The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel

by Gonzales, Manuel

  He had made first contact with these women, had performed the collection of them from foster homes or juvenile detention centers, from in-the-middle-of-nowhere town squares and suburban McMansions, from trailer homes at the edge of swamps. He had overseen and led their training, and he felt connected to these women, who were, in turn, connected to him, or so he’d long believed.

  Most saw him as a brother. They told him things. They cried in his arms, and only in his arms. To cry in anyone else’s arms would have risked discovery, risked the admission that inside them there still lived something frail and vulnerable and human. And so, while the betrayal of the Regional Office was as much a betrayal of him and his life’s work, to suspect any of these girls felt like an even worse betrayal of a friendship, a relationship.

  Henry didn’t like sneaking about and taking photographs of them moving through their days just to pass this information on to Oyemi. After a few weeks, though, the new task felt like any other part of his job because that was how things worked no matter who you were, no matter what you did. Not to mention, none of what he’d done seemed to matter. He collected information and passed it on to a man working for Oyemi, but he never received any feedback, never heard anything about the files he put together, the photographs he took, and soon he forgot about the true nature of all he’d been doing.

  Then, less than three months later, Henry walked into his office and found Oyemi there waiting for him, Oyemi who never came to the Manhattan office, who worked and lived in the secret compound upstate.

  “You can put away your camera, Henry,” she said. “We’ve found her.”

  SARAH

  52.

  It felt good. Sarah could admit that it felt very good to lay waste in this way, her mechanical arm taking on a life of its own, taking over in the heat of the moment.

  Felt good to let go.

  For once, God, to really just let go.

  Not that she wasn’t sad.

  Seeing Mr. Niles there in his office, which was the first place she went once her arm had found her, seeing him ruined, cut in two, seeing him like that made her sad.

  She’d give her sadness the time it deserved, but not now.

  Right now it felt very very good to simply follow after her mechanical arm as it did things that amazed even her.

  Finding her and reattaching itself to her shoulder for one. That was pretty fucking amazing.

  Escaping its captors, and wending its way through the labyrinth of the Regional Office, all the while laying waste to any man, woman, or machine that stood in its way, only to seek her out as if it were some long-loved loyal pet traveling alone across the vast American landscape to find its master.

  She certainly hadn’t thought her mechanical arm could have done that.

  She punched her fist through the face of one of the goons. Clean through it.

  She heard the peripheral sound of gunshots—with all the noise and commotion, every sound seemed peripheral—and had barely a chance to turn before her mechanical arm reacted—faster than she could have ever reacted—swiveling around with the man’s face still hanging from its wrist, swiveling and then moving herky-jerky style in what seemed a random pattern and she didn’t know what the arm was doing until it shook loose the poor man’s head and held up its open palm for her to see the bullets it had caught, to show her what it had done like a cat presenting her a mouse.

  Then the mechanical fist closed and she pivoted and threw the bullets, threw them like she was an outfielder throwing from deep center, threw as hard as she could, which, because of her arm, was harder than what was humanly possible. She threw the bullets and four more men fell.

  She grinned.

  This is how it begins, she thought.

  My life, my real life, she thought. It begins like this.

  53.

  Inside the package that had been hot-glued to the inside of her door had been a letter, but if anyone were to ask her when it was all said and done, How did you know, what clued you in, what intel had you obtained? she would say, Chatter, a lot of chatter, or, A sense, I simply had a sense, or, Mr. Niles, Mr. Niles knew something big was coming and he had set me on this weeks ago, months ago, and even still, I figured it out only as it was happening. She would say this and not worry that anyone would discover otherwise because Mr. Niles would be dead by then, because Wendy, too, Wendy would be gone, and because the letter, which she had read so many times that she had memorized it, had been destroyed. By Sarah. Sarah had burned the letter in a metal bowl in her kitchen only just before she left to come to work that same morning.

  54.

  Sarah hadn’t been prepared: for the bursting forth of power, for the connectedness. She hadn’t been prepared for the sense, though she wouldn’t ever tell anyone this, that there had been something emotional to this connection, that there had been something almost sentient.

  She had felt an explosion of joy when her arm attached itself back to her shoulder. Joy that had come not just from herself but from the arm, too, but not just joy, not something just so simple as joy.

  Anyone could feel joy.

  She had felt another sense. She had felt something akin to completeness, or near completeness, or the promise of one day becoming complete.

  A warm, almost liquid feeling had rushed over her. It began at her neck and shoulders and cascaded down like a blanket of warm, soapy water. And it had been too much. She’d admit that—to herself if no one else—that it was all a little too much. She’d doubled over, fallen into a sobbing, hiccupping fit, as if only when the arm had come back to her had she been able to understand just how ruined and alone and incomplete she’d been without it. In the middle of a pitched battle, in the middle of the destruction of the Regional Office, she had doubled over and wept.

  And the arm had let her weep. It was as if the arm saw what she was experiencing, understood instinctively what she needed right at that moment, and told her, Go ahead.

  Told her, Take a moment. That’s fine. Take your moment, get it all out of your system, let yourself go.

  Told her, It’s okay. I’ve got this. It’s a-okay.

