Children of the Underground (32 page)

“Your mouth,” I said to the man.

“Huh?” the man looked at me as if he'd forgotten that I was there.

“Close your mouth,” I ordered him. Without asking any more questions, he closed his mouth and I wrapped tape twice around his head, covering his closed lips.

“Done?” Michael asked when I cut the last piece of tape.

“Done,” I answered. I looked down at my handiwork. All that the guard could move was his eyes, which darted back and forth between me and Michael. Michael reached down and grabbed the man by the collar. Michael dragged him into the bathroom, pulling him into the stall farthest from the door. When Michael got back from the bathroom, he holstered his knife. “We need to disable the stairwell alarm,” he said.

“And then the fifth floor,” I said.

“And then the fifth floor,” Michael echoed. We made our way to the box next to the stairwell door. Michael took his knife back out and popped open the box. A time existed when disabling the alarm would have been difficult. When it was originally installed, the control box contained numerous trip lines so that even the slightest mistake would have triggered the alarm. It would have taken hours to disarm the alarm if the trip lines were still in place. Lucky for us, the guards had more than hours. They'd had days, weeks, even years. They had already done the hard work for us, jerry-rigging the alarm so that they could easily disarm it before entering the stairwell. They had set up a system of switches that could be flipped on or off from any floor. Palti showed us how we could use their handiwork to easily pull the whole thing apart. Michael peered inside the box. I looked over his shoulder. I could see the two wires connected at the top. Michael reached out, still careful not to touch any other part of the box. He grabbed the wires and twisted their connector counterclockwise. The connector came off after only three turns. Michael pulled the wires apart. Everything was quiet. We wouldn't have to worry about the door alarms anymore. Michael, still holding the separated wires in his hand, looked at me and smiled. “You ready?” he asked.

“Let's go,” I said, walking past him to the door. I stopped at the door for a second, took a deep breath, and pulled open the door. It swung easily. The stairwell was silent. The alarm was dead. Michael followed me into the stairwell. We stood together in the darkness for a minute, letting our eyes readjust. Then we started up the stairs in unison.

We ran past the door to the third floor. I could feel it pulling me toward it like a magnet. The answer to everything that mattered in my life was on that floor, but we couldn't get it without getting the key first. We kept running. We ran past the fourth floor and kept running. I figured that we had only forty minutes before the next shift change. In forty minutes we had to get to the fifth floor, disable the guard, get the Historian's key, get back to the third floor, disable the guard on the third floor, find the information, and escape. It wasn't a lot of time. It was going to be close. I put my head down and ran faster, taking the dark steps two at a time, jumping ahead of Michael and his lame leg.

I made it up to the door leading to the fifth floor and waited for Michael to catch up. I counted in my head, once second, two seconds, three seconds
.
He was standing next to me in three seconds. Even so, it felt like wasted time. I gave Michael a quick look to make sure he was ready and not too winded. He nodded to me before we jumped through the door, much like we had done the last time.
Everything you do is practice for the next thing you do
. Like before, the hallway in front of us was empty. We didn't have to guess at the guard's location this time. We heard someone laughing at the other end of the hallway, around the corner from us, in front of the archives. We moved toward the sound, each of us holding our weapons in front of us, trying not to make any noise. We didn't have time to think about a plan. We knew what we had to do. Move more quickly than the guard does. Don't hesitate. Don't doubt. Just go.

We rounded the corner, still in unison. The moment we rounded the corner, I keyed in on the guard. He didn't suspect anything. He was facing away from us, looking into the archives, breaking protocol by talking on his cell phone. We didn't worry about what he was looking at. Despite his leg, Michael moved instinctively. He knew that the guard was in a vulnerable position. He got to the guard before the guard had a chance to turn around. He beat me there by two steps. By the time I reached the guard, Michael was already clutching the guard's left wrist, twisting it. If the guard had been smart, if he had been properly trained, he would have reached for his gun with his free hand. Instead, he turned and tried throwing a punch. As the guard swung, Michael grabbed the guard's right wrist. Michael now had both of the man's wrists in his grasp. Michael was about to either kick or knee the man to try to get him to the ground. That wasn't necessary. Instead I walked up to the man and placed the nozzle of my gun against his temple. “Don't move,” I said in a voice I hoped would keep the guard calm. The guard turned his eyes toward me without moving his head.

