Get Barb!

CHAPTER ONE

“He’s an ICE agent.” The girl’s voice was flat, but her eyes bore into Barb Sharpe’s. She lifted the hem of her uniform shirt to expose the ugly rainbow of bruises mottling her rib cage. “He says if I try to leave again, he’ll kill me. Still think you can help?”

“Absolutely.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I’m 54 years old. I know a thing or two about handling so-called powerful men...”

 

CHAPTER TWO

"Too old and ugly," said the taller of the two young men, a gawky blonde who'd introduced himself as Simon.

He didnt say this out loud, of course, but Barb Sharpe could read the smirk he gave his partner as she walked up to the booth. They were in a Denny's, holding interviews for an office manager position in a company so new it didn't yet have an office.

"Did you bring a resume?" said the partner, an only slightly less gawky, brown-haired fellow named Dmitri. He held out his hand, clearly impatient to move her along as quickly as possible.

The other applicants waiting at the front of the restaurant were young and pretty. It didn't take a genius to see that these man-boys were looking for some front-desk candy to make up for the years they'd lived like monks, grinding out their PhDs. Barb had no illusions regarding her own appearance. At 34, she was trim and fit, but her features were a little too severe, her energy too intense, to ever serve as office decoration. What she would be, however, was a smart and competent manager, exactly what her interviewers needed—even if they didn't know it.

First, however, she had to get the job, and she couldn't do that by submitting passively to this poorly disguised beauty pageant. It was time to flip the script. She took another look at the two figures across from her. Silicon Valley was full of young men like this, academically brilliant and at the same time utterly lacking in worldly wisdom. Their hair was freshly cut, and they wore white dress shirts open at the collar, but they were boys playing dress-up. And what do boys need even more than pretty girls?

A mother.

"You're leasing office space in that new complex across the street, right?" she said, abruptly taking charge of the interview.

Visibly puzzled at her non-answer, Dmitri nodded his head.

"How many square feet?" she said. "What are the terms? Do you have a guaranteed right to renew? How about an option to lease additional space at the same rate?"

They stared at her wide-eyed, their faces a blend of confusion and shame. Their degrees certified their brilliance, yet they couldn't answer her simple questions.

"Do you have the lease?" she said, sticking out her hand.

Both boys reached for the attaché sitting between them. Dmitri was slightly faster, and he pulled out a thick packet of paper. Barb took it from him and began paging through it.

"Have you signed this yet?" she said.

"No," they said in unison.

"Good," she said. "They're robbing you blind. Worse than that, they're locking you into terms that will hamstring the future of the company."

"How do you know all that?" said Simon.

"I used to run the office for a commercial realtor." She didn't bother telling them that her boss had exposed himself to her one afternoon when they were alone. When she'd reacted by laughing out loud, he'd summarily fired her—which was how she'd come to be sitting here.

As they watched, dumbfounded, Barb took out her phone, dialed the number from the lease, and proceeded to browbeat the agent into renegotiating the agreement. By the time she'd hammered out new, more favorable terms, there was no doubt of her position within the company. The boys might be the owners of record, but the one running things would be her.

#

From the beginning, Barb's authority extended far beyond that usually associated with her role, but she had no need for a fancier title. In fact, she preferred to keep a low profile. Anyone who mattered knew that she was the power behind the throne. Every important decision, from the color of the lobby to the hiring of a sales manager, ran through her desk. She was even responsible for naming the company, suggesting Simitri, which combined the founder's names into something technical-sounding while vague enough to encompass whatever brilliant product the boys came up with.

Barb may not have had a PhD, but she grasped concepts quickly and had a way of bringing Simon and Dmitri back down to earth whenever they flew too high into theory and abstraction—and forgot that their ideas needed to be monetized. With her help, they settled on a business-to-business model rather than trying to sell directly to consumers. Let others struggle to please the fickle public. As the saying went, "When everyone is digging for gold, sell shovels."

During the early, lean years, she subsisted on the same modest salary the boys gave themselves, working the same long hours and eating the same microwave dinners and frozen pizza. The only thing she would never scrimp on was the money order she sent every month to her mother and brother's last known address.

As contracts trickled in and the corporate checking account steadily grew, Barb insisted on increasing their pay until, almost without notice, the three of them had climbed from a lower-class existence to a middle-class one to an upper-middle-class one and beyond. By that time, Simitri had grown to just under 500 souls, all working together to fashion and sell the best possible metaphorical shovels as the high-tech gold rush showed no signs of abating.

