The current project was the type that would make one famous if discovered — the kind of famous that gets you executed after a lengthy public trial. Nikolaus was very much aware of the risks involved. He had split the building of the thing across several different contracting companies run by loyal party members whose employees were mostly loyal party members. In truth there were only a couple of thousand loyal party members spread across the entire country. The rest were party members when the sun was shining. Still, he was impressed what only a thousand people could accomplish when they worked in secret and remained focused.
A secured facility for both research and manufacturing was how the project was presented to the board of directors to get initial funding. It had been the decision of the party that this facility should be built by a corporation with stockholders rather than just the party or a privately held company. When you spread the blame around from the beginning you reduced your chance of going to prison or being executed. This blame had already spread to the bulk of the financial institutions on America's Wall Street.
The corporation had manufacturing and research facilities scattered around the globe. They were big suppliers of various medical products and a few patented drugs. In Wall Street's eyes, the biotech star was once again rising.
It wasn't a well kept secret that several black-ops contracts were being worked on by the corporation. With all of the concern about terrorists using biological or chemical agents to attack large populations, business had been booming for the lines making antidotes. Even if an attack never happened, every government had to stockpile enough for all of their citizens. Some of the products would only keep three years in storage unless the storage was kept at or below -60C.
The cost of keeping millions of doses stored at such a temperature was very prohibitive for most countries. Now the company was offering “storage provider” contracts. Countries either too poor or unwilling to spend the money up front could pay the company an annual fee in the millions of dollars range. The company promised to have on hand in storage the number of doses needed by the largest population participating in the contract. The company would air lift the doses to the country in need within four hours of being notified about the attack.
Because wind can carry a biological or chemical agent a long way, there were five separate “storage provider” contracts, also referred to as plans. Countries chose which contract they wanted to participate in. The fees for the plans were determined by the largest population participating in the plan. Each country was instructed to join a plan that didn't have neighboring countries in it. The plans would only protect as many people as they had doses. Other plans may offer to sell some of their doses, but if they didn't, you would have to wait for production to get scaled up cranking out the product you needed. In short, everyone was banking on al-Qaeda never getting strong enough to launch a biological agent high enough into the atmosphere to cover more than one continent.
Had the citizens of any country participating in the plans heard of this, they might have thought it ghoulish, but insurance companies play the statistics game every day. Human lives are meaningless numbers on a spreadsheet to them. They were banking on two things. The first was that al-Qaeda couldn't pull it off. The second was if they did pull it off, everyone would be dead anyway, so no fear of being sued. Everyone that is, except the leaders who chose to join the plan instead of providing in-country storage. They built their own little freezer and hooked it to their data center UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). The taxpayers paid for that little project as well, they just were never told about it.
The beauty in all of this was it allowed Nikolaus to be in charge of building a new secured facility with acres of both refrigerated and frozen storage. Because the facility would be storing a commodity which was beyond any price once an attack happened, it had to be highly secured. If you are going to build a highly secured facility, you should also put some research labs, sleeping quarters, etc. in the compound so you can do all of your government-funded or secret projects there. The dorm like settings allowed for the building of communal showers. Last, but not least, the only way to keep your secret projects truly secret is to have a large incinerator on site as well.
Everybody on the board of directors knew this would be a location for some clandestine operations. Every one of them understood that they didn't have clearance from the various governments involved to know what projects were going on there. They swallowed this pill because the cash influx from the “storage provider” contracts alone gave them the largest stock option bonuses they had ever had. Once the facility was fully operational, the following year's option would be even bigger.
Nikolaus made certain some of the labs were of “pilot plant” size. It was easy justifying the creation of them since the company had routinely set up pilot plants for new drug or chemical lines working out the production kinks before adding the line to an existing factory. The board of directors didn't know it yet, but this company was poised to become one of the largest suppliers in the world of stem-cell and whole-blood products. The profit generated by producing new stem-cell lines would be staggering.
***
Margret sat in the board room watching Big Four Consulting run through their PowerPoint presentation. Her boss, Kent, had signed onto this idea several weeks ago and helped prepare the final spreadsheet using numbers provided by the consulting firm. The room was packed with consultants not old enough to shave but dressed in their finest anyway. The exact same people made the exact same comments they had made in the presentation to Kent; of course Kent's assistant was the only one who noticed. Twisting, bending, smiling and empathizing all happened right on cue. Good-looking young guys were placed strategically around and across from the female board member, while the short skirts virtually smothered the dirty old men.
