7. Second Shot

7

Second Shot

KINGSTON MOORE

Kingston didn’t wait for Nicole’s reply email before starting to draft another company-wide missive for Sidewinder’s employees.

Yeah, some days, Kingston could be out of touch with the people who worked for the companies owned by Last Chance, Inc.

Jeez, that singular thought conveyed the whole issue. Too many layers existed between Kingston and the people who worked for him.

The whole corporate structure was like shouting through fifty layers of asbestos insulation. No wonder the message was muffled.

And no wonder Sidewinder employees were now holding war councils and deciding whether to abandon ship.

If Sidewinder’s staff simply packed their desks and left, taking their institutional knowledge, sector expertise, and product ideas with them, Kingston’s chance to win The Shark’s bet would evaporate in his palms.

Intellectual property companies like Sidewinder were only as good as their innovators and pipelines. They were essentially idea factories, and half-finished projects were worthless.

Any generic company could cobble together a lump on the end of a stick that approximated a golf club and sell it for cheap on the internet. The precise metallurgy in Sidewinder’s golf club heads and the specific fiberglass composition of their clubs’ shafts made them special, and special made them sought-after, and sought-after made them expensive.

And all that made the company profitable.

Kingston needed to staunch the bleeding of employees at Sidewinder quickly.

And yet, as Last Chance’s private jet streaked through the sky and he stared at the blank page on his laptop screen, no matter what he wrote, it sounded like what Nicole would call “more venture capitalist bull hockey.”

He stared at the glowing rectangle, deleting anything he dared write, as they flew over Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New York and then landed at White Plains, a regional airport in Westchester County, New York, that was friendly to the private planes belonging to those who worked in New York City or affluent western Connecticut, both less than an hour away by car.

As he disembarked down the staircase to the tarmac, he yelled back to the pilot, “Has the plane been reserved for tomorrow?”

The shout came back, “No, sir. The schedule is clear until next week.”

“Turn it around. We’re going back to California tomorrow morning. Schedule take-off for six.”

Kingston did not acknowledge the leap of his heart at the thought of seeing Nicole Lamb, bantering with her, standing close to her in elevators or the anteroom of her lab so soon.

He especially did not look at the fact that he was gleaning information from her about her friends as he pretended to be someone other than the evil venture capitalist who’d bought her company and held all their livelihoods hanging from a puppet string between his fingers.