Final Venture

by Michael Ridpath

  The case had quickly become more complicated and the fees had risen. Although Lisa and I agonized over the money, it became harder and harder to pull out. In the end, I always came to the same decision: I wasn't going to abandon my sister.

  'I'm sorry about all this,' I said to Lisa, taking her hand.

  She squeezed it. 'Don't worry. I'd do the same for my brother, and I know he'd do it for me.'

  We were lying naked in bed together, reading. Lisa was engrossed in The Quincunx, a thick, fiendishly complicated novel whose title I didn't even understand. I was skimming the Tetracom material Diane had given me, trying to keep my eyes open.

  'We had some good results today,' Lisa said.

  I put down my papers. 'Really?'

  'Yes, the animal work on BP 56 is looking good. We'll be able to try it on humans soon.'

  'That's great! So it really works?'

  'We won't know until it has gone through the whole clinical trials process, but so far it's looking very good.'

  'Well done, my love.' I leaned over and kissed her. It was Lisa who had first suggested that BP 56, some kind of small molecule called a neuropeptide that she had isolated, would have a beneficial effect on Parkinson's disease. And it now looked as if she was right. I felt a flood of pride at what she had achieved. 'Perhaps Boston Peptides will have a market cap of a billion dollars in a few years.' I smiled at her.

  'All you venture capitalists ever think about is money! The best thing would be if we actually could treat Parkinson's. That really would be cool.'

  'OK, you've got me,' I said, properly chastened. 'But I can still hope.'

  She smiled. 'Poor Henry is so excited he can hardly control himself.' Henry Chan was her boss and the founder of Boston Peptides. 'But we're going to need cash from somewhere to fund the clinical trials. Venture First doesn't want to put up any more. I kind of sympathize with Craig.'

  I winced. 'At least Venture First has an excuse. I think they've just about run out of money themselves.' They were a small venture-capital firm that had provided the initial funding to Boston Peptides. The rumours in the market were that their performance had been poor and they were having trouble raising more funds from their investors.

  'So what kind of people do you get to take these drugs?' I asked.

  'People with Parkinson's disease, of course.'

  'No, I mean during the clinical trials. Who would want to be the first human ever to take a drug?'

  'Oh, I see what you mean. Volunteers. Medical students, mostly. They get paid for it.'

  'They must be mad.'

  'It's perfectly safe.'

  'How can you know until it's been tried on people?'

  'We do very thorough tests on animals. If there's a major problem it will show up.'

  'So why do the tests on people at all, then?'

  'There are often some side-effects,' Lisa said. 'Headaches, nausea, diarrhoea.'

  'You'd never catch me doing it,' I said.

  'Someone's got to. And these volunteers really are doing something for science.'

  'Mad,' I said. 'Brave, but mad.'

  Lisa glanced at the papers I was reading.

  'What are all these?'

  'Oh, it's a deal called Tetracom that Diane is working on. It looks quite promising.'

  'Diane, huh?'

  'Yes.' I tried to come out with the next bit casually. 'We're going to Cincinnati next week to visit them. I'll be out Thursday night.'

  She pulled back. 'OK,' she said, picking up her book again.

  I watched as she studied the page in front of her intently.

  'Do you have a problem with that?' I said at last.

  'No.' She didn't look up from her book.

  'I mean, I have to go. It's my job to work with Diane.'

  Then she looked up, a spark of anger in her face. 'To tell you the truth, I do mind, Simon.'

  'You shouldn't,' I said. 'There's nothing to worry about. You should know that.'

  'You say there's nothing to worry about,' Lisa snapped. 'I think perhaps there is. A business trip to Cincinnati. The two of you alone in some hotel. If she has got her eye on you, that's when she'll make her move, Simon.'

  'Lisa! She's a partner in my firm. A colleague. A boss.'

  'She's done it before!'

  'Who told you that?'

  'Dad,' she said quietly.

  'Huh,' I snorted. 'He put all this into your mind, didn't he?'

