The Consultant (49 page)

It was only for Dylan’s safety that she took their son and left. Otherwise, he knew, she would have remained right where she was.  

Phil looked at him with hatred. “Patoff
told
me.”  

“Told you what?”  

“About
you
!”  

“Where is Patoff—or whatever his real name is?”  

Phil stared at him in silence.  

“Where is he?”  

“The consultants are leaving. They’ve done their job.”  

“
He
,” Craig said. “Not
they
.”  

Phil sounded forlorn. “We’re on our own now. We’re all alone.” His voice was filled with sudden fury. “BFG failed!”  

“Good,” Craig said. “That’s what we wanted, remember?”  

His friend—  

ex-friend
 

—shook his head as though trying to free it from confusing thoughts.  

The lobby was starting to fill with workers entering from the elevators and stairwell. As though summoned by a dog whistle audible only to them, they arrived individually, in pairs and in packs.  

Packs?
 

Yes, there was something almost wolflike in both the way they arrived and immediately began circling in, and in the nearly identical expressions on their faces. It wasn’t all of them, of course, but too many for comfort, and Craig saw that the lobby entrance was now blocked to him.  

But at least his family and the others had gotten out.  

And were hopefully calling the cops.  

From elsewhere in the building came the staccato sound of automatic gunfire.  

“There’s nothing left for us,” Phil said.  

“You’re talking nonsense,” Craig told him.  

“CompWare wasn’t worthy.”  

He almost made a
Wayne’s World
joke, but he could tell from Phil’s face that it would not be appreciated. “I’m glad BFG’s leaving. Now we can get back to doing what we’re supposed to do: create software packages.” He attempted a rapprochement. “And you’re in charge.”  

Phil didn’t take the bait. Behind him, the lobby was getting crowded. As in the parking lot the morning after the retreat in the maze, when they had learned of Austin Matthews’ suicide, the CompWare employees had separated themselves by department and division. There seemed a competitive aspect to it this time, however, as though workers remained within their own group not because they felt more familiar and comfortable with their immediate coworkers but because they didn’t want to associate with people from
other
groups. It was almost a hostility, and Craig wondered what the consultant had done or said to obtain that result.  

“You are my sworn enemy,” Phil said again, softly, threateningly.  

“I’ve had enough of this shit.” Craig tried to push past the other man, but Phil moved to block him. Other employees— salespeople and personnel from Phil’s division—massed behind Phil protectively, and Craig saw that many of them had in their hands office supplies that could be used as weapons: scissors, staplers, letter openers, laser pointers, box cutters, sharpened pencils, metal rulers.  

“A fight to the death!” Phil announced. “Programming versus Sales!”  

Craig frowned, confused. “What?”  

As if on cue, the various factions in the lobby stepped back, forming a rough perimeter around the open middle section of the floor. Phil’s Sales force fanned out around him like one of the gangs from
West Side Story
. Craig looked over at the programmers, who were standing together some ways off to his left. They seemed just as baffled as he was.  

“No one’s fighting anyone!” Craig declared.  

“Fight or die,” Phil said, and his smile made it clear which one he’d prefer.  

“We don’t even have any weapons!” Huell shouted.  

“What the fuck is going on?” Rusty muttered to no one in particular.  

Not all of the gathered employees were in lockstep, Craig noticed. For every brainwashed gung ho would-be soldier, there were two noncombatants who were frightened, bewildered and wanted nothing more than to get out of the building. Indeed, several employees
had
left the lobby and were sprinting across the darkened parking lot, following Angie and the others, but that avenue of escape was no longer an option. The uniformed guards were back, faces still hidden by paper bags, and they stood with their cradled weapons in front of the doors, ready to repel anyone who attempted to flee.  

“Everyone get back to work!” Craig announced loudly. “Just stop this nonsense and go back to your desks!”  

“Attack!” Phil cried.  

