Kelley Eskridge (7 page)

She took a deep breath and reached for
what Donatella called the power voice. “All
right
,
people.” She knew enough to use her stomach, not her throat, so the
sound was broad rather than high, even though a bit wobbly. Some of the
people who had been talking trailed off; those who had disengaged sat
up in their chairs and looked at her doubtfully. Senior Woman was still
yammering on. Jackal exchanged glances with Jordie; he shook his head
again.

Jackal stood up and leaned across the
table, bracing herself against her hands. Senior Woman sensed the
motion and turned to find Jackal close enough to spit on.

“Excuse me,” said Jackal quietly, “could I
just get your attention for a minute?” When Senior Woman started to
sputter, Jackal held up her finger. Senior Woman's lips thinned; the
woman beside her smiled down at her own lap.

Jackal motioned to Jordie as she sat down,
handing him the heavy silence.

“Okay,” he began again. “This doesn't seem
very productive to me. Two out of every three meetings I go to are
exactly like this, and nothing ever gets done. I'll bet some of us
can't even remember our original topic.”

A gray-haired man with skin darker than
Jackal's said, “I can. It was the question of what makes projects
successful.”

“Well, this isn't it.”

“No,” the other man agreed. “This is what
screws them up. This kind of thing makes people go out of their way to
avoid working with each other.”

Neill was listening closely now, his juice
glass pushed to one side.

“So part of the trick is to keep them
working together.” That from the woman who'd been fighting with Senior
Woman; she gave her sparring partner a rueful look.

“Yes,” Jordie said. “And you can't just
bully them into it. Theory X doesn't apply anymore. You have to make
them willing to do it.”

Neill spoke then. “And how do you do that?”

He waited. No one answered for a full
minute.

“That is what you are here to learn,” he
said. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “There are two things I have to
teach you about managing activities: influence and structure. Influence
in this context is helping people perceive the work you need from them
as meaningful and constructive. Structure is setting up this work in
the way that best ensures success and therefore reinforces their choice
to do it. Influence and structure,” he repeated, and underlined them
with ink-fingered gestures: Jackal wondered if she would always see
influence
as a blue stroke. Or perhaps
she would just see Neill's face, intent and empty of concern.

“You've just participated in one work
experience based on influence and structure, and one that was not. It's
up to you to decide which you found more productive. These two concepts
will be the foundation of our learning. They are complex skills, both
to acquire and to apply. They are the bridge between people and
results. They are not theories: theories are garbage and I don't want
to hear yours. And they are not negotiable. If you don't see the value,
don't return: there will be no hard feelings. Now go off and think
about it. Be back here at ten tomorrow morning if you're coming back.”

Everyone sat like animals on the road gone
lamp-eyed in oncoming headlights, until Neill began shepherding them
gently out the door. Jackal found herself with Jordie, Sawyer, the
woman with the soft voice, and the woman in the wheelchair, who was
called Ng Mai and who expertly steered them to a noodle café
about a half-kilometer further inside the complex.

“Well,” Jordie said when they had ordered
their food and were all cradling cups of green tea. The sun shone warm
on Jackal's back. She breathed in the smell of soy and onion that
wafted through the swinging kitchen door.

“Mm hmm,” Mai answered.

“Instructive,” the other woman said, her
voice even softer through the steam of the tea.

“I don't like it,” Sawyer said slowly. He
made a face. “I know, I know, he's the great Neill and I'm a
second-tier manager and I'm lucky to be here. My boss and her boss and
her boss have all made that very clear.” He looked down as he spoke,
tracing circles on the plastic tablecloth with his fingernail. “But
it's so cold. Influence and structure.” He twisted his mouth around the
words. “Manipulation and control, more like. Let's at least be honest.”

