Horrified into a state of catatonia by the constant reminder that someone had launched an assault on the Regional Office. Horrified that in the meantime, someone had also wrenched her mechanical arm from her body.
That.
She had become quite good at pretending to be that.
It helped—if helped was the right word—that they helped by repeatedly hitting her in the face or the back of the head or shocking her with electrodes and asking her if she was so tough now, now that she didn’t have her mechanical arm.
Hitting her without questioning her. Hitting her just to hit her.
That is to say: Some of the times she might not have been pretending.
But right now, she pretended to be asleep. She’d closed her eyes. She’d done her best to relax and deepen her breathing, make it regular. Her chin had fallen so that it just barely touched her chest. She was doing her best to convince the people who had her hostage that she was asleep, not because that might keep them from stomping up to her to wake her, hit her more, but because through the cracked office door she could hear their radios and she wanted to listen without their knowing she was listening because listening gave her hope, because what she could hear was not good, not good for them, not good for them at all.
There were shouts and screams and gun bursts of a violent but confused and frightened nature. Someone shouted out of the walkie-talkie something along the lines of, Blue Team! Blue Team! Report in! Report!, with little success. Someone else suggested sending Emerald Team to go check in with Blue Team but before panic could take firm hold of these panicky mercenaries, Wendy—that asshole intern Wendy—told everyone to shut the fuck up and calm the fuck down because no one was going to check on Blue Team and don’t you idiots watch television, watch movies? Don’t you idiots know that sending team after team after team is like throwing good money after bad? Everyone sticks to the plan, she told them, and that’s that.
Sarah pretended she was sleeping but in her sleep, she smiled. Not a big smile, not a triumphant smile, but a sly and knowing, tiny, barely perceptible smile.
39.
“No one respects me,” Sarah told Mr. Niles, shortly after he’d appointed her his right-hand man, no pun intended.
“They will,” he’d said. “Give it time,” he’d said. “Show them the you I know, and they will fall in line, and they will respect you,” he’d said.
Hearing this, she’d wondered, in the far back of her mind, But will they like me?
And slightly farther back than that she’d wondered, Who is the real me?
Because she didn’t know. Before, she’d been a certain kind of person—who went to college, whose childhood had been scarred by personal tragedy—and after that, she’d become a different sort of person, the kind of person who possessed a mechanical arm and had been given the opportunity to exact formidable vengeance on those who’d caused her childhood tragedy.
But now, and outside of that, who was she?
Not that it mattered. For all the efforts she made to be the kind of boss that would make them feel respect, or awe, or fearful regard, the people who worked for her, the people she was in charge of, didn’t fall in line, respect her, or like her.
Except Henry.
Henry seemed to like her, or to not dislike her, anyway. They acted like friends, or close acquaintances.
He listened to her, that is, when it seemed that Mr. Niles had stopped.
“No one respects me,” she would tell Henry over lunch or a drink. “No one likes me.”
And he would take a bite of salad or a sip of beer and say, “You’re kind of an asshole sometimes.” Or he would say, “You’re an easy target.”
“They act like I’m an office manager,” she would tell him. “They tell me when the copier needs new toner. Or when they need new Post-it notes. Or when the water cooler bottle needs to be changed. Or when the interns fuck up. They tell me these things and then walk away and then laugh, I can hear them laugh. All those nine-to-fivers, laughing at me.”
And inevitably, he’d say: “You’re not the office manager?” Or, “Wait, who is the office manager?”
And every time, even though she knew what he was doing, she’d say: “Carol. Carol’s the fucking office manager.”
And he’d laugh and he’d tell her, “See? You’re too sensitive,” or, “They know this pisses you off,” or, “You have to ignore it,” or, “You can’t let them get to you.”
Easy enough for Henry to say, though. People liked Henry. People waited for Henry to speak before offering their own opinions, which often closely mirrored Henry’s. They went to him for advice about things he knew nothing about and listened to him even more attentively when he claimed—truthfully—that he didn’t have the answers.
Henry never had to ignore the things she couldn’t ignore. These jokes and pranks and personal slights always got to her. And why shouldn’t they have? She’d laid waste to an entire secret black-ops organization that had been terrorizing the Western world for going on thirty years. When a few office drones called her into the break room because they couldn’t open a jar of pickles and they needed her with her mechanical arm to loosen the top up for them, except that the top had already been loosened, or manipulated in such a way that by giving it a good twist, the whole jar exploded, throwing pickle juice all over her and the floor and the walls and the ceiling, even though she’d used her nonmechanical arm against this very eventuality, when a thing like that happened, she couldn’t very well let them get away with that.
She had pickle juice in her hair for fuck’s sake.
Henry had told her to laugh it off, to let it go, that to address it only fueled it.
But as far as she could see, Henry wasn’t the one with pickle juice in his hair.
40.
The truth of the matter was, Sarah wouldn’t have cared as much about the nine-to-fivers (“They know you call them that,” Henry had told her) if she’d had a better track record with the Operatives, who were, in her own mind, more closely aligned with her and her hybrid position at the office.
