by Susan Wolfe
“But, why do you . . . ?”
She spoke over him. “We’ll spend time and money crawling through every single email you’ve sent or received in the last three years, and who knows what’ll turn up? We’re bound to find things that will be terrible for you and the company. Maybe even beyond the side deals.”
A cloud passed across Glen’s face and vanished.
“A lot of innocent shareholders and employees will get hurt,” she continued. “You don’t want that any more than I do.”
He stared at her face while he decided on his next step. Then he sighed and sat wearily down. “Let me get this straight. You think this email is some kind of evidence of side deals?”
Nicely done. Sincere. Convincing.
“Oh, I really do,” she said solemnly. “I’ve read thousands of emails in this side deal investigation, so I’m not exactly a novice. And it’s not a matter of explaining away one. There are lots and lots of them.” Which she was pretty sure would be true, if anybody continued looking.
“Well, my dear, you’re 100 percent wrong. You’re obviously in way over your head. But even if you were right, what’s your point? You want something from me?”
“I want you to make it unnecessary for me to tell Ken anything. You can still make this a win-win for you and the company.”
“Okay. And how’s that, exactly?”
“Well, if you should decide to leave the company, you know, to spend more time with your family, then I won’t have to go to Ken. The bad deals will stop, and everybody’s reputation . . .”
Glen Terkes’ eyes widened to the size of golf balls. “You mean resign? You’d like me to resign? You thought you’d hand me a piece of paper, and then I’d resign?” He laughed, embarrassed for her. “Oh. Forgive me, Miss . . . ?”
“Griffin. It’s Georgia Griffin.”
“Right. You know, if I resign, Miss Griffin, it would be different from somebody like you resigning.” He straightened his cuffs. “I really am this company. If I leave, the whole enterprise will tank within a week. Roy would never let that happen. By the way, I wonder how you could possibly think you’re in a position to second-guess the lawyers on this.”
“I’m not second-guessing anyone. When they see the email I’ve seen, they’ll reach the same conclusion.”
“They’ve seen everything they wanted to see. This is really quite ridiculous. I’m afraid you could be the one who needs to resign, if you try to kick up trouble. I’d hate to have you fired.”
She shrugged. “How would firing me help? Once I tell a company officer, he has a duty to investigate, whether I’m still working here or not.”
“Not if he realizes it’s the confused rambling of some low-level admin who had no idea what she was looking at. Stuff she wasn’t authorized to look at in the first place. What officer is going to listen to that?”
“It’s the email he’ll be listening to,” she said evenly. “And anyway, the SEC listens to everything.”
He cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “The SEC. You’re threatening me with the SEC? Let me get this straight. You want money.”
“No. I want you to do the right thing for the company.”
“And you believe you know what that is.”
His astonishment was drifting toward full-blown indignation, judging by that flush in his cheeks. She couldn’t blame him, really. Here he was, a Captain of Industry, and some germy, no-account rat was sniffing along his credenza as if it owned the place.
He studied her face for a moment and shrugged. “Well, Miss Griffin, you might not know how to spot a side deal, but you apparently do realize you’re threatening to blow up the company. If your motive really is to help the company, then you won’t go to Ken no matter what I say. You certainly won’t go to the SEC. If you were going to, you’d have done it already. So forget this nonsense and go back to doing your job.” He sighed. “Roy would be so disappointed to learn that our General Counsel can’t keep control of his own employees.”
“I’m sure you don’t want to threaten Ken.”
Glen barked a short laugh. “Was I born as young as you are?” He wadded up the email, and dropped it into his wastebasket. “If you care about this company, Miss Griffin, worry about some low-level nobody who makes irresponsible claims about the people who actually run the place.”
“Sure you want to leave that for the cleaning people?”
He snatched the ball of paper out of the basket, then slowed down and tossed it toward her across the desk. “If it worries you, by all means shred it. You’re quite right. We wouldn’t want a cleaning lady to become as confused as you are, would we?” And with that he turned his back on her, and began hitting keys on his keyboard.
Well, that was quite a failure, she thought, as she headed down the stairwell to her car. She wasn’t sure this second chances thing paid off, really.
Would her father have found a way to puncture such impenetrable self-confidence? He’d probably have known better than to waste his time in the first place, but then he didn’t have Ken Madigan to think about. Which he would certainly disapprove of as a dangerous distraction, by the way.
Could she have done something to be taken more seriously? Threatening him with the kiddie porn would have been out-and-out blackmail. Way too risky, and almost certainly unnecessary. More side-deal email? Wouldn’t have mattered. Why should Glen Terkes use a safety net under his high wire act when he was so confident he could simply never fall?
So where did that leave them? He seemed confident that she wouldn’t go to Ken, and of course he was right. She felt confident he’d be afraid to have her fired, since he knew what was in his email even better than she did. Stalemate. Nothing for it now but to see what happened with the Charlie Reebuck gambit.
One thing was certain. Ken would have found this interchange as fascinating as she did. What a shame she could never share it with him.
