The Keepers of the Library

by Glenn Cooper

  Kenney had personal knowledge that no one except for the environmental monitoring team had visited the Vault for a year or more. In years past, visits had been more frequent. There was a tradition at Area 51. On their first day, new employees would be escorted by the Executive Director of the Research Lab for a personal tour, but there hadn’t been a newbie in a good while.

  Stony-faced watchers with sidearms would flank the steel doors. Codes would be punched, and the bomb-proof doors would swing open. Then the newcomer would be led into the enormous, softly lit chamber with the rarefied atmosphere of a deserted cathedral and stand in awe at the sight before them.

  The Library.

  But now the existence of the physical Library had become something of an afterthought, fading into the dim recesses of collective memory. But in the midst of his first major crisis as the head of security, Kenney suddenly felt a need to connect with the past.

  He emerged, the only soul on the Vault level. Outside the massive doors he entered the appropriate codes and stooped slightly for the retinal scan which triggered the hydraulics.

  He stepped into the chilled dehumidified atmosphere and began walking, first a few feet, then a few dozen, finally a few hundred. He periodically looked up at the domed, stadium-like ceiling. As he walked among the bookcases he randomly touched some of the bindings, something that would lead to a reprimand if it were detected and reported up the chain. He assumed one of his own men was watching on CCTV from the sixth floor but no one would be filing a report on him.

  The leather was smooth and cool, the color of mottled buckskin. Tooled onto the spine were years, escalating as he moved toward the rear: 1347—replete, no doubt, with victims of the Black Death in Europe, 1865—Abraham Lincoln’s name was buried inside one of these volumes, 1914—filled with World War I victims. At the rear were the last volumes, thousands for the present year, 2026, but many fewer for 2027. The last recorded date was February 8.

  He made his way to one side of the Vault, where a narrow stairway took him to a high catwalk. There, he leaned into a railing and took in the totality of the Library.

  There were thousands of steel bookcases stretching into the distance, over 700,000 thick leather books, over 240 billion inscribed names. He took it in, absorbing the enormity of it all.

  Area 51 was seventy-nine years old. There had been a total of sixteen security heads since inception. He would be the last. Each man had sworn an oath to protect the security and integrity of the Library. Each, he was quite sure, had stood on this exact spot and contemplated that oath and the spiritual implications of the Library’s very existence.

  Only one of his predecessors, Malcolm Frazier himself, had faced a breach of security as massive as the present one, and he had paid for it with his life.

  Was that the fate that awaited him too?

  Kenney played things by the book, but then and there he decided to look himself up in the database.

  Chapter 5

  It was chilly, and it irritated Will that he needed a coat to take his walks. Down in Florida it was sunny and warm, but Reston, Virginia, was still in the grip of winter.

  He’d always hated everything about their neighborhood—the cookie-cutter houses, the small, square backyards, each with a deck and a barbecue grill, the ubiquitous cul-de-sacs, which looked like lollipops on aerial views. Every morning at 7 A.M. a mass exodus occurred as one or both members of each household clutched their briefcases, got in their cars, and headed to nearby Washington. The March of the Lemmings, he called it.

  Theirs was a modest three-bedroom house, comfortable, not luxurious. They’d never made much money, not that he particularly cared. Nancy’s salary was fine at her level, he had a pension from the FBI and he had his social security, though receiving the monthly payments made him feel geriatric. He’d made a few dollars from his book years earlier but the money had gone mostly into boat refittings, a coveted car and a college fund for Phillip (in case there was a Beyond after the Horizon).

  He took his prescribed exercise regimen seriously. At least two times a day he made a circuit around his neighborhood, and, just as his doctor had predicted, his walking had steadily improved as his heart grew stronger. Along the way, he weakly bonded with some dog walkers and stay-at-home moms, who lavished attention on the new brawny man in their midst and tried to draw him into their book clubs and afternoon coffees.

  He’d gotten to the point where he could jog a few hundred yards, walk, then jog again. Nancy had bought him a wristband heart-rate monitor and he checked it assiduously, staying within his strict limits. Taking orders and obediently following rules rankled him as much as it always had but he never wanted to lie in a hospital bed again.

  During the daytime he was alone. Nancy was one of the Washington lemmings and Phillip attended South Lakes High School. When Will wasn’t doing something aerobic or working with barbells to restore his depleted muscle mass he read and very occasionally turned on the TV. The TV news and talk shows dispirited him with their countdown clocks to February 8 midnight and their so-called experts who reported on the motion of every piece of rock within the solar system.

  He blamed the media for whipping folks into an agitated frenzy and it didn’t surprise him that things were going from bad to worse. Productivity indices were down as people started drifting from their jobs. The “what the hell” and “eat, drink, and be merry” ethos was taking hold everywhere, and government sloganeering couldn’t break the momentum. Markets were down and alcohol sales were up. Marriages were straining and cracking. Suicides were on the rise. The Chinese Doomsday case wasn’t helping as it seemed to be reminding a dispirited, creaky world that the end was nigh.