  'No. I just don't trust that woman.'

  'You don't even know her.'

  'OK,' said Lisa. 'You go then.' She reached over and turned out the light.

  We lay in bed, backs to each other. I was angry. I really had no choice but to go. And Lisa really ought to be able to trust me to go on a business trip with a colleague, even a beautiful one.

  I was still fuming, when I felt a finger brush gently up my spine.

  'Simon?' she whispered.

  'Yes?'

  'I have an idea.'

  'What is it?' I turned to face her.

  She pulled herself close to me, her hands moving over my body. 'I'm going to wear you out so completely that Diane will have to dump you for someone her own age.'

  She gave me a long kiss.

  'Sounds like a good plan to me,' I said.

  5

  The scull cut through the river and the slight head wind towards the Boston University Bridge, where the Charles River narrowed. A mile behind me was the Union Boathouse from where I set off three mornings a week. I was into a good rhythm now. Legs, arms, shoulders, back, breathing all combined to produce the regular splash of wood in water on either side of me.

  I had learned to row at school and had rowed again at Cambridge. In the army they had other ways of keeping you fit, but when I had arrived at Harvard it had not taken me long to find the river again.

  On my left rose the Dome and Senate House of MIT, and beyond them the mysterious tall brown buildings of Kendall Square, housing the biochemical secrets of companies such as Genzyme, Biogen, and our very own BioOne. On my right was the long strip of green that was the Esplanade, then the noisy Storrow Drive, and overlooking that, the sedate apartment buildings of the Back Bay. The air was crisp, the water blue, and the sky clear. Out here, scudding through the middle of this broad river, I felt alone. I could think.

  My conversation with Helen had depressed me. I knew she was near the end of her rope, and I wanted so badly to help her, but I just couldn't do it. If I could find the cash, and we did win the appeal, then her life would still be difficult but it would be bearable. I was the lucky one, with a wife I loved and a job I enjoyed. It wasn't fair. I wanted to share some of that luck with her.

  Although the job wasn't going that brilliantly at the moment. My anger with Frank and the other partners was hardening.

  I remembered the discussions Frank and I had had with Craig when we were putting the deal together. All three of us assumed that the extra three million dollars would be available. Sure, we had inserted the right to refuse to provide the funds in the legals, but my implicit assumption was that that was to protect us from Craig failing to get a team up and running.

  From what I could see, he had done a great job. He was certainly volatile, but we'd known that when we'd invested. Frank was correct that in the last six months a number of companies large and small had begun work on the next generation of switches for the Internet. But none had the determination and sense of purpose of Craig. He lived and breathed Net Cop: it had become his whole life. He would get there first, I was sure. If only we would give him the funds to do it.

  But the partners had made up their minds. There was nothing I could do to change it. I could disappear in a huff, my honour intact, my résumé a shambles, and try to find another job somewhere else. But I'd be throwing away a promising career at a place I liked, working with people I liked.

  Or I could do as Lisa suggested. Try to sort the mess out myself.

  As usual, Lisa was right. I would stay and help Craig. I would
n't let Net Cop die.

  I reached the Harvard boathouses and turned round.

  Frank's opposition bothered me a lot. And so did Lisa's reaction to my going to Cincinnati with Diane. I supposed I could have said no when Diane had suggested dinner the previous Thursday night. But nothing had happened, no matter what Frank thought. And Frank had overreacted to what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.

  Lisa didn't have anything to be jealous about. Did she?

  Diane was attractive. I liked her. We got on well together, we had had a great time at dinner the other night. But I loved Lisa. I loved her so much, so much more than I could ever imagine loving someone like Diane. And I didn't want to do anything that would jeopardize that. I didn't want to end up like my father.

