Power Play: A Novel Read online

  There was a heavy silence, as Fiona looked from one to the other with an intense and serious gaze. Her expression let no one off the hook. “It’s unthinkable that that should happen here. It’s the first time in my six years at NTA, and I have never had a leak from the boardroom in my entire career. I know it happens, but this is a first for me, and probably for some of you too.” She looked at each of them again, and they all nodded. None of them looked guilty to her, and Harding looked seriously annoyed, as though she were wasting their time, which they all knew she wasn’t. Clearly someone on the board was leaking information, and Fiona intended to find out who it was. She wanted to know as soon as possible, and to get the errant member off the board. It was far too serious an offense to take lightly or ignore.

  “I think we all deserve to know who violated the confidentiality of the board, and so far you all deny responsibility for it. That’s not good enough,” she said severely with fire flashing in her green eyes. “There’s too much at stake here, the health of our company, the stability of our stock. We have a responsibility to our stockholders, and our employees. I want to know who talked to the press, and so should you.” Everyone nodded, and Harding looked bored.

  “Get to the point, Fiona,” Harding Williams cut in rudely. “What are you suggesting? Lie detector tests for the board? Fine, you can start with me. Let’s get this over with, without a ridiculous amount of fuss. There was a leak, we seem to have survived it, and maybe it gives the employees we’re laying off and the public a little warning. I’m not excusing what happened, but maybe it was not an entirely bad thing.”

  “I don’t agree with you. And I think it’s important that we know who did it, and see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Fine. You can have your witch hunt, but I’m warning you that I won’t agree to any illegal methods to determine that. We all know what happened at Hewlett-Packard a few years ago, over the same kind of issue. It nearly tore the company apart, made a spectacle of the board in the press, and its members had no idea illegal methods were being used to investigate them, and the chairman nearly wound up in prison when it was discovered. I’m warning you, Fiona. I don’t intend to go to prison for you or your witch hunt. You can conduct some kind of investigation, but every single procedure had better be legal and aboveboard.”

  “I can assure you it will be,” she said coolly. “I share your concerns. I don’t want a replay of the HP problems either. I contacted several investigative firms, and will submit their names to all of you today. I want a straightforward, entirely legal investigation of all our board members, and myself as well, to discover who is responsible for the leak, since no one is willing to admit to it.”

  “Does it really matter?” he asked, looking bored again. “The word is out, you said you’re doing damage control. It’s not going to change anything if you find out who talked. It might even have been a very clever reporter who figured it out some other way.”

  “That’s not possible, and you know it. And I want to be absolutely certain it won’t happen again. What occurred is completely counter to all our rules of governance, how we run this company and this board,” Fiona said, and the chairman rolled his eyes as soon as she did.

  “For God’s sake, Fiona, it takes more than ‘governance’ to run a board. We all know what the rules are. We waste half our time discussing procedures and inventing new ones to slow us down. I’m amazed you find time to run the company at all. I never wasted all that time during my entire career. We made good decisions and followed through on them. We didn’t fritter away our time making up new rules about how to do it.”

  “You can’t run a corporation like a dictatorship anymore,” she said firmly. “Those days are over. And our stockholders wouldn’t put up with it, as well they shouldn’t. We all have to live by the rules, and stockholders are much better informed and far more demanding than they were twenty or thirty years ago,” she said, and he knew it was true. Fiona was a modern CEO, and lived by all those rules that Harding thought were a waste of time. He criticized Fiona often for it.

  “I’d like a vote on an investigation to find out who the source of the leak was, using legal methods only to get that information.” Fiona turned to the board with her request, and Harding was the first to vote the motion in, just to get it over with, although he made it obvious that he thought it was foolish and a waste of NTA’s money, but he made no opposition to her request. Everyone voted for the investigation of the leak.

  “Satisfied?” he asked her as they left the boardroom together.

  “Yes, thank you, Harding.”

  “And what are you going to do when you find out who it was?” he asked with a mocking look. “Spank them? We have better things to do with our time.”

  “I’ll ask them to resign from the board,” she said in a firm voice and looked him in the eye, and what she saw there was the same contempt she had seen in his eyes for twenty-five years, since Harvard Business School. She knew that in her entire lifetime she would never win his respect and didn’t care. Her career had been phenomenal, no matter what he thought of her.

  The root of Harding’s dislike for her was an old story. She thought of it again after she left him and hurried back to her office, for an afternoon of meetings, that she had to rush for now. The emergency board meeting had taken longer than planned, with their discussions of the investigation, and Harding’s interruptions and caustic comments.

  In Fiona’s first year of Harvard Business School, she had felt inadequate and in over her head, and thought about dropping out many times. She felt less capable than almost all her classmates, most of whom were men, and seemed a great deal more sure of themselves. All she’d had was ambition, and a love of business, which didn’t seem like enough to her, particularly that first year. It had been a hard time for her. Both of her parents had died in a car accident the year before, and she felt completely lost and devastated without them. Her father had encouraged her to do anything she wanted, and she had followed through on her plans to get an MBA even after he and her mother died. Her only support system had been her older sister, who was doing her residency in psychiatry at Stanford, three thousand miles away. Fiona had been frightened and alone at school in Cambridge, and many of her male classmates had been aggressive and hostile to her. And her professors had been indifferent to her.

