Out in the main office his assistant lifted a stack of papers and stood. Today he noticed that, from the back, her ass looked like a peach: round, firm, and begging to be bitten. The deep-green suit clinging to her curves showed him where he wanted to bite first. He shifted in his chair to give his burgeoning erection room to grow.
Just this morning, he’d thought of installing a spy camera behind her desk so he could make a highlights tape of her bending over to get files, walking down the hall, maybe touching up her lipstick. He’d researched it enough to know it was possible, but decided that if he were caught, the political blowback would be too unpleasant. The Internet had plenty of sleazy images. Besides, he was breaking so many big laws that he needed to be careful about the small ones.
She turned around, and her lips tightened. She’d caught him looking, but what could she do? Looking wasn’t against any sexual harassment law, and she still enjoyed the vestiges of summer goodwill.
She crossed the ash-gray carpet on her long legs and stood in front of his door. She lifted the papers, a question on her face.
“Come in.” He rolled his chair up against his antique mahogany desk and smiled. She smiled back. The expression never made it to her eyes. As far as he was concerned, it didn’t need to.
Tight, controlled steps brought her to his desk. She was a master of moving in those high heels. He bet she had ballet training.
Her fragrance enveloped him, musky perfume, a trace of face powder, and a note of lipstick. Not 999, but the lipstick’s scent still tickled his nose.
“These are for you to sign.” She handed him a sheaf of papers. “I flagged the signature lines with sticky notes.”
“Thank you, Miss Evans.”
“Mrs. Evans,” she corrected.
“Where do I sign?”
She leaned closer, and he breathed in her scent, quietly so she wouldn’t notice. One long, crimson nail pointed at a blank signature line next to a yellow arrow. The sticky note.
Without reading, he slowly signed his name. She flipped several pages and pointed to another location. This time, he signed it even more slowly, forcing her to stand next to him and wait. Her warm form tensed with irritation, but he didn’t care. He liked having her there.
The phone on his desk rang. Ordinarily, screening his calls was her job, but he reached for the phone himself. She’d have to stand there while he talked or come back to show him where to sign the papers. That’d help him through the day.
“I’ll get that.” She hurried toward her own desk, although she could have answered the call at his.
Her ass cheeks bounced as she walked, and he waited until she was sitting in her own chair before he looked away. He had to control himself in the office, but each day was more difficult than the last.
He needed to hunt the tunnels soon.
Chapter 4
Joe sat on the gray planks in his underground front yard and looked around at the carpet of living greenery covering his once bare stone floor. The plants were still too fragile for Joe to walk on, but Edison sniffed around amongst them in a complicated pattern.
A bank of LED spots provided the plants with light. Water from his household pipes trickled down a nearby rock face and fed into an irrigation system originally designed for exactly the opposite environment — a rooftop garden. The system worked down here, too, and it had brought him something he’d sorely missed during these months inside.
He inhaled the smell of rich soil, wet rocks, and the green scent of ground cover. He’d picked out the plants with his garden designer, savoring their evocative names — creeping mazus, brass buttons, and blue star.
Edison looked toward their Victorian house a few yards away. The white door was thrown open onto the newly swept porch. Maeve Wadsworth, his eccentric garden designer, had ordered her crew to pressure wash the yellow boards and red and white gingerbread before starting on the garden. The house sparkled. It probably hadn’t been this clean in a century.
Like every day, he felt grateful to the gifted engineer who’d designed the city’s underground train system and built this house deep beneath his greatest creation, Grand Central Terminal. Without it, Joe would have been stranded in the modern glass and steel Hyatt where he’d been staying when the agoraphobia struck. Instead, he had a home of his own.
Still tense from work, he rolled his shoulders to relax them. He’d pulled back from Pellucid, the facial recognition software company that had made him his fortune. He only did occasional consulting work for them now, which enabled him to maintain access to their databases without raising suspicion. He didn’t miss running Pellucid.
Lucid was his new baby. It was his brain-mapping company. The human brain was already mapped on a large scale, but he intended to penetrate its secrets at a neuronal level. Like his almost-ancestor Nikola Tesla, Joe was convinced the answers to the brain lay in electricity. Not the dramatic electricity that powered Nikola’s legendary devices, but in the tiny blasts of electricity that pulsed through the nervous system at the speed of thought.
He measured that electricity using electrodes that recorded the voltage fluctuations in neurons. The tests were called EEGs, and he intended to build up the largest database of EEGs in the world. Once he had enough data, he intended to apply his pattern-matching abilities, the ones that had made Pellucid the most successful company in its field, to map the brain’s activities.
With a lot of luck, he might be able to figure out what exactly had gone haywire in his own brain and be able to walk on real grass again. He’d not only cure himself, he’d be able to help millions who suffered from agoraphobia and other anxiety disorders. Or at least that was his goal.
Joe pulled dinner out of his takeaway bag — Greek salad. Edison sniffed the air and gave Joe a painfully embarrassed look. The dog had a deep mistrust of salad.
Edison licked his hand apologetically, then trotted over to the porch, scooted up the stairs and disappeared through the open door. He’d had a long day at Joe’s office. He’d earned some decent kibble.
“Abandoning me to salad?” Joe called after him. “The shame of it!”
He laid his meal out on a blanket he’d spread over the boards: salad, beer, and a hunk of bread. This represented his first picnic in the tunnel. Then he phoned the person he most wanted to share it with.
“Celeste,” said a breathy voice on the phone. Her picture, taken years before when they’d been lovers in college, smiled from his screen. When they talked, she could see his face in real time, but he could never see hers. She wouldn’t allow it. Not anymore.
“Joe here. I’m in my garden!” He moved the phone’s camera across the plants. “Welcome to my picnic.”
“Mm-hmm.”
He let out a contented sigh. “One small step for a Joe, one giant leap for Joe-kind.”
Celeste made a breathy exhalation that might have been a laugh.
He wished she could be here to see it, or that he could see the view from her window, but his agoraphobia kept him a prisoner down here just as much as her ALS kept her a prisoner in her expensive penthouse hundreds of feet above the city.
“The LEDs.” He pointed the phone at a bank of lights. “They’re on a twelve-hour timer to make sure the plants get enough light, and they’re motion sensitive. Whenever I come outside, they retract against the walls so I can see the whole lawn. Maeve thought of everything.” Maeve was a genius — she had an incredible visual sense, was good with plants, and had designed and built the light setup herself. Truly a steampunk-esque Renaissance woman.