Fatal Error Read online

  Fatal Error

  Michael Ridpath

  Copyright © 2012, Michael Ridpath

  For Hugh Paton

  Contents

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  PART TWO

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  PART THREE

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  1

  September 1999, Clerkenwell, London

  ‘Are you ready?’

  Guy was smiling at me. A smile that held confidence and anxiety in equal proportion. The confidence was there for all to see. Only I, his friend for seventeen years, could see the anxiety.

  I glanced around the large room with its white-painted brick walls and blue pipes, its cheap desks bearing expensive computers, its chairs in bright green and purple, the table football and the pinball machine, both at rest, both ignored, and the whiteboards covered with scribbles detailing flowcharts, timetables, schedules and missed deadlines. The room was bustling with young men and women in T-shirts and combat trousers tapping away at keyboards, staring at screens, talking on telephones, rushing from desk to desk, pretending that this was just a normal day.

  It wasn’t.

  Today we would find out whether ninetyminutes.com, the company Guy and I had founded a mere five months before, had a future.

  ‘I’m ready.’ I gathered together the papers I would need for the board meeting. ‘Do you think he’ll go for it?’

  ‘Of course he’ll go for it,’ said Guy. He took a deep breath and smiled again, banishing the anxiety, pumping up the self-confidence, winding up the charm. Guy had charisma, and he would need it today, even for his father. Especially for his father.

  He was thirty-one, just a few months older than me. He looked younger, boyish even. He had short blond hair, high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, a mobile, delicate mouth. He dressed cool: white T-shirt under a black designer suit. But he had an edge. Something sharp that lay just beneath his finely structured features. It was a hint of danger, a hint of unpredictability, a touch of cruelty perhaps, or perhaps melancholy. It was difficult to say exactly what it was, or even how it was betrayed, whether by a glint in his eye or a hardening of his mouth. But everyone saw it. Women, men, children for all I knew. It was what attracted people to him. It was what made people follow him.

  It was how he usually got his way.

  The boardroom was a glass-encased bowl at one end of the open-plan office. The table could seat twelve, which was eight too many for our board. There were only four directors of Ninetyminutes: Guy was Chief Executive Officer, I was Finance Director, Guy’s father Tony Jourdan was Chairman and the fourth director was Patrick Hoyle, Tony’s lawyer.

  Although Guy and I ran the company, Tony had put up most of the money and held eighty per cent of the shares. He also held eighty per cent of the votes. Patrick was there to say ‘Yes, Tony,’ whenever necessary. There were other shareholders, all Ninetyminutes employees, including Guy’s brother, but none of them had a seat on the board. It was up to Guy and me to fight their corner.

  This was our second board meeting. They were held on the third Monday of the month and Tony and his lawyer had flown to London from their homes on the French Riviera to attend. We were already settling into a pattern. It began with Guy outlining the company’s progress. Which was good. Astoundingly good. We had founded ninetyminutes.com the previous April with the aim of creating the Internet’s number-one soccer website. Somehow we had managed to get a site up and running by the beginning of August. It provided commentary, gossip, analysis, match reports and statistics about every club in the English Premier League. It had been well received, with great coverage in the press. More importantly visitors were flocking to the site. In our first full month on-line we had had 190,000 visitors and the numbers were climbing strongly week on week. We now had twenty-three employees and were aggressively hiring more.

  Guy went into our plans for the rest of the year. More writers, more match reports, more commentary. Alliances with a bookmaker to enable our visitors to gamble on soccer results. And the gearing up of e-commerce. We were planning to sell club and national kit off the site as well as ninetyminutes.com’s own branded clothing. This was Guy’s big idea: build a brand on the Net and then make money from selling fashionable sportswear on the back of it.

  Tony Jourdan listened closely as Guy spoke. He had been a spectacularly successful property developer in the seventies, but had retired at an early age to the South of France. Too early. It was clear that he missed the cut and thrust of business, and he took his duties as chairman of Ninetyminutes seriously. He looked much like his son, but smaller. His own fair hair was turning a sandy grey. He had the same blue eyes, twinkling out of a deeply tanned face, and the same easy charm that could be turned on at will. But he was tougher. Much tougher.

  It was my turn. Guy had done the easy stuff. Now Tony was warmed up it was time for the crunch.

  I referred everyone to the board papers. ‘As you can see our loss this month will be slightly less than budgeted. I’m hopeful we’ll manage to keep that through to the end of the year, especially if we begin to see some good advertising revenues come in.’

  ‘But still a loss?’ Tony said.

  ‘Oh, yes. That was always in the plan.’

  ‘And when do you expect to turn in a profit?’

  ‘Not until year three.’

  ‘Year three? That’s 2001, isn’t it?’ Tony said, a note of mockery creeping into his voice.

  ‘Probably 2002,’ I answered.

  ‘Our funds won’t last that long.’

  ‘No,’ I replied patiently. ‘We’ll have to raise more.’

