Flash Point (6 page)

And wrong most of all in not even trying to defend Gran. Kaylie had grabbed a purse—a purse!—to do that. Amy had pepper spray in her pocket and, frozen with fear, hadn’t even reached for it. She was a coward, a wuss, wrong wrong wrong.

Gran staggered. Amy caught her before she could fall and eased her to sit on the edge of the flowerpot. The cop stopped arguing with the movie guy long enough to say, “Is the old lady all right?”

“No!” Amy said, trying fiercely to keep back tears. “She’s my grandmother and she’s very sick. Please, can you give us a ride home? I don’t have any money and—please!”

The cop said gently, “Sure, kid.” Over his shoulder he bellowed, “Murphy! Take this family home!”

Murphy, his face young beneath his cap, helped Gran into the backseat of the squad car, all the while staring hungrily at Kaylie. She scowled back; cops were emphatically not her style. Amy sat miserably squashed in between Gran and Kaylie, staring at the metal grill that kept dangerous criminals from assaulting Murphy and his partner.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
. A movie. Special-effects rats. Kaylie leaping off the trellis to defend Gran. Amy frozen, her pepper spray untouched in her pocket.

But . . .

Why had the glass door to the doctor’s office suddenly been locked?

* * *

“She froze,” Alex Everett said, gazing at the screen.

“Good,” Myra Townsend said.

Seven

M
ONDAY

MONDAY MORNING AMY
arrived for her first day of work at Taunton Life Network on Sixth Avenue, downtown. She’d left at seven since she had to walk and had no money left for the bus, but at least it had stopped raining. The building was huge, a glass-and-blue-steel skyscraper that occupied the entire block. Amy found the entrance she’d been instructed to use, a small side door on Remington Street. A security guard had her put her fingertips to a scanner, then consulted a tablet.

“Go ahead, miss. Through those detectors, elevators on your right. Go to Room 864-B.”

She was nervous. Was she dressed OK? She wore her best pants and Kaylie’s green silk sweater, swiped again before Kaylie woke up. Her shoes, though, were her old school flats, comfortable for walking but worn and with a tiny hole on one side. Would jeans and sneakers have been better? Myra Townsend had said they wanted an “athletic” employee. Still, the pants had enough stretch for good movement—

She needn’t have worried. The elevator took her to the basement, where she wandered low-ceilinged, featureless corridors until she found room 864-B. A bored-looking man with another tablet said, “Name?”

“Amy Kent. I’m new today and—”

“Cubicle 96.”

More than a hundred people, all doing . . .
something
in their separate cubicles. In cubicle 96 Amy found a phone, a headset, a thick sheaf of papers, and a list of instructions:

Call each name on the list. Follow the script EXACTLY as you conduct the survey. If the initial response is that no one in this household plays video games, don’t waste time in chitchat. Politely say “thank you,” hang up, and go on to the next name on the list. Remember, your calls may be monitored for training and quality-control purposes.

Telephone surveys. She would be doing exactly what she had lied to Gran and Kaylie that she would be doing.

No. There had been a mistake.

“There’s been a mistake,” she told the bored man with the tablet after she’d wended her way back through the cubicles and found him again. “This isn’t supposed to be my job.”

“Says here it is.”

“No. I need to talk to Myra Townsend.”

She hoped the name would impress him. It didn’t. He consulted his tablet again. “Ms. Townsend will come get you later in the morning to take you to Human Resources to fill out paperwork.”

“Maybe, but meantime there’s been a mistake. I was hired for a different job!”

“Yeah? What job?”

“Well . . . I don’t know.”

He sighed. “Miss, do you want to get to work or do you want to be escorted out of the building? I can arrange that. You have something to take up with Ms. Townsend, you can do it when she arrives.”

“But—”

“You in or out? Choose.”

“In,” Amy said. There didn’t seem to be any choice. She went back to cubicle 96.

For two hours she conducted telephone surveys, trying to find out what people thought about a computer game from TLN’s game division and recording the results on photocopied forms. Thirty-seven people hung up on her. Two men tried to talk dirty to her. Three lonely souls wanted to chat. Forty-one people had never heard of the game; sixty more had heard of it but had never played it. Sixty-one if you also counted Amy. Twelve people actually answered the survey questions.

