Page 65 of Companion Required
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Kennedy
Once they were airborne, Kennedy accepted a glass of water from a member of the cabin crew and settled back in his seat. After the two long-haul flights with very little rest in between, he felt shattered and looked forward to precious downtime in Bali.
Kieran distracted him with their exploits in Hong Kong, but after he fell silent, clearly waiting to hear about Kennedy’s meeting with Milletto, Kennedy suggested he save the tale until they were somewhere less public. Besides, he said, he wanted to get his head down for a few hours. Kieran nodded his agreement. Relieved, Kennedy closed his eyes and thought back on the past thirty-six hours.
During his trip—and despite how much he’d missed having Kieran by his side—he’d decided to dial down their closeness. To do anything different would inevitably hurt Kieran once they returned to their normal lives, and he could not live with himself if that happened. Even without taking into consideration their age difference, Kieran deserved someone fun and reliable, someone who would not eventually disappoint him. Kennedy knew all about the pain of losing someone ’he had come to rely on, and would not let that happen to Kieran. Kennedy eventually let people down—that seemed to be the rule in his life.
Except the business trip had proven the exception to any rule. Yes, he had been taken by surprise during his meeting with Giorgio Milletto. When he’d finally come face to face with a clearly unsurprised Milletto, he’d told himself that someone, somewhere must have leaked his visit. Milletto had sworn to the contrary, that his arrival, however fortuitous, had come out of the blue. Rather than working to his detriment, the information meant there had been no subterfuge when Milletto had turned up in person, to meet him in Cold Steel’s tasteful reception area.
“Mister Kennedy Grey. Thank the Lord,” Milletto had said, beaming, as Kennedy rose to his feet and matched the man’s warm handshake. “This is a pleasant, if slightly unexpected, surprise—you son of a gun. I saw this guy sitting here from the CCTV monitor in my office and thought ‘heck, it can’t be, can it?’ Seems like it is.”
Kennedy had laughed, and within a matter of seconds felt comfortable. Something about the man had made him feel they could talk freely. For someone in his late fifties, he gave off a sense of alertness while still being friendly and welcoming—probably a long-cultivated, charismatic charm. Dressed in a stylish light-grey suit and pale-blue open-necked shirt, Milletto had a full head of almost white hair, and his smiling brown eyes behind fashionable silver-framed glasses gave him the air of a scholar.
“I know this is a little unorthodox,’“ Kennedy had said, following him along a corridor towards a large conference room, ‘“but I wanted us to talk off the record, face to face, so to speak. We’ve only ever conversed by telephone or on video conference. We should have done this long before now, but when you kept changing our meeting—”
“The hell I did. Your end kept changing the goddamn…oh,” Milletto had said, his smile slipping. “Sloan. You know, we both need to keep a careful eye on that SOB.”
Kennedy had sighed then. They were definitely on the same page. Instead of leading Kennedy to the conference room, Milletto had turned right into another corridor and entered his huge corner office, the semi-circular window arrangement overlooking the whole of downtown Los Angeles. After his smiling personal assistant had brought Kennedy an ‘emergency’ double espresso, and been put on alert for more, the two of them had opened up. From the word go, Milletto had been an inspiration—funny, insightful, and more importantly, someone Kennedy felt he could trust to do business with.
Of course Milletto knew the score with his future son-in-law, had seen through his plans. And during their six-hour meeting—stopping only for lunch in a trendy restaurant on the top floor of the building—Kennedy had listened to Milletto’s counterproposal.
Instead of them running with the acquisition—which in his experience had been like one bigger country invading a smaller one, and rarely without casualties—that instead they join forces, turn the transaction into a merger of two powerhouse companies in the security sector, a meeting of minds and talents.
Once Milletto—“call me Giorgio”—had meticulously explained his reasoning, everything had made total sense to Kennedy. Giorgio and his team had even considered a new name, Grey Steel Global. Having expertise in all areas of surveillance, both domestic and corporate markets, on both continents, they would become unstoppable. Once they had opened up in different markets, they could float on both the FTSE and the NASDAQ, and would become one of the top players in the global market. Milletto’s eyes had flashed with a mixture of excitement and pride at the idea.
Still struggling with jetlag, Kennedy had sat back and tried to absorb the overwhelming information. Throughout the meeting, he’d kept tapping into his natural business wariness, had tried to look for a catch, to look beyond the words and see if Milletto—Giorgio—might be trying to play him. But everything Giorgio said made complete sense. At some point, he’d need to speak to Tim.
“Why didn’t you suggest a merger in the first place, why offer to sell the business?”
Giorgio had sat back in his plush leather chair, grinned sadly and stared out of the window.
“That is exactly the question I’d have asked you, if you’d suggested the same thing. And I think it’s only fair you have all the information, if you’re going to agree to a partnership.”
Giorgio had kept his gaze out to the skyline and shaken his head very slightly.
“A year ago, I had a stroke. Collapsed right here in this office, thank the Lord, because they got to me quickly. Touch and go for a while, but my guys took me to the hospital in record time. We managed to keep it out of the press—didn’t want to worry clients—but let me tell you, for me it was a wake-up call. Afterwards, doctors told me to take it easy, hand over the reins of the business. You probably know that anything I make from this business goes to my daughter. I wanted to make sure she’d be well taken care of.”
Right then, Giorgio had swung his chair to face Kennedy.
“But you know what else I learned this past year? You can’t live your life scared, however much time you have. Sure, I had to learn to let a few things go, but give up? No freaking way. When your boys first put the offer on the table, I thought that’d be a perfect solution. But you know, the more I thought about it, the more I changed my mind. And that’s when my wife came up with the idea.
“Unlike my future son-in-law, I’ve only been married once, and trust me, when you eventually get to meet her, you’ll understand why. Kelly-Anne Marie. She’s ten years younger, and the only person who ever stood up to me, while standing up for me, if you know what I mean? She’s the one told me to go find out more about you and maybe go speak to you privately. See if you might at the very least want someone to stay on as a sleeping partner—not that I’d have done much sleeping. But I could certainly have kept an eye on your managers for you—if you know what I mean? And then it just hit me about three weeks ago. Why don’t we go into business together?”
Kennedy had been listening but his jet-lag-addled brain had struggled to take everything on board.
“Look, I ain’t going to lie to you, Kennedy. This is going to be a whole helluva lot of work for both of us if we’re going to pull it off. Mergers don’t come cheap, and many of them crash and burn. But I think we’ve got a shot. We’re complementary—and I don’t mean that in the free-of-charge way. Together our businesses are halves of something that could be something great. And, I guess, the clincher for me is I feel as though you’re someone I could work alongside. How about you?”
Kennedy had talked about his own idea, about bringing him his shares in Securiton so that maybe he’d consider calling off the acquisition. Milletto’s suggestion made far more sense, and the fact that they both had significant shares in Securiton made the deal even sweeter. There would be a lot of things to hammer out, lawyers talking to one another across the pond, probably months of negotiating, but in essence at least, Kennedy approved of the idea wholeheartedly.
“So, should we still hold the meeting in London?” he’d asked.
“Hell, yes,” Milletto had said, folding his arms and raising his eyebrows. “Don’t go spoiling my fun, now. I want to be there to see faces when we announce the counterproposal. I know you broke your holiday to be here today, but can you be on the call? It’d be better coming from the two of us united.”
“I agree,” Kennedy had said. He’d easily find a reliable business centre in Bali and teleconference into the meeting. Hell, he wouldn’t miss it for the world. “And one way or another, I’ll be there.”
* * * *
