Power Play: A Novel (17 page)

“Good morning, Harding,” she said quietly, as he stood across her desk from her, glaring at her, annoyed that she had asked him to come in. She got up and closed her office door. “Please sit down.” She gestured to the chairs in the sitting area, where she had met with the investigator the night before.

“I don’t have time to waste,” he said brusquely. “I have appointments
in the city this afternoon. I can’t run down to Palo Alto every five minutes to please you.”

“That’s fine,” she said, as they sat down. “We can keep this short. I’d like you to resign,” she said in a clear voice. “I think you know why. And I’d like to keep this simple for both of us, and the board.” He looked stunned, by what she’d said and by how smoothly she’d said it. She didn’t look angry or upset, just businesslike and cold. And she met his gaze without hesitating for an instant. “You violated your responsibilities as chairman of the board. You violated the confidentiality agreement you signed, which I’d like to point out to you is a legal document. You jeopardized this company. You gave information to a member of the press, whom you are apparently sleeping with, coincidentally. You’re dishonest and hypocritical, and out of respect you no longer deserve, I’m giving you the opportunity to resign from the board today. And if you choose not to, you will be fired by the board tomorrow. I suggest you cite reasons of ill health. You were due to resign in December anyway, so no one will be surprised. It’s only a matter of a few months’ difference, and ill health is entirely plausible. I’m sure you’ll agree.” He had opened and closed his mouth several times but said nothing as Fiona went on, and he stared at her in outrage, and then stood up and paced around the room. He turned to her then with pure venom in his eyes.

“How dare you speak that way to me?!” He tried to intimidate her, but it didn’t work. Fiona didn’t look impressed by his posturing, and she spoke in a glacial tone.

“How dare you violate this board in the way you did, and give highly confidential information to the press, which affected thousands of lives, and could have caused our stock to plummet, just so you could sleep with some girl half your age, and impress her with
what you knew. How dare
you
!” Her eyes bored into his, and this time the power was hers. Truth was a mighty sword.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he blustered, and without saying another word, she stood up and handed him the photographs of him and the young journalist that were in the folder on her desk. He looked like he was going to have a heart attack when he saw them.

“Her byline was on the first leak. That’s enough evidence for me, and it will be for the board too. Who you sleep with is none of our business, but when your lovers start publishing confidential information about this company, given to them by you, then it becomes my business, Harding. You’re a danger to this corporation, and the board will undoubtedly agree. We are bound by confidentiality not to disclose our reasons for firing you, but if you force my hand, I will. I don’t think you’ll want speculation on why you were fired all over the newspapers and the Internet. I wouldn’t in your shoes.” Her eyes never left his, and they both knew she had the winning hand.

“You little slut,” he said in a voice filled with fury, and he was literally shaking with rage. “You whore!”

“That would be your girlfriend, not me,” she said coldly. “And you. I never was. I was an innocent young girl who was taken advantage of by your friend Jed Ivory, and you’ve held it against me ever since. I never liked you either, but I respected you for your abilities, the integrity I thought you had, and your distinguished career. And it turns out that you’re a sham. You’re a fraud, while you brag about being married for forty-four years, and make speeches about morality. You have none. I want you off this board as fast as you can sign your name. You’re a danger to us all.”

“You had no right to have me followed,” he shouted at her.

“That’s not illegal. I assured all of you that no illegal means would be used to conduct the investigation, and they weren’t. You’re a damn fool to be kissing her in public and making a spectacle of yourself. If she were anyone else, I wouldn’t care, although I think it’s disgusting of you, and in poor taste. But the woman you’re sleeping with is a reporter, you shared boardroom secrets with her, and she published them. That’s where I draw the line.”

“Closing Larksberry would have come out eventually anyway,” he argued with her, but they both knew it would have been presented very differently at the right time. Instead, the information had been used to damage the company, turn the public against them, stir up their employees, and ultimately jeopardize their stock. And Harding knew it too. His reporter friend hadn’t used the information well or responsibly, and he was so besotted with her that he had put himself and the company at risk. “If you leak this to the press, I’ll sue,” he said menacingly, but Fiona wasn’t frightened.

