Millennium - 1. Chapter 1

November 2, 1999

Escorial

Palo Alto, California

“What a great way to start the day,” Robbie said as he stepped out of the shower and grabbed a towel.

“Yep,” I said, getting a smile for my brevity. “Making love to you is so much fun, it’s better than surfing.” It was a nice thing to say, especially since it hadn’t really been all that good. He was holding back, he’d put a wall between us, and it was driving me crazy.

“That’s saying something, coming from you,” he shot back. Surfing was still my passion, my primary physical relief, besides fucking Robbie, that is. After he said that he got nervous and tried to cover it up. “You’re coming with me to see David today, right?” David was his shrink.

“I said I would, so I will.” I know I sounded irritated, but he’d told me about this meeting with David last week without telling me exactly why he wanted me to be there. “Is everything OK?” Now it was my turn to be nervous.

“I’ve just been really down lately, and I’m trying to figure out a way to get myself back on track,” he told me. Only I knew him, I knew him better than he probably knew himself, and there was more that he wasn’t telling me.

“When we got back together after college, I told you that I’d go to any and all your meetings with him if you wanted me to, and I will. But you’re holding back, and I wish you would tell me why this meeting makes you so nervous.”

“Brad, can we talk about this at the appointment?” he asked me, whining. God, I hated it when he whined. “I’ve got a conference call in a half hour and I have to get ready for it so I don’t end up funding another fucking flop.”

I didn’t feel bad for probing; I felt that I had a right to know. I did feel sorry for him. He’d had two shitty movies in a row, and that was almost the kiss of death in Hollywood. It had started last year with Soldier, a sci-fi adventure film starring Kurt Russell. He was so hot, how could a movie with him in it flop? Well, that one had, and it looked to lose somewhere around $75 million. He’d recovered from that gamely, deciding to move on to the next project. Only his next project was The 13^th Warrior, and that one had launched in August only to be panned. They were guessing this one would lose over $100 million. Meanwhile, he’d passed on American Beauty, which had been released just last month and was already huge. It would be enough to shake the toughest guy, and Robbie wasn’t the toughest guy. “That’s fine. I’ve got my own issues to deal with.”

“Amphion?” I just nodded. They’d come from out of nowhere this year, and were stealing deal after deal out from under our noses. “You’ll figure it out,” he said confidently. I pushed his failures and his issues out of my brain and got ready for our meeting this morning. I met Stef in the kitchen and joined him for breakfast.

“You appear to be glowing,” he commented, smiling.

“Yeah, it will probably be the only good thing to happen to me today,” I told him glumly.

“Do not worry about Centronics,” he said.

“Rumor has it we already lost that deal to Amphion,” I told him. “They just want to meet with us to tell us face to face.”

“I think that is all but certain. They want to meet with us to tell us why, and to make sure we are still around if they need more money,” Stef said.

“You know we already lost out?” I asked him. “Who did you sleep with to find out about that?”

He giggled, shedding his businessman’s façade for a minute and putting on his natural, flirtatious persona. “I never kiss and tell.”

“So if they’ve gone with Amphion, why are we meeting with them?” I had better things to do with my time.

“Because I want to hear the pitch they got. I want to know what they were told. And since we have a long relationship with Skip Harvey, we are likely to get a straight answer,” he said. Skip Harvey was the CEO of Centronics, and we’d worked with him before.

“What are we going to do about these guys Stef?” I asked him. I sounded like Robbie, whining, and that annoyed me. The look he gave me told me he picked up on the same thing, and that just made me even more pissed off. “They’ve scooped nine of our last 11 deals.”

“We will have to talk about that,” he said. “I want you to block out the next three days. You, Luke, and I are going on a retreat.”

“Retreat eh? Isn’t that what you do when you’re losing a battle?” I said, throwing out a caustic joke.

“A positive attitude on your part would be helpful,” he said, with a reprimand in his tone that I rarely heard from him.

I sighed. “I’m sorry Stef. It’s just that it seems I’m surrounded by failure these days. We can’t seem to close deals that were easy just a year ago, Robbie’s producing shitty movies, and I have to go meet with him and his shrink this afternoon.”

“Why are you going to meet with his shrink?”

