All Chapters of Rise Of The Trillionaire: Robert Jackson: Chapter 111
- Chapter 120
144 chapters
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN
The name arrived on a Tuesday.Not through Carlisle. Dave had found it himself which surprised him, as he was now accustomed to depend on Carlisle to do anything that involved seeking beneath the surface, and had almost forgotten that he could discover things himself, in case he took the trouble to look far enough.He followed the acquisition strategies using business registry filings made publicly in three jurisdictions. Patient work. The type of work that involved long hours sitting with databases without any immediate result and hoping that the result would eventually payoff provided that he looked hard enough.On a Tuesday afternoon it arrived.A Singapore incorporated Shell Company. Clean on the surface. Standard structure. That type of registration which was registered ten thousand times a year in the Asian business registries, attracting no attention from anyone who wasn't specifically looking.The registration date, however was three days before the indictment of Victoria was
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE
In ten days Carlisle returned.Two weeks is what Dave had anticipated. Ten days meant either the information was easier to find than it should have been, or Carlisle had pushed harder than usual. Neither of these explanations was quite comfortable. Information that came easily about a man who had been invisible for five years look suspicious. The fact that Carlisle was pushing harder than usual was an indication that something had caused him to feel that the urgency was warranted.The document was delivered via the encrypted channel at five AM on a Thursday. Seven pages. The longest report made by Carlisle since the Leonard prison communication mapping. Dave read it before six. He read it again before seven. Then he sat down at his desk for a long moment before picking up the phone.At seven fifteen he called Robert."My office," Dave said. "Before anything else today."Robert was present at seven thirty with coffee and a look which showed that he had read between the lines.Dave laid
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN
Robert made the first approach through Marcus.A carefully worded message sent through a business intermediary in Singapore with genuine connections to Shanghai's investment community. Professional. Neutral. Expressing interest in an introductory conversation between two operators with overlapping sector interests. The kind of message that was sent several times a day in business circles and required nothing more than a brief acknowledgment to be considered received.No acknowledgment came.Marcus waited for five days. Standard professional patience. Then he sent a follow-up through a different intermediary. Different channel. Same neutral professional tone. An invitation to a brief call at Wei Liang's convenience. No pressure. No stated urgency.Nothing.Dave tried a different approach. He reached out through a banking contact who had facilitated introductions across the Shanghai investment community for fifteen years and whose name carried genuine weight in those circles. The contac
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN
Wei Liang's maneuver was aimed directly at the remaining personal assets of Victoria, effected very early on a Monday morning.Not the companies. Not the operational network that he had been meticulously acquiring for the last three months. Rather, her personal holdings. The assets she had retained outside of the company structure. The ones she had kept for herself through years of careful planning especially designed to keep them away from the kind of exposure that her business activities sometimes generated.The step was rapid and accurately framed.Diana was the one who observed it first.She had been following her mother's final position with the professional vision of a person whose grasp on the mechanisms being used is exactly as strong as that of a person who has seen them being built from within."He's moving against her personal assets," Diana said. Tightness was in her voice. Controlled but tense. "Not the companies. The personal assets. The properties. The private investmen
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN
The first strike on Zenco came on a Wednesday.Not in the manner of the slow pressure that Victoria had applied. Not like the threads pulled in a structure designed for slow attrition. Wei Liang was different. He came at the same time. He was precise. Each blow landed on a separate element on Zenco's operation in the exact manner of someone who was reading from a map they had drawn fourteen months ago.The investor base was first to be struck.Three institutional positions were put in suspension within a time period of six hours. They were not the biggest ones in a row but were one of the three that were most strategically to be placed. The investors who the majority of them placed public trust in Zenco thus leading the other investors to decide the same. Their withdrawal didn't hurt Zenco directly in the short perspective. But it was the wrenching of the confidence architecture, the symmetry, which left the financial structures hanging.Marcus presented Robert with the suspension not
