Limitless

I told myself that Ginny’s comments could be dismissed as the cheap and easy nihilism of an overeducated teenager, but if that was the case, why was I so bothered by them?

I took a tiny plastic sachet from the inside pocket of my jacket, opened it and tapped a tablet out on to the palm of my hand. Making sure that Van Loon was facing away from me, I popped the tablet into my mouth and washed it down with a large gulp of whisky.

Then I picked up the folder, opened it at the first page and started reading.

The files contained background information on a series of small-to-medium sized businesses, from retail chains to software houses to aerospace and biotech companies. The material was dense and wide-ranging and included profiles of all the CEOs, as well as of other key personnel. There was technical analysis of price movements going back over a five-year period, and I found myself reading about peaks, troughs, points of resistance – stuff that a few weeks earlier would have been rarefied, incomprehensible fuzz, Mogadon for the eyes.

But just what did Carl Van Loon want? Did he want me to state the obvious, to point out that the Texas-based data-storage firm, Laraby, for example, whose stock had increased twenty thousand per cent over the last five years, was a good long-term investment? Or that the British retail chain, Watson’s – which had just recorded its worst ever losses, and whose CEO, Sir Colin Bird, had presided over similar losses at a venerable Scottish insurance company, Islay Mutual – was not? Was Van Loon seriously looking to me, a freelance copywriter, for recommendations about what stocks he should buy or sell? Again, I thought, hardly – but if that wasn’t the case, then what did he want?

After about fifteen minutes, Van Loon covered the phone again with his hand and said, ‘Sorry this is taking so long, Eddie, but it’s important.’

I shook my head, indicating that he shouldn’t be concerned, and then held up the folder as evidence that I was happily occupied. He went back to his low-level murmuring and I went back to the files.

The more I read, the simpler, and more simplistic, the whole thing seemed. He was testing me. As far as Van Loon was concerned I was a neophyte with a fire in my belly and a lip on me, and as such just might find this amount of concentrated information a little intimidating. He was hardly to know that in my current condition it wasn’t even a stretch. In any case, and for something to do, I decided to divide the files into three separate categories – the duds, the obvious high-performers and the ones that weren’t instantly categorizable as either.

Another fifteen minutes or so passed before Van Loon finally got off the phone and came over to retrieve his drink. He held it up, as before, and we clinked glasses. I got the impression that he was having a hard time suppressing a broad grin. A part of me wanted to ask him who he’d been on the phone to, but it didn’t seem appropriate. Another part of me wanted to ask him an endless series of questions about his daughter, but the moment didn’t seem right for that either – not, of course, that it ever would.

He glanced down at the folder beside me.

‘So did you get a chance to look through any of that stuff?’

‘Yes, Mr Van Loon, I did. It was interesting.’

He knocked back most of his drink in one go, placed the glass on the coffee table and sat down at the other end of the couch.

‘Any initial impressions?’

I said yes, cleared my throat and gave him my spiel about eliminating the duds and the high-performers. Then I recited a short-list I’d drawn up of four or five companies that had real investment potential. I especially recommended that he buy stocks in Janex, a California biotech company, not based on its past performance, but rather on what I described, in a breathless rush, as ‘its telling and muscular strategy of pursuing intellectual-property litigation to protect its growing portfolio of patents’. I also recommended that he buy stocks in the French engineering giant BEA, based on the equally telling fact that the company seemed to be shedding everything except its fiber-optics division. I supported what I had to say with relevant data and quotes, including verbatim quotes from the transcripts of a lawsuit involving Janex. Van Loon looked at me in a curious way throughout, and it didn’t occur to me until I was coming to the end that a possible reason for this was because I hadn’t once referred back to the folder – that I had spoken entirely from memory.

Almost under his breath, and looking at the folder, he said, ‘Yeah. Janex … BEA. They’re the ones.’

I could see him trying to work something out – calculating, eyebrows furrowed, how much of the folder it might be possible to read in the length of time he’d been on the phone. Then he said, ‘That’s … amazing.’

He stood up and paced around the room for a bit. It was clear now that he was calculating something else.