Fascination: (Billionaire Venture Capitalist #9): A Friends to Lovers Romance

by Ainsley St Claire

  “That’s right. It was mysteriously showing up in the mail, and Terry Klein and Bob Perkins were already half checked out of the business, having cashed in over twenty years, and saw it as an opportunity to steal some business away,” Quinn shares.

  “Which they did, and it showed us some of our weakness in the market—we may come in early and want exclusive, but they aren’t required. We need to treat our clients the same with angel and round-one funding through the entire process,” I add.

  I bring up the next slide, which is just a silly picture of three people dressed in black with masks on, looking like they might be ready to rob a bank.

  “So, to ferret out our mole, we deployed a crafty strategy. The teams at SHN would work on several possible acquisitions that we believed to be faulty. Meanwhile, the partners were working on specific wins along with the help of Charles and his friends.”

  “What did that do?” Bella asks.

  “We knew our mole had an inside person. By sending them companies that weren’t good investments, they’d be looking at the shiny objects over there and not what we were doing quietly over here.”

  “Wouldn’t they vet the companies, too?” Cora asks.

  “Normally yes, but because our team had put them through our vetting process and our success rate is so high, our competitors went with the faulty material without vetting it,” Dillon explains. “Our process goes beyond my numbers; Cameron and his team go through every line of code or product piece and make sure it’s reputable and affordable. Cameron and his team can do math far and beyond many in the valley, and sometimes they’re looking for him to figure this all out for them.”

  “Emerson’s team will vet each member of their team, and often we walk away because her people don’t think the leadership is right for the organization,” Cameron adds.

  “And, of course, Mason vets their business plan to make sure we can add value to the company,” Emerson stresses.

  “What we do is very different than all of our competitors, and our proprietary look at companies was sold and/or given to our competitors, who scooped up the information. Some adopted Dillon’s numbers—”

  “Which I’ve since evolved into something even better,” Dillon boasts.

  “—and in the end, our competitors invested in those companies. Perkins Klein invested the heaviest, but we saw investments from Benchmark, Argent Capital, and Carson Mills. But Perkins Klein was the biggest investor, and as we suspected these were bad acquisitions. Today none of the companies exist. We also believe these investments are what killed Perkins Klein and put some financial instability into some of the smaller VC firms.”

  My next slide is a list of company logos and which VC firm they went to.

  “As we suspected, these were bad acquisitions. None of these companies are in business today, and the instability it caused at Perkins Klein made them fold up shop. It also put some financial instability into some of the smaller VC firms, as well.”

  “Thus the saying ‘we’re always one bad decision away from going under,’” William points out.

  “Exactly,” Dillon says. “But we also don’t invest in just anything, and we’ve made a point to have a year’s worth of salary we won’t touch just in case something bad happens.”

  “Benchmark bought up several of Perkins Klein’s struggling but successful companies, and Quinn came to work for us. At that point, we thought the mole was gone and it was over, but we learned otherwise.”

  I put up the logos of four of our client companies.

  “Since our mole and hacker are still unknown, but we’ve figured out how to disable them, they took other measures.” I point to each of the four companies and explain how each was sabotaged. “Initially we suspected that it was Russian mob involvement, but instead the Russian mob was interested in Cynthia due to her turning them in for money laundering at BrightStar Investments.”

  “Sorry I took you all off track,” Cynthia apologizes.

  “They were involved, they just weren’t behind it,” Cora emphasizes.

  “But it did point you to the mole,” Jim points out. “Your legal secretary had been feeding information to an unknown, and because of that, she is currently a guest at the Federal Correction Institution in Dublin, California—not Ireland, for eight more months.”

  “Very true, but we know the mole started before she did, so she was only the second person involved,” Sara adds.

  “We thought it was over, but we were wrong,” I say with a sigh.

  “We were at least hoping,” Dillon adds.

  I put up the logo of Pineapple Technologies. Our heartbreak.

  “This is where the rubber meets the road. Pineapple Technologies was a big turning point for us. On the day they went public, someone had hacked in and stolen all their code and posted their confidential information on the internet. What was proprietary became public, and their stock plummeted. In a matter of weeks, they went belly up.”

  “That was really tough,” William says. “That was my first day with SHN.”

  “Bet you thought you’d made a mistake,” Emerson teases.

  “Who says I’ve changed my mind?” William teases back. “That was a pretty crazy first week.”

  “Talk about walking into chaos,” Sara sympathizes.

  “It was a tough few weeks. But thankfully through Parker Carlyle, who was a member of Cameron’s elite team—”

  “Elite? Can I put that on my résumé?” Parker asks.

  “No way. You can’t update your résumé. Didn’t you know? ‘You can get in, but you can never get out.’” The group laughs at Emerson’s quip.

  “Well, Parker and Constance combed through over two hundred thousand lines of code and found several important things.”

  On the first slide, the threat. I read it aloud. “Dillon, Cameron, and Mason, you should have brought me on when you had a chance.”

  “Talk about a drop-the-mic moment,” Cameron says.

