The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel by Manuel Gonzales Page B

nodded as if coming to a hard-won decision and half-turned to head back to Fifty-Ninth,back to the subway, back to a real life, but before she could change her mind again, she stepped inside.
    A shiver ran through her, which she blamed on the air-conditioning.
    A pretty, young receptionist smiled at her. “Good afternoon. Can I help you?”
    “I’m looking to, um, book a trip to Akron, Ohio?” Sarah said.
    Sarah had looked up the Morrison World Travel Concern before coming. She couldn’t find a website for them but had read a number of stories—many of them in magazines like the
Aston Martin Magazine
and the
Robb Report
. She knew the kinds of vacations booked here, which were not the kind of vacations one took to Akron, Ohio. She expected the receptionist to frown at her, or to look at her blankly, or send her to Travelocity or something, or worse yet, to book her a trip to Akron, Ohio, where Sarah had no intention of going. Instead, the young woman held her pretty smile and said, “Great. I’ll let them know. While you wait, can I offer you something to drink? Water? A glass of champagne?”
    Five minutes later, another woman escorted her to an elevator and told her, “Someone will be waiting for you,” and smiled at her as the doors closed and the elevator began its descent, which was a long descent, and then a few minutes after that, when the doors opened, there he was: Mr. Niles.

15.
    It was almost five in the morning by the time Sarah made it back uptown, back to the Regional Office. She would’ve been at the office sooner if she’d taken a cab, but she didn’t trust a cab—or much of anyone at this point. She could have called one of the Regional Office drivers. They were on call twenty-four hours a day, mostly for the Operatives, whose assignments often required oddly timed comings and goings, but she wasn’t sure she could trust their drivers, either—their own drivers!—not to mention, calling for a car at this hour would have drawn unwanted attention, might have tipped off someone she didn’t want tipped off. Not just that she’d received their envelope, but that she’d refused to accept their offer, which had been contained within that envelope, but not only that: She was preparing to take action against those who’d made the offer.
    So she took the trains. The F train was murder. The 4 was worse. But the platforms and the cars, aside from the occasional drunk passed out on a bench, were empty, and she would see anything weird or out of sorts that might be coming for her.
    Not to mention all the waiting, all the time she spent stewing, helped to clear her head, helped her relax.
    Still.
    What a drag.
    Not what she’d had planned for her Tuesday morning. Or her Monday night.
    She unlocked the first-floor office door and then punched in the elevator code, started the long descent.
    No one else was in, at least. Even the cleaning crew had long since come and gone.
    When she first started working for Mr. Niles, she came in early every morning, hoping (and failing) to impress him and the Operatives—Mr. Niles, if he even noticed, never said anything, hadn’t cared, and the Operatives hazed her for it, but back then there hadn’t been much that they hadn’t hazed her for. She would come in before sunrise and use her key to Mr. Niles’s office—which she had kept even after he had given her her own office—and sat at his desk and watched the sun rise over Manhattan through the three tall video screens that were built to look like windows, the pictures on them so vivid, so real, that there were moments when the rising sun would force her to shade her eyes, when sunlight seemed to stream into the room, when she almost forgot she was a mile, at least, belowground.
    Those mornings, that sunrise, were the best things about working for the Regional Office those first few months. Better than all the fancy gewgaws and super-advanced technologies they used to find new Recruits, better than the