Company (38 page)

The guard looks startled. “I just have a message for you.”

“Oh,” Jones says.

“What you did on Friday was a great thing, Mr. Jones. I told my kids about it.” He consults a scrap of paper. “The message is that the Alpha team wants to see you. As soon as possible. In the usual place.” His eyes flick up at Jones. “Does that make sense? I wrote down exactly what they said.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

Jones claps the guard on the arm and walks on. When he's inside the elevator, he presses 12 and 14 together, even though he is sure nothing will happen—surely the first thing Klausman did after Jones trashed his company was to revoke his Alpha clearance. But no: the elevator moves. Jones chews his lip. At the right moment he hits
DOOR OPEN
and the car slides to a halt on 13, just like always.

Jones hesitates. There are not too many reasons Alpha would want to see him, and even fewer that will be much fun for him. One possibility is they want to bawl him out;
another is they want to inflict some kind of horrendous revenge on him, the nature of which they've spent all weekend devising.

But he can't dodge them forever. He leaves the elevator and walks to the meeting room, his business shoes making no sound on the plush carpet. Despite himself, he is nervous. He reaches the door, stops, and wipes his hands on his pants.

Then he throws open the door. An agent, Tom Mandrake, stops speaking so abruptly that Jones hears his teeth click together. “Hi!” Jones says. “How you guys doing?”

Klausman, sitting in his giant leather chair, eyes him from dark, sunken hollows. The man looks ten years older than he did on Friday. He also looks as if he would like to punch Jones in the guts. “Sit down, Jones.”

He takes a few steps into the room. “I'm good, thanks.”

Klausman eyes him for a moment, then shrugs. It is the worst attempt to feign nonchalance Jones has ever seen. Then Klausman's eyes flick across the room and Eve says, “Jones.”

She's not sitting in her usual position, but rather at the foot of the great table, opposite Klausman's big leather chair. Her expression is stony—which is what she told him to expect, at least in front of Alpha. But at this point Jones isn't taking anything about Eve for granted. “I suppose it would be redundant to tell you how disappointed we are.”

“Probably.”

“Ten years. That's how long this version of Zephyr Holdings has been running. That's how much sweat and blood went into it. You destroyed a decade.”

Jones glances at Klausman, who is staring back at him with his arms folded. He doesn't seem to want to join in, so Jones guesses Eve is today's designated attack dog. Well, too bad; he's addressing this to Klausman. “Are you serious? Do you really think Zephyr was corporate Utopia? It wasn't. It was a shit place to work, and a shitty template for a successful company. You screwed the staff too many times, and that was always going to come back to bite you. Well, here it is.
You
killed Zephyr. All I did was show you that it was dead.”

“Why you arrogant little prick,” Blake says.

“Blake,” Klausman says, his voice low.

Eve folds her hands together and leans forward, pulling Jones's attention back. She looks very earnest, and even now, when Jones is reasonably sure she is focused on nothing beyond extracting the maximum personal benefit possible from this situation, he feels a pang of desire for her. “Jones, we didn't ask you here to vent our frustration. We want to determine the best way forward. If word leaked out that the Omega Management System's test-case company imploded . . . well, there would be no way to recover from that. So our objective is to get Zephyr back on track as fast as possible. We . . .” She glances at Klausman. “We want to ask for your cooperation with that.”

Jones laughs before he can stop himself. “You're joking.”

“There's no one more likely to persuade the staff than you.”

He looks around the table. They're as solemn as funeral directors. “Zephyr is not going back. Zephyr is running a new project now: to find out whether a company can be successful without eating its own employees. You all need to accept that. And stop assuming this is a disaster! What if—and sorry if I'm turning anyone's worldview upside down here—what if Zephyr can be successful
and
a good place to work?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Blake says, disgusted.

Eve says, “Jones, we are not amateurs. Alpha did not
assume
that cutting employee benefits raises productivity. We studied it. We tried it both ways. We tried it in ways you haven't thought of yet, and that's why we know: letting employees run the company is a
bad idea.
Does Zephyr have high turnover and poor morale? Yes. Do its employees complain a lot? Yes. Would it be more successful if it addressed these problems? No, because at that level, happy employees are not more productive. People don't become receptionists and sales assistants because they love answering phones, and if you give them the opportunity to earn the same salary by working less, you know what? They grab it. This is not a principle Alpha invented because we enjoy being assholes; it is a fact. Maybe you don't like it, maybe
we
don't like it, but we understand it, and we manage it. You, Jones, don't understand it. You took a high but manageable level of employee dissatisfaction and turned it into a rebellion because you believe in a goddamn
fantasy.
”

“Enough,” Klausman says. “Jones, I'm only going to ask you once. Will you help me get Zephyr back?”

He feels rattled from Eve's attack, but if there's one thing he's sure of, it's that he's not going to help Alpha. He's surprised they bothered calling him up here to ask, since surely Eve, at least, must know there's no chance he will agree. Perhaps it's a sign of how desperate Klausman is to save his corporate baby. Or maybe—

Oh,
he thinks.

He gets it. He looks at Eve, and it almost breaks his heart. She regards him steadily, waiting for his response.

“No,” he says.

Then it all goes pretty much as he expects.

Eve turns to Klausman, spreading her palms. “Daniel, I have to say it. This is just what I predicted.”

