6. FRIDAY 9:25 AM
The stormy weather has been building all week. Now the heat cracks, and thunder riffs around the office towers, hitting the business district in full fury. Cauls of rain wash across the bare quadrangles. Sheets of water slam and break around planes of windswept concrete. The workers scurry into the sheltering cathedral of the SymaxCorp building under black umbrellas. Religious places are always places of refuge as well as of torment.
Ben shakes out his umbrella, besmirching the perfect marble of the lobby floor with dark spots. He catches Meera near the elevator and steers her away from the gaze of the cameras. He wants to thank her for the helping hand yesterday. Miranda tick-tocks her way across the lobby toward them. She’s already been in for a couple of hours.
‘Today’s the big one,’ Meera warns. ‘They’ve been working all night again. I feel f*cking awful and I haven’t even been here.’ It feels weird to hear a girl in a sari swear. They both recognise that there’s a crisis coming, but what can they do? They’re merely paid employees. Even nicknaming the Chairman after a vampire is tantamount to civil disobedience, and it’s as far as most of their colleagues will dare go. But multinational conglomerates are not taken down by the judicious wielding of sarcasm. There aren’t even many directors, thinks Ben, who can make policy changes. When a company gets this big, it becomes a machine with a mind of its own.
The lift arrives. There’s a girl inside who can’t decide whether to come out or stay in. She drops a pile of papers, looking half-dead. ‘Some people upstairs are getting very f*cking weird,’ she says, as Ben, Meera and Miranda pile in. ‘Three o’clock this morning, there was a fist-fight between two teams over coffee-breaks.’
‘Why do they stay?’ asks Ben.
‘Hive mentality,’ Meera tells him. ‘We’re worker bees, conditioned from birth. That, and the incredible overtime.’
‘Why do we live this shitty life when we could be lying in the sun?’ asks the girl, not looking as if she expects an answer. ‘I haven’t had a tan since student riots closed our school.’
‘Clarke came in at five o’clock this morning,’ Miranda yawns. ‘He’s having a shit-fit about his computer. His entire hard drive has gone.’ She flashes a furtive smile at Ben. ‘I’m out of here the second I get paid.’
The morning starts bad and gets worse. Clarke is ensconced in his office with the door shut. Every once in a while, a muffled shout of anger comes through the wall. The work-floor is a mess. There are papers, files and half-eaten boxes of junk food everywhere. Someone has thrown their trousers into the fountain.
At eleven, Miranda grabs Ben and drags him off. ‘You have got to come and see this.’ She leads him down a floor, to the Accounts Department, and pushes open a door.
‘Apparently, they’ve been here all night. No wonder Meadows took a dive.’
The accountants are gathered around a computer that they have covered in dozens of red candles and votive offerings. They appear to be worshipping it, chanting numbers at the garlanded screen. Their hummed refrain is the theme tune to The Simpsons.
‘It’s true,’ says Ben. ‘There is a thin line between accountancy and madness.’
At eleven thirty, Meera makes an announcement. ‘I think I’ve been looking for the wrong thing,’ she tells them, tapping her screen with a pen.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Electro-magnetic radiation wouldn’t do this. You heard Howard. I’ve been on every website he could recommend and haven’t found a thing. It couldn’t spark a kind of collective mental breakdown.’
‘So what do we look for?’
‘I don’t know – some kind of trauma event.’
‘When did you first notice changes in people?’
Miranda thinks. ‘Maybe three weeks ago.’
‘Soon after Felix went missing. You’re sure he never went home? Suppose he’s still here.’ Ben feels tired and sore-headed. He didn’t sleep well.
‘There is one way to find out,’ suggests Meera.
‘How?’
‘His car key has a finder. It emits an electronic pulse coded to its matching base. All staff with car park spaces have them. It’s so the guards can locate the keys to move vehicles.’
Miranda slaps her forehead. ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that! I’m sorry, I don’t drive, all right?’
‘How will we find the key finder?’ asks Ben.
‘It’ll be with the rest of Felix’s things,’ says Miranda. ‘I can take care of the search. What are you two going to do?’
‘We’re going to get Clarke’s keys,’ says Ben, ‘and take a look inside Room 3014.’