Company (36 page)

Klausman doesn't answer. He doesn't feel outraged or shocked or even surprised; not yet. He watches Jones on the monitors and feels . . . dull.

“Doesn't he understand this company isn't
real
?” Mona says plaintively. “Senior Management doesn't run Zephyr.
We
do. What is he trying to accomplish?” She draws confidence from his silence; her voice rises. “We can sack half the people in that room if we want to.”

“No, Mona,” he says. “We can only sack all of them.” He glances at her and sees confusion in her eyes. It's mirrored in the eyes of the other half-dozen agents present. They are so used to being on the inside, Klausman realizes. They no longer remember anything else. He looks back at the monitors. “If we intervene, we reveal Alpha. And Zephyr is over.”

Tom Mandrake says, “There's practically no one from Human Resources and Asset Protection in that group. So long as we control them—”

“Jones knows how we work,” Klausman cuts in, irritated. He wishes Eve were here; he wouldn't have to explain the implications to her. “If he gains control of Senior Management, we can be sure other departments will follow.”

There's silence for a few moments. Mona says bravely, “I can't see how this will work. You can't
abolish
Senior Management. Zephyr isn't a
democracy.
It's a corporation.”

“I believe,” Klausman says, “that Jones is advancing the theory that those two concepts are not mutually exclusive.”

“Blake won't let it happen,” Mona says stubbornly. “He'll stop this.”

“Let us hope so,” Klausman says. “I'm sixty-three. I don't feel like starting again.”

Jones is beginning to think he's actually done it, that Senior Management has crumpled, when Blake's voice cuts through the tumult. He doesn't shout; he simply raises his chin, speaks clearly, and suddenly everyone listens. Jones has to admit it: Blake has presence. “Do you want the company to collapse? Because that's what I'm hearing. You want Zephyr to go bankrupt.” He rises from his chair and no one tries to restrain him. He straightens the cuffs of his jacket. His blue eyes rake the crowd. “You're unhappy about staff conditions. You think we don't care about your welfare. Well, you're right. Zephyr is not here to care about you. It's a corporation. If you were expecting a theme park, resign. If you're prepared to do your job, stay. But don't demand that we care. Zephyr can't afford to care.”

The workers grow hesitant. They are not totally sure how corporate finances work—from their perspective, it's easy to view Zephyr as an endless source of money, its existence neither threatened nor enhanced by how intelligently that money is spent—but Blake's words clearly contain some kind of truth.

“We did not hire you to fill your lives with happiness.
Your
welfare is not the goal here: Zephyr's is. You want to reverse that—put your own interests above the company's. Well, I'll tell you plainly: this would kill Zephyr stone dead. It would put every one of us out of a job.”

The employees' shoulders slump. Someone says, “Still, things could be a
little
better . . .”

Fear steals into Jones's body. He is not here to make things “a little better.” He's here to take control of Senior Management. Anything less will undo him.

Blake senses victory. His tone softens; he holds out his hands placatingly, palms up. “Look, it's been a long day.” He is the epitome of rationality—especially compared to sweating, wild-eyed Jones, standing on the boardroom table. Blake is calm, firm leadership in a five-thousand-dollar suit. He is exactly the kind of person you would want to be making decisions that affect your ability to earn a living. “Obviously, we're all a little emotional. Perhaps we've said things we didn't mean. Of course Zephyr cares about you. Employees are our greatest asset. You were right to bring this to our attention. We
do
need to make changes. Not abolishing Senior Management, not bankrupting the company—but yes, changes.” He nods thoughtfully. “And to prove it, I promise you this: first thing tomorrow, Senior Management will go through the suggestion box and read every submission
very, very carefully.
”

The employees murmur, raising their eyebrows and shrugging. Jones hears phrases like, “Well, it's an improvement,” and “At least they're listening now,” and he knows it's over. Because everybody would rather have a bad job than no job at all.

“No!” he shouts. He shakes his fist—this is no help to his argument, but he can't help himself. “You want to tell these people what's best for the company, Blake? You don't even know what Zephyr is! It's not the logo, or the bottom line, or the investors, or the
customers—”
Jones is leaking sarcasm by this point. “It's
us
! Look around, you see us? We're it.
We're Zephyr
! We spend half our waking lives here. We know it better than anyone. We care about it more than anyone. That's what people do, Blake, when you put them in a workplace: they get emotionally involved. We're not inputs. We're not machines. You can't outsource some of us and expect everything to be the same. Maybe you wish we were easier to manage, but bad luck: we're human and we're difficult. And we have lives outside of work, goddamn it, and you can't keep stealing pieces of that! You can't keep feeding the bottom line with
us
! If you do, if that's all you know how to do, then goddamm it, this company
deserves
to die!”

The workers roar with approval. It stuns him. Jones thought he was delivering a final, hopeless rant. Instead he has turned the crowd. He looks from one cheering face to another.

