“Dude, I’ve fucked up. Really bad,” whispered Chuck.
“What happened?” I asked, from the other end of the line.
“I… killed a patient.”
“I’m sorry man,” I said, “Not many people could do your job. These things happen.”
“No, you don’t understand,” he hissed, sounding alarmed, like he was grasping for words.
“Right, let me put it plain and simple,” he continued, “I grabbed my big ass drill, smashed his unconscious head in on the operating table, and kept bashing until he was dead. Blood everywhere. Nurses screaming. EKG Flatlined.”
I was dumbfounded. Silence.
“Why?” I finally choked, hoping he would reply that it was all a prank. It wasn’t.
“I don’t fucking know,” he whimpered. “It was a regular hip replacement, done these hundreds of times, no issue. I was hammering away, I couldn’t get the socket in the right place, then… then I just saw red. Normally I would get a bit irritated, adjust the angle a bit and carry on. Like a normal person. But for some reason today, in that moment, I suddenly became more pissed than I have in my entire life. Like, if I rated my anger on a scale of zero to ten, I was a fucking ten thousand. I don’t even know why it irritated me so bad. I just wasn’t myself. That wasn’t me, that wasn’t me…” He was crying, and I had no idea what to say.
“Where are you right now?” I asked, after a pause that seemed like eternity. “Where are your colleagues and the patient?”
“I ran from theatre to my office, locked myself in here. But I won’t be here for long. They’ve called security and the police, I saw them doing CPR on the patient. He’s still a bloody pulp on the operating table. Everyone saw what happened. John, I’m done for. My life is finished. Eight years of med school. A five year residency. Twenty years doing surgeries. My family, friends, kids. Everything. Gone. Down the drain. It was nice knowing you, man.”
“Look,” I sighed, sweating but trying to sound calm, “If it happened, then it’s happened. There’s no going back. Just be honest. If you need anything with legal expenses or family stuff, I’ll see what I can do to help. Face it. Whatever comes your way, at least you can take pride in the fact that you’re not hiding anything or making excuses.”
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” he said, defeated, “Not much to hide anyway.”
Banging erupted from the other end of the line.
“This is the police, open the door!”
“Shit,” he muttered, and hung up.
I collapsed backwards onto the bed, shaking, wondering what the hell I had just heard. I pinched my balding head in utter disbelief. Was this a nightmare?
My wife found me there breathing heavily, and she thought I was having a heart attack. After we both calmed down, I explained the phone call to her. Chuck was my best friend of thirty something years - one of the most successful, smart, talented and level-headed people I knew. And somehow, he had randomly lost his shit in a few seconds, along with the rest of his life.
My wife happened to be a senior manager of the hospital where Chuck practised as a leading orthopaedic surgeon. She was also familiar with him, and saw him regularly at work. According to her, he didn’t behave strangely at all prior to the incident. So I imagined she was even more disturbed to hear the news.
“What in the bloody devil’s name made him do that?” She exclaimed.
“Beats me,” I sighed.
“He’ll need a wicked lawyer to get out of that one,” she rubbed her forehead.
Perhaps she could pull some strings for Chuck, get him a lighter sentence or something, I suggested. It was awful what he did, but I knew the guy - there was no way he meant it. She said she could try, but was doubtful. In the end, he didn’t plead insanity. He admitted to everything up front and got sentenced to life in prison.
Over the next year, three more ‘incidents’ happened at the hospital where my wife worked. Apparently, a top psychiatrist told a suicidal patient that if they wanted to kill themselves, they should ‘just do it’, and even provided guidance on the fastest methods. The psychiatrist was promptly fired, and later said she greatly regretted saying that, suggesting she herself may have had psychosis at the time but lacked insight, ironically.
A few months later, a doctor tried to take blood from an elderly demented patient sixty seven times. For context, if the doctor can’t find a vein after around three attempts, they’re supposed to stop and ask someone else to try, or use imaging guidance. This doctor got so frustrated with himself that he wouldn’t stop until the patient was covered in bruises, with no idea what was gong on.
The final incident was the wildest. It involved another surgeon who cut his own finger off with a scalpel and insisted putting it inside the patient’s abdominal cavity for “good luck”. He was later struck off for obvious reasons. He said he had no idea why he did that, but thought it would be funny at the time.