Sarah met her first Operative for the Regional Office a month after she recovered from obtaining a new arm. Before then, Mr. Niles had kept Sarah mostly to himself and to the doctor, whose leg was healing nicely. For most of a month, she spent her days in the lab or recovering in her room.
“Soon enough,” Mr. Niles told her, “you’ll meet everyone else. Henry, our Recruiter. The Operatives.”
“Is that what I am?” she asked. “An Operative?”
Mr. Niles laughed and said, “No, no, Sarah. You’re a client. We work for you. All of this,” he said, gesturing at her room, her mechanical arm, the file full of information about her mother’s disappearance, “is for you.”
The training, too, or so he explained it. Because she was not the type of woman to be satisfied to know others had avenged her mother on her behalf. No. Mr. Niles could tell. She would only be satisfied if the vengeance was hers. The arm, the training, the recon and support—these were offered to her by the Regional Office. All of that, and the wisdom and experience of the Regional Office’s own Operatives.
The first Operative she met was Jasmine, and she was tall and statuesque and dark-complected and the most striking woman Sarah had ever seen except that standing behind Jasmine, waiting for Jasmine’s cue, were four or five more of the most striking women Sarah had ever seen. She didn’t know the names of the others but she knew Jasmine’s name because Jasmine was the loudest and brashest of the Operatives she’d seen on campus since she’d arrived, since she’d begun her own training session. She laughed the loudest, often at her own jokes, and in the training room, she screamed the loudest when she attacked, loud enough that Sarah could hear her scream even through the sealed door, the protected viewing windows.
“Hi,” Sarah said, holding out her hand for Jasmine to shake. “I’m Sarah.”
“You’re Jasmine, right?” Sarah said, trying to keep any emotions out of her voice. She was wondering how long she would keep her hand held out like that, how long before Jasmine either took it or acknowledged it, or before Sarah let it drop back to her side.
“I don’t shake robot hands,” Jasmine said, the beginnings of a smirk creeping into her lips.
“It’s not,” Sarah began, about to share the secret of which hand was which, but then she remembered and shifted, seamlessly, she hoped. “A problem,” she finished, and brought her hand back down to her side and then put it inside her other hand, and then let it drop to her side again, feeling self-conscious suddenly about what to do with her hands.
“I’m supposed to train with you guys this morning,” she said. Jasmine shook her head and frowned and turned and started walking, the others falling in step behind her. Sarah hated herself for doing this, but she did a half-jog to keep up with Jasmine, who must have been at least seven feet tall. Sarah smiled up at Jasmine as if any of this behavior were normal behavior and continued, “I’ve been doing a lot of one-on-one work with Robert, martial arts Robert? You know, Robert? Of course you know Robert.” She could feel all of the words, every single word ever, tumbling out of her mouth and she couldn’t stop them. “I mean, you know, a lot of hand-to-hand combat training, which has been great, but Mr. Niles? He wants me to get in some group training, too.”
Jasmine stopped and Sarah turned and saw they were standing at the door to the training room, which Sarah couldn’t help but think of as the Danger Room, even though she made sure not to say this out loud for fear of being made fun of. Ever since she’d arrived, she’d been afraid of being made fun of, or being pitied, or being ignored, and something about Jasmine, about her posture, about her eyes, made Sarah feel like all three were happening simultaneously.
“After you,” Jasmine said, opening the door.
Sarah stepped inside and then Jasmine closed the door behind her and sealed it shut. Then Jasmine’s voice came through the intercom speaker. “But first, let’s see what you’ve learned so far.”
Sarah had hoped this would happen, had daydreamed it a number of times in the cafeteria, eating by herself, and in her dorm room, had pictured herself somehow trapped in the Danger Room alone or even with a few others, but with the attention on her, on her mechanical arm, the scenario thrown into high alert, attacks and obstacles coming at her too fast to see, too fast, even, for the Operatives. But not too fast for her, for her arm, her beautiful mechanical arm. And then the scenario would run its course, and the smoke and rubble and haze would clear as the room righted itself, and standing there in the middle of it all, not even breathing heavily, would be Sarah, untouched, unscathed, triumphant.
Which wasn’t exactly how everything happened when Jasmine locked her in the training room by herself.
More, what happened was this:
The floor shifted under her, unexpectedly. She slipped, she scrambled to keep herself up, and so distracted by the shifting flooring, she failed to notice the swinging, padded mallets that lowered down from the ceiling. Not just those, but also the small gun turrets firing paint balls that slid out from openings in the walls. She failed to notice these too, and the tackling dummies running along rails in zigzagging patterns around the room. Watching the video repeatedly and in slow motion after the system was shut down by Mr. Niles, who had happened by to check in on everyone, Sarah could barely make out that it was the paint ball that first tagged her in her left shoulder, throwing her back in anger and surprise and right into one of the swinging mallets that clipped her right ear, that spun her around into a tackling dummy, which carried her for a few yards before another mallet knocked her out from the dummy’s tenuous grasp, by which time the guns had locked her position pretty well and set up a barrage of paint pellets at her.
