by Susan Wolfe
“Close enough in this case, probably,” Ken acknowledged. “It’s actually ‘Performance Improvement Plan,’ often the first step toward firing someone.”
“That didn’t take long, did it?” she commented.
“No,” Ken agreed, “I guess it didn’t. What’s the basis?”
“They say he hasn’t sold enough in the first month of the quarter,” Zack responded, “and doesn’t have enough leads in the pipeline.”
“Do we know how he compares with other guys’ sales and pipeline?”
“No, and I’m sure Buck Gibbons doesn’t know, either.”
“So let’s tell HR to find out before we take any action. In the meantime, Zack, why don’t you check in with Ben and see how he’s doing?”
“Can you make the call with me, Georgia?” Zack asked. “I might not be Ben’s favorite person at the moment.”
“Ben, it’s Zack Stern,” he said into his speakerphone a moment later. “You remember Georgia Griffin?”
“Yeah. Hey, guys.”
“It’s been a few weeks since I talked to you, and we just wanted to check in and see how your quarter’s going?”
“Exactly the way they knew it would go when they changed my territory.”
Georgia and Zack exchanged glances. “They changed your territory?”
“Yeah. Cut my old territory in half, gave my biggest accounts to Linda, and gave me some new territory where I don’t have a single contact.”
“And your quota?” Zack asked.
“Same as it’s always been.”
“Can you meet it?”
A snort came through the speakerphone. “No way. I’m spending my time cold-calling in the new territory, just to find people who’ll talk to me for ten minutes. That’s the only reason you caught me here in the office.”
“Did they change anybody else’s territory?” Georgia asked.
“Nope. Just me and Linda.”
“Ben, this is just wrong,” Zack said. “We need to force them to give you your old territory back.”
“So then they’ll just raise my quota. Or say I have attitude problems. I think the handwriting’s on the wall here. Not sure it’s worth your time.”
“But I feel responsible for this. At least let me give it a shot.”
There was a short silence. “Up to you, but can you find me a bullet-proof vest? Your shots seem to end up lodged in me, somehow.”
“Well,” Zack said after they’d hung up, “I guess that’s a kind of progress. Ben has developed sarcasm.” His jokey tone was belied by the angry glitter in his eyes.
“Are Buck and Glen really going to get away with this?”
He lifted his hands in a gesture of helpless resignation. “Honestly, Georgia, I sorta think they are. I don’t see any way to stop it at this point. Do you?”
Well, no she didn’t, really. Not at the moment. And they were so overwhelmed by the side deal investigation that she couldn’t even try to think of one.
At 9:30 that night the self-denominated Hideous Facts Team was huddled around the cheap laminated table in the windowless red-walled conference room. Quan, Zack, Georgia, and a guy from Internal Audit were reviewing the “hot” email regarding side deals that had been culled by the now thirteen outside lawyers who were set up around a server over at the outside law firm, Woodrow, Mantella.
Although they were almost stacked on top of one another the airless little room was silent, with each reader taking notes and keeping his own counsel about what he was finding. From the email Georgia had read so far, both Dora Hickox and Danny Villus, the two sales executives from the San Francisco office, were up to their eyeballs in side deals, not all of them confined to Chipotle Software. She hoped she was misinterpreting something.
Then Quan said, “Uh-oh.”
They all looked up. “Uh-oh what?” the Internal Audit guy said warily.
“Uh-oh I think I found a smoking gun. May I read it to you?” He blinked rapidly behind his rimless glasses. “This is Charlie Reebuck to Danny Villus on the Ramco deal: ‘As for the buyback, don’t use it unless you have to. You’re a top salesman, out-negotiate him.’ ”
“Shit,” Zack said decisively after a moment of silence. “We gotta do Reebuck.” Georgia wished those walls had been painted something other than the color of dried blood.