  Sir Gordon Ayot (Bart) had never known his own father, my grandfather, who had died on the road to Arnhem. He had inherited a small estate in Devon, a baronetcy, and a desire to join the family regiment, the Life Guards, which he duly did. He did everything that a dashing cavalry officer was supposed to do. He gambled, entertained lavishly, womanized, found a beautiful wife, and learned to drive armoured cars round godforsaken parts of the world. Women loved him, and he loved women. This was clear to me from when I was quite a young boy. My parents did their best to keep the state of their marriage from Helen and me, sending us first of all to bed, and then to boarding school, but of course they didn't succeed. My father's expenditure easily exceeded his income, and the estate shrank until only a small cottage was left. My father felt let down, too. My mother was supposed to be rich, but her father had carelessly gone bust in the property crash of 1974. She tried hard to ignore her husband's recreations, and their expense, but when I was ten, they divorced.

  I hated my father for hurting my mother. But I also admired him. Throughout my teenage years he used to take me off on a series of unplanned trips: scuba-diving in Belize, rock-climbing in Canada, and later when I was at university to nightclubs in London and Paris. Where the money came from for all this, I had no idea, and my mother could never find out. Then one morning at Cambridge I was called to my tutor's rooms. He told me that my father had died peacefully in the night, of a heart attack. He was only forty-five. I subsequently discovered that he had been drinking heavily the evening before, and there were two women half his age there to witness it.

  Against my mother's wishes, I joined the Life Guards after Cambridge. I did it partly out of a sense of loyalty to my father and grandfather, but also because I thought soldiering would be fun. It was, and I was good at it, but in the end the layers of constricting tradition got to me, and I left.

  I bitterly regretted my parents' divorce, and my father's part in it. At ten I had solemnly resolved never ever to do the same thing myself. And now, here I was, six months into my own marriage to a woman I loved, and my father-in-law was suggesting I was going the same way. It wasn't just that he was wrong: he had hurt my pride.

  Lisa's parents were also divorced, of course. Frank had walked out from his wife when Lisa was fourteen. Lisa had never been given a satisfactory explanation, and like me, had never quite forgiven her father. But there the similarity ended. Although her mother quickly remarried and moved to San Francisco, taking Lisa and her brother with her, Frank had stayed single.

  I wanted to make quite sure that neither one of us followed in our parents' footsteps.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw the Union Boathouse speeding nearer. My arms and shoulders ached. It had been a good outing.

  Gil's office was the largest in the firm. The walls were oak-panelled, the furniture antique. Pride of place was given to a portrait of a weak-chinned colonial nobody by Gilbert Stuart, after whom Gilbert Stuart Appleby had been named. The portrait had only arrived a year before. Gil no doubt liked visitors to assume that the picture had been hanging in the family home for generations. But Daniel had pretty good evidence that it represented the first premature expenditure of a chunk of the BioOne millions.

  'Now, have you decided what to do about Net Cop?' Gil asked with quiet concern.

  'I'm going to try to save it.'

  Gil raised his eyebrows. 'How?'

  I smiled. 'I'm not sure yet. But I'm not going to give up. I'll get the two million back somehow. And I'm going to try to make more.'

  Gil watched me closely through those thick glasses. Then he smiled, the wrinkles rearranging themselves on his face. 'I admire your perseverance. Do what you can. But there won't be a cent more from Revere.'

  I returned his smile. 'I understand that.'

  Gil pulled out his pipe and began to stuff it with tobacco. The only place he smoked it was in his own office. These days in America you couldn't smoke a pipe in any semi-public place, even if you did own your own firm.

  'You know the mistake you made, Simon?'

  Plenty of responses leaped to mind, but I settled on 'No?'

  'It wasn't suggesting the follow-on. That was just a matter of judgement. Nor was it your desire to keep your word. Despite what Art says, I find that admirable. It was making a promise that boxed yourself in. As a venture capitalist, you always have to leave a way out. Circumstances change, the unforeseen always happens.'

  I wasn't absolutely sure of this. It seemed to me that if an entrepreneur had put his life savings, his house, his dream into a venture capitalist's hands, at the very least he should expect some sort of commitment back from the venture capitalist. But Gil had written the rule book.

  So I nodded.

