She groped for it. “Hello?”
It was Donald. “Michelle, we’re here.”
“Where are you?” She forced herself to wake up. She sat up in bed.
“On the outskirts of the city. Jay’s driving. We’re going to find a cheap motel and check in. I’ll call you later.”
“Great!”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” She rubbed her eyes. “Just… sleepy.”
“We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Yeah. I need to take a shower and wake up.”
The shower made her feel better, and as she was toweling her hair dry, Alan called. “Sam hasn’t called yet?”
“No.” She had slipped on a pair of panties and was wearing nothing else. “Will he?”
“He might try to get you to do some work. This is supposed to be a day off. If he does call, make an excuse.”
“I can tell him I have a migraine.”
“Better yet, tell him you’re gearing up for Monday. He’ll like that.”
Michelle nodded, inspecting herself in the mirror. Her hair was wet and lay limply against her shoulder blades. “In light of what I learned last night, I suppose he will.”
“How’d you sleep?”
“Terrible. I finally took a sleeping pill.”
“Feel rested enough?”
“I suppose.” She quickly debated on whether to tell him her boyfriend and Jay O’Rourke were in town, then decided to take the plunge. “Jay found out where I live and drove out while I was in El Paso. He felt I was the only person he could trust, that since I was new to Corporate Financial I must not be like the rest of them. And… with what you told me last night I can see now how perceptive he was.”
“I can see why you didn’t mention anything to us last night,” Alan said. “When I first became aware of what was going on, of what Corporate Financial was doing, I couldn’t believe it myself. I didn’t want to believe it; couldn’t believe what I was seeing and experiencing, but finally I had to see it for what it is. Plus, enough of my close friends and co-workers were experiencing the same things, although not to such a degree. And other friends… they started changing drastically, just like the people Rachel knew at Graham Electronics. Once I started looking into stuff on my own and connecting the dots, the evidence was there and I became a believer. I’ve become more of a believer once I got in with the Coalition.”
“And what’s your story?” Michelle asked.
“Similar to Rachel’s,” Alan said. She heard him sigh over the phone. “Only difference is I was a real yuppie. Got my BA and MBA from the University of Missouri in Kansas City, moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a brokerage firm. Met a woman there who I fell madly in love with. Her name was Susan Vickers. We were very much committed to each other. Susan and I moved in together and I thought everything was going great. It wasn’t until we were together for something like ten years that I realized she was not the person I thought she was. At the time I was very career-oriented, very much into what I did for a living, but I always made time for vacations and leisure. I couldn’t get Susan to do anything outside of work; had to practically pry her away from her desk at the office to get her to go on vacation with me. That’s when I started noticing the differences, both in my relationship with her and in the general business climate around me.”
“Was Corporate Financial Consultants working with your employer?” Michelle asked.
“Yes, they were. I didn’t make that connection right away at first. That came later. What happened first was I broke up with Susan. It was hard on me, harder than I thought it would be. She didn’t…” Alan sounded like he was trying to find the right words to say. “…take the breakup like I thought she would. It was like it didn’t faze her, like she didn’t care. That’s what hurt me the most, the fact that she didn’t seem to see that I was hurting inside and she didn’t really care about our relationship at all.”
“Was she… one of them?”
There was a pause on the line. Then, softly, Alan said, “Yes. I found that out later. Five years into our relationship Susan started working with Corporate Financial on a huge project and was gone for months at a time with them. Once I started piecing things together on my own, I put two and two together. And… I realized it was mid-way through our time together that she began to… to turn… into one of them. And I… I didn’t even notice!”
Michelle felt the hairs along the back of her arm bristle. “You think she was trying to turn you at the time?”
“I don’t know,” Alan said quickly. “I really don’t think so… I met enough of those consultants at the time that I’m sure they tried to get to me but… I just don’t know.”
“So how long’s it been since you haven’t been with Susan?” Michelle asked.
“Six years,” Alan said, quietly.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” There was another short pause and then Alan said, “When I started finding out what’s going on, it just made me more determined to fight them. They took the love of my life, totally destroyed her, and they’ve done it to so many other people who don’t have a clue to what’s going on or what’s really happened to their loved ones. I’m going to stop them.”
Michelle understood where Alan was coming from. If she were in his shoes she’d feel the same way, but part of her was a little afraid of what was happening. Every time she stopped to think about the scope of this thing, it terrified her.
“So what are we doing today?” Michelle asked.
“Lay low and rest,” Alan said. “Try not to go out today if you can. Order room service. Punch up some movies on the TV. You can put it on your expense account.”
Michelle laughed.
“Aside from that, if Gary Lawrence or anybody at Corporate Financial tries to contact you today and get you to work, politely beg off. And tomorrow come prepared to step back into the role.”
“Do you know what’s planned for tomorrow?”
“No.” Alan sounded a little concerned about this. “I have my suspicions, though. I plan to be at this first meeting. In fact, I requested to Sam that I want to be on this project with you. There’s a good chance that tomorrow will simply be a preliminary meeting and they’ll send you home after that.”
“You think so?” Michelle didn’t want to get her hopes up.
“It’s possible. I can’t promise it, but…” There was that hesitation again. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just… I didn’t really see the need for them to call you out here so quickly for this particular client unless Sam and Gary had something specific in mind.”
“Like what?”
Alan sighed. “I don’t know. And I don’t want to speculate more without doing some more digging.”
Michelle couldn’t help but feel a twinge of unease at the sound of Alan’s voice. After promising to stay in her room and get as much rest as possible and limit her phone calls from the LAN line inside the room, they ended the conversation and Michelle finished dressing. By the time she finished it was well after one o’clock and she was ravenous. After a quick consultation with the room service menu, she ordered a roast beef sandwich, a chef salad with ranch dressing, and a bottle of Evian water, and relaxed on the bed with the news.
The lead news story grabbed her attention. In what was being described as the worst incident of workplace violence in the United States, Victor Adams, a distraught thirty-seven year old former employee of Free State Insurance Company, went on a rampage Friday morning at the corporate headquarters of his former employer, killing the entire executive staff and over a dozen other people, most of them described as upper-manager types. He’d arrived at the building armed with various semi-assault rifles, semi-automatic pistols, and several hundred rounds of ammunition. The rampage had caused pure pandemonium at the sprawling corporate headquarters of the insurance giant, which was located in Orange County, California. “I just hid under the desk of my cubicle,” a frightened-looking dark-haired woman told the news anchor during one of the news broadcasts. “He passed right by me. He actually walked down every aisle of my department like he was looking for specific people. He wasn’t just shooting everybody, he was targeting upper management.”