  She couldn’t say what the arm did exactly while she was doubled over, sobbing into her shirt, but when she came to, she was surrounded by bodies, six of them, that hadn’t been there just a minute ago.

  55.

  She grabbed a guy who might not even have been one of the guys, but by this point, did it matter? She grabbed this guy and threw him headfirst through a cubicle wall and maybe she heard his neck snap or maybe it was the wall that snapped, and then, it was over.

  The assault on the Regional Office was over. There was no one left. He had been the last guy.

  Or there were people left, but they were the women, the Operatives.

  When did they get here? she wondered. Have they been here the whole time?

  Later, she would learn that they’d been summoned. Someone (or something?) had summoned them all back home. They hadn’t known why until they’d arrived and realized what was going on and then took up the fight.

  But for now, all she knew was that they were here. They were breathing hard and were bent over, catching their breath. Katie touched her left cheek, which had a long flap of skin flapping off it. They were torn up but they were professionals. She could say that much about them. They didn’t stand around in a daze, looking for someone to tell them it was over, the day had been saved. They figured it out, or they knew it instinctively, and then they started to clean up, attended to the hostages, attended to the Regional Office, or what was left of it.

  Sarah told Jasmine about Mr. Niles. How she had arrived too late to save Mr. Niles. She didn’t tell her how she had wanted to cry at the sight of him, split in two, how she had wanted to cry, to slide to her knees in between the two halves of him and sob in her hands, how she had started to do this, in fact, had started falling forward, stricken at the si
ght of him, but that her knees wouldn’t bend her to the ground, no matter how hard she tried, she could only stand there, and that before she was ready, her body turned on its own, turned and began to run, run from his office and run to the floor where the fighting was going on, how her body had abandoned not just Mr. Niles there but also her own commands, had left them behind, had obeyed some other commands.

  Instead, she asked Jasmine to go see to Mr. Niles, to cover him up, that at least.

  She and Jasmine still did not always get on. Jasmine liked to ask questions, liked to question anything Sarah said, liked to make sure that Sarah and everyone else knew, even after all of these years, that Sarah was not her boss, liked to imply that, mechanical arm or no, right-hand man to Mr. Niles or whatever, she didn’t take orders from Sarah and only rarely took requests.

  Sarah didn’t know what to expect, then, when she asked Jasmine to see to Mr. Niles.

  But Jasmine didn’t ask questions. Didn’t argue or pout or roll her eyes. Didn’t move around like a robot behind Sarah’s back, which she had been known to do. Jasmine only nodded and placed her hand gently on Sarah’s arm, and didn’t say anything, and then left to see to Mr. Niles.

  56.

  Dear Ms. O’Hara, the letter read.

  We are writing to you out of respect, out of respect and out of a sense of some obligation, obligation to you, and maybe out of not a little guilt, guilt not for what we have done or what we are about to do, but for what we have—until now—failed to do, which is to tell you the truth about your employer, to tell you these truths, and then to offer you a way out, or not just out, because what good is it to you to simply have a way out, and so also a way forward.

  We are offering you this: a way forward.

  57.

  It was a confusing time, the two weeks following the assault.

  Henry was still missing. The security director was dead—they found him in his apartment, executed by the looks of it. Oyemi’s compound had been burned practically to its foundation. It seemed safe to say that she was dead, the Oracles, too, whose charred remains had been discovered at the bottom of their now-empty pool, the heat and power of the fire having cleared the strange blue liquid from the basin.

  One of the Operatives had found them when they went up to check on the Catskills compound and had called Sarah into the chamber where their pool had been. The bodies, burned beyond recognition, all looked the same. Sarah didn’t wonder which one of them had been her mother. Because of course she found the files, after all the dust settled and after she settled herself into Mr. Niles’s office and looked through his files. She found the records verifying what she had learned in the envelope taped to her door that night before the attack. She knew what had really happened to her mother, and of course she felt betrayed by it all. Oddly, though, she didn’t feel betrayed by Mr. Niles. She should have, on some level she knew she should have blamed him, but she didn’t. He’d been a young man, a foolish and young man, when that had all happened. He had been swayed by Oyemi, and what good would it do to hold a grudge against a dead man anyway?

  No good. It would do no good.

  And so the betrayal she felt was aimed at whoever sent her the envelope in the first place, and no matter, standing there in front of the charred corpses of the Oracles, she certainly didn’t try to imagine one of them with her mother’s face. Because why would she have? What would she have gained by doing anything so sentimental and ridiculous as gently touching each corpse on its charred forehead, by whispering I love you and I’m sorry to each one in turn, by trying to picture each body, not as it had been before the fire, because the Oracles had never looked like her mother, had always looked only like Oracles, bald and tinted by the light of the milky-blue water they were submerged in, but by trying to picture each with her mother’s face, her mother’s smile, her mother’s mousy, shoulder-length hair?

  Would she have gotten her mother back?

  Would the past seventeen years of her life have been any different?

