The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (22 page)

Sarah had lost hope. After the assault, after her arm, after the hostages, after Wendy. What else could she do but let go of hope?

It was one thing to hold on to hope in the face of great danger and an uncertain future, but in the face of great danger and a fairly certain future? A fairly certain future and an already painful present?

In the face of all that, hope slipped away.

She wasn’t proud of herself, but she didn’t hold it against herself, either.

Her shoulders slumped, insofar as they could slump, the ropes having been tied around her pretty tightly so that even slumping seemed a restricted activity.

Her sigh was a resigned-to-her-fate kind of sigh.

She had lost. The Regional Office had lost. If Mr. Niles wasn’t yet dead, if Oyemi wasn’t found and murdered, she knew that they soon would be and that there was nothing she could do for any of them or about any of it.

It was sad, the thought. Sad that it took them less than a day, less than half a day, to break her down, but break her down they had, and kudos to them for knowing exactly how.

She would never rescue Mr. Niles from the clutches of evil.

She would never sit at his desk, handed control of the Regional Office, once he stepped down as director.

She would wait here in this chair, bound by these ropes, and that was about the end of that.

A small voice in her head yelled out one last gasping, I will get free from these ropes, you motherfuckers, but she tamped that voice down, shushed it, quieted it, gently stroked its forehead until it became calm and compliant, because she’d been beaten, and having been beaten, now all she wanted was for it to end, for all of it to end.

She was tired and weepy and afraid.

And then things went black. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but things going black seemed to implicate an end to things.

“Oh, good,” she said. “About time,” she said.

Except everything went black. Not just the office. She could see through the blinds and the cracks at the top of the blinds that the whole floor, maybe the entire building, had gone black, too.

It’s a trick, she thought.

Then the screaming. Then the screaming began.

But actually, there had been shouts before, shouts when the lights had shut off, when the power had gone down, but she had figured those shouts had been part of the game, part of the trick. One more way of fucking with poor one-armed Sarah! She tried to convince herself the same about the screaming, but the screaming seemed different.

The screaming sounded urgent and fearful and full of pain.

Fake, she thought. Fake fear. Fake urgency. Fake pain.

But the sound of pain, and Sarah could attest to this in a
firsthand kind of way, the sound of pain was a sound that was difficult to adequately fake.

And for a second, Sarah considered maybe there was a chance, a small chance, a very small chance that something was happening. That whoever (Mr. Niles?) had been maneuvering through the building in a deadly and secret way had finally made his way to the real action, had dispensed with enough teams to make a play for a full-out rescue.

“I know this is a trick,” she yelled. She was beyond pretending that they weren’t getting to her.

“I know you fucking assholes are just trying to fucking trick me,” she yelled. “Stop trying to trick me,” she said, quieter now. Under her breath. The only one who could hear her over the shouts and gunshots and the screams and small explosions was her.

What was going on out there? she wondered.

“How was it for you growing up?” Mr. Niles asked. He said this as offhandedly as he could, as if he were asking her if she’d pass him some salt or the ketchup please, but she could tell he was tense, was listening intently for her answer.

They’d just finished a lunch meet: new Recruits, operations pipeline, department budgets, typical stuff.

“It was fine,” she said. But he wanted more, and she didn’t know what it was.

Before, when people found out about her mother, they wanted details, wanted to hear Sarah’s theories, wanted to tell her their own theories, wanted to feel part of but separate from what seemed to them an unfathomable childhood trauma. Sarah would never have accused them of being jealous of her, but there was a want there, a desire of some kind for a tragic history on that scale that they could call their own.

But that wouldn’t be what Mr. Niles was after. He already knew the details of her tragedy, had known them better than she had, nor was he the type to need or want a vicarious tragedy to live through, and even if he harbored such a desire, he had at his fingertips this very thing on a whole different level, as Sarah had discovered reading through Henry’s files on the Operatives.

