Dreams in the Tower Part 3 (4 page)

24

What was it that Leutz had said earlier? Something about needing Mike, about him needing to be sober so he could help her? Well he
knew
she hadn’t said anything about not drinking at all, not explicitly. This was her fault for not being clearer. Fear had kept him from touching any more alcohol until after lunch; it had been easy to not think about drinking when the delivery unit dinged and opened to reveal a superb salmon filet with sautéed veggies in a creamy lemon sauce. But with his belly full and his eyes finding the seductive crystal decanter full of 20-year single malt scotch, his fear had waned. He had spent the remainder of the afternoon with glass in hand, sitting at the window and watching the cleanup crews and private police going about their business like ants hundreds of feet below, disconnected from him in ways they probably would never understand.

Today there would be no working late, no creeping up to Natalie’s bedroom door and poking his head in to check on her, no easing into his own bed so as not to wake Meredith from what little sleep she got these days. Today he was leaving at 5:30 on the dot, just like everyone else. And this wouldn’t be the last time, even if this was the only time he had an excuse for leaving early that involved work—or a type of work, anyway.

“Okay Lom,” he said, leaning over his desk screen. “You know the plan. Guide me through this.”

“Certainly, Mr. Torres,” Lom said, his drab face occupying the top left corner of the screen. The virtual assistant was still as subservient as ever despite the fact that, as of just hours ago, he was now legally a person. “I am detecting a slight speech impairment and heavy breathing,” Lom said. “Perhaps I may advise you to take a Sobril tablet.”

“Advise all you want.” Mike wasn’t dumb enough to go in too loaded to do the job, but he certainly wasn’t doing it completely sober either; he needed to be relaxed enough to make this work.

“Yes, Mr. Torres. You may wish to know that Mr. Bellowe is preparing to leave his office.”

Grabbing up his briefcase and tab, Mike hurried out of his own office.
Time this right and don’t screw up.
“Elle, close everything up here.”

“Yes, Mr. Torres,” Elle said from the door screen.

He hurried down the hall and mashed the elevator button, fearing that Lom was about to pop up on his tab and say that Carl was already at the elevators two floors below. But just as the ding told him his elevator had arrived, Lom said, “Mr. Bellowe has left his office.”

“Excellent,” Mike said, stepping into the elevator, which was vacant (Lom was making sure that he and Carl would have privacy on their ride down). He pressed the button for the 56
th
floor. “You take over from here, then.” Mike folded the tablet and slid it into his pocket, cutting off the virtual secretary’s response.

After the doors slid shut, seconds went by without the elevator moving. Lom had control of this elevator now, and he knew to start the decent only when Carl’s finger pressed the call button. Mike was putting a lot of faith into the secretary to get this right. Though even if it all worked smoothly Mike wasn’t sure he could do his part. There was too much working against him. Not the least was the fact that Carl had no reason to trust him. Mike had been Carl’s boss even before all this, before Unify; holding power over people did not always cultivate trust—more likely it bred enmity and resentment.

The elevator began moving, and Mike tried his best to look like he normally did on his way out of the office—but that was a hard thing to do when you tried to do it. Two floors down the elevator stopped, the doors opened and in stepped Carl Bellowe, his face showing a weariness that said he did not really care for conversation. He didn’t even acknowledge Mike as he stood beside him. When they were moving again, Mike worked out what he was going to say in his head. This was the important part; if this was not genuine there might be no next step.

But just as he was about to ask Carl if he would like to share a cart (under the guise of discussing some recent report), the other man’s hand found Mike’s and pressed a small strip of paper into Mike’s palm. Standing in bewilderment, Mike watched the Carl leave the elevator and hurry down the hall—then Mike sped through the doors before they closed and strode promptly down the hallway to catch up with him. But when Mike rounded the corner, Carl was already in a cart and moving through the checkpoint.

“Dammit,” Mike said under his breath.

