Severance Package

by Duane Swierczynski

Express pain.

  Beg.

  He’d never made a sound like that before, never thought his vocal cords were capable of such an animalistic cry.

  “Tell me,” she said loudly, as if announcing it to the whole office, “about the Omega Project.”

  “I don’t know …what you’re … talking about.”

  Molly shook her head, as if she were disappointed.

  Then with her free hand—again, Jamie couldn’t believe his entire body was incapacitated by one soft, slender hand—she reached over and unbuttoned the cuff on her blouse. She was the only one in the office, aside from David, who wore long-sleeved shirts in the humid Philadelphia summer. As Molly rolled up her sleeve, Jamie saw why.

  A thick silver bracelet was strapped around her wrist. It looked like a series of metal dominoes linked together, side by side, enveloping her delicately muscled forearm. Molly tapped one of the silver dominoes, then flipped open a compartment on the bottom. She pulled something out.

  Then she showed it to him.

  A silver blade. Nothing too long. It was shaped like a triangle, with one long end wrapped in black electrician’s tape.

  Jamie recognized the blade. It was an X-Acto blade. Common office supply, especially in the newspaper business. He’d done paste-up at his college newspaper for a few years. Nicked his fingers with X-Acto blades endless times.

  Now Molly pressed the sharp edge of the blade to the pad of his thumb, like a teacher touching a piece of chalk to a blackboard.

  “The Omega Project,” she repeated.

  Keene asked, “The Omega Project?”

  “No idea.”

  Keene turned a laptop around, closed the video feed, opened up a new window, and started typing. One window led to another in a furious progression, with Keene typing a series of keywords and passwords and search terms.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  “Strange. I’ve never run across anything with a name like that. It’s so … 1970s. We wouldn’t give an operation a groaner like that.”

  “Bloody strange.”

  Then McCoy’s face lightened. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Hold off on that search.”

  “Why?”

  “I think she’s messing with his mind.”

  “And ours, too. So there is no Omega?”

  “Remember, she’s auditioning. Maybe she’s just showing off her interrogation techniques.”

  “Even if her subject knows nothing?”

  “Even better. She has to take it all the way.”

  “She’s sick, mate,” Keene said.

  “She’s awesome. Hand me that file, will you?”

  Jamie tried to squirm away, but each movement yielded fresh agony in his arm.

  “What are you doing?” Jamie asked. He could feel the tip of the blade on his thumb. Maybe it was his imagination, but the blade felt like it was sinking into his flesh, deep enough to scrape bone. God. Was she actually stabbing his thumb?

  “Tell me about the Omega Project,” she said aloud.

  Then Molly squinted and whispered: “I know you don’t know anything, Jamie. Don’t pass out.”

  “Why the hell are you asking me then?”

  “Wrong answer,” Molly said.

  Then she cut him, dragging the blade down the length of his thumb, across the thick muscle at the base, and out before she reached the vulnerable veins of the wrist.

  Jamie howled. He tried to move, but couldn’t. He couldn’t see the damage to his thumb, because his palm was facing Molly, who was now placing the bloodied tip of the blade to his index finger.

  “Tell me about Omega,” she said again.

  Then she whispered: “Stay awake.”

  Stay awake? Jamie couldn’t see his thumb, but he imagined a Ball Park Frank on the grill, skin burst and curled open, exposing the meat beneath.

  God, what will make her stop?

  Jamie tried to move. Bolt forward. Knock her off balance. Anything.

  But he was paralyzed.

  She pressed the blade deep into the tip of his index finger.

  Only now did he realize that Molly was holding his left hand. Jamie was left-handed. He held pens with his thumb and index finger. He grabbed the adhesive strip on Chase’s diapers between his thumb and index finger. He ran his fingertips down Andrea’s chest, feeling her soft skin and bumpy edges around her nipple, and it was one of his favorite sensations, and now lost to him forever because—

  —because Molly was ripping his index finger down to the palm.

  She asked him more questions. Maybe it was the same question. The Omega Project. Whatever that was. The Alpha. The Omega. Omega Man. Early Man. Dead Man. But Jamie couldn’t hear, because he was in shock by then—dazed and incoherent and searching for some other part of his body where he could hide out for a while. Away from the pain of his burst hot dog fingers, and the warm blood—his blood—running down his forearm, racing around, dripping from his elbow.

  Maybe she was on his middle finger now. He thought she might be. Because it felt like she stopped halfway down. Because one of her own fingers pressed down at the base of that finger, which was partly how she’d paralyzed him, and maybe she was going to finish off the hand and slice off the tops of his fingers and put them in a little Ziploc baggie for later and ask him again about the Omega Project on the way to the ER….

  “I guess you don’t know anything after all,” she said, or maybe Jamie fantasized it.

  Molly let him collapse to the carpet again.

  He could move again, if he wanted.

  He didn’t want.

  “I’m proud of you,” she whispered. He watched her stockinged feet walk around his body, trying to avoid stepping in the blood.

  He didn’t want to listen to her voice anymore.

  “But we’re going to do just a little more,” she continued. “Try not to pass out.”

