Children of the Underground (30 page)

“Other buildings,” Palti said. “I don't know where. No single bit of information is kept exclusively in one building. Everything is duplicated and spread out. I don't know exactly where any of the other buildings are. I know only this one.”

“How long have you been at this one?” I asked.

“Twenty-four years,” Palti answered. He couldn't have been older than his midforties. He must have started there when he was close to my age.

“That's a long time,” I said without thinking.

“Thanks for reminding me,” Palti answered with another wan smile. He took another cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it. “Anyway,” he continued, “the third floor and half of the fourth floor contain proprietary information.” Palti looked at Michael. “Information about our side, information that we've kept and modified and expanded over the years. When someone on our side has children or gets married or gets promoted, if their file is assigned to us, that information goes on either the third or the fourth floor. The files are kept more or less alphabetically.”

“What do you mean
more or less
?” I asked.

“Well, sometimes people change their names,” Palti answered. “We don't reassign them if they do. Instead, each person is assigned a ten-digit number when their file is created. That number never changes.”

“Do people know their own numbers?” Michael asked. I knew he was trying to figure out if his side did it the same way, if he had a number, if your father had a number.

“No,” Palti answered. “We don't even know our own numbers. Our files, the files about me and the people I work with, are kept at other sites. We could probably come pretty close to guessing our numbers based on the files we have, but we don't know.”

“Who knows?” Michael asked.

“The numbers are assigned in one of the three central units. Those units have the keys needed to figure out which information cell has any specific piece of information. Without those units, it's like a library with no card catalogue, the Internet with no search engines. But we're getting off track.”

“So, my son. He's going to be in the
W
s,” I said to Palti, picking the first letter in your father's last name.

Palti shook his head. “No,” he said. “That's not your son's name. Not in the system. Your son's file was created when he was given to his current parents.”

“So where's his information?” I asked. “What's his name?”

Palti told me the name they gave you. It's a name I'll never use and I hope you forget. Some things you're better off not knowing.

“His file is on the third floor?” I asked.

“Yes,” Palti said. “It's on the third floor.” I'd heard enough. I was ready to talk about how we were going to get inside. Michael kept asking questions.

“What's on the fifth floor?” Michael asked.

Palti looked at Michael as if he'd been waiting for Michael to ask him the question. “The fifth floor,” Palti said, “and a growing portion of the fourth floor, has the historical information. The information here is kept chronologically, not alphabetically like the rest of the building.”

“What do you mean, historical information?” Michael said breathlessly.

“It's the information that we've kept about the War, going back hundreds of years, at least the portion of it that's stored in our location. The newer information is stored on the fourth floor. The older information is on the fifth.”

“Have you been up there?” Michael asked, staring at Palti now. “Have you been to the fifth floor? Have you looked at the files?”

“I don't go to the historical information often,” Palti said. “We're not supposed to dig where we're not needed. They call me a Historian. That's the job title they've given me, like they call men like you soldiers. But I'm a file clerk. I don't pretend otherwise.”

“You said you don't go often. That means that sometimes you do go. What have you seen?” I was surprised by Michael's sudden interest. Of course, Michael probably never thought he'd be sitting in front of a strange little man who had the ability to do something Michael could never do. He had the ability to peek behind the curtain.

“Nothing,” Palti said, shaking his head. Michael's shoulders slumped. Palti continued, “I go to the historical records because sometimes current records become historical and need to be filed. You don't know how many times I've been asked to pull a nonproprietary file. They never tell me why. Then, a few weeks later, they ask me to refile it in the historical information section. Or sometimes, out of the blue, I'll be asked to file a file whose last entry was a wedding or the birth of a child in the historical information section. I'll date it and I'll file it. When I started, our historical information section was exclusively on the fifth floor. Every day it grows.”

“So, how do we get inside?” I asked, hoping Michael was ready to move on.

Palti reached into his jacket pocket, the one opposite the one he'd been pulling his cigarettes from. He took out a large key with a square head. He placed it on the table in front of him.

“That's it?” Michael asked.

Palti nodded. “That's a copy of the key to the back door. I'll disable the exterior alarms. I can make it look like a system failure. You'll still have to avoid tripping the interior alarms. I can tell you how to get to the third floor without tripping them. Then there are the guards. They work in shifts. There are gaps in those shifts. No one has ever tried to break into our cell before, so the guards aren't very diligent, but that doesn't mean that this will be easy.”

“You say that no one has ever tried to break into your cell before. What about other cells?” I asked.

“There was a building in San Diego about twelve years ago. Five men attempted a breach. The building was razed, burned to the ground.”