He turned his attention, then, to the slip of paper clutched in his fist. He looked down and saw nothing but the cryptic words ‘Diane’s apartment. 10 tonight. Alone.’ As he folded the paper and put it carefully into his chest pocket, preserving the evidence, Mike wasn’t sure whether he should be worried or relieved. Or scared. Surely they didn’t know he was onto them or that he suspected them of something. He had never done anything to lead Carl or Diane to think he had anti-Silte sentiments.
So much for the plan
, he thought, though he couldn’t help but feel relief that things weren’t going quite the way he expected: now whatever happened next was out of his hands and—more importantly—off his conscience.

*  *  *

It was barely 9:45 that night when Mike got tired of waiting. He had been sitting on a stool at the island in the center of the kitchen, staring back and forth from the front door to his tablet’s illuminated screen ever since Meredith disappeared into their bedroom half an hour before. They had been arguing about…something. He had no idea what it had been, but it had turned, predictably, to his drinking. He looked down at the counter, where his glass lay in three big chunks. Many tiny shards swam in a bath of amber spreading out in tendrils away from the wreckage; probing fingers of sticky brown stuff carried the tiny, knife-sharp fragments across the cold stone to leave sparkling silt deposits all over the counter. He hadn’t
meant
to break the glass; he hadn’t even meant to slam it down so hard. But in the heat of argument she had interpreted this accident as an act of anger and left the room without another word.
Let her be mad
, Mike thought.
I don’t care. I have work to do.

Sick of waiting around and letting his anxiety simmer, and wanting to escape his wife for a while, Mike decided he would start that work early. He got up from the island—and stumbled to his knees. He pushed himself groggily to his feet and stepped towards the door. The floor became a tenuous rope bridge spanning the windy chasm between two mountains. He reached out for where the guide ropes should have been as he took another step, but his hands fell through empty air. Standing still and breathing heavy, he waited until his equilibrium had returned enough to stop his swaying and then made for the door. In what felt like a few seconds he had made it through the heavy wooden portal and was out, down the hall and knocking on Diane Salpollo’s door.

“Hey, you all right there, Torres?” A firm hand grasped his shoulder and a leg nudged the back of his knee just hard enough that Mike stumbled forward. He turned and saw the grinning face of Carl Bellowe, lit eerily by the hall’s nighttime safety lights. He looked so polite and friendly that Mike was positive he was being completely insincere.

“You’ve been drinking again, huh, Mike?” Carl said lightly. He pushed down almost unnoticeably on Mike’s shoulder and Mike teetered, nearly falling. “Look at you,” Carl said. “We better get you inside.”

The door opened slowly and Diane appeared, wearing only a white robe and a pair of wooly socks; she looked just as mock-cheerful as Carl. “Yes?” she said, showing perfect teeth. “What’s going on?”

“Mike’s had a few too many,” Carl explained. “I think we’d be horrible neighbors to let him go back home like this. You know, his wife isn’t handling his little habit too well, I hear.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Diane said. “Come in.”

Carl’s hand, still grasping his shoulder as though it were staunching up some horrific wound, steered him into the room past Diane. Mike’s eyes had to adjust to the brightness, and then he saw an apartment almost identical to his own, except that it wasn’t filled with the personal belongings they had brought over from his house. He saw right away that Diane was a very tidy person; actually the place seemed fairly barren of anything beyond the furniture and exceedingly subtle decorative items that had come with each apartment. He guessed this lack of clutter came with not having a family.

“Oh, Mike, you big piss-drunk moron,” Carl said. When Mike turned to look at his two hosts he saw they were no longer showing their false smiles. In fact, their looks were purely hostile, their eyes four hollow, menacing holes.

Without a hint of concern Diane said, “Give him a break, Carl. His life is just
so
hard.”

“You came early,” Carl said. “Not to mention you’re completely wasted. What were you thinking? No, don’t answer. We know about your drinking problem. Hell, everyone at the office knows. Not so good for morale and unity, but that’s beside the point. The fact is, if you had come at 10 o’clock and sober this would have been a lot easier. We had a strict plan for keeping this secret, and hiding things from Leutz-and-Co isn’t getting any easier.”

