Chloe needed no further impetus to act; she turned and pushed through the crowd, spurred on by a throbbing anxiety that seemed to grow in obscene, suffocating power with every step that brought her closer to her destination.
After what seemed like a mere few seconds of walking, in this strangely time-accelerated state of fear, she reached the broad spiral stairway that would take her to the underground level. Upon reaching the bottom she walked a little too briskly over to a section of the club that was cordoned off with velvet rope, behind which stood a burly Thai bouncer in a black suit, his heavily muscled arms crossed intimidatingly over his chest.
‘This is the Platinum-level VIP section,’ he grunted. ‘Card.’
Chloe pressed a button on her thigh armour and a flap opened, revealing a small compartment containing some money and a perfectly forged Platinum VIP card. She gave it to the bouncer, who scanned it and then handed it back. His broad face was now all smiles, and with a toothy grin he parted the velvet rope to allow Chloe to enter.
‘Welcome,’ he said in as suave a tone as he could put on. ‘If you’d like you can head on over to the bar for complimentary Cristal, or we can arrange other delectable treats for you. A bowl of the finest cocaine, perhaps?’
‘Uh, no thanks.’
‘If you need anything, the waitresses are the girls dressed in white. And I do mean anything. Call on them and they will see to your every need.’
‘Thanks,’ Chloe mumbled as she moved off.
She strolled through the VIP area, the subdued and distinguished décor of which was entirely at odds with the garish loudness of the palatial nightclub upstairs. Here and there rich businessmen, minor celebrities and other powerful people – all of whom were attired in tailored suits and extravagant designer eveningwear – lounged on plush leather sofas, where they busied themselves quaffing Glenfiddich 50-Year-Old whiskey and Cristal champagne, snorting cocaine off black onyx tabletops, and feigning polite hyena laughter at each other’s hollow jokes and trite anecdotes. The too-broad grins on their faces, revealing artificially whitened teeth, did little to disguise the freshly sharpened daggers in their eyes. Hovering around them like sirens, their deathly song temporarily drowned out by the cacophony reverberating through the bar from the vast dancefloor above, a bevy of half-naked beauties fawned over their every need. The serving girls, a uniformly stunning young women of a variety of ethnicities, were dressed in white, and were attired only in lacy white thongs and nothing else. Chloe couldn’t help but stare, slack-jawed at the topless women – she was, after all, attracted to both girls and boys – but despite the sudden surge of hormones, she could not overcome her revulsion at this scene of hedonistic decadence, and the ugly smiles and hideous laughter of the ultrarich clientele turned her stomach. She turned her eyes away from the grotesque spectacle and checked her watch. The appointed time was drawing dangerously near.
Two bare-breasted Arab girls sauntered up to her, their sultry almond eyes heavy with mascara and eyeshadow.
‘Hi there,’ one of them purred, taking Chloe’s right hand and stroking her gloved palm suggestively. ‘What can we get for you this evening? We have everything you might want.’
Struggling to maintain her focus, Chloe swallowed a mouthful of dry, sticky saliva and used all of her willpower to jerk her hand away, even as the other topless girl pressed her full, pert breasts against her left arm.
‘I don’t need anything,’ she managed to utter, staring at the floor. ‘I’ll um, get a drink after I go to the bathroom.’
‘It’s at the end of the room next to the bar.’
The girls slipped back into the shadows, two sylphs half-materialised from heaven, or hell, and Chloe half-walked, half-stumbled along a subtly lit path that led past the bar towards the far end of the VIP room. One side of the room consisted of a thick glass wall, which featured, along its entire height and breadth, a view into an enormous aquarium. Chloe jumped back in surprise as a six-foot hammerhead shark appeared from behind a multicoloured dome of coral and drifted with dispassionate languor along the edge of the glass, mere feet from her.
‘Jesus!’ she gasped, her nerves on edge.
She looked down and saw that her hands were shaking, and she wished she had pockets in this suit into which she could stuff them. Without another glance at the shark, as wondrous a creature as it was, shemade a beeline for the corridor that led to the restrooms, where, worryingly, another stoic-looking bouncer was stationed.
‘Platinum card,’ the man growled.
Chloe presented him with the card, which again was scanned and then double-checked under an ultraviolet light.
‘Come on in.’
Chloe hurried past him to the women’s bathroom. Once inside, she exhaled a sigh of relief; it was empty. The room was small, with only four stalls, but the place shone with luxurious splendour, with every aspect of the décor dripping in opulence, right down to the gold tap fittings. Chloe glanced at her watch one more time, and then locked herself into a stall to wait for the power to go out. She closed the toilet lid and sat down, and then pulled her helmet off to suck in a deep breath, feeling a sense of immediate but fleeting relief when she filled her lungs. The removal of the helmet and the rush of cool air against her sweaty cheeks did little to assuage the maggot-mass of ravenous anxiety and venomous fear that was squirming in her guts, and it could not still her violently shaking hands. Everything felt beyond surreal, and for a few moments Chloe was convinced that she had long ago lost her mind, and that in reality her body was strapped tight in a straitjacket inside some sort of mental hospital, and this was all some impossibly elaborate illusion, a chaotic nightmare
