Graveland: A Novel (30 page)

So, about a month ago, when he had a chance conversation with Jerome Hale, former head of research at Eiben-Chemcorp, Vaughan decided he was going to take some positive action. Hale was talking about what he believed Eiben currently had in the pipeline, a suite of in-development products that were offshoots of MDT-48, a designer smart drug that had nearly destroyed the company about a decade earlier when a batch was siphoned out of the lab and found its way onto the streets. MDT was way too powerful and dangerous a drug ever to find a place in the mainstream commercial market, but researchers at Eiben had been trying ever since to develop second-generation and much-toned-down versions—one of which, apparently, according to Hale, was targeted at geriatrics and was reputed to combat a range of conditions, including extreme fatigue and dementia. He added that this was still years away from even going to first-phase clinical trials,
but wasn’t it interesting?

By which he meant,
given their own involvement in these events all those years ago
—his as head of research and Vaughan’s as proprietor of the parent company.

Vaughan nodded in agreement, yes, for sure—but he actually found it much more interesting than that. Without telling Jerry Hale what he was doing, he proceeded to track down an old contact who still worked at Eiben, and then, using a combination of arm-twisting, outright intimidation, and eye-watering amounts of money, he managed to coax a sample out of the Eiben lab.

First he was warned about possible side effects. Then he was told that the formula required a buildup in the system and not to expect any results for at least a week. But when nothing had happened after two, and with his general condition deteriorating rapidly, Vaughan sort of resigned himself to the inevitable and triggered the succession process with Howley.

And then, go figure, the medication kicked in.

Originally given enough for a month, he now has less than a week’s supply left.

Which is an issue he’ll have to address very soon.

Vaughan wanders out of the library. He went in there to take a quick nap. Normally at this time of the day, after lunch, he’ll go to bed for at least an hour and sleep soundly. He’ll then spend another hour fighting grogginess and trying to reconstitute himself so he can function for the remainder of the day. Recently, though, he’s finding that ten minutes in an armchair is all he needs, and that no recovery time is required either.

The only problem
now
—given that he’s officially, ironic air quotes, retired—is that he doesn’t have anything to do.

As he moves along the floor of the hallway, with its mother-of-pearl-encrusted black marble tiles, he taps out a quick, slightly giddy soft-shoe shuffle.

He’ll have to see about
that
, though, won’t he?

*   *   *

On his way to the Bloomberg studios on Friday afternoon, Craig Howley flicks through his notes. He likes to be prepared, to have a sprinkling of figures and statistics at the ready. It won’t be a hard interview, in the sense that he won’t be asked any particularly hard questions, but he does want to get certain points across, and that can sometimes be hard to do without coming off like a used-car salesman.

He also flicks through his datebook. Normally at this time of year he and Jessica go to the country on weekends, but with the Kurtzmann Foundation benefit happening on Monday night, Jess is up to her eyes in last-minute arrangements, so she’s staying put. He will, too.

Maybe catch up on some reading.

He glances out the window. They’re on Lexington, the Tower just a couple of blocks away.

As he’s gathering up his notes and papers, his phone rings.

It’s Paul Blanford.

Howley’s done a little extra homework since their lunch earlier in the week—on Eiben-Chemcorp, on its board, on the sector in general—and he’s fairly sure now that he’s got Blanford by the balls. As CEO, Blanford has been perfectly adequate, but with the company’s $47 billion in annual sales built on blockbuster drugs such as Narolet and Triburbazine—drugs whose patents are due to expire in the near future—the board is, well, pretty jumpy. What’s more, Howley knows of at least three members who are said to be unhappy with the CEO’s performance. Any public hint of another R&D leak, therefore, and it’d be curtains for Blanford.

“Paul?”

“Craig. How are you?”

“I’m good. Any luck with that thing?”

“Not yet, but I’m all over it, believe me. I just need another couple of days.”

