The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (20 page)

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 there 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.

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.

“Don’t let them get to you,” he said once she had opened her eyes and looked at him again. Then he smiled and said, “Man, that sounded pretty dumb. It always sounds better in a movie or something, doesn’t it.” He smiled again and held out his hand and said, “Henry. My name is Henry. Heard you’ve had a rough go of it.”

“Well,” Sarah began, reaching for his hand.

“Is it your left?” Henry interrupted. “Arm, that is. I’ve got a guy who bet me it was your right arm, but that seems just way too obvious.” She pulled her hand back. He laughed an awkward but disarming laugh and said, “I’m kidding. I don’t have a guy, or a bet. It’s just easier for me to get the awkward thing out right away because I’m going to say it eventually. I know I am. But this way, I say it, and there’s a weird moment, and then it’s over, and then I’m not spending the whole conversation thinking about when I’m going to accidentally say the thing I’m not supposed to say.” He held his hand out for a moment longer, then pulled it back, too. He shrugged and frowned. “It’s a quirk. Now. How’s training going? Pretty shitty, huh?”

“It can only go up from here, right?” Sarah said, and she felt like crying. She’d managed to contain all of the emotions that she should have been feeling about her arm, about being in the city and not with her aunt, about discovering the truth about her mother, about the way the other women had been treating her, and would have kept them all in check so long as no one asked her about any of it. But as soon as anyone said the first nice thing to her, all of it threatened to come out.

“Let’s go get a drink,” he said, doing a fine job of ignoring the tears welling in her eyes, which gave her a moment to wipe them
away and shove the feelings that caused them back deep down inside herself. “Because, frankly, there’s still down. Sorry to be the one to tell you this, but . . . Things can always go down.

“Your problem,” Henry said, “and it’s not just your problem, but your problem is you have this sense about you that there’s something different about you.”

Henry had taken her to a hotel bar not far from the travel agency. It wasn’t yet two in the afternoon. They’d taken the elevator back up to the travel agency, had walked through the travel agency, had crossed Park and walked a few blocks, had come into this bar, and not once had Henry stopped talking. Henry hadn’t given her time to change out of her training outfit and Sarah felt self-conscious, or she would have if anyone had been in the bar but the two of them and the bartender.

“There is something different about me,” Sarah said, almost frustrated by how much she needed to talk to someone about all of this.

“Right. I know. Trust me, we all know. But there’s something different about all of the women here. All the Operatives and trainee Recruits, anyway. They’re all different from the rest of us, and from each other. But the difference between their difference and your difference—do you want to know the difference between their difference and your difference?” he asked. He knew she did, otherwise why would they be here talking about any of this? He liked to hear himself talk, Sarah could tell, and since he was the first person not Mr. Niles she’d found any sort of connection with, she humored him. She nodded and even went so far as to say, “What’s the difference between their difference and my difference?”

He nodded back at her and took another drink of his beer, his third, but Sarah was trying not to judge him by it. “The difference,” he said, “is how they carry that difference. Even the Recruits, even before they’re recruited, even before we’ve sought them out, they carry what makes them different in an open and, I don’t know, kind of loud way. You’ve seen them around the office, you can’t not see them around the office. They’re bigger than life, these women.”

“But they are bigger,” Sarah said, interrupting him. “Jesus, have you seen Jasmine? She’s like a hundred feet tall.”

Henry shook his head and paused to take another drink and then dropped his empty glass too heavily onto the table and said, “No, no she’s not. You know how tall Jasmine is? It’s in her file. I measured her myself.”

“You measured Jasmine?”

“S’my job. Stop interrupting. I measured her myself and I kid you not. Five feet three inches.”

“No she isn’t.”

“S’true. I’m going to get another drink. You want another drink? It’s entirely true. You’re what? Five four? Five five? You’re taller than Jasmine. But. It’s part of her power, or the mystical property of her. Or who knows what the fuck it’s about, I just find them and train them. I’m no expert. But! I’ve watched them, I’ve observed them all, and they each have different strengths and different—but not many—weaknesses, and they all have this one thing in common. Every. Single. One of them.”

Henry picked up his empty glass and tried to take a drink from it and looked a little perplexed and said, “I drank that one way too fast.”

Sarah considered telling him that he’d never gotten his next drink but thought better of it.

“What?” she asked. “What do they have in common?”

