Termination Man: a novel (10 page)

Part of this was purely physical. In addition to her height, at thirty-two, Claire still had the musculature of the high school athlete that she had been more than a decade earlier. The visible strength in her thighs, calves, and biceps accentuated her overall centerfold's stature rather than detracting from it. Then there were her abs: It is rare enough to see a man with a recognizable six-pack. But I could see the outlines of Claire's abdominal muscles beneath her light copper tan.

Many women had claimed over the years to see similar attributes in me. I realized, though, that physical attraction had little, if anything, to do with this particular conquest of mine. By going to bed with me, Claire was asserting her own form of domination over the proprietor of Craig Walker Consulting. She had proven to herself, and to me, that she could get under my skin if she wanted to. She could force me to compromise my standards of professionalism, the ones that I had absorbed and learned to revere during my years as a six-figure business consultant. Her presence in my bed gave her a foothold in my life and personal affairs that a mere employee would never have acquired. It was a vulnerability that she could easily exploit if she ever chose to.

And vulnerabilities were a favorite conversational topic of Claire Turner.

“Did you visit your parents and sister today?” she asked.

“Sure did,” I responded.

“And how were they?”

“Mom and Dad are doing fine, all things considered. Laurie’s got a new job—some sort of a telemarketing gig.”

“Mmm.”

We lay in silence for a while, and I began to contemplate the numerous tasks that awaited me in the coming weeks. Undercover jobs inside companies always required more extensive planning. They also included a significant risk of exposure. Rank-and-file corporate employees—especially those who had reason to believe that their employer was targeting them—could be extremely suspicious of a new and unfamiliar presence placed suddenly in their midst. And in practically all cases, I had to engage the targets immediately, and win their trust within a short period of time.

As my older sister had suggested, it was a bit like being a spy.

"They're your weakness, you know," Claire said.

"Who?"

"Laurie and your mother and father."

After she had said it, she smiled matter-of-factly, and waited to see how I would respond. I knew, of course, that she wasn't simply concerned about my emotional well-being or mental health. Claire had remarked more than once that I should move my base of operations to the East Coast, preferably somewhere in the vicinity of New York. Claire was obsessed with the Big Apple, and she disdained Ohio as an agriculture-and-rust-belt backwater, no matter how much money we were making here. New York was the business and financial epicenter of the world, the place where she would make the contact that would take her to whatever her Next Big Thing would be.

Claire knew that my commitment to my parents and my disabled sister would prevent me from ever leaving Ohio. I had, in fact, told her as much.

Instead of reacting angrily, as she had likely expected, I replied in the same deadpan manner, my voice containing only the slightest hint of sarcasm.

"Gee, Claire, what makes you say that? Unless I remember incorrectly, you've got a family, too. You weren't simply hatched out of a Victoria's Secret catalog, were you?"

She gave my chest a light slap. The gesture was playful, but her eyes remained serious. And it was another reminder of the fact that she had mastered me as much as I had mastered her. How many employees would feel entitled to touch their bosses in such a manner?

"Of course I've got family," she said, her expression suddenly hard. "You know that." And know that I did. Claire had grown up in rural Michigan. Her childhood had not been a happy one. "But we're talking about you."

"Okay. Let's talk about me, then."

"Alright. You feel a sense of guilt over the fact that your father has emphysema, and that your sister was in the wrong place at the wrong time when she was nineteen years old."

I already felt my anger rising. I would have tolerated this remark from few women, and almost no men. Claire had one thing right: my family was my soft spot.

"Did it ever occur to you, Claire, that I take care of my parents and my sister simply because I love them?"

She looked at me incredulously, almost as if I had just suggested that she should cash her next paycheck and distribute the money to random passersby on the street. But I knew that Claire's alcoholic father had been anything but loving. Her mother had been absent for most of her growing up years, though her parents had since reconciled. Claire's two brothers had followed in her father's footsteps. One was a seldom-employed alcoholic. The other one was serving time in the Michigan state prison system for armed robbery.

"And I'm saying that love might be a weakness," she said.

I didn't intend to explain it to her: why I never thought of my oxygen-tethered father or my wheelchair-bound sister as weaknesses. If she couldn't intuitively grasp that sort of thing by this stage in her life, then nothing that I could say would change her mind.

"Let's make a deal, Claire," I said calmly.

"What?" she raised her eyebrows.

"We keep my family out of our discussions—personal as well as professional."

Claire sighed. "Have it your way, Craig. I'm just saying."

"I thought we agreed that you were finished saying."

"Fine. If you don't want to talk about you, then let’s talk about me. My father and mother live in a rundown house where the plumbing doesn't always work, and the downstairs never gets warmer than sixty-five degrees during the worst part of the winter. And you don't see me compromising my professional life to tend to them. I haven't even seen them twice in the past five years."

"You sound almost proud of that."

She paused to consider this. "Yeah. Now that you mention it, I guess I am."

"You cold bitch," I said. I gave her my best smile, the one that could still melt ladies' hearts when and if I wanted it to. The smile that had helped me land those lucrative contracts. I smiled at Claire because this was the only way to utter a comment like that without turning the conversation into an outright argument; and there was already a sense of tension between us today, despite the sex.

She looked back at me and decided to take the face-saving way out. She laughed along with my joke. Then she reached across the bed and touched me in a way that was as painful as it was arousing.

"You're an idiot," she said.

"I'm your boss."

"Oh, really?" she asked. "Tell me, then: what is it that you want of me, boss? Tell me what you want me to do."

