J. Gonzalez - The Corporation

“Maybe she was under some kind of stress related to her job,” Michelle suggested. “Maybe she had problems at home.”

“That’s what I thought at first,” Rachel said. She leaned forward. “But I asked her point blank—‘Carol, what the hell’s wrong? You okay?’ And she… she reacted real slowly, as if she didn’t know how to respond to such a personal question. It was creepy… like watching a puppet being pulled by a marionette’s strings. Or a very slow robot with a slow processor.”

Michelle thought about Jay’s description of Dennis Harrington when he stumbled upon him in his motel room and shuddered.

“Basically topics we used to talk about were now off limits,” Rachel continued. “The people I used to like, that I used to think of fondly, started neglecting their families, their interests outside of work. They were still at work when I left at the end of the day and they were in the office when I came in at 7:30. I went through my notes, observed patterns, and called some of my old co-workers at previous jobs, ones I knew I could trust. Some of them had left their jobs and were working elsewhere. I asked them certain things and they verified stuff I needed to know. Namely, how the climate and certain people around them had changed drastically. That’s when I knew.”

“Knew what?” Michelle said, some of her bravado creeping in. “That your mind was playing tricks on you? That you were getting a little too paranoid?”

Rachel ignored the barb and fixed Michelle with a stare that was direct and uncompromising. “My boss changed overnight from a woman full of laughter and humor and a love for life into this chainsaw Nazi bitch who would not engage you in conversation about anything other than work. She was a good manager, was serious about her work, knew her job and the industry inside and out and could talk about it when it was time to do business, but you could talk to her about anything else too: family, baseball, what it’s like to go body surfing in Hawaii… anything .” Rachel paused. “When she changed, she wouldn’t even consider topics outside of work during conversation. She changed so drastically, did a complete one-eighty turn, that it stunned me. I hunkered in my cube for the next day and just observed what was going on. The girl a few cubes down from me got hit next, and I started noticing a change in Bernie, our department Analyst, the next morning. I wrote up my resignation letter that day at noon, got my stuff and left. I haven’t worked at a large corporation since then.”

Michelle was just about to ask, so what do you do to make money to survive? , when headlights from a car stabbed into the murky blackness of the parking lot. Alan reached out and pushed Michelle down into the seat. “ Down !” Michelle ducked. Rachel flattened herself into the backseat and Michelle tried to stay below the dashboard. Her heart was hammering. For a moment she couldn’t hear anything, but then the sound of a car slowly cruising the lot came to her ears. She couldn’t see the headlights, but she could see the shift and change of the shadows they created from her position while hunkered in the front seat to know somebody was driving around out there. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

Alan didn’t say anything at first. He was sprawled out, legs beneath the dash, his upper body contorted over the driver’s seat of the car. He was peeking out cautiously over the rim of the bottom of the driver’s side window. “Hold on,” he said. “We just need to see if this is a legitimate guest at the hotel, that’s all.”

Michelle almost said, why wouldn’t it be ? Now was not the time to start questioning what was going on and cause a rift. There was something wrong; she knew it, had known it since early this week when she’d started feeling uneasy around Dennis Harrington and Alma Smith, and learned Jay O’Rourke had been fired from Building Products. The feeling had intensified over the past twenty-four hours. Now was definitely not the time to start acting like one of those stubborn characters you see in horror movies, the ones who refuse to believe something is happening when all evidence points to the fact that, yes indeed, some weird shit is going down.

“What are they doing?” Rachel asked from the backseat.

“Hold on,” Alan said. Pause. “The car just parked and turned off the lights. Hold it…”

Michelle felt a cramp hit her leg and she tried shifting her weight around. No good.

“He’s getting out and heading to the hotel,” Alan said. He straightened up and eased back into his seat. Rachel sat up and Michelle crawled out from her space in the front bucket seat. Her leg tingled from the cramp. “Sorry about that,” he said. “But we’ve got to be careful.”

“Who do you think it could have been?” Michelle asked.

“Somebody from Corporate Financial doing a sweep of the lot,” Alan said. He watched the figure retreat into the lobby dragging a suitcase behind him. “They’ve been known to do that.”

“Snoop around parking lots?”

Alan turned to her. “Yes. Especially when Corporate Financial is doing business at a conference or something. They like to monitor everything around them as much as possible.”

“Do you think they’re on to us?” Michelle asked, suddenly thinking about Sam Greenberg and wondering if he was starting to suspect she wasn’t the cut-to-the-mold corporate drone she’d built herself up to be during her interview.

“I don’t think so but you never can tell,” Alan said. “They are aware of the Coalition, though. I wouldn’t put it past them to be suspicious.”

“If they’re aware of the Coalition, how can you be sure they’re not aware of you ?” Michelle asked.

“I’m not,” Alan said. He checked the parking lot out in the rear and side view mirrors as he talked. “But like I said, they know something’s up, and they know about the group. One of our members was found murdered two months ago in his home in Seattle. The member in question had penetrated one of Corporate Financial’s biggest clients. He was feeding us good information, so good that we got a very good map of their corporate structure and the names of their higher personnel. Believe it or not, that information is pretty top secret. Not even Corporate Financial underlings know who really runs the company.”

“A guy named Gary Lawrence is one of their VPs,” Michelle said. “He’s very high up in the company. The president is a guy named Frank Marstein. One of the other VPs is a Linda Harris. I’ve never met any of them except for Gary Lawrence, and he seemed very normal. Very… well, unlike the others.”

Alan nodded. “Lawrence is quite frightening. He can put on a good front. He certainly had me thinking he wasn’t like the others, but he is. The guy I just told you about that was found murdered… that was his mission, to determine Lawrence’s true nature. That’s what killed him.”

Michelle felt the chill settle over her. “So… what did he find out? And how—”

“How’d he die?” Alan finished for her. “Police are attributing it to a break-in, that he’d surprised a burglar. Official cause of death was strangulation. It was closed quickly. Want to know why?”

Michelle was afraid to ask but she did anyway. “Sure. What else have I got to lose?”

“There was really no sign of a break-in—no picked locks, no smashed windows, no sign of a struggle. No suspicious fingerprints were found. But he was definitely strangled; the physical signs showed it. And there was another thing.” Alan regarded Michelle seriously. “His neck and face were coated in substance the coroner and medical examiners couldn’t identify. One of our members talked to somebody at the morgue and they said the stuff was almost like slime. Or grease .”