Chapter 5: Planting the Seeds
Chapter 5: Planting the Seeds
The silence that descended upon Liam’s office after the video call was absolute. The faint hum of the servers, a sound he usually found comforting, now felt like the purr of a contented predator. The ghost of Scott Henderson’s bloated, terrified face still lingered on the black screen, a digital trophy of a perfect victory. Liam had followed David Chen’s directive to the letter. He hadn’t just handled the problem; he had annihilated it.
He leaned back, allowing himself a single, slow exhale. The cold fire of his fury had burned down to embers, leaving behind a clean, sharp clarity. He sent a brief, two-sentence email to David and Marcus Thorne: “Henderson account terminated by client request. Full details and call recording attached.” No embellishment was needed. The results spoke for themselves.
Now came the cleanup, the procedural epilogue to the drama. Terminating an account wasn’t a single keystroke. It was a process, a checklist of digital loose ends to be tied off. The most significant of these were the seven Call Tracking Numbers—the CTNs—that had been exclusively assigned to Henderson & Son Contracting for nearly a decade.
These numbers were more than just a string of digits. They were the lifeblood of Henderson’s business, the primary arteries connecting him to his customers. They were printed on the vinyl lettering peeling from the side of his rusting work van. They were on thousands of cheap business cards stuffed into corkboards in local diners and hardware stores. They were on faded magnets clinging to refrigerators all over the county. They were a legacy, and for a business built on local reputation, they were invaluable.
Company protocol was clear and designed to protect Apex from liability. When a client terminated their service, they were given the option to ‘port’ their CTNs to a new provider. It was their property, provided they paid the administrative fee—a modest two hundred dollars per number. It was a simple, transactional process.
Liam initiated the standard automated email to Henderson’s registered address, outlining the procedure and the 30-day window he had to claim the numbers before they were quarantined and eventually returned to the general pool. He knew Henderson was unlikely to even read it in his current state. So, to cover all his bases and create an impeccable paper trail, he followed up with a text message to Henderson’s cell.
He set his phone down, expecting either silence or a one-word profanity. What he got was a deluge. His phone began vibrating against the polished wood of his desk, a frantic, angry buzzing.
Liam watched the messages flood in, a torrent of misspelled rage and self-pity. There was no remorse, no introspection. Only the pathetic lashing out of a bully who had finally been punched back. With the calm precision of an archivist, Liam took a screenshot of each message, saved them to Henderson’s case file under the subfolder “Post-Termination Communications,” and then muted the conversation. The buzzing stopped.
He stared at the muted notification, a small, impotent symbol of Henderson’s impotent fury. The protocol was to do nothing. Wait thirty days. The numbers would be quarantined for another ninety, then released back into the vast, anonymous pool of available lines. Henderson’s business lifeline would simply dissolve into the ether. Justice served. Case closed.
But it didn’t feel closed. It felt… incomplete.
Letting those numbers die felt like a waste. They were valuable assets. Each one was a potential job, a chance for a customer—maybe someone like that desperate army wife, Sarah Miller—to find a contractor who would actually help them. Letting them simply vanish felt like burning down a rotten house but leaving the fertile land it stood on to go to seed.
A new thought, quiet and dangerous, began to take root in the methodical soil of his mind. He wasn't a destroyer. He was a systems analyst. He understood how the complex machinery of Apex worked, its rules and its loopholes. The system was designed to reallocate resources. What if he simply… reallocated them with a purpose?
It would be a flagrant overstep of his authority. It would be an act of corporate sabotage disguised as account maintenance. And it would be the most exquisitely perfect form of poetic justice. Punishing Henderson was one thing. Rewarding his opposite was another level entirely.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up the client database. He filtered by industry: Contracting & Home Repair. Then by geography: Local Service Area. Finally, he sorted by a metric of his own creation: an internal ‘Client Quality Score’ that factored in on-time payments, lead conversion rates, and the tone of their service calls.
The name at the top of the list was Bobby Hayes. Hayes Construction.
Liam opened the file. It was the polar opposite of Henderson’s. Perfect payment history for four straight years. A stunningly high lead-to-job conversion rate of eighty percent. And the call logs… Liam clicked open a random recent recording out of curiosity.
“Ashley speaking, Hayes Construction, how can I make your day better?” a bright, cheerful female voice answered. The client was an elderly woman, flustered about a broken handrail. The woman, Ashley, was patient, kind, and reassuring. She had a quote and a scheduled time locked in within five minutes. Liam pulled up another call. It was Bobby Hayes himself, talking a frantic homeowner through shutting off a water main after a pipe burst, his voice calm and authoritative, promising to be there within the hour.
Liam remembered Bobby from a renewal call six months prior. A salt-of-the-earth guy, all gratitude and easy laughter, who talked about his daughter’s soccer tournament before getting down to business. He was the kind of client who made the job feel worthwhile. A good man running a good business, trying to build something honest for his family. He was everything Scott Henderson was not.
Liam looked at his two monitors, the screens side-by-side. On the left, Scott Henderson’s dead account, a toxic waste dump of racist tirades and canceled services, holding seven valuable, legacy phone numbers hostage. On the right, Bobby Hayes’s thriving account, a clean, well-tended garden of positive reviews and satisfied customers.
An idea, no longer a thought but a fully-formed plan, crystallized in his mind. The porting fee was the key. It was an administrative charge, and as a senior manager with a “free hand,” he had the authority to waive administrative charges under certain circumstances—“to ensure client retention and satisfaction,” as the company handbook so helpfully stated.
He wouldn't be stealing the numbers. Henderson had refused to claim them. He would be following protocol. The numbers would be deactivated, quarantined, and then… re-assigned. And if he happened to put a hold on them during their quarantine and then assign them to a high-value, deserving client as part of a “service upgrade package,” who would ever know? It was just a few clicks. A quiet reallocation of assets buried in a mountain of paperwork.
A slow, cold smile spread across Liam’s face. This was better than just winning. This was rebalancing the universe, one call tracking number at a time. The seeds of a perfect, silent revenge were not just planted. They were about to be watered.
Characters
Ashley Vance
Bobby Hayes
David Chen
