Free Power Down by Ben Coes Page A

continue to sleep at night. But no, it isn’t just about the money. For me, it never was. It never will be. Of course, if I didn’t make money for the shareholders of this company, the board of directors would fire me. But so far they haven’t needed to. We’ve done pretty well. You know, I think sometimes it’s the guys like Nick and me who don’t care so much about the money that end up being pretty good at making it.”
    Marks paused and smiled. He waited a few moments, looking at the crowd of reporters, then back to the young reporter.
    “I fought in Vietnam,” Marks said, looking past the wall of cameras and reporters to the young woman. “I almost died there. An Irishman from Boston named Henry O’Brien saved my life. I vowed if I ever had a son, I wouldn’t let him die in a meaningless war. I had one child. A son. We named him Henry. I used to call him Hank, God bless his soul.”
    Marks paused. He walked back to the center of the stage. He turned back toward the reporters, who remained silent, mesmerized by Marks, waiting to see where he would take this clearly unrehearsed moment.
    “On August 22, 2006, Hank was killed in Iraq, shot in the chest in a meaningless war, all because the rest of us needed gasoline for our cars. I failed to protect my son. America failed to protect its sons and daughters.I swore then, if I ever had the ability, I’d do whatever I could to make it so nobody else had to collect their son’s remains like I did, picking them up at the airport in a wooden box because the rest of us need our gasoline.”
    The KKB-Anson merger was the lead story on every network that evening. Badenhausen’s positioning worked, and so did Marks’s answer. The emphasis on the KKB-Anson deal wasn’t about the financial terms of the transaction. The proposed merger wasn’t discussed in terms of cost synergies, putting two companies together in order to find duplicative cost centers, like employees, who would then be terminated. The deal had a larger logic to it, a marriage of complementary energy sources, and of supply and demand. But most of all, it was about American energy independence. Several members of Congress, and even the president of the United States, hailed the deal. Marks was celebrated as an American hero.
    But in another office high in the Manhattan skyline, the mood was neither patriotic nor happy. In the penthouse floor of a sterile-looking steel and black glass skyscraper at Fifty-first Street and Madison Avenue, the announcement of the KKB-Anson merger was not only expected, it was long overdue.
    A young man not more than thirty-six years old sat behind his desk staring at the flat-screen television in front of him.
    Alexander Fortuna was handsome, disarmingly so. He looked Mediterranean, with a tan glow to his skin, a perfect nose. His eyes were dark black pools. Their depth had a sinister quality, a dangerous aspect that, when framed against the beauty of the man’s face, became somehow disarming. His clothing was impeccable, expensive, custom. A dark blue button-down was tucked into white corduroy pants, formal looking yet casual. He wore his black hair slightly long, down to the top of his shoulders.
    Alexander Fortuna had been waiting for this moment. Like a handon a light switch, the merger announcement caused him to flip on. It was time. The years of careful planning were over. It was his turn to act.
    “America’s energy company,” Fortuna said aloud, to no one in particular, as he watched replays of Marks’s press conference on the screen, over and over.
    Standing up, he walked to the window and looked to the north. He could see Central Park in the distance, his favorite view.
    “America’s energy company,” he whispered to himself.

9

    PASSWOOD-REGENT L.P.
CANARY WHARF
LONDON, ENGLAND
    On the eighty-eighth floor of a skyscraper in the Canary Wharf section of London, a young man sat at a desk of polished steel. It spread out in front of the big window and was at