  He heard Molly’s words but tried not to extract any meaning from them. But that was difficult. Words were everything to him. He had been a writer—was still a writer, even if it was toiling over meaningless press releases for financial services that made absolutely no sense to him.

  It was impossible to deny her words had meaning.

  Try not to pass out.

  Which was an incredibly frightening statement. Because “Try not to pass out” meant there was more pain coming. Probably a great deal of it. And that didn’t sound good. Jamie thought they’d explored his personal threshold for pain quite thoroughly. It was exactly one thumb, one index finger, and half of a middle finger.

  So when Molly lifted him to his feet again, wrapped a well-muscled arm around his torso, and rested his weight on her own body, he thought:

  I’m in for more pain.

  And we’re going to work on that together.

  But then the blade was in her other hand, and this time she had a fist curled around the taped-up part, and the blade was pointed down like a dagger. Her supporting arm loosened, and Jamie slipped down a bit. Her arm caught him under his right armpit and extended around his neck—tight. Almost choking him.

  The blade touched Jamie’s chest, right through his shirt. Pierced the skin like it had pierced his thumb.

  And then the blade whisked down his chest.

  Oh God.

  This time she was going to kill him.

  “Ugh,” Keene said. “Not sure I’m in the mood for an evisceration. It’s almost supper.”

  “Shhh,” McCoy said.

  “What is she doing?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “She’s not cutting his chest. Not that I can see.”

  “No, she’s not.”

  “What, is she pretending?”

  “Hang on a sec.”

  McCoy had the Girlfriend file on his lap. Which showed how much he was engrossed in this operation. Usually, he’d store his can of Caley between his legs. He flipped through a few pages.

  “She flashed me a seven, right?”

  “I believe so, mate. I can roll b
ack the recording if you like.”

  “No, no. We both saw it. Seven is this guy. Jamie DeBroux. Media relations director. Formerly, a journalist. He received the lowest risk assessment.”

  “Which explains the fingers.”

  “Yeah … hey, you’re right. I didn’t think of that. That’s brilliant.”

  “Look. She’s still slicing at him.”

  “Still no blood?” McCoy asked, but slid himself closer to the laptop nearest him and punched in a few numbers. The same scene popped up on his monitor.

  “No,” said Keene. “Either she’s playing around with him, or she has the worst aim I’ve ever seen.”

  “What the devil is she …”

  Then McCoy smiled. He was like a kid at a birthday party who’d blasted apart the piñata with one whack of the stick. Candy and toys rained down all around him.

  “I love this girl! Oh, man, I want to be her baby daddy.”

  Keene looked at him. There was no way he was asking “What?” again. He stone refused.

  “When we meet, I will fall to my knees and worship her blood-caked feet. Oh man, I am crushing so hard right now!”

  Keene wasn’t going to do it. Not dignified.

  On screen, Girlfriend continued to feign stabs at her quarry. Only now she had him on his knees, and was swiping her hooked blade across the space directly in front of his throat. His eyes. His abdomen. His genitals. Vicious, sharp little movements, leaving little margin for error. If the quarry were to so much as sneeze, he’d be ripped open in a flash.

  The quarry, this DeBroux guy, was trembling. Hard to tell if it was fear or spasms of pain. His injured hand hung limply at his side, and blood dripped from his savaged fingertips in a Jackson Pollock pattern.

  McCoy slapped Keene on the arm. “You know what she’s doing?”

  No, I don’t, Keene thought. He’s waiting for me to say it. He wants me to say it. He needs me to say it.

  Oh, this is childish.

  “What?” Keene asked.

  McCoy said, “She’s running us through her résumé.”

  Jamie was in the strange position of being close to death, expecting death, and slowly coming to terms with death, but unable to actually die.

  The moment he saw the blade again, he knew it was going to enter his chest. An atom bomb of fear detonated in his heart.

  He thought of Chase.

  Chase and that cartoon duck in little boy pants.

  Although he imagined it did, the blade didn’t seem to be cutting his chest. It whipped over the surface of his shirt above ever so slightly, then slipped away and plunged toward another spot on his chest. This failed to enter his body, too.

  A flurry of motion followed, almost too quick for Jamie to comprehend, but with every stroke he expected that this would be the one, the blade would penetrate his flesh and his life would rapidly come to an end.

  Even on his knees a few moments later, the blade dancing across his throat and face now, so fast, he actually felt the wind from Molly’s frenzied movements.

  But the blade never penetrated.

  This, more than anything else that had happened this morning—the gunshot, the sliced fingers—broke Jamie De-Broux’s mind a bit.

  McCoy pointed out what he could. Keene was still a little mystified.

  “That’s right out of the Solthurner Fechtbuch,” McCoy said. “And oooh. A little jung gum in there, too.”

  “Why isn’t she taking him out?”

  “Because he’s number seven. She doesn’t need to.”

  “So why go after him at all?”

  “To show off. She already lost one of her targets—number five, that McCrane guy. The one with the champagne?”

  “Right.”

  “That means she needs to make it up somehow. She promised that she’d demonstrate a full array of her techniques. She promised they’d be surprising yet economical. Wants us to know she could tear people apart any countless number of ways, from the undetectable to the flashy. First, she did a straight-on interrogation. Now, she’s being flashy.”