  ‘We’ll need cash to gear up for the e-commerce phase,’ added Guy.

  ‘All of this was in the plan,’ I said.

  ‘And where is this cash going to come from?’ asked Tony.

  ‘Actually, we have an idea for that,’ Guy said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Over the last few months we’ve been talking to a firm called Orchestra Ventures. They’ve seen what we’ve been doing and they like it. They want to invest ten million pounds. It’ll be enough to finance our growth plans and take us through to next year.’

  Tony raised his eyebrows. ‘Ten million, huh? And what do they want for their ten million?’

  ‘It’s all here,’ I said, passing copies of a term sheet to Tony and Hoyle. The sheet outlined the terms under which Orchestra Ventures would make their investment. They were the product of several days of hard negotiating.

  Tony scanned it quickly. Then he tossed it on to the table. ‘This is crap,’ he said. His blue ey
es were cold. No sign of the famous Jourdan charm. ‘The way I read this, my equity stake goes down from eighty per cent to twenty per cent.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘After all, they’re putting up ten million quid. You invested two.’

  ‘But management’s stake is sticking at twenty per cent. Do Orchestra Ventures expect me to give up some of my equity to you?’

  ‘Well, that’s not quite the way it will be done.’

  ‘But that’s the overall effect, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I admitted.

  ‘Why on earth do they think I should do that?’

  ‘They think we need a decent equity stake to give us an incentive.’

  ‘They do, do they?’ Tony let his contempt for that idea show. ‘But I was the one who stumped up the cash when you came begging to me. When you’d been to everyone else and no one was prepared to touch you. I deserve to make a decent profit.’

  ‘You will make a profit,’ I said.

  ‘And Ninetyminutes will have the funding to take us on to the next stage and beyond,’ said Guy.

  Tony leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘You boys don’t have a clue about this, do you?’

  If Tony was trying to bait me, he nearly succeeded. But I just managed to keep control. ‘And why is that?’ I asked through gritted teeth.

  ‘Because you give away everything to the first mug who’s willing to back you. Now that’s fine when I’m the mug. But not when it’s my equity stake you’re giving away.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Bootstrap it,’ Tony said. ‘Get some cash flow into the company. Then use the cash to expand. Better yet, borrow on the back of it.’

  ‘But that’ll be too slow!’ Guy protested. ‘If we’re going to dominate this space, we need cash now. And more in six months’ time.’

  ‘Not on these terms, you don’t.’

  ‘So where do you suggest we get this cash flow?’ I asked.

  ‘Skin.’

  ‘Skin?’

  ‘Yeah, skin. You know. Pics of women without clothes on. And men, for that matter.’

  I flinched.

  Tony ignored me. ‘Last week I bumped into an old friend from my property days. Joe Petrelli. Smart guy. He has a nose for cash flow, always has. He tells me the only money being made on the Internet at the moment is in skin.’

  I had heard that too. But I didn’t like it.

  ‘People rack up a fortune on their credit cards downloading dirty pictures,’ Tony went on. ‘It’s a licence to print money.’

  ‘I can’t see what this has to do with us,’ said Guy. But I was sure he could.

  ‘It’s a perfect fit,’ said Tony. ‘Sign up the punters with football, and then reel them in with links to a porn site. Joe can put us in touch with the guys he deals with in LA.’

  Guy and I sat stunned.

  ‘What do you think, Patrick?’ Tony asked.

  ‘Great idea, Tony,’ Hoyle said. ‘These losses worry me. We have to do something to turn them around. Footie and totty, a great combination.’ He gave a deep chuckle at his own skilful use of language, a low rumble that shook his broad shoulders. He was a huge fat man with several chins and a sweating brow. His merriment just seemed to underline the sleaziness of the whole proposition.

  ‘If we turn ourselves into a porn site we’ll never attract respectable investors,’ I protested.

  ‘We won’t need them,’ said Tony. ‘We’ll have our own cash to spend. Guy?’

  We all turned to Guy. I prayed that he would be able to come up with an effective response. I had less than no desire to count the credit card payments of sad men downloading computer porn, however much money there was in it.

  Guy stared hard at Tony. It was a cold stare, lacking the affection or even the respect of a son for his father. If Guy was angry, he was controlling it. It was the stare of someone assessing an enemy, thinking through his weaknesses, weighing options.

  Eventually, he spoke, ‘Let’s stand back a bit here,’ he said. ‘My objective when I first dreamed up this company was to make it the foremost soccer website in Europe. If we can do that, the site will be worth hundreds of millions, given the valuations we’re seeing at the moment. That’s much more important than a few hundred thousand in the P and L. I can see a link to a pornography site would help our cash flow,’ he nodded towards his father. ‘But it would make it that much harder to reach our objective. It would take the whole site a long way downmarket. So I don’t think we should do it. We’re better off going for outside investment.’

  ‘From Orchestra?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The bunch of crooks who want to steal my equity?’

