The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (24 page)

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

This study would be remiss and incomplete if it did not take a moment to delve into the two theories on how Henry managed to so effectively enact his plans against the Regional Office, theories that speak to the pivotal question of whether he worked alone and in secret, or did he have assistance?

Obviously, Henry was aided, there is no question in this matter, aided by his own team of Operatives. Of the women who worked for Henry, we know for sure there was Wendy, Colleen, Windsor, and Rose. But the question then is: Was there someone else, someone equal to Henry, planning and executing this assault?

The theory that he planned and executed this alone proceeds thusly:

Oyemi told Henry he would be the one to neutralize Emma, who the Oracles had determined was the threat. How she had decided on Emma, Henry didn’t know. Still, he talked Oyemi into giving him two weeks to finish the assignment. Two weeks to kill Emma.

Of course, when he first met Emma, Henry didn’t know he loved her or would love her or that she would love him.

But isn’t that always the case?

You toiled in your job for year after year, training stunningly beautiful and dangerous young women to fight the encroaching forces of evil, caught up in a work life that offered satisfaction on many deep levels but that precluded any sort of real chance at long-lasting relationships. You resigned yourself to a life as a bachelor, to keeping your feelings for these amazing and powerful women on the level of friendly or brotherly love, whichever it was they needed to make it through the day, and in the process of doing all of this, you reached a bottom-level sort of contentment in life because what choice did you have, really? This was the life you’d chosen, or maybe it had been chosen for you, but it was your life after all and you’d made your peace with that, had resigned yourself to all of that when one day, along came a woman of extraordinary grace and beauty, the kind of woman you couldn’t help but fall in love with, except you didn’t say anything or make any moves because you were a gentleman and you were fully aware of that old saw about your pen and the company ink, not to mention, deep down you had always been a chickenshit. But still, for the first time, you could imagine how, under different circumstances, you might have had a chance with one of these women, with this one woman in particular, that she might have found some way to love you back, and for the first time, too, you began feeling the stirrings of some real and long-ignored dissatisfaction with this life you’d built for yourself. So maybe
you paid her a little more attention than you did the other Recruits, the other field Operatives, and maybe she noticed and offered you sly, under-the-radar smiles, and maybe you began to share inside jokes with each other, or you brushed past each other in the narrow (but not that narrow) hallways. Or maybe one day you found yourself in the break room looking for your lunch in the fridge and she came up behind you and placed her hand on your shoulder and with that light but comfortable and unhesitating touch sent an electric jolt through you down to your very bones. She bent into the fridge next to you to see what you were looking for and even as the thought itself entered your own head, she beat you to it—she always beat you to these things—by saying, You know what, why don’t we just go get lunch instead, you and me, and maybe a drink, too, or not a drink but a something else?

And maybe you should have known how it would end. Or Henry. Henry should have known.

Or maybe not known
exactly
how it would end.

Who would have known
exactly
how it would end?

The Oracles, maybe.

Not that he would have believed them. Even if they had told him, had sent him a message. One day he would fall in love (not likely) with a Recruit who would love him back (as if). One day, he would learn that the woman who had captured his heart was also the woman prophesied to betray the Regional Office and destroy Oyemi and Mr. Niles and everything they’d ever worked for.
Told him that he would be assigned the task of killing her, this woman he had come to love. Told him that he would be forced to choose between Love and Loyalty, that he would choose Love over Loyalty, and then told him that it wouldn’t matter because while Love might be eternal and undying, Emma wasn’t either of those and would be killed anyway.

If they had told him all of this, he wouldn’t have believed them.

Not that the Oracles ever gave such explicit instructions on the future of this world. More,
The one who loved will destroy that which was once loved
. That was more their speed. That was the kind of ambiguous bullshit the Oracles yammered on about.

Of course, he was strapped for ideas on how to wrangle his way out of this plan of Oyemi’s but figured an extra two weeks was an extra two weeks. Except the first week and a half he wasted by trying to come up with a plan on his own. And then Emma cornered him in the parking garage, asked him, “What the fuck, Henry, you’ve been acting like an idiot the past week and a half,” and that was when he told her. About Oyemi. About the prophecy. About his job to do.

