But I knew it wasn't over. Harry had promised to ruin me, and I fully expected him to try. What Harry didn't realize was that trying to ruin my professional life was an even bigger mistake than trying to fight me physically.
The real fallout happened the following Wednesday. Harry Caldwell was a man of his word. He spent thousands of dollars hiring a private investigator to dig into my background, determined to find my employer and use his corporate weight to get me fired. He discovered that my company was called Apex Paradigm Solutions, a supposedly mid-level cybersecurity and physical risk assessment firm.
What Harry's private investigator failed to realize—because it was classified under heavily redacted federal clearances—was that Apex Paradigm wasn't just a consulting firm. It was a primary subcontractor for the Department of Defense, and I didn't just work there; I was the founder, the CEO, and the majority shareholder. We vetted logistics networks for federal contracts, ensuring that civilian freight companies met the rigorous security protocols required to transport sensitive government materials.
Harry's company, Caldwell Freight, had been aggressively bidding for a massive, multi-million-dollar logistics contract with the DoD for the last six months. It was the contract that was supposed to take his company from regional success to national dominance.
On Wednesday morning, Harry leveraged his political connections and managed to get a conference call with the regional director of the Federal Procurement Office, a man named General Robert Montgomery, to lodge a formal complaint against a "violent, unstable employee" working for one of the government's contractors, threatening to pull his own logistics bid if I wasn't dealt with.
I know exactly how this call went because General Montgomery, who had been my commanding officer during my second tour in Iraq, called me laughing his head off ten minutes after hanging up with Harry.
"Dave, you won't believe this," Montgomery chuckled over the encrypted line. "I just had some pompous blowhard named Caldwell demanding I fire you. He said you 'viciously attacked' his son."
"Did he mention his son threw the first punch, sir?" I asked, smiling at my desk.
"He left that part out," Montgomery said. "I let him rant for about five minutes. Then, I politely informed him that Apex Paradigm is the exact firm we contracted to run the final security vetting on his logistics company's upcoming bid. I also informed him that you were the lead assessor on his file."