The Consultant

by Little,Bentley

  “This isn’t a meeting!” Craig spat out. “Everything isn’t a meeting!”

  “Oh, but it is. Life is nothing but a series of meetings, and I called this one in order to discuss your bitter jealousy over Mr. Allen’s promotion to CEO, and to determine whether that jealousy will impair your work performance and jeopardize your continued tenure with the company.”

  “Bitter jealousy?” he said. “I’m not jealous at all.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Craig looked at the man with dawning understanding. Phil’s promotion, he realized, had been nothing but a tactical move on the consultant’s part, a way to drive a wedge between himself and his friend. The two of them had probably been the closest thing to a threat that BFG faced, and the consultant had made a concerted effort to separate them.

  But how had Phil succumbed? How could he have been so weak?

  He couldn’t help feeling disappointed. He could not have been recruited, and he wondered how the man had known that Phil was the weaker link.

  “I’m happy for him,” Craig said, looking the consultant in the eye. “And I’m hopeful that having one of our own in that position will lead CompWare in a better direction.”

  “That is a hope we all share.” The consultant was suddenly all business. “Now, starting next week, the entire operation here will be on a nighttime schedule. This will cut down on the commute time for employees as they won’t be on the road during rush hour, and it will cut down on electricity costs since CompWare will be operational during non-peak hours, thus providing the company with a lower utility rate.”

  “But that’s not why we’ll be working at night,” Craig said.

  “No,” the consultant told him. “It isn’t.”

  “Are you trying to get people to quit? Is that it? Because I’m not going anywhere.”

  “If I wanted to get rid of you, there are far more effective methods.”

  Craig became exceptionally aware of the sticky blood beneath his shoes, the red all over the walls. But he didn’t back down. “You don’t intimidate me.”

  “I’m not trying to,” the consultant said innocently.

  Craig confronted him. “So why are you doing all this? You’re running this place into the ground. People are dying.”

  “People die everywhere, every day. That’s life.”

  “You didn’t cause this kind of damage at any of those Fortune 500 companies you consulted for.”

  Patoff seemed pensive. “We do what’s best for each individual business, based on needs, resources, financial status, a whole host of variables.”

  “You went to my son’s school. My wife’s work.”

  “We’re thorough.” He swiveled in his chair, looked out the window. “This is the saddest time,” he said softly. “When it’s all winding down, coming to an end.” He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Craig. “I honestly thought we had a chance here, an opportunity to streamline operations and create a perfect company.”

  He swiveled the chair back around, brightening a little. “Maybe we still do,” he said. “Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Sometimes Ralph works in mysterious ways.”

  “I’ll bite,” Craig said. “How do you create a perfect company?”

  “A company is like a machine. All of the parts need to fit together in order to achieve maximum efficiency.”

  He recognized those words. That was what Phil had told him. Verbatim.

  “Our job is to make those parts fit, to take out what’s unnecessary, to file down gears so they mesh, to rewire when required. The ultimate goal? Speaking plainly: a corporation without workers, an entirely self-contained entity.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “It’s not always possible,” the consultant conceded. “But that’s the goal, that’s what we’re after.” He looked out the window again. “I really thought CompWare might be…” He trailed off.

  “I’m leaving,” Craig announced.

  “Good meeting,” the consultant said. “Good meeting. And with Ralph’s blessing, maybe CompWare will be the one.”

  “And we’ll all be fired. Or dead.”

  “Ralph willing.” The consultant laughed to show he was only joking—but they both knew that he wasn’t.

  Craig turned away, walking back through the blood and out the door, heading down the short dark hall to the elevator, leaving red footprints behind him.

  On Tuesday, the two remaining members of the Board were found dead in their respective houses, one the victim of a home invasion robbery/murder, the other having slipped in the bathtub and hit his head.

  On Wednesday, Elaine told him that she’d landed a job at a rival software development firm. She’d taken a pay cut, but was relieved to be out. Scott Cho and the other employees who had been arrested after the fatal retreat were officially fired.

  On Thursday, six divisions were condensed to three, with a total of twenty-four people laid off.

  On Friday, in a freak accident in the CompWare parking lot that was “breaking news” on all of the local stations, six employees were killed, three others sent to the hospital in critical condition.

  And when Craig checked the target list Phil had given him, all of them were on it.

  FORTY ONE

  Craig slept in late Monday morning, waking up when Dylan came in to give him a hug before Angie took the boy to school. Craig wanted to be well-prepared for his new shift, didn’t want to give anyone a reason to question his competence, ability or loyalty, and though he wasn’t really tired, he forced himself to take a nap in the afternoon, shortly after picking up Dylan at three. He instructed Angie to wake him at six, so he could eat dinner before heading off to work.

  “I’ll wake you up, Daddy!” Dylan offered.

  “Okay,” Craig told him, smiling. “Don’t forget.”

  “I won’t!”

  But no one woke him, and it was after seven when Craig finally got up on his own. He noticed immediately that the house was dark. And silent.