CHAPTER 23
“Georgia, somebody’s in trouble in this company, and I need to know who it is.” Sally and Georgia were standing just inside the closed door of Sally’s office, with a rather pronounced slam still vibrating the air, and Sally’s hand guarding the handle. Georgia felt a slight panic that Sally was blocking her exit, which was of course irrational. This was what she’d been building toward. She was about to test her father’s assertion that flattery is the lie most likely to be believed.
Looking uncomfortable was certainly easy enough. “Oh well, Sally, I’m not sure about that. If you haven’t heard about it, then I probably misunderstood something. And if he is in trouble, I’m sure he can fix it himself.”
“Who?”
“And if he can’t, it probably won’t have an impact on you.”
“What??”
“I mean, you know, a negative one, anyway.”
“Georgia, is this a joke of some kind? I should warn you, I have a very poor sense of humor.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true.”
Sally twitched with annoyance. For some reason she was sporting a perfectly tasteful cream-colored, silk blouse this morning. Forgot to do her laundry, maybe.
Georgia’s pulse began to thud as she made herself hunch her shoulders and avert her eyes. “Well . . . Okay, I’ll tell you. But I just overheard this, okay, so you won’t blame me if it turns out I misinterpreted something?”
“Of course I won’t blame you. Just tell me exactly what you heard, so I can judge for myself.” She let go of the handle and brushed past Georgia to her desk, so that Georgia had to pivot on the thick carpet in order to face her. She noticed that the sickly rubber plant had finally been removed for decent burial, replaced by a healthy new plant with big green fronds. Poor thing.
“Well,” Georgia began, “on Wednesday afternoon after the board meeting I started to go down to my car because I’d left my cell phone in it, and I like to keep it with me in case Katie-Ann calls.”
“Yes.” One urgent syllable.
“Well, and I decided to take th
e stairwell on the east side of the building, even though it’s hot as blazes in there, because my car’s right at the bottom and I wanted to be fast.”
“Fine,” Sally prompted, “and then you heard something?”
Georgia nodded. “As I was going down the stairwell from the third floor, I heard some male voices on the landing outside the door to the second floor. You know, nobody ever uses that stairwell in the summer, so I was surprised somebody was there.”
“Yes!” Sally hissed through slightly clenched teeth.
“Well, I recognized Jean-Claude’s voice and I just stopped.”
“Jean-Claude. Go on.”
“Jean-Claude was saying how disappointed he was by the latest stock drop. He’s afraid we’ll become a takeover target if we don’t get the price back up. He said he was reaching a crisis in confidence that we had the right leader in place.”
“Go on!”
“Well, then I heard Larry Stockton’s voice, and realized there were several board members. Larry said if we’d reached the point of considering a change, we have to think about who’s going to lead the company while we look for a replacement. Jared Winters asked Jean-Claude if he wanted to come back, and Jean-Claude did this little croaking sound that made everybody laugh.
“So then Jared said that on an interim basis he thought we should consider you in the role.” So implausible. Hard not to wince. Georgia forced herself to breathe slowly.
“Really.” Sally’s impatience vanished, and she tilted her head to the side and smiled slightly, considering.
“But then Larry said that wouldn’t work, because you’re so loyal to Roy, you probably wouldn’t even do it, and if you did, you’d just continue Roy’s bad policies.”
“This was Larry Stockton?”
“Yes, and Jean-Claude said it was unfortunate, but he agreed. So then Jared said maybe Andrea Hancock could do it, but Paul said we can’t do anything that would slow down the 6.1 and Oracle compatibility. So then somebody said maybe Ken.”
“Madigan?”
“They didn’t say a last name. And then somebody else said maybe we’d have to get an interim leader from outside.”
“And then what?”
“Well, then Larry complained he felt like he’d gone swimming in his suit, standing in that hot stairwell. They agreed that Jean-Claude would get all the non-employee directors on a call to discuss it further, because they might decide to move quickly.”
Georgia shrugged. “And that’s it. I was scared to death one of them would come up the stairs and find me there, but they all just went down and out. As soon as I heard the door slam, I ran back up to the third floor and waited in my cube until I was sure they were gone.”
“Very interesting.” Sally stared into the distance for a moment, then looked back at Georgia and asked lightly, “Have you told Ken about this?”
“I felt like maybe I shouldn’t tell anybody, since I wasn’t supposed to hear it myself. But do you think it’s what I think it is? Is Roy in trouble?”
“Of course he’s in trouble,” Sally snapped. “What on earth else could it mean?”
Score!
“Then maybe I should tell Ken . . .”
“No!” Sally barked and then smiled sweetly. “I mean, you have to do what you think is best, Georgia, but this is so serious that I think you’d be wise to keep it to yourself. If the board finds out you were eavesdropping, you might not have a job here much longer.”
Georgia made her voice timid. “But you wouldn’t tell . . .”
Sally’s reassuring smile was completely at odds with her glittering eyes. “Of course not, Georgia. I won’t breathe a word of this to anybody. I’m surprised you even need to ask. It’s good you told me, though, because I am in charge of Human Resources, and this is the most serious personnel problem there is. I need to think carefully how to handle it.” She looked out her window and touched the scar above her eyebrow. “I just wonder what has upset them so?”
