I flipped the sun visor down in front of my face and looked into the vanity mirror so that I was gazing into my own fluttering green eyes. The skin around them appeared gossamer, purple and white, like the surface of a thin seashell. “I look exhausted,” I muttered. “It must be all the travelling. I can’t believe my hair is freaking blue.”
Rabbit ignored me, his eyes were pinching together to define the blurry, rain-obscured traffic through the windshield. He turned onto Avenue of the Americas and stopped the car about a quarter-block’s distance from the Cibix main entrance.
My eyes studied the dripping windshield. “Rabbit, can’t you drop me off any closer? It’s pouring out.”
“It’s only a drizzle. You will be fine.”
“I am not stepping out of this car and walking into my first day at a new job looking like a wet rat, dragged in from the gutter. It’s unprofessional. Pull up closer!”
“Someone is really getting into her role as a corporate drone.”
“Well, I’ve never worked in an office before and I want to make a good impression.”
“You do realize you don’t actually work at Cibix, don’t you?”
“I realize that. Will you please pull up closer?”
“Fine, fine,” he said, checking his mirrors and pulling back into traffic.
The car crawled the length of the Cibix building, turning into a gated parking lot with a sign that read: CIBIX EMPLOYEE PARKING. Rabbit let the car idle as I climbed out. He rolled down the window and poked his head out to tell me one more time, “Serious, Alice. Remember that this is serious.”
Rabbit gunned it out of the parking lot and I scampered across the pavement towards the entrance. Towering over the VIP parking area was an American flag, intertwined with a yellow flag displaying the Cibix logo, which was a small squiggly tornado. Both flags were currently being battered by the wind that accompanied the dreary rain drizzle.
The men and women treading inside the doors were dressed mostly in black, as though already morning the loss of their day, and they gripped briefcases and paper coffee cups with the Starbucks label. I imagined that they were off to plan big mergers, roll our new products, and win new customers. Actually, I had no idea what people in corporate America really did. I was a professional liar, so my cubicle was whatever millionaire’s yacht I was causing a dust up in at the moment.
As I made my way towards the entrance, an empty soda can rolled to my feet and bounced off the tip of my shoe. I sidestepped it just in time to avoid it barreling underneath my feet and tripping me. I looked down, puzzled, at the wayward can. It appeared to have rolled from a tank-like dumpster located on the perimeter of the parking lot. It seemed specifically destined to hit my feet.
I noticed a man hauling a load of trash from the dumpster, and when he turned his face upwards, the sparse sun caught against the waxy surface of his bald head.
I adjusted the Stink bug in my ear. “What’s with the backup?” I asked Rabbit.
“What do you mean?”
“I just spotted Moonboots McCafferty dressed in janitor’s garb, unloading Cibix’s trash into the dumpster in the parking lot. He nearly killed me with a rogue soda can.”
“Motley must have thought we needed backup in case things get hairy.”
There was a strange commotion from the other end of the parking lot.
“Oh, and you’re not going to believe this,” I said with a tired grunt, “but I just spotted a six-foot tall security guard with a nasty Irish accent yelling at some guy for dumping his Starbucks cup in the trash instead of the recycle bin.”
“Xerxes O’Brien? Motley called in Xerxes too? Are you sure?”
“Positive. I mean how many enormous Irish guys with a beard as red as a barn are there in this city?”
“It’s probably for the best that they are here.”
Chapter Twelve: The Corporate Grind
I CROSSED INTO the Cibix lobby with the black briefcase leveled at my hip just as Rabbit’s voice kicked in on the Stink bug again. “Good morning, all Cibix employees. The weather report for today, as always, is stale recycled air. The employee cafeteria will be serving limp fish sticks. For consistency sake, your boss will still be a blowhard. And remember, stale coffee will be available all day long, so we encourage you to stay for some unpaid over time.”
I smiled, even though I was fully committed to still hating Rabbit. “What direction?” I hushed for Rabbit to hear through the Stink bug.
