The Biggest Cat

It always made things easier if the building was old, a heap of concrete and grimed glass that had little in the way of physical locks and nothing at all when it came to more sophisticated security systems that cost real money and made a real difference. This was a prime example of the type, an office block that had somehow managed to survive the turn of the century and now seemed to be waiting for demolition, living on borrowed time. Breaking and entering in this case would be done more for the need of secrecy when simply walking in through the front door would have been no problem at all.

Melissa never failed to be amused when she heard the supposed description of her job in the words of another person. Inevitably they imagined her tapping away at an archaic word processor, delving into filing cabinets full of dusty old records or doggedly scribbling shorthand into a paper notepad. To them an investigative journalist was no different from the stereotype that existed in the mind of the average person to describe any common hack that churned out newsprint for the gutter press on a daily basis.

They were so far off the mark that she often wondered what such people would have said in response to seeing her scale the treacherous fire escape to reach the roof of the building. Did they imagine a conventional reporter popping the lock on the tiny hut that housed the winch for the internal lift with a pouch of professional picks and slip inside? There was no way to hold a pencil and pad as you gripped the lift cable between hands clad in gloves designed to defeat the friction generated as you slid down to the car below.

If you made a living by chasing the stories that Melissa had made her concern, such skills were not simply useful, they were a necessity.

She yanked the trapdoor in the roof of the lift car open and dropped inside without a moment of hesitation. The lights inside were out, but she was used to operating in the dark and she found the panel of buttons to direct the lift to a specific floor a moment later. She counted the buttons until she found the one she wanted and soon the lift was in motion, grinding down the shaft.

Melissa used the time it took to reach her chosen floor to deliberately slow her breathing and take stock. She was more than equal to the task that she had set herself, physically solid and diligently fit as well as young and reckless enough to ignore the inherent danger of the situation. Her thick brown hair was pinned to the back of her head and she had made no attempt to cover her hazel eyes or the pale freckles that marked her cheeks. In her experience it was enough to be wearing grey jeans and a black jacket when running around on this kind of a job. Covering your head with anything intended to conceal your identity was more likely to get you noticed than going without.

She was always careful when it came to the risks she took in pursuit of a lead, but even she had to admit that tonight she was taking far more of a chance than she was used to. Entering a building that she had no time to familiarise herself with, agreeing to meet with an unknown informant and all to receive a piece of information that she had not been able to verify.

But if the pieces fell into place and this was the one that, as she suspected, could complete the puzzle then it would all be worth the gamble. With this one snippet of vital information, Melissa would be so much closer to finally bringing Thomas Rubin's world crashing down around him.

As the lift came to a lurching halt and the doors trundled open, she took a deep breath and moved warily out into the gloom of the corridor and towards the room where she had been told the contact was waiting.

To the world at large, Thomas Rubin was no more than a harmless eccentric who dabbled in one interest after another and was never harmed by the inevitable failure of his ventures due to the fact that he was a member of the independently wealthy upper class. It had even been suggested that if there were ever a real man who could be compared to the fictional Bruce Wayne, it would have been Rubin himself.

The argument ran that were the character real, Bruce Wayne could never have pulled off the feat of living the life of his vigilante alter ego and would instead have settled down to become something like the charming Rubin. The witty soul who had thought the idea up at a cocktail party had been trying to discover an angle from which he could poke fun at the man who had the money and the good looks by suggesting that he was far too simple to hide a secret identity beneath his amiable charm and easy smile.

It was a stark irony that he was totally and utterly wrong.

Thomas Rubin may have been born into money, but he had also been born into a restless need to control his own fate that threatened to spill over into madness. Possessed of a fevered intellect, he had spent his youth watching father descend into helpless idiocy and dependence as a degenerative condition slowly destroyed his mind and rendered him a vegetable. The memory haunted him endlessly and the knowledge that the sickness was genetic and thus something that he may have inherited alongside his wealth drove him to save himself from the same fate.

Rubin had devoted the largest part of his fortunes to curing himself, employing the very best in the relevant fields of medicine to create a solution. For him there had been no object in terms of cost or morality and the cure he sought, while it remained a mystery to all but the man himself, came at a cost to both Rubin and those who created it.

There was no doubt that the treatment he received was a success, but the side effects of the supposed cure manifested in a violent exaggeration of his already unstable mind. Driven by the paranoid fear that the transgressions he had made in order to secure his cure would result in his ultimate downfall, he disposed of the men who had created it for him in order to silence them.

By now so steeped in the criminal underworld where he had been forced to search for his unethical needs, Rubin plunged deeper into the mire of crime rather than try to escape from its clutches. He was already incriminated and deeply in debt to the world of organised crime and a man so desperate to retain control and unhinged by his massive dosages of unstable chemicals was not about to become the stooge of any figure in the criminal fraternity.

After a bloody rise to power, Rubin now lead a double life that was a mocking parody of the comicbook character to which he had been compared. By day he was a harmless oddball, but by night he was a powerful and influential figure in the underworld who had so far escaped the notice of the law.

