He
flinched when a sudden and jagged burst of light flashed in front of him. Then
he counted—one, one thousand…two, one thousand…three, one thousand…four, one
thousand—before a deep boom overtook the light. Symbolic, he thought. The
thunder’s getting closer and
so am I.

He
looked at his reflection in the huge 12th-floor
window of his office. The classic embodiment of a leader, he thought: 43 years
old, suit custom-tailored to his lean six feet, clean shaven, dark hair trimmed
above his ears (rock ‘n’ roll
bands be damned). What he considered his best feature wasn’t visible: a slight limp that he would
explain, with modest reluctance, as the result of a wound in his left thigh,
where he’d
been bayoneted during hand-to-hand combat with a Vietcong soldier—which wasn’t quite true, but was close enough:
during the war, yes, but the result of slipping in muck during a monsoon and
being impaled on a tent peg.

When
he returned from Vietnam, he was appointed executive vice-president of his
father’s computer hardware
business. Five years later, a cerebral aneurysm soundlessly killed his sleeping
father and transformed the business into his business.

He’d always known he had the decisive,
shrewd, and prescient intellect of a leader. Unfortunately, those same characteristics
had been resented all his life—which was why he’d been thwarted in running for student
offices in high school and college, as his classmates always had chosen others’ popularity over his competence, and
why his Army career had stalled, as his intimidated contemporaries and even
commanders had deprived him of deserved opportunities and promotions. Finally,
he was in command.

As
expected, the business thrived under his leadership. Until about three years
ago, when it started to decline. Granted, it’d been undramatic: a piece here, a
piece there, but slow and steady, like hunks of soil eroding off a riverbank.
He’d been stunned and
puzzled—until he realized that he was the victim, not the cause.

Two
destructive influences, both totally out of his control and not at all his
fault, had converged on him. First were the slob Californians: unshaven,
dressing in rumpled sport shirts and Levis as if they worked on a loading dock
or a construction site, and having no sense of propriety. Second were the insufferable
Asians: America had spent millions to develop new technologies, only to give
them away so gook countries could exploit American markets, for god’s sake. No home-grown business like
his could compete with their cheap labor and government subsidies.  

Looking
back on it, he wished he’d
surrendered to one of the attempts to take over his business. One major battle
and one crisis, and it would’ve
been over. Instead, he’d
beaten back all of them. Ironically, it’d all been a waste of time and so damn much money, since
the modernized plant—humming with new equipment and systems that now
manufactured products faster and cheaper than ever—still wasn’t rapid enough to keep pace with what
seemed to be weekly technological changes or cheap enough to yield sufficient
profits. As a result, his business was enduring the commercial equivalent of
death by a thousand cuts: a product here, a service here, a customer there.

Worse,
the handwriting on the company wall was spelling his own name as well; if it
went down, so would he. About two years ago, he’d begun agonizing over how to rescue
himself. His first impulse had been a high-risk, large-dividend investment of
some kind, but he backed off when his research revealed that such an
investment, by its very nature, also implied a high risk of failure. He’d then imagined a hefty, and thus very
lucrative, drug sale—but had no notion how to acquire any drugs, let alone in
sufficient volume, and drug trafficking was just plain dangerous.

As
one idea after another succumbed to some insurmountable flaw, his desperation
began to deteriorate into panic. Then, a little over a year ago, what he
thought of as “The Plan” revealed itself. It was magical: one moment there was
no solution, and the next moment there it was, vivid and briljant.

Gary M.
Lepper is a retired trial lawyer with degrees from Stanford University. An Army
veteran, he has written for a local newspaper as well as authored A
Bibliographical Introduction to Seventy-five Modern American Authors, a
research study on modern American first edition fiction and poetry that can be
found in most libraries. He is an avid baseball fan and fantasy baseball league
commissioner and nine-time winner of the Walnut Creek Bush (fantasy baseball)
League. Lepper is a collector of first edition novels, comic books and baseball
cards among other ephemera. He is married with two daughters, three granddaughters
and, at last, one grandson, as well as the devoted owner of “Frodo,” a half maltese,
half shih tzu attack dog.