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Competition turned into desperation and a healthy number of these Vanderbilts were now either on their way to jail or just getting out, but the dream of building high-tech railroad tracks was still there. It was still a crowded arena, one that couldn’t help but cannibalize itself. And somewhere in the ugliness, Aaron Cannondale saw opportunity. It wasn’t his normal line of business, but it was one that he had told Hayden on a number of occasions he was determined to enter, given the right circumstance.

“The world deserves unlimited bandwidth. It is our collective destiny. I know that some of you doubt that unlimited bandwidth will truly close the digital divide. ‘More of the same,’ you say. Those who can pay will get the perks. And to a certain degree, you are right, at least in the early stages. But isn’t this a bit of a false dilemma? Artificially curtailing the progress of the ‘haves’ will not save the ‘have nots.’”

Hayden could see Aaron working up to his close. “Pause for effect, Aaron,” he said to himself. Like clockwork, Aaron paused, putting on his trademark look of sincerity.

“Let me leave you with this. Wanting to hand out a computer to every person on the planet, while noble, will not guarantee a better world. Working together, we can one day make unlimited bandwidth a reality. Working together, we can ensure that the ‘haves’ bring the have nots along with them. Working together – business and government, side-by-side -– we may just do some good.
”

“Thank you.”

“Wait for it, Aaron. Good,” Hayden whispered. “Applause. Excellent.”

Aaron knew he had a gift, and he wasn’t shy about using it. The key was unbridled confidence, poise, and a knack for theatrics. He didn’t try to do a 100-yard dash to the closing either, as most people did when they gave a speech. Then there was the photographic memory. Hayden could provide him with a speech on the plane and let him disappear for a while to get into the zone. By the time the plane landed, he’d find Aaron somewhere in the back doing a crossword puzzle, the speech entirely in his head.

Aaron shook hands with the UN crowd and made his way to the exit. Hayden did his normal thing of slipping out a side door to let his client bask in the afterglow. It was part of a speechwriter’s shtick make your guy look like a rock star, and then get lost.

Hayden’s path to speech writing had been circuitous. He had studied computer science and satellite technology at Cambridge. He was also fluent in Arabic. He had spent time in Morocco, and promised himself that he would go back when he could no longer smell the place in his mind – a promise he had long since broken.

Hayden met Aaron at the black town car waiting outside. The New York sun pounded away at the road like an invisible sledge hammer. It was different from the mild sun Hayden had woken up to a day earlier in Salt Lake City, home of Aaron’s company, Lyrical. The light was different in New York - somehow more vibrant, more blue. Light was important to Hayden. It helped define a place, or a face, or an event. To him, if light were a word it would be a modifier that turned a perfectly bland sentence into something memorable. Light was also the great rationalizer. It could make an ugly girl look half decent. It could turn the facade of a decaying building into a wonderland of images. It could seduce you into seeing something that wasn’t there, or seeing too much in something basic. Everything was wholly dependent on what kind of light you viewed it in.

“Well, my friend, what did you think?”

“You did well, Aaron. Very well.”

“Don’t sugar coat it, Hayden. I must have fucked
something
up?” “Now that you mention it, you could have paused longer at your kicker.”

“Uh huh.”

“And you raced through the first two minutes. Gotta slow down.” 

“You’re right. Did you see them? No sipping the Kool-Aid today, Hayden. They gulped it down. It was so fresh, Hayden, so original. ‘Mr. Original,’ that’s what you are.”

“You were very, very good, Aaron.”

They climbed into the back of the car for the ride out to Teterboro. Three years after 9/11, the film reel of lower Manhattan on fire

continued to quietly play in the minds of the city’s inhabitants — at

work, at home, looking out the window of a cross-town bus — but the

numbness was gone. In its place was a collective desire to return to

good times, times like the great technology wave. It had been a time

of dirty Ketel One martinis, black clothing, and new fathers puffing

Cohibas as they strolled their infants through Central Park. New

Yorkers wanted something like that again. New York was different

now, but it would always remember how to make money. It certainly

wasn’t going to curl up or go fetal, not if Aaron Cannondale had anything to do with it.

