Kitabı oku: «Beyond Business», sayfa 4

Chapter Six

Helen arrived at Shabu Hachi two minutes early for her 8:00 p.m. meeting with Ichiro Kobayashi, of the media conglomerate TAKA Corporation.

The restaurant hostess led Helen to the table where Ichiro Kobayashi and another man waited for her.

She smiled and bowed slightly, holding out a business card bearing her information in both English and Japanese to Kobayashi. He handed her one in return, likewise in English and Japanese, and though his manner was nothing short of courteous, she had the distinct sense that he was unhappy at having to deal with a woman instead of a man.

She repeated the process with the other man and felt the same sense of disconcertion from him.

His card said he was Chion Kinjo and he worked in acquisitions for TAKA, along with Kobayashi. His card listed offices in Tokyo, Kyoto and Shizuoka.

TAKA was a huge corporation.

It was distinctly possible that Helen was in over her head. She just needed to make sure she didn’t let on that she felt that way.

She put the cards in her pocket, then took out a small ornament she’d purchased from a Chicago artisan and gave it to Kobayashi as a souvenir of Chicago. It was customary, but she also hoped he would keep it and be reminded that this was a town he liked and wanted to return to.

“This is for you,” she said. “It’s a token of thanks and, I hope, a happy reminder of our beautiful city.”

He turned it in his hand and gave a nod of approval. “Very lovely. The detail is magnificent.”

Helen breathed one small sigh of relief. So far, so good, given the fact that they would rather have been dealing with her late husband than with her.

Kobayashi indicated she should sit next to him, which she took as a good sign. The moment they were seated, a waitress brought water to the table and, after a brief exchange with Kinjo in Japanese, filled their glasses, bowed and left the table.

“I’ve taken the liberty of suggesting a variety of foods from the eastern region of our country,” Kobayashi said to Helen. “I hope that’s agreeable to you?”

“Indeed.” Helen nodded. “It’s not often one gets to take a culinary tour like this with a native. I look forward to trying your selections.”

This seemed to please Kobayashi. He gave a polite smile then leaped right into business. “I’m sorry to hear of your husband’s death,” he said. “I would have liked to have met him.”

Had George been alive, there was no way he would have considered talking to these men about a merger. He would sooner have driven the company into bankruptcy.

In fact, he all but had.

“He was a good man,” she said, swallowing the lie as smoothly as a tall glass of lemonade.

“As far as his company is concerned, my associate and I have grave concerns about the recent performance of Hanson Media.”

Helen nodded. “I understand. However, a comparative study would show that American media companies are all undergoing growing pains right now.”

“Growing pains?” he repeated.

Shoot, she’d meant to avoid idioms. “Difficulty in a changing market,” she explained. “Culturally speaking, things are changing rapidly in the United States, and a lot of news outfits have been hit hard trying to strike a balance between news, information and entertainment.”

“Does that not make this a risky investment?”

“No, that makes this a savvy investment.” Helen steeled her nerve. It was going to take a lot of confidence for her to pull this one off. “The reason for the growing pains in the media industry is that the growth is so rapid. Any investment made today will be multiplied tenfold within just a few years.”

“Then why are you selling interest in the company?” Kinjo asked shrewdly.

She leveled her gaze on him. “Because I want Hanson Media Group to be heard around the world—” she cocked her head “—and I believe you want the same for TAKA. Together, Hanson and TAKA would be a very, very powerful force in world media.”

The two men maintained masks of impassive consideration. Not one readable emotion so much as flickered across either one of their faces.

“You wish to maintain some control over Hanson Media Group?” Kobayashi asked.

Helen turned her gaze to him and leveled it. “I’m looking for a merger, Mr. Kobayashi, not a takeover.”

The men exchanged glances.

“We are not in need of saving,” Helen added, although it was as preposterous as a drowning victim trying to negotiate with a lifeguard before accepting help. “We are in want of power. We believe that with TAKA we can achieve that. For both our companies.”

“TAKA is already powerful,” Kobayashi said in a clipped voice. “It is my impression that that is why you approached us with this offer.”

