The Consultant (47 page)

“And you don’t really want that.”  

“No, I don’t.”  

“Why not?”  

“I don’t know. Part of it’s because I don’t want to give up; I don’t want to let
him
win. But part of it’s because BFG will be gone eventually, and if I can maintain contact with Phil, keep him from completely drifting away, we might be in a position to roll back this craziness and do some good.”  

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”  

Craig didn’t respond.  

“Quit.”  

“I can’t.”  

Angie started pushing the vacuum cleaner over to the hall closet.  

“I have to see this through.”  

She ignored him and went into the bathroom, where she started cleaning the sink, shower and toilet. Fifteen minutes later, she came out to find him in the living room parked in front of the television. “Is this what you’re going to do all week? Watch TV?”  

“I don’t know. Do you have any other suggestions?”  

She stopped for a moment on her way to the kitchen and looked at him. “Send out résumés,” she said.  

“Maybe I will,” he told her.  

But she knew he wouldn’t, and she wasn’t sure if that made her more angry or afraid.  

FORTY  

The parking lot was less than half-full when Craig arrived at CompWare a week later, and he found out when he went upstairs to check in with HR that fully a third of all employees were being laid off or furloughed. Michelle Hagen, the woman behind the counter, was the one who told him that, and though she kept glancing up at the camera in the corner, she made no effort to censor herself, and though he didn’t ask, he had the feeling that she was one of the employees affected.  

She told him as well, after looking at his file on her computer, that his hours would be changing next week, that his entire division would be working from eight at night to five in the morning rather than from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.  

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.  

She looked at him levelly. “Nothing does.”  

The corridors of the building were curiously empty as he made his way back to the elevators, and the sixth floor seemed almost completely unoccupied. He’d intended to call Phil and hear from the horse’s mouth exactly what was going on, but his friend—  

(was he still his friend?)
 

—was sitting in Lupe’s chair outside of his office when he arrived, waiting for him. “Craig!” Phil said welcomingly. “Glad to have you back!”  

Craig motioned toward the empty hallway. “What’s going on here?”  

“We’re implementing some of BFG’s suggestions to streamline the company. I really think it’s going to work out.”  

“How’s it going to work out when you’re cutting programmers?”  

“I told you before, I think we should be expanding into devices. Software’s a limiting market, particularly in regard to your area: games. If we can control all aspects of the gaming experience, if we provide content that is only usable on our proprietary devices and we tap into the gullible public’s endless willingness to shell out for upgrades, we’ll be able to explode our market share. Besides, it’s not like we’re picking on your division. We’re cutting across the board. Sales, my old stomping ground, has been reduced by a third.”  

“That makes it even worse. We need people to create product, and we need people to sell product or we won’t be making any money.”  

“Oh, we’ll be making money.”  

“But with fewer workers?”  

“A company is like a machine. All of the parts need to fit together in order to achieve maximum efficiency. What we’re building here is a leaner and meaner machine.”  

“Do you hear yourself?”  

Phil leaned forward excitedly. “I have a revolutionary idea for a new device aimed at teenage boys. The average 18-year-old has ten to twelve erections every day. We could harness this natural energy and use it to power a handheld device. Each expansion of the penis would generate a charge that would be stored in a battery. They’d never need to plug it in; it would run off their own bodies. For women and girls, we could connect a charger to their toilet. Just as dams are used to generate electricity, each flush would cause the water to turn a turbine embedded in the base, generating electricity that would be used to recharge the battery. We’d be pioneers in the field of sustainable energy.”  

Craig looked at him. The ideas were not just ridiculous, they were crazy. He was about to say just that—in as circumspect a manner as possible—when a sharply dressed man with a short clean haircut, a man Craig didn’t know but who looked vaguely familiar, walked up to Phil. “Patel has been taken care of,” he stated.  

Craig didn’t like the sound of that. “Parvesh Patel?” he asked.  

Phil nodded. “Parvesh has met with an unfortunate accident,” he said, a smile playing around the edge of his lips.  

Craig froze. Phil and Parvesh had never gotten along, but he couldn’t believe that his friend would actually cause physical damage to be inflicted on another person, no matter how much he disliked him.  

The consultant would
.  

Yes, the consultant would. And had.  

Now Phil had, too.  

Things had apparently gone far off the rails in the week he’d been gone.  

“Thanks, Anthony.” Phil said. “You can make phone calls if you want.”  

The other man smiled, and Craig didn’t like that smile. “My favorite thing to do,” he said, and left the way he’d come.  

Was Phil brainwashed? Drugged? Possessed? What could have caused the change in him—a few telephone calls and a long meeting with the consultant? It seemed impossible, but the proof was right there. Part of him blamed Phil, but part of him didn’t, since he knew his friend was being manipulated by a power neither of them could understand.  

The Consultant.  

Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.
 

“Let me talk to him,” Craig said.  

“Who?”  

“You know who. Patoff. Or
whatever
his real name is.”  

Phil’s expression hardened. “Why do you want to talk to him?”  

“I have a few questions.”  

“You can ask
me
. I know you resent it, but I
am
the CEO.”  

“I don’t resent it,” Craig said.  

“But…?” Phil prompted.  

He paused, then decided to answer honestly. “But what do you know about running a major company? I certainly couldn’t do it. And I have my doubts that you can, either. But that’s not what I want to talk to Patoff about.”  

“What is it, then?”  

Before he could answer, an announcement came over the speakers. “Will Craig Horne please come to Mr. Patoff’s office immediately?” The words seemed to echo in the empty corridor.  

Craig looked up at the camera through which the consultant had obviously been monitoring their conversation, then over at Phil, who had paled considerably.
He’s afraid
, Craig thought, and in a weird way, he considered that a good sign.  

