The review was endless, but the view out of the Board Room window was magnificent. Having weathered Ken’s initial thrusts and having shown him her firm but accommodating stance, Ken had moderated his attitude. He dropped the sparring and was now focusing entirely on results and outcomes. Catherine was having an easier time of it.
He broke from review to take more calls, one or two of them clearly about the earlier incident raising his hackles.
She entertained herself, soaking in the vista of meadows draped around the private lake on the outskirts of the city where Ken had erected this, the headquarter of his empire. Though the meeting had been set for midday, she’d canceled all appointments into the evening; fully anticipating that the constant and endless interruptions that always swarmed around the man would stretch the review till the black of night, and so it was proving to be.
Catherine maintained a resigned temperament until the sun pulled its final rays over the lip of the horizon and twilight set in. At this point, even her Job-like patience could endure no more. “Satisfied?” she ventured at the conclusion of another run-through of the last video-slot. Even after so many hours of grind she maintained a flat tone that divulged no hint of the irritation seething within.
“A few more runs before we call it a day.” Predictably, Ken had found it necessary to entrench his authority, prolonging the moment.
Ten minutes later, his appetite satiated, Ken closed proceedings “Not bad, Cath. Overall, a pretty good effort.”
Catherine was astonished. For Kenneth Torrington, ‘pretty good effort’ meant giving a piece of himself, and she reckoned he must have heard his own voice speak the words before he could bite them back. Her eyes glinted with triumph and she cocked a brow, “High praise indeed,” she crooned with practiced effort, her expression stoic, her tone betraying only a hint of sarcasm.
As the hours had tumbled by, Catherine noted how Ken’s personality would alter. Now calm and complementary, then ranting on the intercom or into the phone like a maniac. Now rational and calculating, then passionate and fixating on some apparently immaterial detail.
During the multiple interruptions of conference calls and intrusions she’d had ample time to consider the turbulent eddies of Ken’s character as he careened through a morass of confrontations. She’d noted how his frequent sorties to the restroom had invariably brought on a mood swing.
It’s a nasty habit, she’d privately thought. Catherine was sufficiently streetwise to have a reasonable idea where Ken’s vice lay—it was an old story she’d seen many times before—designer narcotics fueled so many in the highest executive echelons.
It was clear he could barely cope otherwise. Ken piled his plate impossibly high with commitments and stress. That fact stirred an uneasy empathy within her for his interminably objectionable character, a primitive and irresistible admiration for the hunter who brings in the kill. Try as she might, the enigma Ken presented choked her ability to reject this master of men.
No matter how much she felt she should hate this man, she could do little but admire his legacy and hate herself for what he somehow stirred in her.
In less than a decade Kenneth Torrington had grown the LifeGames Corporation from concept to knocking on the door of being a Trillion Dollar gargantuan. Even now, surrounded by a team of executives with the keenest minds money could buy, Ken remained distrusting of delegation stubbornly clinging by only the most slender of autocratic threads to dominate every facet of management.
How to sum the man up? Catherine had often pondered the thought. Obsessive…? Sure. Megalomaniac…? Psychopath? Definitely! Like he’s possessed.
While Catherine shuffled her belongings into her bag, Ken launched into another round of ferocious phone discussions with someone buried somewhere in the depths of the monolithic building. She waited patiently for him to finish before making obvious gestures to leave.
His questions answered by the voice beyond the line, Ken truncated the conversation with a grunt as he turned his attentions back to Catherine, “Let’s call it a day,” he instructed, then offered a consolation to a tedious afternoon, “Stick around and I’ll buy you dinner?” He was suddenly charm and roses.
“Thanks… I’ve got plans.”
“They just changed…” he assured her.
She checked her watch.
“…I’ve made a booking already,” he disclosed with an incline to his head that left her no doubt that they’d be dining together.
There was no real way to refuse the man, and, besides, getting any hint of what was going down had been eating her out.