She needed to spoon feed this dimwit?
“Oh, you know what?” she said. “They were talking about that when I first opened the door. Something about releasing the 6.0 version of the software when it still had so many bugs in it.”
“I see.”
“And then refusing to acknowledge to our customers and employees how much trouble it caused. And they thought Roy should give Mark Balog the new staff he needs to prevent his current staff from quitting, instead of spending so much on a renovation employees don’t even like or want.
“Yes.”
“But it sounded like the biggest thing was that preannouncement, you know, that turned out to be wrong. And the way he keeps insisting it was the right thing to do, when the board seems confident it was actually sort of ill-advised.”
“Well, of course,” Sally sighed, shaking her head. “So misguided. Really, just the last straw.” So much for loyalty in Sally’s butt-smooching little heart.
“Well,” Georgia continued, “I just hope we don’t get stuck with somebody from outside who doesn’t know a thing about our business. It would be great if you could, you know, demonstrate you’re ready to do the job if anything happens to Roy. That might put their minds at rest that they have the right person internally, which could make things easier all around.”
“Very sensible, Georgia,” Sally said, rewarding her with a soft smile. “You’ve evaluated this quite well.”
“You might have to act pretty quickly, though. They could be working on an outside interim person already.”
“Why do you say that?” Sally asked sharply.
“Oh, no information.” Georgia held up her palms to prevent misleading her. “Just what I’m worried could be happening.”
“Well, let me know right away if you do hear anything. And by the way, if I do get the job, I’ll surely want a reliable right-hand person to help me out.”
“You mean a really good admin?”
“Oh, Marla’s going to be my admin. I think something more like an executive director position. Is that a job you’d like?”
Georgia widened her eyes. “Wow! You really think I’d be qualified?”
“I think you’ve shown real promise lately, Georgia. Keep your head down, say nothing about this to anyone, and we’ll see where we end up.”
“Thanks, Sally, that’s exactly what I’ll do. Bye now.”
Yes! she thought as she heard Sally’s door click shut behind her. She resisted the impulse to do a little dance right in the corridor, and began walking decorously back to her cube.
Of course, this was still very much a work in progress, she reminded herself. Sally was sniffing the bait but hadn’t yet swallowed, and plenty could still go wrong. What if Sally decided to test the waters by taking one of the board members into her confidence? Could be messy. Well, Georgia couldn’t control everything. Do your work and step back.
In the meantime, she was racking up some impressive job offers around here. Sales Team Friendly Girl. Sally’s Henchperson. Executive Henchperson, no less. Who knew such brilliant careers were available, right here in Silicon Valley?
On her way home, Georgia retrieved a fat envelope from her father’s lawyer. Finally! This must be her father’s literary effort. She’d read it after dinner, but she could at least take a peek before she drove off from the Mail Boxes Etc. She smiled up through her windshield at a blue jay bobbing on a poplar branch, then tore open the heavy envelope.
The contents were confusing. There were ten or more xeroxed pages of crabbed, slanting handwriting that didn’t look like her father’s at all. And from the copy, it looked like the pages of the original document were brittle and flaked around the edges. When she noted that the pages were set up with entry dates, her curiosity was replaced by stirrings of alarm. She found the first page, read the first several entries, and then slapped the pages onto her lap. Honestly. If her father wasn’t careful, his boredom was going to get him in trouble after all. Literary effort indeed, Daddy. Outside her windshield, the blu
e jay gave a raucous squawk and flew away, leaving the poplar branch bouncing gently in his wake.
The group lunch on Monday was at the Cocky Robin, planned to coincide with the first day of the sales kick-off. Afterward, Georgia rode back to the office with Zack, who looked cheerful and relaxed in his wraparound sunglasses as he maneuvered his black Lexus along Zanker Road. The sun felt hot on Georgia’s forehead with the top down, and she kept reaching up to anchor her black hair, which was blowing in annoying little egg-beater circles around her face.
“Wish we could do that more often,” Zack said, his left elbow resting on his door as he used his right hand to steer through traffic. His car phone rang, and he pressed the button on his steering wheel.
“Zack?”
“Hey, Ken. Georgia’s here in the car with me.”
“Hi Georgia. Zack, could you pull over for a minute?”
“Yeah, hold on.” He and Georgia exchanged a quick glance of alarm as he maneuvered out of traffic and stopped on the shoulder. “Hope something hasn’t blown up with the SEC,” he said quietly, as the motor whirred and the top rose out of the trunk to enclose them. “Okay, Ken, we’re here. What’s up?”
“I just got a call from Sally. Guys . . . Glen Terkes is dead.”
Zack yanked off his sunglasses and stared at Georgia. “Dead?!”
So they must have done the kick-off party as planned. Suddenly in the hot car her hands felt icy.
“He didn’t show up for the keynote speech at the sales kick-off this morning,” Ken continued, “and he was supposed to introduce Roy. People got worried, and it turned out the police had already found him . . . passed away in his hotel room.”
“Do they know what he died of?” Zack asked. Terminal perversion, Georgia thought.