Shimmer (33 page)

I kept adding up the savings. Wall Street would be pleased. And weeks would be saved.

My assistant's e-mail arrived.
Regence.
No name or identity on the caller yet. But this was a call from the Regence headquarters.

I heard myself saying, “Is this what you do all day?”

It was a moment before he responded. “Do what, Mr. Case?”

“Call people and make mysterious requests. Is this your job? You arrive at the office at nine, get your coffee in the break room, place a few calls, spread a little intrigue?”

“What?” the man asked.

In some part of my mind, I wondered if I was finally on the verge of a breakdown. In some part of my mind, I wondered if I was maybe imagining this. This circling call. This artificially elusive voice in my ear.

In a way, none of this had ever felt entirely real.

“What do you mean?” the man asked.

“Is it a job that pays well? Is there specific training you go through? Do you have a college degree?”

“I do not see this as relevant, Mr. Case.”

“Are you sitting in a very bright, spartanly furnished, windowless room?” I asked him, and in a way it did feel like I was talking to myself.

“Excuse me, Mr. Case?”

“I'm picturing stainless-steel furniture, a glaring and omnipresent overhead light. I'm picturing you, blond, of course, in a gray, generic but highly tailored suit.”

“Again I am not sure how this is relevant.”

“Still, it's worth discussing,” I said.

“Do you want to know how I obtained your direct phone line, Mr. Case?” the man asked now, seeming to change the subject. Or maybe returning to his script.

“I assume you got it from the company directory,” I said. “Or maybe off our Web site. Or the phone book.”

“Well, no.”

“Did you hack into one of our servers, then? That was probably the hard way.”

“No,” he said somewhat weakly.

“Did you bribe my assistant? Blackmail an intern? Intercept my mail?”

He didn't answer for a moment. Then only said, “No.”

“This is Chairman Tor, isn't it?” I said slowly, although I doubted it was actually him. It was only something to say. Some piece of confusion to add.

There was a pause. “Chairman Tor does not place his own calls,” the man said.

“Because he travels with an entourage,” I said, staring toward New Jersey now, standing now, for the first time noticing a park, a small park, that sat near the waterfront.

Again there was the confused pause. I thought I could even hear papers shuffling but was sure my mind was only supplementing the mildly orchestrated drama of the moment.

“And so?” the voice asked, confidence fading again.

“Yes?”

“And so, are you coming?” he asked.

“Coming to where?”

“To the hangar.”

“To fly to Finland?” I asked. “To meet with Chairman Tor?”

He was quiet. Apparently he had only just realized how clear he'd been with me. Another moment passed. “Yes,” he said.

I hung up the phone.

I had a second e-mail from my assistant. A direct phone number within Regence.

Staring at that park again. Still not sure how much of this was real.

In another moment, I dialed the number.

It was the elegant voice, somewhat less polished or practiced, speaking now in what I assumed to be Finnish, saying something to the effect of
hello.

“This is Robbie Case,” I said. “Tell him to meet me here. If Tor wants to meet, he'll have to come here.”

And I hung up.

I sent a quick e-mail to Cliff, Whitley, Leonard and Julie. Outlining the scope of the next round of cuts.

I stood. I went to the window.

And I wasn't sure why I'd been surprised that Regence had called. After all, I was the one who'd reached out to them first.

I was the one who'd called, days earlier, letting them know Core was available. Core was for sale.

He entered with what, in fact, could only be called an entourage. Chairman Tor, walking into a conference room on the twentieth floor, surrounded by a group of eight vaguely Aryan, remarkably large men and women. Broad-shouldered and tall, full-breasted and dense. There was something very fertile about all of them. Their well-defined faces, their sharply honed jaws, their beautiful hair and mouths. They were made of genes that seemed to call out for reproduction.

I, on the other hand, was meeting with them alone, a thin and tired man leaning against the edge of the windowsill. Pressing one hand against the glass behind me.

The group had been brought up in a freight elevator by my driver,
then escorted quietly to this conference room out of the sight of any employees.

Tor shook my hand. He was, like his entourage, a deeply fit, remarkably handsome man. His hand gripped mine as if it were clinging to the edge of some slick Nordic ice shelf. His eyes stared into me, clearly searching for my inner life, my deepest secrets, my sense of self.

I tried, in my way, to give him nothing. A half smile, a firm grip, a nod toward a chair near me.

“I'm glad to meet you, Mr. Case,” he said in a voice tinged nicely by an English accent.

I barely registered the next twenty minutes, filled as they were with his stories of starting his company, of launching new products, of hiring and building his empire. They were folksy tales, less the tightly drawn insights of an entrepreneur and his visionary plan than the loosely relayed anecdotes of a simple but strong man who'd one day found himself atop this international machine.

He'd reached the 1980s when I noticed that his entourage had formed a kind of perimeter around the room, two men near the door, two women standing equidistant along the windows, a man and woman at each side of him, two men with laptops sitting close at the end of the room. I thought for a moment that I was being surrounded. But I saw that they were actually surrounding him, monitoring the room, the exits, the windows, some kind of security posture that, probably, they kept up at all times.

I realized I should have met with them in a room with a set of children's chairs.

“I'm an engineer,” Tor said to me now. “The rest of this, it is merely a function of the power those fundamental skills did bring me.”

I nodded. I smiled some. I was so incredibly tired. The exhaustion in my body, in my eyes, the exhaustion ever present in everything I saw and did and felt, here now amidst this cast of elegant intruders. I blinked, and again, and light shot in streaks across the black surfaces of my vision.

