The I.P.O.

by Dan Koontz

  Ryan shook his head and gritted his teeth. “I already knew that!” What a waste of time. He reached up for his earpiece disgustedly. He had to get back to the train station to meet Jasper.

  “But he never purchased any shares,” Dillon added.

  Ryan stopped mid-stride. “Then how did he...” It had been years since he’d last spoken to J.R.

  “That’s all I can tell you. Really. That’s all I know,” Dillon said. “I’ll get back in contact you when the time is right.”

  ~~~

  In the weeks following J’Quarius’s death, Bradford, desperate to exonerate Avillage of any involvement in the untimely death of the wildly popular student athlete and under heavy pressure from investors who’d seen their shares plummet to zero, filed suit against the University of Chicago Children’s Medical Center for failing to disclose the risks of J'Quarius's condition.

  The charges were reviewed by the hospital's lawyers, who determined that Dr. Bennett, the treating physician, had meticulously documented his entire conversation, specifically detailing his warning that J’Quarius “could die with continued participation in sports.”

  Bradford wouldn’t back away from his position that he’d never been given that information though – despite the fact that the electronic medical record supported Dr. Bennett's account. And Bennett’s entry was time-stamped just minutes after he and Bradford had talked.

  Lawyers from Bradford’s team, along with the hospital's side, all urged Bradford to drop the baseless case, but he wouldn’t relent. He would, however, be willing to settle out of court, he announced.

  Dr. Bennett pushed hard to stand and fight, but as a single physician in a multi-specialty group-practice employed by a self-insured hospital system looking to protect its bottom line, the decision wasn’t up to him. Bradford, only interested in winning in the court of public opinion, opened with an offer to settle the case for a ludicrous sum of one thousand dollars, on the condition that the amount never be disclosed publicly. The hospital, looking at the alternative of a legal fight, which they would unquestionably win but that would cost them potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend against a client with Bradford's resources, jumped at the offer.

  CHAPTER 9

  By 1AM, most of the guests had either departed or were heading for their cars, gradually giving way to a bustling cleaning crew, now diligently but inconspicuously engaged in vacuuming, blotting out wine stains, and shuttling empty cocktail plates back to the kitchen of James Prescott’s expansive Southampton estate. But Prescott, in a nostalgic mood on the tenth anniversary of the opening of his exchange, couldn’t quite bring himself to call it an evening. By any measure, tonight qualified as a special occasion.

  After a quick survey of the dwindling crowd, he singled out Alec Alanson, a media member of all people, to join him in his study for a nightcap.

  Alec wrote for the Financial Times and was the rare individual who Prescott believed actually “got” him. If anyone ever set out to pen his biography, Prescott tacitly hoped it would be him, with his style of interview that weighed heavily toward listening. A successful interview, Alec believed, was like a memorable photograph. Of course it had to have a compelling subject, and it had to be successfully framed, but if the one recording the beauty or the evil or the genius of the subject became even the slightest focus of the piece, then it was a failure. Alec’s portrayals didn’t center around getting answers to “the tough questions.” They involved unobtrusively peeling away layers and, hopefully, reaching the core. Tonight, he wouldn't pose a single question.

  The heavy wooden door to the study creaked open from its high arched frame as Prescott ushered his guest in ahead of him. Prescott had actually given his housestaff explicit instructions not to grease the door, as he felt the creak added character to the entrance to this most august room of the house.

  Inside, a fire crackled within a cavernous stone fireplace behind a masculine wrought iron gate, flanked on each side by a stack of hand-split oak logs and heavy iron pokers. The opposite wall was lined with rare books that Prescott had painstakingly collected over the years. His most prized possession, an original field atlas illustrated by Audubon himself, lay on a glass-covered pedestal in the center of the room, illuminated from above by a focused beam of white light that somehow left the remainder of the dimly lit room under the influence of only the warm tones of the flickering firelight. Dark wood stretched up the windowless walls to the sixteen-foot beamed ceiling, and a hand-knotted oriental wool rug dating from the late 1800s covered the entirety of the floor. A bare desk at the back of the room and two worn leather armchairs toward the fore were the only furnishings.

  Prescott discreetly tugged on the false spine of a three-volume set on one of the lower bookshelves to reveal a simple ovoid decanter and 2 stout crystal glasses. “Care for a drink?” he asked, holding up a bottle of 60-year-old Macallan Whisky.

  Just sober enough to realize that another drink was the last thing on Earth he needed but also that this would probably be the only time in his life he’d be offered a drink from a bottle that cost more than his car, Alec Alanson politely accepted.

  Prescott handed a generous pour to his honored guest, the most recent member of an exclusive club who’d seen the inside of his study, and he began to pace. He carefully studied a row of books at his eye level, as Alec sat in silence, hypnotized by the honeyed aroma of the whisky mixing with the campfire smells of the burning wood.

  “You know,” Prescott started hesitantly, “when you’re young, your focus is on the question, ‘What are you going to do?’”

  He plodded deliberately a little further down the row of books before continuing, “Then sometime in your 30s, you pop your head up from your work long enough to ask yourself, ‘What am I doing?’”

  He paused again, having reached the end of the bookshelf, before starting back, “In your 50s, the question gradually evolves to, ‘What have I done?’

  “Now,” he said, walking back toward the front the room, “as I’m entering my 60s, I’ve begun to consider how what I’ve done will be perceived historically – what my legacy will be.

  “Are you old enough to remember the 1984 Olympics?” Prescott asked, abruptly changing the subject as he slid down into the armchair opposite Alec, casually crossing his right leg over his left.

  Alec shook his head “no,” careful not to interrupt the mood with extraneous words, studying Prescott’s every move and expression.

  “The United States won more gold medals that year than the next five countries on the medal list combined.” Prescott followed the statement with a period of silence sufficient to ensure that what he’d said had fully sunk in. “This will probably sound simplistic – and it was; I was just a kid at the time – but I saw what America could be that summer. Our 250 million against the world’s five billion, and we came out ahead.

  “That lit a fire in me that’s never really been extinguished – even after I learned of the Soviet boycott.

  “My goal from that summer forward became to do whatever I could to keep or, in some cases, to make this country great. Exceptional.

  “At eighteen, I’d been offered admission to Princeton, but I had actually planned to delay my admission to serve in the army – not the reserves or ROTC, mind you. I was going to enlist.” After stealing a quick peek at Alec to measure his response, he glanced back down at his single-malt Scotch and swirled it reflectively in his snifter, studying the legs of the amber liquid as they slowly stretched down the sides of the glass. He’d never disclosed this to anyone before – not even his wife. After briefly reconsidering, he opted to keep going.

  “My dad talked me out of it – and of course he was right. My talents lay in other areas. I had far more to contribute as a civilian. And I needed more of an academic foundation to maximize my personal strengths.

  “As a junior at Princeton three years later, I finished a minor in American Politics – with the genuine intention of one day running for of
fice.

  “Again, my dad steered me away. ‘Governments are run by schmoozers,’ he told me. ‘Businesses are run by leaders.’ Again, he was right.

  “Then, later that year, I was hit with a lightning bolt of clarity,” Prescott said, his voice rising as he stood back to his feet. “What made this country great – this country with such a brief history and a relatively small percentage of the world’s population – in everything from athletics to electronics, medicine to space exploration, entertainment to finance – was a very small number of exceptional individuals. America had always celebrated these men and women – native born and immigrant – and had given them the environment, the opportunity and the incentive to maximize their potential.

  “But unlike the olympic development program, where the best of the best were identified early, nurtured, trained and, in due time, celebrated, I saw our country implementing policies focused not on nurturing genius but solely on pulling up those people with no potential for greatness, while the would-be-great seemed complacently contented as bigger-than-average fish in their small ponds.” Prescott walked toward the west wall and gazed deeply into the fire. There was no way for him to continue without potentially coming off as callous. So be it.

  “I freely admit ‘no child left behind’ has never been my policy. And I could not care less how our average student stacks up against any other country’s average student in math or science,” Prescott said unapologetically, forcefully stoking the bottom log in the fire, which crumbled into a heap of glowing embers. “Some children are destined to work at the grocery checkout. Some are destined to become automatons in the world’s most powerful military. Some may carve out a nice living as an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer. There’s certainly no shame in that. We need those people. But they aren’t the individuals who make this country exceptional.

  “The exceptional are few and far between. They make an impact. They leave a legacy. They would become my focus.”