But he had not escaped the notice of Melissa Rose, not after he had deprived her of her own mother in the massacre of those who had laboured to create the very chemical cocktail that saved his life. She had followed his careful trail for years now and she had never been closer to bringing him down than she was that very night.

Melissa sensed something was very wrong almost the moment she opened the door and stepped inside. The room was in total darkness, but that was no surprise due to the clandestine nature of the meeting. It was the fact that though she could sense that she was not alone, the contact who must have been in the room and waiting for her with some trepidation, made no effort to declare their presence as she stood there in the darkness.

She was about to speak when there was the sound of a switch being thrown and suddenly the room was bathed in the intense glow of four floodlights, one stood in every corner. The light blinded her and sent her staggering back towards the door with no thought other than to get as far away as fast as possible.

But before she was even able to turn around and make for the corridor, Melissa felt the sudden sensation of something sinking into the flesh in the small of her back. A moment later she was hit by the full charge of a Taser and fell, twitching to the floor.

Helpless and racked with pain, she could offer no resistance as a bag was pulled over her head and painful restraints shackled her at the wrists and ankles.

Despite the fact that she was unable to offer any resistance, her unseen assailants were taking no chances and the last thing that Melissa felt was a sharp blow to the back of the neck before she slipped into unconsciousness.

Thomas Rubin nodded his thanks to the little people who had shown him to his limousine and opened the door while he slipped inside. He failed to make eye contact with any of them out of habit and it would have been impossible for him to have picked them out of a line up. There were just so many people who simply did not matter a jot in the grand scheme of things that he often wondered if there would really be any consequences if her chose to kill one or two of them on occasion. Done discreetly and out of sight, he suspected that the world would just move on regardless of the fact that it had been deprived of one amongst so many drones.

The interior of the limousine was unlit and the shadows prevented anyone outside from seeing the shape of a human body slumped in the backward facing seats. Rubin paid the figure little attention himself until the door was firmly closed and the car had pulled away from the kerb. But even then it was with an air of leisurely disinterest that he pressed a button to turn on the subtle lighting and finally regarded his companion in the rear of the vehicle.

Melissa Rose sat, unmoving and tightly restrained on the expensive leather seats of the limousine. Her limbs were still bound so that she could not move and as an extra precaution her ankles had been secured to a metal ring that was concealed beneath the carpet that covered the floor of the compartment with a length of rope wound from metal fibres. She was gagged with a rubber bit and her face showed signs of the struggle that the rest of her clothes concealed and suggested that she had not been subdued without considerable effort on her own part.

Rubin looked her up and down, seemingly intrigued by the signs of violence that he saw, as if they interested him as more than simply evidence of a beating. He put down his walking stick and leaned forwards to get a better look at the woman who had been making his business her own for quite a while now.

A good twenty years her senior, Rubin had little interest in her body in a truly physical sense. He was in excellent condition for his age, his tall and rather spare frame probably better kept than many men half his years. The first touches of grey were remarkably still only just appearing in his immaculate black hair and he was considered by those who thought him no more than a harmless bachelor to be very handsome. But in truth he had lost interest in the opposite sex a long time ago and his own had never interested him in that manner either.

He was however, confused by the feelings that were being stirred in his gut as he studied Melissa more intently. It was not that he was being filled with a sudden passion for the woman, being captivated by her beauty, the very idea would have amused him no end. To him it seemed that there was something that almost excited him when he considered the lengths to which she had gone to pursue her vendetta. He could imagine this tenacious girl scaling walls and crawling through impossibly small spaces in order to reach her goal.

Rubin unbuttoned her jacket and studied the shape of her chest, cupping the breasts and feeling the muscles of her stomach more like he was testing the ripeness of fruit than being aroused by the contact. Leaving her torso alone, he squeezed her thighs and studied the shape of her legs with no hint of gentleness or concern for the pressure he was exerting on her limbs.

At the sensation of being roughly handled, Melissa stirred slightly and let out a groan of discomfort, shifting and pulling against the restraints that held her.

If Rubin even noticed her begin to come around, he made no move to stop what he was doing and simply continued to put his hands wherever the mood took him. He was far too lost in his own thoughts to care what state his captive might be in and sure enough of her being tied down to worry that she could even attempt to stop him. It was not Melissa Rose's body as it was that fascinated him; it was more what he was intending to do with it that kept him occupied.

Satisfied with his observations, Rubin leaned back and retrieved his walking stick from the seat beside him. He smiled as he cruelly jabbed the tip into Melissa's stomach, the sudden pain from the impact jolting her into a state of agonised awareness.

"Time to wake up," he chided her as he yanked the bit from her mouth, "I don't like to see people wasting my time with pointless theatrics and shows of ridiculous bravado."

Melissa managed to raise her head and look Rubin in the eye, her face a picture of disdain.

"That's good," he nodded, "I'll thank you to look me in the eye when I talk to you."

"People know where I was going last night," Melissa saw no point in beating about the bush. "When I don't turn up as planned they'll call the police," she tried to make her tone as serious as she was able, "then the police will follow the trail I left for them right to you."

