The Consultant (3 page)

He didn’t want to lie to her—he
couldn’t
lie to her; she knew him too well—so he told her what he really thought, an opinion he hadn’t even let himself acknowledge up to this point. “I think we’ll be okay. Maybe not the whole division, but most of it. We’re the workhorses, after all. We’re the producers. And you and me, in particular? I think we’re safe.”  

The expression on her face was one of visible relief. He felt relieved himself, saying it, and he realized that despite everything that was going on, he really did think his job was secure. His and his secretary’s. The thought was absurdly comforting amidst the chaos, and he and Lupe shared a smile.  

After work, he went out with Tyler and a few of the other programmers for drinks, something that had once been a regular occurrence but in the past several years had become exceedingly rare. It was fun hanging out with the guys, so he stayed out a little longer than he’d planned, and when he got home, Dylan was steaming. “Where were you?” his son demanded. “You’re supposed to read to me!”  

Craig couldn’t help laughing at the intensity of the boy’s focused anger, and that only made things worse.  

“I told you Daddy was going to be late,” Angie reminded him.  

“But he’s not supposed to be!”  

“Sorry, buddy.” Craig picked up his son, hoisting the boy onto his shoulders, noticing that he was starting to get heavy. Dylan was growing fast, and in another year or so, Craig probably wouldn’t be able to pick him up anymore. And Dylan probably wouldn’t want him to. The thought made him sad, and while he’d had fun going out with the guys after work, he decided that he should spend as much of his spare time as he could with his son. “Let’s read.”  

THREE  

Austin Matthews left work early with a splitting headache that had already beaten the shit out of the Tylenol he’d taken two hours ago and was apparently kicking the ass of the Advil he’d swallowed just before leaving. Although he’d always been good at maintaining his game face, the stress of CompWare’s ongoing implosion was too much even for his hardened sensibilities. But he’d helped found this company, damn it, and he wasn’t about to let it go down in flames. He’d do whatever he had to do to keep the business alive, and if that meant restructuring and mass layoffs, well, so be it. Sometimes you had to cut off a foot to save the leg.  

He closed his eyes against the pounding pain in his temples. Even if the company came out of this disaster solvent, he’d probably come out of it with an ulcer.  

It had been so much easier when they’d first started out, when he and Josh Ihara had rented their first office in a partially abandoned industrial park. They’d had to borrow from their parents to make the rent each month; the one programmer they had was working on spec, and for a whole week they’d been without power because both of them had forgotten to pay the electric bill. When someone had broken in one night and stolen their one newly purchased desktop PC, they hadn’t been able to replace it because they didn’t have insurance, and all three of them had had to timeshare the remaining refurbished computer. But somehow they’d survived, and while the prospects of their continued existence fluctuated from week to week, and everything was always on the line, they’d had fun. With nothing to lose, they’d been able to take chances, and they had, and it had ended up paying off big time.  

Matthews pressed the button on the dashboard of his Jaguar to open the driveway gate, watching through the windshield as it slid slowly to the side. As he had so often over the past fifteen years, he wished Josh was still with him now. But his former partner had cashed out early, eager to strike out on his own, and though none of Josh’s subsequent ventures had been successful, he had not given up. He was still in the start-up trenches, hoping lightning would strike twice.  

While Matthews remained here, trying to keep things together, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.  

He pulled up the driveway, parking in front of the door rather than pulling into the garage. Inside the house, he announced that he was home, but there was no answer, and he assumed that Rachel was out somewhere with one of her friends. It was just as well. He wanted to lie down for a while, and he went into the bedroom, kicked off his shoes and closed his eyes.  

When he opened them, it was clear from the diminished light outside that some time had passed, and his headache had subsided into a dull pressure behind his eyes. He went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, then wandered around both floors of the house, looking for Rachel. His wife, apparently, was still out, and when he found himself upstairs in his office, he sat down at his desk, opened his laptop and accessed his email.  

There were over three hundred messages in his inbox.  

300!
 

Scrolling down quickly, he saw that they were all from Patoff, the consultant.  

How was that possible? He never left work with messages still pending, it was almost an obsession with him, and when he’d left his office less than—he looked at the time displayed in the corner of the screen—three hours ago, his inbox had been clear. Which meant that ever since he’d left CompWare, Patoff had sent an average of one hundred messages an hour, over one-and-a-half messages every minute. That was not merely obsessive; it was crazy.  

And damn near impossible to do.  

Maybe the messages were identical. Maybe the consultant had set up some sort of program to automatically resend the same message until an answer was received.  

But they all had diverse subject names, and when he called up two at random, they were both completely different. Each was more than two paragraphs long.  

The doorbell rang, and Matthews jumped in his seat.  

Why had he jumped? Was he nervous?  

Yes
.  

But what was he nervous about?  

He didn’t know.  

The doorbell rang again. Matthews frowned. It couldn’t be Rachel; she had a key. And even if she’d forgotten her key, he hadn’t locked the door behind him when he’d come in. So it had to be someone else.  

But the gates were closed. How could someone have gotten up the driveway?  

The bell rang again, and he hurried downstairs. He reached the front door, opened it, and—  

It was the consultant.  

Patoff stood on the wide portico. There was no vehicle other than his own on the driveway, and Matthews wondered how the consultant had gotten here. Had he parked outside the gates, jumped over the fence and walked up the drive? It seemed the only logical answer, but why in the world would he do such a thing? It made no sense.  

The consultant stood there, his expression flat. Matthews was more disconcerted by the man’s presence than he wanted to admit or was willing to show, but he managed to affix a scowl to his face. “What are you doing here?” he said derisively. “This is my house.”  

