Millennium - 51. Chapter 51

January 7, 2000

 

There was a lot of tension in the hotel suite, and it was emanating from one man. It wasn’t Jordan Pfinster, who stood in front of me shaking my hand like you were supposed to, with a firm but not crippling grip. He was 60 years old, and seemed to all appearances to be a competent CEO. He certainly looked like one. He had that East Coast CEO aura, with his Brooks Brothers suit and wing tip shoes. The rest of us looked garishly fashionable in comparison to the staid outfits he and his team wore. No, the tension came from the man behind him, a much older man with a dour look. That was Elliot Pfinster, Jordan’s father, a man whose eyes blazed with an intensity that belied his age, which had to be over 80 years old.

“I’m interested to hear the purpose of this meeting,” Jordan said formally.

I smiled, more to disorient him than anything. He was playing hardball, trying to act like he didn’t need our help. “I think we have some mutual interests, and if we work together, we can achieve some great things,” I said.

“You’re talking about Omega,” he said.

“That would be one,” I told him. His executives stared at our team, while Stef and Luke let me take the lead. “The other would be profit.”

“We’ve refused to bring in new shareholders,” he said, but he looked slightly nervous and uncomfortable. It was at that point that I truly understood the dynamic. Jordan wasn’t speaking for himself, he was speaking for Elliot. That irritated me, because it would then seem as if I was Stefan’s mouthpiece, making me a secondary player here, and that wasn’t the case at all. I swallowed that irritation and focused on the goal at hand.

“So far,” I responded.

“We’ve delivered solid performance for our shareholders, and our plans show us increasing our market share and profits. Why would we need your help?” He was clearly laying out Elliot’s position, not his own. I decided that if I was going to be able to work with this guy, I had to knock that out now.

“How about if we quit posturing,” I said in what could only be a rude manner, considering the venue. “You have a company that is underfunded. You don’t have the resources to exploit your strengths. You haven’t cultivated a strong enough political base, and that means you end up sharing projects you shouldn’t have to share. If you can’t see that, then we really have nothing to talk about.” Jordan remained calm while Elliot’s eyes flashed with anger.

“Who are you going to work with then? PTL?” Then I got where they thought their strength was. They figured that Triton was the only game in town.

“Not a chance,” I said. “They don’t have the potential Triton does. I’m not worried about who we’ll work with. We’ll work with Triton. I’m just wondering if I want to work with you.”

“And just how do you plan to do that?”

“We’ve worked up a generous tender offer for Triton’s shareholders. If I have to, I’ll go directly to them. Of course, I think it would be sheer folly for a CEO to refuse our offer, so I’d have to consider new leadership for the company at that point.” In other words, I’d told them that he worked with us, or we’d buy Triton and fire his ass.

“We’d have a poison pill in place so fast it would make your head spin,” he said. I saw Stef out of the corner of my eye, chomping at the bit to jump in. He’d figured out the dynamic here too. Luke looked pissed off; he hadn’t gotten there yet.

“And then you’d be tied up in legal battles until the next millennium. While you’re spending most of your time and money in court, you’ll be getting farther and farther behind in your product development, and you’ll lose more and more market share to Omega and PTL.” I saw him and his team digest this information. “Let me show you another alternative.”

“Go on.”

“Our vision is a strategic partnership. My team has done a lot of research on your company. We think Triton has an excellent management team, they just need more resources to really dominate the market.” I watched that resonate with all of them. I’d just told them that they could keep their jobs, and that we valued them. “We have those resources, both financial and political.”

“Synergy,” he said, using corporate speak. I managed to avoid laughing at him. I could read him now, and knew he was on board. He was as anxious for this alliance as I was, maybe even more so. But the man behind him glared at me, and he was definitely not on board with our plan.

I felt a presence next to me as Stefan stepped forward, then walked beyond me, past Jordan, and stood in front of Elliot. “Watching these two is like watching a boxing match,” he observed. “I’m wondering if you would perhaps like to leave them to it and adjourn to another room where we can chat, just the two of us, mogul to mogul.” He smiled at the end of his sentence. Stef had an amazing ability to seem incredibly professional yet almost flirtatious at the same time. He was pouring on the charm, really working Elliot, and I thought he was wasting his time. It shocked the shit out of me when Elliot smiled back at him.

