Black Tie: Book One of the Sparrow Archives

by Kieran Strange

  “Honestly...?”

  Cabe looked at her, that same twitch in his muscles that he got when he was finally starting to figure things out.

  “No... no, I don’t think he is.”

  Ten

  “Good evening, Mr. Cooper! Coat? Coffee?”

  Cabe almost didn’t hear Smiley Sally’s high, friendly greeting as he breezed through the business entrance of WrightTech, tracking a decent amount of snow in with him on his sneakers (which offered absolutely zero bloody grip against the icy sidewalk, he was discovering). His head was spinning. The artificial light of the lobby wasn’t aiding matters any, but that didn’t slow his pace at all as he continued across the black marble floor, the brown leather satchel he’d been given to use for this job slung across his shoulder and gripped tight at his side.

  He didn’t believe what he was seeing on those blueprints. Or at least, he didn’t want to believe what he was seeing on those blueprints, and thus refused to believe it until he had confirmed it with his own eyes.

  “Mr. Cooper? Are you okay?”

  The change in her tone was what finally halted him mid-step, the fact that she didn’t sound so disgustingly perky anymore. There was genuine concern in there, and when he lifted his eyes, the redhead was notably worried about him. For some reason, that took him by surprise.

  Maybe he wasn’t okay.

  “No, I, uh.” He shook his head. “I’m... I’m sorry, I was in another world. I’m good, with the coat, and without the coffee.” He gave her a nod, then offered one to the security guard in the corner, whose intense stare was pinned on him at this point.

  “No apologies necessary whatsoever, Mr. Cooper. You’ve had a rather extreme day.”

  “I was just coming in to do some more checks on the building, especially on Mr. Wright’s quarters. After today, I –”

  “Mr. Cooper, you have no need to explain yourself to me,” the secretary said, holding up one hand between them. She flashed him another smile, which actually legitimately did something to ease his nerves. He felt the barbed wire in his chest soften up ever so slightly.

  “You’re doing your job,” she continued. “Call down if you need absolutely anything, and we’ll do whatever we can to assist you. With your work or your own personal comfort.”

  “Thanks... thanks, I appreciate it.” He gave her a nod, and then a bit of a smile. “I’m gonna do some tests on the elevator’s emergency brakes tonight, as well as the glass in the office and penthouse, if you could let the security team know. Is Mr. Wright still working?”

  “Let me see...” she murmured as she returned to her glass desk. Nestled in the thick, curvy sculpture was a glass screen, which she used to access a screen of data he didn’t understand whatsoever as he glanced over her shoulder. Several graphs, along with vertical lines of Latin, ASCII, phonetic, numerical, and many other styles of glyphs. Another security feature, perhaps? A secret and secured internal language only certain WrightTech employees knew how to decode?

  “He and Ms. Bell are still online with Montreal in the main boardroom,” she eventually told him with a broad smile, tucking a lock of scarlet hair back behind one pierced ear. “Is it terribly urgent?”

  “Oh no – no, not at all,” Cabe interjected very quickly, waving his hand. He was probably a drastically different picture to the man she had met yesterday, now a little softer and more shaken up, clad in a pair of faded jeans and a heathered green, long-sleeve Timbers shirt beneath Elliot Wright’s priceless Valentino (which he had mostly brought with him to return). He wondered how many people they saw come through this lobby in streetwear who were normally displayed to the world in suit and tie.

  “I have everything I need, I don’t want to bother them.”

  Cabe lifted his awkwardly flailing hand in a wave and turned to head for the elevators, but the crimson-haired secretary stopped him before he got there.

  “Mr. Cooper?”

  He turned on the heel of his Converse knock-offs to look back at her. She was still stood at her desk, but her demeanor had changed somewhat. It was as if some of the candy-coating had chipped away, and he could see a real person underneath somewhere.