“Go straight through the lobby and then round a left at the receptionist’s desk.”
The receptionist was filing her nails and speaking into one of those bulbous headsets that made her look like she either was manning the Starfleet Enterprise or taking orders at a fast food drive thru window. “Then what?”
“You’re going to see an arrow with a plaque underneath it that points to Finance on the fourteenth floor. Take the elevator up.”
I did as Rabbit instructed and climbed into the elevator. There was a man standing inside already. He was the personification of a midlife crisis. As I stepped onboard, he looked up me up and down with his dull, beady eyes. He had thin greasy hair that he had obnoxiously combed over to one side in a failed attempt to conceal his balding, and he wore an ill-fitting shirt that didn’t make an accommodation for the twenty pounds or so of fat that had accumulated onto his gut since he started his career three decades ago. Every office had one, I figured. When the elevator let me off on the fourteenth floor, I could feel his eyes burning into my backside as I stepped into the hallway.
“Take a right,” Rabbit instructed. I did, and then I followed the sign for the Finance quadrant. “Debra Light’s cubicle is all the way in the back on the left.”
Upon arrival, I noticed that the path to step inside my cube was partially blockaded by a pile of expired printer toner and that spider webs hung from its corners like laced curtains. “You couldn’t spring for a lofty corner office with a window?”
“It was the only vacant one in the department. They’ve had a recent hiring spree. I guess with the new government contract they needed to up the workflow.”
“It’s not like I’m going to be here long.”
“There is a small pocket on the outside of your briefcase. I need you to reach inside, there’s a surprise for you.”
I slid my hand into the mesh pocket and pulled out a name plate that said: Debra Light, Accounting, along with a framed picture of Debra Light’s husband - if Debra’s husband were Rabbit. I did my best to suppress my laughter as I stared at the dorky picture of Rabbit posed beside a fireplace, wearing a tacky argyle sweater.
“Cute touch,” I remarked as I wiggled into my chair.
“Who are you talking to?” asked a female voice from behind me.
I spun my chair around to see a vision of a middle-aged woman. Her hair was stiffened by Aqua Net and her pudgy body was swathed in an outdated blazer. Her figure was squared off by a set of unnecessary shoulder pads, which gave her the appearance of a linebacker. She was sipping coffee from a mug which had an image of a fuzzy kitten wearing sunglasses.
I straightened my posture and smoothed my hair around my face. “Hello. Do you need some accounting done?” I asked the woman. I supposed it was a realistic question for an accountant to ask.
“Is today your first day?” she asked.
“Not technically.”
“But I’ve never seen you before and I sit right over there.” She pointed to the cubicle with three feet of drab braided brown carpet between it and my own. I noted the presence of a cat calendar pinned to the outside wall and framed pictures of cats showcasing around the computer monitor.
I nervously smoothed the hair around my face, battling imaginary flyaway strands. “My first day here, here. I’ve just been transferred from the Paris office to work on Project Nine.” What I wanted to tell her was that I wasn’t in the mood for questions from Shoulder Pads, the one-woman welcoming committee.
“I didn’t know we had office
s in Paris.” I saw her brow furrow, but then her expression lightened as she remarked, “but we’re such a big company, the right hand never knows what the left earlobe is doing.” The laugh she followed up with was violent enough to for her to exert a snort. “But I don’t have to tell you how sucky management is. Probably the Paris bosses are just as bad as here.”
I nodded in fervent agreement. “The worst. Last year at my review, my manager made a big fuss just because I have blue hair. It cost me my Christmas bonus.”
“A Christmas bonus is a sacred thing.” I gave a wounded nod and she continued. “And for having blue hair? That’s some kind of discrimination right there. What if you had some sort of illness that turned your hair blue? What if you were taking some of that, what’s it called, colloidal silver, to keep healthy? I saw a man on the Oprah show once, turned his skin blue with that stuff, but probably he will live to be a hundred years old. Tell ya what, I would march to Human Resources and threaten a lawsuit if I was you.”
“I might just do that,” I said.
