Page 76 of Pipe Dreams
Given her month-long absence, her desk on the thirty-seventh floor wasn’t as big a disaster as she’d expected. Her little team had done a good job keeping the place running smoothly while she was pinch-hitting in Brooklyn. At eightA.M.a phalanx of investment bankers arrived to brief Nate on the offer they were receiving.
“Lauren,” Nate said, breezing in just before the meeting began. “I want you to sit in today.”
“All right?” she said, a little surprised by this demand. She usually ran his office from outside the closed-door meetings.
“I know we haven’t gotten around to talking about what jobs you might pursue after graduation. But I have some ideas. And sitting in today fits with one of them.”
She grabbed a notepad and stood immediately and followed him into the conference room.
“Everyone signs a nondisclosure agreement,” a banker said at first, handing over a form for her to sign.
Since Lauren was part of Nate’s inner circle, she’d signed dozens of these already, promising not to reveal the terms of various potential transactions.
The meeting lasted two hours as the bankers described the terms by which a company called iBits desired to acquire Nate’s router business. It wasn’t an ordinary purchase though. iBits wanted contracts for a ten-year relationship between the division and Kattenberger Technologies whereby Nate would continue to license his software to the company.
Lauren tried to guess which of his tech executives he’d need to meet with later today, and she scribbled pages of notes while the bankers delivered their specs.
After they left, Nate’s chief technology officer ran off to arrange for various engineers to attend a one o’clock meeting where they discussed the technical aspects of the relationship, while Lauren asked one of her minions to order sushi for her and Nate so they wouldn’t starve to death while they scrambled to assemble all the specialists required to analyze the offer.
“It’s a lot of money,” Nate said when they were alone in the conference room. He kicked his sneakers onto the polished table and leaned back in his chair.
“True,” Lauren hedged. “But I can think of a dozen problems already.”
He looked up in surprise, because she didn’t usually volunteer that sort of opinion on a business matter. “Me, too! Let’s hear yours. Sit.”
There was a certain giddiness she felt when some new development at work made them all scramble around, trying to make the most of it. It fizzed in her veins as she sat on one of Nate’s couches. She’d been wondering how it mightbe possible to transition from office manager to something more. That’s why she’d worked so hard to get a degree, right?
As she leaned forward to tell Nate what she thought of the iBits offer, moving up in his organization suddenly seemed possible. “The ongoing contract they need will prevent you from working with any of their competitors in certain lines of business.”
“Right?” he said, tucking his hands behind his head. “That bothers me. A lot. What else?”
They exchanged notes right through lunch, until Nate had to depart for another meeting.
“I hope you didn’t have plans tonight, because we’re going to be sorting through this for hours,” he said.
“No problem,” she said quickly.
“And I’m going to send Becca to Detroit with the team. I need you here on the iBits deal.”
“Oh,” she said, startled. This was finally it—a return to normal. She’d been waiting for this moment for five weeks. “So Becca is feeling better?” Lauren should be jumping up and down right now. So why wasn’t she?
Because the team would start the third round tomorrow night, and she wouldn’t be there to see it.
“She’s... okay,” Nate said slowly. “She wants to get back to work. So I asked Hugh to send an intern with her, because she still tires easily.”
“Good idea,” Lauren said, having no idea if it really was. She was too busy scrutinizing Nate’s face for more clues about the Becca situation. As usual, he revealed nothing. Working for the world’s most stoic human wasn’t easy.
Then she forgot all about Becca because Nate said, “There’s a job I need from you—something a little different. I need a dossier on iBits.”
“Sure,” she said immediately. “Although... you have a team of I-bankers who can give you chapter and verse on that company. Do you really want me to duplicate their efforts?”
“Yeah, I do. They’ll give me all the numbers. But I want you to figure out how things really are at iBits. I don’t know this company at all. Are their employees happy? What do people say about them? Do your special Lauren thing and tell me all the dirt you can find. They want a ten-year contract, so I need to know if these are people I’d look forward to working with, or people I’d rather strangle. Nobody knows me as well as you do, right?”
“Okay. I get it,” she said. A dozen ideas bloomed in her mind at once. What did iBits sound like on social media? When people left the firm, where did they go? What was their maternity leave policy?
That last question was a little gift from her subconscious. She pushed the thought away. “I’m on it,” she told her boss.
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