Now, as a result, this possible link had become the story.
As Howley emerges from the elevator car and into Oberon’s steel and glass reception area, he is joined by Angela, his PA. Efficient and fiercely loyal, Angela is a brunette in her late forties who has worked for Howley since his early days at the Pentagon.
“Morning, Ange.”
“Mr. Howley.”
They proceed toward the central conference room, and as Angela takes his coat and briefcase, she discreetly informs him that Mr. Vaughan has just called in sick.
“What?”
“Just now. It was actually Ms. Prescott I spoke to. She passed on the message.”
Jacqueline Prescott is Vaughan’s PA, and has been since Angela herself was probably in kindergarten.
“What’s the matter with him?”
“She didn’t say exactly. Under the weather, something along those lines.”
In the twelve months he’s been at Oberon, Howley doesn’t think he’s seen Vaughan miss a single one of these Monday morning sit-downs.
“Well, well.”
“Ms. Prescott also said that Mrs. Vaughan would like you to call her after the meeting.”
Howley nods.
Hhmm.
What’s that about?
A moment later, arriving at the door of the conference room, he feels a twinge of apprehension. It’s strange. He’s chaired a thousand meetings in his day. What’s different about this one?
No point being coy. He knows what it is. He’ll be the most senior guy in the room. Which also means that for the next sixty minutes or so he’ll effectively be the Oberon Capital Group. And that’s bound to ignite more succession talk, fuel the chatter he knows has been going on for some time.
Without Vaughan in the room, too, the dynamic will be different, it’ll shift, and that’s always unpredictable.
“Ange, get me a green tea, will you? Decaf.”
He’s already had coffee and doesn’t want to overdo it.
He steps inside. Everything in Oberon’s main conference room-recently renovated according to specs laid down by Vaughan-is white, or on a spectrum, snow, ivory, alabaster, vanilla. The room’s only saving grace, for Howley, and no doubt for the rest of them, is its spectacular view over Central Park.
“Morning, gentlemen.”
Clearly, word has spread that Vaughan won’t be making it in today, and there’s already a certain tension in the air. Seated around the table are the heads of the various industry-specific investment groups, as well as the CEO of Lyndon Consulting, a firm that works exclusively with Oberon to assess performance levels and devise rationalization plans.
Howley gets straight into it, deciding to make no reference to Vaughan’s absence. This sets a tone, and within a matter of minutes-and somewhat to his surprise-he feels a growing confidence. They discuss proposals to buy a Phoenix-based electric utility operator, a chain of British health-food stores, and an equity fund that manages $35.6 billion on behalf of two Swedish pension schemes. Views are expressed, relevant data is presented, figures are pored over. And Howley listens. He defers, solicits further information, and then outlines a provisional strategy for each of the deals. The whole thing goes very smoothly. Afterward, as Howley is chatting with the CEO of Lyndon Consulting about “poor old” Bob Holland, one of the group heads comes up to him and shakes his hand, doesn’t say anything, just gives him a very firm handshake that seems to speak volumes. A few minutes later, two other group heads approach and ask him straight out what his position is on the IPO question.
This is a tricky one.
Filing for a public ticker is not necessarily the panacea that some people think it is. High-profile private equity firms have offered in the past, started well, and then seen their share prices plummet. It’d also involve opening the company’s books to public scrutiny, and as a Pentagon man that’s something Howley would find particularly distasteful. In fact, he’s pretty much ad idem with Vaughan on this, but at the same time he’s aware that that’s not what these guys want to hear.
“Look,” he says to them, just above a whisper, “we’re in a volatile phase here, so let’s take it one step at a time, okay?”
This is sufficiently cryptic and conspiratorial to mean anything and everything-and, crucially, nothing. It seems to satisfy them.
When he gets to his office, Angela already has the call in to Meredith Vaughan. Personally, he’d have waited a bit, but he’s not going to argue. Angela only ever acts in his best interests.
It’s Meredith that’s the problem.
He can’t take her seriously. She’s forty-six years younger than Vaughan-a man who’s already been married five times-and yet she acts, and expects to be treated, like she’s the First Lady. She’s very attractive, he supposes, but that’s hardly relevant.
“Meredith, hi.”
“Thanks for getting back to me, Craig.”
And then there’s that awful come-hither pussycat voice of hers.
“No problem. How’s Jimmy?”
“He’s not too bad, a little tired. I think he’s got a mild chest infection or something.” She pauses. “I wasn’t going to let him go in today.”
“Of course not.” Howley is about to say something here about calling a doctor when he remembers that Vaughan sees a doctor every single day-his own personal physician, no less, a man employed to monitor a serious blood condition Vaughan has, along with anything else that might come up.
Such as a mild chest infection.
“But listen, Craig,” Meredith says. “Jimmy wants you to come for dinner tonight. Is that okay?”
This is not a question. Or an invitation.
“Sure.”
“He just wants a quiet chat.”
Code for don’t bring Jessica.
“Of course.” Howley knows the routine here. Vaughan needs to eat early. “Seven good?”
“Perfect. We’ll see you then.”
We?
After he puts the phone down, Howley looks at his desk, at a big report on it that he has to read for an upcoming symposium he’s addressing on opportunities in the clean energy sector.
Wind turbines, solar power, shale gas.
He reaches for the report and skims through a few pages. He’s distracted, though, and his eyes glaze over. He glances out the window and replays the meeting in his head.
It was subtle, not much you could put your finger on, but he was right-the dynamic here at Oberon HQ has indeed shifted.
Ellen Dorsey wakes up tired. Technically, she got plenty of sleep, but it wasn’t the restorative kind, not by a long shot. It was more like eight hours of enhanced interrogation, but without any actual questions or clear notion of what her interrogators might have wanted her to reveal. It felt like one continuous garbled dream based on what she’d been doing over the previous sixteen hours-online research mainly, plus one or two brief phone calls (no more, solely because it was a Sunday) and a quick trip down to Bra on Columbus Avenue, with assiduous note taking throughout, countless pages of them scrawled on loose sheets of graph paper.
She hadn’t slept well on Saturday night, either, partly due to this heightened sense she’d had of what she might wake up to. And when she did wake up to something, to the Bob Holland killing-the Sunday morning newsfeed already engorged with it-she felt there was no route back.
She felt this was her story.
However irrational that may have seemed. And impractical.
And now, on Monday morning, mainly impractical.
Because as a news item it’s covered, everyone’s on it-it’s not like she’s got a jump on the story. In addition to which the new issue of Parallax will be out on Thursday, so anything she might come up with in the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours would be too late anyway. And next month’s issue, in news-cycle terms, may as well be a century away. There’s always the online edition, but it’s not exactly a premium site for breaking news.