Avatar is the property of people who aren't me. This work of fiction is not authorized by those people.
Norm stopped pacing to lean against the side of the van for the eleventh time. Nobody had said much of anything in the last half hour, having drifted off to separate locations in the barn, each lost in their own thoughts. The space and silence among them left only the hum of electricity to fill the void. It struck Norm as torture by white noise.
Luke, leaning against the van's driver-side door, was the nearest person to him. Without prompting, Luke asked, "Did you ever think we'd be coming back here like this?"
Norm snorted and replied, "I didn't think I'd be coming back at all." It was a true statement. Even though he and the others at Hell's Gate had spent years preparing for RDA's return, Norm had fully expected an unstoppable armada to descend and overwhelm them.
"I guess I felt the same way," Luke said with a nod. "I mean, we had everything up there."
He took a deep breath and said, "Yeah, well, I guess it wasn't ours to have." For all that he had appreciated and loved about Pandora, as the years went by, he realized just how out of place he was on that planet. It might have been better if his avatar had survived the battle, or if the others' could have been saved; but the fact of the matter was that humans would always be aliens to that planet.
Even when he thought back to the days when he and Tom Sully had plotted to take down RDA from within, and when he allowed himself to dream of an alternate reality when that had occurred, he realized that, ultimately, he was not necessarily plotting for the survival of Pandora, but for the betterment of Earth. He might not have the deep, spiritual bond with Gaia that Tseyo had with Eywa, but he was no less tied to his home planet.
Luke chuckled. "For a team leader, you have the worst morale building skills I have ever seen."
Norm laughed and replied, "Give me a second to think of something." He paused for dramatic effect, and then said, "Don't fuck this up."
Luke shook his head. "Inspiring."
Norm grinned and then walked towards the back of the van, in which Tseyo had already taken a seat. Unlike Norm, Tseyo appeared to be the model of calm which, in combination with his face and body paint, had the effect of making him appear rather intimidating. Still, Norm felt compelled to ask, "How're you doing?"
Tseyo grinned. "You've asked me that many times, Norm," he said. "Are you sure you're asking me?"
"I think so," Norm said with a nervous laugh. "I hope so."
The Na'vi chuckled and said, "Patience is the greatest tool a hunter has. Impatient footsteps can be heard throughout the jungle."
"Yeah, but we're not hunting yerik," Norm replied. "This is much more like hunting palulukan."
Tseyo nodded. "Still, even a stalking palulukan can be brought down by a hunter who can wait for the right time to strike."
"Nobody goes hunting for him, though."
"That's also true."
Norm climbed into the back of the van to join Tseyo. "Have you given much thought to what you're going to tell people once it's time?"
"You mean about what's happened to my people?" Norm nodded, and Tseyo shook his head. "I think the words will come to me when they need to."
Norm allowed himself a moment to think about what people's reaction was going to be when Tseyo was broadcast around the world. Would they be awestricken by the Na'vi? Terrified? Certainly the armband of human bones and teeth Tseyo wore would be an unsettling sight.
But then a worse possibility came to mind: What if people simply brushed him off?
Numbed by technology and a string of Earthbound horrors that had gone on for generations, would the fact that an alien had arrived to list the errors of their ways make any difference? In a horrible, alternate ending, humanity receives Klaatu's warning with a collective shrug.
He scratched the back of his neck, and in doing so looked down at Tseyo's belt. He had not protested when Tseyo donned the ceremonial knife which had been gifted to him – Norm understood the sentimental power of carrying on his people's will. The darts, however, still concerned him.
When they were preparing to leave the Schellers' house, Norm had said to Tseyo, "You know we aren't supposed to kill anybody."
Tseyo had glared at him and responded, "Can you promise that our enemies won't want to kill us?"
Their conversation had abruptly ended.
Norm had to admit to himself that he was not wholly concerned about the lives of the RDA guards who might fall at Tseyo's hand. After all, he was convinced that a number of SecOps mercenaries had been killed by his wildly amateur shooting in the first battle for Pandora. He was far more concerned that Tseyo did not fully appreciate that gun-wielding guards in body armor would not be the kind of people who would be felled by a knife or blow dart.
