The Corporation

CHAPTER SIX

WHEN DONALD BECK got home that evening at eight-thirty he felt a flare of concern and a hint of fear rise in his belly. Michelle’s car was not in the garage. No telling where she was; her flight could have been delayed. Donald pulled the car into his spot in the garage and left the door open, then pulled his briefcase and coat out of the backseat and entered the house through the kitchen.

The house was dark. No sign of Michelle anywhere. He turned on the light in the kitchen and headed toward the phone on the wall to check messages when he saw movement in the darkened living room.

His heart leaped in his throat and for a moment he was paralyzed as the shadow materialized into a man rising from the sofa. The man was holding a handgun and he was pointing the weapon at him. “Who the hell are you?” the man said.

“Oh my God!” Donald said, automatically backing up. He dropped his briefcase and took an involuntary step backward. “Don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!”

“Who are you?” The man said again. Donald could tell the man was nervous; wired. Speed freak, he thought. It was some pissant speed freak who’d broken in the house, to steal their belongings to sell for meth or something. “Where’s Michelle?”

At the mention of Michelle’s name, Donald felt his fear grow. “What have you done with her? Where is she?”

“What the hell do you mean what have I done with her? I haven’t done shit to her! Who the hell are you?” The man’s voice cracked with intensity. Donald saw him more clearly now as his vision adjusted to the shadows. The man was five foot nine, thin and wiry, dressed in black jeans and a dark long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His features were handsome, eyes dark and penetrating, hair dark, almost black. He was clutching what looked like a black semi-automatic pistol.

“I… I live here,” Donald stammered. His hands were raised in the classic Don’t shoot me! stance.

“You Michelle’s husband or something?”

“Boyfriend,” Donald said, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. “Please… you don’t want to do this.”

The man seemed to relax and lowered his weapon. “Shit,” he said. Then he gestured for Donald to step into the living room, waving him in with the gun. “Get the hell in here, but turn on the light first.”

At the sight of the man relaxing and lowering his weapon, Donald did as he was told, still deadly afraid. He stepped forward cautiously and flipped on the light to the living room. With the living room now bathed in light, he caught a better look at the intruder and his fear started turning to curiosity as the man replaced the handgun somewhere at the small of his back beneath his shirt. The man turned to the sofa and sat down.

“What’s going on?” Donald asked, standing near the entrance to the kitchen and the living room. Behind him the dining room was still dark, as was the rest of the house. “Why… are you looking for Michelle? What’s going on?”

“When’s the last time you spoke to her?” the man asked. He was sitting on the sofa, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. Donald saw that the man’s forearms were tattooed.

“Last night,” Donald said automatically. What he wanted to say was, who the hell are you and what are you doing in my house? But he didn’t; the instinctual urge to do something to protect himself and his property was momentarily paralyzed.

“She didn’t call today?”

“I don’t know. I was seeing patients all morning and was in surgery this afternoon. I haven’t had a chance to check my messages.”

“Check ’em now.”

“Who are you?” Donald was feeling a little more bold now that there wasn’t a gun pointed at him.

“My name’s Jay,” the man said. “I met Michelle Monday evening in El Paso.”

Donald knew who the man was now. He remembered Michelle mentioning him on the phone a few nights ago. Something about Jay suddenly no longer being with the company she was consulting for; she’d feared he was let go due to something he’d said at a bar the night she met him. “Michelle mentioned you to me,” he said. “Something about she met you Monday, went out with a group of your co-workers and that you didn’t show up to the office the next morning and she later learned you were let go.”

“Yeah, that’s me.” Jay O’Rourke glanced out the window quickly, as if checking to see if the house was being watched. “And I don’t have much time to explain shit, so you’ll have to trust me. Okay?”

“Where’s Michelle?” Donald asked.

“Check your messages. Let’s see.”

