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“You. You can
pass.”
Kelsey just managed
to resist the urge to look behind her; she knew there was nobody there. Her boss’s boss was looking directly at her,
and there was no escape.
“Sir?” she asked,
her voice coming out in a squeak. She’d
worked at the bank for six months, but she’d never met the man who now seemed
to be focused entirely on her. She was
just a teller, while he was…well, the truth was that she didn’t even know
exactly what his position was. He was
powerful and important and had never spoken to her before. She hadn’t expected that would ever change.
“You’re young,” he
said. “You look innocent. You’re dressed too well, of course, but we
can fix that.”
Kelsey glanced
around at the other tellers and personal bankers who worked the front lobby,
trying to determine what was different about her clothing and why being “dressed
too well” might be a problem in the bank.
“Ellen,” he said
tersely to his own secretary, “get her sizes. Go out and pick something up for
her. I don’t want her to be seen outside
until she’s changed.”
“We need a crappy
camera,” he continued, looking around the room.
“Anybody got one here? We can’t
use our regular equipment for this.”
When no one
responded, he looked back at Ellen and said, “Pick up a camera, too. Some kind of little digital that will take
decent pictures but doesn’t look expensive. Maybe go for one of those stupid
colors like lime green or purple. Pick
up a couple of extra memory cards, too.”
He turned back
toward Kelsey. “Young lady,” he
demanded, “do you understand what we need you to do?”
The truth was, she
had no idea what he wanted her to do.
Though the entire bank staff had been called in to this meeting, thus
far it had been largely a strategy session regarding the Occupy Chicago
protesters whose numbers were growing outside the bank, deterring customers
from entering and making some of the employees increasingly nervous. That kind of decision took place far above
Kelsey’s position, and she’d tuned out, never expecting one of the bank’s key
executives to single her out. For a
moment she was frozen, unsure whether to admit that she hadn’t been paying
attention. She’d be taking a risk, but
flying blind on something like this would be even riskier. She had no idea what the camera was for, or
why this executive’s secretary was apparently going to be buying clothes for
her.
Just as she was
about to cop to her wandering mind, inspiration struck. “Why don’t you just lay it out briefly, sir,
so that I can be absolutely sure that we’re on the same page.”
To her relief, he
actually looked pleased. The plan he
laid out, though, certainly didn’t match any plans she might have had. Apparently, she shouldn’t have zoned out
quite so soon. She listened in dismay,
trying to hide her reaction, as Mr. Watson recapped: the protesters outside were becoming
increasingly problematic; it was time that the bank stepped up to protect
itself, and that meant aggressive action.
The first step toward that aggressive action would be for Kelsey,
undercover as a sympathetic college student or low-wage worker or whatever she
thought she could sell, to photograph as many of the protesters as
possible. Once they had clear photos of
the ringleaders, they’d pass them to the bank’s security officers to begin
investigations.
He didn’t say what
he hoped the investigations might uncover, or even what sort of investigations
they might be. He didn’t say anything at
all about what the bank might do with the information gathered or how it might
help with the situation that was unfolding outside their doors.
“We have to protect
ourselves,” was what he did say, and a handful of employees around the room
murmured agreement or nodded their heads. Kelsey knew that some of them were
frightened, leaving the bank in the evening and having to pass by the hoards of
protesters. There hadn’t been any
violence that she was aware of, but looking out into a sea of people who were
protesting your very existence, the work you did every day, the entire system
in which you had chosen to build your career was disconcerting.
She really didn’t
know a lot about the protesters’ issues or whether their complaints were
valid. She wasn’t political
herself. She was, like most people she
knew, just trying to do her job and live her life. She worked to collect a paycheck so she could
afford a nice place to live and enjoy her weekends and evenings without a
thought toward her job. She didn’t hate and fear the protesters like the bank
executives did and some of her colleagues seemed to. She
wasn’t especially interested in helping take them down—or whatever Mr.
Watson had in mind—either. She just
didn’t have any thoughts about them at all.
It seemed, though, that she’d unwittingly committed. And, as some of those signs outside the bank
pointed out, jobs were few and far between at the moment.
While she waited for
Ellen to come back with a change of clothes and her new crappy camera in a
stupid color, she walked to the window and looked down on the courtyard
below. The protesters had been easy to
ignore from up here, but the idea of walking into their midst was more than a
little disconcerting. Chances were good
that they wouldn’t associate her with the bank. That was apparently the whole
point of choosing someone young and relatively new and then changing her out of
her work clothes to send her out into the crowd. But even assuming no confrontations, the
landscape looked a bit dangerous from up here.
