Kent sat in a very fine restaurant in Paris. The IT workers in this location were giving him the royal treatment trying to hang onto their jobs. Given that some of the board members liked to vacation in France, Kent had put this data center as the last one on the list before the central two. The bank was still going to have to keep some kind of offices here so board members could take “business trips” to France. These trips always coincided with the start of their vacations, but thankfully neither the shareholders nor the IRS had called them on it.

Prior to lunch, Kent had asked each of the department heads to come up with a migration plan for this division of the bank to use the existing bank system rather than the one their bank currently used. The deadline for them to get it to him was Friday. They had complained that all of the work currently being done in the existing system wouldn’t allow them time to prepare such a migration plan. Kent told them to stop all work on the system and to begin mapping the data for load into First Global Bank’s existing system.

What Kent didn’t know was they had already done this work a year ago at Margret’s request. They had a list of business rules that must be added to First Global Bank’s system before it could be used, but the bulk of the data mapping was already in place. They would have to spend less than a day updating it. In effect, Kent had given them the rest of the week off when he put in writing no further work was to occur on the system they supported. Most spent the rest of the day updating their résumés and talking with family on the phone. Nobody there was stupid enough to believe they still had a job.

Kent’s real reason for going on this trip was to get everyone putting together a plan to migrate their systems into the primary system used by the original bank. He was visiting the data centers in reverse migration order so if the migration project came in late, he would be able to pitch the “world view” project to the board as the natural completion. Kent hadn’t bothered to read any of the documentation Margret had emailed him prior to contracting with Big Four Consulting to do the data center migrations. If he had, the data center migration project wouldn’t be happening at all.

Now he sat in a very fine restaurant drinking very fine wine and eating very fine food. Only the heads of this bank division were at the table, and they were sparing no expense. They all knew Kent presented projects to the board. Everyone at the table was wondering just how long they were going to have a job. They were only too happy to agree when he said they had to schedule a training session on how to use the main system for First Global Bank. He told them to contact Margret and obtain a pair of trainers from her. All of their employees needed to be trained by the end of next month. Kent had no idea if the system could be cut over in that time frame, but he intended to make them fear for their livelihoods. There were several other sites Kent wanted to see in France before moving on to the next location and he didn’t expect to pay a dime to see them.

Tactically, it would have made more sense to have had this location migrated first. It had the highest cost of operation in the company. Because of the lax work attitude in France, they had twice the operations and programming staff of any division. Payroll and other worker-related taxes paid here by the bank were astronomical. If they really could simply cut over, Kent would be able to eliminate all but one IT person here and sell off all of the computer equipment along with the building the data center was in. Real estate prices had risen in this area and they could ask a premium for a fully equipped data center.

Kent assigned the task of getting the data center up for sale to the VP in charge of business real estate mortgages. The head of IT simply looked at his plate as if it were his last meal. Kent saw this out of the corner of his eye and got an erection from the power rush. He then changed the conversation to what sounded like small talk, dropping in hints of what he wanted to see before leaving. Every VP at the table, except the VP of IT, volunteered to take him as their guest. Ahhh … It’s good to be King! Kent thought.

—–

Nikolaus was sitting at his desk going over reports on freezer construction and existing freezer utilization when his phone rang. The voice on the other end told him the interrogators were finished with the two occupants of the first camp. As instructed, the person calling Nikolaus informed the interrogators they could just go home and everything would be handled. Nikolaus told the caller to transfer the prisoners.

As soon as he hung up the phone, Nikolaus picked up a disposable cell phone and called a special number. When they answered and exchanged pass phrases, Nikolaus told them to assemble the teams; there was a transfer in progress.
 
***********************
You are reading a special promotional version of “Infinite Exposure” containing only the first 18 chapters. This is the first book of the “Earth That Was” trilogy. You can obtain the entire trilogy in EPUB form from here:


<Previous Part Next Part>