Donald pulled his cellular phone off the clip on his belt and flipped it open. “There’s a message,” he said. He pushed a button, brought the phone up to his ear and listened. His eyes met Jay’s briefly and he nodded. When he was finished listening to the message he punched another button and folded the cellular phone up. “That was her. She must’ve called when I was in surgery. I didn’t have the phone with me then and I didn’t get a chance to check my messages. I was so wrapped up with what was happening.”

“What did she say?”

Donald didn’t know if he could trust Jay, but something told him Michelle had trusted him. She’d certainly spoken favorably of him the other night, and she rarely had nice things to say about the people she worked with. She either spoke neutrally of them or negatively. If she’d spoken well of somebody that meant she really liked them. That convinced Donald. “She said her boss called her when she was at the airport in El Paso and told her she had to go to Chicago this weekend on another project. She sounded upset. She said her boss met her at the airport in Harris-burg with her flight arrangements, a corporate credit card, and materials for the project. She was just about to board the flight when she called.”

“Shit!” Jay muttered.

“What’s this about? Why are you here? And how the hell did you break into my house?” For the first time since meeting Jay, Donald felt himself growing angry.

Jay groped for his breast pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “I need a smoke. Mind if we step outside? I’ll tell you all I know there.”

“Yeah, sure.” Donald’s curiosity grew, as did his fear. “Is… she’s not in danger, is she?”

“I don’t know,” Jay said. “I don’t think so. I dug Michelle the minute I met her, and it’s rare I meet somebody in her position and like them automatically. I think she’s fine, but she’s not going to know what the hell’s going on and that concerns me.”

“She’s in some kind of danger, isn’t she? Does it have something to do with her job? Is she involved in some kind of corporate scandal?”

Jay looked up at Donald and put his finger to his lips. When he answered, his voice was low. “Outside,” he said. He rose to his feet, placed a cigarette in his mouth, and headed through the darkened dining room as if he already knew the layout of the house, and opened the sliding glass doors to the backyard. And Donald, still stunned from finding Jay in his home and having a gun pointed at him, could only follow him outside.

Donald slid the back door shut softly as he joined Jay on the patio. Jay lit a cigarette and took a drag. “I needed that. I haven’t had a smoke in three hours. That’s how long I’ve been in your house waiting for her to come home.”

“How’d you get in?” Donald asked. It sounded like a stupid question; he should’ve been pressing Jay to tell him what the hell was going on.

“Side door of the garage,” Jay said. “Sorry. The deadbolt’s shot to shit now. I had to snap the lock to get in.”

“Couldn’t you have just walked up to the house and knocked on the door when you saw me pull up?”

“I didn’t want to chance that,” Jay said. He took a deep drag and exhaled second hand smoke. “I didn’t know if the place was bugged or not—it isn’t, by the way. I made a sweep of the house when I got in and it’s clean.”

“Why would you think my house is bugged?”

“Because I found out my place was bugged Monday night when I came home from the Lone Star.”

“How…” Donald’s mind was spinning, trying to connect the dots. “I don’t understand.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.” Jay O’Rourke’s voice was low and he seemed to be an entirely different person now as he leaned close to Donald. “And I wouldn’t have noticed if Julie, my wife, hadn’t mentioned that our phone line was acting up. She was up when I came home Monday night and mentioned it to me, and I had to call a buddy anyway, so I tried the phone. And there was this echo, kinda faint, but I could hear it. I hung up the phone and slipped out the back door to where the dmarc is on the side of the house. I checked the line and there it was. A bug.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “I took it off, went back into the house and picked up the phone again and called somebody else, another friend. No echo. I knew something was up, but I didn’t want to scare Julie. She went to bed and I spent the rest of the night tearing the place apart and found more of ’em stashed under furniture and pictures in every room of the house, even the bathroom. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night.”

Donald said nothing. He took it all in, wondering what this was leading to.