  Something was wrong.

  He jumped out of bed. “Angie? Dylan?” Passing quickly from room to room, he saw nothing out of place, nothing out of the ordinary, but he didn’t see his wife or son either. Maybe they’d gone to the store and lost track of time, he reasoned, or had car problems on their way back. He knew that was highly unlikely—by now, Angie should have been helping Dylan with his homework and making dinner, and if she had gone somewhere, she would have woken him up to tell him—but he still managed to almost convince himself that their absence had a perfectly sensible explanation.

  Until he saw what was lying on the kitchen counter.

  A business card.

  He knew even before picking it up whose it was, and when he looked at its face, he saw what he expected, two words printed above three letters:

  Regus Patoff

  BFG

  Below that, on the bottom left of the card, was a phone number, and Craig immediately picked up his phone and called it. There was no ring, only a recorded message that clicked on after a moment of deep eerie silence. “The voice mailbox of Regus Patoff is full.”

  The connection was severed.

  This time, Craig called Angie’s cell phone. Pick up, he thought as he finished punching in the numbers and put the phone to his ear. Pick up.

  Her phone sounded from somewhere else in the house, its distinctive Brady Bunch ringtone unmistakable.

  She never went anywhere without her cell.

  He found her phone, and her purse, on the floor next to the couch in the living room. His first instinct was the call the police— but Angie and Dylan had only been gone a couple of hours, not the 24 or 48 required to be a missing person, and he knew the police would do nothing and tell him to wait. The consultant’s business card was still in his hand, and he knew where he needed to go.

  He scribbled a quick note—on the off chance that they did re-turn—and left it on the couch where it would be seen, before locking the front door and heading out.


  ****

  Lights illuminated the CompWare parking lot, revealing more cars than Craig was expecting. The building itself seemed underlit, and though he knew that the people inside were just starting their work shift, CompWare appeared closed and empty. It was only seven forty-seven, and he wasn’t scheduled to work until eight, but he was still apparently the last one here, and the sound of his heels on the asphalt seemed loud as he dashed across the parking lot toward the front entrance.

  The maze was still up, he saw, and he shivered. Was it now going to be a permanent part of the CompWare campus? He wouldn’t be surprised, and he paused for a second before going up the steps, wondering if Dylan and Angie had been taken there. Somehow, he didn’t think so, and he hurried the rest of the way up and through the doors into the lobby.

  The lobby had changed. It was dark and lit by torches spaced far apart on spectacularly dirty walls. Guards were stationed around the perimeter, all of them wearing black militaristic uniforms, all of them holding automatic weapons in their hands, all of them wearing brown paper sacks over their heads. Craig expected to be stopped and quizzed as to where he was going, but no one moved as he made his way over to the elevators.

  He considered going to the seventh floor but instead pressed the button for CompWare’s top level, intending to confront Phil, knowing he had a better chance of getting answers out of his friend than he did the consultant.

  There were nearly a dozen frantic employees in front of the CEO’s office when he arrived, all of them talking over each other. Most, he saw with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, were waving business cards in the air exactly like the one he held in his own hand. Phil’s new secretary—Matthews’ old secretary, Diane— was crying, repeating over and over again, “I don’t know where he is! I don’t know where he is!”

  “What’s going on?” Craig asked, walking up.

  “My husband—”

  “My wife—”

  “My daughters—”

  Like Angie and Dylan, their family members were missing and what had been left in their absence was the consultant’s business card. Craig pushed his way through the crowd until he was standing before the secretary’s desk. “Diane,” he said calmly. “You must have some idea where he is. Did he come in today?”

  “He was in his office when I got here,” she told him. “He’s always here early.”

  “And where do you think he went?”

  She remained flustered. “I don’t know! It’s impossible to know where he goes or what he does. He’s been saying crazy things for the past week, talking about programs that predict violent deaths and apps that find prostitutes and smart phone screens made from plant extracts and protective covers made out of skin…I don’t know!”

  “Calm down,” Craig said reassuringly. “It’s all right.” He patted her hand on the desk. “Did he say anything about using people for…something?”

  Diane wiped a tear from her eye. “Maybe. He’s said so many crazy things…” She thought for a minute. “He said the cafeteria was closing since there were no meals between dinner and breakfast, and people working at night wouldn’t need lunches anymore. I wasn’t spying, but I overheard him talking on the phone about that—to him—and he said, ‘We can put them there.’ Maybe that’s what you’re looking for?”

  It made as much sense as anything else.

  “Okay,” Craig announced. “I’m going to the cafeteria. Anyone who wants to can come along. If we don’t find anything there, I say we search the building.”

  “It’ll be faster if we split up,” said Carlos Baldonado from Research.

  “It’s safer if we stay together,” Hetty Johnson from Sales countered.

  He didn’t want to stand here and argue. “Okay, those who want to go off on their own, start here on the top floor. The rest of you, come with me.”

