Seventy-one: Cold turkey

"You," Mr Raring shook a finger at me, opening the door to the fire escape and nodding for me to go first, "have just solved one of the mysteries that has plagued our office. We thought it was one of the other office girls. Do you know that you almost made the company fold in one night, which had a huge blow on our economy. So many of those men were board members."

"So? They deserved it. They'd all played with my body, thinking I would be too scared to do anything about it. It's just that I wasn't pretty enough for them to actually screw me like they did to the other girls. What they did was bad enough. They each got their own just desserts."

"So," Mr Raring took a deep breath, "you ought to have become a special agent of some sort. When we get out, I might even recommend they recruit you for it. You have the eye and the clear head for it. By the way, you wouldn't happen to know anything about who the seller of secret intelligence that we managed to track to the office was? We couldn't pin down the actual person who did it."

Cocking my head as we went down the stairs, I could feel the muscles up the side of my head tightening up. The withdrawal symptoms were starting to get worse. I swallowed back some sticky saliva that smelt of vomit.

Think, think.

"What was the secret intelligence?"

"They were the identities and names of undercover agents in another country, as well as the plans for the defence grid for the security of the Department of Defence's building."

I paused to catch my breath and sit down on a step. I was sweating worse than a pig and felt so hot that I might burn up. I needed water, but knew we had none. Sweat drops tasted salty and I could smell blood at the back of my throat.

"Jean? Are you feeling all right?"

Another cramp hit me and I tried not to groan. I may have cried out loud and Mr Raring clapped his hand over my mouth. We had no idea who might be in the area, but it hurt so much. I tried to concentrate on Mr Raring's question about the espionage case.

"Is the Department of Defence building a sort of trapezium shape with parallelograms on either side and a moat?" I gasped.

"Ye-es," Mr Raring said, trying to help me down to a landing so I could lie down on my side and curl up into a more comfortable position. "Don't tell me that was you."

I slammed my fist against the concrete several times and not just out of pain. Out of frustration too.

"I always wondered about that," I said through my gritted teeth. "It was too suspicious. Damn it. He really did trick me. I thought he was nice and friendly and I was just trying to help, but he tricked me. I knew it. They were all good for nothing, rotten bastards in there. He set me up to take the fall and nearly made me betray my own country."

"Who was it?"

"Alfred Barrel, the CEO," another wave of cramps hit me and I bit my arm, so that I didn't yell. I spoke fast through my teeth. "I did exactly what he told me, except his plan had a flaw in it, so I altered it. If I hadn't changed his plan, it would have all come back to me, wouldn't it? He said it was all hypothetical and they were just testing the newest computers' abilities, sending through rubbish information. It's a good thing I altered it and then crashed the network and the internet afterward, isn't it? He thought the virus was in the information he gave me. Told me it wasn't my fault. He didn't even do anything when I resigned or complained about the panty lovers. Maggot breathed slime ball. He probably knew all about everything and was using me as a disgruntled employee scapegoat. What an idiot I was. So the information did get through?"

"Not all of it. Some of it was corrupted, but it was enough for our enemies," Mr Raring waved his arm around us at the building we were in. "More information did manage to get through another time though. He must have sent it again later. The Boskies have really been planning this for years, haven't they? I might need you to testify in court one day."

"If I survive," I grunted. My head felt like it was going to explode and black sparkles were gathering at the corners of my vision. Another cramp, worse than all the previous ones and I felt myself slipping away.

"Jean," he patted my cheeks, "stay with me."

"If they come for us and this is a trap," I gasped through my pain, and threw up. I watched my vision turning to black, "you go and hide. Hide behind that corkboard. Don't stay and get caught. They might - kill you."

"Jean," his voice faded into the dark when the pain grew into a mountain too big for me to handle.