by B. C. James
The undercover goddess approached his car as her slim fingers untied the knot that held her scarf on. The silk wrap fell gently to the ground and Freya undid her bun, allowing her hair fall freely about her shoulders. Her amber mane shone in the light of the rising sun. The driver’s mouth gaped open and white drool started to collect at the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away, smearing most of it into the dark stubble on his face. Freya walked slowly across the street to where he was. Moving hypnotically, she seductively removed the oversized jersey. It fell to the pavement behind her as she continued toward him. The driver was beginning to sweat. He nervously ran his hand over his hairless scalp. This was not what he expected. Under the scarf and baggy clothes Freya was every dream he’d ever had of a woman come to life. Dreams didn’t hide under hockey jerseys and walk the alleys in the early morning hours like cheap whores, did they? He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her. When she arrived at his open window, he pulled the twenty-dollar bill back inside his Dart. Freya opened the car door and knelt down in front of him. She ran her fingertips along the length of his arm. He was now completely soaked in sweat.
The T-shirt he wore clung to him as if it was spray-painted on. Self-consciously he sucked his belly in, hoping she would not notice the rolls of fat lopping over his belt. Freya touched his neck and cupped the back of his head in her hand.
“What’s your name?” she said with a light and disarming grin upon her face. A gurgling noise from his throat was the only reply he could make. The more she touched him and spoke to him, the more obvious it was that he was completely intimidated by her. Freya’s touch felt like silk against his skin. She smelled like rose blossoms in spring. The sheer aura of perfection that surrounded this woman had him scared out of his socks.
“Was there something you wanted from me?” Freya whispered into his ear. Her lips brushed against his cheek and he went weak at her touch. He took a deep breath as his head fell back into her hand. Unconsciously, he raised the twenty-dollar bill to her. She took it from him and began to gently kiss his arm. The Goddess grimaced at the taste. It was like dirt, salt, and bile all at once, but she remained composed.
“Do you want me to have this?” she asked.
Speech was now almost impossible for him. All he could do was wheeze “yes,” and nod.
“Mmmmm…thank you for the money, sweetie. You are as generous as you are handsome,” she cooed into his ear. Freya took his hand and placed it upon her breast.
“Was there something you would like me to do in return? Perhaps...” she let his fingers wander across her chest as she spoke.
He began to nod more wildly as she moved his hand down her stomach and between her legs. Desire and anticipation were starting to overpower his sense of fear and inadequacy.
“Ohhhhhh, so that is what you want to buy from me. Baby, I just had to be sure.” Her voice was like honey as she spoke these words. She looked side to side very cautiously and then ran her hand up his shirt. He closed his eyes and felt his whole world go warm as she touched him. Then, without warning he was blinded by a flash of extreme pain. He shuddered as life left his body. Freya covered his mouth with her free hand to keep the man quiet, but the driver was dead before he had a chance to scream.
Freya sat on the pavement moments later, her back against the rear bumper of the Dart. She wiped as much blood off her hands and body as she could with her scarf. It was still early, so it would be at least an hour before anyone discovered the body. The papers were going to have a field day with this one. It wasn’t often that a man was found with his heart ripped out and lying on the seat next to him. Stuffing the twenty into his mouth would have been poetic justice for the insult, but money was money. She put it in her purse instead...along with the four hundred dollars she found in his wallet.
Freya slipped the jersey back on. It was a deep red in color, so any blood that she got on it wouldn’t show. She got up and made her way to the nearest corner, leaving the alley as quickly as she could. From there, she waited for a cab to pass. With a weary wave at the yellow car, she hailed her ride home. She was tired and a little stressed as she got into the taxi. Her thoughts were so focused on a warm bath and the comfort of her Manhattan apartment that she completely overlooked the strange mist that had filled the alley where her victim lay dead.
Chapter 4
There was a building that sat at 7575 Fulton Street in Ada, Michigan. The company that inhabited this structure has well over 1,000 employees. While it was considered a place of business, there were a number of people who have more than a few problems with what goes on at this location.
The address served as the company headquarters for the Cathay Corporation. Nobody outside of the Fulton Street locale was quite sure what Cathay does. For that matter, most of the people who comprised the army of enthusiastic and slavish independent distributors had much of a clue either. Despite the fact that they claimed to produce and sell a large number of products, none of these products could be found in any store. Most of their business model seemed to be built around distributors ambushing their friends, making them sit through long presentations, depriving them of protein, and boring them into a sense of compliance until they themselves joined the ranks of distributors. In the civilized world, this practice was referred to as brainwashing.
Dennis Syrdon strode through the cavernous halls of the Cathay headquarters. As always, he sported a rather wide grin. It was the type of smile that suggested he may actually have more teeth than the rest of the human race. The general brightness of the dental work that beamed out from under his lips also implied that sandblasting was part of his oral hygiene routine. While it was fun to speculate, and Dennis never tried to discourage the harmless jokes at his expense, the truth lay somewhere along the lines of expensive caps and a toothbrush.