Those competing commands led to a chaotic free-for-all in which charged-up salespeople attacked programmers who were trying to get to the elevators, while individuals from other divisions and departments joined in the fracas, either trying to protect those who were being assaulted or assailing people themselves. Craig could only hope that the police would arrive soon, because this could not continue for long without resulting in serious injury.  

Or death.  

That was what the consultant really wanted.  

Phil came at him, an expression of irrepressible rage etched deeply into his ordinarily placid face. Phil was one of the few assailants without a weapon, and because of that, Craig was able to go low and bring him down, tackling him around the waist and throwing him into the swinging door of the women’s restroom. Lisa Goldberg, wielding a wooden clipboard she held by its metal clasp, attempted to protect her boss and swung at Craig’s head as he got to his feet. He easily sidestepped her, causing her to tumble on top of Phil, and he quickly grabbed a broom from one of the custodians, swinging the long stick in front of him in order to clear a path through the melee. Several men and women ran past him, pushing through the stairwell door and hurrying upstairs in an effort to get away from the violence.  

The rampage had spilled out through broken windows and glass doors onto the campus and was now a genuine riot. Dozens of people were fleeing into the maze chased by pursuers who seemed to have found actual weapons: baseball bats, axes, knives, swords. One of the cars in the parking lot appeared to be on fire. Inside, computer terminals from the security station were being thrown to the floor and smashed. Mild mannered employees who had never even had the temerity to call in sick before were now purposefully destroying company property and aggressively battling with coworkers.  

Throughout it all, the bag-headed guards remained in place and unmoving, and Craig couldn’t help wondering what would provoke them to action—and what would happen then.  

The swinging broom had cleared a path for him through the brawling crowd, and he reached the programmers, who were surprisingly unhurt, given the fact that they’d been attacked by Sales and had had no weapons. Only Rusty appeared to have been seriously injured, and he sat on the floor with his back to a wall, holding a wadded-up woman’s blouse to a wound on the side of his face. Several of the programmers were very large, however, and while very little of that bulk was muscle, it had obviously aided in repelling Phil’s people.  

Where was Phil?  

Craig looked toward the restrooms, but the area was filled with struggling secretaries and paralegals, and he couldn’t tell if Phil, or anyone else for that matter, was behind the fighters.  

Both Huell and Benjy were clutching letter openers they’d taken from their attackers, and Craig sidled up to them. “So what do we do now?” Huell asked.  

Lorene appeared at his side. “The front door’s open and not exactly guarded,” she said. “If we can make our way over there and slip between some people, we can probably get out.”  

“Good idea,” Craig said. “You guys do that. My wife’s out there somewhere—probably far down the street by now—and I’m sure she’s called 911. The cops should be here soon. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can stop all this before someone gets killed.”  

“How?”  

“By going straight to the source.”  

“Patoff?” Benjy said.  

Craig nodded.  

“I’m coming, too.”  

Four of the programmers decided to accompany him. Several others had already taken off, and Hong-An chose to stay and help Rusty get outside so he could be ready for transport when an ambulance showed up, but Huell, Cuong, Lorene and Benjy went with him on a stealth mission across the lobby, where the crowd was thinning out, the fight being taken outside and up the stairs. Phil may have started this battle, but it had long since grown out of those confines. Employees weren’t fighting for or against Phil, they were just fighting, egged on by circumstance to wanton destruction. Papers were flying everywhere, more glass was shattering, smoke from the fires was drifting over all.  

Heading to the elevators, they gathered converts along the way, much more than Craig could have ever expected or predicted, angry employees who somehow figured out where the programmers were going and wanted in on it. It was a lynch mob, and he was at its head, and though he should have had qualms about that, he did not.  

An elevator arrived, the doors sliding open to let out a battered, bloody group of terrified men and women who immediately ran screaming along individual trajectories into the heart of the increasingly smoky lobby.  

