The League

Chapter 4 - A Maniac And A Brick

The head of Alastair Technologies stared out the window of his office. The view of Manhattan, usually bright and distracting, was distorted by the rain and darkened by the cloudy sky. Raymond Alastair sat quietly as loud thunder chased flashing lightning.

His secretary came in and dropped off some mail. Raymond waited until she left before swiveling his chair around to face his desk. The first envelope on the stack was almost blank: his name was in one corner, but there was no sender address, no organization seal, no postal stamp. He didn't think much of it: anonymous complaints from employees weren't all that rare, so he opened the envelope with a sigh, wondering what needed to be taken care of now.

Inside was a single piece of paper, folded in half. He unfolded it and smoothed out the crease and saw that it wasn't a complaint letter, it was a drawing. Of a snake.

He stared at it, confused, and flipped it over. The other side was blank. He looked in the envelope again to see if there was anything else, and he noticed that there was writing on the inside of the envelope.

He carefully ripped it open at the edges and spread it flat on his desk. It was a letter, handwritten in pencil, addressed to him. He read it warily, off-put by the strange presentation, and by the time he was finished, he was shaking.

The Snakes were requesting to meet with him.

Raymond pushed a button on his desk to lower the shades over the windows, plunging the office into complete darkness for a brief moment before the automatic lights turned on. He read the letter again, slowly this time, to make sure he'd read it right.

The Snakes were requesting to meet with him.

Being in a high position like his meant hearing things, so the Snakes weren't entirely unfamiliar. He knew they were cunning enough to evade the League and just about every authority, but that was all he knew. He assumed that they were careful and never made a move without thinking it through first, but contacting him was a move he didn't understand. What did they want? Money, some kind of endorsement? What else could he possibly provide?

This is ridiculous, he thought. It couldn't be the Snakes—why would they send a simple letter, without a threat?

Because their name is threat enough.

Raymond shook his head; he was not going to take part in this. He crumpled up the letter and the snake drawing but paused with his hand above the trash. The bin was empty except for one thing: a little origami snake, sitting there so perfectly that it looked like it was placed there.

He stared at it, heart pounding. He didn't make it. His assistant wouldn't do something like that. No one else had visited his office in three days, and papers don't spontaneously contort themselves into snakes.

He picked it up by the tail and unfolded it to find a plea written in bold marker: DON'T THROW IT AWAY, WE WORKED HARD ON THAT!

His phone buzzed. The word UNKNOWN flashed above an indeed unknown number. He hesitated, but ignorance often had worse consequences than compliance, so he reluctantly checked what he'd been sent.

It was a text message. We're watching you. Look up.

His head snapped up in fear. He thought there would be someone standing in front of him, but he was still alone. He turned in a circle until he figured out what the text was referring to: the security camera in his office. It was in the corner, where it should be, and its red light was blinking, as it should be, but it was aimed at his desk instead of at the door, and he knew they were watching him through it.