Business Doctors - Management Consulting Gone Wild (16 page)

“Sure, after two years in prison, you’d want to pound anything that comes close to your dick.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

In comparative terms, the crunches were not as demanding as the previous event and many managed to cross the fifty mark. The magic number of hundred was crossed by Jason and Jamal. With two activities down for the day, Stephanie allowed the group another break. She knew, the next one was going to be more rigorous.

* * *

“We end the day with a two mile cross-country run. Don’t worry too much about the sun. We start in the woods there. The trees will provide enough shade to keep you cool.
We’ve got to finish all activities for the day before sunset. Most of the snakes around the area are not poisonous. But be careful anyway. If you don’t mess with them, they won’t mess with you. You can have water before you start. You won’t get any while you are running.”

After the brief introduction to the final activity of the day, the group members were jogging in the woods. Alex and Jason took an early lead and broke away from the rest of the group.

“You are not thinking of another escape, huh?” Kruger caught up with Hendrik. “Lots of foliage for cover. Not too many guards with guns around.”

“I’m not.” Hendrik responded coldly.

“Well, that’s good. Coz if you are, I’d think that’d be a foolish move. We are being watched, so don’t let the absence of too many guards fool you. You want to get closer to your family, not away. They need you. Keep that in mind.”

“I will,” said Hendrik and kept running.

Most of the candidates had returned back in half an hour. Bullet and Emiliano were missing.

“The bastard,” Jason was pacing up and down at the finish line. “I knew this was going to happen at some point in time. I should’ve taken him out last time itself.”

He turned to Stephanie, “I’m going in.”

“Wait,” Stephanie shouted and pointed towards the woods.

Bullet was carrying Emiliano and dragging him out of the woods. She seemed exhausted. “Heat stroke, or maybe a snake-bite. Do we have a doctor here?” she asked.

“You should’ve left him in the woods,” Jason advised Bullet.

“The thought did cross my mind. But that would be the easy way out. It won’t give me the pleasure of personally kicking his ass during the rest of the activities.”

* * *

“How did it go?” Schneider asked Stephanie as she prepared to wrap up for the day.

“Two down on day one,” Stephanie responded, referring to Gabriel and Emiliano.

“Will they be alright?”

“I think so. Nothing serious. Just minor injury and exhaustion.”

Stephanie turned towards the group. “Thank you guys for your cooperation. Tomorrow is rest day.”

Schneider saw a few around him heave sighs of relief. “Yeah, we are not as brutal as you think we are. You get a whole day to recuperate and come back re-energized for your next test. I can promise you, the next one’s going to be tougher than this. So save your energy and don’t pounce on each other back in the guest house.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute, Schneider?” Kruger approached Schneider as the rest of the guys started heading back to the guesthouse.

“Sure. And you are -” Schneider picked up a handout, his reference material, to check for photos and profiles. He mentally ran a quick face-recognition scan and his eyes stopped at a photograph that had the closest match

“Kruger,” the man who was being searched, helped fill in the gap.

“Oh yes, Kruger. Sorry, still getting used to the names and faces.”

“No problem.”

“Everything’s ok at the guest house?”

“Yeah. The food is good. In fact, compared to what we’ve been getting in prison it’s fantastic. There’s no entertainment. Eighty percent of prisoners do drugs, and twenty percent within that group are addicts. The only drug I’ve seen here is paracetamol. If the guys in there don’t get some dope soon, they are gonna go belly up. Cold turkey, ya know.”

“Are you in that eighty percent group too?” Schneider didn’t know where this was heading, so he kept the conversation going with another question.

“Well, not having my head knocked against the prison wall or a sharp hand-made knife thrust into my guts back in that hell-hole is a privilege that more than compensates for it. So I’m not complaining.”

“That’s good,” Schneider didn’t know what else he could say. He was definitely not going to supply drugs to this group. But yet, this was a new problem that he hadn’t anticipated. And it was important enough to be tackled immediately. Maybe he could pass on this piece of information to Woody and allow him to do the honors without Schneider’s involvement.

Schneider’s train of thought was interrupted by Kruger.

“But that’s not what I want to talk to you about,” Kruger said.

“What is it then?”

“See that guy with the pony tail? That’s Hendrik.”