Georgia watched Ken read the ‘smoking gun’ email the next morning, his palm absent-mindedly brushing the top of his military haircut. Cliff Tanco was seated sideways at the table, his legs stretched out in front of him, and their outside lawyer, Jill, was on the speakerphone. Beyond the window, the utterly motionless trees seemed as lifeless as the parking lot itself, where the only movement was sun ricocheting off hot chrome.
Ken tossed the email onto his table and looked up. “This is quite unfortunate. We now have to review all of Charlie’s email for the San Francisco office, and still find a way to file the Q on time. Has his email been restored?”
“It has.” Georgia glanced at her notes. “And for three years it’s another 54,000 emails.” Somebody whistled. “And don’t we have to look at his other direct reports in San Francisco, too?”
They had a plan in twenty minutes, which included Quan locating thirty new email readers by the end of the day. Was that even possible? Right now they had only thirteen.
“God bless Charlie Reebuck,” Ken said. “Let’s hope he hasn’t cost the shareholders a billion dollars in market cap. I briefed Roy and the board, by the way. The board wonders if this whole investigation should be turned over to an outside firm so there’s no claim of bias. Opinions?”
“My opinion,” Zack replied promptly, “is that the minute you hand this over to an outside firm you can forget about filing on time.”
“I agree with Zack,” Jill said, “and I think it’s unnecessary, unless we find evidence that an executive is involved. Meaning you, Cliff, or you, Ken, or Glen Terkes.” Georgia felt Ken’s eyes flick in her direction without making contact. So he was worried about Glen, too.
“If that happened,” Quan said, “we might have to review the whole world.”
“To be clear,” Jill warned, “if this expands to any office beyond San Francisco for any reason, then we cannot expect to finish on time.”
Ken looked askance at the phone. “Understand the issue, Jill, but we’re here to get this done. Georgia, I’m afraid we need to ask IT to restore all email for all offices, starting with the rest of Charlie’s Western Region offices. Unbelievable, that a high-tech company tries to save money by backing up their email on these Stone Age tapes. Okay, anything else? Thanks, everybody. Zack and Georgia, can I talk to you for one more minute?” They waited while the others filed from the room.
“Just got a call from the number two guy in SAP’s legal department, Jochen Volkmann, the guy who’s handling both the patent and now the ITC case. Evidently he called me as soon as he found out Archie Moss isn’t here anymore.”
“That’s a joke, right?” Zack asked. “We could use a good joke about now. He wasn’t really talking to Archie.”
Ken shrugged with helpless bewilderment. “I think he must’ve been. How else would he even know Archie’s name? Anyway, Volkmann asked me to meet him in New York this week to talk settlement. This would be a lot to dump on you, Zack, because we basically can’t lose one second on the side deals. You good with it?”
“I’m fine with it. By all means, go settle SAP.”
“Well, not in this first meeting, but it shows we’ve got their attention.”
Two mornings later, Maggie appeared in the entrance to Georgia’s cube. “Ken’s calling from New York. He’d like to speak to you and Zack on his speakerphone.”
“Georgia, Zack, you there?” He was whispering. “Have to talk fast, they’ll be back any minute now. This meeting with SAP is unbelievable. They just made a demand so low it’s laughable. I’m supposedly talking to Roy about it now.”
“What’s the demand?” Zack asked.
“Sworn to
secrecy, even from you, but it’s down in the low triple-digits.”
“NFW! After two and a half years?”
“And $24 million in legal fees. Wish you guys were here to see it, the fight’s just drained out of ’em. I tell you, Georgia, your ITC idea was even better than we thought.” Wait, he was giving her credit?
“And we buy peace?” Zack asked.
“You bet we buy peace. Up, gotta go!” The line went dead, and she continued to stare at the phone with a half-smile on her face, bobbing on a little sea of happiness.
Charlie Reebuck probably weighed 130 pounds. Small, skinny, constantly in motion, dressed in a tailored and well-fitting suit that must have begun life in some boys’ department. Georgia’s hand throbbed after he shook it.
