The Consultant Read online

  SEVEN

  Lupe was waiting for craig when he arrived Monday morning. “I was about ready to call you,” she said. “There’s a meeting of division heads right now in the third floor conference room.”

  Frowning, he looked at his watch. “What time is it? Am I late?”

  “No. They’re early. Mr. Patoff emailed me that the meeting was to start at eight sharp. I would’ve called you about it before, but I just got here myself five minutes ago.”

  Craig sighed. “Take a message if anyone calls. I’ll be back when I’m back.”

  “Let me know what happens!” she called after him.

  The door to the third floor conference room was closed, which probably meant that the meeting had already started. Slowly, carefully, so as not to disturb anyone, hoping to attract as little attention to his tardiness as possible, Craig pulled open the door.

  There were no other division heads present, only Patoff, Matthews and the four remaining members of senior management. They were all seated at a long table in the front of the room, facing him like judges at a hearing, their expressions seemingly set in stone. The other tables had been removed from the room, and the only chair left was positioned directly in front of the table. Meekly, feeling more self-conscious than he ever had in his life, he walked forward across the uncarpeted floor, his shoes tapping loudly on the hard surface.

  Was he going to be fired? It felt that way, though he could think of no earthly reason for such a decision, and in his mind he began preparing a defense of his position. Casually, as though unconcerned and suspecting nothing, he glanced at each of the faces in front of him, maintaining a pleasant, friendly smile. His gaze kept coming back to the consultant, in the center next to Matthews, and he thought of that farcical “interview” he’d had, readying himself to rip that sham apart and, by extension, the consultant’s entire efforts up to this point.

  “Thank you for coming,” Patoff said as he approached.

  Craig looked into the man’s blank unreadable face and saw an opportunity to embarrass him in front of the company bigwigs. “Are we going to pray to Ralph?” he asked.

  “We have already done so,” the consultant said. “Now on to other business.”

  Craig hazarded a look at Matthews and the other executives, seeing no discomfiture there, only grim purposefulness on their faces.

  “I was told this was a meeting of division heads.” He hated the note of defensiveness in his voice but was powerless to prevent it.

  Patoff answered. “We’re meeting with all of the division heads individually. You’re the first. Have a seat.” He glanced down at a laptop in front of him and tapped a few keys. “As you know, we recently finished the initial interviews with employees in your division. They all went fairly well, with the exception of—”

  Yours, Craig expected to hear, and he was already planning a rebuttal when, to his surprise, the consultant said, “Tyler Lang.”

  Craig was taken aback. “Tyler?”

  “Yes. As you know, we taped each of the meetings—”

  “No, I did not know that.”

  “Well, we did,” Patoff said shortly, “and I’d like you to view Mr. Lang’s here and give us your opinion.” He typed something on his laptop and pointed to the wall on the right side of the room, where a screen had been set up. “Watch.”

  It was the same room where he had been interviewed, the mysterious 713, and from the angle of the shot, it appeared as though the camera had been set up at about eye-level on Tyler’s left side, though the only camera Craig remembered seeing had been stationed in the upper right corner of the room. Patoff and Tyler were both sitting down, and the consultant was reading aloud from his tablet, “Favorite position: doggie style…”

  Patoff smiled. “We’ll pass up the preliminaries.”

  He sped up the recording, the two figures moving in those infinitesimally jerky motions that signified fast-forwarding. A moment later, the interview resumed at normal speed. “What do you think of Mr. Horne?” Patoff was asking.

  “Craig?” Tyler snorted. “He’s totally out of his depth. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. OfficeManager was a bust, and it’s his fault that it didn’t work. We tried to tell him that times had moved on, but he insisted on that clunky interface and those outdated page designs, and the whole thing looked like something from 2005.”

  Craig felt as though he’d been kicked in the stomach.

  “But he was smart enough to tap you to fix those conceptual flaws with updates to the original program,” the consultant offered.

  “Yeah. Right.” Tyler rolled his eyes. “He’s pissed at me ’cause I called it. This is his attempt to get me out of the picture. He’s set me up to fail and is going to blame me when I don’t pull gold out of my ass and save his stupid program.”

  The consultant stopped the recording and the screen went blank. “We all know that, in addition to whatever other remedies CompWare must take, there need to be reductions in staffing if the company wishes to avoid financial collapse. What we have here is an opportunity to get out in front of things with preemptive action even before we do any in-depth analysis. This is a no-brainer. We have here an ungrateful and disgruntled employee who is obviously not giving the company his best and whose negative attitude could prove infectious. One of the easiest and most obvious decisions you will ever make is to fire Tyler Lang.”

  Although Craig felt hurt by what he’d seen and heard on the recording, he refused to show it. All eyes were on him, he knew, and he did not want to give Patoff the satisfaction of an emotional reaction. Besides, irrespective of his personal feelings, he knew that Tyler Lang was one of the best and most creative programmers they had. He could think of five or six employees in his own division that he would let go before Tyler. Although he had no idea why his friend had not brought up reservations about management style or program specifics to his face, and while he was caught completely flat-footed by the hostility Tyler apparently felt for him, he still thought, objectively, that Tyler was an asset to the division and to the company.