“Because he asked me to,” I told him. He just looked at me, waiting for more. We had a close bond, an amazing bond, and it was almost like we could read each others’ minds. “He won’t tell me.”

“Well, it seems that we should have much more information on all these fronts by the end of the day,” he said, patting me on the knee. “Try to keep your spirits up and your ears open.” He got up and I followed him out to the waiting limousine.

“Well this is different,” I said. We’d had a limousine at Escorial for as long as I could remember. They were usually Cadillacs, with the occasional Mercedes thrown in. This was a Cadillac too, only it was a big SUV, an Escalade. I hopped into the behemoth easily, and was impressed with how luxurious and comfortable it was inside.

“They have become all the rage now,” he said, looking around at the tasteful décor he’d undoubtedly selected. “JP was not so easily swayed, but he is shorter, so jumping in and out of cars is easier for him than this vehicle.”

“I bet you told him that too?” I chuckled. My father was sensitive about being short.

“I remind him of that when I want to piss him off,” Stef said, making us both laugh. “It is easier to get in and out of, more comfortable, and safer.”

“Safer?” I asked.

“It has bullet proof glass and armored sides and bottoms,” he said. He’d been mildly paranoid about safety since Matthew Shepherd’s murder.

“Armored bottoms? That doesn’t sound too appealing to me. I like my bottoms to be easier than that,” I joked.

“How would you know, anyway? You have been monogamous for so long you have forgotten how to get a man into your bed.”

“He’s the only man I need,” I told him honestly. I loved Robbie completely, and I had been faithful to him, completely faithful, for years. Sometimes it was tempting: there would be another guy who would really catch my eye and I’d fantasize about fucking his brains out. But it was just a fantasy. Ironically enough, the longer we were together, the easier it got for me to be faithful.

The Escalade pulled up to Centronics’ offices and we got out. Stef walked in confidently, while I strode in without as much strut in my walk. Luke Carruthers, our partner in our venture capital firm, was waiting for him. He was a hunky fifty-year-old guy, the kind of guy who’d been really hot when he was younger, and somehow the years hadn’t really diminished that. I remembered not to lust at him. I really liked Luke. Stef was the conceptual, big picture guy, while Luke was the details and analytical guy. I was able to bridge the gap. Luke and I had a lot of mutual respect for each other, and we were great as a team.

“Good morning Stef, Brad,” he said cheerfully. “I hope you don’t mind me meeting you here.”

“Not at all,” Stef said.

“After your call this morning, I had to take some time to rearrange my schedule,” Luke said. “Where are we going?”

“That is to be a surprise,” Stef said mysteriously. “We will talk about it after this meeting.” He gave the receptionist our names and took a seat, but he’d barely sat down when our host arrived. No one kept Stefan Schluter waiting.

Skip Harvey came out to greet us himself. He was an older man, in his late 60s, and looked like a classic American businessman. He wore a suit and tie, something somewhat out of place in the laid-back world of technology. His conservative clothing was mirrored by his neatly trimmed and gelled gray hair. “Stef! How great to see you!” he said gregariously. Stef let him give him a “man hug,” a hug where you made sure to shake hands with the person so when they hugged you they couldn’t get too close. “And you two as well!” he said to Luke and me.

We greeted him in a cordial way, and then stepped into the background. Stef was the man, the guy in charge. It would have been irritating in the extreme to have this role, to be constantly subservient to someone, if it were anyone but Stef. But we were a team, and he made sure I knew that, and he made sure that others did too, even if guys like Skip weren’t tuned in enough to pick up on that. Luke was the same way I was, only more so. He was an engineer by aptitude, so for him, analyzing numbers and deals was much more fun than the face-to-face dealings. Luke was more than happy to leave all the work of negotiating and meeting to us. Skip led us into his board room, where there was another guy waiting to meet us, and this guy was really handsome: Dark hair, dark eyes, and a short, thin body that seemed athletic even in a suit.

“Ryan Halsted,” he said curtly as he shook Stef’s hand, then Luke’s. He immediately struck me as a guy who was totally hot and knew it. When he got to me, he shook my hand and gave it a slight extra squeeze, coupled with a slight grin, so seemingly out-of-character. Even a complete idiot would be able to tell he was flirting with me. What the fuck was that all about? I looked back at him rather dismissively, figuring that would just piss him off, but instead, he just got a small smile, the kind that only shows up in the corners of the mouth. If anything, he just seemed challenged.