Schneider pulled up his reference sheets again, trying to hunt for Hendrik’s profile as Kruger spoke.

“You gotta help him, man. He doesn’t speak much. But he’s gonna do some serious damage if you don’t help him.”

“Why? What’s wrong with him? What does he want?”

“His family’s been in some financial shit for a while. He hasn’t been able to meet them or talk to them to find out what’s going on. Won’t be long before he tries to either kill
himself or a few others or do something crazy soon. D’ya think you could arrange for him to meet them for a while and then get back? Or get them over here to meet him?”

Schneider thought for a while.

“And may I ask why you are being the noble and caring spokesperson for him? What’s your part of the deal?”

“Nothin’. Just trying to be helpful.”

Schneider wasn’t going to digest that last response so easily. But he decided not to probe Kruger further.

“Let me see what I can do. You’ll have to join the rest of the guys in the bus now. If you miss it, it’s a long walk back to the guesthouse. I can see you are dead tired too.”

“Sure, buddy. See what you can do for him. You take good care of your people and they’ll take care of you.”

An Ivy League MBA graduate was getting lessons in human resource management from a convict.

Schneider took it in his stride. “Yeah. Let me think about it.”

Chapter 15

The rest day was a welcome break for the group. The candidates seemed to have taken Schneider’s advice of abstaining from too much excitement. There were no clashes, no fights, no verbal sparring. Everyone appeared rejuvenated and ready for the next challenge.

Hendrik wasn’t present in the guesthouse. Schneider had granted him permission to visit his family and give them some money.

When a few folks had asked, Kruger told them he had been taken to the hospital for a quick checkup. Schneider didn’t want to set a precedent and get more requests for family visit
s. Kruger was the only other person to know about Hendrik.

Schneider knew he wasn’t going to escape. He was more worried about Hendrik’s enemies waiting for an opportunity to settle scores. So he got Woody’s men to escort him. Fortunately for Schneider, none of what he feared happened. Hendrik got back to the guest-house, a little more cheerful and ready to take on the next challenge.

Just to be sure, Schneider had advised to install spy cams throughout the premises. And Woody had complied. Schneider made it a point to check the video footage once a day to keep a tab on the behavioral progress of the group. So far the progress had been as he had planned through another framework overused by consultants – the 4 step process of group dynamics development. Forming - Storming - Norming - Performing.

Blizzard’s list and Woody’s millions had helped in the
Forming
stage.

The
Storming
phase had been Schneider’s idea.  By keeping the convicts in captivity together, he assumed that the team members would have contrasting ways of interacting with each other and finding their own little space in the crowd. Those were the easier phases and Schneider knew any team can achieve that. It was the inklings of the
Norming
phase that excited him. Since there was no quarreling or even any serious discussion on the events of the past few days that could derail the game-plan, Schneider was hopeful that the team will converge on the common goal. This was necessary if they were to finally materialize into a
Performing
team. But whether that would fructify or not, only time would tell.

The bus left the guesthouse early in the morning. There were only two guards accompanying the group to their destination for the day. Nobody had briefed the group about the events scheduled for that day.

“Bullet! Interesting name, huh?” Ryan was sitting on the seat adjacent to the one occupied by Bullet.

“Yeah,” Bullet responded curtly looking straight ahead into nothingness. She wasn’t a morning person and had been struggling to keep her eyes open since she got into the bus. The gentle swaying of the bus was nudging her back to sleep. She was in no mood for any conversation.

“You gotta reach the destination fully charged up, ya know. Gotta be ready for the next challenge if you don’t wanna end up like Gabriel yesterday. Talking is an excellent way to warm up the brain,” Ryan tried to keep the discussion going on. Bullet’s mono-syllable response wasn’t good enough for him to stop trying.

“It’s a pet name,” Bullet bought into Ryan’s reasoning and responded.

“That’s obvious. I never thought your parents would have named you that. I’d also find it difficult to visualize you on your knees with a sword on your shoulder and a booming voice echoing in the castle -
I dub thee Bullet
”

“I wish it had been that way. I’d have been fortunate.  Way better than having to live with a bullet in your body.”

“You’ve got a bullet in your body? You aren’t kidding, are you?” Ryan’s artistic articulations stopped in their tracks on hearing Bullet’s revelation.