Did people really spend eight hours a day at this mind-numbing task? Amy couldn’t hear what the people in the other cubicles were doing, but surely TLN didn’t need more than a hundred people doing phone surveys all day, every day? Even her restaurant job, hot and muscle-straining and messy, had been better than this.

At ten Myra Townsend arrived, and Amy nearly sprang at her. “Ms. Townsend! I thought—I mean, you told me—”

“Oh, Amy, I’m so sorry! There’s been a mix-up. This isn’t your job at all. Come with me, dear.”

Amy relaxed. So it
was
a mistake. And Ms. Townsend’s kind face and warm brown eyes were the most welcome things she’d ever seen. She followed the older woman from the room, automatically noting her gray pantsuit—Jil Sander, Amy guessed—gray-and-pink silk scarf, just-right Cuban heels. Ms. Townsend kept up a flow of apologetic chatter, delivered in a discreet cloud of rose perfume.

She led Amy up in the elevator to the main lobby, a vast expanse of marble floor, uniformed guards, a forest of plants in marble pots, and crowds of well-dressed people. A wall with three revolving doors gave onto Sixth Avenue. A side door was open to an alley, through which more uniformed men wheeled metal boxes on handcarts from the open back door of an armored truck.

Amy saw Violet Sanderson in the crowd, walking beside a middle-aged man.

“Hey,” Amy said, pleased, “I met that girl over there, the one with long black hair, at the—”

“Everybody down!
Now!
” someone shouted.

Men in hoods, armed with automatic weapons, suddenly surged into the lobby. The men with the metal boxes drew their own weapons. The rat-a-tat of guns deafened Amy, along with screams and shouts. She and Myra Townsend dropped to the floor just as the man pushing the dolly dropped, spouting blood. Hooded men blocked the doors. Alarms sounded.

Just like yesterday—

But this was no movie, no holographic special effect. One of the guards bringing in the metal boxes moaned as he lay dying, a sound that pierced Amy’s gut. Ms. Townsend had flung one arm protectively if uselessly over Amy’s body, as if to shield her.

“Nobody move!” one of the gunmen shouted. “Don’t move and you don’t get hurt!”

Amy saw a girl move.

The girl crept slowly across the floor toward a baby. The baby hadn’t stopped screaming and its mother lay still, blood on her back. She’d been hit in the exchange of gunfire with the box-deliverers. A gunman shouted into the terrified silence of the lobby, “Shut that kid up! You, hold still!” He waved his gun at the girl on the floor.

She only crawled faster, rising now to all fours. Amy, sprawled flat behind her, could see only a blonde head, a shapely rear in expensive jeans, and the dramatic red soles of Christian Louboutin sandals.

“I said stop, bitch!” a hooded man screamed, waving his gun at the girl.

She kept going, reaching the baby just as the gunman let loose a spray of bullets above everybody’s head. The girl threw her body on top of the baby, shielding it. Just as a boy rose to his feet on the opposite side of the lobby, Amy felt a tug on her shoulder. She turned her head.

Violet Sanderson crouched beside her, whispering fiercely, “Do something!”

Do something? Was Violet crazy? The blonde girl had taken an admirable risk to protect that baby, but during an armed robbery the best thing to do was lie still, follow orders, hope to not get
shot
 . . .

Across the lobby the boy launched himself at a hooded man guarding the revolving doors.

At the same moment Violet said, “Here we go, One Two Three,” and yanked Amy hard. Violet, eight inches taller than Amy, was
strong
. Amy was pulled to her feet.

“Stop!” she cried, but Violet launched both of them forward, straight into the nearest gunman, who went down under the girls’ combined weight. He didn’t fire but instead said mildly, “Hey!”

No no no
, robbers didn’t behave like this! This was—

And then the phantom in her mind:
the empty box again, holding nothing
.

“That’s enough,” Myra Townsend’s voice called loudly. “Thank you, everybody.”

The gunman untangled himself from Violet and Amy, rubbing his elbow. Men pulled off black hoods. The dead mother rose from the floor and hit a switch on the baby doll, which stopped screaming. The dead guard rose, seized his handcart, and wheeled it away. People brushed off their clothes, chatting and shooting amused glances around the lobby. And Amy rushed over to Myra Townsend, grabbed her gray Jil Sander, and screamed in her face, “You tell me what’s going on and you do it this very minute!”

“Really, Amy,” Ms. Townsend said, freeing her sleeve from Amy’s clutch, “why don’t you already know? Everybody else does.”