Emma didn’t get angry or upset, didn’t become unsettled or frightened. Her eyes didn’t widen or even grow colder, more calculating. She listened to what he said and then she nodded once, said, “Right,” and then told him an address and a time, told him to relax, act normal,
placed her hand softly against his face, smiled, and then she turned and walked off.

Once she’d gone, he spent his day as if it were any normal day.

He filed reports. He read and reread case files of potential Recruits. He sat in on meetings with Sarah and her mechanical arm and Mr. Niles. He expressed serious and real concern about the news that Emma had failed to show up that day for her briefing. Then the day ended and he packed his things but no more of his things than he might normally pack, and then he drove home as he should normally have driven home. The point being: He did not once give away anything about what he’d done, what he planned to do, had not let slip his affections, his sudden and vivid daydreams, had not confided in anyone, not even (or especially not) Sarah, who seemed to him just so beholden, not just to the Regional Office, but to Mr. Niles, and therefore, someone he couldn’t trust.

So it should have been a surprise when he arrived at the address Emma gave him—an abandoned, foreclosed house in White Plains—that he found her, Emma, splayed out on the ground, a pool of blood pooling up beneath and around her, a lifeless look to her lifeless face, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a surprise at all.

Because here was the thing about Oyemi: The thing about Oyemi was she was no fool. She wouldn’t have had Henry and only Henry on this job. She probably hadn’t had only him on the job at all, in fact. Who she’d had on
the job had been professionals, men or women or both, who would’ve known what they were doing, wouldn’t have cared about the target, wouldn’t have flinched at the prospect of what they were supposed to do, who would’ve prepared for every contingency, even and especially the contingency of his trying to warn her. Which was why, just as he moved toward her, to check her for signs of life, to take one last look, to dumbly try to staunch the bleeding, a fire was set loose on him from all sides. Not an explosion, but simply a rising wave of flames.

The room flared up, began to melt. Henry didn’t care. He tried to reach Emma but the rooms, all of the rooms, had been rigged. He saw an opening, but it closed before he could take it, and he couldn’t see her through the flames, so many fucking flames, and then he saw another brief opening and took it, became trapped, barreled through, and at the last minute was blown clear of the house and, landing headfirst on the walkway outside, was knocked unconscious. When he woke, he woke up in the hospice wing of the Regional Office, and every day since had regretted taking that opening, escaping the fire, leaving her behind.

Rose hadn’t been told there’d be a robot.

That hadn’t been in any of the literature, hadn’t been part of any Assassin Training Camp seminars or lectures, hadn’t been part of any post–Regional Office debrief, not that she’d gotten any real post–Regional Office debriefing. Everyone had somehow failed to mention that one day, ten years into her future, ten years after the attack on the Regional Office, a robot would show up hell-bent on ruining her life—not to mention killing her—for all that Regional Office bullshit.

Ten fucking years.

Jesus, a long fucking time. They waited a long fucking time for revenge.

Not that she was bitter that no one had told her about there being a fucking robot.

Not that she cared that the men and women she had trained with those years ago, had assaulted the Regional Office with, had all but completely fallen off the face of the earth. But Jesus Christ,
was it too much to expect a card at Christmas? A phone call on her birthday? Forwarding information and a new phone number just in case, oh, who knows, a fucking robot stomped into her fucking yarn and bead shoppe and started tearing shit all to hell?

It swung its robot arm at her. She pivoted, grabbed it by that same arm, heaved it through the wall, except that how that actually transpired went more like: It grabbed her by her face and smashed her head through the cash register.

Fucking robots.

Rose often pictured them coming in here, Henry and Emma.

Not right at that moment, though. God, what a fucking embarrassment that would have been if those two showed up just as she was getting her ass handed to her by some two-bit-looking robot that wasn’t even fully covered in synthetic skin.