“It’s true. That’s how I got the name.”

“When did this happen? Who shot you?” Ryan’s interest peaked.

Kruger sitting in the seat ahead turned back to hear Bullet’s story source

“This was about six years back. I was part of this group of con-artists,” Bullet began her saga. “We tricked people into believing we were a sales team working for well-known companies. We worked in teams, never used weapons and targeted unsuspecting guys who’d fall for our stories. One day, my luck ran out and I got caught up with the wrong victim. The tables turned when I realized, the guy I was trying to dupe was actually a bigger thug than me or my buddies. He probably mistook me for an undercover cop and shot me in a bid to escape. The bullet got lodged in my shoulder. But I was alive. No way I could get admitted to a hospital. The doctors and the cops would have asked too many questions. I could’ve ended up in bigger trouble. So I got a local doc to fish it out and patch me up. But he said he couldn’t locate anything in there and let me go.”

“So there isn’t a bullet in there now?” Ryan wanted to know.

“If the bullet had entered and exited through the shoulder, there should have been two holes. But there was only one. So I knew all along that it was still in there somewhere. It was only last year that I finally mustered the courage to get an X-Ray at a local hospital and confirm.”

“So how do you live with it??” Ryan was getting more curious.

“My shoulder swells up, some kinda infection, every few months and I have to go back to a doc to get the fluid out. But it doesn’t impact my work, so I haven’t bothered too much about it.”

“That’s bizarre!” Ryan finally got his answer, but wasn’t too sure if Bullet had just cooked up the story.

Kruger joined in, “Not as bizarre as the other story I read in the papers a few years back. It was about a dude who’d got a bullet trapped in his face. For many years, he didn’t know what caused his headaches. It was finally removed when the pain spread to the rest of his body and he couldn’t live with it any longer.”

“True. Fact can be stranger than fiction,” Emiliano was trying to re-build burned bridges. “We have another such freak case within this group, a medical marvel,” he pointed at Gabriel, who had his back towards them and oblivious to the discussions. “Doctors said there was a useless piece of equipment lodged in his head too. His brain. They don’t want to take it out, because it still supports a few basic functions - like breathing.”

Ryan and Kruger smiled. Bullet had her eyes closed, lost in her own thoughts. The bus had slowed down and they had reached their destination.

The bus had heavy blinds
to ensure that nobody would know where they were staying or where they had reached. But everyone was elated to be getting out of the place that had become a glorified prison and come out in the open air.

The bus stopped outside a rundown building. It was surrounded by other similar rundown buildings and there was not a soul to be seen. It appeared to be an industrial site of some sorts that had long served its purpose. The group entered. After passing through a series of gates, they reached a large hall, almost the size of a basketball court with a ceiling that was almost hundred feet in height. Whatever the place was, it seemed unused for years. There weren’t too many interesting options around to catch anyone’s attention, except for the huge cage in the center.

Stephanie was waiting just outside the cage. Along with her was the usual posse of the tough looking security guys. There was someone they hadn’t seen before. A toughened old man with a scar running down from his head to the left cheek, stood next to Stephanie.

“Dude. Me thinks someone in here has been watching too much reality TV,” Chang said looking around the hall and at the cage. “Lemme guess. At the end of this, we get to vote out someone? I already have a few names on my list.”

Schneider explained. “In the guest house, there were too many rules holding you back, right? We realized that you love to fight. It’s etched in your DNA. You love the adrenaline rush that comes with it. So we decided to give you the opportunity to do just that.”

Schneider raised his hand slowly, in a dramatic manner and pointed towards the big cage. During his various engagements in the automobile industry, he had seen
several new car models being launched and this was a gesture that somehow got imprinted in his mind.

“But just to ensure that we don’t end up destroying our own pool of recruits that we spent so much time and energy on, we’ll do this with protective gear. We want to test your agility and technique, not just your strength. You will have the option of using a weapon of your choice if you so desire from our collection out here.”

Schneider pointed to a heap lying covered with a large black cloth. Stephanie pulled the cloth to reveal an assorted collection of exotic looking weapons.

