The interview, p.11
The Interview, page 11
Joel had been watching me before and I knew it was possible he was watching me now.
I considered the gazebo to the left of the cube but a bulb was popping and rotating above it. It would illuminate me too brightly.
Make a decision. Quick. I whined to myself, shaking uncontrollably, and that’s when I felt it for sure.
A shifting of the air.
A stirring in my blood.
A cold breath against the nape of my neck.
A whole crescendo of primitive, instinctive responses that screamed one urgent message to me: He can see you.
I spun.
But I couldn’t see him. Not yet.
35
It had taken her long enough to trigger the alarm, Joel thought to himself. He’d expected her to get to it sooner.
That was disappointing, but not a major hurdle. Long experience had taught him that you had to be adaptable, where human nature was concerned.
He got up off the floor with his laptop open and balanced on the flat of his palm. The screen of his laptop was divided into a grid of several smaller windows. Each window displayed an image from a different camera that he could zoom in on or switch between if he so chose.
True, the flashing lights had whited out some of the windows on his screen, but even so, he’d seen enough to know that she’d grabbed a knife from the kitchen to go along with the metal pole she’d taken earlier. He’d watched her debate what to do next and he’d seen her run towards a workstation to scramble beneath it.
Joel was the only one who could see any of this because he’d placed the security cameras on this floor on a loop ever since the last of the staff had left, when it was only him and Kate in the cube.
After closing his laptop, Joel zipped it inside his black nylon backpack and tightened the straps over his shoulders. He was standing in the back-up emergency stairwell. He’d been sitting right behind the fire door when Kate had attempted to force it open.
The space reeked of new paint. It was an easy guess that the stairs had barely been used since the building had opened and not a single person had passed him on their way out since the alarm had been triggered. Because of the unoccupied floors, the number of people currently working here was already low, and of those who’d still been in the building this evening, his hunch was that most of them had used the main stairwell to get out or even the elevators in contravention of the building’s evacuation protocols. It didn’t surprise him. Joel had witnessed the same phenomenon in office blocks all over the world many times before. Once the alarms began to screech, people lost all sense of reason and logic. Panic took over. They fled.
Not him.
After releasing the heavy bolts he’d fitted to secure the fire door, he pulled it open, shunted the photocopier aside and stepped into the office. The alarm was riotous, the lights blinding. He checked his watch and saw that he would have to move fast.
36
Friday 7.14 p.m.
I crouched under the kneehole of the desk I’d chosen. It was a tight fit. The alarm shrieked above me. The emergency lights cast flickering shadows on the floor. The knife was in my fist down on the ground, the metal pole next to me.
The desk I was cowering under was on the far side of a horseshoe with a partial view towards reception. I kept my eyes trained on the exit doors and tried to make myself as small and still as possible.
My back and legs ached. My knees trembled against the ground.
I couldn’t tell if Joel was close. There was no way I could hear him over the commotion of the alarm. From the angle I was on, I knew I wouldn’t see him coming unless he approached me from reception. And if he did come that way, he’d be able to see me.
You chose a bad hiding place. Move.
But my body wouldn’t obey my brain. My fear was too paralysing.
A hot, tingling second of anticipation. All my nerve endings seemed to be alight.
Was he here already?
I thought about easing my head out and taking a look but then I decided against it. If he was standing near to me I’d give myself away.
Jaw clenched, knife trembling, I blinked the sweat from my eyes and retreated even further into my crawlspace.
37
Joel felt an added kick of adrenaline as he rounded the partition wall. The office space was alive with noise and light. Chaos all around him.
He jogged past the gaming area and the glass cube, then cut left, striding by the gazebo and the carousel horses. When he reached the windows Kate had written on, he stepped in between the lamps she’d placed on the ground, craned his neck and looked down.
He could see a modest crowd of onlookers in business clothing gathered on the opposite pavement. A few stragglers were exiting the building to join them. Several of the workers had on lightweight jackets or were carrying briefcases and laptop bags. Already, lots of them were peeling away and leaving the area to begin their weekends. He didn’t anticipate that many of them would come back inside.
After switching off the lamps and turning from the window, Joel zeroed in on the desk he’d seen Kate dive under. Just in front of it, a desk chair had been rolled clear.
With a series of fast, purposeful strides, he was upon it.
The lights flickering in his vision. The alarm screaming in his ears.
A duck and a lunge and he reached out for Kate, snatching for her arm, her hair, anything.
He grasped only air.
What the—?
The crawlspace was empty.
His head snapped up.
She must have moved after he’d closed the laptop. He must have just missed her.
He was still puzzling it out when he glimpsed a hint of movement just off to his right. Something other than the flashing lights.
There.
A desk lamp rocked and teetered. It was on the very edge of one of the desks in the next horseshoe of workstations along.
The lamp teetered some more.
Then it toppled off the desk onto the floor.
Oops.
Kate must have bumped it.
Joel vaulted the desk and sprinted after her.
38
Friday 7.17 p.m.
The noise of the lamp hitting the ground struck me like a fist to the throat.