Then, not sure if this was what he wanted to hear or not, she said, “Normal, really.”

He relaxed. “Normal?”

“Sure,” she said. “I mean, people always think of kids as super sensitive, or intuitive, or something like that, and they are, to a point, but also they’re still people. Like, once, I tried out for drill team, I was in ninth grade? And I didn’t make it, and all these friends of mine did, and I went home, and as soon as I saw my aunt, I started crying, just fell to pieces, and she tried to comfort me, told me what you tell people, you know, Sorry, I know you wanted this, you did your best, maybe next year, but then, you know, she was also like, It’ll be okay, it’s not the end of the world, and I took all of this in and blew up at her. She didn’t understand! What did she know about it! It was the worst day of my life! And she gave me a look. She didn’t say anything, just gave me this look, but I knew. I could tell what she was trying to say, and I told her, Yeah, worse than that day, and then I called her a bitch and locked myself in my bathroom, except it was the only bathroom, and I just stayed in there for hours, so long that my aunt had to go across the hall to use the neighbor’s bathroom.” She sighed. “So, yeah, just your typical teenage nightmare.”

“Maybe you were acting out, though,” he said.

“That’s what my aunt said, and I let her believe that because it made her go easy on me, but, no. I was just really upset about drill team—I mean, everybody was on drill team—and then I punished her for not being as upset as me.” Sarah shook her head and laughed. “My poor aunt. She didn’t want kids, mostly because she didn’t want teenagers, but she tried her best. I was in the
bathroom for hours and I must have painted and repainted my toenails fifty times, and every time she knocked on that door, I’d pretend to sob even louder, but that was too much work after a while, so then I pretended I had fallen asleep in there.”

“So. Normal,” he said.

“Pretty much,” she said, and he laughed, and after that he treated her with a more casual touch, seemed to need to protect her less than before, and once she realized this, she wished she had lied.

And then the door busted open and a flash of light broke through the darkness and something in the office caught fire and by the firelight Sarah could see the thing that had busted the door open, which was one of the guys who’d been holding everyone hostage, except not anymore because he was dead. Sarah couldn’t tell if he was dead because he’d been thrown hard enough into the door to bust it open, or if he had been dead even before he’d been thrown into the door.

But really, that wasn’t her biggest concern.

What the hell was going on was her biggest concern. When were they going to stop fooling around and just put her out of her misery was her biggest concern.

The dead guy, though. The dead guy through the door spoke to either the team’s commitment to this trick they were trying to play on her, or the more likely explanation, the explanation she’d been fighting against since the power had shut off in the first place, the one she was still fighting against now because once you had lost hope, once you had resigned yourself to things not going your way, you found yourself more than a little skeptical of the notion you’d been wrong and that things would in fact go your
way, but still. The dead guy on the floor seemed to point to the notion that this was not a trick and that she was going to be saved.

Sarah closed her eyes. She opened her eyes again. The pile of papers was still on fire, though the fire was petering out. The dead guy was still dead on the floor.

She closed her eyes again. She grabbed a hunk of her cheek with her teeth, her jagged, no-longer-really-there teeth, and bit hard, and opened her eyes again, and again saw the fire, again the dead guy, and it all seemed unreal, this tableau broken occasionally by the flash of gunfire, the glow of another small fire in the distance. She stared at the guy on the floor and the fire and couldn’t stop staring.

Someone charged at her through the darkness and this brought her back into the moment. Someone with evil intent in his heart, she figured, or maybe Wendy, of whom Sarah now harbored a healthy fear.

The charging became louder and more urgent and then another body was thrown forward into the office, was thrown with great and terrible force, so that it wasn’t unlikely that the throw itself was the thing that killed the body that had been thrown.

But the throw wasn’t what killed the body.