The consultant smiled, and Matthews decided that he didn’t like that smile. He had seen it before, at the office, in the context of work, and its meaning had flummoxed him then. But now, things seemed clearer, and while Patoff’s expression was supposed to be obsequious, there was a mocking element in it as well. “I heard that you left early because you weren’t feeling well,” the consultant said smoothly. “I just wanted to check in with you and make sure you’re all right. I also sent you a few emails, and I was wondering if you had a chance to look them over.”  

A few emails?
 

Uneasiness had given way to anger. “I went home because I had a headache. I
still
have a headache. That is why I am not at work. If I
were
at work, I would speak to you about work-related matters. But I am not. I am at home. And I did not
invite
you to my home, and if you want to continue consulting for CompWare, I suggest you leave these premises immediately.”  

The smile grew more obsequious. And more mocking. “I understand, sir. And I’m sorry for the intrusion.” Patoff started to turn away, then turned back, as though he’d forgotten something. “By the way, just to remind you, CompWare has a contract with BFG Associates. You cannot actually fire us from the project.” His smile grew wider. “Well, you
could
. But it would cost CompWare a lot of money.” Still smiling, he nodded. “Hope you feel better.”  

The consultant, turned, walking away, and Matthews watched him, feeling unaccountably nervous.  

Why?
 

He couldn’t say, but he stood in the open doorway as the man strode purposefully down the drive without once looking back. When he reached the gate, the gate slid open, activated by the motion detector, and the consultant stepped through, turning right onto the street, where he must have a car parked.  

He couldn’t have walked all this way. It was over ten miles.  

Why had that even occurred to him?  

Matthews thought about the three hundred email messages awaiting him and shivered involuntarily. He wished now that he hadn’t bullied the Board into hiring BFG. He’d done so out of panic, to reassure investors and the market, but he probably should have put together a team to conduct a search for the right consultant. He hadn’t really had the time, though. He’d needed to act fast, to appear decisive, and the CEOs of several blue chip companies had sworn by the firm. In fact, every indication from the quick research he did was that BFG would be the perfect fit for CompWare and a solution at the very least to their perception problem.  

Now Patoff was sending him hundreds of emails.  

And showing up at his house.  

The solution to his nightmare was turning out to be a nightmare in itself.  

He closed the door, locking it this time before heading back up to his office to read through the consultant’s messages.  

Rachel arrived home shortly afterward, and he left off with the emails—all of which appeared to be dry descriptions of survey methodology that were of little use and no interest to him—in order to tell her that he was home early because he wasn’t feeling well. As he’d known, as he’d wanted, she fussed over him and had him lie down on the couch while she made him some hot tea. She quizzed him about his headache and whether he had symptoms of anything else. He told her it was just the headache, but he did not tell her about the stress he was under or describe his strange encounter with the consultant. He wished he could talk to her, wished she were more involved in his professional life, but their relationship didn’t work that way. His business was his business. Rachel would have made a great mafia wife: she cared about him, but she didn’t want to know the details of his work.  

If Josh were still here, he’d be able to talk to him about what was going on.  

But Josh wasn’t here. Everything was on
his
shoulders, and Matthews decided that the best strategy with the consultants was to just let everything run its course. Patoff was right; CompWare did have a contract with BFG. But that didn’t mean that he had to implement any of the consultants’ recommendations. He could tell Patoff thank you, then toss the entire report directly into the trash can. Or, more likely, he could take the raw data BFG had assembled and pass it on to
another
consulting firm to see what
their
recommendations would be.  

CompWare had a whole host of options, and he didn’t need to decide on any of them now. Just by hiring BFG, the freefall of CompWare’s stock prices had stopped, and perception in the markets and among their business customers was that after restructuring, the company would re-emerge stronger and more competitive. In the meantime, their games were selling better than they ever had. So he had a buffer. He had some leeway.  

But the consultant still made him feel ill-at-ease.  

FOUR  

Craig was ten when his father died of a heart attack, and while the loss was devastating, he’d honestly thought he could handle it. After all, his dad had been there not only for the important early years but for most of his childhood. At ten Craig was old enough to remember all the time they’d spent together, all of the things they’d done. He knew his father’s memory would always be with him. So it came as something of a shock a few years later, in junior high, when the Social Studies teacher announced that they would be doing a genealogy project and he suddenly realized that he had forgotten the sound of his dad’s voice. Sitting in class, he could not even remember with any clarity his father’s face, although there were still pictures of him throughout the house. The realization frightened him, engendering a deep sadness that made him want to cry, and it left him feeling completely alone even in a room full of thirty kids. He went home that day after school and not only looked carefully at all of the framed photos displayed throughout the living room, family room, dining room and bedrooms, but took out the albums from the hall closet and looked through the pictures in there as well.  

It didn’t help. The man in those photos was a stranger to him, someone he’d met in the past but didn’t really know. Somehow, all of those memories of moments, all of those emotions and recollections that he’d thought would be with him always had slipped away, unnoticed, and now he was left with a hole in his history where his father should have been.  

That hole had never really gone away, and it was probably why it was so important now for Craig to spend time with his own son.  

So Craig resented it when Scott Cho called a department meeting Wednesday afternoon and told everyone that if consultants were going to be nosing around, judging the department, they all needed to protect themselves by coming in earlier, leaving later and putting in weekend hours. As far as Craig was concerned, his free time was his own, and while both he and Angie had gotten where they were by being overachievers, they’d both backed off after Dylan was born. Their priorities had changed. Angie worked only on weekends now, and last year when she was offered additional hours on Thursday evenings, she’d turned it down flat. Yes, he still sometimes put in ten-hour days, and he was never far away from his phone or email, but he’d given up working Saturdays and he liked it that way and didn’t want to go back.