It wasn't that she minded the “sex for sale” marketing tactic used by Big Four Consulting. Lord knows they all did it. Had she not been on the short list of people who would be left twisting in the breeze when this project went south, she might have even considered helping herself to a few servings from some of the dishes being offered. What really pissed her off was knowing that the tweaked libidos in the room were going to sign off on the project in hopes of getting some, only to have put the entire corporation face down on the table to be rectally violated when the invoices from the project started. Margret could already see how this train wreck was going to play out.
1. Contract would be signed, then someone would buy drinks and dinner.
2. Mother ship would dock the very next day, spilling out an unbelievable number of well-dressed kids not old enough to shave, costing the company $120/hr. each.
3. Paper consumption would increase 50-fold at the company as hand carts full of great looking documentation having absolutely nothing to do with the project were generated. All of it required by the “process” used by the consulting firm.
4. Entire budget then would be consumed, requiring a small “extension” budget.
5. Once the extension budget was granted, Big Four Consulting would step out of the picture and make company employees do the actual project, putting in 90 hours per week on salary.
6. Most employees involved in the project would quit and the department heads would be tagged for the failed project.
Some people said Margret was sarcastic, those who knew anything about IT knew she was a realist. This is the standard M.O. for large consulting firms. They weren't there to solve your problem, just schmooze you long enough to consume all of your budget. Very few board members were ever willing to say they had been taken for tens of millions of dollars, so they very rarely got sued. When they did get sued, it was usually by a company in dire enough financial straits that they could simply apply for continuances until the plaintiff took bankruptcy. It was an outright racket, but the MBAs would never admit it.
The project leader finished her positive and energetic chat about the last PowerPoint slide she had up. She smiled to
the board and asked if they had any questions. Oh, she is good, thought Margret. Such a classic burn and bucket bunko scam. Just wait for it ...
“What will this project cost?” came the question from one of the board members.
The lemmings are about to go over the cliff, Margret thought.
A quick click of the mouse brought up the final slide in the presentation, which was Kent's spreadsheet, prepared using the Big Four's equipment valuations. There, in black and white, the board saw how half of the project would be paid for by sale of the existing equipment and software licenses once the move was completed. The rest of the project would be paid for by the lack of software and hardware maintenance contracts over the next three years. Given that maintenance contracts tend to go up every year, the project would probably be paid back sooner, but they had to use the numbers currently on file.
Margret sat in silence. If the board was dumb enough to overlook the obvious, she was not going to pipe up about it. She was only Kent's assistant. True, she would be the first fired when this train turned from locomotive to a pile of twisted smoldering steel, but she would be fired today if she pointed out just how stupid both her boss and the board of directors were. What was missing from that spreadsheet was just how much the service contract would be for the three years they were using the software license savings to pay off the project. Margret was fairly certain it was going to be way more than the savings, but the girl had chutzpah for putting up a spreadsheet and leaving that off.
The board made some appreciative sounds and a few members even nodded at each other. Of course they said they would have to discuss the project among themselves before making a decision, but everyone in the room knew the white elephant had been sold again. Business cards were handed out with promises they could call the cell phone any time with questions on the project. The team leader even offered to make reservations at a very posh restaurant where they could get a private room this evening to go over any details in a more relaxed surrounding.
Oh, this girl can work it! thought Margret. I wonder if there will even be 14-year-old girls in the room to catch on video with the dirty old men? Nah. They won't resort to that this time. Some of the fresh faces in this room might be on their knees later, but they all know the elephant has been sold, so they will just be doing that out of habit.
Margret added an item to the To-Do list in her PDA: Update Resume.
***
Kent walked back to his office using his strutting man-in-charge walk. He had power gripped each of the board member's hands at the end of the meeting and assured them he had every confidence of this project's success. He had an entire folder of links to articles from the weekly trade press expounding off-shoring as the answer to world hunger and the Utopia of cost cutting. Of course, Kent had to have his assistant Margret find those links and create that folder, but the board didn't need those details.
Yes sir, Kent was already picking out his corner office in Mahogany Row. He was going to go from director to president, skipping all of those cumbersome VP roles in between. Kent was going to achieve this feat because Kent had a plan!
Original ideas didn't happen much to Kent, at least not good ones. In truth, this wasn't an original idea, and it wasn't his, but he was going to claim it. Kent was going to be stuck in this IT role for approximately two years because the bank frowned upon people changing jobs more often than that. He could be “offered” a job through HR as part of a promotion, but he couldn't apply for one directly before then. You didn't get “offered” the kind of job Kent wanted unless you ended your tour on an up-swing, and he had an up-swing planned.
Big Four Consulting assured him that they could migrate a data center every other month as long as there was a maintenance window in that month. They wouldn't risk moving a data center during the end of a quarter when many additional jobs would need to be run. Moving all four sets of data centers to the new off-shore set would take under 18 months. While the plan would address a massive cost issue, it still wouldn't address the monumental effort of integrating the various applications so management could have its “world view” of First Global Bank.
