Company (13 page)

If she was higher up the corporate ladder, this wouldn't happen: she would be too important for men to dare to flirt with her. And if the men were better-looking (or, in Roger's case, not such a complete prick), maybe she wouldn't mind so much. But they all think the best way to deal with a bulging belly is not to spend thirty minutes a day on the treadmill but to stretch a thin business shirt over it. (Sometimes there is a gap, the belly dragging the tie away from the shirt; sometimes the tie practically lies horizontal.) If they choose to take no pride in their own appearance, why are they entitled to enjoy hers? There is a lot Holly doesn't understand about Zephyr Holdings, but the rules of the corporate flirtation game irk her more than anything else. She can't accept them. Now people say she's unfriendly.

She walks back to her desk and pulls a couple of pages from her in-box. It seems that Elizabeth dropped by. She wants Holly to compile a summary of the summary she wrote for Sydney a couple of hours ago. Holly feels a migraine coming on. She wonders what would happen if she just walked out and went to the gym for the rest of the day.

Freddy arrives and collapses into his chair. She looks at him, waiting for an explanation, but he just stares at his keyboard. “What's the matter?”

“Didn't you see my note?” He pulls the Post-it off his monitor and begins slowly tearing it into strips.

“Yeah, but seriously.”

Freddy doesn't say anything.

“You really went to Human Resources?” She sits up. “What was it like? What do they do? Do they have cubicles?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Oh. Okay, be that way.” Freddy remains silent. “Come on, tell me
something.
”

He shakes his head.

“Oh,
fine,
” Holly says. She turns back to her computer.

Jones takes a few tentative steps out onto the roof, letting the door rest gently against the frame so it won't close and lock him out. He is standing on a gray concrete slab stained with the excrement of about a million pigeons, many of whom are currently observing him from the tops of various aerials and vents. The upper sections of half a dozen skyscrapers that are particularly tall or situated
farther up the hill or both are visible to one side, each window a tiny, tinted glimpse into a miniature corporate world. He walks to the barrier at the roof's edge and finds himself looking down at lunchtime traffic crawling along First Avenue. At this altitude, it's surprisingly quiet. Jones stares at it while the wind pulls at his hair and freezes the sweat on his back.

It's a minute before his brain starts to work again and points out that if he's quick, he can make it back down to level 2 before Security arrives. He can return to the original plan, modifying it only slightly to add asking Senior Management why the hell Daniel Klausman's office is the roof. He hurries back to the door. As he does, he sees there's a service elevator right beside it. He also hears suspiciously loud noises from the stairwell, and tugs the door open to find himself facing two sweaty, red-faced men in blue Security uniforms.

“You,” one of them says. Jones gets the feeling this is the start of a two-word sentence, but doesn't wait for the denouement. He slams the door and slides the bolt home, locking it. He stabs at the elevator call button (which is red and made of rubber) and waits. “Mr. Jones,” one of the guards says through the door, “if you don't leave Mr. Klausman alone right away, there will be serious repercussions.”

The elevator arrives. Jones jumps into it. He stabs 2—
SENIOR MANAGEMENT
—and to his great relief the doors ease closed.

He exhales. He checks his cuffs and straightens his tie. He raises his chin. He may currently be in breach of any number of HR and Security policies, but the company is clearly practicing some kind of vast deception on its workers, so Jones figures that makes them even. He waits for the
ding
, for the doors to open.

They don't. He looks up. The elevator screen says 4, and even as he watches, ticks over to 5. Alarmed, he reaches for 2 again and realizes it's not illuminated. He presses it: it lights up, then goes dark. He tries 5, then 6, then he runs his hand up and down the columns of buttons. All illuminate for no longer than a second. He puts his hand on the elevator wall to steady himself. Is this thing accelerating? In a flash he realizes that this must be how Zephyr disposes of employees who are no longer useful: the elevator free-falls them into the basement.

He feels the elevator begin to slow. So maybe not. The screen shows 11. That winks out and is replaced by 12. It appears he is headed for 14: Training Sales. He exhales in disgust. Security is probably waiting for him there with all his possessions in a cardboard box.

The number 12 blinks out, and the elevator comes to a complete stop. There is a curiously long pause. Then two things happen at once: the elevator goes
ding
and the screen shows 13.

Jones looks at the button panel, just in case he has recently lost his mind. But no. As he thought, there is no button for 13.

The doors slide open.

