C2 Chuck Maitland

Yeo spent several days thinking it through, making rudimentary sketches and simple outlines as a rough approach to his plan, something to get things started. He summoned the Board to a meeting on Monday.

The people at the conference table on the hundred and fifth floor of the TransGlobal Building were not only trusted colleagues, but friends he had known for decades.

Yeo had a knack for surrounding himself with people who never disappointed him.

“I’m sorry to inflict this inconvenience on you,” he said as he stood at the end of the table. “But I’ve decided to dismantle everything and sell it.”

Chuck Maitland waited for the punch line.

Yeo was famous for his pranks, especially for telling a story that everyone bought, before being told the opposite was true.

But Yeo continued in the same solemn tone.

“I want to assemble a team,” he said, “to help me dispose of my fortune. I’d like Chuck to head up that team.”

Chuck and Yeo had been friends since prep school in Hong Kong.

They started at Harvard together when they were both fourteen. They finished their MBAs at Yale when they were twenty.

“But why?” Chuck asked.

Yeo leaned on the table and dropped his head, suggesting some defeat that Chuck had never seen in the man.

Yeo lifted his head and looked at him.

“Because I’m dying,” he said.

A hush fell over the conference room, the silence that might fill a cemetery in the middle of the night.

“And what will you do with it all?” Maitland asked.

“I have a plan,” Yeo said, pulling the folded white sheets from his coat pocket. “I want to save the world, a dollar at a time.”

For the first time since he stepped into the room, Yeo smiled.

“And how do you plan to accomplish this?” Maitland asked, still clinging to the faint hope that it still might be a prank after all.

“As we liquidate my holdings,” he said, “we’ll address the most serious crises on the planet, a step at a time. I know I can’t possibly change it all, but I could leave a model behind for others to follow. The most important impression I want to make is that it’s got to be done. Things cannot continue in the same direction. The planet’s exhausted. The population’s exhausted. All governments are thoroughly corrupt. I see nothing working to save us from our inevitable destruction.”

“Suppose you rattle the markets?” Maitland asked.

“Let the markets rattle. Let the dinosaurs die.”

“You could cause inflation,” Chuck countered again.

“Sell it quick and sell it cheap,” Yeo shot back, clearly becoming impatient.

There would be no punch lines today, Chuck decided.

“What’s the breakdown?” he asked.

Yeo peered down the table of a dozen people, half women, half men.

“I’m asking each of you to resign from your current positions with other companies. I want each of you to head up one of the Global Actions I want to address. I’m asking you to shed all your assets and pitch in.

I’ve provided each of you with an annuity after my demise that will leave you and your children in extreme comfort for some time to come. But I need to see your commitment to the vision, if you’re going to be part of the team.”

There were murmurs throughout the room. Yeo lifted a hand.

“Needless to say, I’ll deprive no one of the love they’ve always enjoyed from me, whatever your decisions.”

It was too much for Maitland to process at this time of the morning. If Yeo was the idea man, Chuck was the money-mover.

He understood the back channels of banking, and the currents of the market, like the back of his hand.

His strengths peaked in the global network of financial traffic where he could trigger buying and selling in milliseconds twenty-four hours a day through an electronic sequencing system based on bombarding algorithms that Einstein might find troubling.

He was just as good at masking profits through subterranean vaults, deep beneath the sea, sometimes known as offshore banks.

What the average depositor didn’t know was that Cartel money was so overwhelming to the banking system that no one understood how much it clouded the activities of the serious money-movers, half of whom funded the cartels and made enormous returns.

But only Chuck and Yeo knew that Yeo was the richest man in the world, because only Chuck and Yeo knew where the money was.

But, as always, his greatest strength was in getting to the heart of the matter. He knew Yeo would never have posed such a challenge to the members of the Board if he weren’t sure of a unanimous response.

“Where do you want to start, Jason?” he asked.

Yeo opened the white sheets and handed them to Chuck.

“Human trafficking,” Yeo replied.