“The next day I faked being sick so Julie wouldn’t worry. She took Danny to day care and went to work, and I called in sick and finished tearing the place apart, looking for more bugs. I checked my computers, ran spyware programs, and did some debugging and found stuff planted on my computer. I blasted those out. I started getting paranoid, tried calling Michelle but got her voice mail. I didn’t want to leave a message, didn’t know if I could trust the cell phone. So I drove over to the hotel she was staying at, since I’d heard from Brian that she was staying at the Hampton near the airport. I knew one of the other Corporate Financial guys was staying there and—”

“Alan Perkins,” Donald said.

“Him and a couple others,” Jay said. “Alma Smith and Dennis Harrington.”

Donald nodded. “Michelle didn’t mention them to me, but she did say there were some other people from Corporate Financial at Building Products.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I found out where they were staying, what rooms they were in, and I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I knew I didn’t trust Harrington and Smith for shit. I didn’t like them the minute they started this bullshit project with Building Products. They’re the biggest corporate zombies I’ve ever seen.” Another drag of the cigarette. “Anyway,” Jay continued, his voice lowered. “I found out where Dennis was staying. The maids were doing some house cleaning, and one of their carts was in the middle of the hallway. I saw a passkey lying on top of a pile of laundry and snagged it. I went to Dennis’s room and slipped the passkey in the slot and opened the door slowly and stepped inside.” He took another drag of his cigarette and Donald could see that Jay’s features looked troubled. “And… this is no shit man. I swear to God I saw this… I stepped into the room and the smell was the first thing that hit me. It smelled like something dead. You dig?”

Donald nodded. “Yeah.” Donald had smelled plenty of decomposing bodies in medical school when he’d worked in dissection.

“I’m thinking Dennis is a sloppy fuck who doesn’t throw his food away, you know what I mean? So I step inside and there’s a body on the bed. I was a little startled at first, but then I recognized the face in the darkened room. It was Dennis, and he looked like he was asleep at first, but the closer I got into the room, the stronger that dead smell was. I leaned over him, not even knowing or caring what kind of excuse I was going to have if he woke up and saw me. And…” Jay took another drag of the cigarette. “I leaned over him and that dead smell was coming from him. I’m not shitting you, man. Fucker smelled like a decaying body.”

“That’s impossible,” Donald murmured quietly. “Maybe there was a dead animal or something in the room.”

Jay shook his head. “No, man. It was him! I touched him and he was stiff. I almost freaked out then. I thought maybe he’d died during the night, so I slapped his face and there was nothing. And then… then I felt this… I don’t know how else to describe it, but it was this… presence… as if there was something else in the room that was aware of me and that… it was trying to wake Dennis up.”

Jay took a drag on his cigarette. His fingers shook slightly. “So I got the hell out of there. I didn’t even close the door, I just ran out of the hotel and went home. When I got home I logged into Building Product’s corporate portal on my Macintosh and spent the rest of the afternoon poking around the secured network we’d made for Corporate Financial. At one point I called the office and Mark answered. I told him I was feeling a little better and was doing a little bit of work and asked to speak to Michelle. He told me Michelle was in a meeting with Accounting and the rest of the Corporate Financial people, and I asked him if Dennis was there too and he said yes.” Jay dragged on the butt of his cigarette and dropped it on the ground, stubbing it out with his booted foot. “That’s when I knew shit wasn’t right.”

Donald was trying to make sense of what Jay was telling him. While he didn’t doubt Jay’s insistence that he smelled decaying flesh in Dennis Harrington’s room, he believed Jay’s imagination had formulated the rest of it. Dennis Harrington had been in a deep sleep; that was all. Jay had freaked out, thought the guy was dead and come back from the grave. As for what he’d smelled… well, maybe Dennis was bad at maintaining his personal hygiene. He wouldn’t be the first. Donald didn’t voice any of this—he wanted to hear the rest of Jay’s story before he had all the evidence—so he let Jay finish.

