Next morning, I was at our venue bright and early. So were Tim and Maggie and – loudly bemoaning his missed breakfast – one of Maggie's innumerable brothers, Sean, all of them as bemused at the early hour as the hotel staff, themselves clearly unused to conference delegates turning up at 7am. In any case – maybe because they weren't actually fully awake – they all followed my instructions without a question: Maggie, employing some side cutters, Tim, despatched back to the office to put a soldering iron to good use and Sean and myself getting down to cack-handedly arranging a variety of display boards and the like.
Its amazing quite how much damage you can do in a short time if you're focused.
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A couple of hours later, anyway, Maggie and I were beginning the meeting and greeting process as the first of our various guests. Or delegates, I suppose. Tim had dropped off the necessaries – and a couple of new creations – and then departed again to pursue his nefarious purposes. Sean, we'd sent round the corner to a cafe that did a better – in the sense of bigger, greasier – breakfast than he would ever have prepared himself.
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The first session, as is the way of these things, was, frankly, boring. Various people – including me – gave updates on our current 'state of play' positions, all of us, more or less deliberately, drawing out parallels and synchronicities.
When we broke for coffee, I got the complaints. OK, only from three or four people, but they were pretty upset. Seemed our improvised intranet wouldn't give them access to the web and they'd failed to find a wi-fi node ... and couldn't get a data-capable phone signal. 
Which was not as much of a surprise as it might have been, I felt, but for appearances sake the hotel factotum was summoned. The conversation – held in a quiet corner of the lobby, with just Sean (who's not small) and myself in earshot – went something like this.
"Your wi-fi's not working."
"I'm sorry, it was checked yesterday evening but you were here very early and you did also specify that you didn't require such a facility, so ..."
"We don't. Also, we'll pay for the damage that my colleagues inadvertently did to your antennae and cables and things. Better yet, I'll get them to repair it all ... just as soon as we've finished."
I can't say that the man looked too pleased about this – I got the feeling that wi-fi was something of a black art, as far as he was concerned – but we had paid premium prices for his rather tatty room and lukewarm coffee, so there wasn't anything much he could do about it.
And Sean loomed very effectively, I thought ...
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So, FaceBook and Twitter accounts remained un-updated, and doubtless hugely urgent e-mails were at risk of going unread for actual hours. People could, of course, use their phones – albeit in a limited fashion – but aside from maybe taking photographs of the presentations, they couldn't do too much harm with them. Certainly, no-one could get hold of any of the raw engineering data we'd be sharing – or the financial projections Steve and I had mapped out in advance – and, possibly, share it with ... anyone else. Anyone not invited to the meeting, in other words. And they wouldn't be able to do so until we'd reached whatever decisions we came up with at the end of the day.
To which end, while Sean and I had been being relatively unpleasant to an innocent hotel person, Tim and Maggie – and a slightly confused looking Steve from FlexnBalls – were doing similar good things, kindly ensuring that some of our guests did not have to do so much as go the toilet – or out for a fag, whatever – unaccompanied. 
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In fact, Steve and I did most of the donkey work while we were in 'session', each covering the single exit when the other was speaking, that sort of thing. It helped that we already knew what we were each going to say, which saved us having to listen to 'our' bits, and that the vast majority of our audience had enough riding on the outcome of the event to be pretty much engrossed in proceedings. Those few who did feel the urgent need for a breath of fresh air – and there were more of them when Steve was speaking than when I had the mike, I was pleased to note – were relatively easily handled. I mean, we genuinely weren't all that well briefed on all the projects represented at the gathering and neither of us had much trouble in finding conversational topics with which to engage anyone who stepped outside for the briefest of moments. Of course, we'd have had a problem following all or our guests into the toilets, what with both of us being male and all that, but we did have Maggie to fall back on and, anyway, Tim's little burst of activity in the morning had made that particular bolt hole pretty useless, communications wise.