Michael took the man's cell phone. He hung up the phone and threw it across the room. Then Michael reached out and unbuckled the guard's belt, taking the guard's gun and the button all at once. Michael stepped away from the guard and dropped the guard's belt behind him. I took two steps backward as well, trying to move to a safe distance from the guard. A bullet to the head would be as effective from two feet as zero. The guard stayed still, not taking any chances with his own life.

“What do you want?” the guard asked Michael.

“Him,” Michael said, pointing into the archives. I hadn't even looked toward the archives. The walls separating the hallway from the archives were glass. We could see into the archives. We could see shelf after shelf full of bound papers sitting on top of dozens, if not hundreds, of file cabinets. I looked through the glass. Standing no more than ten feet away from us behind the glass was a short man with gray hair and a pair of small, round eyeglasses. He wasn't moving. He was staring at us, a look of shock and fear on his face. We didn't worry about sneaking up on the Historian. The Historians weren't armed. They didn't carry buttons. He had no way to sound the alarm. The only things we had to fear from the Historian were stubbornness and loyalty.

“The Historian?” the guard asked, dumbfounded. Michael nodded. “I don't have a key to get inside. He's the only one with a key.”

“Does he like you?” Michael asked the guard. His tone of voice scared even me.

The guard's confusion was growing now, being fed by his fear, like oxygen feeding a fire. “We don't talk. I don't know,” the guard stammered. Michael thought for a second. He was trying to decide what card to play next. Michael pulled out his gun. He aimed it at the guard. Now both of us were pointing our guns at him.

“Get on your knees,” Michael ordered the guard. I could feel my stomach churn, unsure of how far Michael would be willing to take this charade. The guard hesitated for a second. Then he got on his knees. “Face the glass,” Michael ordered him. The guard moved so that he was facing the glass, facing the still-frozen Historian. “The fucker puts names on papers and files them in columns for the living and the dead. He studies this history but he doesn't see the blood,” Michael muttered to himself, just loud enough for the guard to hear. I could see the words register in the guard's face. That was Michael's goal. We didn't merely need the guard to be afraid. We needed him to sell his fear. Ultimately, the guard was irrelevant, a means to an end. We needed to get to the Historian.

Michael turned and looked through the glass directly at the Historian. He held his gun out to his side, pointing it at the guard's temple. “Come out,” Michael yelled to the Historian. “Come out and nobody gets hurt.” The Historian's hands were shaking. He looked frail and old. I wondered if he and Palti were friends. They must have worked together. The Historian looked down at the guard as Michael spoke, leaving no doubt that he could hear Michael through the glass and understood what was happening.

The Historian didn't reply. He barely moved. His eyes drifted from the guard, over to me, and back to Michael. The charcoal smeared on Michael's cheeks made him look menacing and more than a little crazy. The Historian shook his head slowly from side to side. Michael yelled again. “If you come out, we won't hurt you but if you don't come out, we will kill him.” Michael pushed the nozzle of his gun into the guard's forehead. “Ask him for help,” Michael whispered to the guard.

The guard stared at the glass in front of him. “Please, Seymour,” the guard said as loudly as he could muster.

“Come on, Seymour,” Michael echoed. “Don't let this man die for no reason.”

Seymour stepped closer to the glass. He put one hand on the glass in front of him and stared down at the guard. “What happens if I come out?” he asked. The words were barely audible through the glass.

“We just want your key,” I said, stepping forward between the kneeling guard and the glass. “We need it. We don't want to hurt anyone.” I felt the mistake in my words as soon as I spoke them. I didn't need to see the pained look on Michael's face, like someone punched him in the gut, to know it was a mistake. We needed the Historian to be afraid of us. If he wasn't afraid, he wasn't going to open the door. My telling him that we didn't want to hurt anyone made him less afraid.

