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 To all the true American Patriots who fight for their country each day. You know who you are. Chapter One Excerpt The radio announcer suggested that listeners enjoy lots of beautiful North Carolina sunshine and have themselves a good one. Dave Griffin maneuvered into an opening in the morning traffic and slotted his car into the right hand lane. He figured he might be exposed to a bit of sun when he left the Markham-Hook Conglomerate’s Pyramid Building at lunchtime, but he wasn’t sure he’d be having himself a good one or even an okay one. A ton of work lay stacked on his desk in piles that only he could make sense of. He swung his blood-colored SUV around a corner and joined the line inching into the company’s lot for oversized vehicles. While he waited his turn to rumble down the ramp to the underground garage, he fiddled with the radio dials, trying to find a station that wasn’t broadcasting air quality reports, as if people had any choice over which air to breathe. He’d just driven fifteen miles from his new home in the suburbs. He didn’t need a voice coming out of his dashboard to tell him there was so much haze hanging over the city that the Pyramid on top of Markham-Hook’s tallest building couldn’t be seen from five miles away. When he emerged from the garage, he squinted up toward the sky. No trouble seeing the building from across the street. The Markham-Hook Pyramid Building had won awards for everything except in-your-face audacity, and that one was probably in the works. The structure was fifty stories tall, besting by some thirty stories the next highest building in Avalon. The first five floors--main lobby, banquet hall, service floor, new accounts, and human resources--were all Markham-Hook. Floors six through twenty-four were leased to the most prosperous businessmen, lawyers, and doctors in the city. They--and their clients--rode up from the lobby in glass elevators that looked like futuristic space capsules. All the elevators in the building had been feng shueid, and people from Avalon Bonnie Blooms arrived daily to arrange freshly cut flowers in vases attached to the interior elevator walls. Starting with floor twenty-five and ending with forty-five, Markham-Hook housed its own people--computer programmers, investment counselors, insurance and mortgage brokers, travel planners, administrative staff--all the thousands of workers required to keep the Markham-Hook economy humming. Floors forty-six through fifty were reserved for the top management. CEO John Victor Harris’s office held the place of honor in the point of the pyramid where, it was rumored, he could see for thirty miles in every direction on days when the skies were clear. Dave worked on twenty-five. He was a programmer with a workstation in the maze of cubicles that stretched across half of the floor space, from the front to the back of the building. He’d been here four years, hired straight out of NC State before he’d even stepped off the stage clutching his computer science degree. But he didn’t rate one of the double-sized cubicles in a window row. In fact, his closet-sized cube opened onto the carpeted hallway leading from the elevator, so there was constant traffic scuffing back and forth. Someday, though, he’d move over a few aisles. He expected someday to arrive pretty quickly. He’d gotten his yearly review last week and scored above average in everything and superior in a few categories--problem-solving ability, speed and accuracy of his work, and willingness to work overtime when needed. He wasn’t working over today, though. Out of the question. He rode up to his floor on one of the employee elevators, a half-sized duplicate of the luxury cars provided to clients. The doors slid open to reveal the desk of his team’s admin, Myra Hilton. “Morning, Dave.” She waved him to a stop, red-painted talons flashing, and looked at him over the top of her half glasses. “Ken wants to see you when you get a chance.” “Sure. Tell our esteemed supervisor I live to keep him happy.” “Just run by his office at some point in the next fifteen minutes, okay? Otherwise he’ll think I forgot to tell you.” Dave rolled his eyes. Half the time Ken acted like he was too important to relay his own messages and the rest of the time he micromanaged the team. Dave thumped the top of Myra’s desk as he moved past to peek around the corner. No sign of Ken. He turned and made a dash for his cubicle, bobbing and weaving between co-workers like a courier on his way to the CEO with the latest stock figures. Mentally patting himself on the back after the narrow escape, Dave pulled out his desk chair. His triumph didn’t last long. Thumping footsteps sounded behind him as if a troll had escaped from under a bridge and was loose in the building. Dave hunched his shoulders and tried to blend in with the gray walls. “Dave, got a minute?” With a sigh of resignation, he turned and pasted on a look of polite inquiry. Ken, the picture of a man with nothing but lard in his arteries, had clomped into Dave’s cube breathing like a porn star in the middle of a hot scene. He stopped in front of Dave and pushed a piece of paper into his hand. “You were supposed to come by my office.” So this was one of the micromanage days. “Knew you’d forget to check your email yesterday, so I printed this off for you.” Dave hadn’t forgotten, he just hadn’t bothered with his email because anything Ken had to say wasn’t all that important. Knowing it would annoy Ken, he read out loud in a voice he copied from his favorite doom and gloom newscaster. “Departmental meeting Friday morning in Conference Room 25. Nine AM. Mandatory. Major company announcement for all personnel. Cheers. Ken G. Archer, Team B Supervisor.” He crumpled the paper and pushed it into the breast pocket of Ken’s wrinkled sport coat and patted the pocket. He wished his boss would let the coat die. It had long ago lost any ability to recover its shape after cleaning and hung from his shoulders like an old towel. “Rumors were flying yesterday. I’d have to be brain dead not to know about the meeting.” “Dave, this isn’t a regular announcement.” “Is it a surprise party for your birthday or something?” Dave held his watch close to his eyes and pretended to be startled at the lateness of the hour. Ken edged toward the hallway. “Just enjoy the day. You’ll find out the bad news tomorrow.” Sure. Now that Ken had promised dire tidings, Dave was supposed to cheerfully knock out a pile of work and go home at the end of the day so he could curl up with a good book. Ken would probably recommend a nice success story, such as a biography of Bill Gates, that Dave could read while he munched on leftover pizza amid all the trappings of comfortable middle class life he’d managed to acquire in the last year. Mandatory meeting. Bad news. Normally such meetings occurred so the CEO could announce another merger. Rah-rah. More profits for Markham-Hook Conglomerate. But this was different. Even if Ken hadn’t come out and told him, Dave would have known by his lost dog expression. Probably a dip in the company stock prices. The party, after all, couldn’t last forever, even though Markham-Hook had marched along making record profits while the rest of the economy staggered.
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Copyright L.C. Evans 2008. All rights reserved. |