All In

by Simona Ahrnstedt

  “Do you?” Åsa asked seriously.

  Natalia had never really understood why David had asked her out to that first lunch.

  All the Investum shares with unknown owners.

  David’s hasty departure from Båstad.

  The hatred between her family and David.

  Skogbacka.

  Shares with unknown owners.

  Never satisfied.

  She blinked. Could it be true? She turned to Åsa, but her eyes were almost glazed over.

  She had to get to work. ASAP.

  Because now she had identified the look David had given her when he left.

  She’d thought the look had been about the beginning of something great and new.

  But it hadn’t been about a beginning at all.

  It had been about an ending.

  32

  David was in the office early on Monday morning, freshly showered, clean-shaven, and focused.

  He got himself a cup of coffee, sat down at his computer, and waited for Michel.

  It was just a question of moving forward now, nothing more. He forced his thoughts into different mental cubbyholes, closing the doors on all the ones that didn’t have to do with this deal.

  When he had rashly plunged into this relationship with Natalia, he had thought he could handle it because it wouldn’t involve any feelings.

  But he had developed feelings for her, feelings that were far too strong. And now, when he needed all his focus, his concentration was disrupted by an impossible distraction. Because it was impossible, doomed.

  He scanned his e-mails and started sorting through the stacks of paper on his desk. He stretched his neck, which was stiff, but otherwise he was fine, had to be fine.

  Michel came in, serious but apparently energized.

  David hesitated, but he had to say it. He couldn’t think clearly anymore, and he needed his friend’s reassurance.

  “I have something to tell you before we begin,” he said, gesturing to the chair next to his desk.

  Michel sat down. “Does this maybe have anything to do with Natalia De la Grip?”

  “In a way.”

  Michel eyed him skeptically. “Do I want to hear it?”

  “Probably not, but I need your opinion. I’m at a loss. I need to hear that I’m doing the right thing, that what we’re going to do makes financial sense.”

  Michel swore a long string of curse words in French and then shook his head. “I need some coffee,” he said, standing up. “Then we’ll talk about this behind closed doors.”

  David waited. Michel came back with coffee. He shut the door. It was early, but people were already starting to come in.

  “I slept with Natalia,” David began.

  Michel raised an eyebrow. “Again?”

  “Yes.”

  “That wasn’t smart.”

  “No,” David agreed.

  “I mean given that you’re about to destroy her family.”

  “I know what you meant,” David snapped.

  Michel studied him. “What kind of feelings do you have for her?”

  “I don’t feel anything for her.”

  Michel sipped his coffee. He made a face. “I’m in love with Åsa.”

  No shit, Sherlock. “Have you guys talked?”

  Michel nodded.

  “Michel, there’s more I have to tell you.”

  “More?”

  “We’ve gone over this so many times,” David began. “Decided this was a sound business plan, right? Everyone says so. There’s a real financial reason to do this. And we have a good chance of making a lot of money.”

  “Yes,” Michel said slowly.

  “And you know we’ve always said business can’t be personal. That’s what we’ve been best at, keeping a cool head, being professional, not caring about prestige and all that.”

  “I’m really not going to want to hear this, am I?” Michel said with a heavy sigh.

  “When I was a student at Skogbacka something happened, between me and Peter De la Grip.”

  “Something?”

  “It was really bad,” David said, remembering how he’d sat in that soundproof room in the basement with blood pouring from his back. “Life-and-death bad. His father, Gustaf, was involved. And my family too. It’s a long story. It was after that incident I decided.”

  “Decided what?”

  “That I was going to become rich enough to crush them, wipe them out.” David shrugged. “Get revenge.”

  Michel blinked.

  David waited for what he’d said to sink in.

  “Fuck. You should have told me,” Michel finally said.

  David exhaled. It was an incredible relief to have that said, to give all that information to Michel. Almost all of it. “Yes, I should have,” he agreed.

  “We’ve always been upfront with each other, open, no lies—those are your words, your values.”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “But you hid this from me. I have a right to be mad.”

  “Absolutely,” David said. “How mad are you?”

  Michel shrugged. “I’m hurt that you kept this to yourself. But from a purely business perspective, it doesn’t change anything.”

  “No, I didn’t think so.”

  “Do you want to back out? There’s still time to turn around, I assume,” Michel thought out loud. “But if we do, we’re going to bleed. And it would weaken Hammar Capital.” He looked seriously at David. “Is that what you want to do? For her sake?”

  David shook his head. “No, we’re still on.”

  “But she’s going to hate you.”

  “Yes.” Natalia was going to hate him. Maybe that was just as well. She deserved a good man, better than him, better than he could ever be.

  “Hey, you,” Michel said hesitantly.

  “What?”

  “While we’re confessing things to each other ...,” he began.

  David pinched the bridge of his nose. Oh lord, they’d never had a conversation like this before. He wondered which of them was more uncomfortable. “What?” he asked curtly.

  “When we had coffee, Åsa asked if I knew anything about someone vacuuming up Investum shares off the market.”

