“Snoop around parking lots?”
Alan turned to her. “Yes. Especially when Corporate Financial is doing business at a conference or something. They like to monitor everything around them as much as possible.”
“Do you think they’re on to us?” Michelle asked, suddenly thinking about Sam Greenberg and wondering if he was starting to suspect she wasn’t the cut-to-the-mold corporate drone she’d built herself up to be during her interview.
“I don’t think so but you never can tell,” Alan said. “They are aware of the Coalition, though. I wouldn’t put it past them to be suspicious.”
“If they’re aware of the Coalition, how can you be sure they’re not aware of you?” Michelle asked.
“I’m not,” Alan said. He checked the parking lot out in the rear and side view mirrors as he talked. “But like I said, they know something’s up, and they know about the group. One of our members was found murdered two months ago in his home in Seattle. The member in question had penetrated one of Corporate Financial’s biggest clients. He was feeding us good information, so good that we got a very good map of their corporate structure and the names of their higher personnel. Believe it or not, that information is pretty top secret. Not even Corporate Financial underlings know who really runs the company.”
“A guy named Gary Lawrence is one of their VPs,” Michelle said. “He’s very high up in the company. The president is a guy named Frank Marstein. One of the other VPs is a Linda Harris. I’ve never met any of them except for Gary Lawrence, and he seemed very normal. Very… well, unlike the others.”
Alan nodded. “Lawrence is quite frightening. He can put on a good front. He certainly had me thinking he wasn’t like the others, but he is. The guy I just told you about that was found murdered… that was his mission, to determine Lawrence’s true nature. That’s what killed him.”
Michelle felt the chill settle over her. “So… what did he find out? And how—”
“How’d he die?” Alan finished for her. “Police are attributing it to a break-in, that he’d surprised a burglar. Official cause of death was strangulation. It was closed quickly. Want to know why?”
Michelle was afraid to ask but she did anyway. “Sure. What else have I got to lose?”
“There was really no sign of a break-in—no picked locks, no smashed windows, no sign of a struggle. No suspicious fingerprints were found. But he was definitely strangled; the physical signs showed it. And there was another thing.” Alan regarded Michelle seriously. “His neck and face were coated in substance the coroner and medical examiners couldn’t identify. One of our members talked to somebody at the morgue and they said the stuff was almost like slime. Or grease.”
Michelle didn’t know what to say. What did this mean? Before she could ask this question Alan answered it for her. “I don’t know what this means specifically but I have my speculations.”
“And that is?”
“First, you need to know more about Corporate Financial Consultants,” Alan said. “You know what they told you during orientation, right?”
Michelle nodded. Company literature revealed the company was founded in 1938 in Westchester County, New York by two businessmen, Zachary Tyler and Hubert Marnstein. They operated out of a small office, then moved to more prominent real-estate in Manhattan in 1943. By 1950 they had offices in Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, and Los Angeles. Their original goal was to help businesses of all kinds find ways to run their operations more smoothly and efficiently. Originally specializing in Accounting Services, the firm began adding various other consulting tasks to their enterprise—Business Administration, Customer Service, Marketing and Advertising, Data Entry and Computer Technology, and Human Resources. They were now the largest privately held corporate consulting firm in the country and in the process of establishing operations in Europe, Japan, and South America.
“They didn’t tell you Tyler and Marstein were strict anti-communists,” Alan said. “That they left the John Birch Society in 1936 because they felt that group was too liberal and formed their own organization.”
“No!” Michelle said.
“Both of them were alarmed at what they felt was the rising tide of socialism in this country,” Alan continued. “They felt Roosevelt’s New Deal, the rising tide of labor unions and the like, was going to carry this country toward full-fledged communism. A lot of people felt that way then; lots of conservatives feel that way now, that things like Social Security and the like are a form of Marxism. We can argue about the merits or validity of those views, but the point of this history lesson is this: Tyler and Marstein were greedy businessmen who would do anything to earn money, even if it meant taking advantage of natural resources and people if they had to do it. Tyler’s grandfather was a plantation owner who’d owned over fifty slaves before the Civil War. Marstein’s family had owned shares in a Railroad company that enslaved Chinese immigrants and Native Americans; they also employed child laborers.”
Rachel cut in. “To make a long story short, their business policy then and now was to retain a two percent stake in every company they took on as clients. Add that up over the years; over a thousand Fortune 500 corporations have retained the services of Corporate Financial over the decades. Two percent of that kind of money adds up to a shit load.”
Michelle nodded, running the figures in her head. “Jesus!”
“Over time they began buying major shares in their client’s companies,” Alan said. “They formed a dummy corporation; this same dummy corporation owns major shares in a very large portion of today’s biggest companies.”
“But that’s…” Michelle sputtered.
“Deception? Yeah, it’s that and a lot more,” Alan said.
“Their ultimate goal is to be not only the dominant corporate power in the country, but the world,” Rachel said. She drew another cigarette from the pockets of her coat and lit it. “By applying their methods of operation to their client companies, the more the client produces, the quicker profits are funneled up to Corporate Financial and its dummy company. Think of Corporate Financial as being a giant leech. It establishes links—tentacles, if you will—all over the corporate sector. It inserts their employees in this company, establishes their… methods so to speak, and the client begins employing these methods by fair means and foul. Upper management is quick to go along with this because it means larger profits, which translate to bigger salary increases and bonuses for them.”
“This is…” Insane was the word that popped into Michelle’s mind. Paranoid was another. But part of her whispered, what if this is true?
“You saw the behavior today at the meeting,” Alan said, directly addressing Michelle. “How attentive everybody was, how obsessive, how wholly focused they were on the meeting and nothing else. That’s one of Corporate Financial’s methods. They work into you, insinuating themselves into you so that you begin to think and behave like them. It’s like they take control of your thoughts and your life. You become a literal corporate zombie, your only purpose to live is to work for the company’s goals. Your own goals and interests and life become forgotten.”
“But I don’t understand!” Michelle said, trying to puzzle this out, confused and scared about what she was thinking. “You’re suggesting something… impossible!” Jay O’Rourke’s statement to her last week at the Lone Star kept circling her mind. They’re like something out of that Jack Finney novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She refused to believe that.