  Patoff faced him. “Before I formally recommend to these gentlemen here that Mr. Lang should be terminated, I’m afraid I need your approval as the head of his division.”

  Craig felt a web being spun ever more tightly around him. First the ridiculous “interview.” Now, it was suddenly his decision whether or not to fire Tyler. The consultant seemed to be rigging the game in such a way that he would later be able to point to Craig’s choices and actions as justification for letting him go. This Tyler situation could be used against him either way, and though he had no idea why Patoff would want to set him up like this, why the consultant should have any animosity toward him, he had the sneaking suspicion that he was on the man’s hit list.

  He chose to take the high road. “Tyler’s a good worker.”

  Patoff pressed a key on his laptop and the recording started up again. “Craig Horne’s a douche.” The frame froze on Tyler Lang’s expression of contempt.

  “We need him,” Craig said, unfazed.

  The consultant shrugged. “It’s your call. But we’re going to have to trim the workforce somewhere, and if you want to keep Mr. Lang on, we’re going to have to find somewhere else to cut.” He brightened. “I think what we need to do is conduct a work management study.”

  Craig had no idea what that was, but he wasn’t going to give the consultant the satisfaction of admitting as much. “Fine,” he said.

  Matthews and the other members of his management team nodded.

  Patoff smiled. “Very well, then.”

  Matthews stood. “Thank you for coming,” the CEO said formally. “And thank you for your input, Craig. We all appreciate it.”

  He was being dismissed, and it was like something out of a movie. Matthews had always been precise and punctual, well-organized to a fault, but this sort of theater, with the single chair facing the row of executives and the high-handed dismissal, was not like him at all. Patoff had staged this, an
d as Craig stood and walked out, hearing the consultant talk about Bob Tanner, the next person to be summoned, he wondered if the other division heads would be faced with choices similar to the one he had been urged to make.

  “Isn’t it going to be awkward working with him now?” Lupe wondered once he had told her what happened in the meeting. “I mean, you’re still his boss. Isn’t that going to make things…weird?”

  “A little,” Craig admitted. “It’ll definitely be harder for me to be objective now. But maybe it was hard for me to be objective before, since we were friends.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “I just think it’s going to be tough for you two to work together. It’s going to be tough for me when I see him. I used to like Tyler. Now he seems like a two-faced rat.”

  “He doesn’t know that I know. That we know. We keep acting the way we always have, pretend like nothing’s changed, and things should be fine.”

  “Do you think you made the right decision?”

  “He’s a good programmer. And it’s my job to fight for my team.”

  Lupe smiled. “That’s what I like to hear.”

  “I told you,” he reassured her. “As long as I’m here, you’re here.”

  “I like to hear that even more. Oh, by the way, I need to take an early lunch today. Rebecca’s setting up a Biggest Loser thing and we all need to weigh in and chip in ten bucks. The person who loses the most weight gets the cash.”

  He looked at her. “Rebecca I can understand. But why are you doing this? You’re thin.”

  “I’m starting to get a belly. I want to nip it in the bud.”

  “You’re not going to win, you know. And those other women are going to hate you. Some of them need to lose as much as you weigh.”

  She laughed. “I know. But it’s an incentive. I need the pressure or I won’t do it.”

  “Take whatever time you need,” he told her.

  “Thanks, Boss.”

  Craig spent the rest of the morning doing very little work, mostly staring out the window and thinking about the changes coming to CompWare. Always before, he had viewed corporate downsizings and restructurings from the outside, but it was quite another thing to be in the middle of it, and even if he didn’t have such severe reservations about the consultants the company had hired, he was not sure he would agree that CompWare needed to undergo any drastic transformation. Yes, they’d had a few flops, but those weren’t structural problems. In fact, as several people had suggested, if they gradually shifted focus from business software to gaming, the financial situation would probably take care of itself. But Matthews and the other executives, panicked after the failure of the merger, had opted to focus not on their products but on their procedures and had seemingly put the company’s fate in the hands of a consulting firm known for gutting the workforces of their clients.

  There was no way this didn’t end with blood on the floor.

  It was an overcast day, and the grayness of the sky outside mirrored the gloom he felt here in his office. Down on the campus, he saw a woman carrying a box in two hands, heading toward the front of the building and the parking lot. Had she been fired? He doubted it—the next division head was probably just getting to the conference room right now; there’d been no time to fire anyone—but Craig definitely saw her as an omen of the future, and he watched as she made her lonely way along the path and moved out of his sight.

  He had a late lunch with Phil, the two of them heading over to a Chipotle several miles away from CompWare so they could speak freely. On the way, Craig described his early morning meeting.

  “He pulled the same exact shit with me. Tried to get me to fire Isaac Morales.”