The message repeated, and the two of them stared at each other for a moment. Craig asked, “Is his office still on the seventh?”  

“As far as I know,” Phil said, and that hint of uncertainty was also a good sign.  

They walked into an elevator together, though neither of them spoke. Craig pressed the button for the seventh floor, and when Phil didn’t press one of the other buttons, he assumed they would be visiting the consultant together. But when the doors opened on a dingy darkened corridor, he was the only one to step out.  

He turned around, intending to say something to Phil (though he didn’t know what), but the doors closed and he was left alone.  

The seventh floor had deteriorated since he had come here with Phil. The hallway, if possible, was even dimmer than before, lit only by occasionally recessed fluorescents that emitted a faint sputtering light. The walls were peeling, the floor torn up. Whereas the hallway had previously appeared to stretch farther than the length of the building, it now seemed far too short, dead-ending immediately to his right and extending to the left only as far as room 700, the consultant’s office.  

The strange organic sounds that had pulsated behind the walls, above the ceiling, beneath the floor, were still audible but muted, as though the body in which he found himself was dying.  

Craig walked down the shortened hall toward the office, stepping slowly and carefully over the broken floor, trying not to trip, keeping an eye out for that cat thing that had been slinking around here before.  

The door opened before he reached it, and he thought, absurdly, of Willy Wonka. In the Gene Wilder movie, the door to the chocolate factory had opened in the same way. It was not through any mechanical means but magically, and Craig had the sense that the same thing was happening here. He hadn’t set off any motion detector; this wasn’t an automatic door. It was a regular door, and it opened because the consultant had made it open.  

The waiting room had changed. It no longer looked like part of a doctor’s office. Gone were the chairs and magazines, replaced by a jumbled pile of discarded office supplies. Drawn on the walls, in tiny obsessive detail, were flowcharts and organizational diagrams so complicated that it was impossible to tell what they were supposed to represent, or where one ended and another began.  

The old secretary was nowhere to be seen, the frosted window in front of her work station closed, but the door next to the window swung open of its own accord, and Craig walked back to the consultant’s office, skirting the edge of the absent secretary’s circular desk and passing through an open doorway into a well-lit room the size of a school auditorium. At the far end was a window, and in front of the window a small nondescript desk, behind which sat the consultant. Other than that, the room was empty.  

Except for the blood.  

There was blood on the floor and on the walls, a tremendous amount, an impossible amount, some of it dried but most of it fresh and wet, and he had to walk through it to reach the consultant’s desk. He considered not doing so, staying where he was, forcing the consultant to either come to him or shout at the top of his lungs in order to be heard, but even as the thought entered his head, he was being drawn forward, a force not unlike magnetism pulling him toward the far off desk. His shoes almost slipped in the blood, and the smell was nearly overpowering, but he managed to stay upright and not vomit as he approached the consultant.  

From somewhere far off came the sound of singing. A children’s song of some sort.  

He reached the desk. Wearing a crimson bow tie that matched the shade of the splattered walls and floor, the consultant nodded at him. “Thank you for attending this meeting.”  

“This isn’t a meeting!” Craig spat out. “Everything isn’t a meeting!”  

“Oh, but it is. Life is nothing but a series of meetings, and I called
this
one in order to discuss your bitter jealousy over Mr. Allen’s promotion to CEO, and to determine whether that jealousy will impair your work performance and jeopardize your continued tenure with the company.”  

“Bitter jealousy?” he said. “I’m not jealous at all.”  

“Aren’t you?”  

Craig looked at the man with dawning understanding. Phil’s promotion, he realized, had been nothing but a tactical move on the consultant’s part, a way to drive a wedge between himself and his friend. The two of them had probably been the closest thing to a threat that BFG faced, and the consultant had made a concerted effort to separate them.  

But how had Phil succumbed? How could he have been so weak?  

He couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
He
could not have been recruited, and he wondered how the man had known that Phil was the weaker link.  

“I’m happy for him,” Craig said, looking the consultant in the eye. “And I’m hopeful that having one of our own in that position will lead CompWare in a better direction.”  

“That is a hope we all share.” The consultant was suddenly all business. “Now, starting next week, the entire operation here will be on a nighttime schedule. This will cut down on the commute time for employees as they won’t be on the road during rush hour, and it will cut down on electricity costs since CompWare will be operational during non-peak hours, thus providing the company with a lower utility rate.”  

“But that’s not why we’ll be working at night,” Craig said.  

“No,” the consultant told him. “It isn’t.”  

“Are you trying to get people to quit? Is that it? Because I’m not going anywhere.”  

“If I wanted to get rid of you, there are far more effective methods.”  

Craig became exceptionally aware of the sticky blood beneath his shoes, the red all over the walls. But he didn’t back down. “You don’t intimidate me.”  

“I’m not trying to,” the consultant said innocently.  

Craig confronted him. “So why are you doing all this? You’re running this place into the ground. People are
dying
.”  

“People die everywhere, every day. That’s life.”  

“You didn’t cause this kind of damage at any of those Fortune 500 companies you consulted for.”  

Patoff seemed pensive. “We do what’s best for each individual business, based on needs, resources, financial status, a whole host of variables.”  

“You went to my son’s school. My wife’s work.”  

“We’re thorough.” He swiveled in his chair, looked out the window. “This is the saddest time,” he said softly. “When it’s all winding down, coming to an end.” He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Craig. “I honestly thought we had a chance here, an opportunity to streamline operations and create a perfect company.”  

He swiveled the chair back around, brightening a little. “Maybe we still do,” he said. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Sometimes Ralph works in mysterious ways.”  

“I’ll bite,” Craig said. “How do you create a perfect company?”  

“A company is like a machine. All of the parts need to fit together in order to achieve maximum efficiency.”  

He recognized those words. That was what Phil had told him. Verbatim.