“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” he said. He gave the others, including me, a dirty look, and then followed Stef off to the other room in his suite, which was, ironically enough, his bedroom.

Jordan looked at me, and I could tell he was having a hard time not laughing. “There goes the biggest obstacle for us to overcome: my father.”

“What does he want?”

He laughed, finally letting his guard down. “He wants to be 45 years old and still in charge, instead of 82 and retired.”

“I think that Stefan will find a way to make him understand that we can make a great team,” I said confidently.

“That would be an impressive achievement,” Jordan said. “Then again, with his past record, I don’t think I would be too surprised.”

I smiled at his compliment to Stefan and made a mental note to pass that on. “One of the things he’s been adamant about is that a partnership like this is based on a win for all parties. Maybe while they’re wrangling over things in the other room, we can try to figure out how we can help you, and how much money we’ll need to bring to the table.”

I could tell that shocked them all. They had been expecting hard-core, adversarial negotiations. “That sounds like a good idea.”

I led him over to a sitting area near the window and nodded to Luke, who jumped in and took control of both teams. He helped align them by area of specialty, and let them talk; let them work out how they could help each other. “I get the impression that you know what is best for Triton, but you have your hands tied.”

Jordan nodded gravely. “It’s hard for him to let go. I could probably force him out completely, but that would ignite a war. As you said, battles like that would ruin what we are trying to build. So instead, I try to move us in the right direction while placating him at the same time.”

“If he were out of the way, and you had the money you needed, could you dominate the market and force Omega into second or third place?”

“There’s no question about it,” he said. “But they’ve got some deep pockets, and they’re building up some pretty strong external investments through their venture capital activities. I’m worried that if those pan out, that will give them almost unlimited resources, and there’s no way we’d be able to effectively compete with them.”

That sent my mind reeling, as I began to understand more and more of the reasoning behind Omega’s approach. “They’re already much bigger than you. Why would they need even more resources to dominate Triton?”

“They’re bigger but not better,” he said. “We’re lean and mean. You’ve seen our financials. We spend a fortune on research and development, and a lot of that goes to hiring the best talent out there. Omega is too big and bureaucratic to do that. We spend at least twice as much as they do, on a per-dollar-of-revenue basis, on R&D.”

“Actually it’s closer to three times,” I said.

“How do you know that? Their financials are almost as confidential as the location of Jimmy Hoffa’s body.”

I laughed. “I’ve been lucky enough to stumble onto some of their financial information.”

“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share that?” He was as desperate to know what their numbers looked like as we’d been.

“I think we have some issues to iron out first,” I said with a grin. He nodded.

“I heard about all this crap Alex has put you through,” he said sympathetically.

“News sure travels fast.”

“It does,” he said. “It’s amazing that she’s been able to build that company to be as big as it is. Hate is a powerful motivator, I guess. It’s kept her snapping at us for years.”

“She hates you too?”

“You never got to know your real father,” he said, referring to my biological dad. “He was a good friend of mine. Seeing you here, looking just like him, brings back some good memories.” That really surprised me; I wasn’t expecting to talk about my biological father at this meeting, and I had no idea that he and Jordan had been friends.

“I’ve only thought of him as a sperm donor,” I said, probably a little too callously.

“That’s too bad. He was a good man. You would have liked him, I think. We went to school together, to Groton, and then attended Annapolis. He was my best friend.” I could see the sadness in his eyes, even after all these years.

“Is that why she hates you? Because you were his friend?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I knew Alex long before I met your father. I think it was once the dream to marry the two of us off, to merge the two empires through marriage. Those kinds of alliances don’t work in modern America, but it doesn’t stop rich industrialists like my father and Alex’s father from thinking they might. It was all pre-ordained, or so they thought. But then I met my wife, Marcia, and we fell in love, got engaged, and all those plans went to hell.”