My wife seemed as baffled as I was. The odd hospital scandal would occur every few years, she explained, but it usually involved something like a doctor shagging a patient or accidentally leaving swabs inside them during surgery. Still pretty horrifying, but innocuous compared to the insanity that had occurred over the last year. Patients and their relatives who were aware, understandably became terrified of attending that hospital. One eighty year old man requested a transfer, literally as he was having a heart attack in the ED.
As the CEO of a technology company myself, I sympathized with their parent company’s plummeting share price as investors pulled out by the droves. I suggested to my wife that she should get a new job. I was happy to make recommendations, but she was confident they’d relocate her soon.
I met up with an old friend who was a doctor at a hospital in a different state, and we discussed the recent turn of events over some pad Thai.
“Surely they were on coke or something,” he said. “Medical people, we’re usually pretty conservative types. Unless we take stuff. Then we go apeshit.”
“Nah,” I shook my head, “they all tested negative for anything elicit.”
“Huh, weird. Sounds like what happens to those homeopaths that microdose weird shit. Maybe there was something in the food,” he joked.
I wanted to see the place for myself at least, and do some amateur detective work. If there was a ghost haunting the place turning everyone mad, I might be able to spot that much. One long day at work that seemed to drone on forever, I decided to leave early and hopped on a train to my wife’s hospital a few stops away. As I entered through the huge revolving glass doors, all my senses were heightened. There was a few shops on the ground floor, wards and operating theatre on the second, more wards on the third. I had a snoop around and struck up a conversation with a few of the patients and staff, asking them how their day was. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except the place was a lot more empty than when I had last been here a few years ago, for good reason. I sent my wife a text letting her know I was there, but she didn’t reply. Busy woman, I thought, especially with all the recent shenanigans. No point in disturbing her.
Staff were on their lunch break, queuing up on the ground floor cafeteria. Surgeons, nurses, doctors, security guys and other supporting personnel in uniforms. Patients mostly had food in their rooms, and didn’t mingle much with the staff. I joined the queue for beef pie, potatoes and salad on the menu. My portions were slapped on the plate and I swiped my credit card, then made my way to a table in the corner.
I picked up my fork and looked down at my food. An uneasy feeling washed over me. What if, I thought, as I remembered the recent conversation with my doctor friend. There was a one in a million chance, but a little curiosity couldn’t hurt.
I poured my entire plate into an empty plastic bag I had in my briefcase. Later, I sent a sample of it off to a toxicology lab. I laughed to myself at the insanity of it all, as I was stuffing the boiled potato into a plastic tube. The ideas I came up with were really hit or miss, as my wife would put it. Still, my intuition had gotten me reasonably far in business and in life. ‘Try, fail, iterate, succeed’ was my life motto, as long as it was in good faith. But above all, I always had fun and learned something new.
The report on the sample came back a week later. I scratched my head as I stared in disbelief.
Toxic levels of mercury in the sample, it concluded.
“You sure this is right?” I called them.
“We’ve repeated it five times,” said the guy on the other end, “where’d you even get that from?” I was too stunned to speak.
“Well,” he continued, “might want to file a police report against whoever’s poisoning your potatoes. Just sayin’.”
“I got it from some food they were serving at a hospital cafeteria, you know the one,” I finally said.
“Oh, that hospital. Blimey. Explains a lot.”
“But… surely not,” I stammered, “Must be an accident. A leak or something. Or some motherfucker’s got balls of steel. It’s a bloody hospital. They really thought nobody would find out?”
“You say that, but this has been under the radar for…” he paused, “almost two years now?”
“Don’t they get blood tests or something? Checkups? Anything?”
“The patients, yeah. Not the doctors. Certainly wouldn’t get toxicology tests for no reason if they don’t show any symptoms,” he scoffed, “I mean, the amount of mercury in that potato, if it was the same concentration throughout the whole meal, definitely ain’t enough to kill a person. You wouldn’t notice anything after a meal. You might’ve heard of some Russian who tried to assassinate a guy with it a couple years back, it’s like a thousandth of the amount used there. But mercury builds up in your blood. It’s hard to get rid of. So if you ate a bit every day and it stacked up, well… wouldn’t be hard to imagine someone going off their rocker after a few weeks.”
I did a quick Google search. Side effects of mercury poisoning: reduction in muscle strength, problems with memory, mood swings, mental health issues, among other concerning symptoms.
Jesus, I thought, no wonder Chuck went mad. The cafeteria food was slowly killing him. I rushed to the nearest police office to file a report, and called my wife on the way. When she didn’t pick up, I texted her.
