“What if she fucks up or something?” Michelle asked, hefting the explosive in her hand. “Suppose it turns itself on accidentally this morning while I’m eating breakfast and instead of blowing up the parts of the building you want blown up, I blow up the cafeteria and myself instead?”
Alan shook his head. “That won’t happen. Trust me. I know we planned this sort of last minute, but we did it carefully.”
Michelle wanted to respond but didn’t know what to say. At this point she’d crossed the point of no return. It didn’t matter any more. What more did she have to live for? Corporate Financial was set to enslave the world; blowing herself up by accident would be a ticket out of the nightmare.
Alan began handing her more of the explosives and Michelle stacked them in her briefcase. “These things are water-proofed,” Alan said. “Best place for them is in the toilet tanks of as many of the women’s rest rooms as you can get them in.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep.” Alan held one of the devices in his hand. “The executive suite, the bathroom outside the executive secretary’s office, and the bathroom near conference room 4H on the fourth floor are prime targets. They’ll probably take you into the data center tomorrow. There’s a bathroom right off the data center’s main entrance. Plant two of them in that one. Then there’s going to be a bathroom in the executive lounge in the basement. Hit that one, too.”
“The basement?”
“That’s where they’re going to begin your immersion.”
“How… how will I be able to get out of the immersion?”
Alan held up an earpiece. “Remember this?” He passed it on to her. “You’ll be in direct contact with Rachel and me all day. The audio wire you wore today goes with it. At three p.m. tomorrow Rachel or myself will send a signal to you that will break through the subliminal messages Corporate Financial will be feeding you during immersion. It’s a signal designed to penetrate not only audio, but psychic messages as well.”
“Psychic messages?”
“It will intercept brain waves,” Alan explained. “That’s part of how they’ll turn you. Unlike planting the explosives, this part of our mission has been in the planning stages for a long time. We’ve been working on it for three years and we’ve tested it. Trust me on this. Naturally, you’re going to try to fight the immersion as you lie down in that room, but just in case you succumb we’re going to intercept their influences and awaken you this way. If we don’t hear anything from you, we’re going to jam the signals again. We’re going to keep jamming the signal until you tell us you’re awake and that you’re making your way out of the building. If we don’t hear from you in five minutes, we’re aborting.”
Michelle tried to read Alan’s face to see if he was telling the truth. He looked like he was. His features were open, honest, and she saw the same ray of hope she saw when she first met him. His was an honest face, one she felt she could trust. Yet for some reason, she didn’t believe him when he said that if they didn’t succeed in tearing her away from Corporate Financial’s grip they would abort. She didn’t believe that for one second.
If they didn’t hear from her, if she failed to wake up and make a beeline for the doors, they were going to go through with the plan anyway.
All this passed through her mind in a microsecond. “When I come out of it, then what?” she asked.
“Leave one of the devices in the room,” Alan said. “It’ll be the last one. Make your way out of the room and head upstairs. The stairway will dump you off near the data center and there will be a side exit. There’ll be a guard station there; don’t worry about that one, they probably won’t notice you leave anyway. If they do and they try to stop you, keep going. I’ll be waiting for you in a green Honda in the executive parking lot.”
“When will you show up?”
“Two p.m.” He sighed and rubbed his right hand across his face. He looked tired. “I told Sam that I’m meeting a client in the Bay Area and that I’ll be at headquarters to meet with IT. I’ll be planting devices myself, hopefully in the data center.”
“So I meet you at the car at, say, ten after three, and we take off and then what?”
“When we’re a mile away I call Rachel and give her the signal. If it works, we’ll know. We’ll likely hear the blast, probably even see it.”
Despite the severity of the crime she was about to partake in, Michelle no longer felt a sense of dread or foreboding. She no longer had any pangs of doubt. She had to do this come hell or high water. “And then what?”
“Then we meet up in San Francisco and one of our associates will put us up in a safe house. I’ll give Jay and Donald the address and phone number later this morning. We’ll meet up there, monitor things over the next day or so, and then we’ll see where we stand.”
Michelle looked at the briefcase, now almost packed with the explosive devices. She closed the lid and snapped the locks in place, then picked it up. It was heavy, but she’d be able to manage it. “What if we’re caught?”
“We won’t get caught.”
“What if we’re caught?”
“That can’t happen.”
“You didn’t make a backup plan?”
Alan grabbed her shoulders and spun her toward him. For the first time his face was livid, hot with anger. “We’re going to win! Do you understand me? We’re going to destroy these bastards and everything they stand for and that includes the… thing they’ve got sleeping in their basement!”
Michelle felt the blood drain from her face at the sound of Alan’s voice. “What thing?”
Alan looked at her. “You know what I mean. You know what Rachel and I told you last week in Chicago. About the Marstein’s devil-worshipping.”
When Rachel and Alan mentioned the occult angle to her yesterday, Michelle hadn’t given it much credit. If the Marstein’s believed it and were able to convince a bunch of other greedy executives that making sacrifices to the dark gods would increase their stock portfolios, that was their business. Michelle thought back to what Alan had told her yesterday about corporations being recognized as actual people. It stood to reason that if people could be possessed by demonic entities then corporations could too. And when the Marstein’s alleged devil-worship was taken into consideration, it all made sense. But if Alan and Rachel believed that there was some truth to the stories, then this was a whole different matter. “You believe the stories are real?”
“Hell yes!” Alan said, his voice a whisper. “I thought you believed us!”
“I did,” Michelle said, feeling a flush of embarrassment now that she realized she’d conveyed to them a little too strongly that she’d swallowed everything they’d told her. “But this… devil thing… is just… I mean, I believe that they believe it but—”
“Make no mistake about it,” Alan said, his tone serious, his gaze penetrating. “This shit is real. Corporate Financial has done something nobody would have ever dreamed of, and the thing Marstein conjured, the thing that makes him and his company rich and fat, exists to be fed and get stronger. It has its hooks in the people who run the company, and you can believe they’re getting something out of it.”
“What’s that?”
“Money. Power. Prestige.” Alan paused. “Pleasure.”
Michelle felt herself shiver. “What kind of pleasure?”
They looked at each other for a moment and despite her rational side telling her that this was bullshit, that this was a product of some mass hallucination, another part of her, the part that she always listened to, was telling her it was real, it was happening and she had to trust her instincts. She had to trust the fact that Donald believed it. If Donald was in the belief camp, it had to be true. She would trust her life to him. He’d never lied to her and never misled her before on anything. He’d never do anything to hurt her.