In addition to her salary, Barb made sure that she was awarded regular and substantial stock grants. She was careful to do everything on the up and up, and the boys never once complained. They were smart enough to know who kept their company running.

In return, she gave Simitri her life. Every waking hour was devoted to keeping things running smoothly. Even her dreams were filled with company business. It wasn't a sacrifice for her. She enjoyed every aspect, and especially the challenges—the bigger the better. She loved devoting her every skill and talent to meeting them. With each successful conclusion, she grew in ability and confidence.

A prime example came when their largest customer threatened to leave unless Simitri cut its pricing in half. Everyone, including Simon and Dmitri, tried to get the client's CEO to see reason. But the more they explained how they couldn't meet his demand and stay in business, the more intransigent he became.

"The bastard won't see reason," cried Simon after one particularly frustrating call.

"If we lose the account, we're done for," moaned Dmitri. "And if we accept his terms, we're still done for."

Barb let them do their best, and when it didn't move the needle, she picked up the phone and placed a call to the unreasonable CEO's executive assistant. She introduced herself and invited the woman to coffee. Later that afternoon, in a quiet corner at Starbucks, the two quickly got down to brass tacks.

"Our profit margin is roughly 35%," said Barb. "Knocking 50% off pricing would mean taking a 15% percent loss."

"I understand," said the executive assistant, a no-nonsense type named Nancy. "The problem is our new CEO. He's just a kid, frankly, and he's in over his head and desperate to prove himself."

"So, what do you say we put our heads together and figure out how to give your boy a win while keeping my two in business?"

Over the next hour, they hashed out a compromise that cut the top-line pricing while tacking on a series of nonsense fees for "platinum-level consultation," "premiere access," and "white-glove service." The result was a contract that cut the nominal rate but kept the same bottom-line payments coming in to Simitri. Each woman went back to her respective company and presented the plan as if it were an anonymous leak from the other side. Within a day, a new deal was struck, each team believing they'd put one over on the other.

Through everything, even as Simitri's ranks swelled to well over a thousand, Barb kept the wheels turning with ruthless efficiency. She made certain that those who added value to the company were rewarded while the game players and self-promoters were ruthlessly rooted out. And she did it all without ever raising her voice.

Each success only served to make her more of an object of gossip in the office. People openly wondered if she had ice in her veins, with some going so far as to speculate that she was "on the spectrum." She laughed inside, knowing that she was not an unfeeling person. On the contrary, she felt the pain of others deeply. What she didn't do, however, was let her empathy keep her from doing what was best for everyone involved.

She also didn't bother with any sort of personal life. Oh, there were liaisons over the years—she had needs like anyone else. But none of the men she spent time with could give her anything approaching the rewards she got from running Simitri. And whenever the thought of motherhood came up, she quickly pushed it back down. Who needed to open that can of worms when her maternal needs were more than met by her boys and the many other employees under her care.

With every passing year, Barb grew more and more content inside her cozy walled garden. But as we're taught by the oldest story of all, wherever there's a paradise, a serpent must eventually come calling.

#

This one's name was Peter Jackery. He headed one of the largest private equity firms in the country, buying up tech companies, holding them for a year or two before selling them for three to five times his purchase price. He accomplished this magic trick by ruthlessly downsizing the staff, stripping the remaining employees of their benefits, and slashing every other expense to the bone. This made the company massively profitable—on paper. It also had the unfortunate side effect of decimating its productivity. But by the time that became apparent, he'd already sold it and moved on to his next victim.

The boys—who were in their forties by now but still boys in Barb's eyes—tried to hide the meeting from her. They didn't know she had access to all of their calendars—even the ones they thought private. She spotted the same mysteriously vague entry on both Simon and Dmitri's personal calendars almost before they'd finished entering it. 5:30 PM at an address she all too clearly remembered from twenty-five years before.

When 5:30 rolled around, Barb grabbed her satchel and crossed the busy avenue to the Denny's, still standing after all these years. Dmitri and Simon were in the same booth at the back. Opposite them was a hunched figure, intensely holding forth. Barb recognized him immediately. Peter Jackery's face had graced more than a few breathless stories in the financial press touting his brilliance and business acumen. In person, his appearance proved less imposing. He was on the short side, with pinched features, almost ferret-like, and a prematurely receding hairline. What he lacked in purely physical assets, however, he more than made up for in force of personality. From yards away, Barb could feel the sheer power of his will and the charismatic confidence pouring off him. He held the boys spellbound, and Barb knew she'd need to armor herself before he trained his powers her way. She reminded herself of the stories she'd heard from the victims of his buyout schemes. He might be a good talker, but behind that talk lay a trail of corporate ruin and human misery.