  Harding had taken a sabbatical from his career that year, and had been talked into teaching at the business school by a classmate of his from Princeton, and Harding had given Fiona a nearly failing grade. Her only reassurance had come from Harding’s old friend Jed Ivory, who had a reputation for doing all he could to help and mentor his students. And he had been incredibly kind to her, and had become her only friend.

  Jed had been separated from his wife then, in a stormy marriage. She had originally been one of his students, and both had been cheating and having affairs for years. He had been quietly negotiating a divorce with her, while separated, when he began helping Fiona, and within a month, they were sleeping with each other, and Fiona fell madly in love with him. She wasn’t aware of it, but it wasn’t unfamiliar ground to him. But it caused talk around the business school nonetheless. And Fiona was remotely aware that Harding strongly disapproved. Later, he blamed her for the end of Jed’s marriage, which she had very little if anything to do with. And her affair with Jed ended abruptly at the end of her first year when he was forced to admit to her that he had been involved with another graduate student, in another field, had gotten her pregnant, and had agreed to marry her in June. Fiona was devastated, and spent the summer crying over him.

  In September, when she went back to school, she met David, the man she would eventually marry. And somewhat on the rebound, they got engaged at Christmas, and married when they graduated, and she moved to San Francisco with him, where he was from. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. But the affair with Jed Ivory had left her bruised.

  It had been awkward running into Jed during her second
year at Harvard. He tried to rekindle their relationship several times, although he was married and had an infant son by then, and Fiona managed to avoid him, and never took a class from him again. By then, she knew that his affairs with his students were business school legend, and he had taken advantage of her youth and vulnerability. She had never seen or heard from him again after she graduated, but she knew from others that he had married twice since, always to much younger women. In spite of that, Harding seemed to think he walked on water, and chose to disregard his reputation for having affairs with his students. Harding’s view of Fiona as seductress had never wavered, although she had been the victim and not the culprit. In his old boy mentality, always partial to men, he still believed that she had broken up Jed’s marriage, and had treated her like a slut ever since. He never hesitated to hint darkly at her previously “racy” reputation while at Harvard, and Fiona offered no explanation. She didn’t feel she owed anyone that, and had long since come to view her affair with Jed Ivory as an unfortunate accident that happened during her student days, in the ghastly year after her parents died, which he had taken full advantage of as well.

  Fiona had nothing to apologize for, but Harding was still blaming her for the affair twenty-five years later, despite her astounding career, seventeen-year marriage and consummately respectable life. If anything, it seemed ridiculous to her, and she couldn’t be bothered explaining it or defending it to him. She had been dismayed to find that Harding was the chairman of the board when she took the job as CEO of NTA in Palo Alto, and he hadn’t been pleased either, but there was no denying her remarkable skills, impressive work history, and sheer talent, so he voted her in. He would have looked like a fool if he didn’t. The entire board said they were lucky to get her, and he didn’t want to admit to his personal grudge against her. And Fiona had felt she could overlook his unpleasant style with her. She had, except for the headaches she got after every board meeting. She tossed back the two Advils and took a sip of water as soon as she got back to her desk. She had a thousand things to attend to that afternoon, and gave the green light for the investigation of the board. The firm they hired to handle it hoped to have the information about the source of the leak in six or eight weeks.

  By the time Fiona walked to her car in the parking lot at six o’clock, she had had a full day. She stopped at the white Mercedes station wagon she drove, unlocked it, took off her suit jacket and laid it on the backseat, and rolled up the sleeves of her white silk shirt. Without thinking, her actions were the same as her male colleagues before they got in their cars to drive home. She was thinking about everything she’d done that afternoon, and the board meeting, as she drove out of the parking lot and headed home. It was a beautiful May afternoon, the sun was still warm, and she could hardly wait to get home to Portola Valley, where she swam in the pool every day when she got home. She could have had a car and driver, and no one would have criticized her for it, but she preferred to drive herself. She had never been enamored with the superficial perks of the job. She used the corporate jet when she traveled around the country for meetings or to visit plants. But she had never wanted a chauffeur, and enjoyed the time to unwind on the way home. The time between office and home had been particularly useful to her while the kids were still at home. Now, for the past year, she came back to an empty house every night, which was painful, but she brought work with her, and more often than not, she was so exhausted by the time she finished her nightly reading that she fell asleep on her bed with the lights on, fully dressed. She worked hard, but she had always been there for her children, despite her demanding career.

