“Anything else you can think of?” Rachel asked from the back-seat. “Anything in the range of personal development issues or Human Resources stuff?”
“No,” Michelle said, suddenly stopping herself in mid-sentence as a thought came to her. “Well, actually I have noticed disapproval of taking time off. You know...vacations and stuff. Calling in sick. That kind of thing.”
Rachel and Alan nodded. “Go on,” Alan prodded.
“What does this have to do with—”
“It has a lot to do with what we’re up against,” Alan said, his features grim.
Michelle regarded them both, hoping to see if there was just the slightest chance—just the slightest—that they were mad. There wasn’t. She could read it in their faces, in their eyes. They were dead serious and that made her nervous. “I don’t know,” she said, her breath coming out in a whoosh. “There’s so much emphasis now on...devoting yourself to the company you work for, being loyal to them and identifying yourself with them, and you don’t get much in return. It used to be that you could get a good position with a good company and stay there forever. Your job might not always be secure, but your position with the company always was if you were a good employee. If there were cutbacks, they tried to find a way to keep you employed somehow. Those days seem to be gone.”
Alan nodded, and when she was finished he leveled his gaze at her. “You don’t know much about my background, or Rachel’s for that matter. Rachel’s history is similar to yours.” He turned to Rachel. “Care to indulge her?”
“I barely knew my parents,” Rachel said, addressing Michelle directly. “I’m only twenty-five; my mom was twenty-three when she got pregnant with me. She was working for a huge financial planning firm in Chicago and met my father there. He took off when he learned my mom was pregnant, so I never met my natural father. According to my research, my mom was normal during the first three or four years of my life. I barely remember her; all I get are images, brief snapshots or five minute movie reels in my head of when she was my mother. My real mother.” There was a sense of loss in her voice, a heart-breaking sense of sadness that reminded Michelle of her own losses—the lack of her parents love and attention, the loss of Alanis. “When I was four she went through a management training program in an attempt to rise through the ranks at work so she could better provide for me. That’s when she stopped being my mom—she became more absorbed in work. She stopped paying attention to me, was hardly around when I was growing up. She met a guy at work and he moved in with us. He was just like her; very driven, very into his work. They always brought their work home, and I was mostly raised by my grandparents and my uncle Stephen and his wife Shelly. My mom and her boyfriend, whom she later married, provided food and a roof over my head, but that was it. She...acted like a mother whenever she had to show up for a parent-teacher conference or something, but she wasn’t my mother. She started changing drastically when I was five, and by the time I was ten she wasn’t the same woman. The more I tried to remember her from before she changed, the more that image started slipping away. It got to the point that by the time I was in Junior High, I didn’t realize my mother had once been a vibrant person.”
Rachel dragged on her cigarette. “To make a long story short, I was extremely rebellious as a teenager. I got sent to Juvie and later graduated from high school through a GED program. I went to tech school to become an html programmer and got a job working at the same company my mother worked at. Weird coincidence, huh? I tried establishing a relationship with her and for a while I thought it might work. We had something in common now—we worked for the same employer—but whenever I tried to arrange mother-daughter things, my mom always had an excuse, and it always involved work. She just wouldn’t take the time to relax and enjoy the finer things in life. I asked her once why she worked so much, why didn’t she take a vacation or something, and she said, ‘Why would I want to take a vacation? This is what I do.’
“Anyway, that’s when I noticed differences at work. That some people were exactly like my mother and others were more normal, more...you know...they did their jobs, then they went home and had a life. I started noticing this more and more at other companies—I went through five jobs from the time I got my technical school training done till I finally dropped out of the corporate rat race—and I got interested in learning about these people’s lives. I’d always had a diary, so I started jotting down my observations, people’s names, where they worked, what their personalities were like. One day I compared everything.” Rachel fixed Michelle with an intent stare. “And what I found was that twenty percent of all the people at the companies I worked at were exactly like my parents. And that Corporate Financial Consulting was always in some way involved with my employer.”
This is the worst conspiracy theory I’ve ever heard, Michelle thought. “What about other consulting firms? Deloitte and Touche? Ingram Micro? Surely they were doing business with your employers as well?”
“Not all of them, and not all at the same time,” Rachel said. “Deloitte and Touche was only brought in by two of my employers for some short-term project. Ingram Micro I never worked with. There was one firm—I can’t remember their name—but they were involved on a long-term project with one company I was at. Corporate Financial was working with all five of my employers during my stints with them. I even got to see it first hand.”
