The Ruthless Magnate

Chapter 1

John Randall Williams sat looking out the window of the conference room, on the forty-eighth floor of his office in New York.

The men in the room were silent for a moment, waiting for him to speak.

They were the senior employees of his company.

John was a tall, handsome, powerfully built man, with broad shoulders, a mane of white hair, ice-blue eyes, and a stern expression.

He had played football at Harvard, and was still in remarkable shape at sixty-six.

There were ten of his top men at the conference table with him.

They had been wrestling with negotiations for a company he had wanted to buy for the past three months, and he had to make a decision about whether or not to go in for the kill now.

He was known for his tough positions and relentless pursuit of what he wanted, without mercy.

He owned container ships all over the world, and this was a line he had wanted to buy for years, for their fleet of vessels that suited his needs.

The deal appealed to him because the owners were operating from weakness.

It was a family-owned operation, and the three sons who had inherited it from their father were losing ground daily, and John knew it.

He had made them a low offer and continued to drive the price down while they procrastinated.

Behind his back, people said John was a man without mercy, without a heart.

To his face no one contradicted him, they didn’t dare.

But in spite of his toughness in business, he had incredible charisma, along with his good looks.

He was charming when he wanted to be, if it served his purpose.

Or as cold and immovable as a glacier, if he preferred.

He had inherited his shipping line. His great-grandfather, Arthur Williams, had owned passenger ships, elegant ones that had been the luxury liners of their day.

John’s father, James Williams, had converted them to cargo ships and made them infinitely more profitable.

John’s father had died young, and when he inherited the line, John had taken their fleet in hand, modernized it to state of the art, and had the most lucrative cargo ships anywhere in the world.

He had turned distinguished old money into vast quantities of new money, and he shamelessly put his competitors out of business whenever it suited his purposes.

He was about to do it again. The ships he wanted to buy would be put into dry dock and renovated.

The men currently working on them would all lose their jobs, and his fleet would have grown again.

The current owners knew how John Williams operated, and felt a responsibility to the men who had worked for them faithfully for years.

But none of the three brothers who owned the line now wanted the headaches that went with the business, such as dock strikes and dangerous waters.

They had lost two ships to pirates in the last year, and another had sunk in a hurricane, with loss of life among those onboard.

Two of the brothers were past retirement age, and the youngest had never liked the business they were in.

They wanted out but not at Williams’s prices, and were concerned about what he would do with their faithful employees.

But their losses had been too great and they knew they had to sell.

It just pained them to agree to the slaughter they knew Williams would make of it.

It was what he did. Some said he enjoyed it.

He had a checkered reputation, and some fans, who also fell prey to his charms. Mostly women.

But some men were impressed by how tough and what an astute businessman he was.

The men seated around the conference table were waiting for his final offer.

It was a fine art figuring out just how low he could go, and naming a price he knew the sellers would accept this time.

He was brilliant at it, and had been doing it for all thirty years he had run the company.

No one denied that he was a hard man, but an incredibly smart one.

He had an instinct for business like few others.

He was bold and never afraid to take a risk.

When people thought he would lose, he came out of the shadows with unbeatable strength and always won.

He seldom made mistakes and had had few losses in the course of his career.

And very few of his allies or adversaries dared to stand up to him. In fact, none.

There was only one person who knew the softer side of John Williams, and was his source of comfort in a harsh world.

His wife, Helen, had been the gentlest person he’d ever known.

She knew what he was thinking and feeling without his ever saying a word.

Only she understood how much it pained him at times to destroy another man’s business or nearly steal his ships from him.

If John had a conscience, he hid it well.

Helen gave him strength in his rare weak moments.

Their daughter, Gabrielle, would inherit his shipping empire one day, and had no interest in how it worked. She had gone into medicine instead.

Helen saw all John’s strengths and loved him with his weaknesses, and even his flaws.

She had loved him unconditionally, a rare thing in life.

He shone like a bright star in her eyes.

Gabby, their only child, saw only the sins he committed, and never forgave him for them, or forgot them.

She hated what he did and how he did it.

She had gone to college in the West at Stanford, went to medical school there, and did her residency and settled in Aspen, Colorado.

She was an orthopedic surgeon, and was said to be one of the best knee surgeons in the West. Aspen was a ski community, and she had plenty of business in the winter, and people came from all over the country to be operated on by her all year long.

Helen had been the bridge over troubled waters between them, and she had been good at it.

Gabby and her father needed an interpreter to speak to each other.

The chasm between them was almost unbridgeable now.

Gabby had loved and admired him when she was a child, but not now as an adult.

As an adult she loathed what he did. It was painful to watch when he moved in for the kill. And so predictable.

Her mother, John’s beloved wife, had died nine months before of breast cancer.

They had tried everything, even experimental treatments at Mass General and Stanford, and the Anderson Center in Texas, but they had discovered it too late.

John was inconsolable when she died, but he didn’t let it show at the office.

As far as everyone could see, nothing had changed.

He was as tough and merciless as ever, maybe even slightly more so.

He had cried himself to sleep every night for six months, and for the past three months, he had been slowly learning to live with the loss.

His nights were a deep, dark abyss now, and he slept only briefly, in the early morning hours.

The lines in his face were more sharply etched, his deep blue eyes pools of pain.

Gabby had never believed that her father loved her, and could see no evidence of it in his behavior toward her.

He had never been around when she was growing up, always at the office.

He had demanded excellence of her for her entire life, was easily critical of her, rarely praised her accomplishments, and always raised the bar higher.

She kept her distance from him now for her own sanity.

She firmly believed that her father was capable of loving only her mother, and no one else.

No matter how much he loved his daughter, and Helen knew he did, he could never find the right ways to show her.

Their relationship as father and daughter required a language that neither had ever learned how to speak, and Helen’s absence for the past nine months was sorely felt by both of them.

Gabby missed her mother as much as her father did, but they were unable to express their feelings to each other.

Gabby’s brash, outspoken criticism of John only made him colder with her.

His famous harshness destroyed any sympathy and compassion she might have had for him.

Their mourning for the past nine months had been a lonely place for both of them.

Gabby hadn’t come home since the funeral, and only called infrequently, when she felt she had to.

She took days to return his calls, and they had nothing to say to each other.

She had told him she wasn’t coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Helen had always made the holidays warm for all of them, but there was no one to do that now.

Gabby had decided to stay in Aspen and work through the holidays, which was her busiest season, due to skiing accidents.

And John had decided to spend the holidays alone.

He didn’t want to spend them with anyone else.

He knew that if Gabby came home, it would just end in an argument, so he didn’t try to convince her.

His not doing so confirmed to her what she already believed and had all her life, that he didn’t love her.

He loved only his wife and himself, as Gabby always said. She saw him as a cold, selfish man.