What killed the body was still sticking out of the body’s back, which was what probably caused the blackout, too. She understood this now. The blackout, the screaming, the gunshots, the explosions, the chaos, the death and destruction of the teams who’d executed this assault on the Regional Office hadn’t been the handiwork of Mr. Niles or even Henry. All of that had been the handiwork, literally, of the thing that was currently sticking
painfully and awkwardly out of the back of the new dead body on the ground in the office.

Which was a mechanical arm.

Which was, not to put too fine a point on it, her fucking mechanical arm. Which unmoored itself from the goon’s backside and surveyed the office and then saw—did it see?—then saw Sarah, saw her and locked itself, locked its seeing eye, wherever that might be, locked it dead onto Sarah.

And then it lunged. It lunged right for her.

From
The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

Then began a period of great success for the Regional Office. The first Oracle led Oyemi, within a week, to the next and then the third and final Oracle. The trio guided Oyemi to the first real Recruit—the young woman in Peoria did not pan out, though the record on why she did not pan out has been lost—a woman named Gemini (whose exploits, such as disrupting the Ring of Three and expanding her mouth into a vortex to swallow whole the swarm of bees set loose on Kansas by the warlock Harold Raines, and, ultimately, her death at the very hands of Harold Raines, can be read about to exhaustion in any number of other papers, as well as in the haphazard account of the Regional Office
The Book of Gemini
).

Soon after the recruitment of Gemini, the first full class of Recruits was brought in for training, resulting in a freshman class of Operatives that included Jasmine, the longest-standing field Operative in the history of the Regional Office. Shortly after, the Oracles led Mr. Niles to the discovery of Henry (already discussed at some length), after which Henry recruited his own class—the
fifth and final class recruited under the umbrella of Oyemi and Mr. Niles—and found, hidden within that class, Emma.

By this point, the Regional Office had grown, had long since moved out of its humble offices in Queens to the building it occupied on the day of the attack in midtown Manhattan. Oyemi and Mr. Niles had enjoyed nearly unparalleled success with their venture. Certainly, the Regional Office was not the only organization of its kind. The city had long supported groups such as the Legion of Good, the Powerful Six, and Hammersmith’s Men, but nothing on the scale nor with the success of the Regional Office.

During this time, Jasmine came into her own, and while the most famous of the early Operatives, Gemini, had died, other formidable Operatives had joined the ranks of the Regional Office, most notably: Juneau, Robin Cueto, Kelly Shepherd. Together, these women saved the world from destruction, from self-annihilation, from the evil forces of darkness, from interdimensional war strikes, from alien forces. And standing out from this crowd of powerful women was Emma.

Of the ten missions most often attributed to the Golden Age of the Regional Office, Emma was responsible for the successful execution of six, including the retrieval of the Tremont Hotel from interdimensional, time-traveling assassins who intended to murder a future madame president by kidnapping and murdering her great-grandmother.
(Granted, Jasmine played pivotal roles in all of these, but it is Jasmine’s sad fortune to have remained with the Regional Office through good and bad, and not planned for two years the destruction of Oyemi and the Regional Office, and far too often are her history and her contributions to the Regional Office overlooked.)

By this time, Oyemi had moved her side of the operations to her secret and remote compound in the Catskills and Mr. Niles had taken over as director of the Regional Office in Manhattan. The end of the world was thwarted time and again by the Regional Office over the course of this golden age, which lasted between five and five thousand years (the count varying depending on timelines and how one considers the actions of Operatives when those actions spanned space, time, and dimension). The forces of evil threatening at every turn the survival of the planet and the innocents living on it in blissful ignorance were often foiled multiple times in the span of one week. With the assistance of the Oracles, the trust fund left Oyemi by her great-uncle quadrupled, and soon after, the travel agency was formed and, much to everyone’s surprise, added its own profit to the accounts.

By practically every metric conceivable, the Regional Office had arrived, its Operatives had never been stronger, its missions never more dangerous, and the whole thing could not be stopped.

And then, almost without warning, it all came to an end.