  “You didn’t fall for it?”

  “Hell, no.” Phil was driving and pulled into a parking space. “But then again, they didn’t have Isaac on tape trashing me.” He shook his head. “What’s up with that? I thought you and Tyler were buds.”

  “I did, too. And I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of why he might be mad at me or resent me or whatever, but I can’t come up with a thing.”

  They got out of the car. “I’m just wondering how he kept it so hidden,” Phil said. “You didn’t even have an inkling?”

  Craig shook his head. “I just talked to him yesterday. Everything was fine. Or I thought it was.”

  “I blame BFG.”

  “I wish I could, too. But I’ve looked at it from every angle, and I just don’t see how they could be behind this. For sure they’re exploiting it, but I don’t think they caused it.”

  “I still blame BFG.”

  They went inside, ordered, then found a table by the window and sat down.

  “Regus Patoff,” Phil mused. “I know that name from somewhere. I tried searching it the other day but didn’t come up with anything. The only references to him I found involved BFG.”

  “Did we ever figure out what that stands for?”

  “No clue.”

  Craig took a sip of his iced tea. “I need to ask you a question. And answer me honestly. Do you think we hate BFG because they’re consultants and their word could end up getting us laid off, or do you think there’s something particular about BFG that bothers us? I’ve been thinking about this. I mean, would we hate any consultants who CompWare hired or just them?”

  “Them? The only person I’ve seen from BFG is Patoff. As far as I know, he’s the only one anyone’s seen. And remember what that asshole said to Dylan? No, it’s definitely not just consultants in general that we hate. It’s him.”

  “Maybe we should complain.”

  “To who?”

  “You don’t think Matthews would want to know?”

  “Honestly? I don’t. He’s looking to pull this company’s wiener out of the fire, and if some toes get stepped on along the way, I don’t think he cares. He’s the one who brought in BFG. He knows their reputation, and he’s all in. This is the way he’s decided to go, and my guess is that anyone who rocks the boat will be thrown overboard. The goal is to downsize anyway.”

  “What if we catch him in some unethical behavior?”

  “It has to be cut-and-dried, and we have to have proof. I mean, what do we have so far? Acting creepy and conducting some odd interviews? He hasn’t actually done anything wrong. You saw those executives this morning. They’re behind him.”

  Craig picked up his burrito. “This isn’t looking good.”

  “No,” Phil said, “it’s not.”

  ****

  “Tyler?” Angie said incredulously after Dylan had gone to bed and Craig had told her about his day. “I don’t believe it.”

  “I can’t believe it either. And I saw it. I keep trying to figure out if there was some way the consultant could have goaded him into it or tricked him into saying what he did.”

  “Do you think that’s what happened?”

  Craig sighed. “No. I want to think that. But no, I don’t.”

  “I thought he was your friend. Why would he trash you like that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “At least they’re taking your side instead of his.”

  “Unless they’re trying to build a case against me.”

  Angie smiled. “Now you’re just being paranoid. They didn’t want to get rid of you; they wanted to get rid of him.” She paused for a second, looked into his eyes. “Maybe you should have let them.”

  He shook his head. “Even if Tyler for some reason hates my guts, he’s still one of my strongest programmers. And I need him on that OfficeManager project.”

  “Well, you don’t need to be bosom buddies to work together. You just need to be professional.”

  “And I think we both can be.”

  “Speaking of consultants,” Angie said, “they’re hiring some to look at the Urgent Care.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s what we want to know. We’re already making do with half the budget we had five years ago—and we have twice the number of patients. They got
rid of half of the salaried employees in favor of the per diems, who flake out on us almost every weekend. If they’re looking to cut, I don’t what more they can do. And it’s a complete waste of money. We don’t have to hire consultants to ‘study’ the Urgent Care. All management needs to do is talk to the doctors and nurses who work there. We know what needs to be done.”

  “You think they’ve already made their decisions and are just looking for consultants to back them up?”

  “You know I do. Those gutless wonders obviously plan to screw things up even more than they already have, only they need to have a ‘study’ they can point to in order to justify their actions when we raise hell.” She sighed. “Their mission statement is that everything is for the patients, but they compromise patient care every time they cut our budget or do things like waste money by hiring consultants.”

  Craig was silent for a moment. “You don’t know the name of the consultants they’re using, do you?”

  She smiled. “I knew you would ask that. And I wondered myself. So, yes I do. I asked Pam when she called, and she said it’s some healthcare-related consulting firm called Perfect Practices.”

  He let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “At least it’s not BFG.”

  “That doesn’t mean these guys are any better,” she pointed out.

  “I think it does,” he said.

  ****

  Something was up.

  Craig knew it even before he went upstairs to his office. He didn’t talk to anyone while coming in from the parking lot, but there was a weird energy in the lobby, an almost tangible tension that reminded him of the day the A.I. merger hadn’t gone through and half of senior management had jumped out of the crashing plane with golden parachutes.