  He’d known the whole time that they couldn’t underestimate her. “What did you say?” he asked.

  Michel made a face. “I broke down and told her everything. What do you think? I flatly denied it, of course. But now she’s going to hate me.”

  “Join the club. I think Natalia suspects something too. If we had been dealing with those two instead of the men, we would never have made it this far.” Investum’s board was one hundred percent male. Seven white middle-aged men. That’s what happened when you recruited buddies from your good old boy network. You lost out on talent.

  There was a knock on the door. “Everything’s ready,” Malin Theselius said, sticking her head in the doorway.

  David looked at the clock. There were still twenty minutes left until the stock market opened. He nodded to her. “We’re on our way.”

  The Stockholm Stock Exchange had been computerized years ago. No trading actually took place in the beautiful old 1770s building in Old Town Stockholm anymore. Everything happened at Nasdaq OMX down in the Frihamnen waterfront neighborhood and was then immediately displayed on monitors around the country, in banks, brokerage firms, the offices of fund managers. The market opened at nine o’clock.

  They’d already made a massive buy early this morning, before the market opened. With that buy, in one fell swoop, Hammar Capital now owned ten percent of Investum. Deals of that size were traditionally occasionally permitted after hours, in order to minimize halts in trading.

  “Did you flag it?” Michel asked.

  David nodded. As soon as anyone owned more than five percent of a company, you had to flag it by reporting it to Sweden’s Financial Supervisory Authority. For Hammar Capital to suddenly own not just five, but ten percent would have explosive results on the market. “I just e-
mailed them,” David said.

  “They’re going to audit us.”

  What David had done ran along an extremely fine line between unethical and illegal. “They won’t be able to prove shit,” he said.

  David and Michel stood up. They buttoned their jackets and looked at each other. They walked out to the lobby in silence. The Reuters screens, monitors that reported stock prices without a time delay, hung in the conference room, and they headed there. Malin came in too. A couple of the analysts came and sat down at the table.

  Nine o’clock arrived.

  The market opened.

  The prices blinked, ticking by row by row. The Investum share price started climbing. And climbing.

  “I’m going to send the press release now,” Malin said ceremonially.

  David nodded.

  She hit SEND.

  The price kept going up.

  Soon they would find out what would happen when the market realized what was going on. You never knew for sure. The stock market had a mind of its own. It was erratic. But they had their hunches.

  David looked at Michel. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Michel nodded. Malin nodded.

  The war had begun.

  33

  Natalia and Åsa had gone their separate ways after tennis. Åsa had taken a taxi to Investum, while Natalia had put on her sneakers and walked from the Royal Tennis Hall to her office at Stureplan.

  She was tired and hadn’t slept well, so she thought a little more exercise might do her some good. The city was quiet and mellow, and the urge to rush had dissipated. She needed to think. She bought a bottle of water on the way, and tried to focus her mind.

  When she reached the bank’s half-full offices, she got to work, convinced that this was the best way she knew to handle her anxiety, powerlessness, and fatigue.

  There didn’t seem to be any sign. The office was calm. Everything was under control. She persuaded herself that she was wrong, that she’d overreacted.

  All hell broke loose at five minutes past nine.

  Every phone started ringing, almost simultaneously. Texts and e-mails chimed in, every electronic device started blinking and making noise. After a look at one of the e-mails, she knew it was bad, really bad.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered.

  It was as if she were at the top of a building that had started to collapse beneath her.

  She acted without thinking. She grabbed her purse, threw her cell phone into it, and rushed out.

  “I have to go to Investum,” she called to the receptionist.

  The whole way there, she tried calling: her father, Peter, J-O, but every line was busy. She was forced to stop and catch her breath at a street corner. Her hand on her side, she was on the verge of vomiting.

  She couldn’t believe it was true. Despite all her suspicions, despite her musings that morning, the shock was still numbing.

  She was breathing so hard she saw spots. Her hands were shaking, her legs were numb. She forced herself to keep going.

  Ten minutes later she pulled open the front door, ran up the stairs, and opened the door to Investum’s headquarters. The lobby was in chaos. No one even looked up when she came in, standing there breathing so hard she could taste blood in her mouth. Phones were ringing, people were talking loudly, their faces red, their eyes glazed. Women and men ran around with papers in their hands. The big TV on the wall was showing live financial news, and someone had turned up the volume. The monitors for the various stock prices blinked cataclysmically.

  Natalia knocked on the door to Åsa’s office and stepped in without waiting for a response. Åsa had her feet up on her desk, the red soles of her pumps bright and shiny. She waved Natalia in while she kept talking into her BlackBerry in a steady voice.

  “Gustaf is on his way home from Båstad,” Åsa said by way of a greeting after she hung up. Her phone rang again, but after a glance at the caller ID, she sent the call to voice mail. “Peter and the others are coming too,” she added.

  “Alexander?” Natalia asked. It felt like a time when the family ought to be together.

  Åsa shook her head. “Haven’t talked to him. He’s already on a plane to New York, apparently he was just here for the weekend.”

