Fearless by M. W. Craven

Author:M. W. Craven [Craven, M. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2023-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 58

Longhorn prime beef is an oxymoron. It’s a Texan tradition to pretend it’s the best steak in America. It isn’t. It’s too lean. Doesn’t have the right marbling. Unless it’s cooked low and slow, it’s inedible. By the time I was halfway through my porterhouse, I had aching jaws.

As we ate, North gave me a potted history of the company. Some of it I knew; a lot of it I didn’t.

Spencer Quinn had been in Texas with Gunnar on a climbing holiday. They’d wanted to climb a rockface in every county in the Trans-Pecos area. When Gunnar Ulrich’s SLCD failed – or slipped; it was never established – he’d fallen from a bone-smashing height where the chances of survival were negligible. Quinn had been underneath on the same rope, and Ulrich had hit him on the way down. He’d been knocked unconscious, but his SLCD had held firm. By the time he’d regained consciousness and climbed back down, Ulrich was already dead – cause of death: massive internal haemorrhaging.

I’d known most of that. The stories in the press were comprehensive, and North stuck largely to what had been written. There’d been a bit more colour to why the two boys had been in Texas to begin with, but rock climbers, especially those who live in a city, always have to travel. The rocks won’t come to them. It’s kind of part of the deal.

It all seemed straightforward. What happened next wasn’t.

I could understand the motivation behind Quinn doing something in his friend’s name. People had certainly started things for worse reasons. It was a little cute, but that sort of made sense. How Quinn had achieved it didn’t.

Not the starting-a-solar-energy-company-in-the-desert part. That did make sense. No point setting one up anywhere else. It would be like putting a windfarm inside a barn.

It was how he’d raised his capital that was interesting.

Most people, when faced with a funding shortfall for their all-consuming passion, will start tugging on people’s heartstrings. Get donations flooding in. Maybe get a bit of crowdsourcing going on. Try to get some momentum. It was a protracted but risk-free way of funding projects like the one Quinn had had in mind.

But Quinn hadn’t been interested in that. Instead he had gone directly to the banks, asking for a loan of thirty million dollars. According to North, banks were permanently on the lookout for solar energy investment opportunities. The government underwrote large parts of their loans, making it virtually risk-free.

Still, none of the main banks would touch him. He was technically still at school, wasn’t studying the right field and didn’t have an entrepreneurial background. But Quinn refused to give up. Eventually he found a bank willing to back him. Banco Nacional de Coahuila, a small Mexican bank with a scattering of branches stateside, was the one that finally agreed to fund the project in his dead friend’s name. Quinn had hired North to help him during the difficult early days.

‘And were they?’ I said.

‘Were they what?’

‘Difficult early days.

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