No. If it were a choice between suffering a painful and brutal death at the hands of this crusher or suffering that kind of embarrassment in front of Henry or Emma? Rose would take the painful and brutal death every time, friend, and thank you very much.

Not that she hadn’t pictured that moment, though, that awkward and awful reunion.

The bell over the door would tinkle. She wouldn’t look up, not right away, even though she would know it was them, would sense it in her skin. Maybe Henry would clear his throat or Emma would say, “Hello, dear,” the way she did, and Rose would look up and smile at them, briefly, just so they knew that she knew they were there and that something was in store for them. She would offer them something to drink, some cookies, maybe, because for whatever fucking reason, whenever she pictured this moment, she pictured herself in it having just baked a batch of chocolate-chip cookies. They would catch up on what was new and relive old
times, and then, just when they were comfortable, just when the last tattered shreds of awkwardness and discomfort had fallen away,
bam,
she’d pull out the banker box of files she kept in her storage closet, throw that shit on the table in between the two of them, and then yell at them: Ten, there are ten more fucking boxes just like this one.

Then she’d pull out a file, it wouldn’t matter which one, and open it up and read from the top:

Subject suffers violent and debilitating nightmares.

Subject often uses sex as a weapon.

Subject suffers from deep trust issues.

No shit, Sherlock, she would say. That’s the thing about being the subject who was abducted when you were fucking sixteen and trained to be a superpowered assassin with the promise that you’ll help save the world when really all you’re doing is settling a fucking score.

Subject is often violent to herself and others.

She wouldn’t show them the scars. She wouldn’t have to.

Subject often lies for no apparent reason.

She could go on.

She would go on. She would go on and on and on.

She kept all the receipts, too. Every therapist visit, every prescription filled, ever since the attack on the Regional Office. Just in case. She had the receipts taped to individual sheets of blank paper, all professional and shit, and then tabulated in a spreadsheet—a highlighted spreadsheet. She had all of this ready for the day that one of those assholes showed up, not that they ever would, but had it just the same, neatly organized, and then,
stapled to the front, a fifteen-page itemized bill, and at the bottom of that bill, in all caps and in red, next to the line “Total Due,” she’d stamped: “YOU OWE ME MY LIFE BACK, YOU FUCKERS.”

She’d ordered that stamp specially made online.

She had pictured this moment often—the banker’s box, the invoice—but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make it feel as delicious a moment as she wanted it to be when she imagined it happening.

A failure of her weak imagination, perhaps, or maybe she just knew them too well, knew they wouldn’t care. They wouldn’t even fucking apologize. They weren’t the type. There’d be no, Sorry we took you from the life that you knew, from your family, from your friends, sorry we whisked you away and made promises, so many goddamn promises, all of which we failed to keep. No, Sorry we made you cut that one dude in half, that you still think of him from time to time, wonder about his family, whether he had one, what they might’ve been told about him, about how he died, sorry you can’t stop picturing the stunned look in his eye.

They would justify. That’s who they were.

She had wanted to leave the life she had been living, they would remind her.

She had wanted to get away from her dumb and neglectful father, her overbearing and angry mother, her pitiful and untempered sister.

She had hated her friends, hated her hometown.

She had hated her life.

She had told them so herself. They came for her just when she needed them most.

And what about those promises? What about what they gave her, the training, the powers they helped her discover within herself, helped her unleash and hone? The adventure, the thrills. Not to mention, she had been paid handsomely. She had been offered work after the Regional Office job. She had been offered a new life if she’d wanted it, an apartment in Biarritz, a new name, a new way forward, and she chose. She chose the life she chose. They had done everything they said they would. They molded her, taught her a craft, and then watched her become so very, very good at it. Could she give them that, at least?

And yes, she could give them that at least.

She was very good at what they trained her to be, but so what?

So what if she was good at this thing?

It wasn’t her life, wasn’t the life she had thought she’d wanted, wasn’t the life she was supposed to live.

Not to mention they broke her fucking heart.