Claire's playacting of submissiveness was unconvincing—so out of character as it was for her. But her hands, and her body, and the sweet, pungent smell of her did arouse me as she continued to manipulate me. I was ready for her whether I actually wanted her or not.

Before I could say another word, Claire was atop me, and I was inside her, simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her contradictory aspects: her hyper-feminine sexuality, mixed with a callousness and a lust for power that was more commonly associated with the masculine sex.

I placed my hands around her bare buttocks and dug my fingernails into her skin. I knew from experience that this was what she wanted me to do.

"Fuck me, Craig," she commanded.

And I did. She was moist and soft and compliant. She was ravenous and strong and unyielding in her preoccupation with her own pleasure.

Claire began to buck up and down as she sat astride me. I felt her grip on my shoulders, squeezing me so hard with her fingertips that the pinching discomfort competed with the hot, slippery sensations below. She stared at me through half-lidded eyes, her gaze never wavering. Claire's face was contorted into a grimace that contained desire, but little hint of tenderness or vulnerability. She brought her open mouth to mine, forcing her tongue between my teeth.

It occurred to me that I might be over my head with Claire. Despite her MBA and her impressive professional resume, there was something else inside her that was cold and hard and unpredictable. Something that would be foreign to most women. It might simply be a product of that wrong-side-of-the-tracks town
where she had been raised
, and those barren Michigan winters. Or it
might be
something more sinister, a force that had grown inside a child who had
found her own twisted strategy for surviving
in a dysfunctional household
.
A child who, lacking love, had learned to thrive on games of victory and domination instead.

The next day, Sunday, I drove to New Hastings, Ohio and got my first look at United Press and Stamping, aka UP&S.

Central Ohio is flat, and semi-rural outside a handful of cities. My GPS told me that the factory was located on the outskirts of the little town of New Hastings—a satellite community of Columbus, home to the state capitol and the Ohio State University.

Exiting the highway and passing through town, I saw numerous OSU Buckeyes flags and banners dotting the lawns and porches in the town proper. Despite the barns, grain silos, and cornfields (brown and low-cut three months after the harvest) around New Hastings, the town considered itself to be within the metropolitan orbit of Columbus.  

I approached the plant from the south, driving along the two-lane highway that led to the main visitor’s entrance. The parking lot was all but empty. Yet as I stepped out of my car, I knew that I would not be alone here, even on a Sunday afternoon. There was a security guard somewhere inside the building, I was sure. I could not see him, but he had no doubt already seen me via one of the plant’s security cameras. I was betting that he would not be unduly alarmed by a lone, well-dressed man driving a Lexus. If questioned, I would tell him that I was a vendor salesperson, and that I merely wanted to confirm the company’s location in advance of my Monday morning appointment.

I was able to manufacture an alibi or a plausible excuse for every eventuality, it seemed. That was one of the skills that I had developed during my years working undercover.

If questioned, I would not be able to tell the security guard the truth: That as an undercover management consultant, it was my custom to perform a visual inspection of my operating environment prior to the beginning of every job. That was my reason for being here on this Sunday afternoon, while the UP&S plant contained no employees.

This practice of advance reconnaissance was about more than simply grasping a site’s location and spatial layout. I needed to absorb the vibes of a place. I had learned over the years that every organizational setting has its own atmosphere. And that atmosphere frequently affects the challenges and outcomes of the job. I wouldn’t be able to get the full vibes until the employees were here, of course; but this observation was the starting point.

The plant facility of UP&S occupied the center of a large lot that had likely been farmland before the first backhoes and bulldozers broke ground here about fifteen years ago. The building’s exterior walls were painted a pure, industrial white. The company name was emblazoned in blue lettering on the manufacturing end of the complex, which was easy to distinguish by its size, height, and the absence of windows. A network of utility pipes and air ducts crisscrossed this section of the roof. The opposite end, where the office space would be found, was a matrix of windows. Extensive shrubbery had been planted in this direction, though it was all brown and bare at this stage in November.

This empty plant, this giant, hulking presence in the central Ohio countryside, would be my next battleground. Once more I began to contemplate what I would need to accomplish here. I mentally summoned the names and the faces of my targets from the personnel files that Beth Fisk had given me: Lucy Browning and Alan Ferguson—the company agitators. Nick King and Michael O’Rourke—the blue-collar embezzlers. They were all about to learn that the employee who bets against the company usually finds himself holding a losing hand.

The following Tuesday I would enter this company under an alias. Before I left, four employees who were presently on the company’s payroll would be ousted from their jobs. While I seldom experienced pangs of guilt about my work, I did take it seriously. The jobs performed by Craig Walker Consulting were serious business for everyone involved.

I wouldn’t be alone, of course. Claire would be joining me onsite within a matter of days. Like me, she would acquire another, temporary identity while at UP&S.

I would also be able to confer discreetly with my TP Automotive clients—although I would need to exercise extreme caution. Beth, Bernie, Kurt, and Shawn would all be here with me. They had recently been established within TP Automotive as a provisional management team of sorts. As I understood the organization chart, Kurt Myers was the acting CEO of UP&S for now. Shawn was slated to take over as soon as the situation here stabilized.

Shawn was currently installed here as a vice president. He oversaw the accounting, purchasing, and production control departments. TP Automotive had placed Beth in a senior human resources role, of course. And Bernie—he was just here being Bernie. The work of the corporate legal department was usually arcane to outsiders. None of the employees at UP&S would have the slightest idea of what he was up to—and none of them would think to ask.