  “What did Dad say?”

  Åsa shrugged. “You know how he is. He stays calm. On the surface.”

  Natalia knew. Her father never lost his cool, although he must be furious now. Peter, on the other hand, would be frazzled. And even now Peter was surely trying to find a scapegoat for this catastrophe. A shiver ran through Natalia. She had an incredibly bad feeling about this.

  “What do we know?” Natalia asked.

  Åsa’s phone rang again, and this time she took the call, but she waved to Natalia to stay, so Natalia sat there in the visitor’s chair, slumped, sapped of energy, mute from shock.

  Åsa finished her conversation. “There’s going to be a press conference at ten o’clock,” she said. “They’re doing the broadcast from Hammar Capital’s headquarters. Come on.”

  They walked out to the lobby. Every time a phone rang, every time an e-mail or a text message came in, there was yet another catastrophe to add to the previous ones. This—whatever was going on—would hurt the business in unforeseeable ways. Natalia looked around. It was like a battlefield. Someone was crying. Someone was screaming.

  “It’s starting!” someone called, and they gathered in front of the TV.

  A blond woman, communications director Malin Theselius, began the press conference at the exact specified time and stated in a steady voice that Hammar Capital, based on the quantity of shares they now owned, would be calling a special general meeting. The journalists shouted their questions, trying to drown each other out. Natalia had never seen such a heated press conference. It was like a bad movie. Malin answered as best she could. She gave a calm, composed impression, polite and accommodating. David had recruited someone who really knew what she was doing.

  Yes, the major owners and backers are with Hammar Capital.

  Yes, David Hammar wants a seat on the board.

  Yes, things will be done totally by the books.

  The questions never ended.

  And the phones were still ringing in the office. Natalia watched Investum’s own communications director, a fifty-year-old man in a suit, answer his cell phone, and then she saw his face go totally ashen. Whatever he’d been told was really bad.

  Natalia looked down, cold and nauseated. This was only just beginning. She heard the communications director raise his voice and thought that it was never good when the man whose job it was to be the outward face of the company was screaming like an angry drunk. She looked at the TV, where the blond Malin Theselius was courteously answering the journalists’ questions. The contrast was striking, but maybe she was being unfair. As far as she knew, this was the first time in the company’s history that anything like this had happened. It wasn’t really so strange that they didn’t have any strategies for handling it.

  David was on-screen, off to the side behind Malin. Michel stood on her other side. Both men looked refreshed and exhilarated, and David totally oozed power and confidence. It came through loud and clear. Natalia wondered if he would say anything and if so, what. And she wondered if there was some manual for how she was supposed to feel in a situation like this. The first shock hadn’t subsided yet. Maybe some shocks never did.

  She was completely closed off from her feelings. As if she was watching herself and the situation from the outside. As if there was some other Natalia standing a little ways away, watching what was happening, a Natalia who was trying to analyze the situation but who didn’t feel a thing. She noted simply that she had been tricked, betrayed, and deceived.

  She started to feel dizzy. She couldn’t take this in, couldn’t.

  Her phone rang, and through completely foggy eyes, she saw from the caller ID that it was J-O.

  “Where are
you?” she answered without saying hello.

  “On my way in,” J-O replied. She heard airport sounds in the background and tried to remember where he might be. “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’ll be in the office in ten minutes,” she replied. “I’ll see you there.”

  “The Danes are going to pull out.”

  “I know.”

  This was going to have completely unforeseeable consequences. And on so many different levels. Heads would roll, people would lose their jobs. And Investum, the unsinkable company, the pride of the nation . . . Natalia couldn’t even imagine what would happen to Investum. She took a deep breath and stood up. She didn’t have time to fall apart. Because when this caught up with her, she didn’t know if she would be able to get through it.

  “I have to go back to work,” she told Åsa, who hardly looked up.

  Inside the Bank of London’s offices at Stureplan things were significantly calmer; people were watching live broadcasts and muttering comments, but working as usual.

  Natalia sat glued to a TV screen in the lunchroom, following the developments with one hand over her mouth. She tried her father and Peter on their cell phones, over and over again, but no one answered. She called David. When it went to voice mail for the second time, she left a message and then sat staring at her phone, trying to will him to answer. Nothing happened.

  When the staff came in to eat lunch, she shut herself into her office. She just sat there as if someone had poured lead into her joints. Her blood was pounding, but she was so tired. And she was cold and a little sick to her stomach. I’m in shock, she persuaded herself. It’s the body’s way of protecting itself against mortal danger.

  J-O came in after lunch. By now the websites of all the major papers had the news on their home pages—Hammar Capital Goes After Investum. David Hammar vs. Goliath.

  Later, she went out and bought all the papers. The news was everywhere.

  Here’s how it affects you.

  The power struggle.

  Playboy billionaire’s brazen power grab.

  At three o’clock a grim J-O confirmed that the Danes had pulled out. The banking deal Natalia had been working on for so long had fallen through.