Henry rubbed his face and his eyes and then looked at her and said, “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?” He waited for her to say something and when she didn’t he sighed. “They carry their difference, the way they carry their difference. They have differences, see, they each are very different from the rest of us, and the way they carry this difference, well, it’s like their difference, they carry it with a sense of pride. Like it makes them better. And it does. It makes them stronger and faster and smarter and more powerful. They know it and they make sure everyone else knows it, too. That’s the difference between their difference and your difference.”

“That their difference makes them better than my difference?”

“Christ,” he said. “You’re smarter than this, you know.” He took her hand and squeezed it tightly, his fingers pulsing against her fingers and her palm with every syllable, and said, “No. They act like it makes them better. You don’t.”

“But,” she began, and he let go of her hand and grabbed her other hand.

“But nothing,” he said. “You’ve got a mechanical fucking arm, right? That’s not nothing, right? A mechanical fucking arm that—Jesus, which one is it?” He held up her hand and pressed his fingers deep into her own and pulsed them again and studied it through squinted eyes. “I mean, it’s remarkable, isn’t it? Your hands. Exactly the same.” He dropped her hand and sighed and said, “I can’t tell. Weird. I thought I’d be able to tell.” Then he
looked at his watch. “Ah well, we should get back to work. I’ve got a Recruits meeting in twenty.”

He paid. Sarah was surprised walking out of the dark bar into the bright afternoon sun. They didn’t say much of anything else walking back to the travel agency and riding down the elevator to the Regional Office, even though she wanted to say more. As they stepped off the elevator, he told her, “I’m around, you know. If you want to chat or get another drink.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“It’ll get better,” he said. “I mean, first, it’ll probably get worse, but then it will get better. If you remember what I told you, that is.” Then he turned and then, walking to the men’s room, he said, “Or not.”

Jasmine threw the first punch.

But before that, Sarah had been swimming for almost an hour. She’d had the pool all to herself. None of the others thought swimming offered enough impact. The Operatives and the Recruits were all about impact. Sarah liked the smooth motion of herself through the water. She had been a decent swimmer before, but since coming to the Regional Office and the new arm and really getting it together generally, she had become sleek and natural in the water, slipping through with almost no effort. She had assumed that with her mechanical arm, she would feel lopsided, not necessarily because of the weight of it, though the weight of it had entered her mind, but because of its strength and her normal arm’s lack thereof, but somehow her body had adjusted and her strokes were even and strong and while her normal arm did eventually tire out, she had found herself able to swim at a strong pace for hours on end before that happened.

She had asked the doctor about this, about how her normal arm managed to keep up with her mechanical arm, and jokingly had asked him if they had in fact given her two mechanical arms, and the look of horror that crossed his face was so horrific that she quickly laughed and assured him she was only kidding, that she knew he’d given her only the one arm.

Ever since she broke his femur, he had been touchy and a bit twitchy around her.

“I’m not sure,” he said, once he’d regained his composure. “Perhaps the hyperadvanced nanotechnology we used in the mechanical arm is sending signals to the rest of your body, has somehow found a way to boost, even just a little, your own strength and endurance?”

This idea struck her as both fascinating and a little unsettling, and so she’d brought it up to Mr. Niles, who shook his head and laughed and said, “He’s a kook, that old man. Hey, when he’s right, he’s right. I mean, look at your arm, look at the amazing work he did with your arm. But listen, the reason your body is stronger is because we’ve been strengthening it. Remember? You’ve been training every day for four months now. Of course the rest of you can keep up better for an hour, for two hours, and if you keep it up, maybe four or six hours, which is when you’ll be ready for the thing. But your body has limits. Your arm doesn’t. So don’t push it too hard.”

And so, an hour, sometimes an hour and a half, was all she would let herself swim at one time before giving herself a rest.

She stopped at the edge of the pool and held herself there, her eyes closed, her nose just below the surface, the waves rising and falling against her ears, so that the echo of them against the indoor pool became muffled and then clear and then muffled. Hanging there in the water, she felt she could swim across the Atlantic if she wanted.

When she pulled her head above water, she saw Jasmine standing at the edge of her lane and two others standing behind her.
Jasmine squatted down and smiled at Sarah a mean kind of smile and then said, “Look. The robot knows how to swim.”