  ~~~

  Annamaria Olivera’s eyes struggled to half-mast, as she slowly transitioned from a sound sleep to a semi-conscious twilight. A persistent buzzing from the front-left pocket of her painted-on jeans and a continuous throbbing in her head wouldn’t allow her to fall back asleep, and the lingering alcohol that had kept her liver working double-time all night prevented her from fully waking up.

  A thin web of viscous saliva stretched between the corner of her half-open mouth and a puddle of drool on the magazine cover her head had spent the night resting on, as she slowly pushed herself up off the floor. A veritable newsstand of similar magazines carpeted the opulent hotel suite, her image splashed across every one – Glamour, Vogue, Cosmo, Vanity Fair, and a host of weekly tabloids. How they – or she – ended up there was a mystery that would probably never be solved.

  Holding her pounding head in one hand, straining to focus her blurred vision on the cell phone in her other, she mumbled the incoming text message out loud, “We need to meet – Fellow Avillage Orphan.”

  And with those seven words, she was wide awake – despite the persistent headache.

  Annamaria’s childhood had officially ended the day that Aaron Bradford had set foot in her Rainbow City orphanage.

  For most of the past five years she had traveled the globe with her adoptive mother, an aging model, who was far too envious of her to be any kind of role model, and her father, a photographer who viewed her as no less an inanimate piece of artwork than any of the other photographers she’d worked with had.

  When she’d turned seventeen, Bradford and her board of directors had happily signed off on her request to move on without her parents, saving the shareholders a year’s worth of parental stipends in the process. And while she hadn’t sacrificed any nurturing or love by ridding herself of her toxic adoptive parents, she had given up the last shred of structure she’d had in her life.