Honey, this is going to seem out of the blue, DO NOT eat the food at the hospital. Come home ASAP, will explain.
My wife was a health nut, and usually packed her own lunch, but I wasn’t risking it. I gave the police the story and report, and a few hours of questioning later, they said they would look into it and stay in contact. I returned home late that night, eager to tell my wife about what had happened, but she still wasn’t home. She hadn’t called me, and didn’t reply to any of my texts.
I later found out that she had been arrested.
As soon as I made the report earlier that afternoon, they dispatched a group of officers to the hospital and confirmed that the canteen food did indeed contain toxic levels of mercury. They quickly interviewed the chefs, staff, patients and managers. All the ground floor stores were shut down. Anyone under suspicion was brought to the police station for further questioning. After the first round of a length investigation, it turns out that, the managers collectively orchestrated the plan.
They asked chefs to sprinkle mercury in all the dishes, telling them it was vitamins, and had been doing so for the past two years. The company had been experiencing financial trouble as a result of some poor investment decisions. For some reason, they decided the best way to downsize and cover that up at the same time was to make the staff mentally ill so they would make more mistakes, and eventually get the place shut down as a result of it. They all knew this whole time - ten of them in total, including my wife. While it was hard to pin the blame on any single person, things didn’t look good for any of them. The case had gained widespread attention, and no amount of money or connections was getting them out of this one. Some people even accused me of being in on it, despite being the one to blow the whistle in the first place.
I visited my wife at the police station. My mind drew a blank when I saw her.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said tearfully, “How could I? You’re going to say you married a monster.”
“You killed innocent people,” I said quietly, “while you lied to me every night.”
“I don’t know what was going through my mind. You’re not going to believe me. When they suggested it, for some reason, we were all convinced it was the perfect idea at the time. All ten of us. The company wasn’t doing so well. A bunch of executives had invested in some dumb shit that went into the ground with company, and they were scrambling to hide it and fudge the accounting. All the clinics ran on debt for months. Then they told us the only way to survive was to downsize - they did the math, and the entire hospital would have to close. And the only way to fire a shit ton of people for no reason without bringing suspicion was to make doctors fuck up and blame it on them. We were promised bonuses and they told us as long as we played along, our jobs would be safe. We’d get relocated to a competitor if things ever went south. They gave us a bunch of reasons for why we’d never get caught.”
I put my head in my hands, exasperated.
“Sarah, are you hearing yourself right now?”
“Baby,” she said, sobbing at this point, “I don’t know why I did it. You know me, I would never do something like this. Yet when they told us to, I couldn’t help but think it was the best idea anyone had ever thought of,” she wept.
“If the executives told you to jump off a cliff, you’d do it too?”
My heart ached. I looked at her pitifully, seeing the sweet girl I had met at university.
“The execs didn’t come up with the idea either,” she said solemnly. “By they, I meant The Advisory.”
I stopped.
“Wait, you mean… The Advisory and Company?”
She nodded.
The Advisory & Co. was a management consulting firm. They were one of those weird mysterious companies marketed, exclusively by word of mouth to counsel executives on how to improve efficiency in their businesses. An old colleague of mine who became the chief operations officer of a large retail company had recommended them to me a few years back, and I had received several more since then.
“They’re just amazing,” he told me, “they tell you how to cut and people don’t even get offended. Sounded too good to be true, obviously I was sceptical at first. But they’ve got their ways. You’ve got to try them, I can set you up for a meeting. They’ve reinvented us,” he said, excited and starry eyed. Annoyingly, he had the balance sheets to show for it. They claimed to have several high profile clients, but who they worked with and even employed as partners was a closely guarded secret. There was rumor that the consultants they employed weren’t even allowed to say they worked for The Advisory.
I never took on those recommendations, despite the glowing reviews. Wasn’t a fan of those companies in the business of ‘doing business’, telling you to cut costs just so you can pay them millions. Gave me Ponzi vibes. The intelligence could be helpful, but I never bothered to look into it.
“You’re saying they told you to poison people with mercury?”
“Yeah, and somehow convinced us it was a great idea. I must not have lost my mind, I really don’t know how,” she repeated.
“Well,” I said, shocked, “that’ll be something to bring up in court.”
“Nobody even knows who works for them,” she said, “Some people think they don’t even exist. Who are they gonna arrest? When we met with them, they all wore masks. Besides, you can’t arrest someone for giving advice. They tell us what to do, we do it because we trust them and paid them a crap ton, then we take all the blame.”