She did the best she could to make a show of resisting, “Hmmm… not sure, I’d make a call but my battery’s dead.”
Ken held the door open, “Use Nancy’s line.”
As they moved out of the Board Room, Catherine wrestled with the prospect of spending more time in Ken’s company than duty required. Better instinct urged her to refuse the offer, yet and equally, there were many questions she desperately wanted answers for and dinner seemed the ideal forum to conduct an excavation of truth.
Since Ken ran LifeGames on a strictly need-to-know basis, details of the company were deeply opaque. The door to understanding its operations and technologies had only been opened a sliver, a barely sufficient overview of intricacies that forced Catherine to interpret much of what she’d produced, and then weather Ken’s abuse and castigation for errors she’d inevitably make. With a barely sufficient grounding to get her job done, through the months she’d become intrigued, eaten by curiosity to understand what truly lay at the heart of this tightly guarded, still private, empire.
As they walked, as if to goad her interests, from several floors deep below their feet came the vibrations of life and the tremble of heavy machinery. Catherine knew she could not resist, silently she had already accepted the date regardless of the sham telephone call she would make.
They entered Ken’s private wing and Catherine stopped at Nancy’s desk where she rode one cheek of her pencil-skirted rump onto the corner, leant over and scooped up Nancy’s receiver. Ken walked on alone into his office, out of sight he stepped back close enough to the doorway to eavesdrop the first part of Catherine’s conversation before he backed up and moved on into his adjoining office: “Hi Jacks, I’m going to be in late, hope the flight went well—Love ya, sweetie.”
A resonating quality from the excerpt of Catherine’s voice piqued Ken’s curiosity but he drove the thought away as he swung in behind the mahogany desk, braced and ready for action.
Back at Nancy’s desk, Catherine replaced the handset but delayed making her way into Ken’s office—he sounded demented, tearing through three abrupt telephone conversations in quick succession. Something was up and it sounded big, it sounded big and bad. She tried to tune-in but her mind kept drifting and sifting through the events of the afternoon: She recalled with inward embarrassment the unfamiliar feelings of lust that had knotted in the base of her gut as she had watched the sun’s shadows creeping across the floor bringing on inevitable dusk. She remembered now knowing, as only a woman can with a man like this, that this dinner invitation would be inevitable tonight. And, strangely, she’d decided that perhaps the interruptions that had drawn the meeting out were fateful.
But, as Ken’s voice ebbed and flowed in the other office, she had time to delve deeper. Catherine found her feelings of sexuality toward this man both repulsive and titillating. But try as she might to divorce from a lust she could not fathom, it remained there, ugly and lurking in the shadows of her mind, attached by a primitive umbilical cord to a past she’d never managed to uncover. Intellectually, she grasped well enough how her father, a man so similar yet only a waif of this monster, had snared her with his noxious charm, opening the floodgates of her emotions to the string of lovers who’d possessed that same ability to manipulate; yet emotionally she remained powerless to resist the fierce who prowl, seeking willing participants in their game of persecutor-and-victim.
Catherine turned her thoughts about Ken over in her mind, trying to uncover the foundations of electricity that sparked and danced between them. With this knowledge she hoped she might free herself of his unwanted spell. Though brusque and rude, she could not deny; Ken could be fired with rare charm when the mood took him. But, admitting what came next to her mind felt like a personal-heresy to the point of revulsion—it horrified her that it was Ken who continually crashed into her fantasy world at night as she slept. The dreams of him, potent and real, had begun the moment they had first met and the specter of all he represented had gripped her.
For so many years no male had spontaneously appeared on the stage of her mind, yet somehow, this one had slipped through and it plagued her.
As though someone had walked over her grave, Catherine felt a cold shudder rack her body. Alone in the deserted office wing she began to feel vulnerable, as if eyes were leering, prying into her soul and gloating on her every lurid thought. It seemed suddenly cold and forbidding in the room alone.