“This isn’t slander, Harding. It’s all true. You can’t sue for libel against the truth. It’s an iron-clad defense. And we won’t leak anything to the press if you resign today. You can tender your resignation to the board tomorrow at nine
A.M
. I called an emergency meeting and I expect you to be there. It’s all over after that.” Fiona maintained a level tone, but he had been shouting at her almost since he walked in. “How you do this is entirely up to you. You can do it cleanly, or make a mess of it. It’s your choice. Personally, I’d go quietly, if I were you.”

“Women like you shouldn’t be running corporations,” he said viciously. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” But the solidity of their stock even in a bad economy said otherwise, and he knew that too.

“I’m not under discussion here,” Fiona said quietly, and handed
him a resignation letter she’d had prepared for him that morning. He took a look at it, crumpled it into a ball, threw it at her feet, and walked out of the room. But she knew he would have to sign one like it the next day, or they would fire him. He was through, finished, over. He had been exposed as the dishonest person he was. She picked up the crumpled resignation letter and threw it in the waste-basket as her assistant came in with a worried look. She had seen Harding leave, and heard him shouting through the closed door.

“Do you need an Advil?” Fiona laughed at what she said. She had never felt better. She was only sorry she had let him torment her for six years, and make her feel guilty twenty-five years before.

“No, Angela, I don’t,” Fiona said, and went back to her desk.

She had a full day of meetings after that, and another finance committee meeting that night, but she wasn’t even tired when she got home. And she looked fresh and alert the next morning at nine o’clock when she met with the board. They were already assembled when she got there, and they looked concerned and were anxious to know what the emergency meeting was about. And just as she arrived, Harding stormed into the room. His face was red with rage as he sat down and addressed them from the chairman’s seat.

“I want you all to know what kind of person this woman is,” he bellowed as they looked at him in astonishment. Fiona knew what was coming, but she didn’t care. There were no more battles to be fought with him. He had lost the war, and the board members were about to find that out too. “She had an affair with a married professor when she was at Harvard. She seduced him, and lured him away from his wife. She caused him to divorce her. She’s a homewrecker and a slut. She’s an immoral woman and has been all her life.” The board members stared at him after his outburst. He looked deranged.

Fiona spoke up in a calm voice as they looked at Harding and then at her. “The man was separated when I met him. He was a friend of Harding’s. And the professor in question had a habit of sleeping with his students. He divorced his wife to marry another student he got pregnant, which wasn’t me, and broke my heart. I was twenty-four years old, and the girl he got pregnant was twenty-two. He took advantage of both of us, and a lot of other girls like us before and since. That’s not why we’re here today,” she transitioned smoothly, as several of the board members squirmed in their seats. They didn’t like what Harding had said, or the way he had tried to portray her. They respected Fiona, as a woman and as the CEO. “We’re here because our investigators have discovered the source of our leak,” she said calmly. “Unfortunately, Harding is our boardroom leak. He’s involved with a journalist, and has been having an affair with her for the past year. She’s the woman whose byline was on the story. There is no question of it, and I have a copy of the report for each of you.” There was a stack of them on the conference table, marked confidential, with their names on them. She went on calmly from her seat. “I urged Harding to resign yesterday, for reasons of ill health, which would cause very little attention in the press, since he’s due to resign in five months anyway. He refused. I would like to make the same suggestion today, or we can fire him. I don’t care either way.” She turned to Harding then, who was slumped in his chair. He had run out of steam, and every member of the board looked shocked by what they’d just heard. “Harding, do you have anything to say?” She asked the question without visible emotion and appeared to be in total control. There were whispered murmurs from the board members as they each took a copy of the report, and then he spoke up.