People milled in all directions, shouted, chanted and waved signs. She had visions of being crushed or trampled
before she even pulled out her camera.
And what if taking photographs aroused suspicion? What if she were
trapped alone in that roiling mass of people and someone did decide to question
her?
Kelsey felt a little
sick to her stomach and her heart was racing.
A part of her wished she could just slip out the door before Ellen
returned and never look back. This wasn’t what she’d signed on for, for
sure. She wasn’t even sure whether it
was legal for the bank to make her do this:
it certainly wasn’t in her job description.
But the job had a
lot going for it when they weren’t sending her out into a war zone: good hours,
medical insurance and a decent pay rate.
She might not pay much attention to politics, but she knew this wasn’t a
good time to be unemployed, and that made it a worse time to walk out on a good
job with no notice or to put herself at risk of being fired. She wondered briefly whether she could work
up the courage to decline this assignment, and what kind of fallout she could
expect if she did. Maybe they’d just choose someone else and she could go back
to cashing paychecks and selling money orders and ignoring the world outside
her window. She’d nearly worked up the
nerve to make that suggestion when Ellen came bustling back through the door
carrying the familiar plastic bags of a national discount store.
Before Kelsey had a
chance to say a word, the older woman hustled over to her and started pulling
things out of her bags, talking all the while.
“Mr. Watson is so
happy that you’re willing to do this,” she began, seemingly truly unaware that
no one had actually asked Kelsey whether or not she was willing.
“You don’t know how
those people worry him. They’re keeping him up at night. Do you know that last week they named him in
a mock awards ceremony, saying that he’d personally played a role in creating
the economic problems some people are facing today?”
Ellen clearly
considered the idea outrageous, but it was the first Kelsey had heard of it and
the older woman’s words had the opposite of their intended effect. For the first time, Kelsey wondered just what
the bank and its leadership had done to inspire the outrage in the
streets. Had Mr. Watson and his
colleagues, in fact, had a personal hand in the troubles apparently facing the
country? Was she somehow contributing to
that with this subterfuge?
Ellen shook her head
in disgust and almost seemed to respond to Kelsey’s thoughts. “As if anyone were responsible except those
greedy speculators who thought they could flip houses to make a quick fortune. Well, and people buying beyond their
means—everyone seems to have to have the best these days, whether they can
afford it or not. If people made bad
decisions, it’s not Mr. Watson’s fault, or any other banker’s. They shouldn’t have bought what they couldn’t
pay for.”
For the first time
she seemed to notice that Kelsey had been silent since she’d entered the room.
“Don’t you agree?”
she asked in a tone that made it clear that she assumed that all sane and
sentient beings would agree with her entirely.
“I don’t know,” Kelsey
said honestly. Her voice came out small
and uncertain. It wasn’t that she
disagreed with Ellen’s analysis, exactly.
She just didn’t know much about it.
She knew that people disagreed vehemently about who was to blame and
what should be done, but she really hadn’t been paying attention. She didn’t own a house, and thus far her job
had seemed safe. In this moment, it
didn’t feel quite as safe as she’d believed it to be that morning, but she
still had no idea whether it was really nearly impossible to find work, or
whether those who said the unemployed were lazy or too picky had a valid
point. She didn’t much want to start
thinking about it now, so she was grateful when Ellen shifted gears and started
talking to her about the clothing in the bags.
“I bought you a few
outfits, since this will probably take more than one day. If it goes on longer than that, you can
repeat; half those people out there claim to be unemployed and broke, so they
shouldn’t expect you to have an elaborate wardrobe. It would be better if it didn’t all look new,
but what can we do? At least it looks
cheap.
“I got you a pair of
gym shoes, too. You don’t know how long
you’ll be on your feet, and you want to be able to move quickly if you have
to.” At the last comment, the alarm
Kelsey had been fighting rose back to the surface. As Ellen began swiftly removing tags from the
new clothing, she asked, “Ellen…what am I doing, exactly?”
The older woman
looked at her in surprise. “Taking
pictures,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And it was, given that Mr. Watson had
explained that part clearly and had called for a camera. But Kelsey’s question was more complicated.
“I mean, why? How does photographing the protesters protect
us?”
This time, Ellen
looked at her sharply. She appeared to
consider her response carefully, then said lightly, “Haven’t you ever heard
‘know your enemy’?”
Before Kelsey could
ask any further questions, she pressed a set of clothes into her hands and
said, “Go change. I’ll get the camera set up.”
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