"Mind if I join you?" Barb said, dragging a chair over to the booth.

Dmitri and Simon had the grace to be embarrassed, while Jackery trained his attention her way, openly looking her up and down before visibly dismissing her as beneath his dignity to acknowledge.

"Who the hell is this?" he said to Simon and Dmitri.

"I'm a stakeholder in the company you've come here to raid," she said.

Jackery's eyes flicked back her way. He once again looked her over, letting his eyes linger on her body. Finding her neither sexually attractive nor physically imposing, he turned his mouth down as if spotting a cockroach floating in his soup.

"Is this going to be a problem?" he said to the boys.

"We're the founders," said Dmitri. "We make the decisions."

"She's our office manager," added Simon.

"Get along," Jackery said to her, flicking his fingers as if dismissing an impudent child. "This is an executive-level discussion."

"That makes it my job to take notes," she said, pulling her steno pad out of the satchel. "For the record."

"Didn't you hear me?" said Jackery, clearly unused to being challenged. "I said, get along."

"I don't answer to you," said Barb, careful to keep her tone calm and professional. "If Simon and Dmitri want me to leave, they'll have to say so themselves."

With both Barb and Jackery's attention focused their way, the boys looked more uncomfortable than she'd ever seen them. She could tell they wanted to appear powerful in Jackery's eyes, but they were simply too decent to dismiss her as he had. After a long and painful silence, Dmitri finally spoke.

"It can't hurt to have a record, can it?"

"Sounds good to me," chimed in Simon.

A flash of annoyance flitted across Jackery's face, but he quickly swallowed it and resumed training his attention on the boys.

"As I was saying, there are painfully few actual geniuses in Silicon Valley, but you two are the real deal. It's a goddamn shame the market doesn't recognize your worth. Your share price should be ten—maybe twenty—times what it is. Even if it were, pitifully little of that value would be in your pockets. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to be a billionaire on paper, but you know what's even nicer?"

"Having that money in our pockets?" ventured Dmitri.

"Bingo! And I can make that happen."

As he continued his spiel, Barb dutifully took down every word in perfect shorthand while simultaneously forming a response to counteract the spell he was weaving. When he paused to let his message sink in, she took her opportunity.

"Two years ago, you bought Fireflash, fired 25% of the developers, halved the sales team's commissions, and eliminated the bonus program. Today, it's worth less than a third of its original valuation. With Nutrishine, it was 30% of the developers, and the company is currently in bankruptcy."

"In both cases, the drop in value occurred after my involvement was finished," he said, addressing himself to Simon and Dmitri. "And, to be frank, neither of those companies were of the caliber of what you've created. Your operation is a well-tuned machine. I'd be a fool to tamper with it."

He reached into a briefcase by his side and drew out two contracts, which he slid across the table. When Simon and Dmitri saw the number prominently displayed on the first page, their eyes got big, and Barb knew she'd lost them. She did her best, laying out story after story of how Jackery's operation had destroyed companies and ruined lives, but nothing she said could match the allure of cold, hard cash.

"With money like this, whatever you dream, you can have," said Jackery. "A mansion. Done! Servants at your beck and call. Done! Your own private island. Bam! It's yours. Plus a yacht to ferry you there and back."

"You get seasick," Barb said to Dmitri.

"That's why you'll have a fleet of private jets," said Jackery, displaying the barest hint of annoyance at her interruption. "With pilots on call 24/7 and hand-picked flight attendants to cater to your every desire. And I mean every desire."

Despite Barb's warnings, Simon and Dmitri succumbed to Jackery's crude but effective temptation and signed over all rights to Simitri.

In short order, the hatchet men swooped in. Jackery's hand-picked CEO took an axe to the staff, eliminated bonuses, and swapped out the health plan for one that routinely denied all claims. Barb did her best to overrule the new HR vultures, saving whatever jobs she could and securing a decent and humane severance for those she couldn't.

It wasn't long before the new CEO learned of her actions, and two security guards appeared at her desk to usher her from the building and into a premature retirement.

#

For Barb, this moment represented the shattering of her world. For Peter Jackery, it was another day at the office. He couldn't know—neither of them could—that this was merely the first round in a fight he would come to regret ever starting.