She slipped off the desk and made her way toward the ranting that emanated from Ken’s lair.
Catherine settled into a sofa arranged around the low-slung coffee table off to one side of the expansive office. With her back to the corner, tranquility returned and she resumed mulling the events of the day and her thoughts of Ken.
Just then Ken hung up, “I’ll be another while,” he warned. “Problems here and strife in the Korea division.” He grimaced theatrically. “Grab yourself more coffee or drink and pour me a Chivas on the rocks.”
He instructed Catherine with such an ease of authority that she was halfway to the liquor-cabinet before she realised the impertinence in his order. She poured two whiskeys and turned to see wildfire blazing in Ken’s eyes as he began a harangue into the phone in a language that sounded like bad Italian.
After receiving no acknowledgment for her efforts, Catherine swished across the room and sprawled in the leather lounge suite. Mirroring to Ken his lack of acknowledgement for her presence, she began leafing through the coffee-table books as she sipped the astringent honey-colored spirit.
She worked carefully to cultivate an air of disinterest to Ken’s presence and conversation, yet in truth she remained finely tuned to his every nuance, gleaning whatever she could from the stream of visual cues that punctuated the flow of communication.
Call after call were business matters; surveys, pricing structures, marketing matters and details of technical jargon far beyond her knowledge or interest. All batted out with commanding eloquence. Often switching through an impressive range of foreign tongues.
Then came a call in English. Ken’s demeanor became guarded, his tone hushed, his answers truncated. Chemicals seemed to featured heavily—technical terms and talk of polymer strings, peptides and the like. No, more like Pharmaceuticals, Catherine thought. His dependence?
She listened more carefully—the context seemed to definitely relate to the LifeGames operation. She could swear it smacked of the earlier crisis. Nothing tangible to link it solidly, just a woman’s instinct.
Catherine reclined deeper into the luxurious embrace of the leather and sighed with an audible show of boredom, magnifying her sham disinterest in the hope that Ken might be lulled into speaking more freely. Her ploy proved wholly unsuccessful. Ken remained guarded to her presence, allowing her to snag only a few shards of seemingly unrelated details from the conversation flow. Nothing of it made sense in isolation.
Catherine focused her attention on Ken’s jerky hand-movements as they fidgeted. He seemed uncharacteristically rattled. The down-lighters glinted off his forehead prickled as it was with a fine rash of adrenaline sweat. Before she could gather more information, Ken abruptly ended his conversation.
“Ready?” He shot Catherine a smile that could not have been more dissonant to his mood an instant earlier. His disposition flipped to charm. A boyish mischief twinkled in his eye.
On instinct, Catherine beamed Ken a wide smile, “Guess so”. Then cursed herself for so readily snapping at every scrap he tossed her way.
Chapter 2
The dimly lit trattoria serving hearty peasant food and plum red wine came as a surprise—she’d not have guessed it his style, imagining he’d lean more toward the ostentatious.
As they settled in she realized it was ideal, the perfect atmosphere of anonymity she needed to angle him toward her objectives.
Nobody gave Ken a second glance. Wealthy as he was, he’d successfully avoided the public limelight of celebrity—an ongoing task that Catherine was charged with maintaining.
Catherine had her objectives clearly in mind; she intended this evening to liberate a hearty dollop of LifeGames’ back-story from Ken’s habitually guarded tongue. She certainly hoped for details on the mysterious crisis that he’d stormed off to confront earlier in the day.
Until this evening all that Catherine had learned of the company and its genesis were the need-to-know details of LifeGames’ marketing strategy. Since on all of their previous meetings they’d been accompanied by a group of colleagues from their respective companies, she was determined that this evening alone with him would yield answers.
The idea to hold the review through most of the day, alone with Ken, had been at his instruction. When Catherine had called to confirm that the campaign was ready for the review, Ken had insisted on a private meeting without respective teams. His copious note taking suggested that when the full review was conducted, he’d have insight to run circles around his executives who’d be seeing it for the first time—a shrewd move to give him the edge in the meeting.
