This time felt a little different though. MI6 and the CIA had become quite skittish since 9/11. They had lost all sense of the irony or playfulness that they had during the Cold War. When it came to the war on terrorism, they weren’t fooling around.
Jagmetti narrowed it down to the Client who was so keen to know when a communications satellite would be launched over Europe. He picked up his phone to make a call, but paused to remind himself that his phone was probably tapped. He put the receiver down, grabbed his coat, and headed downstairs to a payphone on the square, the only place he felt he could speak freely. His lawyers would know what to do. He trusted them to know what to do. More important, he paid them to know what to do.
It was a bit chilly outside. Hayden was glad to have the warmth of the car. He saw Jagmetti leave his building and make his way to a pay phone. Jagmetti spoke for about three minutes, and then left on foot. Hayden got out of the car.
The building had a key card system to enter. No worries, Benbow had set him up. Hayden pulled the card from his wallet and passed it over the card reader. The door clicked. In.
Hayden took the stairs, three floors to Jagmetti’s office. Again, a card reader; again he entered.
The guy’s office was clean. Hayden made his way to the safe. Knowing that Jagmetti would recognize any changes to the contents of the safe, even the most minute, Hayden took painstaking care probing the files for what he was looking for. Once he found it, he took the paper out and placed it on Jagmetti’s desk. He pulled out a miniature digital camera and began to take photos.
Twenty minutes had passed. He was pushing it, but the material was so good. He delicately replaced the paper back in the safe exactly where he had found it. Hayden could hear the elevator in the hallway. Someone was coming up.
Dammit,
Hayden whispered to himself. He closed the safe door and made his way to the front of the office. No good. The elevator had stopped on his floor.
Thankfully, it had been someone from another office who had gotten out of the elevator. Hayden was able to get out of Jagmetti’s office undetected and make his way down the stairs to the street.
Back in his hotel room, Hayden lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He was still a bit jet lagged. He stood up, went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He went into the bedroom and sat down at his computer. He thought he would catch a few news headlines. He scanned his usual sites. Then he saw it, a lead story in
Fortune
magazine’s online edition written by Thomas Feegan:
Cannondale’s Folly: Why The World’s Sixth Richest Man Invested in an Unknown Dutch Company, and Why You Shouldn’t.
The article followed the usual pattern: build the person up to appear infallible, then let him have it. And because Aaron’s childhood and adulthood were in such stark contrast to each other, the story made for great reading.
Feegan went into intimate detail about how Aaron’s father had been a frustrated soul in a new country that he thought he understood, but really didn’t. Feegan also talked about Aaron’s mother, about how she was loving, but always conscious that she was living in a household with two men whose intellects were much more developed than her own. Feegan cited Aaron’s motivations: wealth, influence and power – exactly the three ingredients that Feegan and the magazine needed to transform Aaron from Horatio Alger to Gordon Gekko in less than 3,000 words.
As a speechwriter, Hayden understood the negative effect that raw ambition had on an audience, and he therefore instructed his clients to avoid it like kryptonite. As a journalist, Feegan understood the pejorative impact that ambition had on readers, and therefore exposed it at every possible level.
Hayden had a hard time reading the entire article. He whispered to himself as he looked at the screen.
I told Aaron to keep his distance from Feegan.
Sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph were filled with the kind of venom normally reserved for mass murderers or dictators. And the words were backed up by plenty of numbers quantifying the ineptness of Cheyenne, the self-enriching relationship between Teestone Financial and Timmermans and Michelle, and the misfortune that would befall Cheyenne’s innocent employees, many of whom were likely to lose their jobs.
Jesus, Michelle. Why did you have to go and do that
? he thought to himself. She had been right to expect the worst, and it didn’t get much worse than this. They would go after her. She had the keys to the treasure chest.
Hayden felt sick. She had been so tender with him, so selfless. He wished that she had come to him sooner, before she had compromised herself, but that was history now.
