Headcount: v5

by Frank Stein

  The sound of the train was now deafening, and the blaze of its headlights disoriented me. For a second I thought I was shouting out loud, but I must not have been, because Mo was still facing the tracks, oblivious to what was about to happen.

  I looked at Simone, and she was staring at me with a half-smile that I couldn’t understand. Her smile made me want to fall to my knees and cry.

  And she shrugged, turned away from me, and ran at Mo.

  FORTY-SIX

  This time I could hear myself shout, but Mo still couldn’t. She just stood there as Simone rushed towards her.

  But my depth perception must have been off.

  Simone ran straight past Mo, straight past the yellow line that says Do Not Cross, and straight into the path of eight hundred and fifty-two thousand pounds of moving metal.

  Now, if you haven’t seen something like this and aren’t familiar with Sir Isaac Newton’s simple law that says the total force exerted is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration, you might think that if a train is slowing down to stop, it’s probably not fatal to step out in front of it.

  And you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.

  Obviously Simone remembered her high-school physics, because although it was a heartbreaking and traumatic sight for us, it was probably as quick a death as one could hope for. It is not an uncommon way for a New Yorker to end it, but it was not something I had witnessed before, and it is not a sight I’d wish on anyone.

  And now I remembered Simone watching the children in the playground, and I thought of her sad eyes when she mentioned her horses, and I realized that her odd smile was just a simple goodbye.

  And so I fell to my knees and cried, and for the second time, I grieved for Simone.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  The police and paramedics and MTA staff came and went and I don’t remember what I told them or if they even asked me anything. I cried the whole time. Mo was shocked at how upset I was, and I couldn’t figure it out either. It wasn’t guilt, that much I knew. Simone’s choice had nothing to do with me. She wasn’t lame enough to kill herself over some guy, and I wasn’t arrogant enough to imagine that she would.

  It was only later, in the privacy of my bedroom, with my head on the pillow that still smelled like cigarettes and peppermint, that I realized I had also been grieving for myself. My last hope of getting out had died in that subway station.

  And then suddenly I was no longer sad. I felt liberated. I now had no choice but to embrace who I was and what I did. The process of my transformation was complete, and it felt wonderful and exhilarating. Lying there in my empty bedroom with all the lights on I began to laugh out loud. It was a sudden manifestation of the surge of ecstasy that whipped through my body, a wave of power, cold power, like a callous that covered my emotions, shielding me from their rawness.

  I was alone, and free because of it. I was now worthy of my full name, middle initial included.

  And I couldn’t fucking wait until my next assignment.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Sadly, I did have to wait. Mo was still finalizing the sale of the California job, and she was busy as hell. I didn’t go in to the office for the rest of that week. Truth is, I don’t remember what I did, other than work out, smoke cigarettes, and watch Mighty Mouse cartoons. My enthusiasm for a raging killing binge had died down by the weekend, and I even began thinking about my regular job.

  The following Monday I went in to the office. I hadn’t been there for a couple of months now. Not particularly unusual for a consultant—in fact, partners look at you funny when you’re in the office, because it usually means you’re not on a project and hence you’re not billing a client for your time. If you’re not billing, it means that the consulting partnership is directly funding you from their own take-home. Hence the funny looks. What they’re really saying is, “Get billable, you loser. I need to buy a new set of snowmobiles for my mountain home.”

  At first I laid low in the office. Then I checked my schedule on the intranet, and noticed that although it showed me as available that week, Mo had booked me for a month starting the following week, which meant she expected the California project to start up soon. That was good, because it meant I wouldn’t get picked up for anything else for the rest of the week. Not unless someone needed last-minute help on a sales proposal or some internal research.

  I took the time to catch up on some of the news from the Midwest. The “Janesville Massacre,” as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel called it, had been chalked up to the work of Chester, the “vigilante plastic surgeon” who was seeking revenge for the District Attorney’s leniency with the perpetrators of the hate-related murder of his partner. Apparently the act had received praise from several left-wing bloggers, and even the larger white-supremacist groups had not had much to say in defense of their fallen Aryan brothers. Obviously the child hadn’t said much. Poor little guy. But he did know how to handle a gun awfully well, so I didn’t lose too much sleep over him. He’d probably be better off in foster care than in that environment.

  They obviously hadn’t found the sniper rifle. And the only thing in the news reports that troubled me was the mention of FBI involvement. Not just the involvement in general, but the name of the agent in particular: Special Agent Ramona Garcia.

  Still, it had been a week since the Janesville murders, and no one had tried to contact us. It seemed to be a pretty good sign that there was nothing to connect us to Janesville. I silently thanked Simone for cleaning out the trash and bathrooms at Chester’s.

  Mo called me on Thursday that week. She sounded upbeat.

  “Hey. We sold the California project. I’m getting a small team to start here next week. You’re on the team.”

  “Awesome,” I said. “What kind of work is it?”

  “Supply chain optimization for SpacedOut Clothing.”

  “Oh, shit, cool. They’re a super-trendy company. I didn’t know they were based in California, although I guess it’s kind of obvious now that I think about it.”