She wanted to point out that it was a proposal more than an offer. Characterizing it as an offer made it sound as if she were willing to sacrifice Hanson Media Group completely, and she wasn’t.

But Helen knew it didn’t make sense to argue with the man, particularly since Kobayashi wasn’t the person ultimately making the decision. Better to play nice and try and work up their interest. “TAKA could be more powerful,” she said, smiling confidently.

Kobayashi didn’t answer that directly, but the short breath he took before speaking again gave him away. He wasn’t willing to walk away.

He was at least interested.

“There is one concern we have, which you have not addressed,” he said to her.

“What’s that?” Apprehension nibbled at Helen’s nerves. Were they going to throw a curve ball her way?

“Hanson Media Group appears to have a growing liability in the radio division. We believe this is endangering any investment advantages.”

The radio division was turning out to be more trouble than Helen had anticipated. But after all the time she had spent longing for more contact with George’s children, she wasn’t about to offer one of them the opportunity to help the company then snatch it away.

Besides, she had faith in Evan. He didn’t have a lot of nine-to-five business experience, but he was smart as a whip. And he had a good sense of what people in their company’s most desirable demographic wanted.

“I’ve just hired new staff to head the radio division, including my late husband’s son, Evan.” She smiled, hoping her confidence in Evan shone through, rather than the occasional uncertainty she felt as George Hanson’s widow.

“It is our understanding that he is intending to change your programming to what you call ‘shock jock’ programs, specifically that of a Len Doss, who has already cost other broadcasting companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in Federal Communications Commission fines.”

Helen was surprised that Kobayashi had this information, which should’ve been classified. But she trusted Evan and Meredith to do what was best for the company.

“Hanson Broadcasting hasn’t made any commitments to Mr. Doss. It is Evan’s full intention to investigate the possibility thoroughly and make an educated decision based on the balance of risks and gains.” She gave her brightest smile. “And if Evan Hanson decides that hiring Mr. Doss is in the company’s best interest, I have absolute faith in him.”

“Is that so?”

She nodded, and she meant it. Evan knew what appealed to young men his age more than she or Kobayashi did, that she was certain of. “Believe me, the division is in excellent hands.”

Kobayashi looked dubious. “Are you able to prove that?”

“Our numbers for the next quarter should bear it out.” She took a steadying breath. “Believe me, Mr. Kobayashi, nothing is standing in the way of Hanson Media and nationwide success.”

Spying was such an ugly word.

Meredith preferred to think of herself as brokering information that would benefit all parties involved.

She was an investigator, not a corporate spy.

Still, as she crept around the offices of Hanson Media Group by the fluorescent semilight of 2:30 a.m., jumping at every tiny noise, she felt like a spy. A sneak.

A liar.

Yes, she was doing what her employer had hired her to do. This was, in reality, her job. And she’d do it well; she always did. But this time it was personal, and that made all the difference. Instead of gathering sensitive corporate information from one company and handing it over to another, she was gathering sensitive information about Hanson Media—a name that had invoked various strong and conflicted feelings in her for over a decade—and providing it to a company that potentially wanted to take over and push the Hansons out entirely.

Meredith didn’t know what her employer’s ultimate goal for the company was: it wasn’t her job to know.

It was her job to collect pertinent information and pass it along to her boss.

The ignorance of what would then happen because of it should have been bliss.

She wouldn’t let her trepidation stop her, though. It was just raw emotion, and this job had no room for emotion. Emotion was a liar. It made a person believe things that might not be true. Whatever she felt, she needed to soldier on and get the job done.

Just as she’d always done.

So she proceeded. Her heart pounded with the fear that someone—some weary soul who wanted to get his work done before taking his family to Disney World, or some ambitious soul who wanted to impress his boss with work done early—would show up around one of the quiet corners.

But the only sound was the hum of the building air conditioner, whooshing cold air through miles of air ducts.

Meredith went to David Hanson’s office first. With any luck she’d find everything she needed there and she wouldn’t have to dig around in anyone else’s files.