  Her flawless look and effortless talent allowed her to live by her own rules, and she knew it. As was the case with many Avillage recruits, she resented her work – and the people who were profiting from it – but the money was addictive, and she’d been so deeply indoctrinated with the idea that she had to be successful that she kept going. Plus she knew if she stopped, even for a moment, she might be forced to look at what she’d become, and she wasn’t ready to deal with that.

  The text message was a complete shock. Aside from her adoptive parents and a small group of people within Avillage, no one should have known that she was bound to Avillage, and as far as she knew, she had never come across anyone else who’d been adopted into the exchange.

  She called down to the valet to fetch her car as she changed into a pair of looser-fitting jeans and a baggy sweatshirt and then threaded her impossibly shiny black hair through the back of a Yankees hat that she pulled down low over her eyes.

  Her shoot that weekend was cancelled, effective immediately. It wasn’t as if her agency could do anything about it. The only threat they could possibly make was that they’d get someone else. But who would they get? The day would inevitably come when she would be replaceable, but for now, there was only one Annamaria Olivera in the fashion world.

  Judging from the 617 area code on the text message, she figured she’d be heading to Boston.

  ~~~

  Tenuous allies at best, Ryan and Dillon had at least managed to resolve one of their longstanding issues. Covert communication was no longer a problem now that they were living in the same city. With high-end walkie-talkies, Dillon, a freshman at MIT, could transmit clearly two miles up Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard, where Ryan was a third-year senior majoring in economics.

  They had gone back and forth for months over whether or not they should reach out to Annamaria. Dillon was stuck on the fact that she’d become by far the highest-profile Avillage orphan, while Ryan contended that her near 24/7 press coverage was overwhelmingly unfavorable and that anyone who was regularly referred to as a “socialite” in the tabloids wasn’t the face they needed for their cause – no matter how beautiful or famous a face it was.

  Dillon, driven by a self-sustaining internal fusion reaction of anger, was running low on patience and was desperate to do something. Anything. Now. On the other hand, Ryan, who was still cautiously trying to distill the truth out of what his obviously biased source was feeding him, argued that they could potentially end up doing irreparable harm to their image if they made the wrong move. They had to be viewed from the outside as sympathetic figures – exploited orphans – not greedy, entitled rich kids who already had way more than the average American (at least partially because of opportunities that Avillage had given them) and were now trying to hoard even more money. Annamaria, whose only marketable talent seemed to be showing skin for the camera, exemplified the entitled rich kid.

  Eventually Dillon couldn’t stand the inaction any longer, and texted Annamaria from his computer – using Ryan’s cell phone number.

  ~~~

  Ryan was an even six feet tall with broad shoulders and a man’s build. At seventeen, he wouldn’t have looked completely out of place in high school, but he certainly didn’t stick out in a lecture hall full of college students in their early 20s. And his casual, confident demeanor further disguised any age discrepancy.

  His dark hair was thick but neatly cropped, and his big brown eyes were as clear and bright as they’d been the day he was adopted by Avillage ten years earlier. He was thoughtful and compassionate, but often difficult to read with an expression that tended away from extremes. It was an accurate external representation of his constantly working mind, but one that was occasionally misinterpreted as cold or indifferent.

  Although he held celebrity status with a few students on campus who’d either figured out or had been told by their shareholding parents who he was, he maintained a small group of close friends and a wider group of friendly acquaintances, like most of the other kids did. And since the arrival of the first freshman class near his age the previous fall, he’d had no trouble finding dates.
>
  He had yet to find a course that he’d considered a real challenge; the most difficult decisions he faced often centered around which classmates he’d work with on group projects – a sensitive issue in a school of grade-mongers often being graded on a curve.

  And even though he had more than enough credits to graduate, he kept up a heavy course load in a wide array of subjects, ranging from mathematics to psychology to history to international law, all while making good money in the stock market. And neither he nor his parents nor Avillage saw any advantage in his graduating before he was eighteen.

  Away from the classroom, he’d come up with a way to combine a rough application of an incomplete-information game theory model with his unique ability to rapidly assimilate and recognize patterns in large sets of data to come up with a strategy for trading futures on the Chicago Board of Exchange. Using his method, he was reliably gaining 3% per day on 60% of his holdings, while the other 40% would end up down by the same amount. That led to a modest net increase in his bankroll of 0.6% per day. But compounding that daily over the roughly 250 trading days of the past year – a year in which the commodities markets were relatively flat – he had nearly quintupled his original bank roll, while quietly socking a portion of his profits away into a growing portfolio on the Avillage Exchange.

  He was on his way out of a World War II history course taught from the various perspectives of all of the major players, contemplating how he and Dillon were a lot like the pseudo-allied United States and Russia – ideological opposites thrown into an alliance against the bigger and more immediate threat of Avillage’s Germany – when he was blindsided by a phone call from New York.

  “Hello?”

  “Who is this?” came the hushed but determined Latina-accented voice on the other end.