Hayden read on. Cheyenne was profitless and buried under a mountain of debt. Worse, its principals couldn’t articulate when or if it would ever be in the black. They challenged any analyst or market watcher who challenged them. According to Feegan’s article, in one interview Timmermans apparently told a respected stock analyst in New York to “quit being so naive and join the future.” Under normal circumstances, that particular foot in the mouth would have been followed by a slap from the analyst in the form of a reduced stock rating or a negative report. But that didn’t happen. Feegan pointed to this as a sign that history was indeed repeating itself – that only a few years after the fall, the impatient principals at Cheyenne, determined to single-handedly get the tech market back on its feet, had successfully hoodwinked investors and persuaded analysts to go along for the ride – analysts who should have known better. And they went along because of two men. One of them was Cannondale. People listened to him because he epitomized success and, of course, because success was supposed to breed success.
The other person was less a man than a cult. The cult of Braun had emerged from the dot.com flames relatively intact. After the overcast market of the last few years, people desperately wanted to believe that
Braun had changed, that the Street had changed, but as Feegan aptly said in his piece, “Greed, apparently, has no sell-by date.”
Hayden shook his head.
Feegan has them.
Feegan had placed Timmermans’ hand deep in the corporate cookie jar, exposing his penchant for expensive clothes, luxury cars, and fast deals with Russian satellite thugs who came off as menacing silhouettes lurking around an anything goes, post-Communist land grab.
The article, and those that would follow, had a reluctant Michelle cooking the books to make Cheyenne look healthier than it was. Also damning was Feegan’s account of how Teestone enriched certain Cheyenne principals, save Peter. Not only was it problematic, but it was a bold, catch-me-if-you-can return to the dot.com days.
And off in the distance, pulling the strings from a strange French chateau high above Salt Lake City, was Aaron Cannondale. Feegan painted Aaron as an eccentric living so high above the income levels of mere mortals that the lack of oxygen to his brain had made him odd and inattentive.
But something was conspicuously absent from the article, something that would have made Feegan and his editors orgasmic if they had been able to connect the dots, and that was Aaron’s involvement in the fiduciary misconduct at Cheyenne. Nowhere in the article did Feegan actually accuse Aaron of any real wrongdoing other than being aloof.
Where is it?
Hayden said out loud, searching the article for the damning evidence. But it wasn’t there. Hayden re-read the section where Feegan called Aaron “odd” and “inattentive”:
Cannondale is most comfortable surrounding himself with an eclectic mix of people at what he immodestly calls his “cabin” in Utah. This cabin has 34 rooms, 10 bathrooms, an entire glass façade and a Biblical Garden in the middle. It is the same “cabin” where Cannondale enjoys entertaining guests with gimmicks like full rodeos, or renting out the cast of Circque du Soleil for private shows. It is the same “cabin” where Cannondale retreated to play video games and count his billions while Cheyenne burned through money.
Feegan couldn’t directly connect Aaron to the improprieties. He couldn’t connect him to Braun’s overly optimistic analyst reports. Indeed, Feegan could not pin anything illegal on Aaron, so he did the next best thing — he painted him as a sort of defrocked technology cleric whose following was fading.
Hayden stopped reading. He thought of the implications that the article would have on Cheyenne, on Aaron, on Michelle. There would be more articles, plenty more. And those articles would pry deeper and deeper until Cannondale became the poster child for a new era of corporate hedonism. Yep, Feegan had himself a whopper of a story, and there was no amount of damage control that Aaron or Timmermans could deploy to stop it.
Hayden picked up the phone. He needed to make the call now, while the anger was still ripe.
Aaron’s assistant, Libby, answered on the second ring. “Libby, it’s Hayden.”
“Well, well, well. If it’s not the mystery boy. How are you, Hayden?” She liked him.
“Mystery boy?”
What the hell did that mean, Hayden thought.
“Hayden, he’s been stomping around and having us call all over creation for you. He’s taking it out on everyone else. Where are you, Hayden? I can’t tell from the caller ID on the phone.”
“Just took some time off, that’s all.”
“Well, I’d better put you through to him before he finds out I’m sitting here chatting with you.”
“Thanks, Libby. Libby?”
“Yes, Hayden.”
