Termination Man: a novel (54 page)

“I won’t break your heart, Donna,” I said. “Or at least that’s not my intention.”

I wanted to say much more, of course. I wanted to tell her that in the wake of Lucy’s death and Claire’s betrayal, my time with her seemed like the purest and most inviting thing that I had ever come across. I wanted to say that she had forced me to question the assumptions that I had lived with for years. I wanted to make many promises; but I didn’t know if the sudden rush of emotions I felt for this woman was genuine—or merely another aspect of my reaction to recent events.

“I guess that will have to do for now,” she said. Then, forcing a smile: “Now get out of here, Craig
whatever-your-name
is, before I decide that falling for you is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Donna—”

She placed one finger on my lips. “Hush. Just give me some time to think about all of this.” Then she kissed me goodnight at the door, and I stepped outside onto the porch.

The December air that night was already chilled and biting. The weather, which had been mild so far this year, had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. I shivered against the gale of a stiff Alberta clipper.

I had parked the Lexus a few houses down, due to the spaces in front of Donna’s house being occupied by other cars. I figured that one of the neighbors must have been having a party. Well, it was the season for parties. Christmas was only days away. The surrounding houses were festooned with multicolored lights and holiday wreathes. A glowing plastic nativity scene occupied the lawn next door.

I reached my car. I clicked the Lexus’s remote key fob and the lock clicked open. I was about to grab the door handle; then something made me pause. I felt the presence of other people around me before I heard someone say my name.

“Craig Walker.” It took me only a few seconds to discern that this was the voice of Kurt Myers. I turned around and Kurt was standing in the middle of the street. He wasn’t alone. He was flanked by Bernie Chapman. There was another person as well:  I didn’t recognize the man with the shaved head who was standing beside Kurt. He didn’t look like the sort of character who would be a confidant of a TP Automotive vice president. The bald man was easily six-feet four inches tall; and he had the shoulders and build of an NFL lineman. The dark blazer he was wearing had been purchased at a specialty shop, of course. Men of those dimensions don’t buy their clothes in ordinary stores. And still the man’s body strained against the confines of the fabric. It was cold, as I’ve mentioned; but the giant didn’t appear to feel the chill.

“I hope that your purpose here is to talk some sense into that woman,” Kurt said.

I found myself momentarily without words. Donna wasn't the only one who had entered unchartered territory this night. I was the corporate spy, the one accustomed to manipulating behind the scenes and leveraging other people’s secrets. But now my clients were openly spying on me. And there was more than spying involved here. Kurt was attempting to send a message. He had brought along his lawyer, and this other man whose presence was supposed to intimidate me. It was as if Kurt were informing me that there was more than one way he could exercise his will. He had any number of minions who could do his bidding in any number of ways. Whatever was required to get the job done. In all my years of internal security work and private consulting, I had occasionally encountered corporate employees who threatened me within the context of one of my assumed aliases. This was the first time that a
client
had ever threatened me in such a manner.

Nevertheless, I was determined to show Kurt that I was not impressed. I had to appear unflappable—even though this unexpected trio had thrown me off my balance. 

“I work for TP Automotive during business hours,” I said. “What I do after five o’clock is my own business.”

Kurt laughed. “I don’t even need to dignify that one with a response, do I? Come on, now, Craig. You and I are both company men at heart. We don’t think like nine-to-fivers.”

Yes,
we are
both company men
, I thought. We were members of the same tribe, even though I was not technically on the TP Automotive payroll. We both prided ourselves on our identities as professionals—members of that tribe of men and women who don suits and ties each morning rather than coveralls and work boots. Our loyalties were based not on patriotism, nor religion, nor even class affiliation. We were loyal to the abstract entity known as the
corporation
—for the corporation gave us our six-figure salaries, our security, and the titles that formed the cores of our individual self-worth.

But lately the price of that self-worth had risen, hadn’t it? 

Years ago I had read a book called
The Organization Man.
Penned by a
Fortune Magazine
journalist named William H. Whyte and published in 1956, the book had decried the lockstep conformity in post-war corporate America. Whyte had written about men who gave eight or nine hours of their lives to behemoth corporations each day, at jobs that drained them of individuality, energy, and creativity.

The Organization Man
had been a supplemental text in one of my MBA courses, a management science class. The book was critical of corporate culture, obviously, and the class instructor had assigned it as a source of “alternative viewpoints” about the principles that most of us—being rising stars in the corporate world—held dear.

I don’t know what sort of reaction the professor had been expecting. During the class discussion of
The Organization Man
, however, it became clear that few of us felt much sympathy for our Eisenhower-era counterparts. We had all spent some time in the professional workforce, and few of us had ever worked eight or nine hours per day. Instead we all worked eleven, twelve, or fourteen hours per day. On any given evening, one text message, email, or cell phone summons could yank us out of our homes and back into our offices—mentally if not physically as well. Our weekends were often filled with corporate-sponsored volunteer work. We exercised caution when posting personal photos to our Facebook accounts, lest we accidentally display a photo or a comment that might be misinterpreted by the roving eyes of our employers’ human resources departments, who routinely monitored employee activity on social networking sites.  

“Eight or nine hours, that’s it?” one woman in the class had asked. “What the hell were those guys complaining about?”

This comment had elicited cynical laughter, and a general murmur of agreement. The days of postwar hothouse capitalism had seemed quaint and gently paternalistic to most of us.
Eight or nine hours per day were
nothing.
In today’s hypercompetitive marketplace, corporate players were corporate players
twenty-four hours a day
. 

