Christopher Reich - The First Billion

Gavallan sighed as he scooted toward the edge of the chair. Pitch over. Business lost. Next. Despite himself, he acknowledged a jab of disappointment and had to sit straighter to keep his shoulders from sagging. He knew he had had no right to count on winning the business, but he truly believed that Black Jet could do the best job for Kirov.

“Don’t let me keep you,” he said. “I’ll be in the office tomorrow if we might answer any questions for you. If you have a free hour, I’d enjoy showing you around the firm.” He rose. “But, Mr. Kirov, I want you to know one thing.”

“Yes?”

“I do believe.”

Kirov rose from the chair, but a moment later sank back down into its cushioned folds, motioning Gavallan to sit. “I will make you proposition, Mr. Gavallan. We are close to finishing the buildout of our central Russian operations. Kiev, Minsk. These are large cities; maybe a hundred thousand subscribers each. Unfortunately, we need fifty million dollars to complete the construction.”

“Fifty million?”

“I am thinking a loan to be repaid from the proceeds of the IPO. It is uncommon?”

“Not at all,” said Gavallan, unable to keep the excitement from his voice. Part of him wanted to jump at the chance, another to take a step back. A fifty-million-dollar loan would exhaust Black Jet’s resources and leave it perilously exposed to the market’s vagaries. It was a tremendous risk. Yet, the fees the deal would bring promised to be tremendous, more than anything Black Jet had ever earned on a single transaction. Add to that the interest on the loan, and of course the prestige… My God, Gavallan said to himself, the prestige alone would do wonders for the company.

He looked at Kirov, doing his best to size him up. The personality contest went both ways. The man was controlling, vain, and at least a little bit of an egomaniac. But his conceit was his strength. How else could he muster the energy, the dedication, the tenacity to build a company like Mercury? Who but the vainest sort of individual would dare talk of aiding his country in such grandiose terms?

Gavallan turned his thoughts to the bigshot flying in from the Big Apple on his big Lear or big Cessna or big Gulfstream. Inside, he smiled. It was a delinquent’s smile, an outsider’s smile, and it reveled in the pique and fury and disbelief that the overconfident executive would feel when he learned that Black Jet had won the two-billion-dollar mandate to bring Mercury Broadband public. Nothing came easier to a Texas farmboy than spitting in the eye of his betters.

Maybe the Russians weren’t the only ones with an inferiority complex.

“Tell you what,” said Gavallan. “Cancel that dinner engagement. Let Black Jet take you public and I’ll write you a check first thing in the morning for fifty million dollars. Prime plus seven to be repaid out of the proceeds of the IPO.” He stuck out his hand.

Konstantin Kirov hesitated, searching Gavallan’s eyes. “I can trust you with my baby? It is not just for me, but for my Russia, too.”

“Yes, you can trust me.”

“Prime plus five and we repay within thirty days.”

“No,” said Gavallan, tasting the deal, wanting it more than anything, but never so much as to make a poor agreement. “It has to come from the proceeds.”

Giving a fateful shrug, Kirov rose laboriously from his chair and grasped Gavallan’s hand. “Yes, we shall work together. You are a believer. I see it in your eyes.” He laughed richly. “I tell you something. Between us, I never like BMW anyway. But you must promise to call me Konstantin. In Russia, business is family.”

Gavallan stood, and though the handshake was awkward and formal, he found himself laughing with his new client, new friend, and new family member, Konstantin Romanovich Kirov.

They’d moved into a conference room down the hall. A “working room,” they called it, and it was fitted for the late nights and early mornings that claimed so large a part of an investment banker’s existence. Besides the glass table and low-backed chairs, there was a refrigerator stocked with Coke, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and, as if an afterthought in their caffeinated universe, Evian. One cupboard held chips, cookies, and candy bars, and another, rumor had it, fresh fruit—though Gavallan had never seen anyone munching so much as a grape. Next door there was a pantry with a microwave oven, a freezer, and a coffeemaker. A paper plate bearing the remains of Gavallan’s sausage and egg burrito sat half in, half out of the trash can. A pall of cigarette smoke hovered below the ceiling. Let mortals worry about ulcers, colitis, and quadruple bypasses. They weren’t subject to daily deadlines that could cost a firm tens of millions of dollars and their own paychecks that extra, all-important zero.

Gavallan leaned back in his chair, balancing on its rear legs. He’d already gone over the Private Eye-PO’s most recent message and its accusations of misrepresentation and fraud. Reluctantly, he’d let everyone in on Grafton Byrnes’s secret visit to Moscow and his failure thus far to report in. He did not, however, feel it necessary to tell them about Byrnes’s early checkout.

“Listen, people, our back’s up against the wall here,” he said. “We need to take a close look at our deal books and see if we can find any holes that correspond to the areas the Private Eye-PO is attacking—namely, the Moscow network operations center and Mercury’s hardware purchasing. I don’t think we will, but I’m not going to my grave like the captain of the Titanic saying, ‘She’s unsinkable.’ No one’s leaving this room until we decide just what the heck we’re going to do. Comprende?”

His eyes moved from face to face, waiting for someone to pick up the baton. Bruce Jay Tustin, Tony Llewellyn-Davies, Sam Tannenbaum—or “Shirley Temple,” as Tustin had christened the blond, ponytailed lawyer—and Meg Kratzer. He was waiting for someone to share his outrage, but outrage, he knew, implied responsibility, and the Mercury deal had been his and his alone from the beginning. Finally, Meg Kratzer chimed in—Meg, for whom silence was an accusation of laziness.

“Look,” she said. “We handled all customer and managerial questions in-house. If something weren’t kosher about Mercury’s Moscow operations, we would have heard about it from one of their customers. Financial, accounting, and operational issues were completed by Silber, Goldi, and Grimm in Geneva. If there were a problem with Mercury’s physical plant and inventory, they would have found it—guaranteed! I don’t know a bigger tight-ass in the business.”

“I do,” said Tustin, rolling his eyes and lofting a thumb in Meg’s direction.

“I appreciate the compliment, Mr. Tustin,” she responded. “It’s hard to be more thorough than a Swiss with a microscope and a mandate to inspect. Coming from someone who’s such a renowned tight-ass himself, that’s very high praise indeed. I will thank you, however, to keep that greasy kid stuff in which you drown your last three remaining hairs off my deal books. I needed a whole bottle of Mr. Clean to get it off last time.”

“Very funny,” retorted Tustin, above the nervous laughter. “Just so you know, it’s pommade. That’s French, for ‘classy.’”

Meg Kratzer circled the table, passing out a thick red three-ring notebook to everyone present. She was a vital, animated woman, short, stocky, and neatly attired in an olive Valentino two-piece. Her red hair was pulled back into a severe bun. Her blue eyes glimmered with healthy determination. At age sixty-three, she was a mother of four, a grandmother of ten, and self-appointed godmother to Jett Gavallan. She’d put in twenty-five years at a well-known securities house, only to be told when she turned fifty that her shelf life had expired. The termination letter called her “irascible, opinionated, and obstinate,” and said she was “unable to meet the rapidly evolving dictates of the financial arena.”