“I’ll resign,” he said as he stood up and looked at the faces around
the conference table. “I want your assurance that none of this will be leaked to the press,” he said with a terrified expression. Every board member nodded assent. He didn’t deserve the loyalty he hadn’t shown himself, but all Fiona wanted was for the matter to die a silent death. Exposing him would only harm NTA, which was her first concern and theirs, but not his, or he would never have done what he did.

“You have our assurance and our word,” one of the board members spoke up. Harding nodded, and looked at Nathan Daniels, the most senior member of the board. He was a bank president, whom they all respected, and had been on the board longer than anyone else.

“I’ll send it to you today. For reasons of ill health,” Harding confirmed. And then he walked out without looking at any of them. He offered no apology, and never said goodbye. He didn’t look at Fiona either as he left the room, and there was a long moment of silence as they all absorbed what had happened. He was the last person that any of them would have expected to betray them, or to have his head turned around by an affair with a young woman. He had risked his reputation and his honor for her, and she had betrayed him in turn by publishing what he said.

Fiona brought them to order then, and reminded them that they needed to appoint a new chairman before they left the room. NTA could not have a board without a leader at its helm. She suggested Nathan Daniels, who was respected by them all. Fiona’s suggestion was adopted by the board and unanimously endorsed.

Twenty minutes later they all left the room with a copy of the report in their hands. They still looked shocked by everything that had occurred and by the proceedings that morning. Fiona went back to
her office and asked the PR department to draft a press release, announcing Harding’s resignation for reasons of ill health, and Nathan Daniels’s appointment as chairman of the board. It was a benign announcement, and Nathan’s long tenure made him a reasonable choice that would please their stockholders. The release was unlikely to cause comment in any quarter. And by one o’clock Fiona had Harding’s resignation in her hands. It was over. The mystery had been solved. And Harding was gone. Fiona had handled it as she did everything else, with competence, dignity, and grace. She wanted to have a sense of victory about it, but she didn’t. She felt nothing except relief, as she quietly went back to her duties of the day as CEO. But her mission had been accomplished; the board of the corporation she had been entrusted to run was safe at last.

The first call Fiona got the morning after Harding Williams’s resignation was from Logan Smith. She took the call and wondered if the timing was coincidental, or if he was going to comment on Harding leaving the board. She didn’t have long to wait.

“Was he your leak?” was the first thing he said after hello. He was even smarter than she’d thought, and had figured it out. But she had no intention of telling him the truth. She liked him, but she wasn’t about to divulge secrets to him, or anyone else.

“He’s been sick,” she answered calmly, as though nothing unusual had occurred. “He had to retire at the end of the year anyway. We have mandatory retirement, and he’s turning seventy in December. It didn’t make sense for him to hang on for another five months in bad health.” She spoke in her most professional voice.

“He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would retire five minutes before he had to, even if he’s half dead. I interviewed him two years ago, and he’s a tough old bird.”

“We all get old and sick. Even Harding. We were all worried about
him. But it was the right thing to do.” That much was true. But Logan was still suspicious. It didn’t sound plausible to him.

“I can smell a party line when I hear one, Fiona.” But he didn’t insist. And then he thought of something else. “Did you know when we had lunch the other day? I’m just curious. I won’t run it. You can tell me off the record.”

“Actually, I didn’t. I only discovered that he was leaving the board later that day.” That was true too, when she met with the investigator in her office and discovered Harding was the source of their leak. But the decision hadn’t been Harding’s. It had been hers. “The board met yesterday to accept his resignation. He couldn’t carry out his duties any longer.” She was feeding him partial truths, and she didn’t like it. She didn’t want to lie to Logan, but she couldn’t tell him the truth, nor would she. She wanted to get off the subject. But Logan wasn’t ready to do that yet.

“It’s no secret he disapproved of women in high corporate positions. He told me that himself. And word on the street was always that he particularly hated you.” It was a heavy statement for him to make and expect her to refute. And she was very careful what she answered.