Aaron immediately got on the cell phone.

“Lisa, any messages? Right ... uh, huh ... okay ... fuck him ... confirm it ... why? ... who? ... right ... I love it ... change it to the 14th ...

can’t do that tonight ... right ...tell Nichols that I want him to follow

up ... exactly ... turquoise.”

Hayden hated cell phones. To him, they were one of the culprits

responsible for the decline of the art of conversation. They encouraged a truncated form of the English language that left him feeling as

malnourished as the emptiness that set in after polishing off a bag of

Cheetos. He decided to get some reading done while Aaron was on

the phone.

Hayden opened a manila folder labeled “Speech Fodder” which

contained articles that he regularly clipped from newspapers. They covered random topics: an article on the economics of semiconductors; another on AIDS research in Africa; an obituary of Charles K. Johnson, the founder of the Flat Earth Society; a history of the oyster in New York; a discussion on international tariffs; an interpretation of David Hume’s “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding;” and some lines from Thomas Hobbes on the concept of commonwealth. There was no rhyme or reason to what he collected, he just

knew that at some point he’d work it into a speech.

One article from the
Wall Street Journal
caught his attention. It

was about the Global Positioning System — the constellation of 24

satellites that sit in geosynchronous orbit above the earth beaming

radio signals to the U.S. military, shippers, truckers, hikers, and rental

cars. The article pointed out that the signal coming from the satellites, which had to travel 11,000 miles, was so weak that by the time it

arrived on earth, a single Christmas tree light was about 1,000 times

as bright. The article went on to say that the signal could essentially

be altered by anyone possessing a jamming device that they could get

off of the Internet for $40.

“A Christmas tree light,” Hayden mumbled to himself in amazement.

“What’s that, my friend?” Aaron said, cupping the receiver of his

cell phone.

“Nothing. Just talking to myself, Aaron.”

“Don’t do that.”

Rebecca’s is the kind of place where you pay $25 for an egg salad sandwich and a bottle of root beer. But to the inhabitants of Southampton, Long Island, it’s just their general store.

Rebecca’s reminded Jack Braun of McMillan’s in Michigan’s

Upper Peninsula because of the décor – spartan walls, fresh produce, homemade dills, tins of beans neatly stacked on pine shelves. Aside from the prices, everything else was pretty much the same - people coming in to pick up their daily newspapers, the owner’s daughter behind the counter, an American flag waving out front.

Jack had fled Michigan a long time ago. He was Wall Street now. He had always yearned to leave the simple folk behind, somehow sensing there was more to life than eating Dinty Moore stew out of the can while ice fishing. When he got the math scholarship to Princeton, he took it, thanked his parents, and never looked back. And he never once made apologies for what he now had.

Funny thing, jealousy. That’s what he sensed on the rare occasions when he went back to Michigan to check up on his parents. He had money, cars, a house in the Hamptons, a $6 million apartment in Manhattan, and a couple of horses that he raced, the sort of things that men and women back home only saw in movies or talked about derisively over cups of strong, black coffee in the diner. He was living the American Dream, but it wasn’t good enough for them. They still found a way to make him feel inadequate, to let him know that the secret to happiness wasn’t actually in attaining the things you wanted, but rather in the dreaming and the praying and the hoping that if you were good enough and God fearing enough, you’d find something special in your stocking one day.

Bullshit. That’s what it was. Simple-minded, backwater bullshit. If there was one thing that he knew he had going for him that those cowards back at home didn’t, it was that he tried to limit the amount of time he spent dreaming. He preferred action. And as a telecom analyst in the mid-to-late 90s that’s what he got. When he started, they paid him $250,000 a year. At the height of the party, he was getting $10 million a year before bonus. They fired him after the telecom meltdown; said he was getting “too close” to the companies he followed. The real reason was that he was expensive, and that he had become too much of a poster child for an era that they wanted to put behind them.