“Now we have to scare him again,” Michael whispered to me. Our clock was running. I stepped back again so that the only thing between Michael, who was standing with his gun pointed at the trembling guard, and the Historian was a one-inch-thick piece of bulletproof glass. “You have ten seconds to open the door,” Michael called out. Then he started counting down. “Ten. Nine.” I watched the Historian. Michael was right. He wasn't afraid anymore. “Eight. Seven.” He didn't believe that we'd go through with it. “Six. Five.”

“Please,” I shouted to the Historian in between Michael calling out numbers. The Historian wouldn't look up at me. Instead he stared down at his hands. “Four. Three.” It was over. I had ended this guard's life as surely as if I'd shot him myself. “Two. One.” When Michael said the word
one,
the Historian looked up to see what happened as if watching the end of a magic trick. The word seemed to hang in the air. For a moment there was no other sound. I looked over at Michael. “Fuck,” he said under his breath, shaking his head. Then he took the gun and tucked it back into the waistband of his pants. The guard saw Michael do this and exhaled. He was still on his knees. He thought it was over, that he was being spared. For a second, I thought it was over too. We were wrong. Michael simply realized that the gun would be too loud. He couldn't risk firing it. Somebody on another floor might hear. He needed something quieter. Michael pulled out his knife. He walked up behind the guard before the guard had a chance to look back, before he had a chance to realize that this was how his life was going to end. Then Michael slit his throat from ear to ear. I heard a gurgling sound, not unlike the sound of a recently unclogged drain. It was the only sound the guard's body made. He fell to the floor with hardly a twitch. Almost immediately, blood began to pool on the wooden floor beneath his neck.

I looked away from the guard's body. I looked through the glass at the Historian. He had come forward and was standing there, both his hands pressed against the glass, his face nearly touching it. He was staring down at the guard's body in shock. I saw his lips move. “Why?” he said too quietly to hear. I knew that he didn't expect an answer. He was the Historian. He was supposed to be the one with all the answers.

Michael stepped closer to the glass. He leaned toward it. Michael's face was only inches from the Historian's. “We have the guard on the second floor tied up in the bathroom. If you don't get out here right fucking now, we're going to drag him up here and make you watch us kill him too. There's a female guard on the first floor. We'll get to her eventually if we have to. How many people do you want to kill tonight, Seymour?”

Seymour stared at Michael. “Me?” Seymour asked. He stared at Michael through the glass like he was staring at some brutal animal at a zoo.

“How many, Seymour?” Michael shouted, throwing his reservations about noise to the wind. When Seymour didn't move, Michael turned to me. “Watch him,” he said loud enough for Seymour to hear him. “I'm going to go get the next one.” Michael started walking away, toward the stairs.

“Wait,” Seymour yelled as Michael walked away. Michael stopped. “If I give you the key, no one else dies?” Seymour asked. I wanted to shout to him “Yes!” but I'd already said the wrong thing once tonight.

“That's what I've been saying, Seymour,” Michael said and continued walking away.

“Okay,” Seymour said. “I'm coming out.” Seymour walked toward the glass door. He pushed a button and swung the door open. I looked over at Michael. Michael was staring through the open door, staring at the pages and books full of information, full of details, full of secrets about the War. He almost looked entranced. Seymour stepped through the archive doors.

“Where's the key?” I walked up to him and asked.

“It's around my neck,” Seymour said. I reached out and grabbed the lanyard he had around his neck. A small electronic key card was dangling on the end. I took out my knife and cut the lanyard from around Seymour's neck so that I didn't have to pull it over his head. Like that, I was holding the key in my hand.

I stepped away from the Historian and slipped my backpack off my shoulder. “What are you doing?” Michael asked.

“I'm getting the tape out,” I told him, “so that we can tape him up like we planned.”

Michael shook his head. “There's no time for that. We're behind schedule. Besides, if we bring him with us, he can show you where to look. He can help you find it. Without him, it will take too long.” Michael was right. We couldn't have more than twenty-five minutes left. We were still going to have to incapacitate the guard on the third floor and then find your file. I looked through the glass at the seemingly endless files in the archives. We'd never make it out if we had to find your file ourselves.