  He was going to the cafeteria, though he knew the most logical place to start would have been on the seventh floor. But he didn’t want to believe that Dylan and Angie could be there. He saw in his mind that monstrous room with its crimson-splattered walls and floor sticky with blood, and felt the bleakness of despair pushing itself into his thoughts. He pushed back, pushed it away, and led all of them except Carlos and another man he didn’t know to the elevators.

  Everyone was panicked and outraged, talking over each other, but from what he could tell, the circumstances of each were remarkably similar to his own. While sleeping in preparation for the new nighttime work shift, family members had disappeared, and upon awakening, the employees had found the consultant’s business card.

  It took two elevators to hold them all, but luckily both arrived at once, and they rode down in tandem to the second floor.

  Where the cafeteria had been was a stark industrial landscape. Gone were the ficus trees and ferns, the open kitchen and light wood tables. In their place, large metal gas tanks lined the walls and steel girders slanted from dark ceiling to torn-up floor. Dim dirty light filtered in from grimy windows, revealing a shadowed network of tubes, ducts and pipes. A single light bulb stood on a metal tripod in the center of the huge room, and as Craig made his way toward it, he saw that the cord from the light ran across the ground to an area where a group of men, women and children were standing in narrow stalls, electrodes and wires attached to their heads.

  There were gasps all around as everyone seemed to notice the sight at once, and then the names of wives, husbands and children were being shouted as employees rushed across the open space to find the members of their families. Craig was running, too, looking for Dylan and Angie, and he found them next to each other in the middle of the group. They were restrained within their stalls, arms affixed to metal bars with plastic ties, and he pulled the electrodes off their heads and used the most jagged key on his ring to saw through the thin plastic fasteners, freeing Dylan first, then Angie. Others were doing the same, and the light bulb on the tripod slowly dimmed as its power source was disconnected.

  Craig didn’t know how such a thing could work or why anyone would want it to—

  human batteries?

  —but he was certain it was one of Phil’s new lunatic ideas, and his focus right now was getting his wife and son out of the building.

  He hugged Dylan tightly. “Are you all right, little buddy?”

  Dylan nodded, faking a small smile, but he didn’t answer and his eyes remained blank.

  “What happened?” Craig asked Angie as he pulled her out of her narrow cubicle.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I should, but I can’t remember.” She put a protective arm around Dylan, kissing the top of his head. “Everything’s all right now,” she told him. “We’re okay.”

  “I found Patoff’s business card in the kitchen.”

  “I knew it had to be him, but…I can’t remember. I don’t know how we got here or what happened at home. I don’t even know the last thing I remember. I was just…there. Then I was…here.”

  “Well, we need to get you out of here now,” he told them. “As fast as we can. And then go to the police.” He looked around at the others, some of whom had freed their loved ones, others who were in the process of doing so. One woman remained alone, with no one to help her, and she was struggling against her bonds, begging for someone to let her out. “Stay here,” Craig told Angie, and pulled the electrodes off the woman’s head, sawing through her bonds with his keys.

  The light bulb finally went out completely.

  In the pale illumination offered by the grimy windows, everyone more than three feet away looked like a silhouette. “We need to go!” Craig announced loudly.

  “You’re coming with us, right?” Angie said. Her lip was trembling. Dylan stared at him mutely.

  He put an arm around both of them. “Yeah. I’m coming.”

  “This way!” he called out, leading everyone toward the stairwell. He didn’t trust the elevators and thought they had a better chance of getting out more quickly if they took the stairs.

  A
fter the darkness of the second floor, the light in the stairway was jarring. He blinked against the brightness, wiping his eyes, and started down, one hand on the metal railing, the other holding tightly to Dylan’s hand. They made it to the first landing, then continued to the bottom, where Craig opened the door that led to the lobby.

  The stair door was hidden off to the side, next to the restrooms, but Phil was waiting when they emerged. He stood before them, an expression of triumph on his face. He was wearing a bow tie, and his hair had been cut short. The effect was disconcerting, as though he had been possessed by the consultant, and the words that he spoke did nothing to dispel that impression.

  “Trying to escape?” he said.

  Craig looked at him. “Escape from what? This is where I work.”

  “And them?” Phil motioned toward Angie and Dylan.

  “My wife and son were kidnapped and hooked up to a light bulb in what used to be the cafeteria. And so were all these other people.” The growing crowd pushed him forward as everyone from the second floor came through the door. “What’s gotten into you?”

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

  Where was this coming from? Craig moved a step closer, motioning for those behind him to head toward the lobby exit. The armed uniformed guards who had been there on his way in had decamped to another part of the building, and, remarkably, the doors were unguarded. If he could keep Phil distracted, the others might be able to make it out safely and call the police. From the corner of his eye, he saw a line of people hurrying toward the doors. Angie was holding onto his sleeve, but he pulled away from her and, without taking his eyes off Phil, gestured frantically for her and Dylan to leave.

  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.