The First Billion

The bad news had come one week before the IPO was set to begin trading. Luca was in Milwaukee on the fourteenth day of a sixteen-day road trip. He'd just emerged from his thirty-third face-to-face investor meeting, talking up Synertel and its position as a vanguard in Internet transmission technologies. The fund manager evinced interest and promised to put in for 10 percent of the offering. There was talk of Synertel's stock tripling the first day. In Luca's mind, his five-hundred-million stake had already grown to over a billion dollars. His days as a lab rat were near their end, his years of sixteen-hour days, forgone vacations, and forgotten family about to pay off. Ray Luca was as good as a billionaire, and as such qualified to call himself a visionary, a creator, an evangelist of tomorrow.

And then it was gone.

Out of nowhere a team from Lucent bettered the speed of Luca's fiber-optic dynametric switch by two gigaseconds. Two fuckin' gigs! Less time than an atom took to circle a molecule, but an eternity in the world of high-speed Internet transmissions.

Black Jet Securities shelved the offering, Jett Gavallan, its CEO, publicly calling for a reevaluation of Synertel's technology. Investor interest evaporated faster than rain in the Mojave. Luca was fired. His wife, doomed to another go-round as a start-up spouse, said "Screw this" and took the girls to live with her mother in Boston. In the space of seventy-two hours, Ray Luca went from billionaire-to-be to bum-in-training. Unemployed, unwanted, and unloved, dismissed by everyone and everything that had meant something to him, he was as instantly obsolete as his very own fiber-optic switch.

Taking in the agro-fluorescent lights, the soda-stained carpeting, and the chest-high cubicles, he wheezed dejectedly. It was time to get out of this jail.

The thought of escape drew his eyes to the battered Samsonite at his feet. Dropping a hand, he unlatched the silver briefcase and gingerly removed the fax he'd received this morning. Simply holding it made his fingers tingle, his stomach swoon. It was his pass to the big time. His golden E-ticket. His invitation to the major leagues. He reread it for the hundredth time, his eyes tripping over the mention of "Prosecutor General," "Joint Russo-American Task Force on Organized Crime," and "FBI." He planned on spending the entire night calling sources in Europe- reporters for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post- asking if they'd heard anything about Kirov's being arrested or a raid on his offices.

He considered calling Cate Magnus, too. She'd sent him the fax; maybe she could shed some light on what was going on in Russia. He discarded the idea immediately. The rules were clear. Only she was allowed to initiate contact.

"Hi, I'm Cate Magnus," she'd said when he'd picked up the phone at his home on a sultry spring evening hardly four weeks before. "Jerry Brucker at the paper told me it would be worthwhile for us to have a little talk."

"Oh?" He recognized her name, and Brucker was an old pal from M.I.T.

"I've got an interesting piece of news that could do you some good. Mercury Broadband," she whispered. "Take a closer look. I think you'll find something the Private Eye-PO might like to share with his readers."

The next day he'd received an envelope containing the photographs of Mercury's Moscow downlink facility. If her claims sounded sketchy, the Cyrillic letters and twin-headed eagle of the Russian crest stamped on the backs of the photographs did not. A friend had translated the words as "property of the Prosecutor General's office," and Luca had shivered. Next came proof of Mercury's phony purchases from Cisco, then just this morning news of Kirov's impending arrest. If everything Cate Magnus said was true, Mercury wasn't just a scam dog- it was a monumental fraud. An international incident waiting to happen.

Envisioning the Black Jet name on the prospectus, he knew it was meant to be.

"Come on, Jett, just give us some time," he'd pleaded with Gavallan at their last meeting. "Don't cancel the offering. Six months and another round of financing and we'll be in the clear. We'll dust those losers from Lucent."

"Sorry, Ray. I don't think the VC guys would go for it. Six months is a lifetime, you know that. It's tragic. We're all disappointed for you. But unfortunately, this kind of stuff happens."

"Four months," Ray had pleaded, grabbing at Gavallan's sleeve, pawing at him. "I'll double the speed… Come on, Jett. You gotta believe. Synertel can do it."

"So will Lucent, Ray. It's not the speed. You need a new technology."

A new technology. The words had defeated Luca. Four years later, they still did.