His walk was fast-paced, and the motion of his arms occasionally looked like it was borrowed from the sport of race walking. Despite the speed of his usual stride, it never looked like he was in any sort of hurry. What it did convey was the unspoken message that Dennis was a happy and confident person…and if someone gave him half a chance he would talk them into being happy and confident as well.
“Here son, have a pen,” Syrdon said as he removed a bright silver, metal fountain pen with the Cathay logo printed on it from his suit’s inside pocket and spontaneously presented it to an unsuspecting delivery person.
The FedEx courier was walking in the opposite direction of Dennis down the hall. He was the type of delivery person who took the Domino’s Pizza, “We deliver in 30 minutes, or it’s free,” approach to his job. He was deep in thought about how to beat the traffic to his next mail drop when Cathay’s popular president and CEO stopped him and pressed the writing instrument into his hand.
“You’re doing a hell of a job, kid! A HELL of a job!” Dennis said as he grabbed the young man’s left hand and shook it vigorously, while patting him on the shoulder with his right. The fact that he had never met this delivery boy before in his life didn’t matter one little bit. As far as Dennis Syrdon was concerned, the kid was doing a hell of a job and should be acknowledged for it. It was the type of handshake that usually didn’t happen unless somebody was opening a supermarket, or some politician was doing his best to look friendly for the camera. This manner of assault was normal for Cathay’s head honcho. In fact, his suit and coat pockets usually bulged with these Cathay pens just to make sure that this sort of recognition was commonplace. On most days, he refused to go home until every pen had been given away.
The young man nearly lost his balance. It wasn’t every day that a millionaire grabbed him in the hall and complimented the skill in which he was performing his duties, let alone a millionaire like Dennis Syrdon. He wasn’t just filthy rich; the media also loved this guy. He was occasionally a surprise guest on some of the higher-rated television reality shows and had even been allowed to do several guest commentaries on Monday Night Football. Celebrities usually didn’t even notice couriers, let alone g
ive them things to write with.
“Remember kid, Cathay all the way!” he said to the stunned FedEx guy. Dennis gave the young man a big thumbs up and then went back to his rapid walk down the hall. The young man in the corridor behind him clutched the pen like it was the Nobel Prize and fought the urge to weep.
A thumbs up was Syrdon’s personal sign to the world. Even during those times when he’d prefer to raise the third digit on his hand as a testament to how he thought that particular day was going, he still smiled and held his thumb high. This was his little way of telling every person he saw that everything was going to be all right. The funny part was that regardless of what little disasters were going on in their lives at the time, most people generally did feel better about things after he did this. There were days when he gave that sign so often he would have to soak his hand in ice for a good hour when he got home at night.
“Cathay all the way. I can’t believe it was actually that simple,” he snickered to himself as he opened his office door. It wasn’t too long ago that the company needed a change of image. For years, they were the joke of the American business world. The board of directors was desperate and willing to try anything. Syrdon had just gotten his MBA from the University of Michigan at the tender age of twenty-three and was regarded by most of his professors as the greatest mind the business world had seen since Henry Ford. The board took a chance and hired him on as the youngest President and CEO in the company’s history.
To live up to his whiz kid image, he’d needed to successfully change the public’s perception of the company. He’d started by changing the name. The original moniker was supposed give people the impression that they stood for the AMerican WAY. Most people failed to make the mental connection between an aggressive, multi-level marketing company and truly patriotic things like Bunker Hill, D-Day, Norman Rockwell, and Lee Iacocca. Outside of an enthusiastic minority of distributors, most of the country simply laughed at this organization.
Dennis changed the name to Cathay. When asked during interviews what meaning the name had for him, he would simply get a faraway look on his face and say that Cathay was the name of his first love. Occasionally he would even wipe a little tear from his eye. What most people didn’t figure out was that Dennis’s first love seemed to be money. Cathay is actually an English alternative for the word “Catai,” which, in turn, was another name for China. Syrdon re-named the company after the place where he would have all their cheap goods manufactured. It was an inside joke that only he could laugh at.
He delegated the responsibility of the company re-launch and branding to a group of image consultants called Quest, USA. The first thing they needed was a slogan. An infectious little catch phrase that was memorable but completely noncommittal to anything in the world that actually mattered. This would keep their slogan in the minds of the people without the risk of taking an actual stand on anything of substance.
The first thing that Quest had come up with was, “Join Cathay, resistance is futile.” As it turned out, the folks at Star Trek had already used that as the catch phrase for its characters, the Borg. The expression wasn’t copyrighted, but Dennis scrapped the idea anyway. The Borg race was portrayed as robotic, murderous, incapable of individual thought, and controlled by a central consciousness. Not that these things were not also true of the Cathay Corporation, but Dennis didn’t think it would help their public image if the advertising portrayed them as pure evil wrapped up in a hive mentality.
Thirty days and ninety thousand dollars in consulting fees later, the creative heads at Quest had come up with, “Cathay, join us or bad things will happen.” At that point, the consultants were thrown out into the streets and savagely beaten…well maybe not, but in Syrdon’s imagination that was what should have happened. Unfortunately, the worst he could do was fire them. He was so ticked off at their incompetence that three weeks later he hired them back just so he could have the pleasure of firing them again.
