Christopher Reich - The First Billion

Cate who was gone.

The last picture in the stack had been taken just a few hours before he’d proposed, and showed the two of them at the rail of Sten Norgren’s fifty-foot Wellington as it passed by the Presidio, San Francisco’s oldest military installation. Cate’s lustrous black hair, sparkling in the mid-morning sun, whipped across her face. Her eyes were partially hidden, but there was no disguising the smile or the quicksilver brilliance of the perfect white teeth. And no mistaking the unalloyed joy behind them.

Bringing the photo closer, he traced a thumb over her features, searching her obscured expression for a hint of what was to come. Looking past the hair into her eyes, checking her smile, he fought to glimpse a trace of discord, a measure of dissembling, some signal of the betrayal that lurked around the corner. He’d been doing the same stupid thing every day for a month, and every day he came away empty. She hadn’t given him a clue.

This failure to foresee her actions had left him feeling powerless, the fool. Later, when she’d refused to explain her reasons, or to even speak with him, his emotions had hardened and he’d felt tricked and cheated and vengeful.

A few nights ago, he’d woken in a sweat, trembling, his heart racked with a terrifying anxiety. He hadn’t suffered a nightmare. No subconscious spasm that his bet on Mercury would turn sour, no clawing certainty he’d lose everything he’d worked toward since leaving the Air Force, that he might end up penniless and without a means of supporting himself. The fear that stole upon him out of the darkness was deeper and more personal. It was fear sprung from his most desperate insecurity, more a premonition really, a merciless and exacting portrait drawn in black and gray of his life to come.

He saw himself in twenty years. He looked as he did now. He had all his hair, was trim and fit. He knew as you do in the subterfuge of dreams that he still had Black Jet, that he played golf once a week and went sailing on occasion, and that he was as well-off as he would ever need to be. Yet his image was surrounded by a naked aura of despair. Waves of loneliness rose from him like heat from the desert floor. Here was a man who had spent his life wedded to his business, involved in the stark, predictable activity of making money. Here was a drone who embraced repetition and success as a substitute for passion—and who, for all his effort and infinite industry, had no one.

Awake, perched on the edge of his bed in the dead of night, he’d suddenly realized that he had no possibilities without her, that he would never find someone to replace her, that there was no one in the world who could excite him and challenge him and thrill him as she had. No one who would own him so utterly.

Gavallan’s phone rang. Bolting forward, he dropped the pictures into the drawer, slid it shut, and picked up the receiver. It was Emerald Chew on his private line.

“Yes, Emerald.”

“Sorry to disturb you, but Tony’s on his way in. He’s very agitated.”

“Agitated?” Gavallan dropped his feet to the floor and sat bolt upright. “Did he say what it’s ab—”

Just then the door burst open and Antony Llewellyn-Davies, the firm’s head of capital markets, rushed into the room.

“Tony, what is it? What’s wrong?”

But one look had already told him everything he needed to know.

He’s back,” shouted Antony Llewellyn-Davies. “And he’s calling our stock a ‘scam dog.’ Cocky bastard!”

Gavallan rounded his desk, confronting the anxious man in the center of the office. “Who’s back?”

“Who do you think? The Private Eye-PO. He’s worse than the bloody herp. But this time he’s gone too far. It’s slander. I swear it is, Jett. Mercury, a scam dog? Never.”

Gavallan knew all too well what a scam dog was. Slang used by day traders and Internet stock junkies, it connoted a stock that was at worst a fraud—hence, “scam”—and at best an underperforming or poorly run company—hence, “dog.” “Okay, Tony, let’s calm down. Just give it to me from the top.”

“If you’ll step aside, I believe the expression is ‘Better show than tell.’”

Llewellyn-Davies was a tall, thin man with wavy blond hair and a bobbing Adam’s apple. An émigré from “the City,” as London’s financial district was known, he looked every inch an advertisement for the English upper classes. Gray slacks, white shirt, and navy pullover: It was his uniform, and he wore it every day. Add the apple blossom cheeks and the look of childish outrage and he was the old Etonian who’d never grown up. Just thirty-one, he was the youngest member of Black Jet’s executive board, and its latest addition.

Gavallan allowed Llewellyn-Davies to pass, and a minute later the men were huddled over the monitor reading the Private Eye-PO’s latest salvo at the Mercury Broadband offering.

Hi, kids! Surprised to hear from me again so soon? Don’t be. News this sizzling pops right out of the pan and into your laps. Don’t thank me. Thank our sponsors at Black Jet Securities. Last week, we showed you a pretty pic of Mercury Broadband’s Moscow network operations facilities. Très déclassé, n’est-ce pas? This week, we go a step further. Your Private Eye-PO has come into possession of documents proving once and for all that Mercury is nothing but a hairy little scam dog with mucho fleas.

The Private Eye-PO went on to claim that Mercury Broadband had not purchased sufficient Cisco routers to service its two million business and residential customers in Central and Eastern Europe. (Routers formed what was known as the “IP backbone” and were basically sophisticated machines that channeled digital messages to the proper addresses.) As proof, he contrasted a footnoted item in the Mercury offering prospectus with a copy of an internal accounting document from Cisco Systems, the giant manufacturer of Internet operating equipment. Whereas the prospectus claimed that Mercury had purchased over three million dollars’ worth of equipment from Cisco in the last year alone (and even listed the products: the 12000 series Gigabit Switch Router, the 7500 series router, and the MC 3810 multiservice access convertor), Cisco’s internal “customer revenue summary” showed cumulative sales to Mercury during the period 1999–2002 totaling just $212,000.

The missive ended with an unusually brazen sign-off.

Shocked, loyal readers? Not as much as the hotshots at Black Jet, I’ll bet. Or are they in the know? Here’s a quick lesson, Mr. Gavallan: No routers, no customers. No customers, no moolah! Remember, it’s never too late to ix-nay the deal, Jett. You’ve done it before at the last minute—and for less of a reason. Will your pride permit you to do it again? Or is the going price for honesty two billion smackers these days? Hey, all you lowlifes in San Francisco, can you say “due diligence”? Better yet, can you say “class action”? See you in court, Jett!

“Class action, my ass,” spat Gavallan, chewing the inside of his lip, fighting to control the fount of anger welling inside him. “I toured their network operations centers in Kiev, Prague, and St. Petersburg. Their facilities are top of the line. They’ve got a dozen engineers on payroll in Geneva laying out plans for the new expansion grid. He’s got it all wr—” Aware that his words were sounding more like an excuse than an explanation, he cut himself off. “This is bad, Tony.”

Llewellyn-Davies crossed his arms, nodding. “Indeed. Do we just ignore this too? I mean we can’t, can we? This is the second time in two weeks he’s come after us. First Moscow, now this. Hasn’t that chum of yours found him yet? The Internet detective, what?”