"Oh please," Rubin actually laughed, "who do you think set up the trap you walked into just a matter of hours ago?" He shook his head. "I seem to recall that one of the conditions of the meeting was that you tell no one a thing about it. Now a smart person would have agreed and told someone anyway, but not a person who is as hell bent on their goal as you. I staked a lot on the fact that you have been like an animal on the scent for so long that the glimpse of your prey would simply be too much for you, that it would defeat your common sense and make you take a risk. And it seems that I was right, as here you are," he gestured to her with his walking stick before holding a hand to his ear with a mocking expression, "and the sound of the erstwhile police bearing down upon me is oddly still absent."

"Then what are you waiting for?"

"I don't really follow," Rubin laughed again.

"Just finish me off, at least that way I don't have to listen to your voice anymore."

"I suppose that's what you'd expect of me?"

"It's what you did to my Mother, after she worked on your damn cure."

"Hmm," Rubin shook his head, "that was a very long time ago. You should learn to let bygones be bygones or you'll end up losing your whole life to that kind of thing. Take me for example; I've moved on from that whole thing to such a degree that I can't even recall the number of scientists I had to have killed, let alone the names and the faces."

"Shut up," Melissa screamed in rage at his callous recounting of the event. "Shut the hell up!"

"You need to work on your temper as well," he sighed. "Anyway, I'm tired of killing people as a first resort, it's very final. I've been thinking that perhaps it's time I tried to put people to better uses rather than just having them killed. I see so many people in the course of my day who it seems to me could be put to far better uses that they are, mainly because they have been left to their own devices. I think that it would be a very easy thing for me to find more appropriate things for them to be doing and in the long run they'd be happier as well."

Rubin paused as if he wanted to let the brilliance of his patently insane statement sink in.

"But we all have to start somewhere," he nodded at Melissa, "and you have the honour of being the first unhappy soul who I intend to put to better use."

Melissa felt a black pit of dread open in the bottom of her bowels.

"I always wanted a pet as a child, but I could never have one because of the terrible allergies that they set off in me. A shame for me as I would have loved a cat, such graceful and lovely creatures and with such spirit as well." Rubin paused for a moment and Melissa wondered if he was simply lost on an insane train of thought, dreaming of cats he might have owned over the years. "Now you," he snapped back to reality, "you remind me of a cat in many ways. Agile, resourceful and possessed of ferocity that makes you formidable as well as intriguing. I think that you would make the perfect cat, just the pet I have been looking for."

That was it, Melissa thought, the final proof that she was in the clutches of a madman.

"What the hell do you mean?" she shook her head. "I'm not a cat and I'm not about to be any kind of pet to a bastard like you."

"Well of course you're not," Rubin seemed surprised that she was even making such a statement, "not yet anyway. But I have the means to change all that as well as give you a course in what would be expected of an obedient pet. No, I think you'll make a very nice cat when all is said and done, and the obvious bonus for me is that no fur means no irritation for my allergies."

Before Melissa could fully digest his words, Rubin smashed his stick into the side of her head and once more rendered her unconscious.

With that done he turned his head and amused himself for the rest of the journey by watching the course taken by raindrops as they slid down the window of the limousine.

To say that Melissa regained consciousness would not have been strictly true, from the point where she blacked out in the back of the limousine from the impact of Rubin's walking stick; she was kept in a controlled state of sedation by various means. Through a rigidly controlled programme of drugs and hypnosis, her mind never managed to return to full clarity. And when she finally was allowed to regain consciousness for the first time, it would not have been possible to call her Melissa Rose any longer.

As soon as the limousine arrived at its destination, a tall and exceptionally modern building owned entirely by Rubin, it pulled into a subterranean parking garage and came to a gentle halt.

Rubin himself sat quietly and watched as Melissa's inert form was pulled out of the car and dumped into a waiting wheelchair by a pair of silent orderlies. Once their charge was secure, they pushed her across the concrete floor and into a waiting lift.

As the doors slid closed, he smiled at the thought of the changes that would have taken place when he saw her next.

Inside the lift the orderlies chatted to one another in low voices, ignoring the pitiful state of the woman in the wheelchair. They were more than aware of the true nature of the man who employed them and in truth were indebted to him for keeping them hidden from the law themselves. Like the majority of those on Rubin's payroll, they knew very well that the unspoken rule of working for the man was to do as they were told and ask no questions when an explanation was not given.

It was an arrangement that worked well for them. And at the end of the day, what did one beaten up woman matter to either of them? The chances were that they had done worse themselves and neither was about to experience a change of heart and become Melissa's champion. The simple fear of their employer's wrath was enough to keep them in line and doom her to her fate.

The doors of the lift opened and Melissa was wheeled out into a cramped lobby decorated in sterile white. Swinging double doors stood in three of the walls and a small reception desk was manned by a woman who looked suspiciously like a heavyweight boxer in drag and doing a bad impersonation of a nurse.

"This is the special patient," one of the orderlies pointed at Melissa as he spoke to the woman behind the desk.

The woman glanced at Melissa as though she was a sack of rancid meat and pushed a clipboard across the desk without saying a word. Her lack of civility did not seem to bother either of the orderlies and the one who had spoken scrawled in the appropriate place and tossed the clipboard back onto the desk as though trying to outdo the show of rudeness that had gone before.