He had a sickening image of Tseyo stepping out from behind a wall, weapon ready, and then being cut down by a sharp burst of gunfire. The memory quickly became a flashback, and he recalled the hundreds of Na'vi who charged the mercenaries' line. In one instant, they were confidently firing arrows at the threatening horde of technology; in the next, they were fleeing, dragging wounded comrades as far as they could before being shot themselves.
Pain radiated from Norm's shoulder.
Norm was snapped out of his memories – and looked up to meet his Na'vi friend's eyes – when Tseyo sighed. "However, it's much harder to be patient when you aren't doing anything at all," he said with a wry grin.
He laughed and replied, "Yeah, it is." Tseyo's red-painted tail swished, leading to Norm changing the subject. "So, why'd you choose virility?"
Tseyo turned his head in silent question, then looked back at his tail. He turned back with a smile. "Atanapay thought it would be a joke," he said. "She didn't know what it meant."
"Atanapay?"
"Natalie," Tseyo said. "Last night, we decided on a more fitting name."
Norm began to make some uncomfortable connections in his mind. He glanced down again at Tseyo's abdomen on the off-chance that he had missed a much more graphic symbol of virility, but was relieved to see none there. He did note, however, a stain of red paint at the top of Tseyo's loincloth.
Norm might have asked more probative questions, but his earpiece came to life with Dawn's voice. "Boss says it's time to move," she said urgently.
It took him a second to react, but he responded, "Okay, we're going." He leaned out from the back of the van and shouted to the others, "It's show time!"
Luke jumped into the driver's seat, while Amy and Matthew got into the back of the van. When the back door was secured, Norm patted on the partition which divided the driver's cabin from the cargo hold, and Luke quickly pulled out of the barn.
"Let me know when you guys are near Alameda," Dawn said. "I'll put in the signal to RDA's system that you've been scanned. Then you'll have half an hour to get to the loading dock."
"Did you get that, Luke?" Norm asked as he pressed his earpiece.
"Yeah," Luke replied. "We can all hear each other," he added dryly. "That's kind of the point of all of us having communicators."
"Then why didn't I hear Abe?"
"Because you must not have been paying attention," Abe replied tersely. "Is your head in the game, Norm?"
He tried to bite his tongue, but he could not help himself. "I'm here," Norm replied. "I guess I've just learned to tune you out."
The subsequent stream of swearing left Norm grinning.
Pain radiated from Jude's chest with every breath and every one of the van's bumps. When they turned onto an unpaved road – she assumed it was a road – every other second was punctuated with a stabbing pain in her side. What kept her distracted, however, was not so much the physical pain, but the realization that she had been bested. Jude had taken dozens of contracts since the beginning of her sordid career, and she always came out on top. Yet here she was, hooded and in the hands of the country's most wanted terrorist organization.
She had known it was too good to be true when the Schellers contacted her, but she had been far too confident in herself. She should have dragged it out and let her electronic surveillance do its work. She should have dug deeper into the wife's personal security firm and found out her former liaison was on her payroll. But even if she had done these things differently, Jude had a feeling that the information she gathered would not have made much difference.
From what she had seen, Abe was absolutely right in asserting that RDA had deployed her too late in the game to stop his plot. Maybe she could have caught them at the last second and passed along their plans to her RDA handlers; but from what she knew of RDA, her guess was that even if she reported their plans and movements at the last possible moment, their bureaucracy would hinder their responsiveness.
Jude wondered if it was not too late to do something to interfere; not so much to fulfill her contract – she knew that was dead – but to screw the man who showed her up. But despite her best efforts, she could not think of a realistic way to accomplish such a thing. She did believe Abe's assertion that the Soldiers would kill her out of hand if she revealed her relationship to RDA, and it sounded to her like the Soldiers were already distrustful enough of Abe to shrug off a warning that he was preparing a double-cross. They seemed to have prepared for that on their own.
For the moment, Jude was stuck as a pawn in this game. If she came out alive, then she could give greater consideration to her revenge schemes. As such, Jude decided to keep quiet and play the role of a complicit hostage while keeping her eyes open for possible, future exploits.
That is, she would if they ever decided to take the bag off her head.