Less than two minutes had passed and she was curled up on the floor trying her best to cover her ears, her face, pelted by paint balls, covered in so much paint it had all run together and turned brown, her arm useless except to protect her head.
41.
Waiting, held hostage in the Regional Office, beaten and ridiculed, Sarah curbed her despair with a theory. One that explained the screaming and shouting going on over the radios, the loss of Blue Team and, if she wasn’t mistaken, Emerald Team, too.
Someone had slipped through. When these assholes had stormed inside, rounded everyone up, someone had slipped through the cracks and was mounting a counteroffensive, not unlike the counteroffensive she had planned.
She wondered who it was.
She had someone in mind but still, she liked to play the game of wondering who it was out there in the building wreaking havoc on Blue Team and Emerald Team and whatever other goddamn teams were out there. Worming his way through the air ducts and back stairwells and through empty offices, laying waste to everyone in his path, John McClane–style.
From what she could tell, the girls, their girls, seemed to be off on a mission—she didn’t know how but these bastards had tapped into the Regional Office protocols, had sent them all on bogus missions all across the globe. And if what she had seen was accurate, they’d sent Jasmine, their best, to a whole different, alternate universe. And the Recruits? Where were they? Trapped, probably, inside their dorm on the Upper West Side. Trapped and fighting their own fight. She didn’t know for sure.
Which told her two things: Whoever was behind this wasn’t after the girls, or rather, might have been after the girls but not to destroy them, and whoever was out there playing Die Hard, in the stairwells and air ducts, wasn’t one of the girls, either.
And it sure as hell wasn’t one of the hostages, any of her dumb regular colleagues.
She’d had enough experience with the hostages, was full of enough pain and bruising and blood and broken bits of her, that she could attest for certain that it wasn’t any one of the goddamn hostages, frightened little sheep who had just sat idly by while those goddamn mercenaries kicked her ass and who couldn’t follow a simple plan, not even to save their own lives.
She hadn’t seen the first sign of the security director all day and was beginning to suspect he’d been behind the security breach and also probably the protocol breach that sent the girls away, and even if he wasn’t, even if he wasn’t one of “them” and he had somehow managed to slip into work unnoticed by her or the bastards mounting this assault on the Regional Office, that didn’t change the fact that the security director was a fat-fuck computer jockey who in no uncertain terms would have been unable to sneak around the building via the moderately sized air ducts or effect any change in this situation whatsoever.
In her mind, that left one person.
Well. Two people. That left two people.
It could be Henry. Sure. Henry was a possibility. Logic pointed to Henry. Field trained. Smart, capable.
If someone were to have asked her: Say an assault is mounted on the Regional Office and you’re taken out of the equation and the Operatives are taken out of the equation too, and one rogue agent is maneuvering through the building slowly decimating the ranks of mercenaries who’ve attempted this assault, who do you think that rogue agent might be? Of course, she would have said, Henry.
Henry would have been that rogue agent. Everyone would know the answer would have been Henry, which was why it couldn’t be Henry. Aside from the simple fact that she knew too much about Henry’s crisis of faith, it couldn’t be Henry because the people mounting this assault would have also known the answer would’ve been Henry. They would’ve known just as well as she did that if anyone were to become a rogue agent operating to save Regional, it would’ve had to have been Henry, and so they would’ve done one of two things before the assault even started: bring Henry on board, or kill him.
So it couldn’t be Henry out th
ere John McClane–style because Henry was dead. And if he wasn’t dead, he was one of them, in which case he was still dead, and he simply didn’t know it yet because she would be the one to kill him.
And so, by sound, logical reasoning, that left only one man in all of the Regional Office capable of all of this.
If her hunch was right, that left only Mr. Niles.
Not that her hunches had been right, or even close to right, so far that day, but if it’s any consolation to Sarah—which it probably isn’t—she would have been just as wrong thinking it was Henry.
42.
Two months into her training, Sarah came out of hand-to-hand combat class and a man of entirely average-sized good looks, aside from a nose a touch too wide for his face and curly hair that had grown too long, was standing outside waiting for her. Or so it seemed by the casual way he leaned against the wall, by the way he perked up and smiled and pushed off the wall when he saw her come out of the gym. She’d seen him around but hadn’t met him and didn’t know his name yet. He opened his mouth to say something but then was distracted by a group of Operatives, or maybe they were trainees, it was hard for Sarah to tell the difference. They all held themselves up with the same sort of haughty self-confidence, even the new ones.
“Hi, Henry,” the gaggle of them said, and though none of them giggled, there was a hint of giggle in their voices. He smiled at them and gave them a little wave and as they were turning the corner, one of them looked at Sarah and said in a Stephen Hawking kind of voice, “Hi. Ro-bot.” And this made the others laugh and then they were gone, but she could hear them laughing still.
She felt her face flush and she clenched her fists at her sides, then remembered herself and remembered the man standing in front of her, and she closed her eyes and relaxed her arms, both of them.
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel Page 18