He stays seated at his workstation for half an hour before Miranda looks furtively around and then wheels her chair over. Before she can speak, Ben holds up his hand to her. ‘All right. All right. I’ll find out what I can.’ So much for his resolve. ‘Tell me one thing. Last night …’
‘It wasn’t because I wanted you to help me, all right? Happy?’
‘Then what was it?’
‘I like you. You have the kind of innocence a girl just wants to wreck.’
‘You’re not like anyone I’ve ever met before. ‘
‘Is that good?’
‘I don’t know. Are you?’
She gives him a dirty smile. ‘I could be better.’
‘I just hope the cameras didn’t pick us up.’
‘You worry too much. What’s the worst that could happen?’
‘Never say that out loud.’
Through his window, Clarke silently observes them speaking. Checking his watch, he heads off to attend a meeting with the board, in a spectacular, hardwood, faux-19th Century conference room overlooking the city skyline. It would be wrong to think of the board members as villains. Nothing is as black and white as that anymore. They’re a group of ordinary, hard-headed businessmen; but their luxurious private world is cocooned, far away from the floors below. They no longer empathise, because they’re dealing now in abstract concepts. The world of business management would rather think about pluralistic environments than toilet dispensers.
‘This deal will turn us into the global standard,’ Clarke promises. ‘It’ll allow us to showcase systems in government buildings all over the world. I’ll have to push the staff hard. We’ll have to go through the night.’
‘Does this mean paying overtime?’ asks the company’s chief accountant.
‘I don’t see how we can legally avoid that.’
‘What you’re asking us is –’
Clarke interrupts. ‘I want your permission to go into Room 3014.’ The directors look at one another in trepidation, but they already know it’s necessary.
Ben checks the floor buttons, and takes the lift to the twelfth floor. He gets out and looks around. An unmarked door leads to another staircase. Climbing the steps, he arrives at a new floor. Apparently there really are two twelfth floors.
Returning to the lift, he heads up to the twenty ninth floor. Another unmarked door leads upwards. He emerges into a dimly lit corridor, plushly-carpeted. At one end of the corridor, he sees a door of polished steel, stencilled as Room 3014. Putting his ear to the cold metal, he hears a low hum emanating from within.
He turns around and walks straight into a tall, cadaverous man in a black suit. Even the senior staff call him Dracula, because he’s the spit-double of Christopher Lee, and he’s never been seen outside of the building in daylight. That’s as far as their imaginations stretch.
‘What are you doing here?’ asks Dr Hugo Samphire, the Chairman of SymaxCorp. ‘This floor is for the exclusive use of the board members.’
‘Dr Samphire. I got lost.’
‘You should have memorised the building plan in your company bible.’
‘I did, but this floor isn’t on it.’
‘Need to know, Mr …’ He squints at Ben’s badge. ‘Harper. Go back to your workstation and do whatever it is we pay you too much to do.’
But he doesn’t. Instead, he meets Miranda in another part of the steel and glass atrium. This part is faux-jungly and filled with tall palms that seem real. Miranda lights a cigarette, with her patented Fuck ’em attitude. People back away from her, because smoking is a sackable offence.
‘I’m not near the sensors, okay? They would set the alarms off. I know where they all are. It helps me to think.’ She blows smoke discreetly. ‘Clarke is tripling everyone’s workload in order to meet Friday’s deadline. After this, all leave is cancelled.’
‘What, you think you can’t handle the pressure?’
‘I’m used to hard work, sonny. What’s the matter with you?’
‘It’s bullshit about the thirtieth floor. There’s no mystery to it. There’s a bigger problem here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I studied the sick lists. There’s a sharply rising pattern of illnesses. I’m down to see Willis, the staff nurse.’
Miranda throws him a look. ‘Good luck. You’ll need it.’
Willis is middle-aged, and exhausted about it. The staff nurse sits in the building’s medical centre, sticking nicotine patches up her arm. ‘Care for a nicotine patch?’ she offers. ‘They’re great. I always have one around about now.’
‘No thanks. How’s business?’
‘Don’t ask. I can’t sew fingers on, for Christ’s sake. One of the workmen lost two of them.’
‘I guess you must have noticed this.’ Ben shows her a graph of rising sicknesses reported by staff. ‘Headaches. Hallucinations. Mental problems. That’s a lot of strange behaviour.’
Willis keeps sticking, barely bothering to look up. ‘Staff will tell you it’s stress-related. That’s bollocks. Ask someone if they work too hard, they’re not going to say no, are they? Everyone’s under stress; it shouldn’t make that much difference. Nobody smokes or drinks anymore. They should; it’d calm them down. I suppose it might be SBS. Sick Building Syndrome. Except that the building’s constructed from hypoallergenic materials.’
‘Something must be causing this. So many of the women …’
‘The female staff don’t operate collectively, Mr Harper. We’re not nuns. We don’t all get our period at the same time. But there is something, some kind of psychosoma.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I dunno, it’s hard to pinpoint. Natural tendencies get exaggerated under pressure. The sickly ones get sick, the angry ones lose their tempers more, the depressed ones get melancholy. There are chemicals that will do that, but there’s no reason for them being used here.’
‘Has anyone ever tested for them?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Can you get me data on anything you think qualifies as unusual behaviour?’
‘Sure. I managed to find quite a lot for Felix.’
‘So what happened to the report?’
She studies him with hooded eyes. ‘What do you think?’
It’s early afternoon, and the atmosphere on Ben’s floor is ramping up. People are tense and visibly working faster. In the reception area, the video images and soothing music now play at a faster, more urgent pace. Ben sits at his computer trying to access Felix’s files. He discovers a set of dated reports:
CONTENTS DELETED
CONTENTS DELETED
CONTENTS DELETED
He stretches out his back, then looks around and sees Fitch shouting at June and throwing papers onto the floor.
‘You collate the forms in binders, not with these damned things! It’s not hard to remember.’ Fitch looks exasperated. June is forced to bend and pick everything up.
June mutters under her breath. It sounds like she says: ‘Fitch the bitch.’
‘We don’t have to hire the obese, you know. We’re doing you a favour. You can keep this job or just order yourself more dessert.’ Fitch clutches her forehead, as if in pain. Ben frowns. Even from the little he knows about Fitch, this is uncharacteristically cruel. She’s obviously been drinking. He had her down as more professional. June’s nearly in tears. Ben can’t stand by and do nothing, even though it means breaking his vow. ‘What is your problem?’ he asks Fitch.
‘Inefficiency is my problem, Mr Harper. We get this done right, we win the contract and we all get to keep our jobs. We may even get bonuses at Christmas. Things are going to get a lot tougher around here. You want to be a lightweight, tell me you can’t handle the pressure.’