The initiation ritual and the drive-by shooting that Schneider had witnessed back in Las Vegas seemed too vicious and old-school. More than the brutality, he failed to see how it tested the new recruit’s physical or mental abilities. The combat round was Schneider’s idea of re-jigging the initiation phase for Woody’s new crew.

“You will fight individually, and no, you don’t get to choose your opponent. We’ve done that part of the thinking for you in our own scientific manner - by drawing names. We don’t expect you to be perfect fighting machines. We are only trying to see how good or bad you really are. We want to see how you react when you are cornered. We want to see how you handle and inflict pain. We want to see if you use brain or brawn or both when you are in there. Most of you have fought on the streets. Some of you might have had formal training in some form of combat skills. That’ll help.”

Schneider’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it. It was Angie. He switched it over to sil
ent mode, and while the vibration kept it buzzing against his leg, he continued addressing the group.

A few seconds later the phone started vibrating again. It was Angie again. Schneider cut the line again and looked back at the group waiting to hear what was in store for them.
“I’ll leave you in the able hands of Cody now. And of course, you know Stephanie well by now, I assume.”

“Not as well as I’d love to,” Kenny whispered to Gabriel. His hormonal urges had taken over again.

“Put a lid on it, will ya? You don’t want a hard-on when you are in that cage trying to save your ass,” Gabriel warned.

“Why not? It’ll be the weapon of my choice. Say hello to my not-so-little friend,” Kenny winked.

The third time when the phone started ringing, Schneider responded.

“Can we talk a little later? I’m busy right now.”

“There’s something more urgent I need to talk to you about.”

“What is it?”

“It’s, umm, sensitive. I can’t talk about it over the phone. Can you come over?”

Schneider thought for a while. Angie’s voice sounded really troubled. It conveyed an unusual sense of urgency. “Ok, I’ll be on my way. It’ll take me at least an hour if I leave right now.”

“Thanks, Michael.”

After three months of unbridled sex, Schneider felt really worried at this sudden attempt at formality by Angie and shuddered to think of the worse.
Did the don find out?

Schneider kept the phone back in his pocket and gestured to Stephanie that he was going to be away for a while. He headed out of the exit and turned towards the parking lot.

“God! I don’t know why I fall for this every time,” he muttered to himself as he got into his car.

Other than the short-lived relationship with Anne,
Schneider had been alone all his adult life. After all the customary hustle and bustle of everyday life in his line of work, once off work, he’d switch back to being a loner. It had become a habit now, a part of his daily routine of existence. But deep down, he had never really grown comfortable being all by himself. He needed to have noise in the background, which fooled his mind into thinking that he had company. In office, it was the incessant chatter, the phones, and the meetings, while driving it was his iPod feeding into the auxiliary input of his Honda Accord, and while at home, the TV would have to be constantly on, even while he slept. Sometimes when he was in a good mood, he would sing along. He knew he couldn’t sing to save his life. But it didn’t matter, as long as there was no eerie silence – anything to fill in the background with
company
. But Schneider was in no mood to sing that day. The iPod was still on, blasting the latest hits. But Schneider’s thoughts were elsewhere.

He had worked out a lot of details for the evaluation sessions. How does anyone test out a bunch of convicts who’ve got little in common? They were in prison for different crimes. They came from disparate backgrounds. Their intellectual status varied. Their future plans were unclear. There was no standard one-size-fits-all procedure to test this group. All the years of consulting experience and his well-structured knowledge-base from the previous assignments were helping him navigate this labyrinth. But he still had to figure out more innovative ways to finish the assignment fast and get back to his regular business. Back to the bitching clients who at times irritated the hell out of him. But all that was still ok. They paid their fees and most importantly, it was all legal. At the end of the assignment, once the dough ended up in their account, Schneider and his team had nothing to do with them. The clients had to fend for themselves.

Management consulting was a good industry to be in. No wonder the best brains from the top MBA programs made a beeline for the top consulting firms each year. The perks were great – the money, the jet-setting lifestyle, the lavish hotels, the business class travel, the frequent flyer miles, the great variety of food. Of course, the last one didn’t matter to Schneider. His taste buds were dead, just like the batteries in the spare torch he carried in his car. There possibly was a technical term for his condition. He had never bothered to find out as it was a minor issue that didn’t impact his lifestyle.