With a quick glance to make sure no one was standing in the shadows watching her, she turned on his computer to look for the files he’d told her about earlier in the week.

“You can see our recent performance history broken down by day, week, month and year,” he’d said, proud of a former administrative assistant’s elaborate spreadsheets. “It’s like forensic science. I can tell you how many newspapers were sold in lower Manhattan by 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, January 13. I can tell you how many people listened to Garrett Pinchon’s Gospel Hour every Sunday morning from 1998 to last November.”

This was just the kind of information her boss wanted to look at.

When the operating system on David’s computer came up, she typed in the password she’d watched him enter earlier.

Bubby.

Whatever that meant.

The system beeped and rattled through the rest of its processes and produced a desktop background photo of David’s wife, Nina, and his kids—Zach and Izzy, he’d told her proudly—smiling at the camera and giving Meredith a twinge of guilt.

Pushing the negative thoughts away, Meredith quickly maneuvered her way through the system, finding the files David had alluded to earlier. She zipped them into a single file, then saved them to a thumb drive she’d put into a USB port. Once upon a time this had been the stuff of CIA espionage. Nowadays, every college student in North America could carry the equivalent of every paper they’d written since elementary school on a device no bigger than a child’s thumb.

It worked for Meredith, who was currently saving spreadsheets that would have sucked up all the memory and then some on an older computer. Even now it wasn’t an instantaneous process. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the desktop while the large files took their time being converted and transferred.

At one point Meredith thought she heard a sound like a cough in the distance. Immediately her hand flew to the monitor button, and she turned it off, waiting breathlessly in the dark to see if a security guard or, worse, another employee would come to investigate the quiet hum of David’s hard drive as it did her bidding.

She waited a good five minutes in the dark, holding her breath nearly the entire time. Finally, thinking it must have been her imagination, she crept to the door and peered around the corner, down the hall. She braced herself for a shock.

Nothing.

With a sigh of profound relief, she went back to David’s office. The computer had finished saving. She pocketed the thumb drive, erased her virtual footsteps on the system and shut the computer down.

Still cautious, she listened with the paranoid awareness of a lone wolf at night as she made her way through the maze of halls.

She saw no one. Heard no one. But she had the most disquieting feeling that someone else was there. Maybe it was surveillance cameras. Or building security out in the main hall. Or the constant hum of countless computers hibernating or showing Star Wars screensavers to no one.

For one crazy instant Meredith thought about going to Evan’s office. Something about the still of the night and some long-dormant knot of emotions called her there. As if she could go and breathe him in … and breathe him out. And maybe get rid of the memories that haunted her still, once and for all.

But there was no time for that. She’d done what she needed to do and now she needed to get the heck out of the building before anyone figured her out.

She opened the main door and, after a surreptitious glance out into the hallway, she stepped away, letting the door to Hanson Media Group close harder than she’d intended.

It was a careless mistake, but it didn’t matter. She’d proven to herself time and again that there was no one there.

No one but the ghosts of a man who once meant the world to her and whose name now meant only a biweekly paycheck, excellent health and dental insurance and a dull ache in her heart that she almost couldn’t bear.

Chapter Seven

Evan Hanson woke to a bang.

He sat bolt upright in the converted sofa bed before he had even a moment to think, his body tensed and ready for fight or flight. For one crazy, disconcerting moment he couldn’t remember where he was, then it came back to him. He was sleeping in his office. Unable to commit to staying in Chicago—or even admit to himself that he’d come back—he’d been camping out in the office, using the executive washroom for bathing and either eating out or ordering food in.

What point would there be in getting an apartment to keep a job that he knew wasn’t going to last long? He was no ace executive but he could see the writing on the wall—Hanson Media Group was going down. If he could do anything to help stop it, he was willing to give it a hundred percent, but at the same time he wasn’t going to bet his life that it would work out. Not that he wanted to come out and say that to anyone still working there.

Either way, there was no way he was going to be in Chicago for the rest of his life.

He missed the sun of Majorca. The fresh regional produce he’d come to enjoy picking up at sunny outdoor markets across Europe. Already he felt like one more quickie takeout meal would kill him.