The key thing here is, while Howley can ostensibly hold out knowledge of this leak as a threat, what he really wants is the same thing Blanford wants, for the leak to be plugged. But as long as Blanford has no idea what Howley’s interest is, and as long as he’s reluctant to ask about it, which he clearly is, Howley feels he has the advantage. Full disclosure—i.e., any mention of Vaughan’s involvement—would transfer some of that advantage back to Blanford, and while this is probably inevitable, it’s something Howley wants to put off until the last possible moment.

First, however, they need to find the leak.

“Why is it taking so long?” he asks.

“Well, R&D is our biggest division, Craig, and I can’t just charge around the place making accusations. You know that.” Blanford has a rep for being nonconfrontational, so this can’t be easy for him. “I mean, I
have
put out some feelers, but it’s a tricky one.”

This isn’t the way Howley would handle it, but he doesn’t have the time to argue his point now. “You know where to reach me, Paul.”

The car pulls into the public plaza of Bloomberg Tower, Howley is met by the producer and a couple of assistants, and they all head inside.

He is shepherded through makeup and then onto the set for a quick sound check. After a few minutes, the show’s host, Rob Melrose, appears, and they chat briefly. The atmosphere is relaxed, the studio bright and spacious, unlike pretty much every other studio Howley’s ever been in.

Someone adjusts his mike, and before he knows it the interview has started.

Rob Melrose’s style is direct and quite dynamic, but he’s also respectful—and, in Howley’s case, maybe even a little deferential.

The first few minutes they spend on private equity and its image problems.

“There’s no denying it, it’s a tough time for the industry,” Howley says in his now almost trademarked whisper. “Because the fact is, Rob, not all deals work out, and it’s pretty easy to highlight the ones that don’t, and make a song and dance about them, but really, the numbers should speak for themselves. I’m talking about the number of jobs created, proportion-wise compared to in the general economy, three-point-nine percent compared to one-point-two percent last year alone, I’m talking about returns for investors and pension funds, and about availability of growth capital for new companies, I mean it just goes on and on.”

“But the negativity
is there,
” Melrose says, swiveling on his stool and flicking the back of his hand at his silver laptop, as if to indicate all the hard data he has on his screen, “so what effect is that going to have on the Oberon Capital Group, what effect is it going to have on Craig Howley?”

“Well, you’re right, Rob, there is negativity, and unfortunately, for a time, that’s going to make it harder for companies like Oberon to raise funds, and to buy companies, and ultimately to create new jobs…”

And … yadda, yadda, yadda.

Okay, Howley can admit it to himself, he was slightly nervous coming on to do this interview, but sitting here now, under the lights, large bot-like cameras hovering on the periphery of his vision, he suddenly feels totally relaxed.

He
knows
this stuff.

There isn’t a single question Rob Melrose could put to him that he wouldn’t be able to answer—comprehensively, and with more wit and depth than they could ever have time for on a show like this. All he needs now is a nice little segue into his IPO spiel and his work here will be done.

“Let me throw something else at you,” Melrose then says. “This whole question of going public, it’s pretty much a hot button issue at the moment, to file or not to file, pitching to investors, how much stock to offer, how low or high to set the price, the whole crazy roller-coaster ride. Where does Craig Howley stand?”

“Well, Rob,” Howley says, looking directly at him now, and smiling, “I’m glad you asked me that…”

*   *   *

“… because it’s been on my mind a lot recently, but you know, having a stock ticker isn’t necessarily a panacea. Sure, it’s a good way to raise cash, but to be frank, that wouldn’t be one of our core concerns right now. And I like the idea of being able to stay agile, especially in the current climate—”

“Keeping it lean and mean.”

“Maybe not the term I’d use, Rob, but yes, and there’s a certain tyranny about the quarterly report, you know, about having to meet analysts’ expectations and forecasts, where you end up romancing the markets instead of looking after your LPs…”

“
Romancing
the markets? Fuck
you,
you prick.”

Frank takes another swig from the now half-empty bottle of Stoli and replaces it on the bedside unit.

The arrogance of this baldy fuck on the screen, with his barely audible, breathy delivery is something else.