“I came across a folder in the Corporate Financial tree that wouldn’t let me in,” Jay continued. “This freaked me out. I’m the System Admin of the entire network and I have complete access. I checked the security settings on the server and everything looked fine, but I couldn’t get into that one folder. So I moved to my Mac at home and transferred a code-breaker program to the Building Products Server. I ran it and it spit back the password. I modified the settings, got in, and spent the better part of an hour transferring all the files over the network to my PC at home. When I was done, I reset the NT settings and got out and read the files on my laptop.” He extracted another cigarette from his pack and lit it. “That’s when I knew I was in deep shit.”

“It’s some kind of corporate scandal, isn’t it?” Donald said softly. “Corporate Financial is helping the executives at Building Products cook the books or something and Michelle doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s being led to commit crimes she isn’t aware of, isn’t she?”

“No, it isn’t that,” Jay said. He took a drag on the cigarette. “Let me finish. When I saw this shit on our network I was freaked out. I didn’t understand all of it, but I knew it wasn’t right. I made backup copies on CD ROM and packed up my shit. When Julie and Danny came home I already had their shit packed, and I told them they were going to Wyoming where Julie’s parents live. Julie was freaked out, she was wondering what the hell was going on and I couldn’t tell her everything. I still didn’t know how much I was being watched, even though I’d destroyed as many of the bugs in the house as possible. I just told her that I thought Corporate Financial and Building Products were conspiring to commit some serious white-collar crimes and that I’d just found out about it and wanted to get them somewhere safe. She understood what I was talking about, and I helped her pack up the car and followed her to the airport. I had all my shit in my car, including the laptop and all my files, and I grabbed my nine and as much ammo and clips as I could carry. I saw them off at the airport and then took off myself. For awhile I didn’t know where I was going to go, but then I remembered Michelle told me she lived out here and I felt I could trust her.” He took another drag of his cigarette. “So here I am.”

“How did you find out where I lived?”

“You can find out all kinds of shit on the internet,” Jay said, taking another casual drag on his cigarette. “Especially if you’re a computer hacker like me.”

“Why do you feel you could trust Michelle?” Donald asked.

“Because she’s new,” Jay said. “I could tell. She had this… I don’t want to say deer-caught-in-the-headlights trip, but there was just something about her that was genuine and real. No sense of falsehood about her. Not like the other Financial Consultant people. Or like a lot of the people at Building Products.”

“And it took you three days to drive out here?” Donald asked.

Jay took a drag on his cigarette. “I drove to St. Louis and I was halfway there, near Oklahoma City, when I could tell I was being tailed. I did some maneuvering, got off some exits and got back on the Interstate again just to prove to myself I wasn’t being tailed, but I could tell somebody was following me. I was casual about getting off, though; I always stopped for gas or food or something. The tail hung back and I pretended not to notice. When I got back on the Interstate again, I watched him in my rearview. He stayed a good ten cars behind me. Finally I got off at a rest stop that was deserted. It was three in the morning and I was somewhere in Oklahoma. I pulled the car around the back and entered the men’s room and waited.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “A minute later I heard a car pull up. The bathroom had a window that was frosted and hard to see out of, but a chunk had been broken out of it, so I could tell that it was the car following me. I waited until the guy came in the bathroom and I plugged him.”

“You shot him?” Donald felt aghast; was he talking to a murderer?

“Yeah.” Jay took another drag of his cigarette. “Not like I wanted to. I didn’t have a choice. It was him, the guy that was following me, and I knew he was coming in to the bathroom to kill me, so I didn’t hesitate. I plugged that motherfucker, two in the chest and one in the head. He didn’t even see it coming.” Jay took another drag of his cigarette. Donald could tell that reliving this episode had affected him; his hands were shaking and his voice trembled. Donald felt his fear flare up again briefly and then it subsided. “For just a split second I thought I’d really fucked up. I was thinking, ‘fuck, dude, you just plugged a guy who wanted to take a leak; you just plugged a guy who was just taking the same route you’re taking, that’s all’. But I didn’t have to think those thoughts for very long because I saw it. He had a pistol clutched in his right hand.” Another drag of the cigarette. “Dude was holding a nine-millimeter Bulldog with a twelve round magazine. There’s only one thing you use those for, dig?”