  'Well, I'm glad you haven't decided to do anything rash. Good luck with Net Cop. Oh, one other thing.'

  'Yes?'

  'Is John Chalfont OK?'

  'I think so. Why?'

  'It's just he was pushing very strongly for that wind-power deal the other day. He should have been here long enough to realize we've turned down a dozen of those.'

  'Just a temporary loss of perspective,' I said. 'Happens to all of us.'

  Gil didn't look convinced. 'Hmm. Thank you, Simon.'

  Encouraged that my career at Revere seemed intact, I left the room, ignoring the feeling that my doubts hadn't disappeared, but had only been suppressed.

  Daniel was looking at the stock quotes on his computer. BioOne had edged up to forty-four dollars. I'd already checked. John was out.

  Daniel glanced up. 'Do you still have a job?'

  'I do.'

  'Gil talked you out of it, huh?'

  'Lisa did, if anyone,' I said.

  'I'm glad one of you has some common sense.'

  I grunted. 'Gil did ask me whether John was OK. I think that wind-power deal worried him.'

  Daniel laughed. 'John's such an airhead.'

  'Oh, come on, Daniel. He's not that bad.'

  'Of course he is. Sure he's a nice guy. But what's the point of that? It's worth zero. He's a loser. He's going nowhere in this firm, it's obvious. You know he's only here because of his father.'

  I shrugged. Perhaps Daniel was right. But I liked John and had no intention of writing him off as a loser.

  Daniel noticed my reticence, and changed the subject. 'So what are you going to do with Net Cop?'

  'Find it some money.'

  Daniel raised his eyebrows. 'How?'

  'God knows. Any ideas?'

  It was always worth asking Daniel for ideas. Despite his cynicism, he could be very creative.

  He paused for a moment. 'What about Jeff Lieberman? He invested in BioOne, didn't he? He might have a go at Net Cop.'

  I thought about it. Jeff had been at business school with us. He was an able student, and he and I had had a lot of time for each other. He had headed off for Bloomfield Weiss, a big investment bank in New York, but he had watched my progress at Revere with interest. I had told him about BioOne, with Lisa's reservations, and he had made a significant investment in the Initial Public Offering.

  'It's worth a try,' I said.

  I looked up his number and dialled it.

  'Jeff Lieberman.'

  'Jeff, it's Simon Ayot
.'

  'Simon! How're you doing?'

  'I'm fine.'

  'And how's my little BioOne? The price isn't going down any further, is it?'

  'Forty-four this morning. Way above where you bought it.'

  'That's true. I can't complain.'

  'Jeff, I was actually calling about another company we're involved in. If you thought BioOne was risky, you should see this one. But the pay-off will be huge if the company makes it.'

  'Tell me more.'

  So I told him all about Net Cop.

  The deal caught his interest. It had those magic words 'The Internet' attached to it. I told him the risks, that Revere had backed out, and we would need more money to keep Net Cop afloat, but that just seemed to whet his appetite. For him, though, there was one important question.

  'Do you like it Simon?'

  I had hoped he wouldn't ask me. I would have to put my reputation on the line for this one. I swallowed. 'It's very risky, but yes, I do like it. Craig Docherty is a winner.'

  'OK, well send me the information. I'll let you know.'

  'I'll do that right away.'

  'Oh, and thanks Simon. Let me know if you hear about any other promising deals.'

  I put the phone down. Jeff might invest. But I still needed to find a lot more money. That would have to wait until Craig had calmed down.

  'Was he interested?' asked Daniel.

  'He might be.'

  'I'm going to New York this weekend. I can see him if you like. Talk to him about it.'

  'Thanks. Do that.'

  I tried to call Craig, but he 'wasn't available', so I left a voice-mail telling him what I was doing. I could understand his anger, but he'd come round, especially if I actually did find some money for him.

  Just then, John strolled in, whistling some hit song from the eighties and clutching a large latte.

  'Still here, Simon?'

  ''Fraid so.'