out the system. But, as she watches, the system’s electronics neatly reroute themselves.
‘That’ll be the tamper-proof protection system. I’ve been watching you for a while, Miss Mangeshkar. Your spelling is atrocious.’ Clarke slowly lowers the cricket bat. Instead, he snatches the Taser from Meera and hits her in the stomach with it. Meera convulses in shock.
‘As a consequence of your inattention to detail, your employment here is officially terminated.’ Clarke hits her with the Taser again. Another violent shock.
‘Kindly empty your desk and see the human resources officer.’ He hits her with the Taser a third time.
‘A suitable reference will be forwarded to you.’
Meera’s body is wracked by electrical activity, and she collapses, almost losing consciousness. Clarke lifts his raised boot and swings a vicious kick at her. ‘We hope your time with us has been enjoyable and instructive,’ he concludes.
Meera rallies for a last-ditch attempt at stopping the man who employed her. She rises painfully to her feet with arms raised, ready to put her kickboxing lessons into practice, but she’s small and slender, while Clarke is heavy-set and demented. The supervisor’s eyes slowly cloud over, the pupils simply fading away. Meera sees the change and flinches, preparing for the worst …
… as Clarke again raises his cricket bat.
12. FRIDAY 2:25 PM
Miranda has had a tough time getting downstairs. The lobby is in chaos as she reaches it. The main doors to the building are locked. She tries them all – same story. She runs to the dazed reception guard. ‘Is there a way of opening these manually?’ she asks.
The guard is catatonic, motionless. ‘I went to university,’ he tells her.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I have a master’s degree in art history. Just so that I could wind up as a fucking security guard. A fucking trained Alsation could do this job. A blind one. With three legs.’
‘The key. I need the door key.’
‘My mother didn’t raise me to stand watch over some rich fucker’s property.’
‘The key!’ she shouts, slapping his face hard and preparing to duck in case he hits her back. But it seems to do the trick.
‘There’s a single master that overrides all the deadbolts to the outer doors and the atrium.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Out there.’ The guard points through the glass to the foliage-covered annexe.
The white-eyed Swan is just finishing locking the door to the atrium from the inside. He pockets the special deadbolt key and continues to pull June behind him. Although she is now conscious again, he has tied her hands together. He drags her across the forest floor of the atrium. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, you painted Jezebel,’ he pants. ‘My God, you could afford to lose some weight.’
Meera is small, but she’s fast. As Clarke swings his bat, she drops to her knees and grabs his raised boot, tipping him off-balance. Clarke is back on his feet in moments. Obsessive men have hidden reserves of power. Roaring like a bear, he slams Meera backward into one of the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, with tremendous force. The glass holds, but its surround doesn’t. The whole thing starts to crack around the edges. Clarke charges forward, pinning Meera against the glass with his orthopedic boot as the rest of the frame cracks.
Clarke shakes his head piteously. ‘If only you could have learned to wear a dress like the other girls.’ He pushes down hard.
The entire panel divorces itself from the frame and falls out, taking Meera with it.
She falls slowly at first, almost gracefully. Meera plummets through space, sailing down on the glass sheet.
As Swan manhandles June on her stomach across the atrium, June hears a strange noise – shattering glass – and looks up. Swan looks up, too. The sheet of glass carrying Meera explodes through the roof of the atrium. Non- lethal fragments rain down, but the great window pane lands on Swan, shearing him in half at the softest point of his waist, and spraying June in blood.
Meera falls through the roof into the top of a tall, artificial palm tree.
From inside the building, Miranda hammers on the doors. June looks up at her in a daze. ‘June!’ she shouts, ‘June! You have to get the key!’ But June is too stunned to register anything. ‘The key! In his pocket! The key!’
As June gathers her senses, she realises what Miranda is asking of her. She reaches into the still-twitching corpse’s jacket and fishes for the key. As she does so, the top half of Swan convulses violently, making her scream. The half-a-corpse latches onto her, pulling her over and trying to drag itself on top. The ragged stump of Swan’s spinal cord is poking out from the bottom of his rib cage, so June stamps on it. As Swan falls back with a gurgling yell, she grabs the key and makes for the entrance door.
She has trouble finding the lock, but spots it and inserts the key. While she’s trying to twist it, Half-Swan starts clawing at her. Oddly, his lower half appears to have died. It’s only the part with the brain in that she has to worry about now. His right hand is trying to lock itself around her ankle. This is definitely sexual harassment, as defined in the office bible.
13. FRIDAY 2:37 PM
Ben reaches the directors’ boardroom and bursts in.
The directors number a dozen men, no women – there’s a surprise. They are seated beside Dr Hugo Samphire, drinking coffee at the long, walnut-veneer table, which is surrounded by colour-coded plans on raised boards. Some are furtively eating digestive biscuits. The front-man is talking to his New York audience at the start of the satellite video presentation. They’re completely oblivious to what’s been going on below.
‘Who are you?’ Dr Samphire snaps at Ben. ‘The satellite presentation is about to start. What the hell do you mean by barging your way in here?’
Ben is momentarily dumbfounded. He looks at the wall vents, which should be pumping the same poisoned air into the room as in the rest of the building. ‘You give your staff different air,’ he says, amazed that Miranda has been right all along.
The directors are glancing at each other; how can an employee know about this? The audience on the video monitor is starting to look puzzled.
‘Kill the link,’ someone orders. ‘We’ll call them back.’ One of the directors breaks the satellite connection. ‘You have to leave right now. Somebody call security.’
Ben is starting to understand the true nature of management. ‘You don’t even know what’s going on down there, do you?’ he realises. One of the directors is trying to call security, but having no luck. ‘The line’s dead,’ he tells the others.
Dr Samphire’s sense of order has been affronted. ‘There’s nothing in the air that’s not perfectly safe to breathe,’ he bridles.
‘There’s a dead body in the main ventilation shaft.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Think so? Try breathing this.’ Ben goes to the door and slams it wide open. On the other side of the corridor, he wedges open the stairwell door. The poisonous air pours in, rolling across the floor like plague-pit fumes.
‘The compounds we’re using will all be fully approved.’
‘You added drugs.’
‘Only to enhance efficiency for the purpose of preparing today’s presentation.’ Dr Samphire tries to sound reasonable in a we’re-all-men-of-the-world way.
‘Meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, you had a separate air supply installed up here.’
‘We don’t need to work as hard as our staff. We’re directors.’
The directors are in an uproar. Nobody wants to risk breathing the bad air. They are arguing among themselves, two or three heading for Ben, when Clarke appears in the stairwell doorway. He has his razor-edged cricket bat slung across his back like some kind of Home Counties bounty hunter.
‘Mr Harper reports to me,’ Clarke explains. ’I’ll enjoy taking care of this.’
With the door between June and Miranda, June fights to get the deadbolt key in the bottom lock. Half-Swan appears to have vanished into the tropical undergrowth, wriggling away like some kind of grotesque reptile. Meera chooses this moment to fall out of the tree, hanging onto the palm fronds, and lands in the soft earth. With her sari torn open, Meera increasingly looks like a Bollywood action heroine, except when she opens her mouth.