I heard a scuffle of footfall behind me.
Now.
I sprang up from underneath the desk I’d moved to, on the opposite side of the desk to Joel. The plug socket for the lamp was in my fist. I’d tugged on the cable to create a diversion after I’d seen him move away from the window.
My breath juddered.
Joel was still rising from a stooped position, the confusion only slowly leaving his face when he saw me.
‘Don’t move!’ I yelled.
My words came out louder than I’d intended. A sudden venting of all my terror and nerves. I let go of the plug and took hold of the kitchen knife in both hands in front of me but I couldn’t keep it steady. The blade caught the flash and flicker of the emergency lights. The metal pole was on the ground by my feet.
‘Stay back! I have a knife!’
‘I can see that, Kate.’ He raised his hands, gently patting the air. ‘Kate, it’s OK. You can relax now. It’s over.’
I stared at him, not quite shaking my head. He had a black backpack slung over his shoulders and I watched as, very slowly, he slipped his arms free of it and placed it down on the ground.
‘You passed the test, Kate. You did well.’
Still I didn’t say anything.
‘Kate, please. What I need for you to do now is trust me and put the knife down, OK?’
Not OK. Not in a million years.
The shrill alarm drilled into my chest. My tongue felt dry and bloated in my mouth. I glanced fitfully towards reception. Why was nobody coming yet? Where were they?
‘Kate. Look at me. Kate.’ When I jerked back around, he raised his hands a little higher and spread his fingers up by his shoulders. He looked calm, reasonable. ‘We don’t want anyone getting hurt here.’
‘Then don’t come any closer to me.’
He hesitated.
Good.
I glanced down at the pole by my foot. The desk was still between us but it didn’t feel like enough of a barrier.
I held my ground, swaying. Pressure behind my eyes. Pressure in my sinuses. The lights stuttering like camera flashes and the din of the alarm making it hard to hear my own thoughts.
‘Kate, it’s OK. You triggered the alarm. But it’s not a big deal. You’ve seen the reaction from everyone in the building, right? That’s because there are safety protocols in place.’
I wet my upper lip. I was shaking uncontrollably. I knew I couldn’t say anything just then. I had no idea what I would say.
‘You remember Tony? He’s the security guard you met on the front desk when you came in.’
My breath snagged. The way he said it suggested he was certain of that. Had he been watching me?
‘Relax, Kate. We’ve done this before. Tony knows the kind of scenario we like to run here at Edge. He’ll be here any second now. It’s his responsibility to cancel the alarm you set off and tell the alarm monitoring service that it’s a false alarm. But first you have to put down the knife for me, OK?’
The crazy thing is, I almost did. I think part of me simply wanted this to be over. I wanted to be able to accept it was just some wildly improbable exercise that had got out of hand.
But that was the problem. It was just too wildly improbable. Even in the midst of my panic, I could tell that no self-respecting company could possibly allow a hoax fire alarm evacuation to be carried out as part of a recruitment process – especially in a building that was occupied by other firms and businesses. No company – not even Edge – could condone what Joel had done to me. And that was why, even as he was attempting to convince me this had happened before, I didn’t believe him.
I couldn’t believe him.
I think he sensed that. I saw something change in his eyes. A tremor of doubt or uncertainty. And when I saw it, he saw me see it, and in that instant, everything turned.
‘OK, Kate, if that’s how you want this to go . . .’
I didn’t wait for the rest. I was already spinning away, pushing off from my leading foot, breaking into a run.
I managed two steps. Three.
It was as if I was trudging through sand.
Then my head was wrenched violently backwards and pain ripped across my scalp.
I screamed.
He must have leapt over the desk to get at me. Snatched for my hair.
My upper body pivoted backwards from my hips after my head, like I’d run into a horizontal beam. I screamed again and tried to lash out with the knife, but by then he’d gathered me into his arms and he was bundling me forwards. I tripped and fell. He pushed me face down over a desk.
My elbows struck first. Then my chin. Breath exploded from my lungs.
His weight crashed down on top of me, pinning me.
I twisted and writhed. I jabbed at him with the point of the knife. His fist circled my wrist. He crushed my bones. Then he slammed the back of my hand down against the desk until the knife fell out of my grasp.
No.
I scrambled for it with my other hand but he got to me before I could grab it, knotting his fist in the hair at the base of my neck, twisting it, tearing it, yanking my head upwards and away.
A bolus of phlegm in my throat.
Fear like firecrackers going off inside my skull.
I kicked out at his shins, his knees.
He bent my arm back behind me, jamming it upwards. A shard of agony in my shoulder joint, streaking down to my elbow. For a horrifying second, I felt sure my arm would break.
I stilled.
And that was when the alarm stopped on a fractured note.
The silence that followed seemed strangely unnatural and forced.
My hearing was still recovering from the onslaught of the siren, not to mention the urgent pounding of my blood, but I thought I caught a muffled sucking sound that could have been the doors into reception closing, followed by cautious footsteps.