  So he avoided current events, took no calls from numbers he didn’t recognize and slammed the door on those reporters who sought him out to tap his “unique perspective.”

  It was more comforting retreating into the realm of books but even that made him cranky because bookstores had become a pathetic rarity—there weren’t any left in Reston. He’d never made a comfortable migration from cardboard and paper to plastic and bits but he could either pay a hefty premium for a real book to be delivered by a UFedEx van or take the path of least resistance and use one of several tablets that Nancy and Phillip possessed. So he grumbled every time he swiped a screen to turn a page but he enjoyed his Shakespeare and Dante, Steinbeck and Faulkner, all wells he wished he’d plumbed more deeply when he was young.

  It was sleeting, and the sidewalks were getting slick. He altered his jogging style to come down flatter on his soles so he wouldn’t slip on his ass and cause one of the housewives to bound from her front door like a St. Bernard with a brandy keg. The street looked less slippery so he hopped off the curb only to be honked at by an approaching car.

  The car stopped abruptly, and the window slid down. It was Phillip.

  “Goddamn it, Phillip!” Will exclaimed. “I hate electric cars. You can’t hear them coming.”

  Phillip shook his head. “You want to get in?”

  “I’m exercising. Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I’m done for the day.”

  “It’s not even two o’clock. Don’t you have to stay through the last period?”

  “Honor students get open-campus privileges.”

  “What about wrestling?”

  “I quit.”

  Will gritted his teeth. “Why?”

  “What’s the point?” Phillip said, driving away.

  When Will got home, he went straight for the master bathroom to turn on the shower and while the water was heating he made for Phillip’s room. Inside, the music was blaring and he had to bang loudly.

  The music stopped and Will heard a dull, “What?”

  “Can I come in?”

  The door unlocked. Phillip was back on his bed before Will entered.

  “I can’t believe you dropped wrestling.”

  “Believe it, it’s true.”

  “Don’t cop an attitude with me. Why’d you q
uit?”

  “I didn’t like it anymore. I’d rather wrestle with girls.”

  “You were good at it.”

  Phillip shot him an attitudinal glance. “How do you know?”

  He was right. Will knew because Nancy peppered him with e-mails of articles from the local e-paper. He’d never seen him wrestle.

  “If you’d have gone to school down in Florida I wouldn’t have missed any of your matches.”

  “So it’s my fault you’re practically split-up with Mom.”

  “I didn’t say it was your fault.”

  “Whatever.”

  “And we’re not split up. It’s a compromise. You know the score. You were always free to choose Florida.”

  “And live on your boat? No thanks.”

  “I would have gotten a condo. I’m still willing to do that when your mom decides to retire.”

  “What’s the point? Feb 9 is in less than a year. Just leave me alone to ride it out on the suckmobile, okay?”

  “What about the things you wrote about in your essay, about having a positive attitude, making each day count, living life to the fullest?”

  The boy gave him a patronizing grin. “It was just an essay.”

  “You didn’t believe the things you wrote?”

  Phillip didn’t answer.

  “You didn’t believe the things you wrote about me?”

  The kid pointed at the ceiling. “I think you left the water on.”

  Phillip’s NetPen chimed. He yawned, turned his music down with a hand gesture and clicked the pen onto speech mode.

  “What?” he said to it.

  “Friend request,” it said in a sweet robot voice.

  “Who?”

  “Hawkbit.”

  “Accept. Gimme pic.”

  “No photo available.”

  He was about to raise the music volume when the pen chimed again. “Message from Hawkbit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need to speak with you,” the pen said.

  He switched the pen from the female voice to an androgynous one. He didn’t like to use his real voice with people he didn’t know. Net Safety 101. He replied, “Chat mode: And you are?”

  “Hawkbit,” the pen said in a masked voice.

  “Well, duh? Do I know you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “But that’s about to change, right?”

  “I hope so.”

  “You XX or XY?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Male or female?”

  “Female.”

  “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

  “Do you know how to tunnel?”

  “Sure. Don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Not into tech?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Why do you want to tunnel?”

  “I’ve got to talk to you. In private.”

  “This is private.”

  “No, superprivate.”

  “Why?”

  “I need your help.”

  He furrowed his brow and was about to ask if Hawkbit was a scam artist. The Net was full of them. “Do you even know who I am?”

  “You’re Phillip Piper, the son of Will Piper. I read your essay. You’re the only person in the world I can trust.”

  FBI Director Parish didn’t look good on one of his good days and he looked particularly gaunt and sallow today. Nancy approached his desk the way one might approach fresh roadkill, guarding against the shock of a sudden leg twitch.

  “Talk to me,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, give me some good news.”

  She sat, crossed her legs and opened her briefing book. She noticed his furtive eye motion directed to her thighs and shrugged it off. She was used to it but if she ever mentioned it to Will she knew he’d knock the guy’s block off. Will was old-school. What was good for the gander wasn’t good for the goose.