Helen’s hopes for the company were admirable. Noble, even. But impossible. Anyone could see that. Offices that used to be filled with enthusiastic employees, reflecting the prosperity of what was once one of the most powerful media groups in the United States, were now half empty. There was little laughter, less water cooler talk, and almost no optimism on the faces of the employees he saw every day.

Most of Hanson’s best employees had left a while back, knowing their résumés would look better if they reflected tenure at a successful company than if they showed a tenacious grip on a ship that was going down faster than the Titanic. It might not stay down—he was fairly sure some other company would snatch it up at a bargain price—but it was going to go down long enough for those onboard to suffer. Unless they were brave enough to hold on to their stock options until the price went up.

But from what he was hearing around the office, most people weren’t. The general consensus was “get out while you can.”

So what the heck was Meredith Waters doing here?

The Meredith he’d known was far too savvy to align herself with a losing cause.

And honestly, it would have suited him a whole lot better not to have her around. She was a distraction.

A major distraction.

Hell, Meredith’s ghost had haunted him for years, her memory floating around the outskirts of his consciousness more frequently than he liked to admit. He didn’t always see it, but often, late at night, when it was just him and his thoughts alone in a room, it was Meredith’s voice that spoke to him.

Which was nuts, because he knew she had to hate him by then. He knew that she wasn’t lying in another bed across the ocean, thinking the same thoughts. And he was fairly certain that she had moved on to a much better and more reliable prospect.

Someone he could never live up to.

He’d spent a lifetime feeling as though he couldn’t live up to his loved ones’ expectations. For a long time it was his failure in his father’s eyes that had disturbed him the most. One would have thought after the snub in the reading of the will that his feeling of failure toward his father would have grown even deeper, but something in him had snapped. Somehow—by some miracle—he had stopped caring what his father thought.

And for a brief but glorious time he’d enjoyed the feeling of not caring what anyone thought.

Then Meredith had appeared. And suddenly who he was as a man, and what she thought of him, mattered more than ever.

And that was what was distracting him the most. It was going to be hard to get her out of his mind: he knew that the moment he first saw her.

He had spent his life since Meredith dating a series of women who were ill-suited for him. He preferred it that way. A fling was one thing, but he’d felt love before and he didn’t ever want to feel it again. And he’d definitely avoided anyone who reminded him at all of Meredith. It was too painful.

At first it was a conscious effort, but soon it had become a habit. He dated blondes. He dated redheads. Deep black hair was fine.

But he never dated girls with that rich, chestnut-colored hair, or pale Irish skin, or laughing green eyes.

He thought of her, and how she had always applied herself completely to every task, whether it was studying for a history exam or helping a friend fill out a college application, or simply making that amazing sour-cream bread she used to make.

He doubted any of the women he had dated in the past decade could make their own breakfast, much less their own bread.

But he couldn’t afford to make those comparisons now, or think of the things he had once loved about Meredith. Particularly now, when they were laboring through this frigid situation they had found themselves in.

Yet even while part of him resisted their new business relationship, he knew she would do the job well. He knew if anyone could help him succeed, it would be Meredith.

And they’d agreed that that was what they were going to do. They were going to work together and make the business succeed. Regardless of what had happened or not happened between them in the past.

The past was dead.

The future was short, at least here at Hanson Media.

All he needed to do was whatever he could to bring about the success of the radio division, then he could get the hell out of Chicago.

His thoughts returned to Lenny Doss. Sure, the guy was a bit of a renegade. He was definitely notorious. But Evan had faith that Lenny could keep his nose clean as far as the FCC regulations went. Lenny was brash, Lenny was bold, Lenny was crude, but Lenny was not stupid.

And he was popular.

Unable to sleep, Evan went to his desk and booted up his computer to check his e-mail. That seemed to be Lenny’s preferred method of communication, so Evan decided he’d write to the guy and ask if he’d made a decision about the contract Evan had offered him.

Amidst what looked like a hundred spam messages offering everything from investment opportunities to physical enhancement, Evan found an e-mail from Lenny himself.

