Michelle picked up her cellular phone and dialed Donald’s cell number, unable to completely turn her attention away from the coverage. When he answered she blurted out, “Did you hear about that guy who killed all those people in California?”
“Yes, I did,” Donald said. “Jay and I have been following it.”
“Free State is one of Corporate Financial Consultant’s clients,” Michelle said. Everything she had not wanted to believe was now crashing down heavily on her, weighing in with its stark reality.
“That’s what we figured,” Donald said. She heard Jay in the background and then Donald came back on the line. “Listen, Jay is going out to an electronics store for some stuff. Think you can sneak away for an hour or two later this evening?”
“If I can, I’d like to.” She’d do anything now to see Donald and hold him in her arms.
“Can you give me Alan’s cell number? I’d like to talk to him.”
“Sure.” Michelle retrieved the number from her daytimer and rattled it off to him. “He knows you’re here by the way. I told him this morning.”
“Good. Jay wants to talk to him, too.”
“I’m scared.” Michelle felt the first crumbles of fear start to tear into her.
“I know, honey. We’re going to do everything we can to find out what the hell’s going wrong.”
“I can just quit,” she said quickly. “I don’t need this job, I can get another job somewhere else. I won’t make as much money, but—”
“But it isn’t about the job anymore,” Donald said. “It goes a lot deeper than that now.”
The wall crumbled faster. Michelle drew in a breath and nodded, realizing he was right. “I’m just so scared. I never wanted any of this… never wanted to play a part in this… this… whatever this is! I never even wanted a career in the corporate world! You know that! I just want to live quietly and not have any trouble and be happy and be with you and… and that’s it! I just don’t want to deal with this!”
“I don’t want to deal with it either, but we have to,” Donald said, his voice soothing and calming. “They’re getting stronger. You feel that, don’t you?”
Michelle nodded. “Yes.”
“The things I’ve seen in Health Care, what you’ve seen throughout the business world, what we’re seeing happening throughout the country… this is big stuff, hon. It’s just the tip of the iceberg. Jay and I did a lot of talking last night and we did some research on the Internet this morning. Corporate Financial has worked in some capacity with almost every major corporation in the country. I looked into the corporate profits and CEO bonuses for all these companies and found out that all of the top executives nearly quadrupled their pay within the past decade while company profits remained stagnant. That’s pretty significant, don’t you think?”
“It is,” Michelle said. “Alan and Rachel told me some stuff last night that is just… mind boggling.”
“Who’s Rachel?”
“A woman who’s on our side.” Michelle gave Donald a quick recap of her conversation with Alan and Rachel late last night. Donald was silent as she spun the tale out, and when she got to the part about Hubert Marstein’s occult interests she thought he would scoff; he didn’t. “I know it sounds silly,” she said. “But… well, shit, Jay will admit it! Some of these people we were working with weren’t… alive! I mean, they acted like they were alive but they were like… animated or something. Like they were being controlled. And I felt that way about Dennis Harrington and Alma Smith.”
“The Red Rose execs come across that way to me, too,” Donald said. His voice sounded grave. “And I think we all need to be on the same page. Let me talk to Alan. I’ll call you a little later.”
“Okay. I love you, Don!”
“I love you, too.”
When she hung up she turned her attention back to the news coverage of Victor Adams’s rampage. A moment later there was a knock on her door. Room Service. A hotel employee wheeled a metal cart bearing her lunch into the room and left. Michelle ate her lunch quietly, her attention riveted to what was now being trumpeted as the Free State Insurance Massacre. Halfway through her salad a more detailed account of who the victims were flashed on the screen—the entire executive branch of Free State Insurance and some of the board of directors, and twelve other people, men and women, who were described by company personnel as upper managers. Human interest stories focusing on specific victims began to play; the dedicated company man who left behind a wife and young son; the doting grandfather who’d been with the company for thirty years; the hardworking woman who left behind a tearful husband and two young children. These were normal people, normal American citizens, the news anchor said, and their only crime was they’d shown up to work that day.
There’s got to be more to it than that, Michelle thought. She focused on the name of one of the victims, Ken Atkins, who was shot in his office as Victor Adams barreled into the IT division. She wrote the words Free State Insurance IT department and Orange County, California on a notepad and circled them. Then, when she was finished with her lunch, she went to the desk where she’d placed her laptop and booted the unit up.
Once she accessed the hotel’s WiFi network she spent the next three hours researching Ken Atkins’s name on the Internet as the news feed broadcast in the background. It took awhile—Google searches, trolling information technology message boards and blogs, but she found what she needed to know. The references were vague and infrequent, but they were enough for her to form an opinion. Ken Atkins had been regarded by his employees as an aloof asshole, an insensitive bastard of a manager who was a complete workaholic and expected not only his employees, but his fellow co-workers, to keep sixty and seventy hour work-weeks. Those that failed or refused were disciplined harshly, eventually being terminated. Others quit before termination could occur. Michelle jotted down notes, copied message board texts into word files and saved them in a special folder she created on her desktop and continued her research. It was obvious from even the scant information she was able to dig up—three or four anecdotes on various message boards frequented by IT professionals who talked shop and vented on the daily frustrations of their jobs, that this was more than enough to convince her. Ken Atkins hadn’t been just a family man—he’d been a corporate zombie masquerading as a normal, average American citizen. The media was extolling his family life, reporting that he’d simply been an average man who went to work that morning to provide for his family and was gunned down. They weren’t reporting that he was a corporate monster who terrorized his employees, threatened to fire them if they didn’t submit to his will or demand that they cease to have a life outside of the office. None of that was being taken into account.