“The men who broke in burned it down?” I asked.

“No,” Palti said. “We burned it down. The information was compromised. We couldn't trust it in that state anymore. We had the redundancy we needed to re-create all the information we lost and the intelligence to change the information we had to.”

“What happened to the five men?” I asked.

“They were still in the building when we lit it on fire,” Palti answered. “I updated two of their files myself. No matter what I do for you,” Palti said, staring straight at me, “the odds of you making it out of the building with the information you want and without bloodshed is almost zero. Someone's blood will be spilled. If you're lucky, you'll be the one who gets to decide whose.”

“Then why don't you just get the information and give it to us?” Michael asked.

“If you want to act on the information,” Palti answered, “you need to steal it, or they'll figure out that there's a spy. When are you planning on breaking in?”

“As soon as possible,” I answered, not wanting to waste another moment. He told us that he needed two days to figure out the best way to disable the exterior alarm. He also advised us to attempt the break-in at night. It would be simpler. The streets would be empty. There would be fewer guards and they would be tired. Then Palti diagrammed the guard schedule, pointing out the gaps. I studied the paper. Michael studied Palti's face.

When Palti was done telling us everything he knew about the guard's movements, Michael ask him one final question: “Why should we trust you?”

“I'm a liar, a thief, and a traitor,” Palti answered him, “but some people have found me useful. The call is yours to make.”

We sat with Palti in the cold wind beside the gray ocean for another two hours, going over details of the building and descriptions of the employees who would be working there at night. We had to trust him. We had no choice. Michael and I have spent nearly every waking moment since we met with Palti going over the plan and scoping out the building. We make our move tomorrow night. We've practiced our parts, rehearsed them like dancers practicing for opening night. It's going to work, Christopher. It has to. Sitting in a building only a few blocks from where I am right now is a file with a piece of paper that is going to lead me to you. Iron doors and walls of fire couldn't stop me now.

Forty-four

I'm staring out the window of a train, heading west. I'm coming for you, Christopher. I'm alone now, but I'm coming.

You need to know what happened that night. You need to know what Michael did for you. We waited until a little after one in the morning before heading to the intelligence cell. We knew that the plan, even if successful, could take hours. Palti told us that the night shifts start at ten o'clock. By the time we got inside, the security team would have already been on duty for almost four hours. They'd be tired and bored. Michael doubted it at first. These people were guarding the most important weapon either side had: information.

Palti questioned Michael. “You are a soldier, correct?” Michael nodded. “Do you know why you were selected to be a soldier?” Michael shrugged, unwilling to tell this spy that he believed that he was selected to be a soldier because someone saw something special in him. “You were selected because they knew that they could train you. You were born to follow. Even if you lead, you lead people to follow the orders of others. That's why all of you are chosen. The people working in these intelligence cells—we weren't selected to be soldiers. We were selected to be glorified security guards and file clerks—even if they call us Facility Patrolmen and Historians. Most of us have worked at this site for more than ten years and nothing has ever happened. Can you imagine what it would be like to work at a job where nothing happens for ten years? If you are going to have any success, it's because my colleagues think of you as the bogeyman, and everyone knows that the bogeyman doesn't exist.”

The street behind the intelligence cell was dark and skinny, not much more than an alleyway. The buildings on the dark, skinny street had high walls with large doors that closed up like giant drawbridges. They were the buildings' back doors, used mostly for deliveries. At one in the morning, the street had no more motion than a painting. Even so, Michael and I hid in the shadows near the buildings. We had spent more than one night watching this street and never saw another person on it. The street had nothing to offer—no bars, no restaurants, no music, no prostitutes, no drug dealers. Only locked doors.

It was twenty after one when we reached the building. I had the key in my pocket. I had my backpack on my back. Inside the backpack I had my gun, a change of clothes, the wig, a roll of duct tape, some charcoal we had purchased from an art store, a small tool kit we had purchased from a hardware store, and my lucky, unopened pack of cigarettes. I had my knife strapped to the outside of my thigh with a Velcro strap. I didn't need to hide the knife for this job. To be seen was to be caught. To be caught was to fight. Michael had two knives and two guns. I asked him why he needed two guns. “One to aim,” he said, “and one to create cover.”

