Severance Package (16 page)

“Ouch,” he said.

Nichole didn’t pay him any mind. She was looking down at her ruined shirt.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I had to rip open your shirt to give you CPR.”

“You couldn’t do it over my shirt? What, were you hoping for a cheap feel?”

“I wasn’t thinking about that,” Jamie said. “I was trying to save your life.”

Nichole looked up the hall. “I guess I should be grateful my bra is still on.”

“Hey, it wasn’t like that.”

“Sure. I remember it from my CPR classes. Step one: If the victim is female, rip open her shirt.”

Nichole looked to see if there was a single button left standing. There wasn’t.

“Come on,” she said, “let’s go.”

Jamie slowly pulled himself to his feet.

“Where’s everybody else? Do you think Molly’s going after them, too?”

Nichole considered this carefully. How much to tell him? After all, Roxanne’s dead body was just a few feet away, around the other end of the cubicles. She would have to lead him around to David’s office the long way—and hope they didn’t encounter Molly.

At least she had two rounds left in the HK P7. If she was given another opportunity, she’d do it point-blank style.

Press the barrel right up against Molly’s forehead and squeeze.

Nichole looked at Jamie—disheveled, bloodied, battered, but still a drone.

Silence, for now, was the best policy.

“Follow me,” she said.

They found the three essentials in David’s office: bandages, booze, and a battery. AA, even. Just what the Talkabout T900 needed.

Unfortunately, the T900 had been crushed.

On their way back, Jamie had scooped it up from the floor of the office where Molly had tried to filet him. The plastic screen was gone. Now the unit refused to turn on, even with the new battery, which Nichole had found in one of David’s desk drawers.

“Let me see it,” Nichole said.

Jamie didn’t argue. He handed it over and sat down on the floor with the first aid kit Nichole had found in David’s desk. Standard company issue, purchased at OfficeMax. Six hundred sixteen pieces, with the ability to serve up to a hundred people.
Handy for mornings like these, when your boss and coworker go bananas and try to shoot, slice, and poison you.

Meanwhile, Nichole was replacing the battery door on the back of the T900. She had opened it up and reinserted the batteries, just in case. She pushed a few buttons. Nothing happened.

“This thing is shot,” Nichole said.

“Told you.”

“Did you land on it, or something?
Damn
it.”

Okay. Jamie couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to do what he could to patch up his hand. At least something to make the bleeding stop until they made it off this floor. If he had his way, he’d wrap the fingers in gauze and slip a black leather glove over the whole thing, like Luke Skywalker wore in
Jedi.
Even better: Convince the Rebels to replace his hand with a cybernetic part. Start over.

Jamie looked at his fingers.

Oh, God.

He couldn’t look at them.

They throbbed hard, as if to remind him:
We’re here. We’re damaged. We’re here. We hurt. Fix us. Fix us now.

Jamie pulled some gauze from the kit and tried to wrap them blind, using as much tape as possible. If Andrea were here, she’d yell at him for not using disinfectant. Of course he could argue that it wasn’t worth worrying about infection. When Jamie looked down, he could have sworn he saw bone.

“What are you doing?”

“Wrapping up my fingers.”

“You’re not doing a very good job.”

“I’m new at this.”

“Give me your hand. We don’t have much time.”

Nichole looked down at Jamie’s mangled fingers and said,

“Oh, God.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not going to be able to stitch anything. There are no stitches in this kit.”

“That’s fine. Whatever you can do.”

“I’ll tape it best I can, try to sterilize everything with this Scotch I found in David’s desk. You can get it looked at later. Okay?”

“Seriously, whatever you can do.”

“Want a drink first? It’s Johnnie Walker Black.”

“I’m okay.”

“I think you’re going to regret that decision in about ten seconds.”

Nichole got to work. Jamie looked up at the ceiling tiles, and listened to peeling and tearing sounds of tape. He didn’t want to know the gory details. Better that he pretend she was expertly stitching up the flesh of each finger, so perfectly, in fact, that a few days later he would be able to flex his fingers and
ping! ping! ping! ping! ping!
—the stitches would pop out, and he’d be completely healed. Even though he knew there were no stitches.

