This is my 2012 Summer Lovin' Story Contest entry. I hope you enjoy it, and don't forget to vote. Thanks for reading.
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In the world of twenty-first century business competition, there are few things more important than knowing what your competitor is doing, or better yet, what your competitor is planning.
Many big corporations spend huge sums of money stealing secret information from their competitors, but no one knows how much, because they never account for spying in their financial reports, do they? They fill thick portfolios with their competitors' pirated trade secrets, poached patent information, purloined e-mails, pilfered memos, and pinched personal information. Industrial espionage has become a fine art, with methods and agents as secretive as those used by the CIA. This story is but one example of how low companies will stoop to gather secret information from a competitor.
The names of individuals in this story have been changed to protect their identities.
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On a hot Tuesday afternoon in June, Susan Bacardo, dressed in business attire, sat in the Houston, Texas, airport boarding area awaiting the call to board her flight to Chicago. She'd arrived at the airport early, because she wanted to get away from her stressful job and her sexually harassing boss. Besides, her laptop contained a PowerPoint presentation she wanted to review before delivering it the next morning at a three-day pharmaceutical conference.
Susan's employer, Shtup Pharma, manufactured and marketed numerous prescription drugs. She was a project manager for Shtup, leading a team of researchers who were attempting to create a female Viagra drug. During their research, they had collected considerable detailed data relating to female sexual arousal and dysfunction caused by chemicals, drugs, and hormones. Along with their one modest success, they had encountered scores of failures in their search for an arousal drug. They'd hit so many dead ends that they became experts in female sexual unresponsiveness. The subject of Susan's presentation at the conference was, "Chemicals, Drugs, and Hormones which Reduce the Female Sexual Response."
While Susan was reviewing her slides, a tall handsome man in a suit approached the counter in the boarding area and spoke with the female agent. He identified himself as Brian Miller. He said he and Susan Bacardo worked at the same company and mentioned they were traveling together. Would the agent be so kind as to assign him a seat next to hers?
Trying always to please the airline's customers, the agent checked the seating assignments. She reported there was an available seat, and assigned it to Brian.
At the same time, Susan happened to look up and noticed the man talking to the agent behind the counter. He seemed to be looking directly at her. He smiled at Susan, then turned and said something to the agent. The agent nodded her head toward Susan, then looked down and typed on her computer terminal. The man didn't look familiar to Susan, but since she traveled often, she met many people. Perhaps he was someone she'd met on a previous trip. Susan shrugged and went back to working on her laptop.
What Susan didn't know was that she'd been targeted by her employer's primary competitor, Bugger Pharmaceutical Corporation, in the form of Brian Miller (the pseudonym he used for his spying task). The knowledge she carried in her head about the female Viagra project was worth a fortune to competitors who were also working on a similar drug. It was Brian's task to pick her brain and tap into that fortune. After all, the first company to market a female Viagra could reap millions, if not billions, of dollars in profits.
When aircraft boarding was called, Susan stood in line behind a jam of other passengers who just couldn't wait to board the plane, even though everyone had an assigned seat. She never understood the herd mentality of passengers and passed it off as just being another quirk of human nature.
As she handed the agent her boarding pass, she passed the handsome man, also waiting to board, and he smiled at her again. Did she know him? While she and the other passengers shuffled down the stifling boarding ramp, Susan tried to remember if she had met him somewhere.
Brian thought Susan was more attractive than the photo he carried in her dossier—and a little taller than she'd been described. He knew a lot about Susan—he'd studied her dossier for almost four weeks learning detailed information about her. He discovered she grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and had graduated from Northwestern University. He also read reports about her job description, her pay, information about her boss, her immediate chain of command, her marital status (she was single), and many more informational tidbits that had been gleaned by other undercover agents from Bugger.
He'd learned Susan's responsibilities included managing a project research team, the project budget, and the female Viagra schedule. Most of the information about Shtup's female Viagra project passed across her desk, so she was the most likely target at Shtup.
With him, Brian carried a list of Shtup managers and phone numbers; he probably knew more about Shtup than many who worked there. For this trip, he was going undercover, impersonating a Shtup employee.
Brian was a biochemist who had worked on Bugger's female Viagra project for about three years, so his knowledge of the subject would be helpful in his spying mission. His research team had been unsuccessful, but another of Bugger's teams working on a cardiac medicine stumbled onto a female arousal drug by accident. At that point, Brian's value on the female Viagra project was reduced.
When Tony Wilson, Brian's manager, obtained a sketchy report that Shtup had a breakthrough on their female Viagra project, and was ahead of Bugger's project, he decided to determine if it was true, and if so, to sidetrack it somehow.
While Tony and Brian were meeting to discuss where Brian might be reassigned within the Bugger research organization, by coincidence, Tony discovered Brian had grown up in Evanston, Illinois, and graduated from Northwestern University. Through their spies, he also knew Susan Bacardo had also graduated from there.
Tony began hatching a plan. Brian was tall and handsome, he had worked on their female Viagra project, and he was familiar with the technology involved. Moreover, word had it, that he was smooth with women. Perhaps Brian and Susan had enough in common that Brian could exploit Susan's weaknesses.
Tony said, "Brian, I have a 'special project' for you. If you're willing to carry it out, it might be worth a nice bonus, or even a promotion. It's going to be top secret, and only a handful of people will be in on it. Okay?"
Although it didn't take long for Brian to make a decision, he didn't realize what he was getting into. His main thought was about earning a healthy bonus.
The following day, Brian discovered the 'special project' Tony Wilson had given him was to gather as much information about Shtup's female Viagra project as possible, namely to target Susan Bacardo.
A week or so into Brian's grooming, Tony gave him some counterfeit identification cards, and told him that one of Bugger's undercover agents had entered his name into Shtup's personnel records, and had even given him a social security number from a real Brian Miller, so that if anyone checked, they'd find he worked there. His status was listed as 'leave of absence' on Shtup's records, so he wouldn't show up on the records they normally reviewed.
At the end of Brian's four weeks of grooming, Tony handed him a fat envelope containing $2,500 in twenty and fifty dollar bills, and said, "Cash can't be traced." Then he winked at Brian and said, "Put the money to good use in Chicago."
The last thing Tony said to him before he left for Houston was, "Gain her confidence and milk her for every bit of information you can. I don't care what you have to do, but don't come back without the information we want."
So that's how Brian Miller happened to be on the same plane, with an assigned seat next to Susan Bacardo, destined for Chicago.
When Susan reached her window seat in business class, she sat down. She removed her uncomfortable mid-heeled black pumps, wiggled her toes, slipped her laptop under the seat, and looked out the window idly watching the men loading luggage in the cargo bay.
She felt the seat next to her jar slightly and turned to see the same handsome man who had smiled at her in the boarding area. He was now sitting next to her. He smiled at her yet again.
"Hello Susan. How are you?"
"Do I know him?" she wondered.
Susan responded, "I'm fine—and you are?"
"Brian Miller. I'm a biochemist from our Boston office," he lied. "I had a meeting in Houston earlier today, and now I'm headed to the pharmaceutical conference."
"How do you know me?"
"You're the project manager for the Feminoral project (Feminoral was Shtup's code name for their female Viagra drug), and I saw your photo in the company newsletter," he lied again.
"But my photo wasn't published in it for Feminoral. Since it's a confidential project, we don't discuss it much."