This was doubly true for me now, being an undercover consultant assigned to handle sensitive HR issues. It had been foolish of me to suggest that there was any real line between my work and my personal life. Nor could I take refuge in the platitudes of fair play that formed the boilerplate text of corporate employee handbooks. By his very presence here, Kurt was declaring that our business lay outside the bounds of ethical conduct. And I had placed myself permanently outside those bounds long ago.

“Here is what we’re going to do,” Kurt said. “Tomorrow morning, when I see you in the office, the two of us are going to pretend that this little conversation never took place. But you—” He pointed his finger at me. “You’re going to give this some serious thought. You’re going to think about your future. About which side you’re on.

“Craig,” he continued. “I can open all sorts of doors for you, if you’d only let me. I know you’ve been wanting to land some inside work at the Big Three. When I’m in Detroit, I have lunch every other Tuesday with a director at General Motors. All it would take is a casual recommendation from me and you’d be in. Be a loyal member of the team, Craig. Help us out here, and I’ll gladly make that happen for you.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you’ll regret it.” He turned meaningfully to the giant in the dark blazer. “And I’m not talking about a lawsuit, either. I trusted you. I took you into my confidence. As far as I’m concerned, that constituted an implied contract between you and me. And I’m not talking about the contract between Craig Walker Consulting and TP Automotive. I’m talking about a personal contract, one written between the two of us. If I find you in breach of that contract, then you’re going to suffer.”

Was this really happening
?
I wondered. Despite everything that had happened up to this point, I still had difficulty fully accepting the fact that Kurt Myers, a vice president of TP Automotive, was threatening me with bodily harm. 

Kurt perceived my disbelief.

“Come on, Craig. Don’t give me the surprised, self-righteous routine. You’re not some low-level staffer who can run to HR. What is it they call you? ‘The Termination Man?’ You wanted to play the game at the highest level, am I right? Well, at this level of play, the game has a different set of rules.”

I realized that I was no longer dealing with a vice president of a major corporation. I was dealing with a man who was accustomed to dominating those around him. And I had not only defied him—I had also threatened his familial line.
Had Kurt figured that much out?
Had he connected all of the dots?
Of course he had—he would have to be a fool not to; and whatever else he was, Kurt Myers was no fool.

This little display of force was a final attempt to back me down, I realized—to convince me to raise my neck in a gesture of submission to the alpha wolf of the pack. If I went along, there was still a chance that I would be reaccepted into the fold. If I continued to defy him, then he might very well make good on his implied threats.

A different set of rules, indeed…

Still, I had to make one final appeal to the notion of ethical standards. I couldn’t get past the fact that Kurt
was
a vice president of TP Automotive. And Bernie was a member of the company’s legal management. I couldn't fully accept that either of these two would actually resort to violence, that it was really such a short journey from the boardroom to the jungle.

“Kurt,” I said. “You’re a professional. You hold a position of leadership in a global automotive components firm that took in $37 billion last year.”

“I’m a man who is defending his family.” Kurt replied, confirming my suspicions. “His family and his own livelihood.”

Bernie had been silent to this point. He gave me that tight lawyer’s smile of his, as if daring me to speak.

“And what about you, Bernie?” I asked. “Does this square with your attorney’s code of professional conduct?”

“I don’t see you here,” Bernie said. “I don’t hear you. This conversation never took place.” 

Kurt motioned to the giant, and the big man stepped away and took his place in the driver’s seat of their car. The trio had parked their Mercedes in the space directly behind my Lexus. Bernie followed, opening the rear driver’s side door and sliding himself in. When both of them were inside the vehicle, Kurt gave me one parting piece of advice.

“Craig, you can still walk away from this. We can still go back to the way things were before. Give this some thought. Think about your priorities. But don’t take too long.”

Without waiting for my reply, Kurt opened the rear passenger side door and leaned inside. The door closed behind him. The Mercedes’ engine started, and the car pulled away. I stood there for a while, and watched the taillights round the next hill and disappear.

‘Think about my priorities?’
Is that what Kurt wanted me to do? One of the most powerful men in the automotive industry had just threatened me with physical violence. It was now clear beyond any doubt that he had chosen his son over the law—a son who was almost certainly a rapist and a murderer. If I had needed further evidence to convince me of the fundamental truth behind Tina Shields’s claims, I had it now.

I also had a lot of thinking to do.

“Good evening, Columbus,” Bob Sanders said. “And greetings to all of you in our extended viewing area throughout central Ohio.” Bob Sanders was seated on a dais in the Channel 11 studio. Seated opposite him across a small table was a guest who had just been introduced as Janet Porter. Janet Porter was a stocky middle-aged woman with a short, frizzy haircut and bifocal glasses.

Bob Sanders was one of the newer reporters on the Channel 11 team. He mostly covered the business
and consumer
beat. Sanders also hosted a regular segment entitled “Scambusters,” that exposed local vendors and merchants who were less than ethical.

“Today I have with me Ms. Janet Porter, of the organization
Citizens for Corporate Truth
. Ms. Porter, perhaps you could begin by telling our viewers a bit about your organization and what it does.”

“Certainly. Citizens for Corporate Truth is—as the name suggests—a corporate watchdog organization. We specialize in exposing white collar crimes, especially those crimes that victimize working people.”

Sanders nodded, giving himself and Channel 11’s viewers a moment to take all of this in. Janet Porter did not appear to be the least bit intimidated by the cameras facing her; nor was she awed by the idea of being on live television. She had obviously been on live TV before.