The Fugitive Grandma Lives

Chapter 14 - Net Worth

Calvin Montebello kept a home above Rancho Mirage in the hills near the Thunderbird Ranch, a princely estate overlooking the palm lined basin of the Coachella Valley. This was his desert retreat away from the bustle of Silicon Valley, a preferred place for confidential meetings with trusted partners and treasured investors.

This evening the guest of honor was an elderly man who had just finished nine holes at the Golden Palm. Harvey Hamilton was one of the most celebrated financiers of his generation, amassing billions as a corporate raider and activist hedge fund manager over decades. Harvey met Calvin at a venture capital conference and served as angel investor in all his start-ups. Outside Silicon Valley, he ran a New York-based firm that a majority shareholder in hundreds of companies, ranging from trucking to restaurants to agribusiness.

In the past few years, Hamilton had focused on the pharmaceutical industry, buying up drug labs that specialized in niche, life-saving treatments for rare diseases. Typically, he would take over a firm and then ratchet up the price of the medicine, forcing desperate patients and their medical providers to pay more for treatment since they had no other option.

Outside of his investment activities, Hamilton poured money into various political causes, including a ballot initiative in California that would increase the voting power of billionaires. Hamilton had been ridiculed in the mainstream media several years back after a TV interview on the voting initiative where he explained his belief that a human beings true value could be measured in their net worth. And since it followed that a financier like himself earned a thousand times the salary of a school teacher, he was in fact a thousand times more valuable and desired exponentially more rights as a citizen.

"How was your game today?" Calvin asked Harvey while a team of servants brought drinks and seated them at the veranda.

"I've never felt so miserable," Harvey grumbled, swirling his tumbler of Scotch-on-the-rocks.

"Why would that be? Think of all you've accomplished. You are at the height of your powers."

"People are laughing behind my back. They think I am aging buffoon."

"What do you care about that?"

"I care because maybe there's a kernel of truth to it."

"You are a brilliant man."

"I am a defeated man."

"Harvey you are one of the wealthiest human beings on the planet. You built an empire from nothing."

"Money helps you win certain battles. But I am still losing the war."

"The war against what?"

"Time!" He slammed down his drink on the glass table. "Time defeats us all in the end, Calvin. You'll see. My experience. My accomplishments. It will all scatter in the wind like dust!"

Calvin was nursing a glass of Zinfadel. He set this down and leaned over to drape an arm around the shoulders of his old friend.

"Death takes everything," Harvey moaned, his face flush and teary. "People think you reach a certain age and you accept your mortality. I can't! Maybe the plebes can accept it. They have so much defeat and disappointment throughout their lives that in a sense the end must be a sort of relief. But you and I aren't built like that Calvin. We don't let the world bend our will. We're the ones who bend it."

"That's why I asked you to come here, Harvey. You are not going to die. None of us are. We are not going to bend our will to death. We are going to bend it to our will. Let me tell you my plan because I am going to need your help."