When the van stopped, she was roughly escorted through what sounded to her like a tunnel complex. A short time later, she was seated, handcuffed to a chair, and the bag finally removed. Once her eyes adjusted to the light, it appeared to her that she was in a control room. A mix of old and new monitors were set up on a few dozen desks aligned in two rows, although only eight of these desks had Soldiers seated at them. Each of the operators seemed to be intensely focused on what was happening on the screens in front of them. Jude was taken by how young some of them appeared – none of them could be past their mid-twenties.
In a nearby corner were a few, more senior-looking people who were quietly talking amongst themselves. Occasionally one of them would walk behind one of the rows to inspect whatever priority they were following. It was one of these Soldiers who came to her, pointed towards one of the active monitors, and said, "That's your guy."
The Soldier sitting at the desk turned in his chair so that Jude could get a better view of the screen. It appeared that the young woman they had sent to keep tabs on Abe had been fitted with a camera, and the two of them looked as though they had just gotten on the train.
The woman continued, "So now you know he's still alive. Questions?"
"Are all of these people tasked to us?"
"No," she said flatly. "You're not that special."
Next to the monitor she was directed towards, a Soldier appeared to be watching a traffic camera; although Jude could not discern what city the feed was coming from, much less why it was important. At another desk in the front row, a Soldier spoke into a headset. "I don't care if you didn't know it was closed to trucks. That's the whole point of recon, you dipshit. Figure it out."
Yet another person said, "Hey, it looks like the pigs are setting up at Leavenworth and Geary. Nothing heavy, just be aware."
"It sounds like something's special," Jude commented.
"We keep busy," the woman said. "You're only here to make sure Scheller doesn't screw us over, not to quarterback. So keep quiet and watch your screen."
Jude kept her eyes on the screen in front of her, but she did her best to pick up on the side conversations in the room. There was a lot of talk concerning road directions and the need for things to be in place within the hour. From the screen displaying the traffic camera, Jude saw a time of nine-fifty. She knew she had been in the van for a while, but certainly not four hours. That had to be East Coast time. But why would the Soldiers monitor traffic in an Eastern city? If striking at RDA's headquarters was not special enough to command all of their attention, what else could be?
Another plot was most certainly in the works; and if it was of the Soldiers' creation, Jude quietly hoped that someone else was aware of it.
By the time the train lurched out of the station, it had been most of two hours since he left the barn outside Modesto. However, the train would cover almost the same distance to San Francisco in just shy of fifteen minutes.
In a passing thought, Abe recalled the conversation he had with Tom when he visited for dinner. "You're going to lay bare the greatest corporate conspiracy in the history of mankind, and then follow that up with an intensified energy crisis," his friend had told him.
He looked around the train car. Sacramento was not one of the hubs for the worldwide high speed rail network that had been the catalyst for RDA's explosive growth, but one of the cities in San Francisco's "local" service area, as were Redding, Fresno, and Reno – cities that, in a simpler time with basic transportation, would have effectively been day trips from San Francisco. Once in the City by the Bay, commuters on these trains could be whisked away to Los Angeles in twenty minutes, Montreal in a little over two hours, or, as the couple behind him seemed destined for, Sydney in just over four hours along the world's fastest line.
The only way it was possible for these trains to reach the ultra high speeds to make trans-Pacific travel routine was with Pandorium's superconductivity used throughout the network. However, the network's heavy use meant that the precious metal needed frequent replacing, hence the need for constant supply from Pandora.
Shutting down the line of supply and, soon after, the rail network would mean more than depriving Australians of easy, weekend trips to Reno's cheap casinos, it would kill industrialized nations' ability to collect cheap labor from across the world. The workers who commuted daily from Nairobi to Rome to maintain luxury hotels in the decrepit cultural capital would immediately be out of work, and Italy would be unable to replace twenty percent of its workforce. If Pakistan would not provide Indians with alternate routes to provide for the flow of workers between them, Iran and Afghanistan, India might decide to blast open those routes with nuclear weapons.
Hundreds of scenarios played out in his mind in those fifteen minutes. Nations were going to war over the last, natural sources of fresh water – such was Mexico's ill-fated attempt to acquire access to the Salton Sea Desalinization Works following the United States' successful reclamation when the Gulf of California surged over the old border with rising sea levels.
