Lopez shrugged. ‘You know, me, when I want to talk, I don’t order a plate of noodles first.’
Ben laughed. ‘We’re going to eat.’
‘OK. Mr Yao, he won’t be happy if I take those plates back full.’
‘We won’t send them back full, I promise,’ said Ben.
Lopez looked at them doubtfully and then moved on.
Kevin turned to Andrei, hunched forward over his plate. ‘What the fuck did you say?’ he hissed. ‘Come on! What?’
‘I said no. What do you think I said?’
‘You said no? You didn’t even tell him you’d think about it?’
‘I said no.’
‘Dude, you said no to a hundred million dollars?’ Kevin leaned back. ‘What the fuck are you doing? He can crush us. Isn’t that what he just showed? You know what? I think that’s what that blocking was about. Us!’
‘I agree. It’s possible.’
Kevin clenched his teeth and looked from side to side, resembling some kind of rodent trapped in a cage. ‘It was about us! Fuck! We never realized! It wasn’t about the search engines at all. It was about us!’
‘That’s how it would appear.’
‘Just to show us that he could crush us.’
‘No,’ said Andrei.
‘Andrei,’ said Ben. ‘I think Kevin’s right. That’s what he was showing us.’
‘No, I don’t think he was trying to show us,’ said Andrei. ‘I think he was trying to do it.’
‘Crush us?’
Andrei nodded.
‘What makes you say that? Did he say it?’
‘No, but he offered me a hundred million dollars. Guys, if you can crush someone, you don’t offer them a hundred million dollars. That’s way too much, don’t you think? Even for a guy like Mike Sweetman. If that’s what you think you’ll have to pay, you wouldn’t just show them – you’d go ahead and do it.’
Ben raised an eyebrow. He had always known that Andrei was very cool, very rational. Sometimes he felt that he lacked a certain degree of emotion. Suddenly, he saw the power in that coolness and rationality.
‘Don’t you think so?’ said Andrei. ‘If you really feel you can crush them at will, then you offer some desultory figure, saying, basically, you’re not worth the effort I’d have to go to to destroy you.’ Andrei picked up a forkful of noodle. ‘If he’d offered me ten million, I probably would have said yes.’
Neither Kevin nor Ben tried to persuade Andrei to accept Mike Sweetman’s offer. Each of them had his reasons. Like Andrei, Kevin was encouraged by the sheer size of the offer. He began to think that Fishbowll might end up being worth a lot more than Mike Sweetman’s number. Ben, on the other hand, was more detached when it came to the question of Fishbowll’s value. He had never really thought about what Fishbowll might be worth and was happy to accept Andrei’s judgement on that. He also didn’t think he had much of a right to try to influence Andrei one way or the other. Unlike Kevin, who understood the programming behind Fishbowll and who had therefore played a large part in its development, Ben felt that he contributed far less and was simply lucky to be a part of this extraordinary thing. He would be happy with whatever he eventually got out of it. He was fairly certain that would be a lot more than the $30,000 he had managed to scrape together from his family, and whether that was the frankly staggering sum of $9 million for his 9 per cent share, or more, or less, wasn’t something he was too concerned about at this point. He had managed to become part of Fishbowll, he wanted that to continue, and he knew that would be unlikely if Andrei sold it to someone else.
Over the next few days, there were moments when Andrei did find himself suddenly thinking: Someone offered me a hundred million dollars! And I turned it down! It would have been easy, very easy, to call Sweetman back and take the offer. He would have $76 million for his share of the business. For a semester’s work.
But he didn’t call Sweetman back. Andrei really believed the offer showed that Sweetman had tried to take them out, risking a move that he hadn’t dared to make before, and only pressure from elsewhere had prevented him from succeeding. Perversely, that gave Andrei faith in Fishbowll’s viability. It also meant that Sweetman saw the type of service Fishbowll was offering either as a huge threat or a huge opportunity. Either way, it gave Andrei faith in Fishbowll’s value. He