Violet Sanderson pulled Amy away. “Come here. I’ll explain.”

“Explain what!” The “second interview” had been bad enough; Amy had never been this furious in her entire life. Her stomach acids boiled, her chest was about to explode. One more word from Myra Townsend and she would slug her.

Violet said softly, “Look around you, One Two Three.”

People were crossing the lobby toward them: the blonde girl who had “saved” the baby, now looking smug. The boy who had assaulted the “robber.” Two more boys and another girl. The real TLN security guards, some looking pleased and some sulky, resumed what Amy guessed were their normal positions.

Ms. Townsend said, “Follow me, everyone,” and set off briskly toward the elevators.

Violet said, “It was a setup, One Two Three. We were being filmed.”

Well, Amy had figured out that much! She snapped, “I didn’t see any cameras!”

“And you never will. The latest microcams are super-small. Come on!”

Ms. Townsend led them to a small conference room on the second floor. Amy recognized the bald man who was waiting there: he had interviewed her the first time. Everyone sat around a polished wooden table. Ms. Townsend, looking harried, excused herself: “I’m needed in editing.”

“I’m Alex Everett,” the bald man said. “Before we do the rest of the introductions, let me explain for those of you who still don’t understand what you’re doing here.” He winked at Amy, who kept her face as blank as she could manage. “You lucky seven have been chosen from hundreds of applicants for Taunton Life Network’s newest show,
Who Knows People, Baby—You?
Myra Townsend and I are the producers, and this is how the show works.”

As he explained, Amy seethed. So the dog in the tree had been a setup and she’d been filmed. The “robbery” in the lobby. The “rats” outside the doctor’s office—which she had believed were a legitimate student-film project. She had been played, and she didn’t like it one bit.

And what kind of lame title was
Who Knows People, Baby?
Give me a break!

Had everyone else figured out what was going on? Obviously Violet had, and the blonde, and the boy who had attacked the guard. Also, from her knowing expression, the small girl with the sharp-featured face. But not the other two boys. At least she wasn’t alone.

Not that it helped. She’d been made to look like a fool. She interrupted Alex, who was now explaining how viewers could vote on a slate of the “players’ possible responses to each scenario.” Amy wasn’t playing.

“I quit,” she said loudly.

Everyone’s head swiveled to look at her.

“You lied to me, and you filmed me without my consent, and I’m not even sure that’s legal!”

“Actually,” Alex said, “no one lied. You were deliberately not told the details of the job you accepted until we had completed the first few scenarios. That some people guessed when you did not perhaps means that they are more sophisticated about television. Nor did we do anything illegal. You gave your consent to film you in the contract you signed.”

All those papers thrust in front of her:
Sign here, initial here, sign here
 . . . All those lawyers. And she’d been too elated at the prospect of a good paycheck and full medical benefits to read anything. Medical benefits . . . Gran . . .

“Of course,” Alex said, watching Amy closely, “you’re free to quit if you choose. This is a job, not serfdom. There is a long waiting list of girls ready to take your place. But then we’ll expect repayment of the advance you’ve received.”

Mrs. Raduski’s rent. Gran.

Violet, in the chair beside her, found Amy’s hand and squeezed it.

Amy choked out, “I’ll stay.”

“Good,” Alex said, “we’re happy to have you. Now, the next important thing—none of you are allowed to blog about the show, or Tweet about it, or post anything about it on Facebook or anywhere else on the Internet until Myra and I give you the go-ahead. That’s in your contracts, and we mean it. You can send private e-mails, messages, or Tweets to your family about your participation, but nothing public. Doing so will result in not only dismissal from the show but legal action. Everybody understand?”

Everybody did. Alex finished explaining the show, adding that the first episodes would air very soon as a replacement for a show that had been abruptly canceled.

Until then, Amy realized, she would never know whether anything that happened outside of her apartment was real or not. Well, she would just spend a lot of time in her apartment! Unless—

“Can you film us in our homes?”

“No, of course not,” Alex said.

“Will we come to work here each day?”

“Yes, and your hours here are eight thirty to six, with an hour for lunch, which is free to you in the company cafeteria. You’ll be doing a variety of tasks, including previewing new TV shows, testing computer games from our games division, even assisting on the sets of different programs. It’s great training for anyone wanting a career in TV, or a spectacular assist to your résumés.”