  They continued watching the monitors for a while.

  “Won’t they find evidence of these … mutilations?”

  “Nah. Bodies were to be burned up anyway. Doesn’t matter.”

  Keene sighed, then turned away from the screen. “Aye, she’s overdoing it.”

  “Maybe, but I like to watch her work.”

  “She should just kill him.”

  Jamie DeBroux wished she’d just kill him already.

  And then a funny thing happened.

  She stopped.

  For the third time that morning, Jamie collapsed onto the carpet. Through Molly’s legs, he could see that the door to the office had opened.

  And there was another pair of legs standing in the doorway. Bare legs. Black flats.

  “Busy, Molly?” a voice said.

  He tried to see past Molly’s legs, but his view was obscured.

  The voice sounded familiar, though.

  It sounded like

  “Nichole Wise, code name Workhorse.”

  “That’s interesting,” Keene said. “I didn’t realize we did the whole gay nickname thing.”

  “We do.”

  “I was being facetious.”

  “But you know who else does?”

  “Well, the CIA.”

  “The motherloving CIA.”

  “Interesting. They send her to monitor the Philadelphia operation?”

  “No. They’ve got a crush on Murphy, and they’re jealous he left them. In fact, I don’t think they’re aware we’re behind his operation. Probably better that way.”

  “Does Girlfriend know about her?”

  “She hasn’t said as much. If she’s figured it out, it’ll be all the more impressive.”

  “Murphy’s office is full of wonders, isn’t it?”

  “It’s what makes this line of work so much fun.”

  Keene could see why McCoy got wrapped up in this sort of thing. The people assets. It could become as addictive as an American soap opera. Not that he watched those things. Who was screwing who. Who had a secret alliance with who else. You could work for a company—or the Company, as it were—for years and not unravel every sticky web.

  “Think your girl can handle it?”

  “From the looks of it, she can handle everything.”

  “Care for a little wager?”

  “Stop talking. I think Girlfriend is about to kill Workhorse, and I don’t want to miss it.”

  ONE-ON-ONE

  If you’re attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn’t, you have all the advantage.

  —JAY ABRAHAM

  Nichole Wise, code name Workhorse, had been waiting for this moment for, oh, a little less than six months. One hundred and seventy-eight days, to be exact. Ever since “Molly Lewis” started working as David’s assistant. The snotty little priss. Nichole knew she wasn’t a civilian, as they’d all claimed.

  That little demonstration in the conference room only confirmed what she’d suspected for months.

  She was one of them.

  One Murphy didn’t tell the other operatives about, for some reason.

  Nichole had been recruited a year after 9/11. Those were heady times. Let’s scramble up some terrorist nest eggs, David had said, and in that moment, Nichole could be suckered into believing he was a patriot. But she knew better. She knew David Murphy was up to something else, and used this line about an “ultrasecret wing of the intelligence community” as a ploy to dupe other wise good people into doing his bidding.

  Some agents may have seen this as a babysitting gig, but not Nichole. She was keeping tabs on one of the most notorious operatives the Company had ever known. One who had suddenly retired a few months after 9/11, then opened up a “financial services” corporation.

  We can smell a front company a mile away, Nichole’s handler had told her. We want to know who he’s fronting.

  Nichole had nod
ded.

  We want you in there, and we want you to stay in there until you find out.

  Whatever he had cooking on the side—and Nichole’s bosses were fairly sure David Murphy had something cooking on the side—she would be there to assess and act, if necessary.

  So when Murphy had called them in here on a Saturday morning, she knew something big was breaking. But it frustrated her to no end that she had no idea what it might be.

  And that would be a failure.

  Whatever Murphy had going, she should have been on it from the beginning. This completely blindsided her.

  She’d installed an undetectable key logger on Murphy’s machine a few days after she started, and changed the gear every month. She knew every e-mail he sent, every Web page he browsed.

  She’d recorded every closed-door conversation Murphy ever had.

  She used compressed air, a digital camera, and many long nights with Photoshop to read his sealed mail.

  She’d collected every shredded bag of crosscut papers and reconstituted them in her suburban apartment, one bag at a time, one long weekend at a time. She’d used tiny paperweights to hold them in place and worked one piece at a time. Many nights she’d dream about strips of paper.

  She entered into a clandestine, sex-only relationship with the mail guy—and every mail guy henceforth—even though many of them had a devil-may-care attitude toward personal hygiene.

  She’d even burned through countless cheap wristwatches, placed under the back tire of Murphy’s car—oh how relentlessly old school that was—to fastidiously track his movements.

  Over three years of clandestine operations, she’d earned the sobriquet “Workhorse” a dozen times over.

  And nothing.

  “Keep watching him,” her bosses told her.

  She did as instructed, only occasionally pausing to conduct other operations now and again. She was too valuable to waste on David Murphy full time.

  That was when Nichole began to grow paranoid. Perhaps she was missing something when she was conducting her other ops.

  Maybe Murphy knew about her, and conducted his other business when she was otherwise engaged. Just to make it look like he was being a good corporate choirboy, heading up a successful private business.