Catherine knew all too well how he would grill them, seeming to do so from instinct rather than effort. Keep them off balance and subordinate, she thought—Ken was a gifted general and tactician and there was no doubt in her mind that this evening would require all the finesse required to lure this devil of a man out of his craftily defended den.
As they settled into the meal the conversation relaxed and Catherine probed until she saw her moment; “What’s a hedge trader doing running a technology company?” She spotted what looked like a flash of suspicion and danger move behind Ken’s eyes and she hesitated momentarily. “Uhhm… you were a fund trader I believe?” She stammered to recover the landmine so nearly trodden on.
Ken eyed her carefully, weighing her question with suspicion. He hated probes in any part of his business anatomy, but he especially loathed any discussion of his pre-LifeGames dealings.
“Yes and the eleemosynary thing,” Ken replied, his answer deliberately and cryptically weighed with ‘the’ definite article to buy him time to think and to gauge if she already knew details he’d rather stayed cloaked.
“What?” Catherine frowned with bemusement.
“Yes—my foundation was in hedge business; and, of course, eleemosynary… which you’d know about from your own due diligence… it was covered in the Fortune interview—no doubt you picked it up in the original briefing documents?”
Eleemosynary—the word was a challenge and Catherine had tripped over it.
It was obscure enough that she’d betrayed her confusion for a nano-second.
An instant later her mind flipped up the answer—Ken had been shredded before a senate inquiry into his dealings in one of the rarest forms of financial trust. He’d been accused of routing vast fortunes of questionable funds, laundering them out beyond the grasp of any tax authority in the world.
Eleemosynary Trusts were the hiding holes for the super-wealthy. Safely sequestered behind legal barriers put in place before Magna Carta and modern fiscal entities, the happy beneficiaries of vast wealth could enjoy tax-free status.
A Fortune Magazine article had concluded that this trust was the foundation for LifeGames’ murky beginnings.
She scrambled to cover and detour around Ken’s changing the topic.
“Of course—I’m sorry. Long day,” she tried to deflect weakly, knowing he’d bumped her off balance and cursing herself for allow
ing the conversation, moving so precisely in the direction she intended, to need rescuing.
By his expression she knew it was a tipping point, a watershed moment to get the momentum back without him realizing that she had an agenda.
“It’s just… to a layperson like me all this high-tech wizardry is a fair leap from running a hedge fund. Nobody wakes up and decides one morning; ‘I reckon I’ll become a computer-wizard’?” Catherine suggested.
“Strangely,” Ken looked a little surprised, “You got that right… You’re somehow in my head or just guessing lucky.”
“Really?”
“Yeah… waking part… that’s true.” He stopped talking to top off their wine glasses, and she thought he may slip the noose, but she got lucky; “I do find it strange you put it like that; I literally opened my eyes one morning with the concept of LifeGames fully installed in my head. I say installed, because I didn’t have to think about it further than that.” He took a sip, clearly weighing something in his mind. “All I needed to make the idea work was the computer-wizard you mentioned—the computer-wizard and a billion or six.”
His demeanor and pauses told Catherine he was mulling the tack the conversation was on, “This level of VR… virtual reality… it doesn’t come cheap. Remember… nothing remotely like it existed when we got our start.” He pushed away his half-finished plate of food.
Catherine studied him intently from behind a pointedly engaging smile. All the while and with every fiber in her being she hoped her devoted attention would keep the information flowing.
Though Ken saw her eagerness, he’d begun to feel comfortable and in total control of the subject, so he rode onward on her cue and reciprocated the attentions; “I already had a bundle, but OPM… other people’s money… is how you really get big, quick. Leverage. I had a track record, but convincing investors that their money is safe in high-tech with a technophobe takes a certain degree of…”
LifeGames Corporatoin Page 2
