Limitless

I stopped the cab at Forty-seventh Street and walked the remaining block to the Van Loon Building. By the time I got into the lobby, I had just about managed to suppress my limp. I was greeted by Van Loon’s personal assistant and taken up to a large suite of offices on the sixty-second floor. I noticed that in the general design of the place – in the corridors and in the enormous reception area – there was an impeccable though slightly bewildering blend of the traditional and the modern, the stuffy and the streamlined – a sumptuous, seamless fusion of mahogany, ebony, marble, steel, chrome and glass. This made the company seem, at once, like an august, venerable institution and a pared-down, front-line operation – staffed mostly, I have to say, by guys about fifteen years my junior. Nevertheless, I had a keen sense that nothing here was beyond me, that it was all for the taking, that the corporate structure of a place like this was delicate and gossamer-thin and would yield to the slightest pressure.

But as I sat down in the reception area, beneath a huge Van Loon & Associates company logo, my mood shifted again, lurched a little closer to the edge, and I was assailed by queasiness and doubt.

How had I ended up here?

How had I come to be working for a private investment bank?

Why was I wearing a suit?

Who was I?

I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions even now. In fact, a few moments ago – in the bathroom of the Northview Motor Lodge – staring into the mugshot-sized mirror above the stained wash-basin, with the hum and occasional rattle of the ice-machine outside penetrating the walls, and my skull, I struggled to see even a trace of the individual that had begun to form and crystallize out of that mass of chemically-induced impulses and counter-impulses, out of that irresistible surge of busyness. I searched, too, in the lines of my face for any indications of the individual I might eventually have become – a big-time player, a destroyer, a spiritual descendant of Jay Gould – but all there was in my reflection, all I recognized, with no real indications of anything the future might have held, was me … the familiar face of a thousand shaves.

I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was extremely friendly and smiled over at me every now and again. When Van Loon finally arrived, he strolled across reception with a broad smile on his face. He slapped me on the back and ushered me into his office, which was about half the size of Rhode Island.

‘Sorry for the delay, Eddie, but I’ve been overseas.’

Flicking through some documents on his desk, he then explained that he’d flown in direct from Tokyo on his new Gulfstream V.

‘You’ve been to Tokyo and back since Tuesday evening?’ I asked.

He nodded and said that having waited sixteen months to get the new jet, he’d wanted to make sure that it was worth its not inconsiderable price tag of $37m and change. His delay in arriving this morning, he added after a pause, had had nothing to do with the jet, but was rather the fault of gridlocked Manhattan traffic. It seemed to matter to him that I understood this.

I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.

‘So, Eddie,’ he said, sitting down behind the desk, and indicating that I should sit down too, ‘did you have a chance to look at those files?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And?’

‘They were interesting.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t think you should really have much difficulty justifying the price that MCL is asking,’ I began, shifting in the seat, aware suddenly of how tired I was.

‘Why not?’

‘Because there are some very significant options embedded in this deal, strategic stuff that isn’t evident in the existing numbers.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, the biggest option value lies in the build-out of a broadband infrastructure, which is something Abraxas really needs …’

‘Why?’

‘To defend itself against aggressive competition – some other portal that might be in a position to develop faster downloads, streaming video, that kind of thing.’

As I spoke – and through the almost hallucinatory quality of my exhaustion – I was becoming conscious of how large a gap there was between information and knowledge, between the huge amount of data I’d absorbed in the last forty-eight hours and the arrangement of that data into a coherent argument.

‘The thing is,’ I went on, ‘building-out broadband is a big cash drain and highly risky, but since Abraxas has a leading portal brand already, all it really needs is a credible threat to develop its own broadband.’

Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.

‘So, by buying MCL, Abraxas gets that credibility, without actually having to complete the build-out, at least not straightaway.’

‘How’s that?’