  “Another eight postcards were found yesterday, bringing the total number to thirty-six.”

  He rubbed his eyes and gazed out onto Pennsylvania Avenue. “I said good news.”

  “Well, I suppose the good news is that they’re intercepting about a quarter of them at post-office sorting stations so some of the targets aren’t getting them anymore. The volume of physical mail is way down these days.”

  “Hooray for that,” he said sarcastically.

  “The new batch of postcards is fitting into the same overall pattern. These were postmarked three days ago and passed through the Village Post Office on Varick Street in New York. That means they could have been dropped off in any of twenty-one street boxes. It’s the seventh different post-office branch that the sender’s used. So he’s moving around. We’re going over CCTV footage, of course, but as you can imagine, the image volume is overwhelming so I place a low probability of tagging an identifiable suspect making a drop into one or more boxes.”

  “What about the addresses?”

  “Also the same pattern. About a third of the addresses are stale. The recipient’s moved in the last ten or more years.”

  “Suggesting?”

  “As you know, we’ve secured the cooperation of Area 51 on this. They think whoever is responsible is working off an old database, about twenty years old.”

  “How long has Frank Lim worked there?”

  “Twenty-six years.”

  “So he could have stolen the database years ago and waited for his moment.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Parish folded his hands behind his neck. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “I think it’s a stretch. I mean the guy has legitimate access to current data. If he wanted, he could have been committing a few names and addresses to memory every day and writing them down when he got home. Why rely on an old database? Besides, the postcards were sent from New York. We know Lim hasn’t been out of Nevada.”

  “The theory goes that he may have a confederate in New York.”

  “I know that. I also know I haven’t seen a shred of evidence along those lines.”

  “Have we drilled him on that angle?”

  “Area 51 Security is in control of him. The watchers haven’t given us access.”

  “Who’s watching the watchers, that’s what I want to know,” Parish complained.

  Nancy, more than anyone, had no love for them. “Exactly.”

  “I’ll work through the White House to get us into position to interview Lim. Meanwhile, I may want you to go to Beijing. I want you to use your charms to pacify the brass at the Ministry of State Security. This thing is about to boil over into a major international crisis and we’ve got to do everything we can to defuse it. The White House thinks that VidCons aren’t cutting it. Only way to show proper respect is to kiss their butts in person.”

  She said nothing.

  He clearly didn’t like her nonresponse. “What?” he said testily. “Your husband’s okay, isn’t he? You can travel now, right?”

  It was the last thing she wanted to do but she kept a game face. “Yes, sir. Not a problem.”

  It was a Saturday morning and Will was determined to arrange some sort of family group activity but beyond that kernel of a thought he had nothing. If they were in Florida he’d have suggested—what else—fishing, but what was it that people did in Virginia? Search for virgins? Nancy poured him a coffee at the breakfast bar, sounding a skeptical note. Phillip wasn’t the family-outing type, she warned. And besides, she’d be amazed if he woke up much before midafternoon.

  “We could take a drive,” Will said hopefully.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Panama City?”

  She padded her slippered feet behind him and kissed his ear. “We’ll ship you back pretty soon.”

  “I’m ready, you know.”

  “You’re doing great but don’t rush things.”

  “If I pass my exercise test at Georgetown, I’m heading south, okay?”

  She sighed. She hadn’t told him yet. “Whatever you say, but I’d like you to wait til
l I’m back.”

  “What do you mean, back? Where are you going?”

  “Beijing.” She held her breath.

  “Jesus, Nancy.”

  “Parish wants me to brief the Chinese government personally. I can’t duck it, Will. This thing is becoming a major international thing.”

  “That’s nuts. If someone with database access wanted to provoke China they’d send postcards to Chinese cities, not American ones!”

  “I don’t disagree. All I can tell you is that isn’t the way the Chinese are seeing it. Anyway, Parish is insisting.”

  He put his cup down hard. “I’m going out.”

  “Will!” she called after him. “Can’t we talk about it? Don’t go running out on me like you always do!”

  He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t know why he had to talk. Living on his own was easier. He hated the art of give-and-take and compromise. He liked things his way—always had, always would.

  He sat on the front stairs lacing his sneakers tight. Truth be told, the thing that bothered him the most about Nancy’s going to China was that he’d be left alone with Phillip. Maybe on an intellectual level he knew that the kid probably loved him but the resentment on the surface was palpable. Not so different than the resentment he’d harbored against his own dad. But his old man had been a violent brute, a nasty drunk, a certifiable bastard.

  He wasn’t that guy.

  Phillip had it easy. He didn’t know what a lousy father was.

  He rose to start his circuit. Physically, he was feeling strong. Maybe he’d start jogging straight off instead of walking.

  Something caught his eye; rather, something didn’t catch his eye. When he was an FBI agent, his ability to scan a crime scene and notice the smallest detail had been legendary. That was a long time ago but some things stayed with you.

  As he approached the garage he peered into the small windows in the garage doors.

  Where was Phillip’s sideview mirror?