The beginning of the end of the Regional Office can be summed up thusly:

A man fell in love with a woman.

The same can be said of almost any iconic tragedy—
The
Aeneid,
The
Iliad,
Romeo and Juliet
.

The fall of the Regional Office.

More specifically:

Henry fell in love with Emma.

Then Emma was marked for death by Oyemi via the predictions of the Oracles.

And Oyemi, either through ignorance or a cold sense of fate, told Henry to kill Emma.

More specifically still:

One day, Henry slipped into his car to drive home at the end of a normal day. He turned the key in the ignition. He switched off his stereo because sometimes he just wanted the sound of the wheels on the road, the bumps and skips of the tires rolling across the uneven pavement. He checked his rearview mirror. He shifted down to reverse, and then he passed out.

He came to in a chair in an office with a mineral water in his hand.

“Hello, Henry,” Oyemi said, her voice coming from behind him. “I hope water is okay. If not, I can get you something else.”

He paused, but for just a second, and then said, “Water’s fine,” because it was the only concrete thing he could land on. Of course he’d met Oyemi. She’d been
there when Mr. Niles had hired him, and he had seen her a few other times, but those meetings had all been brief, officious, and not nearly as unsettling as this one.

Oyemi walked around and sat against the desk in front of him.

“Usually,” she said, “I like to play a little game.” She nodded at the water in his hand. “Make the person in that chair think they’ve been here for a while, have been discussing important things with me all this time, and only just woke up at the very end.”

Henry looked at her but didn’t know what to say or that there was anything he should say.

“You know,” she said. “You’re in the chair, you’ve got a drink in your hand, you wake up, and I’m sitting or standing across from you, saying something like”—she waved her hand and shrugged her shoulders—“‘I hope you understand, the fate of the agency rests on your shoulders now.’ Or, ‘I’m glad we agree on this,’ or, if I’m in a mood, I might say something like, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’s how you feel.’ Something like that.”

“Ah,” Henry said.

“I know,” she said, and sighed. “It loses something in translation. It’s funny. Trust me.” Then she said, “You ruined it, though. You woke up too soon.”

“Sorry,” he said, because whatever he might not have known about Oyemi, he was fairly certain that you didn’t want to ruin anything for her.

She waved off his apology. “Just me, wasting time.” She paused. “Avoiding bad news, too. That’s part of it. I hate giving people bad news.”

Henry cleared his throat. The glass in his hand seemed heavier all of a sudden. “News?”

“And then, too, this game, this trick, it lets me say something true, something real, and then pass it off as a joke, you know, like, ‘Fate of the agency rests in your hands,’ and so on, and then it feels less serious when I tell someone, ‘No, in fact, what I said was true.’”

“I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I’m a little lost.”

She smiled. People who said Oyemi had an unsettling smile didn’t know from unsettling smiles.

“The fate of the agency,” she said, still smiling.

Her smile was predatory and ever widening. She contained in her mouth, as far as he could tell from various furtive glances, the normal amount of teeth, but after every meeting with her, he came away with the sense that her mouth had been full of teeth, rows and rows of teeth, sharp and blunt alike, but too many.

“The fate of the entire Regional Office and all it stands for and all it does, in fact, depends on you.” Oyemi looked at her hands, now folded in front of her. “On you, Henry.” Then she looked up at him and smiled again and he wished she would stop smiling. Then she said, “And here’s why.”

Henry knew little about the Oracles, their origin,
their design, how accurate their predictions were. They’d been moved out of the city and to Oyemi’s compound shortly after he’d been hired. Their messages were cryptic, delivered from the Oracles to a team of analysts—the channelers—who ran analytics, cross-checked predictions and world events on various spreadsheets. It was a mystery to him but he hadn’t ever cared how it—or the entire system—worked. He received assignments by way of a channeler from the Oracles. Girls to pick up. The wheres and whens but little else.

By whatever means, assignments landed in his inbox and that was all that mattered to him.

