Murray Hill || A Superhuman Tale - 1

Chapter Forty-Two

The offices of Levinson Brothers, Inc. were housed in a small, non-descript building several blocks off 47th street in Midtown. The building was just outside what traditionally was known as the Diamond District, but as soon as Tommy entered the building, he knew it was a place of serious business. People were friendly and casual, but there were no frills and security was airtight.

The preceding three days had been a whirlwind of activity, and three times Tommy had been forced to reschedule his appointment with a Levinson buyer named Abraham Behrman. He was not the least upset or insulted that Mr. Behrman made him wait now. It was Tommy's first breather in 72 hours, and the buyer was being courteous in agreeing to squeeze him in at 3:30 on an otherwise busy workday.

Three days earlier, Tommy hadn't even gotten off the train from D.C. before he'd again called his lawyers and instructed them to refine their research. He still wanted the complete details of Hollirich, but first he wanted all possible information on Valhalla Security Systems: clients, contracts, corporate officers, offices, assets, real estate. In sum, everything, and he wanted it within 24 hours.

The lawyers initially had pushed back against the short deadline, but soon relented. It took very little time for them to confirm his suspicions that Valhalla was the villain of this play, a view that was reinforced by everything they subsequently had learned.

The company had been around since 2003, first under the name SOC-V, Inc., and after 2007, as Valhalla. Its founding investors were all Special Operations Command veterans (hence, the name), who had specialized in various types of counterinsurgency and intelligence work.

By 2009, when Hollirich purchased a majority share in the small, privately traded corporation, it employed nearly 200 people and staffed U.S. government contracts on three continents. The company provided intelligence analysis and military advising in the Middle East, operational security and reconnaissance in Africa, and training and military advising in South America. Net revenues then were a tidy and steady $42 million per year, quite a lot of money for a small start-up.

Looking at how the company was positioned as a Hollirich subsidiary, Tommy's limited and somewhat dated knowledge of the intelligence community still told him much. Through its various contracts with the U.S. government, and those of other countries, the company had expanded its workforce to more than 400. It had engaged in several novel ventures, including its participation with a group of investors in a deal that purchased nearly 5,000 refurbished Soviet-era mechanized and armored vehicles in Russia and other Eastern European countries for resale on the after-market in the Middle East and Africa.

Valhalla's hiring spree brought in entry level employees from a variety of countries, including many former service members from various eastern European states. Such employees generally couldn't staff positions supporting sensitive U.S. government contracts and likely would only be able to serve as muscle for the company in contracts abroad: namely, as mercenaries. The overall scope of the company's business plans, though, remained a mystery.

What was equally opaque were Valhalla's domestic operations. On paper, they made a great deal of money in the United States, but Valhalla maintained only three domestic offices: the corporate headquarters outside Eugene, Oregon, a small facility in Washington, D.C., and a larger presence in Tampa, near MacDill Air Force Base, home of several major U.S. military commands.

Over the last three days, Tommy had travelled to each facility to make an initial assessment of their operations.

The D.C. office was little more than a small storefront with a reception area and a conference room. Obviously, it was a place for company officers to take meetings and hang their hats when visiting the capital. Their home office, in Eugene, was bustling, but Tommy could discern only administrative and support staff there. The company was conducting a modest business in Tampa, providing technical and language support at MacDill, though the volume was in no way sufficient to account for Valhalla's large domestic revenues.