To: ehanson@hansonmediagroup.com

From: ossmanhimself@lennydoss.com

Subject: You’ve got competition, Bud!

Yo man! DigiDog Satellite Radio has given me a pretty sweet offer. You willing to up yours by 10% with a three-year guarantee? That’s the only way you’ll get the Doss Man. LD

Evan muttered an oath.

He quickly typed DigiDog into a search engine. It turned out they were an up-and-coming satellite company and they were paying big bucks to acquire high-profile talent—which could certainly define Lenny Doss—as well as high-end music catalogs. A quick scan of the projected programming showed that DigiDog had expended a lot of money already on what was really an uncertain venture.

Lenny Doss’s name, however, did not come up in a search of DigiDog. Not even in tangen-tially related articles in which programming directors talked about their dream lineups. So the question of whether anyone had actually approached Lenny Doss with a deal wasn’t necessarily answered. They might have, but then again, it could have been a ploy on Lenny’s part to work up Hanson Media’s enthusiasm for him.

The problem was that Evan couldn’t be sure which it was. And Evan was convinced that Lenny Doss was the first and most important step toward success for Hanson Broadcasting. He was sure of it.

After just several minutes’ consideration, he came up with a plan.

“I’m taking Lenny Doss out for drinks tonight and you need to come with us and convince him to sign on with Hanson,” Evan said to Meredith later that morning.

What he didn’t say was please, though the word repeated itself in his mind.

“What? You’re joking, right?”

“Nope. Dominick’s on Navy Pier. Seven-thirty or so.” He could already picture her there, in the soft light of Dominick’s, wearing some-thing—anything—other than her conservative work clothes.

“And you want me to come with you,” she said incredulously, watching his brown eyes for signs that he was just pulling her leg. Especially given the heated conversation they’d already had about the wisdom of hiring Lenny Doss.

“Yes, I do,” Evan said, straight-faced. She could always tell when he was joking, because even though he could keep his mouth still he always got a hint of a dimple on the left side. She used to think it was adorable.

There was no dimple now.

He wasn’t kidding.

“Why would I do that, Evan?” she asked. “Why would I go out and actively try to hire a guy like that?”

“Because you know I want to bring him on board.”

“And you know I’m adamantly against it.”

“And you know you’re wrong about that.”

“I do not!”

“Well, I do.” He took her by the arm and led her to his office, saying, “Technically, I’m your boss and you need to do what I ask you to.”

She wrenched free of his grasp and said, “Yeah, well, technically, I’m not working for your department, so you have to clear this kind of thing with your stepmother, and I think if she reviewed both sides of this issue, she’d be inclined to agree with me.”

“Not if she looked at the facts.”

“What facts could possibly condone what he’s done?” Meredith wanted to know.

Evan stopped walking and looked at her. “Nothing can condone what he’s done, but his statistics are impressive and that makes him worth considering, even if you don’t like his past.”

“It’s his future I’m concerned with.”

They rounded the corner into Evan’s office and he said, “That’s why you need to consider all the facts, not just the Internet gossip you’ve looked up.”

She shot him a look of disagreement, but he was right. She’d known as soon as he’d mentioned Lenny Doss’s name that the guy was a ticking time bomb, so she’d gone online looking for evidence that proved her right, not evidence that proved her wrong.

Apparently Evan had done the opposite.

As usual.

“You’ve got to look at the statistics here.” He sat her down in his chair and leaned across her to type an Internet address into his computer. “Check out the numbers on WRFK,” he said, pointing at a chart on the computer screen. “This is about the time they moved from a regular news format to talk radio with Lenny Doss.”

Meredith leaned forward and looked, taking the mouse in hand and moving around the chart a bit to get a more detailed picture. “What month did they hire him?” she asked, concentrating on the demographics and the charted increase in listeners.

“February.” He pointed. “Right there.”

“Mmm-hmm.” She clicked on the date and checked for the entire programming schedule, to see if there was another reason that could account for all or some of the increase. “They also had religious programming on Sundays at that time,” she pointed out half-heartedly. Religious programming virtually never pulled in big ratings.

