The hallway contracted towards the end like the tip of a duck’s tail.
Something was familiar about the plopping sounds from the boy’s wet boots as he walked across this hard linoleum floor. Yet, this hallway was not familiar. This building was not familiar. The grey, nondescript office complex looked like any other building in this part of the City. Its tenants, a mix of professional services, small business contractors, and the occasional sales office, had very little interest in their neighbors’ dealings. The soundproof walls all but ensured complete isolation from each of the other suites.
The boy at last reached the last door of the hallway before the fire exit, a stark grey metal door with nothing on it but a chrome handle and a numeric keypad.
So, this was where he worked.
The boy punched in the 8-digit code as instructed in the letter from the man he had never known. He rotated the handle downwards, counter-clockwise, until it clicked in place. The clicking briefly startled the boy, but no one else was around to hear it, and certainly not at this hour. The door gave way with a gentle shove, revealing a dark reception area containing a metal desk paired with a wooden coat rack. There was no chair behind the reception desk, indicating that this room had never been used for that purpose. The boy reached for the light switch, turning on the overhead florescent lighting. A security camera lurked in the far corner of the ceiling behind one of those black plastic globes that you might find in a department store.
The boy kept his coat on.
The room’s opposite side connected to a passage to an inner room. Inside, green points of light flickered. A router. Network traffic was still flowing from somewhere.
He must not have turned off everything before they got to him.
The boy dried his boots off on the mat and entered the vast inner room. The room smelled like the inside of a dusty library, lit by floor lamps with task lighting on the desk surfaces that gave everything a greenish tinge. A large carved mahogany desk stood in its center with papers strewn about on top. The boy could now see the blinking router stacked on top of a rack of black server machines, humming along. Flanking the massive desk on one side, a drafter’s workbench with overlaid sketches on several sheets of plotter paper. On the other side, a computer terminal with a tube monitor glowed. As the boy wandered in, he was careful not to trip over the black cable that connected the terminal on the desk to the router.
The only other sound in the room was a faint dripping from a faucet in the back, where there was a kitchenette with a sink. A pot of stale black coffee sat in a coffee machine. Along the side of the room were two long aisles of filing cabinets that reached up to the ceiling.
The boy stood on his tiptoes to see the front of the first aisle—and saw that it was simply labeled with the boy’s own name: Mason.