  “I... I wanted to say thank you. For what you did for Mr. Wright. He’s... there’s a lot of talk out there, but in here? We’re like a family. He keeps us safe, he gives us good benefits and a good wage, he donates to all these charities and does all these cool things so just... thank you. For making sure he didn’t die out there.” She glanced downward and smirked a bit. “I had a feeling neither he nor Ms. Bell would... have the time, with how busy their schedules are, to thank you themselves. I just wanted you to know we do appreciate it.”

  Cabe was probably a little darker in the cheeks than he had been beforehand. There wasn’t really a non-cheesy way one could respond to something like that. “Well, uh... thanks...? I’m just... that’s just what I do. It’s really no problem. Really.”

  She nodded, smiling back at him, and he walked past the security guard and toward the furthest elevator.

  Dammit, he thought as the door closed. He kept forgetting to ask her name. She was nice, and the longer he went being too distracted to actually ask for for it, the ruder he was going to seem when he finally remembered to.

  Sliding the leather strap of the satchel from his shoulder, Cabe tried to refocus his mind on what he was here to do. The secretary would inform the security team that he would be testing the elevator, which meant he had free reign to play with it for at least half an hour before anyone got suspicious.

  I hate elevators, he grumbled inwardly as he pulled the photocopy of the portion of the blueprints that had bothered from from his bag. For the first time, he was glad this particular elevator had no C.C.T.V. cameras connected to it. The fact that his new boss probably liked to rough and tumble in here was going to make his job a lot easier.

  When he had initially done his inspection of the WrightTech tower, to save time, he had only inspected each of the four identical storage locker levels on floors thirty-four through -seven at face-value, stopping on each and taking a walk around the semi-circular corridor and back to check for weak points in the architecture. As for now, he was going to have to hope that his hunch was correct, otherwise he was going to have put a lot of energy and effort into this for zippo.

  It hadn’t mattered much to him at first. But as time went on – as he watched Mr. Wright constantly adjust his cuffs so that the same amount each side protruded from his jacket sleeve or so that his cufflinks were both facing the same way – and the more he saw of the man’s meticulously-organized living quarters and office space, the way everything on his bedroom dresser and sitting room bar and office bookcases was at a perfect right angle...

  As time went on, he had started to wonder.

  Why thirty-nine storeys?

  Inhaling ever so slightly to brace himself, Cabe pulled the emergency brake for the elevator at the thirty-third floor – Elliot and Emiko’s offices. As was anticipated, and as had happened during his test run the day before, the lift car came to a gentle but ear-popping halt within seconds, the overhead light remaining on but dimming slightly.

  “Smooth,” muttered Cabe, rolling his eyes. How many times had Elliot pulled that old chestnut on a girl in here?

  With the aid of a small flashlight in his jeans pocket, Cabe crouched in the elevator and examined the blueprints. They claimed the top fifteen storeys each had eleven feet of clearance between floor and ceiling, a more luxurious space for the executive living suites and offices, as well as Elliot’s private storage facilities. He hadn’t noticed that before on the blueprints, or at least, he hadn’t put two and two together that the corridor he had walked down in each of the storage units most definitely did not sport eleven feet high ceilings. And while it was possible that the sealed vaults themselves were much more spacious than the corridor itself... something else had pointed Cabe in another direction.

  The original planning permit for the building that Ronnie had
dug up, commissioned in 1988 by a Mr. Matthew Bell for a Mr. Michael John Wright, originally boasted a twenty-eight-storey unit in a much smaller lot at the same location the building was currently at. This was revised four years ago at the behest of a Mr. Elliot Michael Wright, after he bought up half the lots on the block around him and acquired planning permission for the building to rise to a forty-storey unit.

  Given that planning permits weren’t exactly at the top of his priority list when the client had provided full blueprint specs, it hadn’t been until Cabe was pouring over every inch of the building (wondering how Elliot Wright could work on some kind of secret tech in such an open-plan office environment) that he had seen the slip, and everything had clicked into place.

  When would a man with such an obvious need for everything around him to be neat and orderly and even and rounded to the nearest digit be comfortable sleeping on the thirty-ninth floor of his thirty-nine-storey building?

