Disclosure_ A Novel - Michael Crichton [7]
And then, pointedly:
Isn’t that pretty unusual?
Christ, he thought. He began to sweat again. He forced himself to take another deep breath. He reached the end of the fourth-floor corridor and came to his office, expecting to find Stephanie Kaplan, the CFO, waiting there for him. Kaplan could tell him what was going on. But his office was empty. He turned to his assistant, Cindy Wolfe, who was busy at the filing cabinets. “Where’s Stephanie?”
“She’s not coming.”
“Why not?”
“They canceled your nine-thirty meeting because of all the personnel changes,” Cindy said.
“What changes?” Sanders said. “What’s going on?”
“There’s been some kind of reorganization,” Cindy said. She avoided meeting his eyes, and looked down at the call book on her desk. “They just scheduled a private lunch with all the division heads in the main conference room for twelve-thirty today, and Phil Blackburn is on his way down to talk to you. He should be here any minute. Let’s see, what else? DHL is delivering drives from Kuala Lumpur this afternoon. Gary Bosak wants to meet with you at ten-thirty.” She ran her finger down the call book. “Don Cherry called twice about the Corridor, and you just got a rush call from Eddie in Austin.”
“Call him back.” Eddie Larson was the production supervisor in the Austin plant, which made cellular telephones. Cindy placed the call; a moment later he heard the familiar voice with the Texas twang.
“Hey there, Tommy boy.”
“Hi, Eddie. What’s up?”
“Little problem on the line. You got a minute?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Are congratulations on a new job in order?”
“I haven’t heard anything yet,” Sanders said.
“Uh-huh. But it’s going to happen?”
“I haven’t heard anything, Eddie.”
“Is it true they’re going to shut down the Austin plant?”
Sanders was so startled, he burst out laughing. “What?”
“Hey, that’s what they’re saying down here, Tommy boy. Conley-White is going to buy the company and then shut us down.”
“Hell,” Sanders said. “Nobody’s buying anything, and nobody’s selling anything, Eddie. The Austin line is an industry standard. And it’s very profitable.”
He paused. “You’d tell me if you knew, wouldn’t you, Tommy boy?”
“Yes, I would,” Sanders said. “But it’s just a rumor, Eddie. So forget it. Now, what’s the line problem?”
“Diddly stuff. The women on the production line are demanding that we clean out the pinups in the men’s locker room. They say it’s offensive to them. You ask me, I think it’s bull,” Larson said. “Because women never go into the men’s locker room.”
“Then how do they know about the pinups?”
“The night cleanup crews have women on ’em. So now the women working the line want the pinups removed.”
Sanders sighed. “We don’t need any complaints about being unresponsive on sex issues. Get the pinups out.”
“Even if the women have pinups in their locker room?”
“Just do it, Eddie.”
“You ask me, it’s caving in to a lot of feminist bullshit.”
There was a knock on the door. Sanders looked up and saw Phil Blackburn, the company lawyer, standing there.
“Eddie, I have to go.”
“Okay,” Eddie said, “but I’m telling you—”
“Eddie, I’m sorry. I have to go. Call me if anything changes.”
Sanders hung up the phone, and Blackburn came into the room. Sanders’s first impression was that the lawyer was smiling too broadly, behaving too cheerfully.
It was a bad sign.
Philip Blackburn, the chief legal counsel for DigiCom, was a slender man of forty-six wearing a dark green Hugo Boss suit. Like Sanders, Blackburn had been with DigiCom for over a decade, which meant that he was one of the “old guys,” one of those who had “gotten in at the beginning.” When Sanders first met him, Blackburn was a brash, bearded young civil rights lawyer from Berkeley. But Blackburn had long since abandoned protest for profits, which he pursued with singleminded intensity—while carefully emphasizing the new corporate issues of diversity and equal opportunity. Blackburn’s embrace of the latest fashions in clothing and correctness made “PC Phil” a figure of fun in some quarters of the company. As one executive