“They wore masks? What is this, a horror movie?”
“They had their reasons,” she insisted.
“Why would you trust a faceless company to tell you what to do?”
“They had stunning reviews from people we really trusted. When we spoke to them, they knew everything. About us, even all the insider secrets from the competition.”
“That’s the biggest red flag ever.” I shook my head. “If they told you the competitors’ secrets, what’s to stop them telling them yours? Worse yet, if a competitor is paying them more than you, what’s to stop them stabbing you in the back? I mean, they literally tried to recruit you to a competitor. Could it get any more obvious?”
She struggled to come up with an answer. But my biggest question was still how on earth all ten of them decided it was a ‘good idea’. People in the big business space often get brainwashed by social proof and the promise of big bucks to the point of losing their morality, especially under desperate circumstances. Nothing new. I liked to think I was one of the better guys, though looking back, even I made a few deals that I now regret for reasons other than financial. But this was no greed - it was utter stupidity. I struggled to fathom that I was talking to the intelligent, righteous girl I had married twenty eight years ago who wanted to cure cancer.
“I’ll have a dig into this company, and see what I find. Other than that…” I looked down. “I really have nothing to say.”
“You’ve got to help me, John, please!” She wailed, as I left the station.
I got in touch with the old colleague who had recommended me The Advisory.
“Ah, finally seeing the light are you now, Johnny?” He chuckled, as he handed me a phone number on a torn slip of paper. “It’ll be very weird at first. Believe me, I was very weirded out. But I assure you, they know their stuff.”
“Can’t hurt to try,” I said, smiling painfully.
I sat alone on my couch that evening as I called the number. A friendly woman’s voice beamed from the other end.
“Good evening, The Advisory speaking. How may we help?”
“Hello, I was recommended your services by a good friend of mine,” I said, “So I was wondering-“
“Brilliant!” The voice exclaimed. “We’ll order a taxi over to pick you up right outside your doorstep on Brock Lane in roughly twenty minutes. All expenses covered. Talk soon!” The line hung up.
I had never felt both accommodated and violated at the same time. Realistically, I understood that they had so many connections that extracting my personal data from some random company I had given it to in the past was like a piece of cake. Either that, or they hacked my phone in five seconds. So this is the full Advisory & Co. experience, I thought. Fuck, I’m getting kidnapped. I scribbled a note on a piece of paper and left it on my dining room table. ‘If I disappear, The Advisory killed me.’
Against my better judgement, I stepped outside. A black Mercedes AMG slipped onto my road, and a man in a white mask stepped out. It was the smiling variant of one of those comedy-tragedy theatre masks. Weird is an understatement, I thought, I’m in the fucking Purge or something.
“Good evening sir,” the man said,
“Hi,” I waved.
“I’m your driver, here to ensure a comfortable ride. For security purposes, we must check your person and ask you to leave all communication devices and valuables in the safe. They will be returned at the end of the meeting.”
He opened up the boot which contained a large grey safe, door open. I hesitantly put my phone and wallet in the safe as he patted me down. He fished my house keys from my pocket. “And these too,” he said, tossing them into the safe. He slammed the boot and opened the back passenger door for me. I climbed in and was enveloped by the scent of Febreeze.
The entire drive lasted over an hour. We turned into corners I never thought existed, and by the time I arrived, I had no clue where I was. Proabably as intended. The masked man opened the door for me, and I stepped out to see a massive glass building in the shape of a pyramid, as tall as a skyscraper. The ground floor was enormous and had black tinted windows all the way around. The floors above were completely transparent, and masked people lounged around in offices. They were drinking coffee, typing at computers and talking to each other. It was oddly quiet outside for a street with so many tall buildings.
I followed the masked man to a set of tall, revolving glass doors, and entered. A woman wearing the same mask was waiting for me at the lobby.
“Lovely to meet you, Mr Walker. You can call me Juliette,” even though I couldn’t see her face, I could hear a smile through her voice.
“Evening,” I nodded.
“This way,” she gestured to the elevator. We got inside and she pushed the button to the tenth floor.
“You look a little nervous,” she said, “I’ll address the elephant in the room now. As you can tell, we operate differently to other consulting companies. In other words, we’re weird.”
Glad we’re on the same page with that one, I thought, as I laughed politely.
“That’s because our intelligence is unrivalled by any other firm. So we protect the identities of our partners, who work hard to solve real world problems with the most influential organizations.”
We stepped out of the elevator.