We stood outside the back door of the building. I took the charcoal out of my backpack. Michael nodded. I rubbed a thick layer of charcoal on my fingers. Michael leaned toward me. I took my darkened fingers and reached out, touching his face. I rubbed the charcoal into his cheeks, his forehead, and his chin. Streaks of gray ran across his pale face. I wasn't trying to cover his whole face. I was simply helping him to blend in with the shadows. When I was done, I handed Michael the charcoal and he did the same to me. I closed my eyes as he rubbed his fingers over my cheeks, down the bridge of my nose, and around my eyes. When he was done, I took the key out of my pocket. We stepped closer to the building. According to Palti, only six people would be working in the building at this time of night. Michael and I had surveyed the comings and goings the previous night to confirm this. Everything Palti had said to us about the building had checked out. The six employees included five Facility Patrolmen, one guarding each floor, and one Historian. It was a requirement to have at least one Historian on site at all times in case of emergencies. When I asked Palti how often emergencies pop up in the middle of the night, he smirked and said, “You'd be surprised.” During the day, anywhere between four and eight Historians would be there. One or two of them would be stationed on each floor, and each Historian was supposed to stay in the archives on the floor he was assigned to that day. During the day, their key cards wouldn't even get them into the archives on other floors. The guards' key cards never gave them access to the archives. They spent years doing nothing but patrolling the hallways and corridors linking the archives. At night, when only one Historian was on duty, that Historian could go anywhere. His key unlocked every door.

The back door was large and thick. It had no handle, being fashioned primarily to be opened from the inside. It was painted black like the walls around it, so it wasn't easy to find. The night guard on the first floor was stationed at the front of the building. He usually stayed at his station, with no reason to walk the halls. Nothing on the first floor had any value. Besides, if anyone broke in through the back, the alarm would go off—the alarm that Palti was supposed to have already disconnected for us. After feeling my way through the darkness, I found the keyhole. I took the key out of my pocket, aligned it with the keyhole, and pushed. The key stopped when it had gotten only about halfway into the lock. I cursed Palti. He'd failed us already. Michael glared at me. His face told me that he had never trusted Palti to begin with. But it was an old lock. I jiggled the key. It moved. The key slid in the rest of the way.

Palti had given us the right key. We still needed him to have disabled the alarm for the plan to work, though. I twisted my wrist. The key turned in the lock. “Gentle,” Michael whispered. Without a handle, I had to pull the key toward me while it was still in the lock to open the door. I held my breath, waiting for the unholy blaring of an alarm. Palti assured us we'd hear it if it went off. “The whole neighborhood will hear it,” he said. It was a regular alarm, set up for vagrants and common thieves. The more sophisticated alarms were farther inside. The door creaked slightly as I pulled it open and then—silence. He may have been a liar, a thief, and a traitor, but Palti got us into the building.

We stepped inside. No lights were on in the back half of the building. The only light was the gray light leaking in from the front where the guard was stationed. Palti had drawn us a map of each of the five floors of the building. Michael and I had studied them, memorizing them so that we could move effortlessly through the darkness. Once we had committed the maps to memory, we shredded them. The first floor was little more than a long, snaking hallway. At different points in the hallway, doors on either side opened into large storage rooms. These doors were unlocked. There was no need to lock them. If thieves got that far, the storage rooms showed the thieves that there was nothing to steal here but old office furniture. Immediately in front of us, on the left side of the hallway, was the freight elevator. According to Palti, no one ever used the freight elevator. He wasn't even sure if it worked. Plus, it had its own separate locks and no one had a key. Michael carefully closed the back door behind us. The hall became even darker. We stood in silence, waiting for our eyes to adjust.

Once we could see well enough, we started walking silently down the hallway. The hallway ran all the way from the back to the front of the building, but there was a door halfway through the hallway, dividing the building in two. We were in the back half. The guard was in the front. Still, we knew we couldn't take any chances. The door dividing the hallway in two was adjacent to the door to the staircase. The passenger elevator was on the guard's side of the door. The stairs were on our side. That was okay. We weren't going to use the elevator anyway. We just had to be careful not to make any noises that the guard might hear through the hallway door and, if we did, we had to be ready to remedy the situation quickly. When we got to the door to the staircase, I took the gun out of my backpack and held it at shoulder height—the way I'd been taught—scanning the darkness for danger, ready to aim and shoot. Michael dropped to his knees in front of the door to the staircase, looking at the lock. I reached into my backpack and took out the tiny tool kit and handed it to Michael. After Palti described it to him, Michael was sure that he could pick the lock. I never doubted that picking locks was one of his skills. Picking the lock was only one of the hurdles, though. The door was also equipped with an alarm that was set to go off as soon as the door was opened. Michael couldn't disable the alarm from this side of the door. That's where the elevators came into play.

