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him. On the other hand, he wasn’t about to block the move.
    “I’m not going to stand in your way,” Bowen said. “So you go ahead, become a CEO right now.”
    The decision was made. Ken Lay, the kid from rural Missouri, became chairman and chief executive of a major corporation in June 1984, at the age of forty-two.
    It could be argued that the creation of Enron was set in motion on April 21, 1985, when a thirteen-year-old Texas boy decided to phone Zurich.
    Earlier that day, the teenager, Beau Herrold, had taken a message for his stepfather from Sam Segnar, chief executive of InterNorth, an Omaha energy company. Beau told the caller that his stepfather, Ken Lay, was traveling with his mother, Linda. As instructed, he refused to say where Lay was or how to reach him. Still, Beau chewed over the call; it somehow seemed urgent enough that he decided to let his stepfather know about it right away. He checked his parents’ itinerary and saw that they would be arriving at the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich. Beau called and left a message for Lay with the front desk.
    That evening at eleven, the Lays arrived at the hotel from the latest meeting with European investors. At the front desk, Lay picked up Beau’s message and, after checking in, called the boy. Lay knew Segnar’s name, and certainly knew his company, InterNorth, a rival, but he had no idea why the man was calling. Taking a seat at a small desk in the one-bedroom suite, he dialed Segnar at home. As the phone rang, Lay glanced out the window, admiring the lights of Zurich twinkling under a cloud-filled sky. Segnar answered, and the two men spent a moment exchanging pleasantries. Then Segnar sprang the question.
    “Ken,” Segnar said, “would you have any interest in putting our two companies together?”
    The idea struck Lay out of the blue. He barely knew what to say. “Well, Sam,” Lay finally replied, “truthfully, I’ve never really thought about it before.”
    There were plenty of reasons to do it, Segnar said. Both companies were pursuing a strategy based on the idea that fully deregulated markets were coming in the gas industry. Both understood that the biggest pipeline systemswould be the winners. Both had been snapping up smaller pipelines and were often competing bidders. Fighting over scraps made no sense when they both could achieve their shared goal through a single merger—with each other.
    Segnar had plenty of other justifications for pushing the deal, but many of those went unmentioned. Irwin Jacobs, the feared corporate raider, was loading up on InterNorth stock. If Segnar didn’t take control of his own destiny, Jacobs might do it for him. A major acquisition, like HNG, would load the company up with debt and make it far less attractive as a candidate for a hostile takeover.
    Intrigued, Lay asked some questions and said he would get his best people working on the idea. For the next few days, he traveled through Europe with almost no sleep. During the day he met investors; all night he held strategy sessions by phone with his team. HNG wanted seventy dollars a share, InterNorth haggled for sixty-five. Segnar caved on everything, including a commitment that Lay could take over in a matter of years. The seventy-dollars-a-share deal was announced on May 2, just eleven days after the phone call to Zurich.
    There was little time for celebration. Lay had acquired new problems, as he discovered at a September reception in Houston. He hosted the get-together for the InterNorth crowd, giving them a chance to meet the city’s big oilmen. But instead, the directors trooped off to another room to verbally beat up Sam Segnar. They had grown angry about the HNG deal, which they thought had put the company too deeply in debt. Worse, they had heard rumors that Lay and Segnar had secretly agreed to move the headquarters from Omaha to Houston. Segnar denied there was any such deal, but the directors wanted to hear it from Lay—that night.
    As the last of