“Brad Schluter,” I said, just as curtly as he’d introduced himself to Stef and Luke.

“We’ve met before,” he said. I looked at him questioningly. “At the tech conference last year,” he added. I wracked my memory, trying to remember him, or trying to remember if I was so drunk I’d done something with him I shouldn’t have. Nothing resonated.

“I’m sorry I don’t remember,” I said affably. He’d expected me to lie, to blow it off and pretend I knew him, but my honesty threw him off a bit.

“Ryan is my chief financial officer,” Skip said. “He just joined us a few months ago.”

“Where did you work before this?” Stef asked politely.

“I was at Omega,” he said. That intrigued me. Omega was like a black hole, just as bad as Amphion. It was rumored that there was a person behind the scenes running things, while there were just front men who were there more as decoys than anything. When I’d talked to them, they’d tried hard to sound like they were calling the shots, but it never never quite came off right. They actually seemed more like men who took orders, not those who gave orders, kind of like Cary Chase, the CEO of Amphion.

“That must have been interesting,” Stef said cryptically. It was funny to see Stef’s reaction intrigue Ryan. This guy really let way too many of his thoughts show on his face.

“I learned a lot,” Ryan said, bouncing back gamely.

“Stef, I wanted to meet with you and your team in person to tell you news that you probably already know. We’ve accepted a funding offer from Amphion,” Skip said, getting us on topic.

Stef replied with a response that surprised them, but not us. “I am so happy that you were able to acquire funding! I think you have a great opportunity with this company. If all of the threats about the Y2K disaster come true, you will be phenomenally successful!” Stef was always a good loser, graceful and classy. He reminded me of my mother, of Isidore, when he was like this.

“Why thank you,” Skip said uncomfortably. “We just wanted you to know why.” In other words, they didn’t want to burn any bridges. He turned to Ryan, who took over the presentation. That was interesting.

“While your offer was generous, Amphion offered more money for a smaller share of equity,” Ryan said, almost with a self-satisfied expression. That was even more interesting.

“An extra $2,000,000 for 1% less stock,” Skip said. Ryan was behind him, and flashed him a positively evil look, as well he should have. Until this moment, we’d had no idea how much different our deal had been than the one they were offered Amphion. We didn’t know how much we’d lost by before, but now we did. We knew, and it was chump change.

“Well those are generous terms,” Stef said, trying to alleviate any alarm Ryan may have. He’d picked up on Ryan’s dirty look too. “Will they be able to support you with any contingent funding?”

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“One of the biggest advantages that we provide to firms that we fund is our willingness to be on call during a contingency,” Stef said. I gave him a dirty look behind his back, not because I was mad at him, but because I wanted Ryan to see it and think that I was irritated at him for giving things away. There was nothing secret here at all, it was merely a pose. “In the past, we have been able to step in and assist when a company underestimated its need for funding.”

“Well, Amphion has deep pockets, so I’m sure they’ll do the same thing,” Ryan said defensively. That told us all a lot. It told us that Amphion didn’t follow up with their start-ups like we did, a nice marketing point to make. It also told us that Ryan knew a lot more about Amphion than we did. That was saying something, as hard as we’d been trying to find out about them.

“I did not know they assisted start-ups after they funded them,” Stef said.

“It’s just not part of their marketing materials,” Ryan said dismissively. We’d seen their marketing materials. A less substantive bunch of shit has never before been put together. But for money-hungry companies, they often just looked at the pretty pictures, and Amphion certainly had pretty pictures in their brochure.

I wanted to goad him further; to see if he’d let anything else out. “I went to school with the guy who runs Amphion.”

“I heard about that,” he observed calmly, only for him that spoke volumes. His shields were up now; I’d hit very close to home. Something told me we weren’t talking about Cary Chase.

“I went to school with Cary Chase too,” I said casually, baiting him.

“I heard about that too,” he said smugly. And with that, he’d given me the biggest hint, the biggest clue on this Amphion thing that I’d ever gotten.

“Gunn certainly produces some talent,” Luke said, chiming in perfectly.

“In any event, Skip, you have to take the best deal. Your board would accept nothing less,” Stef said smoothly, trying to lead Ryan away before he realized the gem of information he’d dropped into my lap. “I hope you know that you have burned no bridges with us.”