  When he slept on the fortieth floor of his forty-storey building, of course. And Cabe had a feeling he knew exactly where that extra floor was hiding...

  “What kind of wank-job thinks Elliot Wright would put up with having a single-level office...?” he muttered to himself as he withdrew a small pry-bar and hammer from the satchel. “Stupid idiot rookie mistake...”

  The tools made short work of the safety lock that held the escape hatch closed from the outside. Cabe shrugged the coat off, slid the satchel over his shoulder, put the flashlight between his teeth, and hauled himself up out of the tight hatch onto the top of the car.

  I really, really, really hate elevators, he reminded himself, keeping low to the crosshead in an anchored crouch. The hoist-way itself was incredibly spacious and clean, cylindrical like the car itself with a soft purple glow warming its sides from the emergency lighting system.

  An escape route at the back of the shaft was marked up and down by twin rows of sturdy ladder rungs protruding from the wall and wrapped in warning tape. There was at least a two- or three-foot gap between the rungs and the back of the car, meaning even someone Cabe’s size would have to stretch out considerably far from the top of the car in order to grab ahold of one – and then cross his fingers and toes that he didn’t miss, slip, and fall down the shaft. Other than that, the thick, taut cables that moved the car were in excellent condition, and the ventilation was surprisingly adequate. Nothing unusual there.

  With the car hovering there, at the thirty-third floor’s landing, Cabe found exactly what he had been searching for on his first damn shot.

  LEVEL 33.3 boasted the blunt, white print on the inside of the shaft-way doors directly above him, like some kind of cosmic mathematical joke on the world. And on him. Sitting there on the crosshead with one hand on the main cable and the other on his satchel, he smirked broadly around the flashlight, allowing himself a good solid ten or fifteen seconds to be proud of his accomplishments today.

  That was all, though. Repositioning himself for balance, Cabe found the box on top of the car which housed the inspection station controls and flicked on both the attached light and inspection mode, giving him full control over the elevator’s movements from here. He lifted the car several feet up the shaft, bringing himself closer to the hidden floor’s large arched outer doors.

  “We don’t get to play with enough secret doors these days,” he mused to no one in particular, running his now gloved hands across it. There weren’t any obvious signs of the door being booby-trapped, and while he wasn’t Agent Faraj, he did tend to have a knack for telling if things were booby-trapped. He liked to think that, for the most part, he wasn’t much of a boob anymore. He ran the car up and down the hoist-way several levels, checking the other shaft-way doors for levels thirty through thirty-six both for similarities in design and construct, and to throw off anyone who might be watching him in the security station.

  When he was fully convinced that the door to the hidden floor was exactly the same as the others, Cabe brought the car slowly into its landing so that the interlocks would allow the doors to open. Leaving the elevator on inspection mode, he hopped back down into the car and used the straight end of the pry-bar to gently ease both sets of doors open.

  He wasn’t expecting what he saw. Not at all.

  Behind a stunning wall and door of glass and chrome was what could only be described as a large, brightly-lit laboratory. Groundbreaking tech Cabe didn’t even recognize and certainly couldn’t categorize hung from every wall, protruded from every ell, and sat upon every surface. The entire floor seemed to be divided into rooms and chambers of various sizes for various applications, each separated by the same type of transparent barricade. Several computers in a room to his left were running numbers, and a 3D printer on the same counter looked like it had been knocking something up for a decent few hours.

  In the closest office, a tray of test tubes filled with a dark, inky substance that looked suspiciously like blood were marked with handwritten labels too tiny to make out at his current distance. The same expansive desk was home to a towering stack of manila files, a well-loved and well-used WrightPad Pro, a moleskin notepad, a digital microscope, and two matching tabletop drawer units probably containing office equipment like paperclips and staples (he hoped).

  In the furthest room, what appeared to be an enormous piece of medical equipment (it looked like a small Stargate or something, but Cabe had been knocked unconscious enough times to recognize a C.T. scanner) was partially hidden behind an open lavender curtain.

  Holy... yeah.