When they let him go, he took a year off to travel the world in his plane. Along the way, he picked up an assortment of 90s superheroes doing the same thing. In Norway, it was the former general counsel for an online property that provided answers to random questions posed by users. In Katmandu, he trekked with the former head of marketing for an online grocery company. He had a memorable dinner with the former head of sales for a clothing dot.com in Bangkok, and climbed part of Mt. Kilimanjaro with early investors in a company that delivered videos and snacks to your door. When he got to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, a place where he thought he could soak up the silence, he stumbled upon what felt like a summer camp for dot.com dropouts.

His return to the States was lonely. Friends were gone or hiding in offline leper caves. That said, it all seemed prelude to him. Yes, he had gotten dinged like the rest of them, but he wasn’t staying down. He was now an analyst at Teestone Financial covering computer software and networking. His reports were gaining a following. He was good with words in a way that other analysts were not. That year back in college doing editorials for
The Daily Princetonian
had paid off. The ability to write was still a differentiator in an industry consumed with figures. Institutional holders bought and sold millions of dollars based on his remarks. The
Wall Street Journal
quoted him endlessly.
Institutional Investor
had just named him the top-rated analyst on the Street. He knew everybody, and they knew him. His reports were beginning to drive stocks up, finally. That gave people hope.

Although Braun had been tainted, he was considered too smart, too relentless, too connected to be cast aside - a 90s Milken whom people couldn’t help but gravitate toward, regardless of past sins. Other analysts liked having Braun back in the saddle. He lent a certain gravitas to a market trying to right itself. Investors liked him because he was beginning to make money for them again. CNBC liked him because he gave them pithy quotes and reminded them of the good old days. His appearances were beginning to boost their ratings. People were in a forgiving mood.

Even the Sartos who ran the diner back in Michigan had made contact again. His recommendations in the late 90s had lost them $20,000 of their hard-earned money. Guilt prompted him to cover them out of his own pocket. They went their separate ways, but only a month ago they had sent him a letter saying they saw an interview with him, had decided to invest in a couple of companies based on his comments and had made some money.

The CEOs of the tech companies who hadn’t given up liked him because he stroked their egos and re-validated their visions. They, in turn, were beginning to throw their investment banking business to Teestone, albeit within the confines of the newly reinforced, so-called Chinese walls that were supposed to exist between the investment banking and analyst sides of the house.

It was Braun’s Man in the Arena tenacity that had won over Aaron Cannondale. Aaron kept a copy of Teddy Roosevelt’s words in his pocket – “… the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause...”

Aaron had run across Braun back in the day. How had a former ski mask and beauty aid outfit transformed itself into a telecom company? Braun. How had a former wholesale fish company converted itself into a wireless player? Braun. The way Aaron saw it, he needed a guy like Braun to help him give flight to what he had in mind. So it wasn’t completely surprising that while Braun was standing there in line for a grilled cheese sandwich and a chocolate milk at Rebecca’s, his cell phone rang. He stepped out of line and made his way down one of the small aisles for more privacy.

“Braun speaking.”

“It’s Vaughn.”

Terry Vaughn – the investment banking guru at Teestone, Friend of Cannondale, and arguably one the most connected guys on the Street.

“Jack, did you catch Cannondale’s speech at the UN this week?” “Cannondale? He’s been out of the news for a while.” “We all have.”

Braun grinned a knowing grin. “I didn’t hear the speech, no. What did he have to say?”

“Same old digital divide crap. He called me the other day, Jack.” “And? He’s not getting into fiber optics, is he? It would be a bit late to go down that path.”

“Not exactly. But he’s onto something.”

“Like what?”

“He’s not saying, entirely. I get the impression that he’s looking around.”

“Interesting.”