44
Sarah waited for something to happen, for anything to happen. For Mr. Niles to bust in and save her. For Wendy to come in and ridicule her. Anything would have been better than sitting tied up in this chair, with all these men with guns outside the door, and wondering just how many bones of hers were broken. A lot of bones. A lot of things must have been broken about her, she thought, for her to feel the way she felt, which was not good.
She wondered what they planned to do with her. She wondered why they hadn’t simply killed her yet. Any hope that they’d be able to use her to their own ends or that they’d be able to turn her to their side should have been well done away with by now.
What with the hostage situation and how she had handled all of that.
What with how she had screamed out over and over again as they dragged her away that she would find who was behind all of this and destroy that person and then find every single last one of them, too, find them no matter where they hid, no matter what they tried to do to escape, that she would have her vengeance on their very souls if necessary.
She had screamed a lot of things. None of them very pleasant.
She wondered when they’d come back in here and whether it would be the small quiet one who came in here, who was methodical and almost tender about his painful administrations, or the loud, big one, who was brash energy and uncaring force. She wondered what it meant that she was trying to decide between the two of them, which one she liked more (the big one).
If she had her mechanical arm, she thought, she would be out of these ropes in seconds, in nanoseconds.
If she were one of the girls, one of the Operatives, she thought.
But this thought, futile as it was, was interrupted when Wendy stepped into the office.
Fucking Wendy, the fucking intern.
45
A week after the fight with Jasmine, Henry stopped Sarah in the hallway, took her gently but firmly by the elbow. Her body was still sore from her scrape with Jasmine and she flinched at his touch and he let her go, an apology in his eyes.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Sarah said.
“I doubt it,” Henry said.
“It wasn’t me. I didn’t start that fight.”
Henry gave her scoffing eyes. “Of course you didn’t.” He shook his head. “The flip of your hair, the look in your eyes. Not to mention, Jasmine fights dirty. It’s what she’s good at and everyone knows it.”
“I didn’t.”
Henry shrugged. Shrugging seemed to be his default reaction to just about anything Sarah said. “Come with me,” he said.
“Where are we going?” she said, and when he didn’t answer and didn’t let go of her arm, she said, “Where are you taking me?”
“Out,” Henry said. “It’s the end of the road, you’re off the team, kid.”
Sarah stopped; Henry reached for her wrist; she yanked her arm free from Henry’s grip. “What?” she said. “You’re joking. I’m off the team?”
“Christ, O’Hara,” he said, and then turned and kept walking. “Where’s your sense of humor?” He stopped and turned and said, “Well? You coming or not?”
“Tell me where we’re going.”
He shrugged. “My office. Is that acceptable? Can we go? Can you walk a little faster?” And when he turned again, she jogged to catch up.
Henry’s office looked like the office of a crazy person.
“This isn’t your office,” Sarah said.
“And by the way,” Henry said, ignoring her. “You’re not on the team. You’re a client.”
Henry barely glanced at her as he stepped over and around piles and stacks of papers and files, empty printer boxes, pieces of gray Styrofoam, an old tube TV set with a VCR embedded in the front of it, to get to the only free chair, which might have been behind the desk or on the other side of the desk, Sarah couldn’t tell, because she wasn’t even sure it was a desk.
“This is the office of a crazy person,” she said.
“No arguments there.” He reached under his desk and lifted — with some effort — a battered and heavily taped cardboard box labeled “Lamps, Kitchen Supplies, Plunger,” and set it, tilting to the left, on top of the stacks of paper and files and photographs on his desk.
“Has anyone else seen this office?” Sarah said. “I mean, like, Mr. Niles? He doesn’t mind that this is an office?”
Henry opened the box and nodded at it. “Well,” he said. “There you go. Have a look, go ahead, take your time.”
Sarah stood in the doorway, mostly because she didn’t see many places she could go.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, just move shit around,” he said.
Sarah scanned the area right in front of her but couldn’t see what was movable and what should be left in place.
“Jesus,” Henry said. Then he shoved his desk forward and there followed a chain reaction of shifting masses that toppled piles left and right, a slip-slide of paper off chairs and the desk. Sarah thought of domino chains cascading down but then reconsidered. Domino chains are exacting and deliberate, are meticulous, which Henry’s office was anything but. Instead, she thought of a mudslide, like the kind that threatened Los Angeles, everything full of sensitive and unpredictable threat.
Somehow, he cleared a patch of floor in front of his desk and then tipped one of the other chairs — which she hadn’t seen the first time around — back just enough to let the folders and books slide off it, and he dropped that chair in the almost cleared spot, its two back legs wobbly on a half-empty box of Pendaflex folders, and then he patted the seat and said, “There.”
Then he stood up to better look inside his box and flipped through folders, pulling them out and tossing them into Sarah’s lap once she had sat down.
“This isn’t all of them, but you don’t need all of them.”
“What are they?”
He sighed, stopped, looked up at her. “Don’t ask me questions you can easily answer for yourself. You’re smarter than that.” Then he went back to his box.
Sarah opened the folder on top and then held it above her lap, since Henry hadn’t stopped tossing new folders onto the pile growing there.
On the first folder was a name — Jasmine — followed by: “Weaknesses & Threats.”
46
Even with her eyes closed, even pretending to sleep, Sarah could tell it was Wendy by her perfume. Not that she knew what kind of perfume Wendy wore but by the simple fact that there was perfume and that it was so strong.
“We know you’re awake,” Wendy said in the voice she had once reserved for intern Jacob. “You can stop pretending because we know.”
Sarah wasn’t surprised it had been Wendy when it turned out to be Wendy.
Okay, so maybe she had been very surprised, but she shouldn’t have been, and that was just as close, right?
The thing was, she had liked Wendy.
Sarah wished she hadn’t liked Wendy, who had tried so hard to be Sarah’s friend, had tried to get into her good graces. And maybe Sarah shouldn’t have fallen for this kind of thing, maybe she had let herself believe that Wendy wanted her as a mentor and potentially, long-term speaking, a friend. Maybe Mr. Niles had been less attentive, less present, and maybe Henry had been acting weird since Emma was killed in the field, and maybe Sarah had been tired of being left out by the other girls. Nobody could blame her for being susceptible to the flattery and attentions of a pretty, intelligent, hardworking intern who, sure, maybe wanted a leg up in the hiring process after her internship, but that hadn’t meant she wasn’t also sincere in her desire to be Sarah’s friend.