And Sarah didn’t know why that—more than anything else—set her off, but set her off it did, and there were words said and feelings felt, and Sarah climbed out of the water, and there were more words and more feelings, and, well, Jasmine threw the first punch, but still . . .

She threw it so fast no one saw it, not even Sarah, who only barely felt it, felt the wake of it, the soft touch of air against her cheek, her earlobe, the ripple of her hair. In the moment, or immediately after the moment, Sarah thought she must have moved out of the way of Jasmine’s punch, ever so slightly out of the way. Maybe her arm had given her a sixth sense about these things or maybe she was in possession of some kind of mystical property, had always been so, a power buried too deep for anyone to detect it, but protective and powerful enough to shift her an inch to the left just before she was punched, but no. In hindsight, Sarah would understand that Jasmine threw that punch so fast that no one could see it and so close that only Sarah could feel it, but missed all the same, on purpose. Namely, to make it look like Sarah threw the first punch—or kick, as it turned out—like Sarah was the instigator, and it worked.

Sarah was quicker than any of them expected her to be, she could tell by the looks on their faces and by the fact that she swept her leg under Jasmine’s to sweep Jasmine off her feet.

Jasmine recovered quickly enough, though, and was up and skipping behind Sarah even as Sarah landed her mechanical fist
on the floor where Jasmine’s head had been. She cracked the deck and heard a small chorus of sarcastic oooohs.

Sarah was outmatched, of course.

Of course, Sarah was outmatched.

Jasmine had been around a long time. She’d outlived Gemini, who had been one of the first Recruits and legendarily strong. Chances were, she would outlive the entire crop of new Recruits, too, judging by the sorry looks of them. She wasn’t the strongest. That was Lucy. She wasn’t the fastest, that was clearly Celia, and Dominic was by far the smartest—the shit that girl knew baffled even Oyemi—but Jasmine was by far the shrewdest, the most observant, the best able to look for and then exploit even the tiniest movement, the smallest tell. Of all the Operatives—except for maybe Emma, who had just arrived and was still a bit of a mystery—Jasmine put the mystical properties of her existence to work best. Which was how she’d known exactly how close and how fast to punch. Which was how she’d known to skip behind Sarah on her right because she knew which arm was the strong arm and which arm was more than just strong. Which was how she knew that in two minutes Henry and Mr. Niles would arrive to break everything up. Which was how she knew that to kill this girl, this one-armed freak, all she’d have to do was slide up behind her, crack her neck—done!—and let her fall, not that she wanted to kill her, per se, just put her in her place. How she knew where to hit her—pop, pop, pop, kidney, kidney, lower back—and how hard—hard enough to make a point but just shy of leaving a deep mark. Which was how she knew she had ten seconds left to get in one
more good punch, to the nose, nobody can ignore a broken nose, which she threw with maybe a little more juice on it because why not, one last good punch, why not give it more of the juice, but which—to her surprise—didn’t connect because the girl got lucky. The one-armed freak’s one arm caught the punch midpunch and wouldn’t let go, no matter how strongly Jasmine wrenched, no matter that she practically flung Sarah across the room. The arm—that fucking mechanical arm—wouldn’t let go of her arm. Who knows how long it would have held on if Mr. Niles and Henry hadn’t shown up, shut everything down, separated Jasmine and Sarah, pulled them away. Even Sarah didn’t know. The last Sarah heard from Jasmine, as Henry pulled her down the hall, was, “You got lucky, freak, but not next time. Not so lucky next time.”

But it wasn’t luck.

Watching the video of it all later while in bed, feeling sore and trampled, Sarah saw just how well Jasmine had set her up. She saw, or didn’t see, the punch that started it all, saw her own leg-sweep that came out of nowhere, seemingly unprovoked, saw how quick and fluid Jasmine was, and realized how much she’d underestimated these women.

All of this was secondary information, though, was background noise to what she couldn’t figure out no matter how many times she rewatched the video.

How had she caught that punch?

Jasmine had hit her three times, had thrown her forward onto her knees with those punches, and she had a clear shot at Sarah’s face, Sarah too dazed and winded and in pain to even think of defending herself, but despite what Jasmine thought or said,
catching that punch had had nothing to do with luck, had had nothing to do with her, had had everything to do with her mechanical arm, which had moved on its own, had surprised Sarah as much as it had surprised Jasmine.

Had surprised her and, now that she had watched it happen again and again, frightened her, too.

Frightened her not a little bit.