“Here we go.”

“You haven’t started yet?” Jamie asked.

“Brace yourself.”

Jamie kept his eyes transfixed on the off-white ceiling tiles, imagining that the dimples in the material were craters big enough to hide in. He heard the quiet hollow
thoooomp
of a corktop being removed from a bottle.

“Cheers.”

There was no way Jamie could have prepared himself for the agony that washed down over his mangled hand. The old pain—the pain that caused the horrible gashes in the first place—was like a memory of the beaches of heaven compared to this NEW PAIN. The burning-acid molten-flesh drilled-bone torture of NEW PAIN.

“Shhhh now.”

Nichole held his wrist steady while the rest of his body writhed violently. Jamie shrank and floated up into a big crater on the ceiling.

A few minutes later, he opened his eyes. The light was harsh. He was back down on the floor.

Riiiiip.

“You passed out,” Nichole said.

“Urrrgghhhhh,” Jamie said.

“Don’t throw up. I’m halfway done.”

She continued working.

Passing out didn’t erase a single memory. There was no blissful moment of, Hey now, where am I? Why is this tall woman fussing over my hand? Why is she only wearing a bra? Jamie remembered everything. Nothing had changed. Except that he felt like he needed to throw up.

“Nichole.”

“Yeah.”

Riiiiip.

“Do you have any idea why David wanted to kill us this morning?”

She didn’t reply.

“Did he lose his mind?” Jamie asked. “I think that’s the theory I would prefer. The stress of the job, he goes postal …”

“That what you believe?”

“No.”

“Me neither.”

Riiiiip.

“That’s because you know what’s really going on, don’t you? That we’re actually some kind of secret intelligence agency.”

“If you don’t already know, then you’re not supposed to know.”

“Jesus, Nichole, c’mon!” Then he added a faint “Ow.” She had pressed down hard. Maybe even on purpose. “I almost died this morning. Along with everybody else. I deserve to know.”

“Trying to concentrate here.”

“Can you at least tell me if we’re working for the good guys?”

Nichole looked at him with a lifted eyebrow.

“You know? The U.S. government?”

She returned to her tapework.

“Reason I ask,” Jamie said, “is because if we are the good guys, then how come David Murphy was allowed to come in this morning with orders to kill us? That’s not something the good guys do, is it? Especially to people like me, who until about an hour ago had no friggin’ idea we actually worked for the government?”

“You
don’t work for the government,” she said.

Jamie would have stormed out of the office had Nichole not been taping up the remains of his hand. This was not right. This was not fair. Guy in the military, he gets a draft notice, gets told, yeah, you might get a ball blown off in another country, or come home in a flag-draped box.
That’s how we roll, Private.
Guy puts on a police badge, same deal, only you take your risks in your own backyard. Death’s unlikely, but certainly possible. You know walking in.

But Jamie wasn’t a cop or a solider. He was a public relations guy who thought he was working for a financial services company, and did so because of decent pay and medical benefits. He didn’t sign on for anything else.

This was not right.

This was not fair.

Not to his wife and baby, who right now had no idea what was happening up here.

This was the horror of 9/11, or at least, the horror Jamie imagined whenever he thought about what it was like on one of those burning floors of the towers. The horror that your family will never know what happened in your last minutes alive. Like you were already dead.

He felt eyes. Nichole was staring at him.

“I’ve been thinking about what to say to you,” she said. “Because I
do
want you to live through this. And the less you know, the better. Trust me on this. I can’t speak for the rest of this company, but I’m one of the good guys. I may be the only good guy here. You probably saved my life, so I’m going to try to save yours. Fair enough?”

Jamie swallowed. His mouth tasted like death. “Yeah.”

“David is a bad guy. David sealed this floor and tried to kill us. Molly stopped David, but now
she’s
trying to kill us. That makes her a bad guy, too. That’s all we need to know.”

“Okay.”

“Our strategy is simple. We avoid Molly, and we try to make it off this floor alive.”

“I’m hoping you know how to do that.”

“Yeah,” Nichole said. “We ask David.”

She showed him a syringe.

“That wasn’t in the first aid kit, was it?” Jamie asked.