“Well thank you, Stef,” Skip said. “You are the classiest guy in this business.” He put his arms around Luke and Stef and gregariously led them from the room. I stayed behind to talk to Ryan a bit longer.

“It was nice to see you again,” Ryan said, extending his hand. I held it a little longer than necessary, forcing myself to flirt back with him now that we were alone. Robbie wouldn’t be upset that I was flirting. I thought about whom I’d rather fuck: my all-but-husband, with his tall, studly physique, or this short little twerp. Robbie had nothing to worry about.

Still, he was pretty cute. “It was really nice to see you too,” I said, forcing myself to look at him lustfully, even though that really wasn’t hard to do at all. “Maybe you’d like to do lunch sometime?”

“Just you and me?” he asked, almost coquettishly.

“Yeah, you’re not afraid to be alone with me, are you?” I teased.

“No, but your boyfriend may not like that,” he said. He knew all about me, knew I was gay, and that I had a boyfriend that I was completely faithful to. This was just a little creepy.

“I’ll try not to give him anything to worry about,” I told him, my voice slightly sultry. I saw him swallow hard at that, and felt my ego soar, the kind of boost to self-confidence that really helps when you’re 37 years old and not as young and vital as you used to be. I left things on that note and wandered out to find Stef and Luke. Their conversation with Skip gave me time for some introspection.

We lived in Malibu, in LA, where the culture of youth was firmly implanted. I was a slug compared to all the twinks out there. Robbie had guys like that throw themselves at him every day, and he’d never cheated once. I smiled when I thought about that, and how proud I was of him. I’d know if he cheated for two reasons. First of all, no one could keep their mouths shut in that town, so the first guy he banged would have told everyone and the gossip chain would have taken it from there. Second, he was so transparent, I could see right through him. He could never hide that from me. That’s one of the reasons I wasn’t completely frantic about the meeting this afternoon, because I knew he hadn’t been unfaithful. Still, this would be just the sort of thing he would do if he had: he’d set up a meeting with David so David could protect him from my wrath. It would be a smart move. Stef interrupted me before I could dive completely into a mental hell, where I visualized him banging guys like Ryan all day long behind my back. “You are ready?”

“I am,” I said. We said goodbye to Skip, an unnecessarily drawn out procedure, and climbed into the limousine.

Stef put up the privacy screen, and then looked at us with a raised eyebrow. “Well that was a most illuminating meeting.”

“It certainly was,” Luke said.

“So the guy running Amphion went to school with me, but he isn’t Cary Chase. I can’t think of anyone who would be out for me like this,” I told them.

“I would like to know if they are gunning just for us,” Stef said. “I would like to know how many deals, besides the ones we are in competition for, they have done.”

“I’ll get on that,” I offered. Dealing with Amphion had become primarily my baby.

“For our meeting tomorrow, I would like to evaluate some of these deals using your parameters,” Stef told Luke. “Not the revised parameters you have developed over the past three years or so, I am talking about the original parameters we started with.”

“None of them would have made it, Stef, I can tell you that right now,” Luke said.

“I agree, but I would like to know by how much,” Stef said. Luke nodded happily, thinking that Stef was going to finally agree to become more aggressive in our bidding. I saw the opposite. The exercise was like homework, not to convince Stef, but to convince Luke. He read my mind, that I’d figured out his game, and gave me a warning glare, telling me to keep my mouth shut.

“They have a spy, at least one, working for us,” I announced.

“How do you know this?” Stef demanded.

“Isn’t it obvious? That bid was tailored to beat ours by exactly the bare minimum needed to get Centronics to pick Amphion instead of us. That’s why Ryan was so pissed off at Skip for shooting off those numbers,” I told them.

“He was pissed?” Luke asked. He wasn’t good at non-verbal communication, evidently.

“He was,” Stef said to him while looking at me. “We must find out who this person is and weed him or her out.” It sounded ruthless, but this may end up costing us a lot of money down the road. How dishonest, how unethical for someone to do that: it made my blood boil.

“How will we do that?” Luke asked.

“When we go on our retreat, we will have to evaluate who has access to this information, and the next time a bid comes up, we will have to plant some data on that person and see what happens,” Stef said.

