"So, before you head to the stock exchange, a final question. Why is your company motto ‘In Utmost Good Faith’?”
“Because we thought ‘Don’t be evil’ was wishy-washy.”
“Okay, on that note, thank you very much, Mr. Lewis Key.”
The morning business show cut to ads and T. Harold Orr turned the set off.
“That man and his company make my stomach churn. The sanctimonious prig.”
“Yes, dear. Could you pass the pepper please.”
He slid the pepper pot to his wife, who sprinkled her poached eggs without looking away from her social media updates.
“He’ll get a shock when the market opens this morning. That will wipe the smile off his smug, arrogant, oh so perfect and punchable face.”
They finished breakfast without talking.
Harold sat at his desk, looking out the window. Hunters were on the marsh and he watched a duck begin to cartwheel from the sky, the sound of the shot arriving a moment later. He smiled to himself, twenty minutes until Key rang the bell on the floor of the stock exchange. That signal honor would be the shot marking the start of his fall.
One man against the behemoth of Invirotect. It made David v Goliath look like an even contest. But someone had to step up. It was bad enough when the government tried to regulate against profit. Some fanatic with his communist visions of utopia should not get as powerful as Key had.
The clock hands ticked closer to the top of the hour and Harold put Bloomberg on the television, but kept the sound down.
On his laptop he watched the box for Invirotect, anticipating its dive into red. It moved up a little, and up again, then it spiked sharply, nearly a whole percentage point.
Key was being interviewed and he turned the sound up.
“Mr Key--”
“Call me Lew.”
“Lew, the announcements you have laid out, and the aggressive stock buy back, must have taken some time to arrange, and all without the market getting wind of it. How did you manage this? It’s quite a coup.”
“Well, Mike, our company motto is no gimmick. I believe in providing the jobs and living standards our employees deserve, and caring for the planet and its environment in a way we all deserve. But I also believe in the investors and the markets doing the right thing. Sadly they often don’t, and while we were preparing our strategy for the new investment it came to our attention that someone was preparing an illegal attack against Invirotect--”
“Mr Key, Lew, can you give us any details of this?”
“Well, not yet, the Criminal Fraud division of the F.B.I. and the S.E.C.C. have to deal with the matter, and I don’t want to prejudice that investigation. But I would love to see that face of the person behind it this morning while he watched my company stock go up as it deserves, and not down like he planned.”
Harold turned it off. In his ears the blood started to hiss, his temples felt constricted. Without checking he knew his blood pressure would be in the red. On the screen in front of him the stock for Invirotect continued to rise, dragging the whole market with it.
There was a knock on his office door and his wife came in, “Dear, there are some men here to see you, they say they are from the F.B.I.”
“Mr Thibault Harold Orr, you are under arrest for fraud.”
An original story and photograph by Stuart C Turnbull.