Blake says, “Jones, think about what you're doing, for Christ's—”

Eve talks over him. “And I'm going to speak frankly, because the circumstances demand it. The blame for this debacle, Daniel, lies at your feet. You allowed Zephyr staff too much freedom, despite what we knew about their levels of dissatisfaction. You selected Jones for Alpha. And now we've spent three days
talking.
It pains me to say this, Daniel, but you are losing Zephyr. We need to take back the company. We need to sack the ringleaders. It has to happen now. And, Daniel, you have to step down.”

Klausman's eyebrows jump up in shock.

“I'm not saying permanently. But this is a crisis. It's no time to stand on egos. You started this company, Daniel, but you have to let somebody else save it. You know it's true. If this happened on anyone else's watch, you'd sack them in a second. Not out of spite, not as punishment, but because that's what's best for the company. It's what the investors will demand; it's what our customers will demand. If they hear about this, and if we haven't done something drastic, something major, in response . . . I don't need to tell you how damaging that would be. Alpha wouldn't survive it, Daniel. It couldn't. That's why you need to hand it over to me.”

Blake says, “Whoa, whoa—”

Eve says, “Daniel. You know I'm right.”

Blake: “This is not the kind of thing that should be decided on the spur—”

Eve: “Blake, you had your chance. It was on Friday, at 5:00
P.M.
”

Blake: “Oh, come on, what has that got to do with—okay, maybe that could have been handled better, but they took us by surprise. It was—”

Eve: “Unless we do something, we'll be sitting here tomorrow saying we could have done today better. Daniel, I love you. And I love this company. That's why I'm pushing so hard. I'm sorry to say it, but if you can't see this is a crisis, I'm tendering my resignation.”

Blake: “That's a cheap stunt.”

Eve: “I'm completely serious.”

Blake: “You bitch—”

Klausman says, “All right.” His voice is soft, barely audible. He doesn't meet anyone's eyes. Jones almost feels sorry for him.

Jones leaves and nobody cares: they're enraptured by the seismic power shift occurring around Daniel Klausman and Eve Jantiss. He walks down the corridor, and, on a whim, enters the monitoring room. There are two techs present, but after the first curious glance, they ignore him. Jones pulls a chair into the middle of the room and stares at the monitors for a while.

“I don't know what to say to you.”

It's Blake, standing with one hand on the door handle. Jones turns back to the monitors. He hears Blake let go of the door handle and come closer, until he can practically feel waves of silent hostility breaking against his back. “You know, Eve is Eve. She saw an opportunity, she took it. I hope she wraps her car around a pylon on the way home tonight, but I get it: she outplayed me.
You,
though—I warned you. I told you what she was like. But you went ahead and let her screw you anyway. You spineless piece of crap, I bet you still think she's on your side. I bet you can't wait for her to come out of that room and tell you everything's going to be all right. Is that why you're hanging around?”

“Blake?” Eve says. Jones sees her reflection in the glass wall. “I know you're pissed and all, but let's not do anything that will make it impossible to work with each other, okay?”

Blake makes a noise that sounds like he's chewing his own tongue. “I'll leave you two to it.” His voice is wet with contempt.

Eve closes the door behind him. She comes around and squats in front of Jones. When she enters his field of vision, she is sharing a wide, beautiful smile with the two techs. “Okay!” she says to Jones. “Let's get coffee and talk this thing out.”

Jones starts to laugh. It pops out of him without warning and escalates into something uncontrollable, where there are tears in his eyes and a stitch in his side. Eve watches him, her smile growing fractured.

“You,” he says, “are unbelievable. I mean that.”

“Thanks. So what do you say—”

“We're not going for coffee.”

“Ah.” She rocks back on her heels. “So it's like that.”

“What you said in there about sacking people, was that just for Alpha? Or did you mean it?”

She says softly, “Jones, this isn't a company. What you've done . . . it's sweet. It really is. But it's not workable. You still think there are such things as good companies and bad companies, and there aren't. I'm sorry.”

Jones stares at her.

She holds up her hands. “Okay, let's get this straight. I did not pretend to like you. I am not some kind of corporate whore who uses sex to get what she wants.” Jones starts laughing again. “I mean it. I care for you. Look at me. Jones, I adore you. What happened in there, that's business. It has nothing to do with you and me.”

“It has
everything—
” he chokes on the word. For a second he thinks he's about to cry.

Eve doesn't say anything for a moment. “It will be easier if you help, Jones. You can save a lot of jobs.”

“If you sack a single person, I'll tell the whole company about Alpha.”

“Jones,” she says patiently, “that would only force me to sack all of them.”

“You won't do that.”

“I will. In a heartbeat. We already have everything in place; all it takes is a phone call. And after what you've done, it might even be easier to start from scratch.” She puts her hands together, as if in prayer. “But the best solution, Jones, is to go back to the way things were before. Your friends can keep their jobs. I won't have to move Alpha to a new city. Everyone's happy—well, you know what I mean. Please, think about it. It really is the best outcome.”

“I should have told everyone about Alpha the second I found out.”

Eve bites her lip. “Jones, you have this idea that they will be glad to know the truth. That they'll thank you for telling them. They won't. They'll hate you. I'm telling you the truth right now, Jones, and are you grateful? No, you're angry and upset and you probably hate me a little. I don't want to threaten you, because I know you're emotional and you're not thinking logically, but if you want to stay friends with any of those people, you won't say a word about Alpha. You'll convince them that they need Senior Management back.”