“Check the ratings,” Evan said, his voice ringing with smug confidence at what she’d find.

She checked. The religious programming had abysmal ratings. Worse than most. “Oh.”

“Exactly.”

Meredith frowned, looking for any evidence there might be that Evan was assigning too much credit to this one man. “When did they fire him?”

“They didn’t.”

“No?” Darn it, she should have armed herself with more specific information before meeting with Evan about this.

“He left for Gemini Broadcasting here.” He pointed at the computer screen again, leaning so close across Meredith that she could smell not only his cologne but the achingly familiar scent of his skin. “In November of the following year.”

“And the ratings went down,” Meredith observed, so distracted by the close proximity of Evan that she almost couldn’t concentrate on the matter at hand.

Evan, on the other hand, didn’t appear to be having any such problem being close to Meredith. He gave a chipper nod, his face devoid of anything other than triumph that Meredith appeared to be seeing the light, now that he was shining it directly in her eyes. “The ratings went way down.”

She went back to the search engine and typed in Gemini Broadcasting, just as Evan had a week earlier, and typed in the pertinent dates.

He waited a moment while she studied the higher ratings before saying, “See what I mean?”

She clicked off and rolled back in the chair to face him. “Yes, I do.”

“But you’re conflicted because, while you like what he could potentially do for the company, you don’t like what he stands for,” Evan said, trying to read the unaccustomed sternness in her eyes and her posture. Every time he got anywhere near her she tensed up and resisted whatever he was saying.

If she’d shown any form of emotion at all—which she hadn’t—he’d have thought her reaction to him was personal.

As it was, he could only conclude that she hated Lenny Doss, or what he stood for, so much that she felt angry at Evan for even wanting to hire him and for pointing out that there were good things to be considered in the process.

“Right,” she admitted, taking a short breath and moving slightly away from where Evan stood. The chair she was sitting in knocked against the desk behind her. “But as I’ve said before, I’m also hesitant about his potential as a liability. That’s really important,” she added.

“Fine. Check the e-mails he’s written to me about that,” Evan said, switching to another program and pulling up a folder in which he’d stored his correspondence with Lenny Doss. He kept a little more distance this time, not so much because he was afraid to get near her because of her reaction, but because he didn’t want to see her react by recoiling again.

If she did, he’d know it was on purpose and not just some small coincidence, and he didn’t want to know that. “Read them all, if it will make you feel better,” he said, stepping back and going to the small refrigerator under the picture window to take out a bottle of spring water and give himself something to do other than just stand there gazing at Meredith and trying to figure out how the years had only made her prettier instead of older.

“Okay.” She looked back at the screen. “Just give me a couple of minutes.”

He hadn’t thought she’d really do that, but it was nice to be away from her scrutiny for a moment, even though it seemed like forever that he stood there waiting for her to read through the e-mails.

One by one, date by date, she clicked through, stopping every once in a while to make a note on the small pad on his desk.

He noticed that her handwriting was still the same messy scrawl it had been in high school. Something about that small fact made him feel a little warmer inside.

A little more at home.

But that was all she gave in terms of comforting vibes. The rest of her was completely cool and impersonal. He tried to read the expression on her face, but though the face itself was undeniably familiar, some of the expressions she wore now were completely new to him. He had only his experience with people to go by, and he got the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that, for Meredith, this was all just standard business.

Finally she finished scrolling through the notes and turned the chair around to face Evan. Her green eyes were bright, probably from the sudden light change of looking from the computer monitor to Evan, and she said, “Okay, I will admit I kind of see your point.”

He couldn’t believe his ears. “You agree with me?”

“Wait a minute.” She held up a slender hand. The left one, actually.

The one he’d once thought would wear his wedding and engagement rings.

“I didn’t say I agree with you,” she went on, blissfully ignorant of his disconcerting thoughts about their past. “There’s still plenty we disagree about.”

That hadn’t always been the case.

“But I am saying,” she continued, “that I see your point about his ratings and I understand why his contrition has given you confidence in potentially hiring him.”