‘Hello?’ The voice was male, uncertain. ‘What’s happening here?’
I would have screamed if I could but Joel exerted more pressure on my elbow joint, and for a sickening second there was only the red-hot pain inside my head and the terror of worse to come. His lips grazed my ear, his breath on my face.
‘He’s sixty-four, Kate. He has a wife. A daughter. Did he tell you he was retiring soon? Do this right and he lives. But make trouble for me and I’ll kill him. And then I’ll kill you.’
39
Friday 7.21 p.m.
Joel palmed the knife as he pushed off me. I could still feel the weight and crush of his body as he stepped clear.
I stayed where I was for a trembling second. When I turned, cradling my elbow, I looked at the guard and it was all I could do not to shake my head and beg for help.
He was standing in the threshold of the reception area, staring back at me, clearly troubled by my appearance and uneasy about the scene he’d walked in on. His eyes kept darting to Joel and darting back to me again, his lips moving slowly, as if he wanted to be able to tell himself this was something other than what it appeared to be.
‘Miss? Is everything all right?’
The note of concern in his voice almost undid me. He was shorter than Joel and when I didn’t respond right away, he went up on his toes to look past Joel to get a clearer sight of me. There was a mobile phone clutched in his right hand, a computer tablet in his left. He was wearing a luminous safety vest over his blazer and his face was damp and flushed – from getting up here in a hurry, I supposed.
He was overweight and out of condition. If Joel attacked him, there would only be one outcome. He could kill him. I believed that.
‘She’s fine,’ Joel said. ‘We just got a little carried away, is all.’
A shudder of revulsion passed through me.
Even as he said it I could see the picture he was attempting to paint and how things between us might appear. My skirt was rucked up. My blouse was rumpled and untucked. My skin was glowing. I was breathing hard. My hair was loosened and in disarray.
And then there was Joel. Handsome. Confident. Together.
He cupped a hand to the back of his neck and worked a rakish grin. The knife was in his other hand, concealed behind his thigh. My eyes were drawn to it like a magnet and he must have known that because he tapped it with his index finger twice like an improvised Morse code. A warning and a reminder: Don’t make me hurt him.
The guard was still peering at me, his mouth squirming beneath his moustache. I could tell he was looking to me for confirmation of what Joel was saying to him but I couldn’t help him with that.
In my scrambling mind, a part of me was still sprawled over that table. Joel’s body pressing into me. His breath in my ear.
I remained sickly still as Joel moved forwards, taking several steps closer to the guard, silently rolling the metal pole under a desk with his foot, blocking the guard’s view of me and the wider office floor. With his hand behind his thigh, he double-tapped the knife blade again. I took the signal to mean: Back me up here or else.
‘Did you mute the alarm on this floor with that tablet or cancel it altogether?’ Joel asked him.
The guard didn’t answer. He was too distracted, too unnerved. He glanced to his side, at the cracked glass panel in the door and the extinguisher down on the ground. Then he took several steps sideways until he could see the office layout more fully. His eyes widened as he read the message I’d scrawled on the windows.
‘Miss, I didn’t . . .’ He shook his head and stared at Joel, lowering his hands. ‘You didn’t tell me there’d be anything like this going on. You never said . . .’
A long, see-sawing moment.
It was as if all the air had been sucked out of the room.
Everything seemed to be spiralling.
Everything spinning out of control.
‘Is the building empty?’ Joel demanded.
The guard was flailing. He didn’t respond. For a moment, he seemed to be as lost and trapped as I was.
‘I’m sorry,’ he blurted. ‘I had no choice. My daughter, she’s—’
‘Hey!’ Joel snapped his fingers. ‘I told you. Let me worry about your daughter. Now focus. Is everybody out?’
His daughter. What was he about to say about his daughter?
The guard seemed to brace himself against something – a suppressed inner pain or fear – and then he nodded, and sagged and looked down at his tablet.
I felt something inside me tear and give way.
‘The system says everyone who works here has checked out, yes.’
‘What about the rest of the security team?’
‘They clocked off at six-thirty. It’s just me now.’
I leaned back against the desk behind me. My body had gone limp and puppet-like. It was a struggle to breathe.
He has a wife. A daughter.
What had Joel done? What was he prepared to do?
Why?
‘And the emergency response?’
No answer.
I was still reeling, so it took me a second until I noticed that Joel had snatched for the guard’s wrist, lifting his hand with the tablet in it until he could check the screen. Again, I stared at the knife Joel was concealing behind him. I was terrified he’d lash out any second.
‘The monitoring service has called me once already,’ the guard replied woodenly. ‘They’re waiting on my report.’
‘Call them now,’ Joel told him. ‘Tell them you’ve checked and everything is fine. There’s no need for any fire crews to respond.’
I watched them, unmoving. Staring at the guard, I realized that our roles had been reversed because now I was the one trying to catch up to what was unfolding before me. I also suspected that I’d misinterpreted the way the guard had been looking at me when he’d first come in. What I had read as uncertainty and concern might just as easily have been a mixture of shame and fear.
