Part Seventy-Nine: Greg Under Siege.

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Timeline: 17:15, Friday 20th April :: Pawnee Lodge Motel and Diner, I-80.

“Dammit, every man and his dog is in this car park. Look at that service line, it’s hanging right out of the building. Are you sure you need to stop? We could be stuck here for hours, but be back in Bamptonville in less than no time.”

Greg demonstrated his displeasure at having to stop by heaving the steering wheel heavily to the left on the start of a second run through the car park, searching for an empty space. 

“Ease up,” Wayne yelled as the torque threw him heavily against the door. The atmosphere between them had become fraught and oppressive. The notion that he’d made a mistake in coming here entered Wayne’s head; he wanted badly to get out of the truck away from Greg to think things through. He gritted his teeth and snapped. 

“Because we do! Stop and I’ll get in the line while you find a place to park up and somewhere for us to sit and talk; up there on that hill looks good.” He pointed to a grassy knoll laid out with picnic benches overlooking the far side of the car park as he dropped down from the cab and loped away to join the end of the cafeteria line for service.

Wayne had felt excited at the prospect of meeting Greg again and bouncing his ideas off him. Greg was his hero; the man who had believed in him enough to back him, give him a start and put him on the business map. Greg had opened his eyes to the wider possibilities of his enterprise lying beyond his own back door; and it had all happened, just like the man said it would. But that excitement was fast becoming a disappointment. Wayne shuffled slowly forwards with the movement of the line with his hopes for them working together on his major project, beyond the IPO and the franchise, appearing increasingly unlikely.

The man driving the truck today and the business fire-brand he had signed up with two years ago seemed to be two different persons.

‘Greg is not the same man I knew two years ago and not the man I expected to find here today.’

Intense disillusion replaced his ebullient expectations. The electric tingle of eager anticipation that had passed through him at the thought that they would work together on one of the greatest endeavours for modern man, surmounting its challenges and attendant risks was now sunk into hollow despondency. Greg had figured prominently in Wayne’s future plans. The prospect of them working closely together on the enormous undertaking he contemplated had become a corner stone of Wayne’s ambitions and was way beyond what every ordinary person deemed possible. Everything had come together at the right time, even Greg’s dismissal from Bailey’s and his arrival here in the USA, free of any encumbrances had seemed like a gift from heaven itself.

But now as the afternoon breeze coated his teeth with a layer of dust while he grimaced and shuffled forwards in a line to buy coffee, Wayne felt that fate had played a foul trick on him. ‘Where the hell is the single–minded drive and dynamism, the electric fast reactions, suggestions, questions and ideas that flowed incessantly from the man I knew in Florida? The man I need to pioneer this project that could make us both richer than Bill Gates?’

That had not been evident in the man he had sat beside in the truck for the past hour. Perhaps he was expecting too much? Yet it was Greg who had expanded Wayne’s own ambitions beyond his father's garage. Greg had been so exact and unswerving in his belief in himself and what he was doing then; even the thought of failure he had dismissed with a contemptuous wave of a hand.  It was Greg’s business plan that Wayne had followed and benefited him from the enormous success it had delivered. He remembered Greg’s impatience when they put the plan together and he had made suggestions that were not supported by proven facts.  Wayne recalled the stern, unsmiling face of the man who stood pointing an accusing finger at him as he pontificated ‘Work is for horses and speculation in the absence of hard facts is the privilege of a fool.’

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