“So you rejected her for another woman,” I said. I could see where that would really piss her off.

“She doesn’t like to have her plans derailed.” He got pensive. “Your father was the best man at my wedding. He met Alex there. She was a princess, an only child from a wealthy family, very used to getting her way. Your father was a dashing, charming naval officer.”

“And he swept her off her feet?”

“No, he ignored her. She always got her way, and here was this handsome guy who wouldn’t give her the time of day. It was funny to watch how hard she worked to get him to notice her. He made her work for it. He had her so tied up that she slept with him on their first real date. She ended up pregnant with Mike, so they had a quick wedding.”

“Were they happy?”

“No. They never really were. He didn’t want to marry her, but even with his family’s historical background, there was no way he could have succeeded in the Navy with her family as an enemy. On the surface, it was a magical match. He was warm and engaging, she was cold and frosty. He was a party guy, always looking for a good time, and he rarely had a nickel left in his pocket when the day was done. She was loaded. But she was controlling, and he wanted his freedom. She tried to chain him down, using Mike, money, sex, whatever tools she could find. It wasn’t too hard to see what would happen.”

“You mean that he’d cheat on her?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. He’d been quite the ladies man in college. He had the moves down. So when she played games and cut him off, he just shrugged and found his pleasure elsewhere. It infuriated her, more because he was defying her and she couldn’t control him than because she loved him and he hurt her.”

“So he found my mother and preyed on her,” I said bitterly.

He got nervous. “It was actually the other way around.”

“What?”

“Your mother seduced him. Not that it would have taken much work, but he didn’t sleep with other officers’ wives. His fling with your mother really bothered him, enough that he took a few days of leave and came to talk to me about it. He was angry with himself for giving in to her, for letting himself be seduced.” If promiscuity was genetic, this explained all my problems. Both of my biological parents had been sluts.

“Did he know about me?” This was driving deep into my emotional core. I found myself with that same feeling, that feeling like I was falling. I subconsciously looked around for Robbie, but just knowing that he was here in Connecticut with me, that I’d be with him later, was enough to shore me up.

“He knew,” Jordan said. “He also knew there was nothing he could do about you. He couldn’t acknowledge you or Alex would go nuts. He didn’t want to cause any problems with your parents. He figured it would be best to just let everyone think you were Billy Schluter’s kid.”

“I was lucky. My father didn’t let that bother him. He loved me just as much as if I were his own son, probably more.” The bitterness in my voice surprised us both.

“It was your father’s plan to contact you later, when you were a teenager, and try to explain things. He didn’t think any good would come of disturbing you when you were just a boy. Did you know that he even made a trip to Claremont to see you?” I felt my mouth drop open; there was no way I could hide how stunning that piece of information was.

“When?”

“In 1968. He wanted to know how you were doing, what you were like. He went to your school in his uniform so they’d let him in. He said he talked to you, and you even shook his hand. You really impressed him. Do you remember?”

I thought back to those times in Claremont and found my mind rebelling against the effort. It reminded me that digging there, into that time, would be very painful. “No, I don’t,” I told him.

“You were young, so it’s not a surprise,” he said. “I hope this hasn’t upset you.” The concern in his voice revealed the compassionate side of his personality, a side of this hard-core businessman one probably wouldn’t normally see.

“I was going down the road, happy with my life, content to leave him and the Carmichaels as a part of my past that was irrelevant. It was easier to think he didn’t give a shit about me, that he just moved on with his life. Alex has brought her feud to me, forcing me to deal with it, and I didn’t want to, I still don’t want to.” I paused to collect my thoughts. “So she hates you for not marrying her, and she hates you because she thinks you’re responsible for saddling her with a rogue for a husband?”

“That’s pretty much it. And her father was much like her, so he stepped in to protect his daughter. That’s when this battle between our families started. Before that, we’d worked together, done joint ventures. After that, it was a battle to the death.”

“So they were winning?”

That pissed him off. “They play dirty.”

“And that surprises you?” I joked. He chuckled. “It seems that we are natural allies, you and I,” I said, moving him beyond that.