  “Agreed,” I say. “This left open the idea that it was a candidate we had chosen not to hire at some point or a company we had not invested in—not a current employee.”

  “My team missed it. Pure genius to find that,” Cora says with a broad smile. “I keep trying to talk Parker into joining my team, but nothing has tempted him yet.”

  “It was too exhausting,” Parker shares.

  “But you found that our hackers had signed their work. They were calling themselves Adam and Eve. They’d been signing their work as AM and EA, so when he found the words MacIntosh and Ambrosia, we made the jump that they were named Adam MacIntosh and Eve Ambrosia,” I continue.

  I then move to the next slide, where I have a picture of Ruben’s painting of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

  “With Sara’s brilliant legal mind, we figured out the next step. We all agreed with Sara’s theory that our hackers named themselves. With MacIntosh and Ambrosia being apple varieties and Adam and Eve being in the Garden of Eden, it pointed us to the fruit of the poisonous tree theory. We think the hacker believes that our gains through SHN are fruit from the poisonous tree.”

  “Sara, you really are a brilliant legal mind to have put that together,” Walker says, obviously impressed with how she came to such a conclusion with so little information.

  Sara shrugs. “I had recently been reacquainted with my birth parents, who are born-again Christians, and the ambrosia apple is my favorite.”

  “Don’t let her pass it off. This really helped to make sense of who our hackers were,” I stress.

  I put up the logo of SketchIt.

  “Quinn saved us again when she went to visit SketchIt and saw the beginnings of what happened with Pineapple Technologies. With her quick thinking, she called in Cameron, who alerted FBI Cybercrimes, and they inserted a Trojan horse into the hacker's system.”

  “It allowed us to monitor what they were doing, and we were able to identify several hackers and arrest them,” Cora shares.

  “I just wish they knew
who Adam and Eve were,” Greer muses.

  “At least we were able to indict them in absentia, so no matter if it takes us two weeks or twenty years, they’ll be going to jail,” Walker points out.

  “But our hackers know they were indicted and said as much,” I add while I pull up the voice mail they sent me. “We have something big planned, and we are hiding in plain sight.”

  “That’s so spooky,” Hadlee says.

  “It is, but it also tells us that we know who the hacker and mole are,” Jim points out.

  “Annabelle,” William announces.

  “Maybe, though we can’t say for sure that Mason’s poisoning and the hacking and mole are related.”

  I bring up a slide of the wolfsbane flower.

  “That’s pretty,” Cynthia says.

  “That is what I was poisoned with. We don’t know for sure if Annabelle was behind the poisoning, but that theory has not been discounted, and many of you thought she was our original mole,” I point out. “The jury is still out on that, too.”

  I look over at CeCe, and she nods. I bring up the logo of Metro Composition.

  “CeCe is an advisor and investor with us. She’s in our inner circle. Recently, someone has made a serious run at her company.” I walk everyone through what they’ve heard on the news and in the gossip rags.

  “But we can’t be sure that your nutjob is the same nutjob Metro is dealing with?” Trey questions.

  “We don’t know yet. We’ve looked for listening devices throughout Metro’s offices and Caroline’s home. We’re still working our way through the evidence, which continues to grow with each passing day,” Jim shares.

  Looking out at the group, I put my hands in my pockets. “This is our situation right now. I know we’ve commented along the way, but now that you’re all seeing it in a more linear format, what do you think?”

  “I want them found, arrested, and serving their life sentences in Lompoc and Dublin,” Dillon volunteers.

  “Amen,” agrees Cameron.

  “Well, as many of you know, my sister was behind a large theft ring in Napa right under my nose. They’ve said you know them. If you’ve figured out it isn’t an employee, and this has been going on since before several of you joined the firm, who are some people who maybe you went to school with who you didn’t invite into the firm?” Andy asks.

  “We were pretty close in school, but each of us had other friends. If we’re going to go that far back, the pool widens significantly,” I say.

  “That’s not a bad idea. Why don’t the three of you start a list of people? We can figure out what they’re doing today and see who’s doing well and who isn’t,” Jim offers.

  “Is there anyone you’ve upset?” Marci asks.

  “That list is pretty long. We gave a list of all the companies we chose not to invest in to Jim a while ago, and we continue to update it,” I share.

  “Sorry. I know we’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” Marci says while she studies the slide.

  “Exactly, and despite the fact that we all think it’s Annabelle, we also need to keep our minds open to others on the off chance that it isn’t her and we miss something less obvious,” Cora points out.

  Chapter twelve

  CeCe

  The barges that sail beneath the Bay Bridge on their way to deliver their goods distract me from the giant negative number sitting on my P&L. Good grief. The last year has essentially been a colossal waste of time. I gave my company all the love I had, and someone took it from me like a possession. My body’s a shell of shattered remains of who I was: vivacious and high spirited. This betrayal has drained me better than a vampire. I hate the person who did this to us as sure as the sun rises and sets. It’s just killing me. Someone in my own house has taken six months of work done by dozens of employees and focus groups and thrown it all out the window by giving it away to a competitor for a few measly dollars. I hope they can sleep at night.