Jordie frowned. “But it's not. It's not
manipulation. You saw yourself how different it was when he ran the
session and when he just sat back. It was better when he did it. It was
great. He had, I don't know—he had this vision of how it ought to go
and he made it happen.” He leaned so far across the small table that he
was in danger of sweeping all the cups away, and his hair feathered out
of its meticulous topknot. He cares about this a lot, Jackal thought.
She tasted it, like something she'd swallowed with her tea: what did
she care about that much? It struck her again how much older than her
they all were. Did surety of purpose come with age? How do they know
what they want, she wondered, watching Jordie cresting on his own
wavefront, earnest and emphatic, making even Sawyer smile faintly and
reconsider. Jackal already knew she'd go back to the class: Khofi said
she needed this to be the Hope, and it was the first tangible direction
Ko had ever pointed her in, even if they hadn't yet actually told her
where she was going. But there was a destination, and Neill was already
beginning to assess her ability to reach it. Those were the sandpaper
moments. She predicted her future: a little extra attention, more
opportunities to practice, more direct coaching. More praise than the
others when it was needed to motivate her. A larger share of criticism,
when it was time to refine and integrate her understanding. Neill would
make sure she learned.

And she loved it. Even with too little sleep
and apple lumps in her stomach, she hurried toward it. The work was
like nitrogen in her blood, a fizzing feeling when she did well. Here
she felt confident, real. Here she felt safe. When she doubted herself
and her ability to play the role that she was being customized for, she
pushed herself harder, staked out another skill and skinned it and
sucked it from the guts down to the marrow. It nourished her spirit in
the same way that Snow sustained her heart.

She ran all the way from the bus. Neill
wouldn't wait for her, Hope or not. He always started on time: it was
one of what he called the hard rules, the ones with no flex. Middle
managers fostered the rumor that he had once opened a strategy meeting
at the appointed time, without the CEO of Ko. He was still outlining
his role as the facilitator and reviewing the proposed agenda when
Smith stepped into the room. Jackal imagined that had been a great
relief for the other executives, who were probably trying to decide
whether to actually do business without the Chief or to piss off Neill
at the start of the most delicate political activity of the Ko planning
year. The story went that Neill had peremptorily waved Smith up to the
head of the table without pausing his monologue; and that while the
rest of the room held its collective breath, Smith had simply smiled in
a way that could have been either polite apology or confident
amusement, and taken her seat. Most of Ko scoffed at this as
embellishment, but Donatella had been in the room, serving as the
meeting's recorder. Lately whenever Jackal got too scared, she tried to
remember that Ko's Chief knew how to smile.

Neill, of course, could smile a dozen
ways: that was one of the skills.

She cornered into the room at three
seconds before ten o'clock, and smiled as Jordie shoved his palmtop
aside to make space for her. She shrugged off her jacket, moving easily
in her Neill-inspired clothes that she now understood were designed to
be non-threatening and comfortable to stand in for hours at a time. She
laughed with Svenson over her breathlessness, and fumbled in her bag
for a disk she'd copied for Allison, a collection of live soleares
flamenco performances that was one of the staples of her music
collection. She loved to share this music with people; she wondered
what Allison, with her precisely constructed approach to the world,
would make of the percussive clapping and the shouted encouragements
that jostled for rhythmic space, wove themselves into a net that caught
the passionate singing and threw it back out to the listener. “There's
ten songs and a history of flamenco with a bunch of links, and an
amazing video of the story of Carmen set to flamenco, really powerful.”
Allison was smiling; so was everyone else. “Ah,” Jackal said, “I'm
being enthusiastic again. Well, there you go. There's a lot of beauty
on this disk, it's worth getting excited about.”

“Nobody's laughing at you,” said Jordie.
“Near you. We're laughing near you. Your enthusiasm really comes out
when you facilitate, you know? It makes people want to keep working,
just to get more of that energy splashed their way.”

She was so pleased, she was sure it showed
in a yellow cloud around her head like a ring of light. I can do this,
she thought. I can. I can take this to Al Iskandariyah and it'll be
mine. She could almost love Ko for giving her this thing, this balance
to the confusion and fear. If this work was really part of being a
Hope, then perhaps she would survive to fool the world. Save her family
and her web. Maybe even make the CEO smile for her one day. She
wondered if she could ever tell Neill how much difference he had made.

