“Sure. We’ve worked together on the annuals and a few other projects.”
“Julie’s last day here at SUE is today. Actually, she’s already gone. She’s going to pursue some other career possibilities.”
His eyes widened, but he said nothing. Julie was always enthusiastic about her job and bragged about being groomed to be a unit vice president, possibly of Public Relations or even of Publishing.
“In examining replacement possibilities I decided I was interested in someone with a financial background rather than someone with an industry background. I don’t have the time to educate someone on the ins and outs of my shop and would prefer a person who already understands the basics. I want someone who can jump in and get involved immediately.”
He nodded slowly, not knowing why.
“You know Jim Ling over in World Trade?”
“Sure. He’s a good man.”
“And Susan Kanzia in Corporate Planning?”
“I’ve heard the name. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with her.”
“Well,” she continued, leaning forward again, “in asking around internally, those three names came up.”
“Which three?”
“Yours, Ling’s, and Kanzia’s.”
“Really?”
“And as I said, time is at a premium right now. If it sounds like something you might be interested in, I’d like to discuss it now.”
“Sure.”
“If not, I’ll understand.”
“No. I’d like to discuss it.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Trisha Lane had been discussing him. His name had been uttered from her lips. She’d said the words David Stonetree, probably like she said when asked about her paintings, “Jasper Johns, Pablo Picasso, J. Lionne-Demilunes.”
“Maty?” she called, looking to the door.
“Yes, Miss Lane?”
“Please bring in that set of material I asked you to get from Archives along with the memos I had you copy.”
“Yes, Miss Lane.”
She stared toward the windows and appeared to be running through a list as if in a trance, then tilted her head slightly, returning her gaze to him.
“Julie had a rather amorphous set of responsibilities when she worked for me but this time I’d like the position to be more clearly defined. Of course, your primary duty would be to help me keep things moving and to handle certain tasks that I delegate to you. As a major project, I’ve been thinking for the past few weeks that we need to get a better grasp on why we were able to cut our adjusted net expenses last quarter by only five percent. I think seven is much more like it. I want to find out who’s wasting what and put a stop to it. That would be an ongoing project, but you would have to get it started. Of course, you’d have the cooperation of all the units....”
Maty stepped into the office with a stack of papers and reports that looked to be a foot high.
“Put them over on the table,” her boss said, motioning with her hand.
“So I’d essentially be running an audit on all the units?”
She shook her head.”I just want to key in on expenses. Each of the units has its own audit process. I want you to interpret what they give us and determine where the leaks are.”
“Oh.”
“Of course, I’d want you to get involved with some other projects that would be of special interest to you. I think it helps to have one’s own territory. Julie was interested in intellectual properties, so I got her involved in the publishing unit top to bottom. If she’d stayed another six months, she might have picked up the whole thing.”
She shrugged her shoulders, a look of disbelief crossing her face. Maty returned with a second stack larger than the first. She set it on the table and walked out of the office, breathing an exaggerated sigh of relief.
“If I recall correctly,” Lane said with a smile, brushing her hair back with both of her hands and snapping her head once, “you expressed to me an interest in... was it The Bahamas?”
He was flattered and couldn’t help but smile. The last they’d talked at any length was when they’d shared a company limo to the airport a year before. She’d asked him what he thought of Wexford’s recent album and how it compared to his previous efforts. He wisely praised it, which was not difficult to do because he genuinely enjoyed it. Then he contrasted it with that of a relatively unknown group that had just released its first album on a different label. A song he’d particularly stressed, Everybody’s Green, eventually made the Top Five. A month later she’d stopped him in the hallway and thanked him for alerting her to the act.
“Right. I remember that.”
“It was a good album, but they could do much better. Sony, you might be interested to know, will probably not release a second album. I think they are a bit too conservative to deal with that act’s philosophy, much less their childish demands. I’ve spoken to them and I’d say, oh, within a few months, we might bring them over to Court, though a few details would have to be worked out. Perhaps we could involve you in the transition.”
“Really. I’d like that. Quite a bit different from doing quarterlies.”
She laughed.”Yes, David, quite a bit different. My group’s not the same as Mr. Hamilton’s or Mr. Paneligan’s. We have more intensity here. You might like it.”
“What do you mean by the transition?”
“Everything. The contracts, recording. Maybe marketing.”
“But I really don’t know much about those things,” he responded a bit too sincerely.
“You’ll learn,” she said, standing up and offering her hand.”We all do.”
He also stood and accepted it. Her grasp was strong and somewhat warmer than he expected.
“So, do we have an agreement?” she asked.
“When do you need to know?”
She looked at him with a mixture of surprise and disbelief.”I need to know by Monday,” she said curtly, turning and walking to her desk.”I’d like to know today.”
“Well,” he said, following her to the other end of the office, “it does sound good, but it’s a big move. I’d like to talk to Mr. Riley, too.”
She weighed his reply, setting her elbows on the desktop and folding her hands.”I suppose that’s reasonable,” she stated matter-of-factly.”As I told you, he recommended you for consideration and in all honesty I doubt he’ll be back.”