Lunch was more of a challenge, not least because the mediocre buffet supplied by the hotel – and the genuine need people had to peel off from the group and discuss events in some degree of confidence – led to a fair number of people deciding to find refreshment elsewhere. That we managed to extend our blackout to a number of local cafés and even to Regents Park itself relied on guile, bloody mindedness – each of us invited ourselves along with a departing individual or group without waiting for anything quite as quaint as an invitation – and, of course, the appropriate technology. Or, specifically, a number of crude but effective jammers, none of which had any great range but which did pretty comprehensively degrade wifi and mobile signals within their ambit. Not without a degree of collateral damage, of course – at least one local diner required an after the event apology for its sudden loss of web access – and not without, well, a degree of illegality. Quite a high degree, come to think of it.
And, of course, none of it would have been even worth trying, had we had to 'cover' all the delegates. So it was just as well we didn't have to. 
Inside information can be a very useful thing.
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Actually, Ruth's call had named names – four of them – who, she reported, had had 'non-hostile' contacts with here esteemed father over the past few days. She'd also hinted that a couple of other projects, both identifiable from the information she provided, might be 'compromised'. Her words, not mine, and not all that specific, to be honest. Then again, as I was till completely at a loss as to why she was dishing the dirt in the first place – and because I'm a suspicious bastard at times – I wasn't going to take it all as gospel, anyway, so ....
But it was useful – salutary, even – if only to be reminded just how high the stakes had become, just how devious That Bastard Simon could be. Well, we already knew he could do belligerent, so ....
So we couldn't just ignore Ruth's input and, instead, dealt with it, in our techy way, as best we could. I did do my best to ignore the interest that the revelation of my source engendered, though. Steve, who knew her only as 'Ruthless Ruth' vacillated between uber-paranoia and a sort of 'whey, you're well in there, mate' enthusiasm, both of which I found exceptionally annoying. Tim, well, Tim was Tim, a man to whom the minutiae of human interactions would always remain a mystery, while Maggie ... just smiled beatifically whenever the subject came up. She did, though, I reminded myself, have god on her side, so ...
And me? Well, like I said, no idea. No idea at all. I mean, I wasn't about to do root canal work on the proverbial gift horse, even if there remained the possibility that it was of the Trojan persuasion, but I still couldn't think of a reasonable rationale for her actions, her apparent willingness to fuck up her relationship with her father.
Over all, I was glad we were so busy.
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Which, of course, we were. Having set our stage – so to speak – in the morning, the afternoon sessions got a little more involved. Frankly, I was dreading it, given that this was where we, theoretically, got to tell a large part of the audience that they were ... well ... toast; that for any of us to survive, some of us had to bite the bullet. It might be the only logical conclusion, given the circumstances, but how people would react ....
In fact it went, more or less, smoothly. I suppose the fact that people had turned up for our little event in the first place indicated a degree of acceptance, or perhaps just resignation. I mean, if we hadn't explicitly stated the outcome we envisaged, it was obvious enough from the general situation and the specific questions we were posing, the way that we had chosen to present the data. Well, obvious to anyone of any intelligence – and there were more than a few of them in the room.
So. By about 4:30 – we'd only booked the room till five – we had the beginning of a workable plan. Not a funded one – we (the 'survivors') had made some pretty open ended commitments viz a viz everyone else's IP, patents and such like – but some sort of plan nonetheless. There was still going to be a lot of work for the lawyers, of course, and probably months of negotiations with our various funders, backers and external partners, but it did nonetheless feel that there might be light at the end of the tunnel.
It could, possibly, even have resolved itself – at least as a sort of collective aspiration, a legally binding agreement being obviously impossible – and we might all have gone home happy.
Except that, as Steve and I shared the 'stage', cajoling and encouraging people into some sort of consensus, the doors to our little conference room suddenly crashed open – there's no other word – and two large men in badly fitting suits insinuated themselves into the room.
I saw Sean make a move towards them, reacting on some sort of instinctive level that I couldn't quite identify, but Maggie got herself in the way in time and ... We were left with an impasse. All conversation ceased, people sat transfixed, all eyes on the newcomers, a collective intake of breath indicating that the ball was very firmly in their hands.
And for a few seconds – it just felt like hours – that's how its remained: the goons glared, the rest of us quailed. It might have continued like that indefinitely.
And then Simon came in.