“Take care of yourself.”
“I certainly will,” Libby said, slightly disarmed by the tone of Hayden’s voice. “Just a moment.”
Hayden could just imagine the look on Aaron’s face as Libby was telling him that “Hayden” was on the phone.
“Well, Hayden, you’d better have a good excuse. I’ve had my folks looking all over the place for you. Where the hell are you? Have you seen this
Fortune
magazine nonsense?”
“I’m helping a friend with a problem.”
“Does your friend not have a phone?”
“Service is sporadic.”
“Well, wherever the hell you are, I need you to get back here. This thing is a mess, and I’ve already got calls from the
Journal
and the
Times
which I haven’t returned.”
“I’m not coming back, Aaron.”
“You’re … hold on a second, Hayden … Libby, tell those guys that I’ll call them back. And … oh, Libby, cancel my lunch, will you? Sorry Hayden. What were you saying?”
“I said I’m not coming back, Aaron.”
“Not coming back? What does that mean, not coming back?”
“It means you’re going to have to find yourself another speechwriter. It means I can’t do your book for you. It means I’m moving on.”
Silence.
“What the hell are you talking about, Hayden? Quit playing games. I need you back here.”
“I’m sorry, Aaron.”
“Sorry? You’re sorry? I take you in. I show you the inside. I introduce you to a world you were likely to have never seen, and all you can say is ‘I’m sorry?’ Well that’s not good enough, Hayden. That’s not good enough at all.”
“I don’t like what I see, Aaron.”
“You don’t like what you see with what?”
“With Cheyenne, with Kuipers, the whole thing. It feels oily.”
“Oily? Well you can thank your lucky fucking stars, Hayden, that you don’t need to deal with such things. I guess you can take great satisfaction in knowing that you don’t need to deal with the messy stuff, Hayden - the hard stuff. You can live your little Bohemian life and float in and out of people’s lives with no strings attached and cast moral aspersions as far as the eye can see. That must be a nice gig, Hayden.”
“I had hoped it wouldn’t come to this, Aaron.”
“Come to what, Hayden? Come to the six-inch knife that you’ve just stuck in my kidney? Is that what you’re talking about, my friend? Whether you like it or not, Hayden, you’re in. You’re in up to your eyeballs, so don’t think for a minute that you’re just going to walk away.”
“I’m out, Aaron.”
“You’re in, Hayden! Do you hear me? You’re in. Don’t you dare dump me. No one dumps me, you got that?”
“It was fun for a while, Aaron, but I don’t believe in it any longer.”
“I’m giving you five seconds to reconsider, Hayden. Five seconds. Five, four …”
Strangely, as Hayden listened to Aaron count down, he didn’t feel the slightest pang of hesitation. He thought of how it once was – the parties at Aaron’s home, those quiet moments when Aaron bared his soul. Then, his mind’s eye turned to all the whispering in corners with the Teestone guys. And that scared look in Aaron’s eye in the hotel lobby after the speech in Detroit.
“Three … two”
Hayden was going to miss Aaron. He really was. He loved the kind of words that Aaron had let him put in his mouth. Once upon a time, Hayden had thought that everybody was really just the same. He no longer believed that.
“One …Goodbye, Hayden.”
Hayden heard the click on the other end. He paused. “Goodbye, Aaron.”
Michelle had just quit. Her departure confirmed that something was very wrong at Cheyenne, even without the Feegan article.
Peter was now worth in excess of $27 million – more than enough to do just about anything that he wanted. And that evening in Amsterdam with a cup of tea by his side and Thelonious Monk’s
Evidence
playing in the background, he decided exactly what he would do. He was going to quit, too.
“Quit?” Timmermans said, shocked. He was pacing around his office as Peter calmly sat in a chair. “Over one silly article?”
“It’s not just the article, Philippe. I’ve had enough.”
“Enough of what?”
“Enough of this. I’m getting bored, Philippe. Time to move on to something else.”
“But we’re not done yet, Peter. And we’ve got this damn problem with the satellite moving around up there. Who’s going to take care of that?”
“I’m done.”