The first thing he notices is the lighting. It's not fluorescent and stabbing at his retinas, oh no; this is a soft, muted light that glows from invisible recesses in the ceiling. Second: the carpet is not the usual violent orange but a gentle, soothing blue. Third: the elevator opens onto a corridor—no surprise there—but this corridor is made of glass, and beyond it Jones can see glass-walled offices everywhere,
offices with walls.
These are the things that really grab his attention. It's only when he has recovered from the shock of these that he notices less significant things, such as the group of people standing in front of him. Front and center is the janitor. Beside him is Eve Jantiss.

“Mr. Jones,” the janitor says. “I'm Daniel Klausman. Welcome to Project Alpha.”

“Standard procedure, of course, is to throw you out of the building.” Klausman is still wearing his gray overalls, but it's his shock of steely-gray hair that Jones can't stop looking at. That's enough to convince him that this man really is the CEO of Zephyr Holdings: he has management hair. Klausman puts a hand on Jones's arm and steers him down a corridor. “We'd be spreading the word that you'd been caught stealing a computer and that'd be the end of you. Wouldn't be the first time.”

Jones glances at Eve, who smiles brilliantly. The sight of all those gleaming teeth makes him more nervous.

Klausman stops walking, and, dutifully, so does everybody else. “But there's something about you, Mr. Jones. Something special. We noticed it right from the start, didn't we?” He looks at Eve. She nods, then, when Klausman turns away, winks. “But this roof thing clinched it. Nobody's ever made it that far before. Curious fella, aren't you? We like that, Mr. Jones. We like it a lot. It would have been interesting to study you. But since that's no longer possible . . . we're going to make you an offer.”

“You pose as a janitor,” Jones says. He realizes this is not particularly insightful, but he needs to establish some facts they can all agree on.

“Some executives, they make a big show of working on the front lines every now and again. You see those McDonald's managers? They flip burgers one day a year, taking breaks every five minutes to call back to the office, and think they're getting frontline experience. I, Mr. Jones, live in the front line. No one's closer to his employees than me.” He smiles, as if expecting Jones to say something appreciative.

“And Eve is not really a receptionist.”

“She is as much a receptionist as I am a janitor.” A smile twitches around the corner of Klausman's lips.

“She
is
a receptionist, but she's mostly something else.”

“Keep going.”

Jones looks around. Through the glass walls, he sees banks of monitors, displaying pictures from around the company. “You're watching. Everything that goes on in the company.”

“Almost there. Can you hit a homer?”

He takes a breath. “The purpose of Zephyr Holdings . . .” He hesitates. If he's wrong, everybody in this room is going to kill themselves laughing. Eve nods encouragingly. He decides:
What the hell.
“Zephyr is a test bed. A laboratory, for trying management techniques and observing the results. Zephyr's an experiment.”

Nobody laughs. Klausman looks around. “What did I tell you? Huh?”

“You've done it again,” one of the suits says.

Klausman spreads his palms. “I am the Alpha and the Omega.”

Now they laugh. Eventually, Jones gets it. “The Omega Management System.” He feels unsteady. “You created it. This is where you come up with the techniques.”

In Training Sales, something terrible is happening to Elizabeth: she is finding Roger attractive. It must be a joke, arranged by her treacherous body and pregnancy-fueled hormones. But Elizabeth is not laughing.
Roger?
Anybody who would set her up with Roger doesn't know the first thing about her. Elizabeth is shocked by her body's opinion of her.

She hasn't decided what to do about her situation. At first it seemed obvious. There's no place in her career for a baby. But that initial reaction has tempered. A hidden, furtive part of her mind, the part that vetoed the condom, perhaps, is growing in influence. It is seeping into her marrow. Elizabeth is losing ground to it. It is a shocking process, or would be if it weren't so anesthetizing. She only glimpses the true extent of its power at moments like this, when she realizes that she is gazing across the aisle at Roger with her mouth hanging open.

Roger catches her gaze. He blinks in surprise. Elizabeth snaps her mouth closed and wheels around to her desk. She clenches her hands into fists.
No! Please, God, not that!

“I don't know why it's such a surprise to everyone,” Klausman says. He is seated behind the biggest desk Jones has ever seen. Two walls of his office are glass, and low-lying clouds drift by. Jones feels as if the building is in the process of toppling over; he keeps realizing he's leaning to the left, seeking balance. “I'm simply applying scientific methods of investigation to a business environment. We don't expect scientists to work on live human beings. They use labs. They experiment in controlled conditions. It's the exact same concept.”