by David Koepp
That was what killed him. It wasn’t “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad,” or “Honey, please, we’re late,” or “That’s some stupid ridiculous bullshit, you gotta learn to shut up when you talk to people.” It was “I hear you, that stinks.” It was all he ever, ever wanted from people when he talked to them. To be heard. And this lady gave it to a four-year-old, after being up all night.
And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
So what Teacake wanted to say that night, while they rode down in the elevator, what he was dying to say was “You’re fucking awesome with your daughter,” but is there a good way to ease into that when you’re not even supposed to know she has a daughter?
So instead, he said nothing.
The elevator doors slid open.
Sub-basement 1 was supposed to be the only sub-basement, and it had never occurred to anybody to question the need for the number. SB-1 looked just fine on the elevator keypad, as good as any other number. The facility’s history as a government installation wasn’t a secret, so finding out there had once been other, lower levels wouldn’t have been much of a surprise, had anybody ever bothered to think about it. But to find out there were three of them, and they were connected by an elaborate series of sensors and alarms to a control panel that had since been walled up behind the reception desk, you know, that would have raised a few eyebrows.
According to the schematic, the top entrance to the tube ladder was located at the end of a short dead-end hallway about a hundred feet from the elevator bank. Naomi reached the end first, stopped, and turned around in the white-painted cinder block space. There was nothing there that suggested an entrance, in fact the opposite—everything about this space said, This is the end.
There were three larger storage units on each side of the hallway, the big two-hundred-square-foot jobs that were mostly used by factories storing overstocks. But there was no door or hatchway or obvious entrance of any kind, except for a small, narrow cabinet between two units marked STAFF ONLY.
Naomi looked from the map, to the hallway, to the map. “I don’t get it.”
“You’re sure it’s here?”
She held the map out to him. “Look for yourself.”
He took the phone, held the map one way, then the other, slid it around a bit. Naomi went to the far wall, the dead end, and smacked it a few times here and there with the flat of her hand. Solid. She knocked, tapped with a fist.
“Cinder block,” she said. “If it’s behind here, we’d need a sledgehammer. Or a jackhammer.”
“Yeah, I’m not down for that.”
Teacake turned the phone upside down, looking at the schematic again. He looked down at the floor. That’s interesting, man.
He zipped the keys out of his key ring again—had to admit, he loved the metallic zing that it made whenever he pulled them out, he’d never been a person who had more than one key before this job—and went to the narrow maintenance cabinet. He opened the cabinet, took a claw hammer off a tool rack, and went back to the same spot in the hallway where he’d been standing, about three feet from the cinder block dead end. He moved till his back was against the wall, got down on all fours, and tapped the hammer once on the floor. It made an unpromising chunk sound.
“That’s concrete,” she said.
“Yup.”
He crawled forward, brought the hammer down again. Same sound. He kept crawling, tapping the hammer every six inches or so, getting the same sound every time.
“It’s a concrete floor, Travis.”
“Weird to hear my real name.” He kept moving, kept tapping the hammer on the floor.
“Sorry,” she said. “It bothers you?”
“Can’t decide.” Yes, he could, and he already had. It didn’t bother him; he loved it. His heart skipped a beat every time she said his name. He couldn’t wait till she said it again. Please say it again, just one more time?
THWUNG. He’d nearly reached the center of the hallway, and when he brought the hammer down there it produced a hollow, metallic echo.
He looked up at Naomi. She grinned and squatted down on the floor next to him. He held up the phone, swiping to enlarge a certain portion of the screen. “Right there. That semicircle made of dashes, kinda shaded gray, can you see it?”
“Yeah, barely.”
“That’s the entrance. They just painted over it.”
Together, they looked down at the floor. He spun the hammer around in his hand a couple of times, thinking. He sat back.
“Okay, look. There’s no way we could hide this shit we’re about to do.”
“What are we about to do?”
“Wreck some more stuff,” he said. “But here’s how I see it. Part of our job is security, and there’s an alarm going off, a’ight? It’s too late to call Griffin, he’s wasted by now, and he wouldn’t know what the fuck it is anyway. He’d just call corporate, but there’s nobody at corporate either, it’s not like there are self-storage emergencies and they got operators standing by, see what I’m saying? The only other people I can think of to call are the cops.”
“To say there’s an old smoke alarm or something going off in the basement?”
