Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [61]
Your situation is not good, Mr. Sanders.
And yet . . . how could he have prevented this? What should he have done instead? He considered the possibilities.
Suppose he had called Blackburn right after the meeting with Meredith, and had told him in detail that Meredith had harassed him. He could have called from the ferry, lodged his complaint before she lodged hers. Would it have made a difference? What would Blackburn have done?
He shook his head, thinking about it. It seemed unlikely that anything would make a difference. Because in the end, Meredith was tied in to the power structure of the company in a way that Sanders was not. Meredith was a corporate player; she had power, allies. That was the message—the final message—of this situation. Sanders didn’t count. He was just a technical guy, a cog in the corporate wheels. His job was to get along with his new boss, and he had failed to do that. Whatever he did now was just whining. Or worse: ratting on the boss. Whistle-blowing. And nobody liked a whistle-blower.
So what could he have done?
As he thought about it, he realized that he couldn’t have called Blackburn right after the meeting because his cellular phone had gone dead, its power drained.
He had a sudden image of a car—a man and a woman in a car, driving to a party. Somebody had told him something once . . . a story about some people in a car.
It teased him. He couldn’t quite get it.
There were plenty of reasons why the phone might be dead. The most likely explanation was nicad memory.The new phones used rechargeable nickel-cadmium batteries, and if they didn’t completely discharge between uses, the batteries could reset themselves at a shorter duration. You never knew when it was going to show up. Sanders had had to throw out batteries before because they developed a short memory.
He took out his phone, turned it on. It glowed brightly. The battery was holding up fine today.
But there was something . . .
Driving in a car.
Something he wasn’t thinking about.
Going to a party.
He frowned. He couldn’t get it. It hung at the back of his memory, too dim to recover.
But it started him thinking: what else wasn’t he getting? Because as he considered the whole situation, he began to have the nagging sense that there was something else that he was overlooking. And he had the feeling that Fernandez had overlooked it, too. Something hadn’t come up in her questions to him. Something that everybody was taking for granted, even though—
Meredith.
Something about Meredith.
She had accused him of harassment. She had gone to Blackburn and accused him the next morning. Why would she do that? No doubt she felt guilty about what had happened at the meeting. And perhaps she was afraid Sanders would accuse her, so she decided to accuse him first. Her accusation was understandable in that light.
But if Meredith really had power, it didn’t make sense to raise the sexual issue at all. She could just as easily have gone to Blackburn and said, Listen, it isn’t working out with Tom. I can’t deal with him. We have to make a change. And Blackburn would have done it.
Instead, she had accused him of harassment. And that must have been embarrassing to her. Because harassment implied a loss of control. It meant that she had not been able to control her subordinate in a meeting. Even if something unpleasant did happen, a boss would never mention it.
Harassment is about power.
It was one thing if you were a lowly female assistant fondled by a stronger, powerful man. But in this case Meredith was the boss. She had all the power. Why would she claim harassment by Sanders? Because the fact was, subordinates didn’t harass their bosses. It just didn’t happen. You’d have to be crazy to harass your boss.
Harassment is about power—the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.
For her to claim sexual harassment was, in an odd way, to admit that she was subordinate to Sanders. And she would never do that. Quite the contrary: Meredith was new to her job, eager to