His arms shoot up beside him, his tanned, lined face twists with trepidation.
“Move the body,” Nora tells me and I do as she says without question or hesitation. “Hurry.”
The man in the suit stares back at Nora with bright blue eyes framed by dark, messy hair.
“What do you want?” he asks with a shaky voice, and shaky hands.
I hide the body in another nearby office.
“He’s about fifteen feet from the surveillance room door,” Victor tells us about the guard downstairs just as I’m stepping back out into the hall.
There’s a single camera right on us, but I hold back the involuntary reaction to look up at it. It may not pick up our faces covered by the masks, but it can still see my eyes and that instinctively makes me cautious.
Having the same idea, Nora and I step out of view of the camera around the short corner next to the office, but her gun remains trained on the man. A knot slips down the center of his throat, moving his Adam’s apple. Her fierce brown eyes never seem to blink as she stares coldly into his blue ones just a few feet away.
“Drop your hands and look natural,” Nora demands, knowing that if the man in the surveillance room sees him like that, he’ll know right away something is wrong. “I said drop them!”
The man drops his hands immediately.
“Don’t look at us,” she says. “I said look natural.”
He does as he’s told, averting his eyes. He steps over and presses his back to the wall and then crosses his arms over his chest to look natural.
“He’s back in the surveillance room,” Victor warns us.
“Now,” Nora says to the man, “when you get that contact from surveillance downstairs, you better make it believable. And send him out of the room.”
The man’s eyes crease with confusion as he continues to stare out ahead of him rather than at us. His rough-edged jaw and disheveled dark hair moves side to side in a bewildered fashion.
“W-What do you mean?” he asks, now looking vaguely in our direction, but in a casual, unsuspicious manner.
“If you’re smart,” Nora says icily, “you’ll figure it out. If not, you’ll be dead in under thirty seconds.”
Suddenly his eyes shift from Nora’s as if his concentration on her has just been broken. Instinctively he goes to raise his fingers to his earpiece, but stops just short when from the corner of his eye he notices Nora’s finger moving in a threatening manner against the trigger: Don’t do anything stupid, it says. I’ll kill you on the spot.
Another knot moves down the man’s throat.
Very slowly he presses his fingers against the earpiece.
Then he smiles and looks upward at the camera positioned near the ceiling.
“They’re probably giving each other blowjobs in the stairwell,” he tells the man in the surveillance room; a tiny speaker is affixed to the front of his black tie. “Vance and me have had a bet goin’ on for a while now: how many men on floor ten can Carmen convert—looks like I’m gonna win.” He nods, looking up at the camera and then glances in our direction to indicate the office just beyond us. “Yeah, Vance is in the office talking to that girl again—I know, I know, I’ve told him about that shit, but seems the teenagers aren’t the only part of the population who can’t seem to unplug. Ha! Ha!” He throws his head back with laughter (I roll my eyes). “Yeah no shit.” The man glances at us briefly; we glare back at him coldly. Hurry it up, our faces, and the barrel of Nora’s gun tells him.
The man clears his throat and looks back up at the camera.
“Hey, since I’m the only one on guard on my floor right now,” he says, “would you mind bringing up something from vending?” He pauses, listening to the other man’s response. “Hey man don’t worry about it; shit’s been quiet as hell in this place for months. Pinceri should pay us more just to stay awake.” He laughs to something the man says into his earpiece. Then he nods. “Yeah, anything’ll do. I’m starving. Thanks.”
A few quiet and intense seconds pass where no one says anything. The man continues to act casual even though from this angle he looks on the verge of pissing himself.
“He’s leaving the surveillance room,” Victor says into our earpieces.
With that, Nora immediately steps from the corner with her gun trained on the man. A second later another bullet zips through the air and the man falls to the floor, dead.
“He’s getting into the north elevator,” Victor tells us as we’re dragging the man—me with his feet, Nora with his arms—into the office with the other dead man.
After hiding the body, Nora and I rush down the hall toward the north elevator and we stand in front of the silver sliding doors, watching the floor numbers light up above it as the elevator makes its way up slowly. Clock is ticking. Time is seeping through our fingers like water.
Floor six.