Donald nodded.

“Once I realized the shit was real, that my mind wasn’t just fucking with me, I took his gun and got the hell out of there. I took off in my car and had to force myself to drive the speed limit, I was so nervous. But I made it. I drove the rest of the night and made it to a little town in Missouri, I don’t remember the name now, and pulled over at a truck stop and got something to eat. I bought a newspaper and tried to chill out. There was a TV on in the diner and the news was on, but there wasn’t anything about the guy I’d shot in Oklahoma.

“So when I was done, I felt better. I picked up a Rand McNally map and got back on the road. I got to St. Louis that afternoon and headed straight to the east side and left the car unlocked in a parking lot, got my shit, and checked into the cheapest motel I could find. Before I split El Paso I took out as much cash as I could out of my checking account and I made sure I had it all in one place, then I checked all my other shit. I needed another set of wheels but I didn’t want to spend the money on ’em, dig? So I hung out a little bit at the motel and waited until dark, got a little sleep, then about midnight I set out and found a new set of wheels real easy. Then I packed up all my shit, threw my nine in a trashbin and tried to bury it beneath the junk, and got the hell out of the city. I crossed the river and got to Springfield the next morning, checked into another motel under a false name and paid cash, crashed and slept till about four. Then I got up, found a gun store in town and bought some rounds for the Bulldog. I came back to the motel and there was still nothing on the news about the guy I’d plugged in Oklahoma. And the motel was one of those low rent things, no broadband internet connection, so I had to use dialup and that was slower than snail shit. I checked the Oklahoma news and saw a little story about some guy whose identity the cops were withholding who’d been killed in a rest stop bathroom off Interstate Forty. No witnesses.” Jay took a drag of his cigarette. “I was pretty confident there were no witnesses either, but I still didn’t want to chance it. Ballistics will still point to me, and I figure the law is on to me now.”

Jay took another drag of his cigarette. “I threw my cell phone away for obvious reasons. Then I called my in-laws in Wyoming from a phone booth. Julie was frantic, but she was safe. As far as I could tell, the cops hadn’t come poking around up there yet. She said she’d called our voice mail and there were messages from the police, that they were looking for me. I told her that if the cops showed up to not believe anything they told her, that I didn’t do anything wrong. I couldn’t tell her where I was, just that I was safe. Then I hung up before any kind of trace could be established. I felt good she and Danny were safe. Her parents live in a rather rugged area and her dad has an arsenal like you wouldn’t believe. The minute you get on their property you trigger their security system.”

“Nice,” Donald said. Now he wished for a cigarette. He used to smoke when he was in college and gave it up during his first year of practice.

“So anyway, here I am.” Jay took another drag on his cigarette. “We need to make sure Michelle’s safe. First thing we should do is if she doesn’t call by nine or so, call her cell.”

“Then what?” Donald asked, his voice low. “If what you said is true and you think they—whoever they are—are on to her, they could be listening in to our communications.”

“True. We just need to find out where she’s staying. We can take it from there.”

Donald didn’t know what to think. If Michelle hadn’t spoken so highly of Jay the other night he would still be fearing for his safety; Jay exhibited all the signs of paranoia. He had severe doubts on the validity of his story about Dennis Harrington. Most likely Jay had spooked himself when he broke into the hotel room and his imagination got the best of him. He found it highly unlikely that Michelle would have been suckered in by any form of delusions Jay may harbor. Jay was right about their next step in this sense; he had to talk to Michelle, had to make sure she was okay, then he had to somehow get her to convey to him that Jay O’Rourke wasn’t entirely insane. This was going to be a tall order, but one he’d have to undertake if he was to completely trust Jay because right now he didn’t completely trust him. Not by a long shot.

“Well, let’s see if we can reach her,” Donald said, glancing at his watch. “It’s quarter past nine now.”

Jay nodded, took a final drag on the cigarette and crushed it beneath the toe of his boot. Then he followed Donald back into the house.