And where was he? The digital display over
the white board read 10:04, and everyone had begun to shift in their
chairs.

The door banged open.

“What's wrong with him?” Jordie muttered.
Jackal did not answer: she was too busy staring. She'd never seen those
particular lines in Neill's face, and so it took a longer moment to
realize that—

“He's sharked,” she whispered back. Neill
must have heard, the way he heard and saw everything in his territory,
but he gave no notice. He took a minute at a window with his back to
the room. Jackal knew when he was ready to turn, because his shoulders
ratcheted down a notch under his shirt.

“I am late. I apologize.” That didn't
sound like a word he was used to saying. “I was delayed by an
administrative matter. Before we proceed, I want to let you know that
unfortunately Mr. Sawyer is no longer with us.”

She scanned the room before she could stop
herself, as if Sawyer might be there, eyebrows raised with the rest of
them.

“Jackal, Sawyer's project passes to you.
We'll discuss it this afternoon.”

Jackal nodded. Great, more work. She
wasn't particularly thrilled with Sawyer right now, but she wished him
well. Surely this was not the first time that someone had been removed
from a class. Sawyer was a pretty good facilitator, but he wasn't on
the team, not really. She hoped he wasn't in too much trouble.

Two hours later, she discovered Neill had
actually meant that Sawyer was no longer with Ko.

She learned from the most unlikely source:
her father. She and Snow met him for lunch, as they did at least once a
week, in the large kitchen at the back of her parents' house. Carlos
always cooked: today there was a quiche of scallions and bacon and goat
cheese, a bowl of acid-green spanish olives, and a salad of sliced
valencia oranges, red grapes, and yellow apple slices. Jackal watched
him conjure the preparations so that everything was ready together,
with just enough time left to pour cream over Snow's fruit, the way she
liked it. It was all delicious: the meal; her father's favorite dishes
with an Etruscan pattern in blue and burnt umber; the cool green light
that hung lazy in the kitchen, slow-moving like the goldfish in the
pond outside the window; her father's laugh, even though Snow's joke
was told all backwards; Snow herself, awkward in motion as always,
scattering bits of quiche onto the table.

She blinked. Her father and Snow had
stopped talking and were staring at her.

“Not hungry?” Carlos asked.

She blinked again, then shook her head
vigorously. “No, no, it's great.” She spiked a huge mouthful of fruit
to prove she meant it. Then she replayed the last ten seconds of
conversation in memory. “You said something about Sawyer? Which Sawyer?”

“Jeremy Sawyer from Biotech,” her father
said, with a look that told her he didn't like having to repeat himself.

“He was in my class. My workshop with
Neill.”

“I know, that's why I'm telling you.”

“What happened to him? I know, I'm sorry,
I was thinking about something else.”

“He's gone.”

Gone? Was Sawyer dead? No, her father
thought euphemisms were tacky. “Gone where?”

“Gone elsewhere. Gone from Ko. Let go.
Fired. I believe the standard phrase is ‘no longer in good employment
standing with the company.’” He showed no expression, but the orange
segment he held was in shreds.

She let her fork clatter down onto her
plate. “Fired?” She had never personally known anyone who was fired
from Ko. Plenty of transfers, sure: Ko was enormous, big enough to
change a person's country, class, lifestyle, family dynamics, just by
reassigning her to another job, complete with intensive cultural
retraining and psychological support. Firing was an utter dismissal, a
condemnation: how would Sawyer live, when so many prospective employers
were trading partners or vendors that could not afford to take the
chance of violating the no-hire clause that was standard in Ko
contracts? “Where did he go?”

“He and his family left the island
yesterday. Dona wasn't able to find out his final destination. He has
people in Burma, I think, but things are very bad there right now. It's
his kids I feel sorry for: he was incredibly stupid, by the sound of
it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have to disappoint Ko in a very big
way to be dismissed with prejudice. It's your Neill's fault, you know,”
he added.