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Chapter Nine
We were usually smart enough not to sleep over in his office, but when I awoke, it was bright and sunny. We were still naked, and somebody was knocking at his door.
I shook him awake in a panic. We needed to get dressed, I needed to skedaddle; we needed to get rid of any evidence of our rendezvous.
He blearily said, “Good morning, gorgeous.”
The knocker at the door yelled, “Rob, your car is here, so I know you're in there. We need to talk.”
Anya from Public Relations.
“How ironic . . .” I muttered, “. . . that our all-too public relations are about to be discovered by her.”
She yelled, “Rob, you can't hide from this. I'm coming in.”
He was getting his pants back on and looked at me, wondering what I would do. He seemed pretty indifferent actually, but I certainly didn't feel like getting caught sleeping my way to the top.
I took a page out of a spy movie and, still completely naked, rolled over the top of the desk to the other side, away from the door. I tried to curl up under it and take up as little room as possible. God willing, she wouldn't see me, and Rob Michaels would get her out as soon as possible.
She rushed in. He'd only barely managed to get his shirt on. It wasn't buttoned.
She didn't mention it. “You ignored all of my messages this morning, but you can't ignore the facts. This is a disaster and we need to manage it.”
“A disaster? Do you mind filling me in on what you're talking about, Comrade?” He semi-offensively called Anya, who was Russian, “Comrade”, but she didn't seem to mind.
“The Antwon Lake Scandal,” she said clearly, her beautiful voice hollow as an executioner's block, “It was our fault.”
He didn't say anything. I remembered reading about that in the news.
Some company had disposed a ton of toxic waste into a lake, after bribing local officials for the permits. No one had figured out yet where the waste came from.
I guessed somebody had figured it out that morning.
“It was our contractor. The waste was from our factory. That whole city is sick, all the animals died, the lake is going to have to be drained, all because of us. Plus, the money that bribed the officials for the permit? It's money that we claimed on our expense reports went to charitable causes. All the principal actors, the decision-makers, were executives of ExploreR. We fucked up, Rob,” she summarized.
“We didn't do shit,” he spat out, “Nobody in this building had any clue that would happen.”
“It's about processes and corporate culture, you know that,” she said, “If we're engaging in illegal, immoral, and destructive acts, it's because we're enabling them. We've been expecting something like this to happen for a while, I told you—”
“You told me fuck-all, you icy bitch,” Rob shouted. I winced. It felt like a punch to the gut for both of us women.
I'd never heard him like this. “If I had listened to you, we would have stopped the GroweR program, and we would never have discovered that crop-growth accelerating hormone.”
“People are dying as a result of our discovery,” she whispered, “I never said to stop the program. I said we weren't being responsible with the waste.”
“If people find out about this, they'll know I knew. That you told me the dangers and that I ignored them. They won't let us explain. Everything will crumble because a few people drank lake water like hillbilly morons.”
She smacked the desk I was hiding under. “They did not drink the water. It got into the water supply. At least three children in town are on life support. You poisoned children, Rob. You did this. Your company stands for everything I've ever wanted to achieve, and you threw it away to get results slightly cheaper and slightly faster.”
“It has to be cheap; otherwise they'll stop giving me money. It has to be fast, faster all the time. I understand why God starts smiting! Everyone wants more and more miracles! You turn water into wine, and suddenly that's not good enough, and you have to rise from the dead just to get people to listen. Let them all nail me to the cross; okay then, everyone can wait two thousand years for their dreams to come true instead of twenty and ExploreR will deliver it.”
“You are not God,” she said sternly, “God doesn't make mistakes.”
This settled him down. I thought they were going to start brawling.
Finally, he said, “Cover it up.”
She said, “I don't want to.”