It only made sense that nations would go to war over the greatest resource: labor. People had thought that a world of twenty billion would have decreased the value of human life, and that was true on an individual basis. For governments, however, and quasi-governments, such as RDA, it simply meant that people had become a true commodity, a resource to be moved en masse whether through commerce or conflict. The high-speed rail system had become the strings holding the fluctuations of population together; without it, the tenuous balances of power and economy would unravel.
If that were not enough, the multitude of tokamak fusion reactors that were straining to keep up with the world's energy demands needed regular Pandorium replacements to sustain their magnetic fields. With fossil fuels long ago depleted, and other renewables all but discarded as nations went all-in on fusion, arresting those plants' resupply would almost surely threaten a total collapse.
And Tom accused him of losing sight of the ability to leverage his position.
Once the train pulled into the San Francisco terminal at King Street, Abe and Ashley had to force their way through the crowd of passengers to reach the RDA employee light rail shuttle that would carry them to RDA's headquarters. Although the crowd was a massive microcosm of humanity, it was the sheer size of the terminal – an eighteen acre complex of railways – that was the greatest obstacle to making one of the shuttles on time.
Abe's shoes clicked on the marble floor as he hurried along, the echoes of his footfalls mixing with the din of tens of thousands of conversations filled the space all the way to the top of the arched, steel-frame ceiling almost two-hundred feet above.
When he and Ashley arrived that the queue for the shuttle, Abe was pleased to see a pair of RDA guards by the doors.
"All RDA employees must have two forms of identification!" one of them, a short, stocky woman, shouted. "This can be your employee badge and then either your driver's license, citizenship identification card, or passport – anything with your name and picture."
Many in the line were not happy. "Who the fuck carries a driver's license?" a man loudly asked. "Like we all own cars."
The guard tried to be patient, but she was clearly exasperated by a morning of identical complaints. "Sir, I'm sorry, but there is a problem with our facial recognition system. You need to be manually in-processed at the headquarters gate."
RDA's facial recognition software was the descendant of security systems originally developed for the city-wide closed-circuit television systems of the late twentieth century, a time when biometrics was in its infancy and an inaccurate science. At the peak of the population and immigration booms, which together resulted in an explosion of crime, the United States passed a law requiring that every citizen have an identification card with multiple biometric features. At the time, it was the world's largest country to have such a requirement, fueling the industry. When China amended its long-standing law to include similar requirements, the biometrics industry exploded.
As nations' security agencies developed extensive databases of their citizens' most unique features – and sold access to those databases to large corporate entities at a premium – businesses were quick to utilize the technology for their own purposes. In the case of RDA's headquarters, as its employee population swelled to the size of a minor city in its own right, it became impractical to have guards manually check every employee's documents; and as biometric forgery improved, it became dangerous to simply let people scan identification cards at kiosks without a way to double-check the identification.
The popular solution, at least for corporations which could afford it, was to set up facial recognition systems at their checkpoints. When a person entered the compound, their biometric card would be scanned at the same time as their face would be captured on camera. Within milliseconds, the information from both sources would be scrubbed through RDA's employee database to verify the employee's identity; and if a false match resulted, an alarm would sound, and the person would be detained until his or her status could be verified.
However, the technology required precise coordination between the scanner and the camera, and RDA learned in the first iterations just how difficult it was to calibrate. False alarms were routine, and the security system was shelved for years while newer, more reliable generations were brought online. This was the flaw Dawn exploited in her virus.
Every thirty seconds, the main computers would recalibrate the card scanners and facial recognition cameras to ensure synchronization. Dawn's virus, working through the high-security exploits she had identified, adjusted the calibration parameters to ensure that each cycle would slightly decouple the systems while at the same time deteriorating the quality of the facial captures; thus, even though the engineers were able to identify and reset the calibration parameters soon after the virus' launch, false matches continued to occur. Protocol required the system to be brought offline for a full diagnostic scan – at least a four-hour process.
Within two minutes of the virus' launch, the first false alarm sounded. Three minutes later, there were more false alarms than valid entries. The system was taken offline, and guards were ordered to conduct manual in-processing of employees and visitors. Now, almost an hour after the system had been taken down, at the start of the morning rush, Abe and Ashley were two of several tens of thousands of people lined up at staff entrances around the RDA complex. As Abe had expected, the guards were only making cursory checks of identification documents in order to keep the crowd from becoming unruly.