  Mo laughed. “Yes. Trust me, their offices are as California as you can imagine.”

  I thought for a second. “Supply chain optimization. So we’re going to be looking at how they get their textiles and other raw materials? And figure out ways to make that more efficient?”

  “You got it. I knew you were an expert. At least, that’s what I told the chief operating officer. He wants to see the resumes of every consultant we plan to include on the team. So make sure your resume has some related stuff.”

  I chuckled. “Well, that one sentence is the extent of my knowledge about supply chain optimization. But it’s only Thursday. I’ll take an online course via our intranet, and I’ll also look at the knowledge-database and pull down reports that C&C has done for other clothing manufacturers. I’ll be an expert by Sunday morning.”

  “Perfect,” said Mo. “And book yourself in at the San Francisco Hilton.”

  “Hell, yes. The one at Union Square? I love that place. Are we working in downtown San Francisco?”

  Mo sighed. “No. We’re going to be working out of SpacedOut’s operations center in Burlingame, near the airport. But I got clearance for us to stay downtown, so we can at least enjoy the city a bit. The downside is we need to wake up an hour earlier every morning and drive through rush hour on highway 101.”

  “A small price to pay for staying at the area’s flagship Hilton.”

  After a few years in consulting, every professional ends up with his or her preferred hotel, airline, and car rental company. It’s often just luck—the first lengthy out-of-town project tends to lock you in to a particular vendor because of the perks you get for being a preferred member of a rewards program. I had ended up in the Hilton camp. Although the younger crew of consultants liked the Starwood Hotels, especially the W, I was fine with the Hilton group. I had always thought the W felt a bit like staying in a nightclub: everything was black, dance music played in the bathrooms, and the receptionists wore purple suits with black ties. Cool, no
doubt, but a little too overstated for my tastes.

  I spent the next few days learning about the global clothing industry, reading SpacedOut’s annual SEC filings, and devouring all the information I could find about textile sourcing and production. I wasn’t surprised to find out that India was a major producer of raw textiles, especially cotton. India was also a top manufacturer of clothing, and virtually every large garment company had operations there.

  According to its annual reports, SpacedOut’s offshore manufacturing was almost exclusively based in India. They had gone through a multi-year restructuring effort, and had consolidated their operations by shutting down facilities in Mexico, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Pakistan. That in itself seemed like a supply chain optimization effort, and I wondered why they wanted to hire C&C after they had completed the work. The answer came to me when I looked through SpacedOut’s latest quarterly report.

  Production costs had actually gone up over the past year, and the previous chief operating officer had been fired. The new COO, a hotshot who had effected miraculous turnarounds at several large garment makers, had been brought in to stop the bleeding and figure out what needed to be done. Of course, he had gone ahead and brought in a consulting firm to help him do just that. This way, if costs didn’t come down, he could blame us, kick us out, and maybe get one more chance to fix things before he got fired. It was a good strategy, and one that kept firms like C&C in business.

  By Sunday afternoon, I felt like a management consultant again—smart, confident, and articulate. I got a haircut in the early evening. After clipping my nails, I went out to Central Park and did the six-mile circuit all the way around. I slowed when I ran past the waterfall, but I didn’t stop. There was nothing for me to see there.

  When I got home, I did a few loads of laundry. As I stripped the sheets and pillowcases, I took a deep breath and fought back tears. Then, as I watched the machine spin away the last hints of Simone, I let myself cry one last time for her.

  FORTY-NINE

  The consulting team assigned to the SpacedOut job had its first meeting at the San Francisco C&C office. Since most consulting jobs involved ad-hoc teams that were put together with staff from different offices around the US, it usually made sense to first connect away from the client site. That way we could meet each other, figure out roles and responsibilities, and get a little more background on the project so that we looked like a well-prepared cohesive team when we showed up at the client’s offices. As consultants we were all accustomed to sizing up our colleagues quickly and integrating ourselves into new teams without much fuss. I had always liked that feeling of meeting a C&C consultant for the first time and instantly forming a bond because each of us understood that we’d be working together in an intense, high-pressure environment.

  And consulting for SpacedOut turned out to be as high-pressure as anything. If I had thought that the work-ethic at a California company that made skinny jeans and pre-torn shirts would be as laid-back as their public image, that thought was quickly dispelled. Perhaps the new COO was feeling the pressure and passing it on to us. Fair enough. We were costing SpacedOut’s shareholders a lot of coin. We should be feeling the pressure.

  Our team was made up of me and five other consultants, all from the San Francisco C&C office. It wasn’t odd that I was flying in from New York—since Mo was the managing partner, it made sense that she’d want to bring in at least one consultant from her home office. And, of course, after a weekend of prep I was now a supply-chain optimization expert.

  We spent the first few days in typical consultant mode, frantically working to impress our new clients while simultaneously struggling to get our heads wrapped around what the hell we were supposed to be doing for them. After several interviews with key operations personnel, we were directed to their repository of sourcing contracts. We love data, and now we had a mountain of it. Mo had three of the junior consultants start to read through the contracts line by line and extract any and all numbers. I worked with the other senior consultant, an Indian guy called Swami, to read through the biggest contracts to look for any clauses that might be loopholes for the other party to take advantage of SpacedOut.

