Out of the Shadows 001

An AI-assisted MIDNIGHT'S WAR novel

CHAPTER ONE: The Dance of the Unicorn

Elliott Grahame surveyed the spreadsheet with great satisfaction. The top line was increasing, the bottom line was more than healthy despite the recent operational expenditures, and the twelve-month trend was precisely in line with the shape of the ramp that the investment bankers were expecting. He didn’t turn around at the sound of his clear glass door being opened behind him, but pointed at the screen instead.

“And that, my friend, is what a billion-dollar company looks like!”

“You think we’re ready to push the IPO?”

“We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot!” He turned around and grinned at his CFO and executive vice-president, Immanual Boschwitz. “You know as well as I do that the stars aren’t going to align forever, Immy.”

“I know better than you do how many accounting gymnastics we had to go through to give you that perfect little ramp,” Immy said dourly. But he was smiling as he took off his glasses and polished them with his blue-striped power tie. “As much as it pains me to say it, you’re right. We’ve already had a few quiet inquiries from Goldman, North Bay Advisors has called twice requesting to pitch, and I’m pretty sure that Sausalito Partners are acting as a stalking horse for Blackrock.”

“Blackrock? We’re going to be rich, Immy! Obscenely rich! Just like I promised.”

“You’ll be obscenely rich, Elliott. My shares are just about enough to make me respectably wealthy.”

Elliott laughed. “A Ferrari and a beach house wouldn’t suit your style anyhow.”

“No, but Deborah wouldn’t object to an oceanview apartment in Miami Beach.”

“So maybe we’ll make that part of your going-public bonus.”

“As your financial advisor, I have to tell you to be careful what you promise your employees,” Immy admonished him and punctuated his words with a wagging finger. “As man with a 25th-year anniversary approaching, I happily accept.”

“Aren’t you the one who taught me that if it’s not in the contract, it never happened!”

“And so the student becomes the master.” Immy slapped him on the shoulder. “Enjoy the moment, Elliott, while it lasts. If I’ve learned one thing from the old lions at the country club, it’s that success is never quite as much fun as it looks from the outside.”

Elliott nodded pensively as his friend and fellow executive exited his office and closed the glass door quietly behind him. So Blackrock was interested, were they? That meant that a one-billion valuation might actually be, as hard as it was to imagine, a conservative estimate!

He picked up a pen from his desk and lovingly ran his finger over the corporate logo it sported, a stylized red HT. HemaTech had been little more than a niggling idea in his head for more than a decade, an irritatingly repetitive notion that there must have been something significant underlying the massive edifice of the Theranos fraud, something so substantive that even in an inoperative form, it had commanded the attention of world-class scientists, bankers, generals, and politicians alike.

Kissinger, Mattis, Nunn, Perry, and Shultz! And as if those big names weren’t illustrious enough, the CEO of Wells Fargo, a U.S. Senator, a CDC director, and an actual member of the Bechtel family who ran one of the biggest construction conglomerates in the world!

The Theranos technology had been seen as so visionary that it brought in more than 700 million in investment, resulting in a ten-billion-dollar valuation and making a very short-term billionaire out of its fraudster founder before generating a single dollar in profit, was entirely forgotten now. And the Theranos name was no longer anything more than a sober warning for the investment community to avoid getting too excited about pie-in-the-sky promises, and more importantly, to refrain from putting the cart ahead of the horse.

But from the moment the fraud was revealed by a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, long before the criminal trial of the responsible parties began, Elliott had rejected the public line that all of those savvy old veterans of wars corporate and real somehow managed to fall for a marginally pretty face combined with an ersatiz-Steve Jobs black turtleneck act. Nor was he convinced that the fact that only two of the board members possessed medical degrees had allowed Elizabeth Holmes to pull the wool over their aged, rheumy eyes.

He also didn’t believe it had been mere greed that motivated twelve men with an average age of eighty to join Holmes’s board of directors. How much more money could an old man who owned part of a $20 billion corporation possibly want, or need? And what could twelve very wealthy and powerful old men, several of whom had a copious amount of innocent blood on their hands, possibly care about making medical tests more efficient and less expensive for the masses? What on Earth could they all have hoped to get out of Theranos?

It was the answer to that last question that provided Elliott with his own vision, the vision that was now going to make him an absurd amount of money before he turned forty.