Thirty-five hundred miles away, Keene asked: “Find your Girlfriend yet?”

McCoy grunted, then drained the rest of his Caley. He walked back to their tiny kitchen for another can. Keene was going to have to think about fixing supper soon. Whenever McCoy reached the six-pack point, he became ravenous. And he was especially cranky when he was hungry.

Keene took over, cycling through the cameras on the thirty-sixth floor, spending barely a second on each office. In the conference room, the boss was still on the floor, the blood around his head looking like an oddly shaped pillow. The corpse of his faithful employee, McCrane, was situated across the room. Kurtwood’s dead body was still in the hallway of the abandoned section of the office. The still-alive DeBroux and Wise were in the head office. But no Girlfriend.

Where could she be?

Keene hoped she wasn’t dead. Otherwise, McCoy would be insufferable for weeks.

Girlfriend was doing her hair.

She had no choice. Six shots had been fired, and she had twisted and rolled and managed to avoid every single one … except one. A lucky shot, most likely fired when Nichole Wise really started to lose control, and was firing blind. Because there was no possible way that had been intentional. That kind of shot was the stuff of military snipers, not workaday Company watchdogs. Wise didn’t have the precision.

The bullet had sliced through the air, then the glass, then more air, and then her cheek.

It had gouged a bloody trail high across her cheekbone, and it had carried enough ground glass to make it hurt.

The pain didn’t matter, though. Her appearance did.

After cleansing her face and the wound, she reached behind her head and pulled the clips from her hair. Her hair was quite long. Paul had liked it that way. She kept it up and away from her face during the workday. Home, alone with Paul, she let it down. Home alone with Paul, she’d often wander around the house without clothes. It left him quite powerless, even if he thought he was in control.

Now she let some of her hair fall down in a wedge over the right side of her face; the rest was clipped up behind her head. She used hot water to smooth out her hair, tease some of the drywall dust and blood and ground glass out of it. After a minute of grooming, it looked passable. This was not a look she’d ever used before. Perhaps this was a good thing.

At the end, she was going to have to look presentable.

That would be the final exam.

Boyfriend would see it.

And, God willing, Boyfriend would give her the promotion she so desperately craved. No.
Needed.

Good thing Boyfriend couldn’t see her now.

She had wanted him to see the pain she endured—that was part of the interview. But not the aftermath. A good operative was super-resilient, able to bounce back from any form of punishment. Most American operatives didn’t have much of a threshold for pain.

This would distinguish her from much of her competition.

She kept bandages and liquid skin in her right bracelet; tweezers and a simple stitching kit in her left. She used them now, working quickly and efficiently. Time was against her. She’d already wasted a minute on her face and rearranging her hair.

Her black skirt was fine—the color masked the blood—but her pantyhose were ruined, sliced open in a dozen places by the sharp glass. They had served her well. The pantyhose weren’t ordinary; you couldn’t buy them in a plastic egg in a department store. They were a special order, reinforced by woven Kevlar. Her legs had scratches and cuts, but no major gashes.

Her blouse was similarly reinforced. The worst damage she’d taken had been to her left forearm. She had rolled up her sleeve to access her bracelet.

Perhaps she should have rolled her sleeve back down.

Like the pantyhose, the blouse had to go. She wore a sleeveless
shirt over her bra, one that didn’t look strange when paired with a skirt. It would do for the remainder of the interview.

Her legs and feet were bare, but she could easily recover her shoes before she departed.

Her hair now covered her face.

Glass had been plucked out; flesh taped, bonded, or sutured; clothes wiped clean.

Girlfriend was ready for the remainder of the morning activities.

She allowed herself the luxury of staring at herself in the bathroom mirror for a few moments. She was deep within the offices of
Philadelphia Living.
She’d stolen a key from the publisher two months ago. She’d followed him to a bar called The Happy Rooster—how appropriate, that name. He had been drunk and had stumbled off to sing karaoke. She slipped her hand into the bag, secreted the key, and disappeared into the shadows before he’d reached the second chorus of “Afternoon Delight.” In the meantime, she’d kept the key in a compartment in her right bracelet. She was glad it had finally been of some use.