“I could tell you my stories too,” I said. “But I really don't have time.”

He nodded. He sat back, taking a very careful moment to clasp his hands in his lap, to stare down at them. Studying his motions, preparing his comments for me.

“You and I,” he said, “left to battle in the vacuum created by Fadowsky's genius.”

“Genius,” I said. “Yes.”

“You see, our cultures, our people, they have more in common than you and I want to believe.”

And it was a moment, a slow, slow moment, but I finally found myself nodding, smiling. Smile.

“Let's end this fighting.”

And I kept on nodding, smiling.

“Our two companies should not be at war,” he said.

And he was going to say it now.

“I'm talking about the new economy,” he said, “a borderless world, the free flow of information between nations and old adversaries.”

And I blinked again, looking away, toward the window. Seeing streaks of light still crossing fast across my eyes, and I could see the words as I spoke them, “You want to buy my company.”

I turned back to him and he was smiling wide, leaning forward, nodding slowly. “A majority stake,” he said in English now perfect, clean, without any accent at all. “At a multiple of, say, one-fifth of your current revenue.”

I smiled. I could not help but smile. It was what I'd wanted. An offer to buy this company. But, still, I had to smile.

And I said in a moment, “A price that's a fraction of what your emissary offered me just a few weeks ago.”

He smiled. His eyes seemed to sparkle. His lips were so wet. “And just think,” he said slowly, “think about what price I will offer you a few days from now.”

Next to the pile of letters was a tall stack of legal documents. The offer from Regence.

Just a few days since my meeting with Tor.

No one in the company knew about the offer yet. But soon I would tell them.

I read letters from people who'd been fired.

I read letters from shareholders praising what I'd done.

I read articles in the paper in support of my actions.

I read articles in the paper telling the stories of the people without jobs.

And other letters. A month's worth of letters from my parents. All morning I'd been reading and rereading the story of each person. Picturing each city in which they lived, each neighborhood and home they described. Reliving the details of the decisions they had once made.

Imagining one of these letters might be real.

Core was now just a few months from collapse. Selling to Regence wouldn't stop the collapse. But it would give the company a little life, a few extra months. Enough time to finalize the sale. And enough time that the sale might help cover up some of the reasons for our collapse.

Although the senior staff would be marked by this failure forever.

And I would be done, marked like all the senior staff.

But rich.

Sued. Tied up in lawsuits. But nothing I couldn't settle in time.

I stood up now. Restacking the letters. Then leaving my office. No direction or place in mind. Thinking only that it had been weeks since I'd last walked through the office. Since I'd held a meeting on the fly.

I only had to walk for a few minutes to see it. Hear it most of all. The quiet. It wasn't that people had given up. They weren't silent in their offices, they weren't sitting quietly at their desks, heads lowered, just waiting for some end. They were still in motion, still moving quickly. Still loud in their calls and work.

But I could hear the silence. The quiet that hung between each word that was spoken.

Fear.

And yet, for all the reaction in the market and the press and inside the company, we could see now that we were losing very few clients to Regence. The stock had fallen sixty percent, but our client base had dropped only five. I'd tried to emphasize this to everyone who would listen. And the financial analysts and reporters all agreed with what I said. None saw us in decline because our clients were fleeing, because our services were so dramatically diminished or because our revenue was falling off much at all. What they saw, only, was the stock. Diving. And diving because, with Regence against us, now there was definition to how large we could grow, a cap on how many clients we could get. That cap alone was burying us. Because what had kept the stock so high for so long was the undefined potential of Core Communications. And without definition, our potential had always been limitless.

Now, though, our future had been seen, explained and quantified.

And so what I'd been cutting was our new products. Our new efforts. Our less profitable services.

I'd been cutting our future.

Yet, for a week now, the stock had been stabilizing. Down $75 since Regence had introduced its boxes, but this week there were buyers in our stock.

“Faith in the company?” Julie had asked me that morning, sitting in a chair in my office, staring absently toward the door.

“Cliff says no,” I said. “Cliff says it won't last.”

And I wasn't sure how much it had helped. Weeks, maybe. Even a month.

But not enough, of course.

Now I stood near a glass conference room. Stood near the tall multipaned windows. Stood near desks and workspaces and chairs and printers and copiers and people.

I'd forgotten, for a moment, what floor I was on.

I thought about heading toward the DMZ. Wanting to pass through that collection of juvenile programmers and game-playing admins. But I knew that wasn't what I would see. Instead the DMZ had be
come the worst floor in the company, the most tired, the most pained, all of it a reflection of Leonard's anxious, dying state.

I needed to call Trevor. To tell him about Regence. And to tell him what was about to happen.

But I couldn't do it yet.

I wondered if anyone still played putt-putt.

I wondered if anyone still played basketball.

I wondered if anyone could find the energy to form an active rogue section.

The night before, I'd found Cliff in his office at one
A.M
., staring wide-eyed into a computer screen, typing rapidly on his keyboard. “Looking for a way,” he said quietly, not turning to me, his shoulders pulled forward, his office filled with the vaguely bitter scent of vomit.

And I'd only turned away.

The night before, I'd found Julie in her office at two
A.M
., carefully filing away papers related to every employee program, every community service action the company had ever done. “Never did,” she said slowly, “have time to sort through all this.” And she stared down at the piles, her hands touching each paper, carefully placing each document in a file, each file in a box, each box in a corner of the room.