When the doors of the adjacent elevator opened seconds later, no one ran out. The people inside this elevator were dead, piled on top of each other in such a way that there was no space between them, fitted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle so that they formed a wall of heads and feet and arms and torsos, many of them naked, most of them bloody. He recognized quite a few of the corpses, and sadness threatened to overwhelm horror as he looked into the lifeless eyes of Matthews’ secretary Diane. A pink Facilities and Equipment form had been stapled to Diane’s forehead, and Craig didn’t have to move closer and read it in order to know what it said.  

These people had been surplused out.  

Sickened, Craig entered the first elevator, along with everyone else who could fit inside. There were nearly a dozen of them, with an equal or greater number left out, and before the doors slid shut, Craig told the others to follow as soon as they could.  

Staring up at the lighted numbers above the door, he had no idea what they were in for, what they would find. This was a foolhardy move, a strategy conceived entirely without logic or reason. But with all that had happened, he was still alive, had remained relatively untouched, and he believed that to be because the consultant had other plans in mind for him. He needed to take advantage of this protection and confront the consultant directly—  

kill him
 

—before the police arrived and his chance was lost. Still holding onto the broom, he asked Julio Ortiz if he could swap the broom for a claw hammer the custodian was carrying. A frightened Julio acquiesced, and Craig hefted the hammer in his hand as the elevator doors opened.  

The seventh floor.  

It had changed yet again. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it had been along the lines of what he’d encountered last time—floors and walls covered in blood—or what he’d found on the second floor—industrial darkness and people hooked up to electricity. It definitely was not the sight that greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. For they found themselves in a generic business office: CompWare without the modernist touches. A single room the size of a football field, it was well-lit and divided into cubicles by metal-framed partitions. The room walls and partition walls were a uniform off-white, and both the floor and acoustic ceiling panels were the slightly lighter color of unlined paper. Craig smelled smoke, but the whiff of it was faint, as though seeping in from another world, and the dominant odor was of printer ink and toner. Muzak issued softly from speakers situated in the ceiling next to air-conditioning vents.  

“We stay together,” Craig said.  

There was a musical ding behind them as another elevator arrived, and those employees joined Craig’s group as they hugged the wall to the left, walking past the warren of cubicles, searching for the consultant.  

Why had he come up here? Craig asked himself. What did he hope to achieve? The consultant was not human, was beyond human, and there was no way he could hope to fight against something that possessed the sort of power wielded by the consultant. He should have tried to get out of the building, find his family and wait for the police.  

But he hadn’t.  

Something had compelled him to search out the consultant, something had drawn him up here, and he wondered if he was unknowingly doing the consultant’s bidding.  

So far, the cubicles they passed had been empty, but that changed. A temporary partition wall blocked the way forward, forcing them to turn right and walk down an aisle between open workspaces. Here, the cubicles were populated by people who appeared to have died at their desks. At one, Anthony, Phil’s new right-hand man, the one who had brought the news of Parvesh’s unfortunate “accident,” lay dead in a chair, frozen in place, eyes wide open, face contorted in agony, phone held to his ear. Next door, the “doctor” who had taken the sample for his blood test was slumped lifelessly over his workstation, one hand clutching a hypodermic needle. The trail of dead continued as they made their way up the aisle, all of them men and women Craig recognized as being affiliated with BFG.  

He saw Mrs. Adams, his observer, lying on the floor with her legs splayed and her skirt hiked up.  

The instrumental Muzak had disappeared sometime in the last few minutes, replaced by a church spiritual, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” that sounded as though it were being sung in a nearby room by a live choir. Only…  

Only the words were wrong.  

May the bastards
 

All be broken
 

Right damn now, Ralph
 

Right damn now
 

“What the fuck?” Huell said under his breath.  

Craig looked over the tops of the partitions, trying to see if there were any doorways in the wall that might lead to another room where the choir could be singing. The idea of a cappella singers in an office made no sense at all, and even as he scanned the side wall, the singing voices faded away, replaced by a generic instrumental version of “Girl From Ipanema” from the speakers in the ceiling above.