Corporate Capers part 1

Part 1:

Sarah was in her bedroom getting dressed. She paused, buttoning her blouse midway up. Her hands were trembling. She forced herself to calm down. She had to act natural. She couldn't give any indication today was anything but a normal day at work.

Sarah was a young business major, fresh out of college with her degree. She'd been lucky enough to land a job as an assistant to of one of the bosses of Green-Line shipping, one of the largest shipping companies in the world.

The position was little more than that of a glorified secretary, Sarah was forced to admit, taking calls, filing papers, fetching coffee, anything her boss, Mr. Chapman, deemed beneath his position. But at least it was a foot in the door. Something to pad her resume and hopefully let her land a real job in a year or two.

Sarah pulled on the jacket of her business suit. She selected a pair of earrings and a necklace from her dresser, put them on, and turned to the mirror to see the effect. Her brown hair was pulled up into a proper, businesslike bun. A pair of glasses framed her bright green eyes. The Brown cloth of her jacket and skirt couldn't hide the shape of her body, developed and honed by countless hours spent at the local gym working out.

At times, Sarah suspected that she'd gotten her job as much for her looks as for her talents. She supposed there were worse problems to be had, but it still rankled her to know that her coworkers thought of her as another pretty bimbo, all looks with nothing between her ears.

               "A pretty bimbo wouldn't have been able to discover what I did." Sarah thought to herself.

A few days ago she'd been sorting through Chapman's memos before she sent them out to whoever they were meant for. He hadn't told her to do it, but she'd done it enough times for him in the past. He wrote his memos in the "passion of the moment" as some of her coworkers joked, and they thus needed more than a little editing to remove all the spelling errors and profanity they were often laced with.

While she'd been going through them, she found one going to a sub-department called the W.S.T. network. Sarah prided herself that she knew the company organization as well as, if not better than her boss. But she'd never heard of any sub-department with the acronym W.S.T.

Her curiosity piqued, Sarah had done a little research in the company records on her own time. The company records were a near impenetrable morass of paperwork. Still, Sarah was able to make enough sense of them to find out one thing: there was no department named W.S.T.; at least not officially.

She hadn't been able to find out anything else that day. Chapman come in just then and sent her after some obscure report he wanted to review. The next couple of days though, Sarah was able to dig a little deeper and find out some more about this mysterious sub-department.

The W.S.T. apparently had a boat assigned to them, a large oceangoing ship, along with a full crew. They also had a warehouse on the docks on a long term lease. These tidbits of information were buried in the paperwork, scattered far and wide. She'd found out about the boat only because the budget for maintenance, and to crew's salaries were added to the budget sheet of another department. Aside from a budget for their salaries, Sarah couldn't find a list of the crew anywhere.

But possibly the biggest bombshell was a memo from the head of W.S.T., a man named Frank Johnson in the heading, to Mr. Chapman. In the memo, Johnson claimed his group would show a profit exceeded $15 billion dollars for that quarter. Sarah doubted that amount showed up on any of the company's reports. By now, Sarah was almost positive her boss is doing something illegal off the books.


Sarah finished getting dressed and left her bedroom. In the kitchen, Sarah met her roommate, Lisa, who was still eating breakfast. The two women shared an apartment. Lisa was a schoolteacher, off for the summer, and, like Sarah, a recent college grad. In fact, they'd been roommates for last two years.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Lisa asked her roommate. Sarah had told her some of what she found out. "Why not just call the police and let them take care of it?"

Sarah shook her head. "There's not enough to go on. I know he's cooking the books, but that's hardly anything to get the police involved. I've got to find some real, hard, evidence he's doing something illegal, before I can blow the whistle."

"Can't you tell the company? If he is cooking the books, that's something they might notice?" Lisa continued, hopefully.

Again, Sarah shook her head. "For all I know, they're in on this as well."
"All right." Lisa said. "I can see you've thought this through." She put a hand on her roommate shoulder. "Just be careful, okay Sarah? Promise me that."

                "Promise." Sarah replied. She reached into her bag and pulled of a USB thumb drive. "I put this together. It contains everything I've found so far. If for some reason I don't come back, take this to the police."

                 Lisa took it with a nod. "Just make sure you do comeback." She added.
On that grim note, Sarah left the apartment and drove to work. Coworkers nodded or waved greetings as she entered the office building that housed the headquarters of the shipping company.

                 "Good morning, Ms. Little." Chapman said, as she sat down at her desk. Sarah looked up at her boss. Did his greeting him in sound off? Did he know? "G-G-Good Morning!" Sarah stammered out, startled.

                 "Stay calm! You're overreacting!" Sarah thought to herself, fighting down her nervousness. Fortunately, Chapman didn't notice her strange behavior, as he walked down to the break room for a fresh cup of coffee. By the time he returned, Sarah had managed to get her nervousness more or less masked.
Sarah spent the morning doing routine paperwork. Getting things from point A to point B, and making sure the right things got to the right points, took a lot of paperwork. Some of it was hers; a lot of it was Chapman's that he couldn't be bothered to look at.
                 
                 Sarah did it without question. It gave her something to do while she waited for an opportunity to look around for the files she needed. "You'll get yours soon enough." Sarah thought to herself, glancing over at the door to Chapman's office. She was looking forward to seeing the look on Chapman's face when her boss's crooked dealings, whatever they were, were finally exposed.
The day passed slowly, or at least it felt that way to Sarah. Finally, around noon, she got her chance, when Chapman took his lunch break. She knew, Chapman wouldn't be back for at least an hour, maybe more. Plenty of time to search his office.

                Doing her best to calm her racing heart, which wasn't nearly good enough, Sarah hurried into Chapman's office, before any of her coworkers saw her.
She was in luck! He had forgotten to log off his computer before he'd left. Sarah was pretty confident she could have guessed his password, but now she wouldn't have to try.

                Sarah inserted a thumb drive and began opening folders and searching for anything that might give her some real evidence about her bosses wrong doings. She was so absorbed in the search that she didn't hear the door to her boss's office open.

               "Looking for something, Ms. Little?" A voice said. Sarah, jumped, startled, and looked up. Chapman stood at the door, grinning frightfully. Besides him was one of Sarah's coworkers, a man named Griffin, one of Chapman's cronies.
Sarah hurriedly tried to think of an alibi; some reason to explain why she was looking through Chapman's files. But she knew it was futile. She'd been caught red-handed…