  ‘Tony,’ I said, ‘you’ll end up with a smaller slice of a much larger pie –’

  ‘Don’t give me that apple-pie bullshit,’ Tony snapped. ‘I heard it dozens of times in my property days and I ignored it every time. You know what, Guy?’ He was speaking to his son now, his voice hard. I was out of the picture. ‘I always kept the pie. The whole pie. And I got rich as a result. That looks like a lesson you need to learn.’

  ‘So are you saying no to Orchestra?’ Guy said, struggling successfully to keep his tone reasonable.

  ‘I’m not just saying no. I’m saying I want you to get hold of Joe Petrelli and find out what he does and how he does it. We’ll discuss it at next month’s board meeting. Sooner if need be.’

  This was worse than we had expected. We had known Tony would be unhappy with the dilution of his equity stake, but we hadn’t expected him to start dictating the strategy of the company. And in such a repulsive direction, too.

  ‘This is my company,’ Guy said in a low voice. ‘And I decide what we do with it.’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Tony. ‘I own eighty per cent of the shares. I decide what gets done. You do it.’

  Guy glanced at me. The anger was burning in his eyes. ‘That’s not acceptable,’ he said.

  Tony held his son’s stare. ‘That’s the way it’s going to be.’

  There was silence for what seemed like an age. Hoyle and I watched the two men. We were no part of this. This was about much more than who controlled Ninetyminutes.

  Then Guy closed his eyes, slowly, deliberately. He took a deep breath and opened them again.

  ‘In that case, I resign.’

  ‘What!’ I exclaimed before I had a chance to control myself.

  ‘Sorry, Davo. I have no choice. I’m determined Ninetyminutes is going to be the best site in Europe. If we don’t take on more equity we haven’t a chance of getting there. We’ll just be another also-ran site with a particularly sleazy image.’

  ‘But one which makes money,’ Tony said.

  ‘Frankly, I don’t care,’ said Guy.

  Tony weighed that up. ‘That, Guy, is your problem,’ he said. ‘But I think you should reconsider.’

  ‘And I think you should,’ said Guy.

  ‘I’m in London until Thursday,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll give you until that morning to decide. Now, gentlemen, this meeting is closed.’

  Ninetyminutes’ office was on the fourth floor of a converted metalworking shop in a quiet street in Clerkenwell. The Jerusalem Tavern was just over the road. Usually cramped and crowded in the evening, it was cool and empty at that time of the afternoon. Guy got in the beers, a pint of bitter for me, a bottle of Czech beer for him.

  ‘Bastard,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘He’ll back down,’ I said.

  ‘No, he won’t.’

  ‘He’ll have to. He can’t run Ninetyminutes without you.’

  ‘He’ll figure out how.’

  ‘There’s got to be a way through this,’ I said. ‘We can come to some kind of compromise.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Guy. ‘Just maybe we could this month. But next month it’ll be more of the same. He’ll come up with ideas for how Ninetyminutes should be run that he knows I won’t like. He’ll dangle them there in front of me for
a while, and then he’ll force them through. To show who’s smarter. Who’s the better businessman. Who has the power.’ He took a drink of his beer. ‘Did you ever play snakes and ladders with your father?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

  ‘Who won?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I think I did. Perhaps he did. I don’t know.’

  ‘I played snakes and ladders with my father a lot and he always won. That made me really angry when I was four. And even angrier when I got older and realized that snakes and ladders is a game of chance. The only way you can win every time is by cheating. Pretty sad when a father has to cheat to beat his four-year-old son.’ Guy stared at the label on the bottle in front of him, as if an answer was written there. ‘I knew it was wrong to take his money.’

  ‘We had no choice.’

  Guy sighed. ‘I suppose not.’

  He was slumped over his beer, his eyes gloomy, almost desperate, the vitality that had been his constant companion over the previous few months nowhere to be seen. An aura of pessimism emanated from him, dragging down my own spirits. The change frightened me.

  We had gone through a lot over the last few months, Guy and I. We had worked long hours, evenings, nights, weekends. We had achieved so much. Getting the site on-line in such a short space of time had been a miracle. Scrabbling together the funding. Recruiting a team of totally committed individuals. I had had a lot of fun. And I had learned a lot about myself and about Guy during that time. I didn’t want it to end.

  ‘We have to fight him, Guy. We’ve worked too hard for too long for it all to finish like this. What about all your plans for covering the major European leagues? What about the e-commerce? What about the ten million quid Orchestra Ventures have put on the table? Yesterday you were more fired up about this than anyone.’

  ‘I know. Yesterday I was acting as if Ninetyminutes was my company. I was ignoring my father, ignoring the meeting today, pretending they didn’t exist. But I was deluding myself. They do exist. I can’t hide from the reality.’

  ‘We’ve faced obstacles like this before and you’ve never quit. You’ve always found a way over them or under them or through them. If it was just me, I’d have given up long ago, you know that.’