The idea for “Cathay, all the way” came to Dennis while he was watching ESPN’s SportsCenter. They were playing highlights from the afternoon’s NFL games. The camera had caught a running back as he had broken past the linebackers for what turned out to be a long, scoring run. The sportscaster had developed a style where he hesitated for just a moment after each word as the play was building up to a touchdown.
“He…could…go…ALL…THE…WAY!!!!” the announcer yelled in his signature style.
Cathay marketing reports were on Dennis’s lap while this was happening. The words, “all the way” bellowed from the television while he was looking at the word Cathay on the letterhead. It was too easy; there was no way something that simple would work. The next morning, the phrase was still bouncing around in Syrdon’s skull. It had stuck.
That January, the company officially unveiled a new campaign aimed at getting people to become Cathay independent distributors. The cornerstone of this push was the slogan “Cathay, all the way.” In a little more than a year, the company had added over seven million new distributors to their already large roster. That number continued to grow dramatically over the next decade. None of these people really had a clue what the company did. On the surface, they were supposed to be selling small consumer goods. It almost seemed like the adult equivalent of peddling Girl Scout cookies. In reality, it was far more complex.
Dennis motivated Cathay distributors with the biblical verse Genesis 9:7: “And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.”
He went so far as to have this printed on oversized, novelty coffee mugs that he, in turn, had sent to everyone in the distributor network. Dennis wanted to reinforce the message that the job of a Cathay distributor was to create other distributors. It was nice if the people actually sold something every now and then, but it was far from mandatory. In fact, the extremely small amount of profit that the average distributor made off of any given sale was usually a deterrent from the act of hawking the company’s wares.
Over time, the company had successfully convinced these people that the way to riches was in the creation of one’s own personal network of underlings. Instead of selling cleaning products to friends, family, and anyone else they could corner at a party, Cathay associates were encouraged to sign all these people up as members of the Cathay family. For every person a member managed to sign up as a distributor under them, they would get a financial piece of everything that the new guy sold. In theory, the best way for a distributor to make millions was to sign up a whole bunch of other distributors and let them do all the work.
Of course, the problem was that the whole concept appealed to the human tendencies toward laziness and easy money. With this type of incentive, every new person who signed up was going to fling themselves out into the world with all the motivation and passion of a misguided televangelist, not a salesman. With everyone desperately trying to bring in others to do the actual work for them, nobody was actually selling anything. Recruitment was massive and sales were low. This huge flaw in the system left behind one glaring question that the company had never really adequately answered: where did the company get all its money?
When asked this, Syrdon just gave whoever was putting forth the question a vigorous thumbs up and assured them that everyone was working very hard.
Dennis walked into the reception area of his office as Holly Ann Makesh, his secretary, was looking frazzled. She had come in that morning immaculately dressed, hair and makeup perfect and ready for another day as the executive assistant to one of the most influential men in America. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and her red hair had gone flat from hours scrunched beneath a telephone headset. She hurriedly handed him his messages and continued with what was becoming another frustrating phone call.
“Mr. Syrdon doesn’t have time to meet with the accounting department!” she barked sharply into the phone. “You will just have to deal with the auditor yourself!”
Dennis sat at the edge of her desk and began to hu
m the old Boston song, “Holly Ann.” It was cute the first time he did it. Though after three years of having him hum it, sing it and that one time he hired Weird Al Yankovic to do a polka cover of the tune at the company Christmas party, it had become slightly annoying. She could not bring herself to hold it against him. He was cute in a business sort of way. With his chiseled features, a nice tan, and his smooth dark hair professionally and fashionably styled, Dennis Syrdon was easy on the eyes. Plus, he had an affable and charming personality, at least he did with her. But there was something a little off about the man. He had a sort of Leisure Suit Larry vibe. There was a sense that, when nobody was around, he was not above unbuttoning his shirt down to the navel, walking around the office with a set of garish gold medallions around his neck, and searching the Sears catalog lingerie section for a trophy wife.
She shooed him off her desk and pressed one of the many lit extension buttons on her phone. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Douglas. We checked this morning, and Sherry hasn’t called into her local office or been seen by anyone in the company since last Tuesday. What? No, Alan isn’t her boss; he’s just the distributor who signed her up. Right…no, he hasn’t seen her either…because we’ve already spoken with him, as well as the local police.”
“Send the family a nice floral arrangement,” Dennis whispered in her ear as the conversation went on.
“Yes, Mrs. Douglas, we are all very concerned as well,” Holly Ann said as sympathetically as she could. “Keep us up to date on any information you may hear about her. Thank you, ma’am. Goodbye.”
Syrdon sat back at the edge of her desk. “I think I feel like Mongolian Barbecue for lunch today.”
Holly rolled her eyes. He was doing it again. Whenever he wanted to head off a discussion about an unpleasant topic, he would fake a short attention span and go off about something completely inane. “Mr. Syrdon,” she said, despite the fact that he was adamant about her calling him Dennis. “Aren’t you the least bit concerned about another missing girl?”
