“We found another one,” he would say. He would start to slide the folder to her. “I won’t bore you with the details of how we found him,” he would say. But then he would. He would bore her with the details. He told her how these men and women had changed their faces through major surgeries, had hidden themselves away in the farther reaches of Nepal, had quietly joined religious cults in western Colorado, had faked their own deaths in airplane tragedies, train derailments, house fires, suicides.
And she would wait, growing ever more impatient for him to finish and to give her the damn file, which he finally would after one last, “Are you sure you want this, want to continue this work?”
At which point she knew she was allowed to simply take the file, that she was almost expected to do so, that for whatever reason Mr. Niles preferred not to give her these things, preferred that they be taken from him almost but not quite against his will.
Then she would sit back in her chair and open the folder and look at the photograph, study it, study the face, study the other photos that might be in the file, and then she would read from cover to cover and then from cover to cover again. And then, having lost track of all time, she would look back up for Mr. Niles, who would have left his own office, left her to it so she could study the file alone, and find the room almost dark, the sun nearly set, and on the desk in front of her, a ham and cheese sandwich and a diet orange Fanta, which she would take — the sandwich in a few bites, the Fanta in two or three swallows — before she returned to the file, committing it to memory, all of it to memory.
What she didn’t expect was how good she would be at tracking down and killing the men and women who had abducted and, ultimately, murdered her mother.
Although, really, if she was being honest with herself, she had proved to be good at so many other things that, in hindsight, she wasn’t entirely surprised. Hunting down targets and eliminating them in secret simply happened to be just one more thing she had taken to, no different, really, than nanophysiology, or artificial subconscious dichotomy, which was what she had been studying in college before she dropped out in pursuit of the truth about her mother.
Not to mention that the Regional Office itself had done most of the heavy lifting. Less seek-out-and-destroy and more just destroy on her part.
Then one day she arrived in Mr. Niles’s office expecting to pick up another file, go after another man or woman responsible for her mother’s death, only to find Mr. Niles standing behind his desk empty-handed.
“That was the last one,” he told her. He held his hands up, spread his fingers wide, and then clapped them together and smiled. “There’s not one of them left.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean, you should be proud of yourself. You took care of every last one of them.”
She didn’t like this. “You should have told me,” she said.
“I just did,” he said, still smiling.
“Before. You should have told me before. I thought there would be more. There aren’t more?”
“There was,” he said. “There was one more, but there was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“He got wind of our man following his trail, tried to run, stole a car, wasn’t the best driver.” He picked up a small envelope full of photographs. A car wreck. An oil-slick road. Burned wreckage.
“We checked it out,” Mr. Niles said before she could say anything. “It’s real. He’s dead.” He paused and leaned heavily against his desk. “And he was the last one.”
Sarah held on to the photos and flipped through them but had stopped looking at them.
“And now what?” she asked.
Mr. Niles sat in his chair and shrugged and looked up at her and said, “Now you have your whole life, your whole life in front of you. Whatever you want.” He looked down at the paperwork on his desk, began reading through memos. “You could go back to school, I don’t know. The apartment is yours as long as you like it.” He looked up at her again. “Don’t feel in a rush to leave, in other words.” Then he turned back to his work.
Sarah, having avenged her mother’s kidnapping and murder at the hands of an anarchist splinter group, and not sure what else to do, and a little stunned, turned to leave his office.
“Oh, Sarah?” he said before she got to his door. She turned back to him, expectant, though she couldn’t have said what she was expecting. To be offered a position, maybe. To be told she had proven herself the equal of any one of the Operatives. To be told how far she had surpassed anyone’s small expectations of her and her mechanical arm. And later, she would learn from Mr. Niles himself that he had wanted to offer just that — a position as an Operative, his unfettered praise — but that Oyemi had very clearly said, “No, not Sarah. Operatives are Operatives, Oracles are Oracles, and everyone else is everyone else.” He had cajoled, he had begged, and finally he had threatened to leave the Regional Office altogether, and had only been brought back from the brink — why, she would wonder, would he care so much about someone he knew so little about? — by Oyemi’s promise that Sarah would come back, that the Oracles had made their prediction, and that he wouldn’t lose her. But Sarah wouldn’t know any of this for some few years yet, and so when she turned expectantly and he said, “I’m going to need those photos back, please,” and shook his head, and said, “Record keeping, filing. You know how it is,” and she handed the photos back to him, a troubling feeling of anger and disappointment welled up inside her.
“Don’t be a stranger,” he said then, as he went back to the work on his desk.
And she left, without so much as saying good-bye, and she stayed away for two days, until she couldn’t stay away any longer. On the third day, she stormed back into the travel agency and down the elevator. She shoved her way into Mr. Niles’s office, ready to yell, ready to rant, ready to throw her anger and frustration and confusion behind her mechanical fist and maybe tear his office apart, and maybe Mr. Niles himself apart, too, except that when he looked up from the papers on his desk, he looked so happy to see her, and said so casually, as if she hadn’t left in the first place, “Oh, good, I was just thinking about you,” that she forgot all about how angry she had been.
He handed her a file folder and said, “Take a look at that, tell me what you think. Serious threat? Think Jasmine could pull it off herself, or do we need a team?”
She took the folder and sat in the chair across from his desk and read the report. Together they argued out a plan of attack, the logistics, the fail-safes, and an hour later, Mr. Niles stood up, stretched, said, “Nice work, Sarah.” Said, “I’ll be in my office if you need anything,” and then he patted her gently on the shoulder and he left, and it wasn’t until then that she noticed the nameplate on the desk, and then outside the office, the newly stenciled name next to the door — both of which read SARAH O’HARA — and she had been there, for the Regional Office, for Mr. Niles, ever since.
~ ~ ~
From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:
Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution
When looking through the literature describing the process by which Oyemi and Mr. Niles gathered together not only their team of mystically inclined superwomen but also the famed and dreaded Oracles, who at once directed the movements and growth of the Regional Office and quite possibly predicted its downfall, one finds little more than stark conjecture and bland assumptions. In other words: One is faced with a wasteland of crackpot theories penned by junior research assistants. Still, the Oracles proved pivotal in the rise and fall of the Regional Office, and no serious study of Oyemi and Mr. Niles and their awesome accomplishments would be complete without some critical consideration of the acquisition of the Oracles.