He presented his forged employee card and driver's license to the female guard. It struck Abe that she had not even looked at them before she handed them back to him and waved him through to the shuttle. Ashley was similarly moved through the checkpoint.
When they were out of earshot of the guards and on their way down the tunnel to the boarding platform, Ashley looked at him and said, "That's it? That's RDA's security?"
"I'm sure we'll get checked again at the building itself," Abe replied. "That's not usually a processing point, so those guards were just weeding out who had the right ID and who didn't. The guards at headquarters won't be so overwhelmed, so they're likely to actually look at the cards."
The light railcar arrived shortly after Abe and Ashley, and it carried them through the mile-long tunnel in a little over two minutes. From that station, they entered the main lobby of RDA's headquarters; a squat, low-ceiling annex to the Bay Point skyscraper. Rather than being bottlenecked into a single tunnel as before, there were twelve lines set up for employees to pass through, each with two guards posted. Abe felt a knot grow in his stomach, and he heard Ashley take a deep breath.
"Choose a separate lane," Abe said. "We don't want to be seen too closely together – in case one of us doesn't make the check."
"I'm not supposed to leave your side," she replied tersely.
"I need a second person in the office. Trust me, I won't run off without you." He was being honest, but he also declined to say that if she were caught – as he quietly hoped – he would not be terribly upset to go on without her.
With some hesitance, Ashley left his side to stand in a line three rows away from him. Just as Abe had predicted, the lines moved more slowly than at the rail terminal as the guards took the time to inspect the badges – even if their inspections were cursory. As the security system had not catastrophically failed in years, guards had become reliant on the technology. They were not nearly as skilled at spotting forged identification as some of their predecessors might have been.
Still, Abe knew that a lack of skill was not enough of a guarantee; and though he was no stranger to the creation of forged documents, he also lacked the skills of a professional. He would not be comfortable until he was past the checkpoint.
When it was his turn to be processed, the guard gave him a nod and muttered something that sounded like, "Morning, sir," but his outstretched hand made it clear that he was more interested in getting on with his job than exchanging pleasantries.
Abe turned over his documentation, and waited anxiously as the guard moved his fingers over the cards. He was checking for ink smudges, the right colors in holograms, and whether or not embossed seals were raised to the correct height. He flicked the edges to ensure the laminations were securely bonded, and then stared hard at the two pictures Abe had presented.
The guard took a breath, looked up at Abe – staring right into his eyes – and paused before saying, "All right, sir. Go on. Have a good day."
Abe was inclined to say something in response, but the best he could muster against the lump in his throat was a slight nod. He took his cards back, and then hurried towards the tower's main atrium. He might have been moving too quickly, however, because he felt someone grab his arm. He turned quickly and saw that it was Ashley who was holding him. "I told you not to run," she scolded.
He did not shake his arm away from her, as it might risk causing a scene. Instead, he kept walking and said flatly, "I wasn't."
"Uh huh."
She let go of him as they entered the tower's atrium. Despite all the time Abe had spent working here, he could not help himself from looking up towards the tower's pinnacle. From the ground floor, it was easier to appreciate the tower's spiral-like construction that, from the outside, was otherwise broken up by the cragged, steel encasement.
Bay Point's four sections were divided by three mezzanine gardens, each of which was rotated to provide for an uninterrupted line of sight to the top of the half-mile spire, which was itself the floor of Chairman Savage's penthouse. This first section, principally a public-access mall, was quiet. Stores would not open for another couple of hours, and so only RDA employees shuffled through on their way to work.
While Abe craned his neck, he touched his earpiece and said, "Status check – we're in."
"We're a little-ways west of Tracy," Luke replied. "Maybe a little more than an hour out. Traffic's starting to get thick."
Dawn chimed in next. "Nobody's raised any alarms so far."
"What about the action outside?" Abe asked.
"Security doesn't seem to be paying it too much attention," she replied to his dismay.
He sighed and said, "Okay. I'll let you know when we're at the next step."
They walked towards the main elevator bay, joining a group of employees waiting for one of the express cars. When it arrived, Abe drew a few looks when he pressed the button for the fourth section mezzanine. The majority of the employees he was with worked in RDA's lower level offices and would disembark on the first or second mezzanines. For them, the executive section might as well have been as exotic a location as Pandora.
