J. Gonzalez - The Corporation

“The Red Rose execs come across that way to me, too,” Donald said. His voice sounded grave. “And I think we all need to be on the same page. Let me talk to Alan. I’ll call you a little later.”

“Okay. I love you, Don!”

“I love you, too.”

When she hung up she turned her attention back to the news coverage of Victor Adams’s rampage. A moment later there was a knock on her door. Room Service. A hotel employee wheeled a metal cart bearing her lunch into the room and left. Michelle ate her lunch quietly, her attention riveted to what was now being trumpeted as the Free State Insurance Massacre. Halfway through her salad a more detailed account of who the victims were flashed on the screen—the entire executive branch of Free State Insurance and some of the board of directors, and twelve other people, men and women, who were described by company personnel as upper managers. Human interest stories focusing on specific victims began to play; the dedicated company man who left behind a wife and young son; the doting grandfather who’d been with the company for thirty years; the hardworking woman who left behind a tearful husband and two young children. These were normal people, normal American citizens, the news anchor said, and their only crime was they’d shown up to work that day.

There’s got to be more to it than that , Michelle thought. She focused on the name of one of the victims, Ken Atkins, who was shot in his office as Victor Adams barreled into the IT division. She wrote the words Free State Insurance IT department and Orange County, California on a notepad and circled them. Then, when she was finished with her lunch, she went to the desk where she’d placed her laptop and booted the unit up.

Once she accessed the hotel’s WiFi network she spent the next three hours researching Ken Atkins’s name on the Internet as the news feed broadcast in the background. It took awhile—Google searches, trolling information technology message boards and blogs, but she found what she needed to know. The references were vague and infrequent, but they were enough for her to form an opinion. Ken Atkins had been regarded by his employees as an aloof asshole, an insensitive bastard of a manager who was a complete workaholic and expected not only his employees, but his fellow co-workers, to keep sixty and seventy hour work-weeks. Those that failed or refused were disciplined harshly, eventually being terminated. Others quit before termination could occur. Michelle jotted down notes, copied message board texts into word files and saved them in a special folder she created on her desktop and continued her research. It was obvious from even the scant information she was able to dig up—three or four anecdotes on various message boards frequented by IT professionals who talked shop and vented on the daily frustrations of their jobs, that this was more than enough to convince her. Ken Atkins hadn’t been just a family man—he’d been a corporate zombie masquerading as a normal, average American citizen. The media was extolling his family life, reporting that he’d simply been an average man who went to work that morning to provide for his family and was gunned down. They weren’t reporting that he was a corporate monster who terrorized his employees, threatened to fire them if they didn’t submit to his will or demand that they cease to have a life outside of the office. None of that was being taken into account.

Michelle would have bet a year’s salary that if she did similar research on the names of the other murder victims she would have learned similar stories.

Alan Crawford called a little after five p.m. “I talked to Jay and Donald,” he said. “We want to get together tonight. All of us. Get you up to speed with what’s happening.”

“Okay. Where?”

“It’s going to have to be after midnight again,” Alan said. “More like three a.m., when they’re more sedate. They tend to recharge in the hours between midnight and six a.m. They may behave like vampires in a way—sucking the life force out of companies and the people who work for them—but they pretty much live and operate by daylight. So let’s say three a.m., my white Datsun again in the parking lot of the hotel.”

“I’ll be there,” Michelle said.

“How are you doing?”

“Okay.” Michelle told him what she’d learned about Ken Atkins. “The media isn’t reporting any of this. I’ve kept the news on all afternoon and there’s been nothing, not even anything about the personal lives of the executives Victor Adams killed.”

“All of the major media outlets have become Corporate Financial Consultant clients,” Alan said. “They’re going to keep all coverage of the people who were killed in this incident as heart-warming as possible. It would be seen as bad press to report disparagingly on the deceased, especially in light of this incident. Would make for bad ratings.”

“So what are we going to talk about tonight?”

“Not on the phone. Has anybody from Corporate Financial contacted you today?”

“No.”

“They still might. If they do, remember to beg off. We’ll get you up to speed tonight at three.”

“Donald and Jay… are they up to speed on everything?”

Michelle detected the briefest pause on Alan’s side of the connection before he responded. “Yes, they are. And they’re prepared. Which is why I want you to rest. You’re going to need to be prepared, too.”

“Prepared for what?” Michelle was getting tired of being given the runaround. “I need to know what the hell’s going on!”

“I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but I’ve since learned some things. And… well… I have every reason to believe that you’re going to be taken to company headquarters tomorrow,” Alan said. “If so, I need you to be alert and ready. You need to learn what Rachel and I found out today, what Jay and Donald know now. Jay has already done the preliminary work and has secured an electronic tracking device, as well as some electronic surveillance equipment.”

“Company headquarters in California?” Michelle knew the corporate headquarters for Corporate Financial was located in the rich, fertile region of the San Joaquin Valley. She’d seen photos of it in company brochures which depicted a sprawling, modern four story structure situated far on the outskirts of a town nestled at the foothills of the Sierra-Nevada’s. “They’re going to fly me out there tomorrow? How do you know this?”

“Intuition.” Alan paused for a moment. “Look, I have pretty strong suspicions they’re going to send you out there. Gary and Sam are extremely interested in you. You’ve played the corporate part so well that you have them totally convinced you’re not only prime material, they want to turn you immediately. They’re going to want to send you to Corporate Headquarters ASAP for some immersion training. They do this with all the consultants they feel are prime material. You definitely fit that bill.”

“Did you get sent to California for this immersion training?”

“No.” There was a sense of tension in the air that Michelle detected immediately. If they were in any other social setting, Michelle would have interpreted it as jealousy from Alan. But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. “Believe it or not, not every employee of Corporate Financial becomes immersed. Likewise, not all of the employees of their client companies become immersed. They tend to focus on the emotionally vulnerable, people with low self-esteem, who embrace their work because it’s really all they have.”

“I’m not like that and you know it!”

“I know that,” Alan said. “And you know that. But they don’t know that, even after all the background checks and psychological profiles they’ve done on you.”