“Why did they transfer you over here anyway? They’re pretty hush-lipped on Project Nine to those of us not in on the operation. The rumor is that it’s something about a top secret government project.”
“They needed some of my financial expertise, which is extensive, by the way, for allocating funds for research and development.”
“Gosh, it must be a real high priority project, because they are just bringing you in by the truckload, aren’t they?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re the second new one that showed up just today. Blondie-locks over there reported in this morning for the same project.” She pointed to a cubicle on the other side of the room, where a buxom blonde was sitting; her ample figure was shoved into a conservative pinstriped blazer. The overstressed buttons on her ensemble looked ready to give out under the cleaving pressure of her chest. As if on cue, the devilish woman turned her attention from tapping her keyboard and did an antagonistic wave in my direction.
“Her again,” I whined.
“You know her?”
I leaned into Shoulder Pads, my nostrils accessing the faint smell of cat urine that was embedded into her clothing. “I heard they hired her in from the competition, so don’t trust her.”
“I would never trust a woman wearing anything that tight.”
Rabbit came back on in my ear. “Okay, Alice, enough hanging around the water cooler. Time to work.”
“Excuse me,” I said to Shoulder Pads, “I need to go make some copies.” I grabbed my briefcase and shot up from my chair and crossed the barracks of cubicles that extended to the hallway where the elevators were located. “The blonde is here,” I murmured into the microphone.
“The blonde?” Rabbit asked.
“Yeah, the psycho one from Brussels, she’s here somehow. And to make it worse, I just got interrogated by a pair of shoulder pads on legs.”
“We can’t let her deter us. We need to get this done right now.” He instructed me, “To get to the server room you need to get back on the elevator you used this morning and shoot down to the building’s sub-ground level.”
I hit the elevator button, and when the doors parted, Xerxes O’Brien was standing inside, dressed in a blue janitor’s smock and hefting a black plastic trash bag over his shoulder. “Going down, little lady?” he asked.
“I knew I saw you in the parking lot.”
“Motley wanted me and Moonboots on backup in case anything goes wrong.”
“I’m on my way down to the server room right now to take care of the Project Nine servers. It might be helpful if you go back up to the finance department and keep an eye on the blond girl in the tight blouse. Make sure she doesn’t come down here.” The elevator stopped and the doors sprang open behind me. I stepped backwards out into the hallway.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to accompany you to the server room and be a lookout?” Xerxes asked.
I tapped my ear and replied, “Rabbit’s got me covered down here.”
“Good luck, Alice.”
The door snapped shut between us and I surveyed my daunting surroundings.
I was standing in a small, boxed-in corridor. In front of me was a heavy industrial door. Next to the door’s fortified handle, a red pulsing flicker radiated from a small black box fixed to the wall. I swiped my fake employee badge beneath the blinking red sensor and the light switched to green. I set my hand on the door’s handle. Cake.
Or was it? Suddenly a deafening alarm sounded. It streamed into the corridor from all angles. I pulled my hand off the handle and backed away.
“Don’t worry,” Rabbit said in my ear just then. “I hacked into the alarm circuits and tripped the fire alarm so the entire building will have to evacuate. The building being empty will make your job easier. To your left, there’s a janitor’s closet. Go hide inside until the employees have all evacuated.”
I jangled the handle on the closet door. “If you tripped the door to lock me inside so you can take off for Maui and leave me behind, I will kill you.”
“Oh, Alice, just go inside and shut up.”
I slithered inside and shut the door. “Great, it’s completely dark in here.” The closet was silent enough that I could hear the glossy click of my own eyelids.
“Don’t worry, you won’t be in there long. According to the human resources documents I hacked last night while I was adding your fake identity into the system, the results from the fire drill conducted last spring reports the standard employee evacuation time for Cibix offices as 3.7 minutes.
“Do you want to listen while I count Mississippis?”
“No need, Alice. I will let you know when time is up. I can see the herd of employees rounding down Avenue of the Americas now. There’s one with gargantuan shoulder pads evacuating from the finance corridor. Is that the one you were socializing with earlier?”