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN
Monday morning Robert dialed the lawyer of Victoria.Not Victoria directly. Her lawyer first. In three sentences he explained what he needed. The lawyer explained that he would send the message and that Robert would receive a response within a period of twenty-four hours.Victoria called back in four.She did not greet him. She said, "Where."Robert gave her a location. A hotel room that neither of them had ever use in a professional manner. The location was selected because it was a neutral ground.She arrived seven minutes after he did.She was not the same as the last time he had seen her up close. Smaller was an inappropriate term since Victoria Castellano was not made smaller. Something in the specific force field had always been totaling about her, the invisible architecture of a person who occupied rooms before she physically entered them, had contracted. She was still composed. Still precise. Even now, still dressed with that specific deliberate nature of one who realized that
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN
On a Thursday, Victoria took her first piece of intelligence.She arrived at Robert's office without an assistant and with a single printed document that she placed on his desk and stood back from as though the distance was important to maintain.Robert read it.Supply chain disruption. Particularly against the eastern manufacturing alliance that Zenco was developing with the one Robert had crafted in the background when Wei Liang was staring at the wrong coast. The document described how Wei Liang was planning to operate. A point of leverage put into a force majeure clause in the partnership agreement on a contractual basis. Obscure. Precisely identified. The nature of vulnerability that necessitated either exceptional legal forensic or insider investigative skills to identify.“How up to date is this?” Robert said.“The move is being made ready now,” Victoria said. "You have perhaps ten days before it's activated."“How did you acquire this?” Robert said.“I still have contacts with
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN
Roxanne saw it during the Thursday morning meeting.She had been present at the intelligence meetings since Victoria joined them, not all of them, but the ones on which the strategic picture was being put together, not the ones which the operational detail was being implemented. Robert had not invited her to go and had not indicated that she should not. She had just started showing up and had already done enough in the first two meetings that no one questioned her presence in subsequent meetings.She was good in those rooms. It was not the first time that Robert had heard her referred to as intelligent but it was the particular aspect of her intelligence that was displayed in a strategy meeting that he had been surprised to hear the first time he had encountered it in a strategy meeting when she listened to the rest of the table. Not because of the tactical content. For the human content underneath it. The motives, the hesitations, the things people were saying at the edges of what th
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN
Robert came there to find Diana already there.She sat at one table corner with an untouched coffee and her phone with its face down next to it. She raised her eyes as he entered. She didn't smile. She did not make anything out of her expression. She simply stared at him with that specific directness with which she had decided to stop controlling what her countenance says.Robert sat across from her.He ordered nothing. He did not come to take coffee.He gazed at her some time. Then he spoke.“I should apologize to you,” he said. “Not the edited version. Not the one in which I justify my position to the point that the apology is a defense.” He maintained a low but straightforward voice. “When Wei Liang attacked your mother's assets I sat at the window and reflected on the history of Victoria, and then on yours. I made you wait while I worked through a calculation that should have been instant and that was wrong."Diana looked at him. Her expression didn't change."The calculation," sh
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY
The Gerald Okafor dialogue increased in pace.The day he left Diana at the coffee place, Robert gave Gerald a phone call. He did not use intermediaries, nor booked the call using his assistant. He dialed the number Gerald had left him at lunch and Gerald answered after the second ring the way a man answers when he expected a call and is not surprised to receive it."I need to move faster than we discussed," Robert said."How fast?" Gerald said.“Four weeks to a public announcement,” Robert said. “The complete acquisition structure should be completed during that window.”A pause on the line. Not hesitation. Gerald thinking in the exact manner he thought everything out systematically and not hurrying the procedure.“Your due diligence has started,” Gerald said. "How far along?""Two weeks of work," Robert said. “Marcus is ahead. He will tell you that it needs four more weeks to be done properly.”“What are you telling me?” Gerald said.“Marcus is right about what it needs,” Robert said