  The contracts were mainly with Indian cotton producers and processing plants, some of which also served as clothing manufacturers. The terminology was confusing at best, and I would have been lost without Swami, who had a law degree and was familiar with some of the standard clauses dictated by Indian labor law and other rules governing contracts with foreign entities.

  The first week went by without us even noticing that we were staying in the heart of San Francisco. We car pooled out of the Hilton’s underground garage before 7 AM, and we only drove back into town around 10 PM. All our meals the first week were consumed in the sterile cafeteria of SpacedOut’s unmarked operations center in Burlingame. Apparently, SpacedOut’s cool factor only applied to its corporate headquarters in downtown San Francisco.

  We worked through the first weekend, but I didn’t care. I was learning a ton about contracts in general and also about the various components of the cotton textile business. The hard work and close companionship with the other consultants felt good, and I almost forgot about the Network and the fact that I was a murderer. Almost.

  Not that I wanted to forget it. My jungle sense was developing well, and I found myself evaluating everyone as a potential target. The feelings of power and righteousness that had previously come and gone as surges had by now settled into a steady emotional buzz. I was now passing judgment based on rules that were independent of the law. The arrogance inherent in that statement did not escape me, and I took myself very seriously. It was getting easier for me to kill, and I knew I had to balance that with additional prudence when selecting a target.

  Mo hadn’t been expecting an assignment from the Network. Even though it turned out that Simone’s death wasn’t an unusual exit strategy for a Network Omega, our little branch was going through some temporary restructuring as Mo got familiar with her new Omega contact.

  So you can imagine her surprise, and to some extent delight, to find that I was the one who unearthed our next target.

  FIFTY

  Gujarat State in western India is one of the larger cotton producing and processing regions of the country. The promise of low labor costs makes India in general an appealing candidate for cotton-sourcing. But the other appeal, perhaps particular to Gujarat at the time, was a streamlined local bureaucracy. Of course, in the context of Indian politics, streamlined simply meant that the system of bribes and kickbacks worked exceptionally fast and with very little mystery. Your Indian counterparts knew exactly whom to bribe and with how much and in what form.

  Bribery wasn’t a particular focus of the Network. We didn’t view it as being objectively evil or undesirable, especially if it was rampant enough for all interested parties to get an equal shot at bribing their way in and out of government concessions. If we had a problem with that concept, the Network would be all-hands-on-deck to take out the thousands of well-paid Washington, DC, lobbyists. And I’ve always held the view that DC lobbyists make the political process more efficient.

  And efficiency was the primary reason SpacedOut had restricted its cotton production to India. Although labor costs were lower in Indonesia and Mexico, India’s well-established bribery infrastructure was unmatched. But still, as Swami and I dug deep into the piles of verbose contracts SpacedOut had signed with Indian companies, we could tell that something wasn’t right with the labor numbers in Gujarat.

  Firstly, we found several instances where SpacedOut had terminated dealings with certain local producers in favor of others with significantly higher labor costs per bale of cotton produced. We initially assumed that this was a way to account for the cost of bribery. However, when one of the executives we interviewed casually mentioned that bribes were paid in cash and accounted for as simple miscellaneous expenses, it became clear that there was no need for SpacedOut to be artificially inflating labor costs to hid
e money paid as bribes. So we dug deeper, and by the end of week two, we had it figured out.

  Over the past two years, SpacedOut had systematically shifted its business away from local Indian cotton producers that used Muslim labor. Of course, this was not obvious from the contracts themselves, but I had done some research after Swami noticed that two of the cancelled contracts had been with cotton mills located in predominantly Muslim areas. After an evening of cross-checking demographics against the list of counterparties in SpacedOut’s broken contracts, I ended up with a one hundred percent match between the list and Gujarat’s Muslim-dominated regions. Now there were two burning questions: why, and why.

  The first question was why Muslim labor was so much cheaper in Gujarat. And the second question was why SpacedOut, a corporation that seemed to clearly believe in equal rights and opportunity, would systematically avoid Muslim labor even though it resulted in higher costs.

  Swami helped me with the first question, which was related to Gujarat’s history of ethnic tension between the majority Hindus and the Muslim minority. Indeed, the tension was prevalent throughout India, but it seemed like Gujarat had made an art form out of the economic and social isolation of the Muslim community.

  Swami explained how Muslims in Gujarat were being treated in ways eerily reminiscent of how Jews were boycotted in 1930s Germany. In fact, many local Hindu right wing leaders had taken to citing Hitler and Mussolini in their rhetoric. And recent terrorist attacks in India and around the world had made it easier for the more militant of the politicians to spread an anti-Muslim message and discourage local businesses from hiring Muslim labor.

  And so, because most Hindu-owned businesses in Gujarat were shying away from Muslims, the labor costs were driven down as desperate Muslims were willing to work for next to nothing. And we were talking about some of the poorest of the poor.