The employees who embarked on the second mezzanine to go up a section, however, were not only unimpressed with him, but they appeared to take pains to avoid eye contact with him. These mid-level managers' experiences with executives tended to be negative, typically getting barked at for missing deadlines or underperformance, real or just perceived. In the days when Abe commanded AMIS, these were the people whose careers and lives he would ruin in the course of internal investigations when accountability passed over a more senior executive.
The office politics at this level could devolve into battle royales – sometimes with real body counts.
When the express elevator reached the third mezzanine garden, two-thousand feet above the ground, the mid-managers quickly scattered, leaving Abe and Ashley alone as they walked briskly to the localized, sectional elevator that would carry them to their target.
He allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief at having managed to get so far without detection, but he soon found that his budding confidence was premature.
Not more than halfway through the gardened walkway, another of the express elevators opened. Abe's heightened sense of caution compelled him to turn and see if a wave of SecOps were disembarking to chase him down. Instead, he made eye contact with an old colleague.
"Shit," Abe muttered as he quickly turned away.
"What?" Ashley asked.
She was about to turn around – and he was going to stop her so they could keep going – when the man called out in a high pitched, Southern drawl, "Abe?" His stomach lurched as his name echoed off the walls.
Abe did a quick survey of the corridors which spiraled around the garden to see if any curious heads were beginning to poke over the railing. Even if RDA had purged everybody who might have been sympathetic to him, Abe was still a figurehead in RDA's lore. This particular colleague, however, was not someone Abe would have considered sympathetic to him. He was simply an ass kisser.
He took a deep breath, turned on his heels, and asked, "Cliff, is that you?"
"You're damned straight it is!" Cliff Houser was a tall, lanky man with glasses. But for a few more wrinkles on his forehead and some thinning hair, he looked just as Abe remembered. More than anything else, Abe remembered Cliff as perhaps one of the least astute people to ever work in RDA's executive corps. However, he could out-drink anybody he came across, and he was smart enough to know how to woo a drunken supervisor into giving him a promotion.
Abe gave him a disingenuous smile as the man jogged up to shake his hand. "How're you doing?"
"Good, man, real good," he replied as he too enthusiastically, forcefully shook Abe's hand. Putting his lack of tact on full display, Cliff said, "Jesus, what are you doing here? Word about town is that you're supposed to be coming back on a prison ship or some such!"
"Whose word is that?"
"Everybody's!" he said with a chuckle. "Yeah, I figured I'd be seeing you next on the ten-o-clock news. Trial of the century kind of stuff."
Abe let out a nervous laugh and said, "Well, surprise." He exchanged a glance with Ashley, who gave him a cross expression in return, clearly wanting to ditch the small talk.
Cliff persisted. He looked at Ashley and asked, "Is this your girl? I don't remember the last time I saw her."
"It's been a while since you've been by the house," Abe replied politely. Cliff had crashed one of his house parties when Natalie was four, and both Abe and Krysta spelled out clear consequences to the invited guests should any of them take it upon themselves to invite him back. "But, no, this isn't Natalie."
"Then I guess you won't mind if I see her after work, huh?" He laughed uproariously at his own joke, while Abe was too dumbstruck to react with more than a snort and half-hearted chuckle.
Ashley, on the other hand, was more direct. "I'd rather suck off a sewage pump than a suit."
Whether oblivious or wanting to push back, Cliff responded by feigning horror and said, "Oh, hard to get, I see?" He then mimicked a cat scratch, complete with sound effects. It occurred to Abe that it this man either had gotten an early start on his liquor, or had become stupider in the nearly twelve years since he had last seen him.
"Listen, maybe we could catch up later," Abe offered. "We have a meeting we need to get to."
"Oh yeah? Who with?"
Abe thought about lying for a moment, but he figured that train had left the station. "Franklin Ashworth, actually," he replied.
Cliff laughed. "I'm pretty sure you don't," he said.
Abe was caught off guard. "Why's that?"
"Well, shit, because I'd know about it." Cliff gave him a light punch on the shoulder and said with a grin, "I got your old job, buddy."
He felt the blood drain from his face, succumbing to a moment of horror on the thought that he had been led along on faulty intelligence. "What?"
