Chapter 7: What Strategy Looks Like

The difficulty with the board, from Alexander's perspective, was not the business.

The business was a success. Reed Capital had made twenty-two percent the previous year, and although this was not exceptional from his perspective, it was, from an outside perspective, a success nonetheless. The business was clean. It was diversified in the ways it needed to be, and it was concentrated in the ways it needed to be. The three members of the board who had issues with the Hargrove purchase were wrong, would know they were wrong, and would know they were wrong in a matter of time. The only variable in the equation was time.

The difficulty with the board was him.

The difficulty with the board was the article in the Post in February, in which the words emotionally volatile were used in a sentence so constructed around him, so constructed so as not to be used in reference to anyone else, and so constructed so as to have appeared in no other article in the Post in the previous month. It was an article that was followed by some murmurings among members of the board, some murmurings that did not appear in the minutes of the meetings but were picked up by Marcus, a man with very good instincts, and those murmurings said, in so many words, "We don't know about Reed." Those murmurings said, in so many words, "He does not let anyone in." Those murmurings said, in so many words, "If there is nothing behind the control, then what happens when the control slips?"

He knew what had brought it on. The near-engagement – which was a term he would pick apart at some point, near-engagement, as if the nearness to something was the same as the something – had been public enough that the end of it had been public as well. The end of it had not been, in the word the tabloids had reached for with such apparent joy, amicable. He had handled it. He had handled it the way he handled most things he didn't like: efficiently, definitively, without apparent feeling.

The apparent feeling was, apparently, the problem.

He had had four months. He had considered three possible solutions. All of them involved somebody he already knew. All of them involved the specific danger of somebody who knew him well enough to assume the situation was what it was not. He needed somebody new. Somebody who didn't know him. Somebody who had enough to lose to keep the terms of the situation unproblematic.

And then the back door of the mid-tier bistro in Brooklyn had swung open, and the waiter had stepped out into the alleyway, and the problem had acquired a possible solution in the way problems tended to when you had thought about them long enough – not gradually, but all at once.

He sat with it.

The whisky was still in his hand. He put it down.

The caller, Collins, or at least Mr. Collins based on the tone of the caller, had been on the phone for four and a half minutes. Long enough for Alexander to get the lay of the land without needing details. Private lender. Inherited debt. The deadline has already been extended twice. The caller's voice had been audible through the door at intervals, and the caller's voice had the flat tone of someone who had stopped trying to negotiate two calls ago.

So: no bank would touch it, which meant the original terms were ugly enough that a conventional lender wouldn't have written them. The debt had passed through an estate, which meant there was a death involved, probably recent, probably close, given the way Collins's voice had done what it had done on the word father. He'd kept his voice together through the whole call, right up until that word, and then it had done something involuntary and brief, and he'd controlled it again almost immediately.

Almost.

Alexander turned his pen between his fingers.

Collins was, in every visible way, exactly the opposite of what Alexander presented to the world. Warm where Alexander was controlled. Easy with people in a way that looked effortlessly so, which in his experience was probably actually effortlessly so, not a strategy at all but nature. He'd watched him work the crowd for forty minutes before the alley, and what he'd seen was not a performance. It was someone who genuinely liked the people in front of him, which was either naive or rare, and in Alexander's experience those two things were not as different as people assumed.

The board, the investors, the gala circuit – all of them wanted something they couldn't get from Alexander directly: the sense that there was a person in there. Something approachable. Something that laughed.

Collins laughed easily. He'd heard it twice from across the bar.

He turned the pen again.

There were risks. There were always risks. The only thing was whether or not the risks were manageable. An NDA would take care of the terms. A contract would take care of the time and the conditions. The money would be—well, he would work out the exact figure, but based on the phone call, he was fairly confident it was in a range that was functionally trivial to him. Not insignificant, but well within the operating costs.

The larger risk was the human factor. People in financial duress and a contract? Not always predictable. They had the capability to resent the situation, to resent the power imbalance and act in a fashion that was unreliable. He would need someone who was sufficiently prideful to adhere to the conditions and sufficiently practical to avoid acting on the feelings of resentment.

He glanced over to the man at table nine. Golf shirt, complaint about the temperature of the bread, the type of entitled dissatisfaction that seemed to believe the world owed it a certain adjustment. He glanced over to Collins, going over to the man, spending four minutes, coming back to the table and the situation resolved without appearing to have had to exert himself in the least.

Proud. Pragmatic. Enough.

He caught the bartender's eye with a half-raised finger.

The bartender came over. "Another?"

"And a cocktail napkin," Alexander said.