Upstairs at her desk Mia watched her coworkers pack their belongings into boxes and wondered which of them would opt to sign the contract. To pay off debts. To put the kids through college. To protect their families.
That afternoon Gloria was missing from the team meeting. There was no minder from Kansas Consulting. Just the remaining members of the business partner team, looking lost and confused. Afterwards, Mia caught Harv outside in the hall and asked him what happened to Gloria.
“I don’t know and I’m not asking,” he said. “Frankly, I don’t care. It’s not like she’s been adding any value to the conversation, has she?”
*****
The building seemed much emptier the following week. The terminated employees were all gone, and with them any semblance of life within the company. At the same time, the Kansas Consultants had disappeared, along with their machinery. Employees walked as if on crystal, afraid to talk, afraid to do anything that might break some invisible truce and cause the whole world to implode. Mia passed Alpha one day in the hall and by the way Alpha studiously avoided looking at her she knew what Beta’s decision had been.
*****
The first of the new heads appeared on a Wednesday. By Friday Mia spotted several of her former coworkers along with others she thought she recognized from the lunchroom and elsewhere. These heads, though, seemed different.
They blinked, for one thing.
They seemed attentive. Their eyes sometimes stared into space like the first group but at others they followed movement. Whether or not they were actually thinking or just reacting like plants to light was anybody’s guess. Mia hoped with all her soul it was the latter.
Especially when she saw Eun-hee’s head being rolled down the corridor, swaying upside-down in her tank. Mia couldn’t help herself; she stepped in front of the rig and grabbed hold of it, preventing the Kansas Consultant from moving forward.
“Back off. Now.”
She ignored him, looking straight into Eun-hee’s eyes. Hair floated like a halo around her head in the milky liquid. “Eun-hee, it’s me.”
“I said back off or else,” the man said.
“Eun-hee, do you recognize me?”
Inside the tank, the eyes moved. They locked on Mia and blinked once. Then the face contorted.
At the same time the Kansas Consultant pulled the scanner from inside his jacket. Seeing him raise the unit, Mia turned and hurried down the hallway. Upstairs in the bathroom she burst into the last stall and curled up on the seat, sobbing.
*****
That night she could think of nothing but Eun-hee’s baby. What had they done with the child? It had been nearly nine months since Eun-hee became pregnant. Despite herself, Mia imagined a baby’s head dangling upside down in a tank. She shook off the image and tried to come up with some course of action.
The police, Eun-hee had pointed out, were a dead end. The local police anyway. What about the feds? Looking it up online, she found an 800 listing for anonymous crime tips. For a full hour she debated whether or not to call, then steeled herself and dialed the phone.
A recording answered. Mia listened impatiently, then turned pale and hung up when it said to dial 9 if calling about Project Hydra.
They knew about it already. And they were doing nothing.
*****
Where was Eun-hee’s baby? Mia couldn’t forget the look in Eun-hee’s eyes. Eun-hee was alive, all right. She was cognizant. She remembered. She knew what they had done to her. And to her baby. Mia pictured the face contorting, the effort of it, the pain. Like she was struggling to say something, to put words together, to make her mouth work in a manner now foreign to it.
Mia pictured Eun-hee struggling to speak. She ran the image over and over again in her head, torturing herself until she was sure she knew what Eun-hee had been trying to say.
Typhon.
The name on the black SUV. Typhon International. With sudden, absolute certainty, Mia realized they were the ones who took Eun-hee that night. They were behind all this. They had Eun-hee’s baby.
Booting up her laptop she discovered Typhon International had a spartan website offering no concrete information, just a few paragraphs of vague text, a couple of pictures of a nondescript building and the words “Efficiency Matters.” Searching farther she located a listing for the company in the town of Belladonna, New Jersey. Mia seemed to remember seeing “New Jersey” underneath the name on the van, but couldn’t be sure.
The next day she called in sick to work, telling Harv that yes, she knew it would be counted as a vacation day. Then she rented a car and drove to Belladonna, NJ.
*****
Typhon International took up a large plot of dead earth on the south edge of town, inside a sprawling industrial park reeking of oil fumes and sawdust. Wide, featureless buildings dotted the treeless landscape beside vast parking lots, many of them empty or nearly so.
The Typhon building was fairly modern in construction, a brick and concrete building with no windows. Parking some distance away, near a silent factory with a parking lot of cracked pavement, Mia watched for hours, nursing a thermos of hot coffee. A few people left through the front office that jutted out from the center right of the Typhon building and a few more arrived but there was no exodus, no shift end as the afternoon wore on.
Eventually, around six-thirty, well past dusk, a tractor-trailer pulled into the lot in a wide sweep and backed into the loading bays. As Mia watched, one rolling steel door opened and the truck slid into it, tight as a bullet in a chamber. The driver and another man got out of the cab and headed inside the building through the front office.
Half an hour later, when there had been no further movement, Mia made up her mind and started up her car, driving it into the Typhon parking lot. She parked in the center of the lot and shut off the dome light, leaving the driver’s door ajar as she got out.
***
Tell us: What do you think of Mia, going to the Typhon building all by herself?