It's unclear who starts the chant. It's not Jones. It should be, but he is too dazed to press his advantage. The important thing is that it starts, and drowns out Blake's efforts to respond.

“Resign! Resign! Resign!”

It rolls around the boardroom like a boulder. One member of Senior Management after another tries futilely to raise his or her voice against it. Blake Seddon holds up his hands for quiet and is completely ignored. The Phoenix struggles against the workers holding him down.

Blake gives up any attempt at dignity. With the veins on his neck standing out, he shouts, “We will
not
resign! And you don't have the authority to make us!”

Most of the crowd doesn't even hear him. Jones does. “You're right. We can't force you to quit. But you can't force us to listen to you. Stay up here. Call yourselves Senior Management. But we won't be doing things your way. We'll be taking charge from now on.”

The other members of Senior Management exchange looks. Jones knows the thought is wriggling into their brains:
What if this rebellion is for real?
Zephyr is already reeling from a catastrophic reorganization. If a bunch of PAs, clerks, and sales assistants start trying to run the company . . . well, surely the end is nigh. Each member of Senior Management possesses a hefty stockholding and a munificent termination clause: the kinds of things that can be difficult to extract from a deceased company. And not only that: if Zephyr goes under while they're on board, they would be unemployed with a bad CV.

An executive who resigns before a corporate collapse, on the other hand—and Jones sees the realization dawning on several Senior Management faces at the same time—is in a different position. This person receives his payout. He cashes in his shares. His CV positively glows, because he clearly disagreed with the direction of the company—a decision stunningly vindicated by its subsequent collapse. That person has a future. That person is a corporate genius.

Stanley Smithson pipes up. “Very well . . . as much as it saddens me, I will resign. I would like to say that—”

“I also resign!”

“I resign, too!”

A mighty cheer goes up from the employees. Jones looks at Blake, but that would be hoping for too much. Blake simply stands there with his arms folded and shakes his head. As the executives shuffle through the crowd, heading to their offices to collect their belongings and shred incriminating documents, Holly throws her arms around Freddy and kisses him in blatant disregard of the company's Employee Conduct and Anti–Sexual Harassment policy. Word ripples out of the boardroom to those pressed outside, unable to fit in. It reaches the PAs, who rise from their chairs in disbelief. They hit the phones, spreading the news throughout the building. Employees lined up outside elevators, still waiting to get to level 2, hear the unbelievable truth:
Senior Management has been sacked!

Outside the building, a few smokers look up to see the lights on half a dozen floors happily flicking on and off. Even higher they can make out dozens of tiny figures crammed against the glass-walled level-2 boardroom—but they have to squint, because the sun is setting. The way its hot orange rays bend around the glass, it almost looks as if a group of golden parachutes are floating gently to the ground.

The party runs hot before Freddy discovers that the boardroom contains a stereo system and a bar fridge stocked with expensive champagne; afterward, it's anarchy. On level 2 there is dancing. In the lobby, employees congregate to excitedly review the day's events—there is nothing astonishing about this except that it is the first time in years that a group of employees from different departments have talked to each other without a written agenda and a prebooked meeting room. On level 12 a marketer screws up a memo on budget cuts and kicks it across the room, which blossoms into an impromptu football game that spans three floors, with bonus points scored for reaching key desks.

Nobody has any idea what will happen next. Most don't think about it—tonight is for celebrating, not strategic planning. But a few are worried. They retreat back to their cubicles and sit there nervously. They feel dread fill their bones. To them, this isn't a party—it's the collapse of natural order. Senior Management may have been incompetent; it may have been corrupt; it was certainly full of assholes—but they were
their
incompetent, corrupt assholes. Senior Management was Zephyr's parents, and even though they were remote and uncaring and tended to leave the kids locked in the car while they shot twelve rounds of golf, their absence makes these employees feel like orphans. They listlessly pick papers out of their in-boxes and click through their task lists, futilely seeking something like a return to normal.

On level 11, Staff Services, the paper football bounces off Roger's glass office wall. Roger peeks through the vertical blinds, then lets them quickly fall closed again. Like most of the managers in Zephyr Holdings, he is hiding. When they rebelled in France, they beheaded dukes, didn't they? They decapitated the cousins of cousins of royalty.

There is a power vacuum in Zephyr Holdings now, one large enough to make Roger's saliva glands tingle. He can feel the company straining to suck managers like him upward to fill it. But it's too risky. The workers are volatile, their passions inflamed. He regrets that whole tender-for-work thing. He regrets the swirling light. If he leaves the sanctuary of his office, he is pretty sure his employees will hang him from it by his tie.

At 9:30
P.M.
Jones is playing strip poker around the board table. He is down to his shoes, socks, boxer shorts, and tie, and is being eyed appreciatively by a young woman from Treasury. Freddy is doing much worse: he only has underpants left, and Holly, sitting beside him, keeps reaching down and snapping the elastic. Freddy yelps at this, but Jones gets the feeling he doesn't mind very much.