“Kind of like a sting,” I observed.

“That is a good analogy,” Stef said, smiling. “We must trust no one, tell no one anything. If we do, we cannot eliminate them from consideration. That means our partners, and our assistants.”

“Our partners and our assistants?” Luke asked, incredulous. “Aren’t we overreacting?” It bothered me that he wasn’t more worried about this.

“We must plug the leak or our ship will sink,” Stef said. Luke just nodded. “I will see you both at Escorial at 9am tomorrow.”

“Sounds good,” Luke said. He hopped out of the Escalade and headed for his own car, while Stef gave our driver instructions to take us home. Home for Stef was Escorial, JP’s old Spanish-style estate where I had grown up. Escorial was huge and sat on top of a hill on twenty acres of land. It had been built in the 1920’s and was probably the largest private house on the Peninsula, even larger than the Filoli mansion in Woodside. Its location was perfect for us, since it was right in the heart of Silicon Valley where we made most of our tech deals.

“How do you know that Luke isn’t the one leaking information?” I asked.

“It would be a huge risk on his part,” Stef said. “He has everything he wants or needs, the perfect setup. Why would he want to upset that?”

“Maybe he wants to have his own firm, independent of us,” I proffered.

“If he did, he would have done it already. I have offered him the chance on several occasions, but he is comfortable working with me, and we have made him a very rich man. That and the fact that he fucks me from time to time.” He giggled when he said that.

“Stef, men have been fucking people for all of time without having any other loyalty to them.” He had too much faith in human nature.

“Yes, but none of his wives know that he fucks me,” he said. I cracked up at that. Luke had married after college, but he’d gone through a mid-life crisis and dumped her for a younger model. Then another. Then another. He was on his fifth marriage.

“I see your point. I guess if we can’t find our leak, we can revisit that later,” I told him.

“I must call Brandon and have him clear a few final things on my schedule,” he said.

“Stef, you said no assistants, and that means Brandon,” I told him.

“It cannot be Brandon,” he asserted.

“It can,” I said calmly. “He would be the perfect spy, a guy who knows every move you make, has access to your most secret documents, both personal and corporate.”

He looked at me, shocked, and then nodded sadly. “You are right. I will adhere to my own rules.” We got back to Escorial and I found Robbie waiting nervously for me.

“We should get going,” he said.

“I’m going to grab some food, and then we can go,” I told him. We had plenty of time. Why was he so nervous?

“Fine,” he said grumpily, and stormed off. I shrugged my shoulders and wolfed down a sandwich. I let him talk me into leaving fifteen minutes early. We got to David’s office and had to wait, so I took the opportunity to give him some shit about that. That was one thing about David though. When we met with him, he was always on time.

“It is good to see both of you,” David said pleasantly as he led us into his office. “It seemed like this was pretty urgent.” Urgent? I didn’t know this was urgent. What the fuck was going on here?

“I’ve just been really down since my last two movies have both been flops,” he said. “I’m trying to figure a way to get out of the rut I’m in.”

“All businessmen fail from time to time,” David said philosophically. “Why do you think you are different?”

“Because I haven’t failed before this. Because up until now, I’ve had a few minor flops, but not a major one. Because up until now, I’ve almost always been right about a movie. That’s made me rich, and it’s put me in high demand. All that is over now,” he said despondently.

“How are things with the two of you?” David probed.

“This isn’t about us, we’re doing just fine,” Robbie snapped. That was really out of character.

“Then why am I here, and why haven’t we talked about this before?” I asked him.

“Because I think I’ve figured out the solution to my dilemma, and I wanted to run it by both of you,” he said casually.

“Alright,” I said before David could intervene with any of that fucking psycho-speak shrinks use. “Tell us.”

“I think part of the problem is that I’ve lost touch with today’s culture, with today’s youth,” he said.

“You’re kidding me, right?” I asked. What a bunch of bullshit.

“I’m serious,” he said, whining again.

“Robbie, you have four teenage sons. How more in tune to the youth of today do you have to be?” I demanded.

David intervened. “I’m sorry to interrupt you two, but before we analyze the problem, I’d like to know what your proposed solution is.”

Robbie turned and looked me straight in the eyes and spoke words I never thought I’d hear from him. “I think we should see other people.”