  My private line rings and I answer without looking. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Caroline. This is Walker Clifton.” I’m not in the mood to deal with him. He was professional yet friendly last night at the partners meeting, thankfully.

  “Hey, Walker, what’s going on?”

  “Well, to start with, I’m absolutely mortified over the news that Jim Adelson brought to the table last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “First and foremost, I want you to know that I have spoken to the head of the FBI‘s San Francisco office about how you’ve been treated, and I’ve also escalated a complaint to the Department of Justice over the handling of your case. I’ve forwarded the report Jim’s team put together. Nothing was more disappointing last night to have no report from the agents assigned to your case, who personally assured me they’d jump on it, and then to hear a private security company has run circles around them. Shameful. Jim Adelson’s report on each employee and narrowing the list down shouldn’t be done by a third party. It should have been done by the FBI.”

  “Thank you, Walker. It’s really disheartening to know they don’t support—”

  “I want to assure you that no matter the business, no matter the size, things like corporate espionage are a serious issue, and we at the DOJ, the state attorney’s office, and the FBI take them seriously.”

  What a politician. I wouldn’t be surprised if he asks for a campaign contribution at the end of this. “Thanks, Walker. I appreciate that.”

  “The next thing to share is that we discussed with both the head of the FBI and the DOJ, and we think we’ve come up with a way to bring out your mole.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stands at attention. “What are you thinking?”

  “I think we should probably have lunch today. I want to discuss and flush out a solution face-to-face. There are still some pieces we need your perspective and buy-in on, and I think by meeting, we’ll have the opportunity to go through our plan and figure it out together.”

  My stomach tightens. This is not what I want right now. “I appreciate the idea, but I’m not sure that I want to air my dirty laundry in public in front of so many people in a busy restaurant where people keep approaching the table.”

  “I get it. That’s not at all what I’m thinking. I’m leaning toward the private room at the Baywater Café. We can sit down, just the two of us, and have lunch and brainstorm.”

  I keep my sigh of exasperation to myself. This will be a colossal waste of time. “Walker, you do know that I’m not interested in anything more than a lunch—”

  “That does disappoint me on so many levels, but I do know that. Don’t get me wrong, I hold out hope that you’ll see the benefit of a relationship with me. Meanwhile, we do need to get Metro Composition through this. My feeling is that we should meet and go through this idea, see if we can make it work.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you for lunch today. What time?

  “One o’clock. How does that work with your schedule?”

  “That will work for me. Should I bring Evelyn or anyone else with me?”

  “No. Absolutely not. We want the circle incredibly small on this. Besides, Evelyn is on the list of suspects.”

  I pause. “She’s innocent in this.”

  “I hope so, but better to be safe than sorry.”

  “All right, I’ll see you at one at Baywater Café.”

  As I look down at the sidewalk and watch the little dots of tourists, runners, bicyclists, and others making use of the San Francisco paths, my disappointment continues. I can’t let myself fall into the pit of despair. The best remedy is a strong cup of espresso and to talk to my best friend. Luckily, I can do both. I call her and make a double espresso as it rings.

  Emerson answers on the third ring. I hope I’m not waking her up.

  “Hey, you.”

  “Hey, yourself. How’s my favorite little boy doing?”

  “Do you mean the little boy who doesn’t sleep?” She laughs.

  “An Energizer Bunny, huh?”


  “You have no idea. Dillon has moved down to the basement at night so he can get some sleep before going to work. Liam had us both up every hour and a half last night.”

  “That little boy likes to eat.”

  “I just don’t think I’m producing enough for him.”

  “I know I’m not a mother yet, but I’ve heard there’s nothing wrong if you need to supplement with formula.”

  “I know, I know, but I’m trying… I’m trying my hardest to increase production, including drinking things that are supposed to increase my milk. I feel like I’m a fricking cow.”

  “You don’t look like one, and that’s all that matters. You look absolutely radiant and gorgeous.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if this was a video call. You’d see that I have spit-up in my hair, I haven’t had a shower today—maybe it’s been a few days—and I’m sure the circles under my eyes are huge.”

  “Sweetheart, no matter what you look like, I’m sure you look spectacular.”

  “All right, I learned a long time ago not to argue with you, but I know you didn’t call to hear about my losing battle with my four-month-old.”

  “You can call me any time, day or night, if you want. You know I’m here for you.”

  Her voice cracks, and I know she’s on the verge of tears. “I know you are, and I can’t tell you how much that means to me.” Emerson clears her throat. “What’s going on with you?”

  “Walker Clifton just called asking to meet for lunch today.”

  “Is he still trying to talk you into a political merger?”

  “Oh, I think he would always love that. He just isn’t understanding that this isn’t an opportunity in his future.”

  “You’re so politically correct. Maybe you would make a good politician’s wife.”

  “Right now, I’m not interested in anybody.” I’m waiting to see where this goes with Mason.

  “Walker knows you're not on the menu, so what does he want?”