cousin is the MD of the Han group and they got talking and he mentioned he had been looking to buy a high-tech company for several months.’
    ‘How have these talks progressed?’
    ‘They’ve been more like negotiations than talks, to tell you the truth.’
    Markham looked embarrassed, as well he might because Lawton knew he had kept it from him deliberately, because he knew he wouldn’t like it. He had a better memory than the old man and Lawton felt sure he didn’t remember hearing a dickey bird about this.
    ‘They would be a good fit for us as they have a growing electronics division and huge amounts of money to invest. They like us because we’re cutting-edge and they think we could turn their mobile phone business into the world’s largest.’
    He babbled on few more minutes, about the work Han did assembling circuits and building laptops but he couldn’t concentrate. He knew a lot about the Han Group, as he had travelled to South Korea many times. They were an aggressive buyer of companies, keen to build additional revenue streams away from their core industries of oil and