“Let’s see what my father thinks about that.” As soon as he’d said that, we saw the doors to Stefan’s bedroom fly open and they came walking out. Did Stef look flushed? I tried not to laugh, hoping that Jordan wouldn’t notice.

“We’ve reached an understanding,” Elliot said curtly to Jordan. “I have tentatively accepted Mr. Schluter’s offer to purchase my shares at $20/share.” That was slightly more than the tender offer we’d prepared, and would cost Stef somewhere around $300 million. “He has agreed to extend the same offer to our existing shareholders. They may either remain as shareholders as the company embarks on this new direction, or accept the tender offer.”

All of the Triton employees stared at him, stunned. He just nodded curtly to them and left the suite. “How did you do that?” Jordan asked Stefan, amazed.

“Your father is an astute businessman,” Stef said. He gave me a look telling me to keep my mouth shut. “Now let us figure out how to build our company.”

It was really exciting to watch the teams get motivated, now that they had a free hand. Jordan and Luke went from team to team, evaluating their suggestions and projects, and looking at their budget guestimates. By the end of the work day, we’d come up with a plan to pump an additional $500 million into Triton, along with another $500 million in reserve to buy out any of Triton’s investors who wanted to sell. We’d raise the money with bank loans and our own capital, which meant that Stef and I would each end up putting about a quarter of our liquid net worth on the line in this deal. I hoped that the hate that had worked out so well for Alexandra would work for us.

There was a knock on the door of the suite, a knock which pulled everyone out of his or her work mode. I walked over to the door and opened it to find Robbie standing there nervously. “Is it OK if I join you? It’s almost dinner time.”

“That would be great,” I said, chuckling inside about his appetite, which forced him to come interrupt us. I gave him a nice kiss and led him into the room. It was funny to watch the Triton employees blanche a little at seeing two men kissing, but no one seemed revolted by it. I introduced Robbie to everyone, and as soon as I was done with that, the waiters arrived with dinner. We took a break to eat, all of us sitting at the big dining room table in the suite.

“So did you all have a productive day?” Robbie asked.

“We did,” Jordan said, smiling.

“I think I have figured out why Omega is investing so heavily through Amphion,” I announced.

“You will of course share this revelation with us?” Stef asked, being charmingly sarcastic.

“Jordan mentioned that they would need additional capital if they were going to dominate the market. I’ve noticed a pattern in their thinking. They come up with very complex and interrelated plans. They wove all of the personal plots into their work with Amphion, and I think they’ve done the same thing here.”

“I don’t understand,” Jordan said.

“To finally defeat you, they needed to be a lot bigger. To hurt me, they needed to put us out of business. They could accomplish those goals at the same time. They direct all of their available cash and capital into the tech industry, which is a booming gold mine, cutting off our access to new deals and profits. Then they turn around and use those profits to crush you once and for all.”

They all thought about that, well, all except for Robbie, who just looked at me proudly. “That’s really interesting, Brad,” Elijah said. Of course, that kind of strategic concept would appeal to him the most. “There’s a big problem with that kind of plan.”

“What?” one of Triton’s execs asked.

“Complex plans can be destroyed when just a few of their cogs fall apart.”

“If Stef is right about the tech markets, they may find their investments largely devalued,” Cal said.

“If he’s right?” Rashid asked. “He’s always right.”

“Stef the sage,” Randi quipped.

“You think the tech markets are a bubble?” Jordan asked Stef.

“I do. I think they will correct themselves by June.”

“I need to call my broker,” Jordan said, only he wasn’t joking. His executives looked just as concerned.

 

January 8, 2000

 

“I didn’t realize this was going to be an art expedition,” Robbie said, giving me crap about our day in New York. We’d gone to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then had dinner and taken in a play: Rent.

“I have to instill some culture into your life. We don’t want people thinking you’re some country bumpkin.”

“Listen to you. You go to a high-falutin’ DC party and now you think you’re all that.” I laughed at his goofy word choices.

“So you’re not having a good time?”