“Probably not.”
She lifted a pen and a sheet of notepaper from a drawer to her right and made a note.
“I’m going to Houston Monday morning to visit our distribution facility. Then I have to go to Seattle, then Honolulu. I won’t be back until Friday. Here’s my home phone number. I’ll be there or here all weekend except tomorrow night. Let me know one way or the other by, let’s say 9:00 Sunday night. Is that enough time for you?”
She handed him the slip.
“Yes, that’s fine. I do want to talk to Mr. Riley, though.”
“If you accept this position, and Mr. Riley returns to work, and you choose to go back to Technology…”
“Yes?” he interrupted, excited that he was going to get to have it both ways.
“You’ll be in big trouble,” she said with an affected snarl. They both laughed.
“I figured,” he replied, nodding again.
“By the way, David,” she continued.”Are you acquainted with Robin McReynolds?”
“Robin?” he blurted out.”Sure! We go way back. He’s really something. Do you know him?”
“No I don’t. Just of him at present. He also has a little something to do with our conversation this afternoon.”
“No kidding? How?”
“First your decision,” she said tauntingly, raising an eyebrow.”Then we’ll discuss Mr. Mc-Reynolds.”
“Robin,” he said to himself.
“And if you decide to accept the position, I’d appreciate your reading through those materials Maty brought in. It should get you up to speed on what’s going on in both Med
ia and Pharmaceuticals.”
“By when?” he asked, turning toward the two stacks of papers.
“Next Friday. With quarterlies out of the way, I’m sure you’ll be able to disengage with a minimum of difficulty.”
“So…”
“I’ll look forward to hearing from you over the weekend,” she said as she stood and again offered her hand.”Give it serious consideration.”
“I will,” he replied, then turned and confidently walked out of the office glancing at the two stacks of papers, wondering if he could absorb them all in a week if he started that minute. Probably not, he concluded.
CHAPTER 3
As he rode a lim to Kravatz’s office, he mulled over his conversation with Lane. On the positive side, there was the fact that she probably held an inside track when it came to rising higher on the SUE totem. He could attach himself to something better than counting beans all day and might be able to work with some of his favorite recording artists, actually be part of their careers, and he someday might even meet and work with Wexford. He could picture it in his mind - Wexford’s Greatest Hits - and in the credits, under special thanks, And of course, my good friend and confidant, Dave Stonetree. And the devil he knew was better than the one he didn’t.
The devil he knew, however, would probably expect 50 or 60 hours from him each week, well past the bonus hour regulation that didn’t apply to Executive Level staffers. He’d really have to work rather than move along at the more reasonable pace he developed over the past few years in Technology. Inappropriate assessments would not be as readily forgiven as they were by Steve Riley, and a serious mistake could cost him his job rather than merit him a five-minute lecture on precision. Was it really worth the money?
The money! God, what an idiot! “I didn’t talk to her about the money,” he mumbled. The driver turned and asked him to repeat himself.
“Nothing.”
He didn’t know how much Julie Marx was paid or enough about the pure management function to even hazard a guess. It must be more than he earned he reasoned, or why would Lane think he’d be interested at all? For the challenge? To fill in some free time? Of course it would be more, but how much? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? He tried to remember Julie’s title. He’d sent memos to her in the past but he couldn’t recall how they were addressed. She wasn’t an officer so she was probably a director. The pay ranges for both were wide and overlapping, so her title might not be very helpful. Maybe when he talked to Riley he’d discover the answer.
Before leaving the Plaza, he’d stopped down to his office to use the telephone. He called Hendricks to arrange to see the Mustang and the voice on the other end told him anytime the next day would be fine. He took the directions and they discussed the car briefly, but Hendricks refused to quote him a price, saying only that it needed to be seen to be appreciated. A second call to Robin McReynolds got a recording saying the number wasn’t working. He tried Sharon, but she didn’t answer.
When he arrived at Alan Kravatz’s office, the lobby was empty and the receptionist gone. After waiting a few minutes, the doctor himself walked in through his private office door and greeted him with a nod. He was slender and tanned, his eyes playful. After dropping a chart on top of a file cabinet, he motioned for his patient to follow down the corridor. They stopped at the second of the six examination rooms and the doctor ushered him in.
He immediately sat in the deep leather recliner, then Kravatz joined beside to him after raising the lights.
“So,” the doctor began, “how was the trip?”
“Enjoyable. I had a nice time.”
“You don’t sound too sincere.”
“Maybe we can look into that today.”
Kravatz was one of only two psychologists in the city who practiced their trade in conjunction with Selfscan, a piece of technology new enough and controversial enough to be widely decried by the medical journals as being nothing more than sideshow quackery and nothing less than dangerously Orwellian. Stonetree’d first come to see him on a lark, but was so impressed with his first results he returned time after time when he found himself struggling with indecision. At $250 a visit, not covered by medical insurance, he nonetheless believed it was worth it.