  Enthralled at what he was seeing, Cabe hopped up out of the stalled elevator car onto the hidden upstairs of Elliot’s office. He wondered if certain people’s keycards were the only way to gain access to this level, or if there was also a staircase linking it to the thirty-third floor. Regardless, now that he was here, he was almost convinced that Dasilva’s black market tip was correct, and that Elliot Wright had been working on something in secret, which was now housed here at WrightTech itself.

  Dammit, I owe Gabby ten bucks.

  The question of exactly what Elliot had been working on was still yet to be answered. Discovering that he apparently liked to dress up and play mad scientist in his spare time was only half of the conundrum.

  Cabe was shocked to find the glass door that led into the lab opened in his hand. His mind was racing down several different tracks simultaneously, such as what security measures had Elliot constructed for this floor, and whether or not what he was seeing was directly attached to WrightTech as a company or something Elliot had been obsessing over personally. Every footstep he was convinced would trip some alarm or render him trapped within a steel box for security to find. Maybe he’d been watching too many Mission Impossible films lately... or maybe he’d just learned after three years on the job to always live by Murphy’s Law: because anything that could go wrong, would go wrong.

  The multiple clear glass walls made the laboratory a bit of a labyrinth to navigate. A thin corridor led back past two smaller rooms on either side (one pair set up like offices, the other like workshops with empty countertops, sinks, and closed cabinets), before splitting into a T. Ahead of him was probably the most expansive room, taking up almost half of the entire floor despite the fact that it was mostly empty save for a few cone markers and half of a badly-burned ballistic dummy; Cabe presumed it was some sort of test space, mostly due to the angled scorch marks across the padded ground, though that brooked the uncomfortable question of exactly what the hell had Elliot been testing to leave behind a mark like that?

  To his left, the corridor offered several more smaller rooms (one of which was totally sealed and soundproofed and completely empty) before reaching the room with the bustling 3D printer. To his right were several opaque rooms with locked doors (one of which had a biohazard symbol on it), and a much larger room which housed the C.T. scanner. That was his first port of call.

  The curved side of the C.T. scanner was labelled TOSHIBA, though the purple hexagon stenciled over the logo t
old him Elliot may have made some modifications to it of his own. The patient table was clean and prepped for its next use. A pair of blank screens hung down beside the scanner, and a third sat on top of the desk against the back wall. Moving further into the room revealed a huge display of eleven or twelve full tomography brain scan sets. Most of the images were in varying shades and tints of blue, but some of them displayed clouds of red in varying sizes and shapes at specific locations on the scan.

  “What the bloody fuck...?” he uttered, the words barely audible on his breath as he reached out to pluck one of the scans from the display, tugging the pushpin out of the wall in the process. There were two large smears of red on each of these images: one over what he recognized from his own C.T. scans as the cerebellum, and one all across the top of the brain.

  Cabe dropped his eyes to the printed label at the bottom of the scan. BELL, E – 08/16.

  A rush of breath escaped his lungs all at once as he realized he’d been holding it in too long. Holy sweet sanctimonious shit. The powers that be must’ve been handing him some sort of bone or consolation prize for his terrible no-good day from hell, because unless Elliot was just a strange bloke with some even stranger hobbies, he may have just found the first piece of evidence to confirm what Dasilva had discovered via her black market contacts: that Elliot Wright was mucking about with some sort of new biological scanning technology.

  For one, he was going to have to chide the young C.E.O. on his poor security foresight. The lack of an armed guard – or any capable security presence at all, really – on the thirty-third floor made this entire laboratory a military, media, or enemy fun-zone waiting to happen. Security personal would need to be stationed outside Elliot’s office twenty-four-seven to ensure this level remained entirely out of the eyes and knowledge of the rest of the world.

  He was about to replace the image and reach for his cell phone when he felt a very familiar, very unpleasant sensation: that of the business-end of a handgun nestled comfortably in the nape of his neck. It fit snugly between the tendons there, cold and impressive, and Cabe’s eyelids fluttered closed with a soft, “... ah, shit.”