“Get to it already,” Diane said, annoyed. “Mike, we know all about your little meetings with Leutz. We know everything about your spying project.”

“
Everything
,” Carl added.

“We’ve talked about getting rid of you,” Diane said. “Not me and Carl, no. But people we know. With you being drunk more often than not lately it wouldn’t be hard to make it look like an accident—or suicide.”

“Luckily neither of us is a sadistic maniac,” Carl said. “We had assurances from a close acquaintance that you weren’t a threat. That in fact you could become a friend.”

They both paused and Mike felt like he was supposed to say something. But he couldn’t think; he had hardly been able to follow what the pair were saying to him. “How do you know about—about me and Leutz?” he asked stupidly.

“Surely it won’t be a surprise,” Carl said, “to find out we are connected high up in the Anti-Corp—or what used to be the Anti-Corp. It’s just ‘the movement’ these days since all of the affiliate groups are infighting or selling out to Silte or disappearing altogether. Well, anyway, our friends know a lot—and I mean
a lot
. Scary. Probably know more than even Leutz herself.”

“How…?” Mike croaked, swaying dangerously in the light of the entryway. “How is that possible?”

With an exasperated sigh, Diane said, “This is pointless. Let’s just move on. We can explain when he has a clearer head.” She looked at Mike with eyes of measured distaste and said, “You still have those pills in your pocket, don’t you? Take one now, before we climb. Our plans will really fall apart if you miss a step and splat at the bottom of the shaft.”

“What are you…?” Mike reached into the pockets of the pants he had been wearing all day and felt his folded-up tab on the left and a small cylinder on the right. He closed his fingers around the object and brought it close to his face so his unfocused eyes could see: it was the bottle of Sobril pills Leutz had given him. Between Carl’s suspicious invitation and the argument with Meredith, Mike had completely forgotten about the experimental sober-up drug in his pocket. He looked up at Diane, mouth agape, and said, “You
knew
about these. How?”

Ignoring him, Diane shrugged off her robe, revealing beneath it a T-shirt and skintight shorts that just reached the tops of her knees. She backed onto a bench along the wall and quickly donned a pair of slip-on sneakers. “Follow,” she said, standing up. “And pop one of those things, will you?” Mike took one out of the bottle but didn’t take it yet.

As Diane walked off toward the living room, Mike turned to look at Carl—but the other man was holding his arm out to indicate Mike should go first. So reluctantly Mike followed Diane. As he stepped from the kitchen into the living room, he noticed that there actually was a slight difference between Diane’s apartment and his own: this one’s windows were in alcoves a few feet deep. This didn’t affect the dimensions of such a large room much, but somehow Mike noticed the slightly smaller size. And he soon found out the reason for this difference. Diane went over to a small hanging tapestry by the nearest window and pulled it back, revealing a metal door painted the same beige color as the walls. She opened the door by sliding it upward, revealing a dark cavity in the wall; somewhere inside, a faint light turned on and Mike saw a ladder on the far wall that disappeared above the doorway. The ladder started about a foot higher than the floor they were standing on and below was nothing but blackness.

“If you fall,” Diane said, “don’t scream. You may catch yourself on the way down, if you’re lucky. The shaft goes all the way to the fiftieth, we think.”

Nodding slowly, Mike popped the Sobril in his mouth and chewed, grimacing at the pill’s bitter taste. He watched as Diane pulled herself into the shaft and began her climb, and he waited for the Sobril to take full effect before he dared follow. He had the thought, as his head cleared, that this was insane, that there was no way he was going to go with two now-confirmed enemies of Silte Corp up this secret shaft to wherever it ended up. But Carl was nudging him from behind, and now that his cover was gone (or had never existed, if he understood their brief explanation correctly) he wasn’t exactly safe anymore regardless of whether he went with them or not. He eased himself to the edge, stooping beneath the low door frame, and reached across the void for the ladder.