“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.