Kent's big plan was to completely eliminate the on-shore programming staff. He had called a college friend at General Motors who told him how they had massively reduced their pension liability and direct cash outlay for programming by outsourcing all development to a consulting company that was using programmers in India and paying them $10/day. Of course the consulting company was charging $10/hour for those programmers and pocketing the difference, but that detail didn't come up. Another detail that didn't come up was the fact every project of any real size the off-shore workers did was a complete failure that had to be hidden in the books. No portion of it could be fixed or salvaged. No matter what country you went to for IT workers, skilled software developers didn't come cheap. This was an arrangement based on cheap, so they didn't get skill.
All Kent had to do to justify getting rid of everyone here, and thus cement his rise straight to a presidency desk, was to eliminate all of the on-shore staff. To do that, he needed a project the board would leap at, thus the “world view” project became the goose laying the golden eggs in Kent's eyes. He could enlist Big Four Consulting, which had just gotten the off-shoring contract, to put together a spreadsheet with staff hour estimates that were amazingly high for an integration project. Then he would have them put together what the project would cost using their off-shore development staff versus the cost of on-shore labor at their standard contracting rates. His staff would of course have to train their own replacements before being shown the door.
Kent wouldn't even have to finish the project. He would get the credit for it, and his replacement would have to deliver it. His replacement would have to work at least a year before he could come up with some other cost cutting measure, and it would all pale compared to the costs Kent had cut. His walk around the company had a very special “I'm the man!” strut today.
***
Kathryn, project manager for Big Four Consulting, was ecstatic when she heard the news they had won the contract. All of the schmoozing had paid off big time. She quickly notified the services manager and got the contract drawn up to overnight to Kent for him to sign. Each invoice presented to the bank had to be below a certain dollar amount so Kent could approve it, but they could invoice as often as needed.
Unlike most projects, they were actually going to do this one instead of just generate paper. They had already contracted with a communications company to provide all of the communications cut over effort for about a quarter of what was in the contract. A huge data center had been built in Bangalore. While a large amount of networking and communications equipment had been installed, not a lot of computers were there. The contract with First Global Bank would get the ball rolling. All of the mainframe and midrange computers used by that company had excess capacity. A deal would be struck to purchase the largest models available from those computer vendors and get them installed. Once installed, they could sign another deal with another client that used the same equipment and bill them out twice. This was going to be a massively profitable venture!
With the overnight sent out and her phone calls made, Kathryn was dreamily calculating what her commission would be from this project. Judging from the email sent out with commission rates for project managers, she would be pulling in an extra $50K per quarter once this project got moving. Not bad at all.
First You Build the Wheel
John arrived in Bangalore and went to one of the addresses provided him to rent a place to live. He took an apartment in a complex built by one of the American companies there. It was very expensive, but came with air conditioning and an Internet connection. Getting a reliable Internet connection in India was more of an obstacle than one from a first-world country could imagine. All you had to do was look at the mud trails that passed for streets to see hundreds of cables wrapped around a single telephone pole which had two or three other poles propping it
up from either side. Power, phone, high-speed Internet, all wrapped in a big bundle at the top of the pole. It looked like one of those massive rubber band collections you see pictures of on the Internet.
Once his computer was set up he immediately set out masking the IP address and then retrieving his email. There were lots of pending messages. He had been gone almost long enough for his mailbox to overflow. He started the deleting and purging jobs and began forwarding the messages to their intended recipients. It took him the better part of the afternoon to get through the existing email.
With the email handled, he went out for a walk past the technology companies to see which had postings out front. He saw a very large building that had been built recently and saw the name of the company. It looked like a massive data center. He went in and found they were looking to hire operations staff, technical support, and just about every other kind of computer job. He dutifully filled out an application giving them his new name and address. His new identity kit came with references and some job history, so he filled that in and handed back the application. The man behind the desk asked him to take a seat and said someone would speak with him in a moment.
John could hear some phone calls being made and some discussions being had. About five minutes later another man came out to greet him and bring him back to an office. He asked a short series of technical questions and John was able to answer all but the mainframe questions. When he was asked why he moved to Bangalore, John responded that he wanted to broaden his IT skills and couldn't do that where he had been.
The man seemed to accept this response in light of the fact he wasn't going to have to pay a buyout fee to obtain John. Competition for low-paid workers was fierce in India. Not fierce enough that any company was actually raising wages, but fierce with lawyers and lawsuits. The standard practice now was that you had to pay a year's wages to a company when you stole one of their employees. You see, the upper class in India keeps everything to themselves. They could care less if the lower classes lived or died as long as they made money at it.
Infinite Exposure Page 6
