“You go,” Ruskin said, his voice shaking. “I can’t. I just... I can’t do it.”
Sandra had given him an icy glare, but had agreed to meet with reporters in the gym in five minutes. “What am I going to tell them?” she asked Ruskin. “What’s the plan? What’s the strategy?”
Ruskin muttered something under his breath that sounded like little more than gibberish.
“What?” Sandra asked. “Tell me!”
But when he raised his head, and Sandra could look him in the eye, she saw nothing there. He was shutting down.
“Fine,” she said, and headed for the gym.
The questions came at her like a hail of bullets.
What had gone wrong? Was it a software fault by the company? Was Arrival Inc. a victim of corporate sabotage? Were the rumors of a ransomware attack true? What was the death toll across the island? Was it true that Arrivals elsewhere had gone rogue? What was happening to the company’s stock price? Had trading in Arrival shares been halted? Would Arrival financially compensate the families of those who’d died today?
Sandra tried her best with each question, coming up every time with, essentially, a variation of “I have no fucking idea.”
She attempted to explain that while she’d helped organize this event, she was not an official spokesperson for the Arrival corporation. The more logical person to answer those questions was Albert Ruskin, she insisted. Well, the reporters asked, why isn’t he taking our questions?
Good question.
Sandra escaped the gymnasium briefly to the hallway, sticking her head, ostrich-like, into a drinking fountain recessed into the wall. She wished she could stay there forever, but there was only so much water she could swallow. When she pulled her head out, Rebecca Geary stood there, arms folded across her chest.
“Where’s Ruskin?” she asked. “If you don’t have any of the answers, he must. He was Lisa’s executive assistant, for Christ’s sake. Right now, at the worst possible time, this Fortune 500 company is leaderless, rudderless.”
How true. The vice president of Arrival was on some African safari and no one had been able to reach him. And even if they could, the best he’d be able to do is issue a statement. What the media needed was someone to be the face of the company, someone to go on camera, someone to take questions, someone who could at least give the impression that the Arrival corporation cared about the mess it had created, and would do everything in its power to make things right. And let’s face it, Rebecca was implying, Sandra was not cutting it.
“Off the record,” Sandra said, and she waited for Rebecca to give a nod of understanding, “I think Ruskin’s having a nervous breakdown.”
Rebecca’s expression gave no evidence of sympathy. “Yeah, well, people are dead. He needs to put on his big-boy pants and get out here.”
Sandra took a deep breath. “Let me try him again.”
The phone in her hand rang. She glanced down, saw HILLARY CLINTON on the screen. She declined the call.
She trotted down the hall to the administrative office. When she turned the handle, she found it locked. She rapped on the frosted glass.
“Ruskin!” she cried. “It’s me.”
When several seconds went by without a response, she rapped again, harder this time.
“If you don’t let me in I’m going to break—”
The door opened three inches, revealing a sliver of Albert Ruskin’s face.
“Are you alone?” he asked.
“I’m alone.”
He opened the door wider to admit her, then closed it and turned the lock.
“You have to get out there,” she said.
“I don’t care,” he said, turning his back to her and walking to the far corner of the room, as if he could somehow escape her there. Between them was a desk, and on top of it, the laptop that had belonged to Lisa Carver.
“You’re Arrival’s only official here. Your boss is dead. Your company’s reputation, if there’s anything of it left, is up to you to defend. There’s an angry media mob out there wondering why you’re not talking to them.”
“I... I just... I can’t...”
“You’ve heard of getting ahead of something?” Sandra said. “Well, it might be a little late for that now. But how far behind do you want to get? Every second you spend in here blubbering, things get worse.”
She briefly placed her hands on her head, as if preparing to tear her hair out.
“What is it, Mr. Ruskin? Don’t you care? Don’t you give a shit about this company?”
He slowly turned and looked at her, as though suddenly realizing she was there. And, as if it were made of putty, his face began to transform. His grim expression morphed into something different.
He was grinning.
“The bitch is dead,” he said.
Sandra blinked. “What?”
“I feel like... like I’ve been liberated. The bitch is dead and I’m a free man.” The grin broadened and he laughed. “It’s just starting to sink in.”
Sandra thought, Is this happening?
“She can’t torment me any longer,” he said. “Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to get out of prison?”
“Um...”
“I’m betting it feels like this.” His grin scaled back to a smile and he looked more contemplative. “Do you know what I used to do?”
She shook her head.
“I ran a food bank.” Ruskin chuckled. “Can you believe that? My life was devoted to helping the hungry, the disadvantaged. But there wasn’t a whole lot of money in running a food bank — surprise, surprise — so I turned to the corporate world, working first at Tesla. And then I got headhunted to come work at Arrival, and eventually become Lisa’s assistant.” He paused. “I was warned. But I didn’t listen.”
“Warned?”
“She’d had plenty of assistants before me.” He grinned. “Kind of like husbands. She couldn’t hang on to those, either. Had two. Didn’t take long before they realized what she was. A succubus, that’s what she was. A female demon.”
It occurred to Sandra at that moment that of all the calls that had come in to Lisa Carver’s phone, none had been from family. “Kids?” she asked.
Ruskin shook his head. “No. Imagine what a mother she would have been. There were rumors that, in her teens, she had a child, but I don’t know.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I became her latest assistant, her latest victim. She was a cat, and I was her mouse. A mouse you don’t actually kill, or eat, but one you torment, that you tease. The night before my wife and I were to go on a second honeymoon, she dropped ten assignments on my desk. We had to cancel. Lisa knew. She knew what she was doing. It was a test of loyalty.”
“I didn’t know you were...”
“Married? Yeah, at one time. Lisa... destroyed our marriage. She knew all the relevant birthdays and anniversary dates — not just ours but her parents’ or mine — and even if we had tickets to something amazing, like a Broadway show that was impossible to get into, she’d always come up with something I had to do, something that took priority over everything, some report that had to be done, some presentation that had to be prepared. Andrea couldn’t—”
“Andrea?”
He nodded. “My wife. Andrea couldn’t take it. She left me. She said to me one day, I had to make a choice. Her, or Lisa. My marriage, or my job.”
Sandra said. “And you chose wrong.”
A sly but sad smile crossed Ruskin’s lips. “Maybe. But I wasn’t going to let Lisa win. It was like she was daring me to quit, like all the others who’d come before. See how much shit I’d put up with before she broke me.” He drew in a breath. “I wasn’t going to let her break me.” The grin returned. “She did not break me.”