Zack directed him to a seat in the windowless conference room on the first floor. “Okay, Mr. Reebuck, I’d like to ask you some questions this afternoon, and Georgia will keep track of what we say. Thanks for coming in today.”
Charlie’s darting brown eyes settled earnestly on Zack. “Happy to help. Just need to get back into the field as quickly as possible.”
“I’ll try to move it along. You’re in charge of sales for the Western Region, is that right?”
“Right. And then I moonlight as a boy prostitute.”
“Great.” Zack smiled appreciatively. “Just so you know, this might go a little faster if I don’t have to figure out what’s real and what’s joking.”
“No problem. That was real.” Slight pause. “So, what am I in trouble for?” He wanted to keep Zack off balance. Afraid, or just a control freak?
“I don’t know that you are in trouble,” Zack clarified. “We’re investigating a string of side deals that originated in your San Francisco office.”
“You’re kidding. Side deals? What deals were those?” Charlie looked very concerned.
“I’ll go over them with you in a few minutes. First, I’d like to ask you whether you ever authorized any deals out of your San Francisco office, in which a distributor was given a right of return outside the signed contract.”
Charlie’s shoulders twitched. “Of course not. That’s against company policy.”
“Okay. I’d like to start with the Ramco deal. You’re familiar with that?”
“Yeah, but that was a while ago. Wasn’t it?” His torso was quivering from his leg jiggling under the table. Was this normal for him? Could he be on drugs?
“Closed in Q4 of last year,” Zack continued. “Did you authorize Danny Villus to offer the distributor a full right of return if he took $200K of product in Q4?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then can you tell me how you explain this email?”
Charlie tapped his middle finger rapidly on the table as he read. He must have been a fairly slow reader. Finally, he looked up. “Yeah?”
“Would you read the second paragraph, please?”
“ ‘I’m giving this my best, but I may need the ability to guarantee that he won’t lose his money. Can you authorize me to offer a buyback for up to $200,000?’ Unquote.”
“Okay, great,” Zack said. “And then would you please read your response? Second paragraph, first sentence I’ve highlighted for you?”
“Surprised you can’t read it yourself. ‘As for the buyback, don’t use it unless you have to. You’re a top salesman, out-negotiate him.’ ”
“Does that refresh your recollection about whether you authorized Danny Villus to offer the distributor a full right of return if he took $200K of product in Q4?”
“Not really, no.”
“Do you recall that you sent this email?”
Charlie shrugged. “If you say it came from my computer, I must have sent it.”
“And do you agree that it authorizes the offer of a $200K buyback?”
He considered a minute. “No.”
“No?” Zack raised his eyebrows. “Can you explain what else it might mean?”
“Well, it just says don’t use it unless you have to. That isn’t the same as saying it’s authorized.”
Zack pushed his glasses up his nose with his middle finger. “Fine, Mr. Reebuck, I can take those from you. Now I’d like to move to the Lucas Solutions deal. That was a deal for $170K. You remember it?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, let’s try to sharpen your memory. Take a look at this email exchange, please.” He handed him two sheets of paper.
Again, Charlie looked at them for several minutes. Then he looked up.
“You see,” Zack said, “paragraph two of Bill Litcomb’s email to you says, ‘I can close this by promising we’ll work with him next quarter if he’s stuck with the product. Please confirm you are okay with that.’ You see that?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me the meaning of ‘we’ll work with him next quarter?’”
He shrugged. “Bill wrote it. Have to ask him.”
“Well, you agreed to ‘work with him next quarter,’ didn’t you?”
“Don’t know.”
Zack raised his eyebrows. “You don’t know? Mr. Reebuck, look at the language in your response email that I have highlighted for you. Do you see where you say, ‘Of course we’ll work with him. He’s a preferred customer.’ Do you see that?”
“Yes.”
“Well, when you agreed to ‘work with him’ what did you think it meant?”
“Don’t remember.”
