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.”