Ben follows Swan into his office and shuts the door. He shows him the photos. Swan seems confused and distracted. Perhaps he, too, is losing control.
‘What do you make of these?’
‘You should have seen it here last night.’ Swan mops his forehead with a paper tissue, leaving little bits stuck to his skin. ‘And now look. Fights breaking out. People being rude to one another. Tasteless remarks made toward our non-Caucasian staff. Dirty pictures scrawled on the walls of the toilets. It’s against nature and it’s against God.’
‘It’s time to do something about this – maybe even evacuate the building until we can figure out –’
But Swan isn’t listening. He’s got his hands on a Bible and is brandishing it. ‘For the Lord sayeth, Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good. Romans 12:21. Someone has to keep a watch on this place.’ He whispers disconcertingly in Ben’s ear. ‘The Devil is in control of this building.’
‘It was you who put the triple sixes and crucifixes all around the basement?’
‘We have to warn the innocent, don’t you understand? You’ll pray with me, won’t you? Say you’ll get on your knees and pray!’
Ben manages to excuse himself and get out of the office. He heads for the reception area.
The video screens have all been changed again. Instead of streams and wheatfields, they now show fast industrial machinery shots cut to hard hip-hop beats.
‘Who changed the screens?’ he asks, as he passes.
‘Mr Clarke’s orders,’ the receptionist tells him. ‘Inspires the workforce, paces things up. It’s like being stabbed in the ears with red hot needles. Can you get repetitive brain injury?’ She drops her head back onto her console with a thud.
Willis looks furtive and distraught as she leafs through her notes. Ben notices she has a number of chewed-up pencils in her hair. Her nicotine patches have increased in size. ‘Look, maybe I was wrong,’ she admits. ‘Maybe it is stress-related. The business with Meadows has freaked everyone. There’s been a big rise in health problems among workers with a history of migraine, asthma or any kind of mental disturbance. I ran medical data matches on key personnel to find out who would be most susceptible. Guess who came out top?’
Easy one. ‘Mr Clarke.’
‘How did you know? He has a history of anger-management problems going back a long way. I think he may be – unwell.’
The pair become aware of a ruckus going on by the food counter. June is trying to return her lunch-plate to an upset chef. ‘You taste it, it’s tainted,’ she explains, visibly upset.
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the chef rallies. ‘I made it fresh this morning.’ One of the other diners is eating, and suddenly throws up. Others start gagging and vomiting. The restaurant quickly becomes disgusting. Everyone is being sick. The air is suddenly sour with bile. Ben pushes around to the back of the counter. ‘Health and Safety. Could you show me where you prepared it?’
The chef leads the way to the rear of the kitchen, where a brushed-steel electronic panel is the master-control for the kitchen. ‘Everything is automated, see? The quantities are mixed here. All I have to do is program them in. Nothing is touched by human hand.’ Everything’s spotlessly clean, but Ben becomes aware of a terrible smell in this area. ‘Christ, what is that?’ he asks.
He looks up at the vent above the master-control. It connects to a thick steel tube. He pulls a refrigeration unit out of the way. Something disgusting is leaking out of the tube. It leads directly over the food container. ‘What’s that for?’
‘Hot air convector; it keeps the food at a preset temperature.’
Ben grabs a spanner and breaks the tube apart. He quickly wishes he hadn’t; it’s full of liquid shit. Everyone jumps back, horrified, as the floor is spattered.
‘Where is this supposed to lead?’
‘Just to the boiler.’
From up the vent, through square steel ducts, through all manner of pipes and tunnels, the effluent sweeps, driven by pumps. Ben runs upstairs, following the ductwork. Behind him follows Miranda. The last duct leads to a junction, where the toilet waste pipe has been connected to the hot air intake. Both pipes are clearly labelled. Ben smashes them apart. Somebody has rerouted the pipes with silver racing tape. It’s an act of vandalism.
‘Why would anyone do that?’ asks Miranda.
‘To be a force of chaos.’ Ben looks at her. ‘To wreck the system.’
‘You don’t think – I wouldn’t even know where to begin …’
Ben studies her long and hard. He softens. ‘All right. Let’s go and see someone who would know where to begin.’
Ben and Miranda head down to the basement. ‘Seriously, why would someone join the pipes together?’ Miranda keeps asking him, as if he can explain everything that’s going on. ‘Industrial espionage?’
‘That’s about ripping off patents, not poisoning everyone in the building. It doesn’t make sense. This guy Howard is in charge of building maintenance. Willis warned me that he’s sort of – unusual.’
They arrive on a Hawaiian beach at sunset. Palm-fringed sands, ukulele music playing on a stereo somewhere, over the sloshing of small waves. Howard the janitor is sitting in a deckchair in sunglasses, before a sun-lamp and back-projected video screens. There’s sand all over the floor, plus a few seashells. He’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, and is drinking a Mohito mixed in a coconut.
‘No point in getting stressed,’ he drawls, in his medicated-for-the-hell-of-it voice. ‘Electromagnetic pulses. Radiation that fries your brain, man. There are phones, computers and monitors in every square inch of this place. They don’t even know what effect it has on humans, but you can see what it does to things with simple nervous systems. Check out the bugs, man.’ He points his sandal at a ring around his work area, where hundreds of cockroaches lie in piles. ‘Works on pigeons, too. Anything with a tiny brain.’
‘Do you think it could trigger some kind of reaction in humans?’ asks Miranda.
‘That’s science-fiction bollocks. All it does is damage cells. It explains the insects and the pigeons. They drop when they hit a certain radius around the building.’
‘But it doesn’t come close to explaining what’s happening in here,’ says Ben.
Howard has no answer for that.
Clarke is on the prowl, and notices the two empty workstations. He stops by Meera’s desk. ‘Where are they?’ he demands, smoothing down his combover, something that is fast becoming a nervous tic.
‘I asked them to give me a hand, sir,’ Meera volunteers. ‘I had too much to do by myself.’
‘Well, get them back, before you find yourself with nothing to do ever again.’ Clarke continues to snoop around Ben’s workstation, and starts fooling around with his computer. There’s a private file on the desktop. Clarke clicks it open. He finds himself looking at the original, untampered-with version of Ben’s CV, including his terminated employments and a note:
HOSPITALISATION: NERVOUS EXHAUSTION
Clarke mutters to himself. The little prick has never held down a job in his life. He picks up the nearest phone, eyeing his wall-mounted cricket bat. ‘Security? I want you to track down a member of staff for me. Ben Harper. When you find him, bring him to my office.’
At that moment, Howard is showing Miranda and Ben the building’s plans on his laptop. ‘There’s more electronic resonance in this building than in any yet designed,’ he explains. ‘It’s fucking with the laws of nature, man. And they want to put them up everywhere.’
This doesn’t make sense to Ben. Too vague, too neat. ‘So you get some electrical disturbance – that wouldn’t make people act crazy, would it?’