"Well, old, old job." His grin became a beaming smile. "Yessir, you're looking at AMIS' Deputy Director for Investigations and Security!"
In a wild swing from panic to indignation, Abe could not think of another time he felt more insulted. Having his old, reliable coworkers purged by a vindictive corporate leader? He could understand that. Having his capable replacement hire someone to silence him and his family to protect the company from catastrophe? He could understand that. But having this blathering idiot be considered a worthy successor for a job he loyally, competently executed for many years? It was difficult for him to stay restrained, and his grip tightened on his suitcase handle to become a white-knuckled fist.
He swallowed hard and said flatly, "It was an impromptu arrangement."
"Well, I hope you don't mind if I sit in and see what all the fuss is about," Cliff replied with a grin.
"Of course not," Abe said, forcing a smile. He turned briefly to Ashley, who looked absolutely bewildered, and gave her a slight shake of his head.
On their way to the elevators, Cliff continued to crow about how he had weaseled his way into Abe's old job through his usual tactic of liquoring up the right people while everybody else was being shown the door. For a moment, he wondered if Cliff was the one who was responsible for overseeing the operation to have him silenced, but he could not fathom a circumstance – or liquor hard enough – where Cliff would be able to earn the kind of confidence needed to be in charge of something so high profile. Indeed, when Cliff began to ramble on about the increasing workload, Abe had it in mind to say that it was because Cliff was too incompetent to keep fraud and saboteurs under control.
Despite his deep, more sinister desires, they made it to Abe's target floor without incident. The black marble hallway, just adequately lit by lighting strips along the floor and ceiling, seemed foreboding to him, despite his years working in this place. Abe became even more uncomfortable when he saw that there were two guards – not just one, as it was when he worked here – manning the security desk which controlled access to AMIS' offices. Worse still, Cliff took it on himself to make introductions.
When he handed his badge to the guards to verify his identity as an AMIS employee, Cliff said, "And this here is Abe Scheller, here to see Franklin Ashworth."
The guard raised an eyebrow and replied, "I don't remember seeing any visitors on the morning schedule."
"That's 'cause it was 'impromptu,'" Cliff said with a grin.
The guard shook his head. "Sorry, but I'm going to have to call in and check."
Time seemed to slow down as the guard reached for the video screen. Abe could not imagine what the first words out of Franklin's mouth would be, but he could imagine the last words would result in an ignominious end to Abe's plan.
"Fuck this," Ashley said, and then leapt over the desk to tackle the accompanying guard.
"What the—?" Cliff started to say, but Abe quickly jabbed his elbow into the drunkard's face before pushing him out of the way to charge the other guard before he could intervene on his comrade's behalf.
Abe tried to go straight for the guard's gun, but he was not fast enough and instead got flipped on his back. Before he could get in too much trouble, Abe reached up, grabbed the guard by the shoulders, and pulled him onto the floor. After that, they fought each other to gain the upper hand.
At some point during the struggle, he heard Dawn in his ear. "Is everything okay?" she asked. "I'm getting a lot of interference."
They were fighting at a draw until Abe managed to get a hold of a can of pepper spray on the guard's belt. Ripping it off the guard, he popped off the cap, aimed the canister at his opponent's face, and activated the spray for a full second. A moment later, the guard cried out and reached for his eyes. Due to their proximity, even Abe felt his eyes begin to burn. Ignoring the pain, he managed to get to his feet and kick the guard several times in his ribs before he knelt down and pulled the gun from its owner's holster.
While the guard writhed on the floor, Abe wiped tears from his eyes and tried to ignore the burning sensation in his nose and on his lips. Coughing and almost breathless, Abe glared at Ashley, who had much more easily subdued her target, and said, "Some help would have been nice."
"I was going to shoot him for you," she said flatly. "Then you used that shit spray and fucked up my eyes." He could see both she and her hostage had reddened eyes.
"Fair enough," he replied as he pulled off the radio from the still-pained guard.
At that point, he turned and pointed his gun at Cliff, who was milking the pain of his broken nose for all he could. Staring down the gun barrel seemed to refocus his attention, however, and he quickly held his hands up over his head. He let out a short laugh and said, "Hey, buddy…"
"I hope you've enjoyed having my old job," Abe interrupted, "because before today is over, you're going to be out of work for a while."