“That’s her.”
“Look at that, time’s up,” Rabbit chimed.
I threw the door open. I re-swiped my badge and the light turned green and I ran inside. The walls were stainless steel, like the interior of pipes, and I saw a plaque for the server room that was the first door off the hallway.
“If you made it into the server room you should see four big servers lined up on the far end of the wall.”
“I see them.”
“Now, walk over to them, pull out the acid from your briefcase, and pour carefully. After you’ve poured the acid, you’re going to see a slight sizzle and some gray, dry smoke. That’s how you know it’s working.”
I set the briefcase down on the ground and flexed my eyes side to side, quickly scanning the corners of the server room to ensure that I was alone. I stooped down beside the briefcase and gingerly popped the locks and reached for the neck of the first flask.
At the exact moment my hand curled the flask, a heavy forced ripped through the air and delivered a bone-crunching slam to my face. I crashed to my knees, the side of my face smashing into the cold, hard floor. My eyes fluttered as I felt my consciousness melt back into the warmth of my eye sockets.
Chapter Thirteen: The Servers
WHEN I OPENED my eyes again I saw the cusped toe of a black high heel shoe an inch away from my teeth. My eyes roved upwards to a pair of long, smooth legs, the surface of them gleaming under a pair of sheer pantyhose. The shoe’s tip knocked at my teeth, and I looked up, past the sea of blond tresses hanging over the face of the woman who wore the shoe. My eyes met her devilish brown eyes.
“Hello, again,” she said. “I’ve missed you since Brussels.”
“I hate you,” I said.
“What’s that?” Her eyes were on the briefcase.
“None of your business.” I reached out to grab her ankles. She wobbled and leveled down to the floor onto her ass.
“You bitch,” she snapped, rolling on her knees to reach for the briefcase. I bolstered onto my knees and pulled her back by the shoulders. She threw her body back
and gripped the hollows of my arm pits and threw me across the floor. My body spun over the slippery surface, and the side of my face smashed against the broad, jagged corner of a server. The determined blond grabbed for the briefcase again and I dragged my belly across the dusty floor towards her, grappling to pull her down by her hair.
“Be careful with that!” I screamed. “It’s dangerous stuff.”
She paused for a second, frozen in an acrobatic contortion. “Is the dynamite stick in that briefcase?”
“Why would I use a jumbo briefcase to carry a tiny thumb drive, you brainless brute?”
She swatted a nasty bitch-slap across my cheek. Her eyes looked skyward, contemplating, and she asked, “If it’s not the dynamite stick, then what is?”
“It’s acid, and if you don’t quit horsing around, you’re gonna feel the peel.”
“Why do you have acid?” She stepped back from the briefcase and gleaned it with caution. Her eyes trained on me and she reached into the waistband of her skirt and pulled out the stun gun she had zapped me with at the library in Brussels. “What are you planning on doing with this acid?” She scuttled at me, stun gun pointed forward, and grabbed me by the scruff of my hair. The Stink bug flew out of my ear and sputtered to the floor.
I clenched my eyes shut against the ripping pangs. “To wreck Cibix’s plan to restore everyone social security numbers. Obviously you already know about it or else you wouldn’t have shown up here.”
“That’s what you’re doing here?” I felt her ease her grip on the tendrils of my hair.
“Yeah, what else would I be doing? Applying for a position in accounting?”
“I thought you had the dynamite stick and you were going to hand it over to Cibix for some kind of payout, but if you’re trying to mess with the government, I don’t care if you wreck the servers.”
She jerked me lose and started to walk away. I let my arms drop and propped myself up by the palms of my hands as I caught my breath.
“But I do care,” a voice, husky and overconfident, roared from the doorway. I turned my eyes to see Pressley Connard. I should have known he was never lurking far behind. His strong shoulders were blocking the exit. The blonde zipped by Pressley on her way out the door. He could have stopped her, but kept his eyes trained on me as he let her speed off.
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