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“Are you okay?” a girl at the next desk said to me as I walked away. “Were you looking for Keeley? She’s off sick with her kid.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. My face felt strangely hot and cold. I gripped the strap of my rucksack to stop my hands from trembling. “I’m from IT, I was just updating some patches on her machine while she was off. All done now.”
It was an effort to form the words, but the girl didn’t seem to notice. She simply nodded and went back to her next call.
I felt like screaming, but I couldn’t. I had to get out of here, I had to figure out what to do. I had to figure out why.
Because the voice on the end of the recording, the voice I had listened to again and again and again… that voice was Cole’s.
And I couldn’t even begin to process what that meant.
My legs felt weak as jelly as I retraced my steps back through the maze of Sunsmile offices and meeting rooms, towards the main entrance. My heart was thudding, and I could think of only one thing. I had to get out of here and call Hel, tell her what I had discovered. Because it made no sense. Cole? Cole?
I was almost at reception, fishing in my pocket for my phone, when I rounded the final corner and saw them—a group of security men huddled around a screen behind the front desk. There were three of them, plus a guy in a suit who looked more like some kind of manager, and they looked worried. One of them was pointing to something on what I was horribly sure was a security monitor. Another was talking to Derek, the guard who had buzzed me in earlier. Derek had his hands raised defensively, as if making a counterargument to some kind of claim.
All the feeling seemed to drain out of me. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. But how? I hadn’t slipped up, had I? No one had challenged me. I hadn’t noticed any suspicious looks from anyone in the call center, and I could swear that Keeley hadn’t clocked anything during our phone call.
I had two choices now: barrel through reception at speed hoping nobody registered me, or back away. I was hesitating—after all, the altercation might be nothing to do with me—when a sound from outside caught my ear and sent my pulse racing even faster. It was the short whoop-whoop of a police siren, as a patrol car pulled up in the hatched “no waiting” box outside the office and turned on its blue lights.
Maybe they weren’t here for me. But it was starting to look very much like they were, and I wasn’t waiting around to find out.
I turned and hurried away, back into the building. I was looking for fire exit signs, but naturally all the ones in this area pointed back to reception, so I ignored them and began half walking, half jogging deeper into the Sunsmile complex. I had a strange feeling in my chest—panic, yes, but mixed with a kind of exhilaration, the pulse of adrenaline that always accompanied me on a job when things got tough. My hand went automatically to my ear again, feeling for the Bluetooth earpiece, but of course, just as before, there was nothing there. It was like a physical reminder of Gabe’s absence—I was on my own.
I was trying to put some hasty distance between myself and reception, while still keeping to a pace that looked plausibly like that of an office worker who’d forgotten she needed to pick up little Freddie from nursery. Not sprinting. No one sprints in an office. But a kind of stressed half-run. The stressed part was easy at least. What was harder was keeping myself from breaking into a full-speed dash. I could almost hear Gabe in my ear: Don’t make yourself conspicuous, babe. Try to blend in.
I am fucking trying, I thought. But I would have growled it with more conviction if Gabe had really been there. When I reached a deserted stretch of corridor, I shrugged off the dark jacket and fished in my bag for the pair of fake glasses I’d packed earlier—thick black frames that were hard to miss. As far as disguises went, it wasn’t much, but the two changes together might confuse someone working from a blurry CCTV picture.
At last I was deep enough into Sunsmile that the fire exit signs began pointing a different way—ahead of me into the complex—and now I followed them, glancing over my shoulder as I did to make sure no one was following me. From far behind me I could hear some kind of commotion—but I wasn’t sure if it was the security guards or something unrelated. The latter seemed like wishful thinking, but whichever it was, they didn’t seem to be on my trail.
I was just starting to feel optimistic when I rounded a corner and saw a guard up ahead, staring down at his phone.
Shit.
He hadn’t seen me, he was too busy reading whatever was on his screen, but my imagination was already filling in the blanks. A text with my description. Maybe even worse—a screenshot from CCTV.
Shit. Shit.
At last I made up my mind and ducked into an office. It was empty and I sat at the desk facing the window and kicked my bag hastily into the footwell, then tried to slow my racing heart. The computer wasn’t on, but I didn’t have time to start it up. Instead, I pulled over some files and picked up the phone.
Above the hum of the dial tone, I could hear footsteps coming up the corridor. Keep going, I begged, internally. Keep going!
But they didn’t. They stopped outside the open door, and I heard a slightly awkward cough.
“Well that’s simply not good enough,” I snapped into the phone. “We needed those numbers yesterday.”
A trickle of sweat ran down between my shoulder blades, and I pressed back into the chair to soak it up.
“I don’t know how to put this, Diane, but tomorrow is not Thursday.” Unless of course it was. I had totally lost track. I shut my eyes, trying not to let the hand holding the receiver shake too visibly. There was another cough, this time accompanied by a very timid tap on the door. I sighed, put the receiver to my shoulder, and swung the chair around.
“Hello, yes? Can I help you?”
The security guard was standing outside the door, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
“Sorry to disturb, but can I ask, have you seen any intruders?”
“Any intruders?” I tried to put every ounce of irritation possible into my voice. “I’m sorry, isn’t that your job? I didn’t realize we were delegating company security to account operatives now.”
“I’m investigating a disturb—” the guard began diffidently, and I cut in, sharply.