“I’m having a great time,” he said, and pulled me to him. I felt his arms wrapping around me, then his lips were on mine, right here in the middle of Times Square. No one gave a shit. What a great city.

“Me too.” I headed to the limo and we hopped in for the brief ride back to the Waldorf. “I’m glad you came with me.”

“I’m glad things worked out so well. Otherwise you’d be in a crappy mood.”

I pretended to scowl at him. “That’s not true. I would have still had a good time. But I’m glad it did work out well, better than I imagined.”

We got back to the hotel and headed straight for the elevators. We’d just gotten in and the elevator door had started to close when someone shoved a hand in the gap, causing the doors to open again. “Sorry to hold you up,” a man’s voice said as he walked in. He was dressed in a uniform, a naval uniform, and had an attractive looking woman with him. She was holding a single red rose in her hand.

“No problem,” Robbie said in his normal, friendly way. We pushed our floor button, the top floor, and they pushed theirs, a few floors below. The elevator soared up, with none of us saying anything. We got to their floor and the doors opened. Just as they got ready to leave, the lady accidentally dropped her rose.

“Here, I’ll get it for you,” I said. I reached down to get it, and as I started to stand upright, I turned and looked at the naval officer. I saw his sleeves, the rows of stripes, and my mind started to whirl. I handed her the rose in a daze.

“Thank you,” she said, and they left.

Robbie looked at me nervously. “Are you alright?” I barely heard him. My mind had seemingly gone through a time warp, and suddenly I was five years old. I was leaving school with some friends when a man came up to see us, wearing a uniform just like that guy’s uniform.

***

“Are you a policeman?” a kid asked him.

“No, I’m in the Navy,” he responded cordially.

“What kind of ship are you on?” one of the kids had asked him.

“I serve on submarines. We call them boats,” the officer had said. Then he’d looked at me. “You must be Brad.” I remembered being gripped with shyness. I hated being noticed then, hated it, because usually the people noticing me were my mother, or Nick and Bitty, and that meant they were going to torment me. I’d looked down and seen his shiny shoes, then felt his hand on my head. “You don’t like me?”

That had sparked a response, because I had always been taught to be polite. “I’m sorry,” I’d mumbled, and looked up at him. The memory of his face, of his expression, appeared in my mind as if a fog had lifted away.

“It’s alright. I just wanted to meet you. I’ve heard so many good things about you,” he said. And now I was no longer a 37-year-old man remembering things, now I was a 5-year-old boy, living them.

“You have?” I’d asked. He could only have heard them from Tonto. My mother never had anything good to say about me.

“You’re a very special boy. Always remember that,” he’d said. Before I could say anything else, another voice, a familiar but unpleasant voice, interrupted our conversation.

“What are you doing here?” my mother shrieked.

“I just wanted to meet him,” the officer said.

“You stay away from my son,” she’d yelled.

“He’s my son too,” he snapped back. She glared at him, then grabbed me forcefully and pulled me after her. All I could do was look back at him, trying to see him. I remembered now the look of sadness in his eyes as she dragged me off. It was the only time I’d ever met my biological father.

***

“Are you OK? What’s wrong?” Robbie asked me. He was panicking. I opened my eyes and we were in our room. I was lying on our bed, and he was sitting next to me, holding my hand.

“I had a flashback,” I told him. “Jordan was a good friend of my bio-dad.” He smiled briefly at the name I’d given Kevin, my biological father. “He told me that my bio-dad had come to see me when I was a kid. The stripes on that guy’s sleeves must have triggered the memory.”

“Your bio-dad came to see you? I thought you never met him?”

“That’s what I thought too, but Jordan told me that he did, and I guess that helped jar the memory loose. I’m fine now,” I told him.

“That was really scary,” he said. “You must have blocked out a lot of things.”

“What are you, a shrink?” I asked, in a really nasty way. I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It just freaked me out.”

“It’s OK,” he said. I got up and took off my clothes, then climbed into bed with him. He made love to me, and then he fell asleep, but I couldn’t. I stayed up most of the night: I couldn’t get the image of my bio-dad out of my mind.