The First Billion

"Listen, people, our back's up against the wall here," he said. "We need to take a close look at our deal books and see if we can find any holes that correspond to the areas the Private Eye-PO is attacking- namely, the Moscow network operations center and Mercury's hardware purchasing. I don't think we will, but I'm not going to my grave like the captain of the Titanic saying, 'She's unsinkable.' No one's leaving this room until we decide just what the heck we're going to do. Comprende?"

His eyes moved from face to face, waiting for someone to pick up the baton. Bruce Jay Tustin, Tony Llewellyn-Davies, Sam Tannenbaum- or "Shirley Temple," as Tustin had christened the blond, ponytailed lawyer- and Meg Kratzer. He was waiting for someone to share his outrage, but outrage, he knew, implied responsibility, and the Mercury deal had been his and his alone from the beginning. Finally, Meg Kratzer chimed in- Meg, for whom silence was an accusation of laziness.

"Look," she said. "We handled all customer and managerial questions in-house. If something weren't kosher about Mercury's Moscow operations, we would have heard about it from one of their customers. Financial, accounting, and operational issues were completed by Silber, Goldi, and Grimm in Geneva. If there were a problem with Mercury's physical plant and inventory, they would have found it- guaranteed! I don't know a bigger tight-ass in the business."

"I do," said Tustin, rolling his eyes and lofting a thumb in Meg's direction.

"I appreciate the compliment, Mr. Tustin," she responded. "It's hard to be more thorough than a Swiss with a microscope and a mandate to inspect. Coming from someone who's such a renowned tight-ass himself, that's very high praise indeed. I will thank you, however, to keep that greasy kid stuff in which you drown your last three remaining hairs off my deal books. I needed a whole bottle of Mr. Clean to get it off last time."

"Very funny," retorted Tustin, above the nervous laughter. "Just so you know, it's pommade. That's French, for 'classy.' "

Meg Kratzer circled the table, passing out a thick red three-ring notebook to everyone present. She was a vital, animated woman, short, stocky, and neatly attired in an olive Valentino two-piece. Her red hair was pulled back into a severe bun. Her blue eyes glimmered with healthy determination. At age sixty-three, she was a mother of four, a grandmother of ten, and self-appointed godmother to Jett Gavallan. She'd put in twenty-five years at a well-known securities house, only to be told when she turned fifty that her shelf life had expired. The termination letter called her "irascible, opinionated, and obstinate," and said she was "unable to meet the rapidly evolving dictates of the financial arena."

Gavallan saw those same qualities as forceful, experienced, and demanding, and found her as up-to-the-minute on all matters financial as the most arrogant graduate of Harvard Business School. She was also articulate, responsible, and possessed of a wicked sense of humor.

As the firm's head of investment banking, Meg had supervised the due diligence performed on Mercury. Its being an initial public offering, this involved the systematic deconstruction and analysis of the client company. Balance sheets were audited; bank balances verified; company officers interviewed (and often investigated); clients telephoned and questioned about their relationship with said company; corporate strategies parsed; and physical assets inventoried down to the last pencil and paper clip. It was a strip search really. With rubber glove and all.

Gavallan pulled the deal book closer, glancing at the Mercury name and logo that adorned the cover. The notebook had to weigh five pounds, and inside it was all the information Meg and her team had collected as part of their due diligence on Mercury.

"Let's start with clients," he said, flipping the notebook open. "Section one."

Section one contained single-sheet summaries of over 150 telephone conversations conducted with Mercury's clients in the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Germany, and Russia. Leafing through the pages, he kept a sharp eye out for those customers based in Moscow. He thumbed past the Czech Ministry of Communication, the Kiev Education Committee, Alpha Bank (Minsk branch office), the Dresden Youth League. All declared themselves satisfied with Mercury's product and services. Finally, he arrived in Moscow: the Moscow Municipal Transportation Service, the Moscow State University department of telecommunications, NTV (one of Moscow's larger television networks). Again, all were satisfied. There were more: Romanov Bank, the Greater Russian Health and Casualty Insurance Company, Nezhdanov Construction, Imperial Aluminum Smelting and Manufacturing.