“Who have you worked with?” I asked.
“The identity of all our clients is also strictly confidential, as are many things here, because we sometimes do advise competing organizations,” she replied, leading me to a glass cubicle. “For instance, we advise pharmaceutical companies, but also regulators. We work with governments, but also unions. Political parties from both sides of the spectrum. Aviation companies and global warming activists. We’ve probably worked with most organizations you’ve ever heard of at one point or another, so it’s my pleasure to be welcoming you onboard.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I sense alarm bells ringing. You’re probably thinking that’s a conflict of interest,” she paused.
“You read my mind,” I replied. She laughed.
“You’re not alone. Our policy is client first, but here we believe the sharing of information benefits not only clients but humanity as a whole. Look at it this way. When pharmaceutical companies better understand regulators’ intentions, which are to keep the public safe, they can better tailor their processes to comply. When regulators understand the challenges pharmaceutical companies face, they can be better informed about what is a realistic guideline to implement. Win-win for both sides.”
“And I assume you advise companies competing in the same industry,” I said.
“Of course, but the same applies. Sharing information between them increases competition, which improves the consumer experience as a whole and thus the entire industry. Or perhaps a merger would benefit them. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. We can advise in that case. But as a veteran of the business world, I’m sure you know all this, Mr Walker.”
She gestured to a seat which I took, and I perched on a couch opposite. A shiny glass desk separated us, a coffee on her side, a hot chocolate on my side, waiting for us as we entered. I resisted the urge to gulp the entire thing down.
“Anyway, enough of this economics mumbo-jumbo. How can I help you today?” she beamed.
“Just wanted to see what you guys thought, get a run down of my company and see where I can improve,” I said nonchalantly.
“Of course.” She pulled up a slide on a large projector. “We’ve analysed your company and identified 574 potential areas of efficiency improvement. Many of these changes are simple, free things you can do to implement, but will make a massive difference to your bottom line. Here,” she handed me the clicker. “Have a look.”
I spent about twenty minutes flicking through the Powerpoint slides. To my astonishment, their analysis and suggestions made perfect sense. I knew my company well, but for many of them, I wondered how I had never thought of that before.
“The first fifteen slides are free to view. They contain just twenty suggestions. We will cover the remaining 554 over several meetings after negotiating a payment contract. But no pressure. Whether you want to work with us, or implement any of the suggestions we make is entirely up to you. We’re just here to advise, and we won’t force you into anything.”
“I’ll let you know, thank you,” I said.
“Just give us a call and we’ll be right at your doorstep. Hope that wasn’t too much of a surprise.” Her voice was cheerful.
I laughed nervously and we went back down to the ground floor. My wallet, keys and phone were returned to me as promised, untampered with. The same masked taxi driver chauffeured me back along the hour long winding path to my front door, and I collapsed onto my living room couch, alone again in my dark house. It was 4AM.
They were odd indeed, but not unreasonable. Certainly didn’t seem like types to suggest a mass poisoning a hospital. Just some admittedly brilliant corporate analysts in masks, who knew a little too much about everything and everyone. It was a little uncomfortable, but as they said, it didn’t have to be a bad thing. Especially if the rest of those slides were anything like the first twenty pages. I shuddered at the very real possibility that my wife was just a terrible person, trying to pin the blame on an entity that wouldn’t be there to defend itself. I glanced at the note I had left on the table. Silly, I thought. Maybe years in this job had left me paranoid of corporate, while unable to accept the reality that my wife wasn’t the person I thought she was.
I would have been fully duped, maybe even booked a second consultation, if it weren’t for one thing.
During the meeting, I looked at the hot chocolate on the table, and that what if thought came back to me. The one-in-a-million-chance-they-wouldn’t-possibly-do-that-but-still-what-if feeling. There were surveillance cameras everywhere around the pyramid, even inside, so it wasn’t like I could’ve poured that stuff into my bag. As Juliette (if that was even her real name) was busy pulling up the slides, I stood up to straighten out my shirt. In the process, I dipped one of the shirt tails in the hot chocolate, my back facing the camera in the corner of the room. It had dried by the time we finished talking. I sent the shirt off to the toxicology lab for analysis, and the results came back a few days later. Toxic levels of mercury in the cotton.
I can’t imagine what that must have felt like, to be stuck wondering why you were a different person at some moment in time, unable to comprehend your own mind. Neither my wife or Chuck knew why they did what they did. But now I know.
The courts are going to have a field day with this one.