Selfscan, in turn, was an offshoot of another questionable semi-psycho/self-realization protocol, Lerman Event Partitioning. Conjured four years earlier, LEP was wildly popular and easily the biggest thing in analysis since Freud had advised that sometimes a cigar was just a cigar.
At its basic level, LEP borrowed generously from Sigmund’s playbook, especially his belief that much of a person’s worldview and behavior sprung from upbringing and childhood experiences, especially those of traumatic nature. But Dr. Lerman—his doctorate having been bestowed for studies in Marketing, not Medicine—took this acorn and nurtured it into mighty oak with many complex and complicated branches full of intersecting mathematical formulas, oblique phrases, obscure historical references and end-of-world jeremiads which one wag described as Nostradamus, Pythagoras and Jung meet at Stonehenge for a picnic featuring saltines topped with peyote sauce and wash it down with Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
The bedrock of LEP was the premise that there was a single core Event in every life, located somewhere between the first conscious memories and puberty. The Event might come easily to some recollections but was more probably locked in the subconscious for any number of reasons. The Event, in turn, led to the Four Primary Compass Points and the Four Secondary Compass Points, which formed the entire architecture of personality and perception. Each of the Elite Eight, in turn, intersected in various combinations, forming subsets of eight Tertiary Points. Once the subject understood this horoscopic-like map, everything in life could become both fathomable, and more importantly, manageable.
Critics—and they weren’t lacking—pegged DJ Lerman as a charlatan. But nobody could dispute that the man was much more than a second-rate sideshow barker.
Strikingly handsome with thick blond hair, twinkling emerald eyes, chiseled jaw and a distinctive, deeply smooth voice, his physical seductiveness alone would be enough to open many doors in a country starved for attractive saviors. Both intelligent and articulate, his books sold in the millions, his lectures attracted thousands, his nationally broadcast, two hour mid-day Lunch with Lerman torpedoed the competition and he was a frequent guest on hard news to afternoon fluff television, preaching his evangels, answering questions and solving puzzles with confidence and charm.
But all of these previous successes were now taking a back seat to a more recent development that stunned the scientific community and was now bluntly redefining many of the already shaky socio-cultural aspects of the CYD pandemic.
Six months earlier, Selfscan had introduced what it termed Enhanced procedures and benefits for our valued patrons. A blood sample had always been required for calibration purposes, which made sense when it came to the target CYD population because of the subtle shifts in overall physiological readings infection, or the lack thereof, that appeared in most common test results. The previous Selfscan progress had been stated in a pair of flat numbers—a percentage representing the individual’s Accuracy Quotient and a second one, the Accuracy Comp, demonstrating how the first compared to all others in the system. Both conclusions were kept private and shared only by the treating physician with the customer.
Now there was the Selfscan Priority Identification Pass, available for an initial fee of $100 and $75 per reissue, that listed the individual’s name, a new Personal I.D. number and the specific validation date, printed on a plastic, credit card-size gold blank featuring a pair of holographs and a fraud prompt coating to prevent knockoffs, counterfeits or alterations.
More prominent in the lower center of the Pass was a nine-symbol string broken by dashes as were Social Security numbers. The final four digits contained the AQ/AC codes. Preceding those were a pair of letters recognizing the location of and the treating physician.
It was the first three numbers, how
ever, that had drawn the most attention and controversy. Publicly, Selfscan referred to them as the Personal Reference Cypher, a private shortcut designation only meaningful to the physician and Selfscan; nothing more, nothing less. But a confidential memo of questionable authenticity, leaked to the media by accident or intent the previous October, suggested that the middle of these symbols revealed an absolutely accurate statement of not only current CYD status but also the likelihoods of progression and ultimate resolution.
If it was true, Selfscan could blow the doors off of the fortress SUE had so carefully constructed over the past few years, being a direct assault of the efficacy of the Tourraix-Camden test and by reference the formulation and recommended use of the entire line of Febrifuge products. Despite the protections offered by the federal Uniform CYD Research and Protection Act—commonly referred to as ProTac—the potential for massive personal injury rewards was a distinct possibility. It was known that the city’s top plaintiff’s attorney, Alan Smith, was already consulting with colleagues throughout the country regarding the possible filing of an immense class action that could bring Southern United to its financial knees.
A couple of anecdotal reports had already suggested the Selfscan numbers were near perfect. The results of a much larger, controlled survey conducted by USA Today were expected to be published within weeks.
“I think I’m ready to give it another try alone today,” Stonetree said, motioning toward the wall opposite him.
“How many times before?”
“I think it’s been four.”
“Maybe,” Kravatz nodded.”You relax for a moment. I’ll get your file and a sampler.”
Stonetree toyed with the control box attached to the recliner until the doctor returned.
“Let’s see,” Kravatz said as he returned to the room.”Yes, it has been four solos. When did you get back?”
“Yesterday.”
“I see. And how did you sleep last night?”
“Fine.”
“I see. And how many cups of coffee this morning?”
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