The elevators in the building were old and, according to Palti, painfully slow. The employees didn't trust them, even in the daytime. No one wanted to get trapped in one of the rickety elevators in the middle of the night. Besides, waiting for and riding the elevator from one floor to the next could take up to five minutes, when it would take only thirty seconds to take the stairs. The guards had hourly shift changes. Each hour on the hour, they would change floors. It was supposed to keep them fresh and alert, never letting anyone get too comfortable or too bored. It was also a check against napping. Each hour, the person on the fifth floor would go down to relieve the person on the fourth floor, who would go down to relieve the person on the third floor, and so on until the person on the first floor was relieved and sent all the way up to guard the fifth floor. The guards weren't supposed to take the stairs because the alarm on the stairs was supposed to be armed at all times. The guards were supposed to take the elevators. The guard whose shift changed from the first floor to the fifth floor almost always did. Everyone else weighed the risk of getting in trouble for the seemingly minor infraction of taking the stairs against waiting for an old, slow elevator that they didn't trust anyway. So they frequently bent the rules and took the stairs. Palti had worked plenty of night shifts. He'd seen them all do it. They'd disable the alarm, walk down a flight of stairs, leave the stairwell, and then reactivate the alarm. The stairway alarm was a single-alarm system, triggered by any of the doors leading to the stairwell from one of the five floors. When the alarm was disabled, anyone could open any door without fear of the alarm going off. So the plan was to listen to the stairwell. Listen for the rule breakers. We'd open doors only when someone else was in the stairwell, and even then only when we knew that they were far away.

“Five guards? That doesn't sound like enough,” Michael had said to Palti as we went over the plan again. Michael believed he could take out all five guards on his own. He'd faced down as many as three professional killers at once, and Palti had described these guards as little more than card punchers.

“Five armed Facility Patrolmen guarding a building that no one is supposed to know exists, a building that hasn't had one attempted break-in for the twenty-plus years it's been in use.” Palti looked up at Michael. “But yes, there are only five guards at night. But each of those five has a gun and, even more dangerous than that, each carries with them a small yellow box with a red button on it. The button has a clear plastic cover that needs to be flipped up for the button to be pushed. But if someone pushes that button”—Palti shook his head—“hell will rain down on that building. If one of those buttons is pushed, you've got ten, fifteen minutes at most before the building is surrounded.”

Kneeling in the darkness, Michael took two small metal tools out of his tool kit. They looked almost like dentists' picks. I stood over him, gun at the ready, listening for any sound, looking for any movement. No one was going to press that button on my watch.

Michael inserted the end of both tools into the lock on the stairwell door and twisted them. Michael held his ear close to the door. He worked the tools back and forth for what felt like two or three minutes. Then he replaced one of the tools with a different one from his kit. He did the same thing with those two for another minute or two. Then he stopped. I hadn't heard anything. Michael looked up at me, smiling. “I got it,” he whispered, holding the picks in place. “It's an auto lock, though. As soon as I take out the picks, it will lock again.”

“Don't open the door yet,” I whispered back to him, “not until we know that the alarm's been disabled.” Michael nodded. We didn't have to worry about the guard on the second floor taking the stairs, not yet. The guard on the fifth floor would move first. Without taking his tools from the lock, Michael placed his ear against the door and listened. I checked my watch. It was two minutes before two a.m. Our timing was close to perfect.

We waited, as still as stone. Michael was frozen with his ear against the door and his hands holding his tools in position in the lock. I stood over him, trying not to get distracted by the silence, trying to concentrate on making sure that we weren't discovered. The best-case scenario was that the guard on the fifth floor would use the stairs and that Michael would hear him. If Michael didn't hear him, then the guard on the fourth floor moving to the third floor would do. We only wanted to make it to the second floor on this shot. That was the plan.

I tried watching the darkness for anything suspicious, but I couldn't help but watch Michael's face too. One minute after two a.m., Michael's eyes lit up, and then he closed them tightly. “What is it?” I asked.

“Shhh!” he said without moving his hands from the lock. “I don't know. I don't know if I heard anything.”

“We have to be sure,” I whispered.

“I know,” Michael said, pushing his ear harder against the door, closing his eyes to try to shun all his other senses. His hands started to move. “It's them,” he said in a rushed, breathless voice. “They're on the stairs.”

“You're sure?” I asked.

He nodded. “Pull the door,” he ordered. “Quick.” I reached forward and grabbed the metal handle on the door. I pulled and listened. At first there was no sound—no alarm, no nothing. Then, out of that nothingness, I heard footsteps. I couldn't tell how high above us the footsteps were. All I could tell was that they were coming down the stairs, inevitably getting closer to us. “Let's go,” Michael said.