Romancing
the markets?

If it wasn’t so tragic, it’d be funny.

But a word like that certainly sticks out, because most of the time what you hear on these business cable shows—the language they use, the jargon—is impenetrable. It’s also mind-numbingly boring, and this is probably deliberate.

Because they …

They obfuscate.

That’s the word.

He burps, and pats his bare chest.

They operate in secrecy and darkness and hide behind arcane terminology.

“… more or less what you get when credit spreads blow out, when correlations go to one…”

Listen
to him.

Laid out in front of Frank on the bed are a couple of books open at specific pages, some magazine pieces, and printouts from the various websites he’s been visiting. A part of him expects all of this material to pull into focus suddenly, to coalesce into a neat revelation, a mathematical formula almost. But another part of him knows it’s not going to happen, that this stuff is too diffuse, the connections too tenuous, the hunger for order and meaning—
his
hunger—too acute and voracious to possibly accommodate any degree of reasoned argument or criticism, any anomalies or pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit.

The truth is, over the last two days, much of it spent in Café Zero, Frank has been sliding into a quicksand of unverified and largely unverifiable … what? He hesitates to describe it as information.

White noise?

All he was looking for was an answer, an explanation, a grand unified field theory, something or someone to focus on and
blame
. What he got instead was an ever-widening gyre of speculation and paranoia—from Alan Greenspan to Ayn Rand, from the securitization of subprime mortgages to the payment of German war reparations, from LIBOR to Jekyll Island … from JFK’s infamous executive order skewering the Fed to Abraham Lincoln being assassinated by a cabal of international bankers because he insisted on printing his own debt-free legal tender to pay for the war.

From the New World Order to the Book of Revelation.

He didn’t know how or where to stop and ended up with a splitting headache, stomach cramps, and a sore back. Sometime late in the afternoon he gave up and came back to the hotel. He stripped and crawled into the shower.

When he got out after about twenty minutes he checked his phone, which he’d left in the room all day. He had half a dozen messages from Deb, a couple from Lenny Byron, and one from Ellen Dorsey. He didn’t reply to any of them.

He didn’t feel up to it.

Wearing only boxer shorts, he flopped back onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling for a while.

Then he got off the bed, grabbed the unopened bottle of Stoli from the dresser,
opened
it, and took a slug.

Deciding that surrender wasn’t an option, he sorted once again through the books and magazines he’d bought, and the articles he’d had printed at Café Zero. He spread some of them out on the bed, trying to conjure up a pattern, a meaning.

He continued taking belts of vodka directly from the bottle.

At one point, in need of further sensory stimulation, he reached over for the remote and flicked the TV on. He whipped through a few channels, dismissing each one in turn. But then he found himself pausing and staring at
this
guy, Craig Howley. It wasn’t so much the Boring Middle-Aged White Guy in a Suit thing that caught his attention, or the awful financial jargon. It was more the words on the screen:
DEFENDING PRIVATE EQUITY
 … which, after a couple of seconds, did actually coalesce into something of a revelation, and quite a neat one, too. Because for all of this time, since last weekend, Frank has been interested in only one thing: finding a wormhole into Lizzie’s mind, and what he suddenly suspected he had here was a wormhole
out
of it. It’s what Ellen Dorsey was talking about the other night in that diner. The three pillars of the system. One guy from an investment bank, one from a hedge fund, and one from a private equity firm.

They got two and narrowly missed the third.

But knowing how much thought and effort were involved here, knowing how much planning and commitment there was,
knowing Lizzie
 … Frank can’t help thinking that this narrow miss must have preyed on her mind, and that as the siege progressed it must have assumed an ever greater significance for her. Because however she felt about their list of demands—which had surely been improvised, and could only ever have been aspirational anyway—their plan, their statement, their grand gesture … was incomplete.

Did that rankle with Lizzie?

He bets it did.

It’s funny, but when he thinks of her now, he sees a different person. It’s as if she has changed, morphed into someone else. It’s as if she has grown in stature.