J. Gonzalez - The Corporation

“Did you get a diagram of the building?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“If you can, try connecting to the network tonight and see if you can get anything else. Email it to the account Jay gave you.”

“I will. I want to take a shower first. I’m beat.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you at three a.m. Your room.”

“You have the stuff?” She felt like a secret agent talking in code.

“I have it and I’ll bring it with me.”

“Okay. See you then.”

When she hung up the phone she sighed in relief. For a moment she felt alone, cast adrift, and more far away from home than she had ever felt before.

Then she sighed again and headed to the bathroom to take a shower.

WHEN THE ALARM woke her up at three a.m. sharp, Michelle rolled out of bed and hit the floor running.

She was ready ten minutes later, freshened up, robe pulled tight over her frame. She waited by the door to her room and opened it the instant she saw Alan appear in the fisheye lens of the peephole.

Alan came inside quickly and Michelle closed and locked the door behind him. She’d turned on the lamp by the bed and, as she joined Alan in the main portion of her room, she saw him put a briefcase on the bed. He opened the flaps and raised the lid. He was dressed in dark jeans and a dark shirt. “Open your briefcase and let’s transfer this stuff into it.”

Michelle got her briefcase, opened it, and removed papers and other documents from it. When it was empty, Alan handed her what looked like a small cardboard box, the kind bank checks arrive in. It felt heavy in her hands and was made of soft brown leather. “This thing’s loaded with C4 and it has a voice-activated trigger,” he said. “Rachel is about ten miles away with a radio that will send the signal to detonate these. I’ve already turned them on; they run on a battery that has a twenty-four hour life span. Rachel won’t turn the radio on until thirty minutes before we’re set to go. Then we’ll—”

“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?”