“See what first hand?”
“How they get you.” Rachel smoked her cigarette down to the filter and stubbed the butt out in an ashtray set along the back panel of the island between the front bucket seats. “They were brought in at Graham Electronics, the last company I was at, for five months after I started. Graham was a great place to work when I started. Of all the companies I was at, there was less bullshit at that one, even among the executives. They were all very cool, very down to earth, very great to work with. Sure, there were some people there who were all gung-ho for the company and who brown-nosed certain higher-ups, but you’ll get that anywhere, in any social situation. Two months after Corporate Financial started doing some work for them, it got worse. A glass ceiling seemed to appear beneath the upper management level seemingly overnight. Certain middle-managers became more company oriented, less friendly, more...dedicated I guess you might say. I noticed the change immediately; I didn’t just roll off the tomato cart yesterday. I sort of hunkered down in my cubicle, did my work as I was told, and observed. And what I saw was pretty scary.”
“And what was so scary?” Michelle asked.
“By my count, ten percent of the people I knew at Graham turned into corporate zombies. Literally. The change was gradual—so gradual that the casual observer wouldn’t recognize it. I’d been seeing the signs the last five years, though, and I paid attention. People I used to talk to at breaks and lunches about anything in the world now only wanted to talk about work. One of my friends, a woman named Carol Williams, used to tell me about her husband and her child all the time. We talked about movies, books, music, stuff on the news. She was very cool. We did our work, talked about office politics and our work in general, but it was never obsessive. Carol got obsessive, though. I asked about her daughter once and Carol looked at me as if she didn’t know what I was talking about. When I pressed her there was this light in her eyes that seemed to suddenly turn on, as if a switch was being thrown. She gave me a very basic answer and that was it; that was not like her. She could gab for hours about her daughter, but on this day she just answered the question and then asked me about the project I was working on.”
“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.”
Michelle didn’t know what to say. What did this mean? Before she could ask this question Alan answered it for her. “I don’t know what this means specifically but I have my speculations.”
“And that is?”
“First, you need to know more about Corporate Financial Consultants,” Alan said. “You know what they told you during orientation, right?”
Michelle nodded. Company literature revealed the company was founded in 1938 in Westchester County, New York by two businessmen, Zachary Tyler and Hubert Marnstein. They operated out of a small office, then moved to more prominent real-estate in Manhattan in 1943. By 1950 they had offices in Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles. Their original goal was to help businesses of all kinds find ways to run their operations more smoothly and efficiently. Originally specializing in Accounting Services, the firm began adding various other consulting tasks to their enterprise—Business Administration, Customer Service, Marketing and Advertising, Data Entry and Computer Technology, and Hu
man Resources. They were now the largest privately held corporate consulting firm in the country and in the process of establishing operations in Europe, Japan, and South America.
“They didn’t tell you Tyler and Marstein were strict anti-communists,” Alan said. “That they left the John Birch Society in 1936 because they felt that group was too liberal and formed their own organization.”
“No!” Michelle said.
“Both of them were alarmed at what they felt was the rising tide of socialism in this country,” Alan continued. “They felt Roosevelt’s New Deal, the rising tide of labor unions and the like, was going to carry this country toward full-fledged communism. A lot of people felt that way then; lots of conservatives feel that way now, that things like Social Security and the like are a form of Marxism. We can argue about the merits or validity of those views, but the point of this history lesson is this: Tyler and Marstein were greedy businessmen who would do anything to earn money, even if it meant taking advantage of natural resources and people if they had to do it. Tyler’s grandfather was a plantation owner who’d owned over fifty slaves before the Civil War. Marstein’s family had owned shares in a Railroad company that enslaved Chinese immigrants and Native Americans; they also employed child laborers.”
Rachel cut in. “To make a long story short, their business policy then and now was to retain a two percent stake in every company they took on as clients. Add that up over the years; over a thousand Fortune 500 corporations have retained the services of Corporate Financial over the decades. Two percent of that kind of money adds up to a shit load.”
Michelle nodded, running the figures in her head. “Jesus!”
“Over time they began buying major shares in their client’s companies,” Alan said. “They formed a dummy corporation; this same dummy corporation owns major shares in a very large portion of today’s biggest companies.”
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