Remember When

'You'd have been right, except that Cole Harrison has a very special gift —in addition to tenacity,' Dick Rowse said grudgingly as he poured scotch from the conference room's bar into his glass.

'What gift is that?'

'Foresight,' he said. 'He has an extraordinary ability to foresee a trend, a change, a need, and to be ready to capitalize on it long before most of his competition.'

'You don't sound as if you admire that,' Gloria said, puzzled.

'I admire the talent, but not the man,' Rowse said bluntly. 'Whatever he does, he does it with some sort of intricate hidden agenda in mind. He drives the Wall Street analysts crazy trying to second-guess him, and they rarely succeed. He drives all of us crazy trying to second-guess him.'

'He sounds like an intriguing man,' Gloria said with an apologetic shrug for her dissenting opinion.

'What makes you think Cole Harrison is a man?' Rowse replied half seriously. 'I have reason to believe he's actually a six-foot-two robot with artificial intelligence in an eight-thousand-dollar suit.' When the other two laughed, he lightened up a little. 'You're laughing, but there's data to support my opinion. He doesn't play golf, he doesn't play tennis, and he's not interested in professional sports or any sort of social life. If he has a friend in the world, no one knows who it is. His former secretary told me the only non-business calls he gets are from women. Women,' Rowse finished with an accusing glance at Gloria, 'all seem to find him fascinating.'

'That shoots down your robot theory right there, Dick,' Corbin joked.

'Not necessarily,' Rowse replied. 'How do we know that the latest robotics technology can't produce a male robot with a—'

'I hate to interrupt this enlightening discussion,' Gloria lied as she stood up and put her glass on the table, 'but I have a job to do, and I'd better get at it. Mr. Harrison may not care about his public image, but it affects the corporation, and we're being paid to enhance it. While he's here today, let's talk him into a press conference about the Cushman deal —future corporate plans, and all that.'

'He won't do it,' Rowse warned as he stood up. 'I've tried.'

'Let's double-team him then and see if the two of us can prevail upon his good sense.'

'He's already turned me down. Maybe you'll have beginner's luck if you try it alone—assuming you can even get in to see him.'

Getting in to see Cole Harrison was much easier than getting his attention, Gloria had realized within moments of being admitted to the chrome-and-glass inner sanctum with its silver-gray carpeting and burgundy suede furnishings.

For the past ten minutes, she had been seated in front of Cole Harrison's desk, trying to convince him to agree to a press conference while he signed documents, talked to his secretary, made several phone calls, and mostly ignored her.

Suddenly his eyes leveled on her. 'You were saying?' he said in the clipped tone of one issuing a command to continue, which of course he was.

'I—' Gloria faltered beneath that cold, assessing gaze, then forged ahead. 'I was trying to explain that a press conference now is not merely helpful, it's vital. The press has already made the Cushman takeover look like a bloodbath. The losers were screaming 'foul' before the game was over—'

'I play to win. I won. They lost. That's all that matters.'

Gloria looked him squarely in the eye and then decided to test her job security. 'According to your opponents, and a lot of people on Wall Street, sir, you play unnecessarily rough, you don't take prisoners. The press has been making you look like some sort of rapacious wolf who enjoys the kill more than the food.'

'That's very colorful, Miss Quigley,' he replied with scathing mockery.

'It's fact, ' she argued, smarting from his snide tone.

'No,' he countered, 'this is fact: Cushman Electronics was founded by a genius six decades ago, but his heirs grew more lazy and more stupid with each successive generation. Those heirs—who happen to make up the board of directors—were born to great wealth, educated in the best schools, and despite the fact that they were letting Cushman, and its shareholders' investments, go down the toilet, they still remained so convinced of their own superiority that they couldn't see what was coming. They couldn't believe that some school chum from their 'old-boy fraternity' wasn't going to step in and rescue them with an infusion of cash that they could squander either on themselves or on fighting off more takeover attempts.

'Instead of that, they lost to me—to an upstart from the wrong side of the social tracks—and it's humiliating to them; it offends all of their cultured sensibilities. That's why they're screaming 'foul.' We weren't engaged in a tea party with polite rituals; we were engaged in a battle. In a battle, there are only winners, and losers, and bad losers.'

Cole waited for her to admit defeat and retreat, but she sat there in stubborn silence, refusing to agree. 'Well?' he demanded after a moment.

'There are ways to fight the battle so that the winner doesn't look like a barbarian, and public relations is the key to that.'

She had a point and Cole knew it, but he didn't particularly appreciate having to face it or admit it. Time and again, as Cole had built his company into a major conglomerate composed of profitable subsidiaries, he'd waged legal and economic battles with complacent aristocrats like the ones on Cushman's board, and each time he'd emerged victorious, he had the feeling that they hated him as virulently for successfully invading their ranks as for taking whatever prize he had wrested from them. It was as if the damage Cole did to their sense of invulnerable superiority was as loathsome to them as the financial damage he did to their bank accounts and stock portfolios.

Personally, Cole found their attitude funny rather than insulting, and he was amused that, when it came down to a corporate battle over the takeover of another company, he was always portrayed as a ruthless marauder swinging a mace, while his targets were innocent victims and his competitors were chivalrous white knights. The real truth was that those courteous knights hired mercenaries in the form of lawyers and accountants and stock analysts to do their 'dirty' fighting and maneuvering behind the scenes; then when their opponent was too weak to put up more than token resistance, they strolled gracefully onto the corporate battlefield wielding a gentlemanly saber. After a brief, symbolic duel, they lifted the blade to their forehead for a courteous salute to their victim, plunged the blade into him, and then strolled off the field, leaving more hired mercenaries to clean up the legal mess and bury the victim.

In contrast to these corporate duelists, Cole was a brawler, a street fighter who was interested only in victory, not in his reputation or in making friends or in showing off his grace and prowess on the battlefield. As a result, he'd acquired many enemies and few friends over the years, along with a reputation for ruthlessness that he partially deserved and one for unscrupulousness that he didn't deserve at all.

None of that bothered him. Lifelong enemies, unjust public accusations, and hard feelings were the dues that one paid for success. Cole paid his without complaint, as did those other determined visionaries who, like him, had managed in the last two decades to harvest vast personal fortunes from soil that was no longer fertile, in an economic climate that was considered unhealthy.

'They said the same thing about Matt Farrell and Intercorp in the late eighties,' Cole reminded her pointedly. 'Now he's the Prince Charming of Wall Street.'

'Yes, he is. And part of that is due to some very good publicity that resulted from his tumultuous marriage to a well-loved heiress and from a more open, public profile.'

Cole glanced toward the doorway and nodded a greeting to the corporation's head counsel, John Nederly, who was being ushered into the office by Cole's secretary. Gloria assumed her time with Cole Harrison was at an end, and she stood up, defeated.

'When do you want to have the press conference?'

For a split second, Gloria couldn't believe her ears. 'I— As soon as possible. How about tomorrow? That's enough time to set it up.'

He was signing more papers handed to him by his secretary, but he glanced up at her and shook his head. 'I'm leaving for Los Angeles tonight, and I'll be there until Wednesday.'

'What about Thursday?'

He shook his head again. 'I'll be in Jeffersonville, Thursday and Friday, handling a family matter.'