  She had always believed that you could have a family and career if you were willing to put in the time, and she had done it to her children’s satisfaction, even if not her husband’s, who had resented her career from the time she took her first serious job when her son Mark was three. The three years she spent at home with him had been her gift to her son, and she had worked full time, at important jobs, ever since. Both children had never seemed to suffer from it, and her relationship with them was strong even now. As witnessed by her call before the board meeting, Alyssa called her mother frequently, on any subject, for advice or just to chat. Fiona cherished the warm, open relationship she had with her, and her son Mark. Her dedication to family and her career had paid off. She had managed to go to school plays, her son’s lacrosse and soccer games, had done Cub Scouts with him, had gone to Alyssa’s ballet recitals, helped with homework, and made Halloween costumes for them at two in the morning.

  Alyssa was now a sophomore at Stanford, and wanted to go to Harvard Business School after she graduated, like her parents. Mark was in graduate school at the Columbia School of Social Work in New York. Unlike his sister and mother, who both had a passion for business, Fiona referred to her son as the family saint. All he wanted was to right the wrongs of the world. And as soon as he finished at Columbia, he wanted to spend time working in an underdeveloped country. He had no interest in business whatsoever. His girlfriend was a medical student, who had spent the previous summer working for Doctors Without Borders in Libya and Kenya, and shared his dreams and altruistic points of view. Fiona loved him for it and was proud of his goals, and Alyssa’s too.

  Fiona considered her career as a mother to be as rewarding, important, and successful as her professional career. And the one area where she felt like a failure was in her marriage to David. Very early on, it had become obvious that it was a disaster, and she had stuck with it for seventeen years nonetheless. She had always wanted to make it work, but David wouldn’t let that happen. He had inherited a modest family business, and was a small-scale entrepreneur. Fiona’s interests had been in major corporations and the business world on a much broader scale. He had wanted her to help him run the family business with him part time once she wanted to go to work, and she had refused, convinced that it would be fertile ground for them to get into bitter battles, with each other and his family, and she was wise enough not to try. And she didn’t say it to him, but she didn’t find his business interesting enough. She much preferred the harder challenges of big corporations and their impact on the world, and the problems they faced, and their far more engaging pursuits. And already with her first job, she had become aware of David’s acute resentment of her success. She came to be the epitome of everything he hated. Not unlike Harding Williams, David used her as an example of everything that was wrong with women in business, and often criticized her for not being at home with their kids, when in fact she was far more present with them than he had ever been. He spent every weekend and two days during the week playing golf with his friends, while she rushed home from meetings to be with her children.

  Fiona had covered all the bases, and tried to be a good wife to David, and he criticized her nonetheless. And the final showdown had come when she was offered the job as CEO of NTA. She had been stunned when he demanded that she turn down the job or he would leave her. Alyssa had been thirteen and Mark sixteen then, and she realized that it had nothing to do with them, despite what David claimed. It was all about his ego, and a chance to deprive her of the realization of her ultimate dream. After lengthy debate and careful consideration, Fiona had taken the job and David moved out that week in a rage. She was sad about it at first, but in the six years since, she realized that it was the best thing that had happened to her. No one was criticizing her, battering her emotionally, putting her down, telling her what was wrong with her and what a bad wife and mother she was, or making her feel guilty for her success in the corporate world. She had never made a secret of her ambitions to him right from the beginning, but she had just gotten too big for him. Or maybe he was too small for her.

  In the end, although she felt guilty about it, and didn’t say it to her children, it had been a relief when he left her. And it was lonely at times, especially now that the children were gone, although Alyssa dropped in often from Stanford, and Mark came home for school vacations, but she loved how peaceful her life had been for
the last six years. Sometimes she thought it would be nice to have a man in her life, but so far that hadn’t happened, and she was happy with her work and her kids, happier than she’d ever been with David. She realized now how bitter he had been, and how angry, and how much he had resented her for most of their marriage. It was a comfort and refreshing not to be the target of his envy and rages anymore.

  He had remarried two years after the divorce, to a very nice woman who suited him much better, but in spite of it, he was still furious with Fiona, and expressed it every chance he got, particularly to their children. David’s anger at her appeared to be an eternal flame. And his wife Jenny had the same negative feelings about the corporate world that he did. Her first husband had committed suicide when his career fell apart and he lost his job over an accounting scandal that could have been easily resolved. She married David within the year, made him a good home, had never worked, and hung on his every word. And although he was only four years older than Fiona, he had retired at fifty, a year after he remarried, and he and Jenny spent most of their time traveling the world, while Fiona continued working, loved what she was doing, and maintained her position in the stratosphere of the corporate world. As far as she could see, she and David were both happy now, which seemed like a vast improvement to her, and she was surprised and disappointed that he continued to refuse to forgive her for her failings, and be friends. He just didn’t have it in him. And their children were disappointed about it too. It was almost impossible to have both their parents in one room, without their father making barbed comments about their mother, and saying something overtly nasty to her. Fiona refused to stoop to his level and get into his games, and usually chatted with Jenny instead about her latest creative project or their most recent trip. She thought Jenny was a good woman and perfect for him.