“Mr. Reebuck.” Zack suddenly stood up and locked his elbows as he leaned forward across the table, looking down at Charlie’s startled face. “I thought you were going to stop kidding around. I think you know exactly what it meant to ‘work with him,’ and I think you know very well that you agreed to the $200K buyback in the Ramco deal. You’re lying to me, and I want you to start telling me the truth.”
Whoa. What happened to Mr. Friendly?
Charlie held his palms up, and ducked his head. “Okay. Don’t get excited. I’ll tell you the truth.” When woodpeckers hummed Beethoven.
Zack sat back down. “Great. You can start by telling me what you meant by ‘work with him.’”
His shoulders twitched again. “Don’t remember.”
Zack expelled an exasperated sigh. Georgia passed him a note: “Ask about his Mattel deal. Say it was fake.”
“Okay, Mr. Reebuck . . .”
“Call me Charlie,” he offered expansively.
“Thank you, Mr. Reebuck, I don’t think I will. I’d like to move to your Mattel deal.”
Charlie stiffened. “Mattel! Now wait a minute. Nothing wrong with that deal. 100% legit.”
Zack flashed Georgia a meaningful look. “As opposed to the Ramco and Lucas Solutions deals?”
“Whatever. If there’s anything wrong with the Mattel deal, I had nothin’ to do with it.”
Zack’s sigh was theatrical. “I’d like to believe you, Mr. Reebuck. But you lie so much, how can I believe anything you say?”
“I know. I know. I’m working on that.” His staccato admission was tinged with regret, and he lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender.
Hide and Seek continued for another two hours.
Zack and Georgia were sorting through their Reebuck notes and vying with each other for blackest humor at 6:30 that evening, when Ken called again. “Guys, we’re done.”
“For the day?” Zack asked, consulting his watch.
“Done entirely. We settled.”
Georgia turned to stare at the speakerphone. “You settled the whole ITC lawsuit??”
“And the patent case. They’re finalizing the agreement now.”
“And the terms?” Zack asked.
“Verboten to say, but believe me, it’s the deal of the millennium.” He actually chortled. “I think they looked into the abyss of having their U.S. sales blocked, and just capitulated. So Georgia, I just emailed you the language for the press release. Can you run it by Roy, and then get it out on the wire before the market opens tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.”
>
“Woohoo!” Zack yelled, and they did a high five.
“This has certainly been quite a day for the company,” Ken said. “How’s the investigation coming?”
“We interviewed Charlie Reebuck.” Zack caught Georgia’s eye and she shook her head. “Tell you about him later. And then we found a way to squeeze three more email readers onto the system, so we’re up to forty-eight. All a little precarious, but we’re gettin’ there.”
“Good. Stay with it. I know you will. I’ll see you in the morning as soon as my plane lands. In the meantime, savor the victory, guys. We don’t get them often enough.”
Zack ended the call, put his palms against the sides of his head and began alternating them. “We’re up. We’re down. We’re up. We’re down. Is the company better or worse off after today, Georgia? What do you think?”
“Better off, of course. One miserable little sales guy can’t begin to cause the kind of damage the patent suit did.”
Zack’s silence was disconcerting.
She wanted to forget about Charlie Reebuck during dinner, but Katie-Ann wasn’t cooperating. She muttered grudging monosyllables until Georgia finally asked, “Hey. What’s up? Spaghetti once too often?”
Katie-Ann paused, her noodles half wound around her fork, and looked up from her plate. “I got my first geometry quiz back today. I really don’t know my butt from a dry well.”
Poor time to criticize a metaphor. “Well, but you’re great in English and history, they’ve put you in the AP classes. French is fine, art should be a snap. Maybe you just need a lower level of geometry.”
“There is no lower level of geometry. Everybody else in my grade is doing trig.” She abandoned all pretense of eating and rested her temples against her fists.
“You sure? I can talk to the teacher. Maybe you and I have to become really good math buddies for a while. Assuming I can figure it out. Otherwise, we’ll get help from somebody who does.”