  “I’ve got it from here,” Sarah told the Operative, Jennifer or Jenny or Jenn, she couldn’t remember. The girl nodded and left Sarah to it and then Sarah stood there and stared at the dried-out pool and the blackened bodies, mostly skeletons now, and she waited for twenty minutes, for an hour, until finally Jasmine’s soft touch on her shoulder woke Sarah from whatever waking sleep she’d fallen into.

  58.

  It was a confusing time and so no one really noticed, not the Operatives, not the remaining administrators, not the last recruitment specialist, not Sarah herself, that there was no one actually in charge of Regional anymore, or that quite by accident, being in charge of Regional had fallen to Sarah.

  What do we do with Mr. Niles? Sarah had an answer.

  How do we reboot the security system? Sarah knew that, too.

  As the questions began to snowball, Sarah led. She put reasonable and simple plans into place. She closed the dormitory where the girls lived. “They might still be out there,” she said. “The people who did this to us, they might be out there just licking their chops, waiting to take our girls out all at once.” She put them in apartments spread out all over the city.

  Sarah was the one who ordered biweekly check-in meetings. She brought the bagels and coffee and rugelach and juice until, after the second meeting, a woman named Jordan, who had been a low-level systems analyst before the assault, said she would bring the food for the next meeting, smiled at Sarah, and said, “You’ve got enough on your plate already.”

  Not that the others weren’t helping out. Accounting gathered itself, counted its missing, and then budgeted repair costs, dug into offshore accounts, restored some financial order. Research, marketing, travel agency staff, who hadn’t known it before but knew now that they not only had been a cover for Regional but had also handled all the travel for the Operatives—all were up and running again in a matter of days.

  Because they understood.

  There were still operations to be completed, case files to be drawn up, distributed, and then filed once the mission had been completed.

  Evil to be thwarted.

  Wrongs to be righted.

  Operatives handled their own filing and the research. They learned computer systems. They learned the recruitment software. Candace, a fairly new girl, an Operative for less than a month before the assault, found a girl in Toronto she wanted to bring in, and so recruitment began again. Jordan handled not just the systems analysis but security as well.

  They all fell into line in a way that would have made Mr. Niles proud, but what Sarah didn’t see, not at first, not until it was pointed out to her, was that they all fell into line behind her.

  And after some debate, after plenty of hand-wringing on Sarah’s part, and questions, mostly along the lines of, Are you sure about this? But really, really sure you want me?, Sarah agreed to step in as head of the Regional Office. Legal drew up a contract. Then it was official.

  Sarah was in charge.

  Of everything.

  From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

  Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

  This study would be remiss and incomplete if it did not take a moment to delve into the two theories on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office, theories that speak to the pivotal question of whether he worked alone and in secret, or did he have assistance?

  Obviously, Henry was aided, there is no question in this matter, aided by his own team of Operatives. Of the women who worked for Henry, we know for sure there was Wendy, Colleen, Windsor, and Rose. But the question then is: Was there someone else, someone equal to Henry, planning and executing this assault?

  The theory that he planned and executed this alone proceeds thusly:

  Oyemi told Henry he would be the one to neutralize Emma, who the Oracles had determined was the threat. How she had decided on
Emma, Henry didn’t know. Still, he talked Oyemi into giving him two weeks to finish the assignment. Two weeks to kill Emma.

  Of course, when he first met Emma, Henry didn’t know he loved her or would love her or that she would love him.

  But isn’t that always the case?

  You toiled in your job for year after year, training stunningly beautiful and dangerous young women to fight the encroaching forces of evil, caught up in a work life that offered satisfaction on many deep levels but that precluded any sort of real chance at long-lasting relationships. You resigned yourself to a life as a bachelor, to keeping your feelings for these amazing and powerful women on the level of friendly or brotherly love, whichever it was they needed to make it through the day, and in the process of doing all of this, you reached a bottom-level sort of contentment in life because what choice did you have, really? This was the life you’d chosen, or maybe it had been chosen for you, but it was your life after all and you’d made your peace with that, had resigned yourself to all of that when one day, along came a woman of extraordinary grace and beauty, the kind of woman you couldn’t help but fall in love with, except you didn’t say anything or make any moves because you were a gentleman and you were fully aware of that old saw about your pen and the company ink, not to mention, deep down you had always been a chickenshit. But still, for the first time, you could imagine how, under different circumstances, you might have had a chance with one of these women, with this one woman in particular, that she might have found some way to love you back, and for the first time, too, you began feeling the stirrings of some real and long-ignored dissatisfaction with this life you’d built for yourself. So maybe you paid her a little more attention than you did the other Recruits, the other field Operatives, and maybe she noticed and offered you sly, under-the-radar smiles, and maybe you began to share inside jokes with each other, or you brushed past each other in the narrow (but not that narrow) hallways. Or maybe one day you found yourself in the break room looking for your lunch in the fridge and she came up behind you and placed her hand on your shoulder and with that light but comfortable and unhesitating touch sent an electric jolt through you down to your very bones. She bent into the fridge next to you to see what you were looking for and even as the thought itself entered your own head, she beat you to it—she always beat you to these things—by saying, You know what, why don’t we just go get lunch instead, you and me, and maybe a drink, too, or not a drink but a something else?