José studied her. He opened his mouth to answer, but they both turned as knock sounded on the inside corridor door.
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“C’mon in,” Dar said.
Kerry entered, carrying a Styrofoam cup. “Brought extra back.
Want some?” she said, after a pause when she saw who was sitting there.“Sure.”
Kerry brought the cup over and handed it to her, glancing over at José. “Good morning.”
José cocked his head and regarded her. “Buenas dias,” He replied.
“Is that café cubano?”
“Yes,” Kerry said. “I’m convinced we run on this, not electricity in this building.” She gave Dar a wink, then retreated to the door. “Sorry to interrupt.” She slipped through the door and left them alone again.
Dar sipped the thick, sugary rocket fuel. “So where were we?”
José blew his breath out. “I have come to say this,” he said. “Either we learn not to eat each other, or we go nowhere.” He laced his fingers together. “No matter what you think, I did not look for you to leave this company.”
Dar grunted.
“You do not sell things,” José went on. “I do not fix things,” he said. “The company needs the both of us to do well and make money.”
“That’s true.”
He leaned forward. “I do not like people who threaten me.” He stared evenly at Dar. “I do not care who they think they are.”
She sensed the raw challenge. But between that and her visceral response there now floated this cushion of introspection brought on by everything she’d been through in the past two weeks. Dar rested her chin on her fist. “Let me ask you something,” she said. “What would you have done if I called your wife a whore?”
José looked at her. “That is not your wife.” He pointed at the door.
“Do not make it the same thing.”
“But to me it is.” Dar got up and circled her desk, not missing the flinch as she closed in on him, only to settle herself on the edge of the flat surface. “Kerry is everything to me your family is to you, José. So I ask you again, if I’d have called your wife a whore, what would you have done?”
The salesman was briefly silent. Then he got up and paced to the wall and back. “I would not have liked it,” he finally admitted. “But you...”
“Had no right to talk to you like that? Sure I did.” Dar shrugged.
“José, I am who I am. I’m not changing.”
He put his hands on his hips. “You threatened me.” He pointed his thumb at his chest. “This is not right.”
“I didn’t threaten you,” Dar objected. “I told you what I was going to do if you said something like that again and I will do just that.” She got up, putting her hands on her desk and leaning back instead. “You want to be fired? I think it would stink for the company if I had to do it, Hurricane Watch
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but trust me. I will.”
José folded his arms over his chest. “You are impossible.”
“Sometimes,” Dar agreed. “But tell me this, José, who else can you depend on when everything’s absolutely shit?”
He grunted.
“Besides.” Dar circled her desk and sat down again. “Stop blaming me for all this crap. You’re the one who decided to bring in someone to attack me.” She dropped the folder on the desk. “So now you’re gonna go back to your office and fire his ass.”
José came to the front of her desk and leaned on it. “I will not,” he said. “This is— Yes, he is a troublemaker, but all his ideas are good ideas. He is right in the things we need to do.”
“Fire him.” Dar opened the folder. “Or, I will. He falsified his employment documents.” She shoved the folder over. “He wants your job. Now that he failed to get me out, you’re his next target. You really want that, José?”
The VP of Sales was studying the paper. “What is this?” he said.
“This was not true? He told us of his successes at this company.”
“He lied.”
José sat down. “You are telling me this now?”
Dar held her hands up and let them fall. “For Christssake, José. I’m not responsible for vetting your damn personnel records! Mari just gave this to me because Alastair asked me to take care of the problem. That’s what he views this guy as. A problem.” She stared at him meaningfully.
“Your problem. Now are you going to get rid of him, or do you want me to do it?”
José fingered the folder. “You say he’s after my job?” he queried.
“How is it you know so much about this??”
Dar met his gaze. “You really want to know?”
“No,” José said, in a disgusted tone. “You have all the power. I see it.” He got up. “But it hurts us to do this. His ideas, they are correct.”
Dar steepled her fingers and regarded him. “I didn’t say they weren’t,” she said, quietly. “I think we do need changes. I think we do need to alter how we do business.”
José looked surprised. “You say that?”
“Yeah. Now that I have the power to make that happen without all of you getting in my way,” Dar replied, with a grim smile. “You want change? You’ll get it. But it’ll happen how I want it to.”
“What does that mean?” José came back and sat down. “Explain to me, what you intend, Dar.” He eyed her shrewdly. “Or do you want me to just get rid of this man because he does not like you.”
“You hired him because he doesn’t like me,” Dar retorted. “He hasn’t said anything you haven’t told me for the last year, José. Think about it.”
The sales exec leaned back in his seat. “That is true,” he acknowledged, after a minute. “He just said them louder and was in 330
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your face with them.”
“But if he’s here, and changes are made now, who gets credit?”
José was silent for a moment, then he pulled his ankle up on his knee and regarded Dar with a wry expression. “Ah,” he grunted. “So what are these changes? Or, is that just a trick to get me out of your face too?”Dar went around behind her desk and sat down, giving herself a moment to consider. She naturally didn’t want to share the nascent plans that had started budding in her head over the last day or so, but instinct told her she’d get a payoff by throwing her adversary a bone.
Sometimes you had to take a risk. “Okay.” She leaned her elbows on her desk. “The biggest problem I see is that we don’t have control over most of what we offer.”
José tilted his head, but didn’t interrupt.
“We’re too dependent on vendors, on long haul providers. It’s too expensive in the long run to over provision, and we can’t ever get fast enough response when we do need an increase.”
“Exactly,” the Sales VP nodded. “That is exactly the problem. It is why we cannot sell the way we need to, because it’s always a hedge, yes?” He waved the hand holding the folder. “We can give so much, but it always has to be paid for and plus.”
Dar nodded. “To make the budget.”
“Si.”
“What if we had our own network?” Dar asked him. “Everything belonging to us. No circuits. Just a slice of bandwidth you could sell however you wanted.”
José went very still for a long moment. “Madre dios. Are you kidding me?” he asked, finally. “Is this serious?”
“It’s serious,” Dar said. “I’ve wanted to do it for a while, I just couldn’t.”
She tapped her thumbs together. “I warned the board already,” she said. “Capital expenditure. Outside the budgets.”