“They do more than just hand down your recruiting assignments,” Oyemi explained. “Their first order of business, in fact, is to scan through all time and all reality for threats to the Regional Office. They’re our first line of defense,” she said. “And they’ve singled out a threat,” she said. Then she paused and leaned in closer. “And that threat is right here. In the agency. Even as we speak.”

Henry gauged the distance between him and Oyemi, between him and the door, tried to predict how many guards were outside this office—maybe none, Oyemi being what she was—tried to calculate the possibility and probability of the various bad scenarios laid out before him—punch Oyemi in the neck and then run for it, or just run for it, or just punch Oyemi in the neck and then try to kill her—but finally, he exhausted the
options, decided none of them were good, that none of them would save him, and so he stayed in his seat.

Oyemi watched him through all of this—no more than a second or two—and then smiled when she saw him relax, resign himself, and then laughed and said, “Not you, Henry.” Then she frowned and looked at her hands, her fingers. “Worse,” she said. Then she looked back up at him. “One of the girls,” she said. “One of our girls.”

“The girls?” he asked. He stared at her for a minute, tried to picture one of his Recruits betraying the Regional Office but couldn’t. “No,” he said. “No.” Then: “Which one?”

She knelt in front of him and placed her hands on his knees and looked earnestly into his eyes and said, “I’m glad you asked.”

She didn’t know. She had received some flimflam from the Oracles—it would take Henry some time to uncover exactly what the Oracles had told Oyemi, namely:
The one who once loved
will one day destroy that which was once loved,
and so on—and from this, from this small ambiguous prediction, he was supposed to single out the Operative poised to destroy Oyemi and the Regional Office. That was now his job. He was supposed to help Oyemi find the girl who would betray Regional.

“How?” he asked. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Get close to them,” she told him, and he thought of Emma, and he thought, I am, I am close to them. “Learn what they’re up to, their secrets, their desires.”

Maybe she saw his look, a skeptical look, because she said, “You won’t be alone. We’ll be here to help,” she said. “The Oracles. Me. Make new files for each girl. Photos, dossiers. Pass them to one of my men, and I will work with the Oracles and we will figure this out together. I promise. We will.”

Only in hindsight did Henry realize there had been something pleading to her voice, her argument, as if she needed him, specifically, and as if he had any choice but to say yes.

As Oyemi instructed, he took photographs and built secret dossiers and case files for every working operative, for all the new Recruits.

He didn’t like the work.

Sure, he’d made his own secret personnel files on them all, but with the express intention of making him better at his job, as their trainer, their Recruiter.

He had made first contact with these women, had performed the collection of them from foster homes or juvenile detention centers, from in-the-middle-of-nowhere town squares and suburban McMansions, from trailer homes at the edge of swamps. He had overseen and led their training, and he felt connected to these women, who were, in turn, connected to him, or so he’d long believed.

Most saw him as a brother. They told him things. They cried in his arms, and only in his arms. To cry in anyone else’s arms would have risked discovery, risked the
admission that inside them there still lived something frail and vulnerable and human. And so, while the betrayal of the Regional Office was as much a betrayal of him and his life’s work, to suspect any of these girls felt like an even worse betrayal of a friendship, a relationship.

Henry didn’t like sneaking about and taking photographs of them moving through their days just to pass this information on to Oyemi. After a few weeks, though, the new task felt like any other part of his job because that was how things worked no matter who you were, no matter what you did. Not to mention, none of what he’d done seemed to matter. He collected information and passed it on to a man working for Oyemi, but he never received any feedback, never heard anything about the files he put together, the photographs he took, and soon he forgot about the true nature of all he’d been doing.

Then, less than three months later, Henry walked into his office and found Oyemi there waiting for him, Oyemi who never came to the Manhattan office, who worked and lived in the secret compound upstate.

“You can put away your camera, Henry,” she said. “We’ve found
her.”