“Exactly. Ridiculous. But here we are, and there’s an alarm going off, and this whole place is stuffed to the rafters with incredibly valuable personal belongings.”
“Right! This stuff is meaningful to people.”
“This is true, what you’re saying. I’ve always felt that way.” He was warming up to it now, feeling the creative buzz of getting your story straight with somebody. “There is an alarm going off, and we are guards. We are people of the security profession.”
“We’re more like clerks.”
“Stay with me. Yes, it is a shitty job, but it is our job.”
“It’s our responsibility.”
“Yes!”
“Plus we’re curious,” she added.
“Yeah, but we leave that part out.” She wasn’t a natural at lying. That’s all right, he knew enough about it for both of them. “A’ight? We in?”
“You know I am.”
“Watch your eyes.”
She raised a hand and turned away, and he spun the hammer around so it was claw-end down and swung it at the floor, hard. The hollow metallic boom was louder, there was definitely something down there, and it wasn’t cement floor. Chunks of dried paint flew. He swung again, two, three, four times in quick succession, and more paint flecked away. On the last blow a two-inch-square section flew off and gave them a good look at the unfinished surface beneath.
There, under several layers of long-dried oil-based semigloss gray floor paint, were the unmistakable metal dimples of a manhole cover.
Twelve
It had been five or six years since Roberto Diaz had gotten a call in the middle of the night. It was a fluke that the phone even rang on his bedside table; since retirement he’d gotten in the habit of turning the thing off around nine at night and not turning it back on again until he’d had at least one cup of coffee in the morning. He’d been much happier ever since. Mellower, anyway. Annie couldn’t quite get there with her devices; she always left her phone on in case one of the kids needed anything, but their youngest was twenty-eight, so chances of that were slim. Still, she liked to check the New York Times in bed first thing after she woke up to see if the world had improved in the last eight hours. Strangely, it never had, but Annie was not one to give up hope.
Tonight Roberto had forgotten, left his phone on by accident, and it’s funny how the old reflexes kicked in when the thing rang shortly after midnight. He was wide-awake before the echo of the first ring had even faded, had his hand on the phone by the time the second ring started, and was sitting up with both feet on the floor when he answered.
“Hell,” he croaked.
Whoops. No voice. Not quite the old reflexes. He cleared his throat and tried again.
“Hello.”
“Roberto Diaz?” It was a woman’s vo
ice.
“Speaking.”
“I’m calling about the 1978 Plymouth Duster for sale.”
He didn’t answer for a long moment.
“Mr. Diaz?”
“Give me five minutes.” He hung up and set the phone back down on the dresser. He just sat there for a few seconds, thinking. He regretted the second glass of wine at dinner, but other than that he didn’t feel much of anything at all. That’s how you knew you were good, when the call didn’t change anything, emotionally. He counted a few breaths, stayed cool, and let the Buddhist mantra he’d discovered in his early fifties float through his mind.
I’m here now.
He wanted a cup of tea before he called back.
Annie turned and looked at him over her shoulder, squinting into the dark. “Who was that?”
“My other wife.”
“How can you be funny right away in the middle of the night?”
“It’s a gift.”
She fumbled around on her night table, feeling for something and not finding it, knocking a few things around.
He looked at her. “What are you doing?”
“Looking for my glasses.”
“Why?”
She rolled over and looked at him. “I don’t know.”
She glanced around the room, as if to make sure everything was still in its place, then turned back to him. “One of the kids?”
“No. Don’t worry.”
She paused. “Oh God.”
If it wasn’t one of the kids and he hadn’t yet told her that somebody they knew was dead, then it could only be Them. It was more of a tired “oh God” that she let out than a fearful “oh God,” the kind of “oh God” you’d say if you found out the cable had gone out again.
“Yep.”
“Who?”
“New voice to me. Somebody’s having a panic attack.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. He never had cheated on her, or even thought about flirting anymore, after the experience in Australia. He was grateful for that, and for her, every day. “Go back to sleep,” he said. “I’ll make it quick.”
He got up and pulled on the clean shirt and pair of pants he kept hung over the chair so they’d be easy to find in the dark. Talk about old habits.
Annie rolled over and snuggled back into her pillow. “Don’t make it too quick. Wait till I’m asleep again, okay?”
“Wasn’t born yesterday, gorgeous.”
She muttered something sweet and inaudible and was back asleep by the time the door closed. The unexpected was still routine, even after all this time, and the calls had stopped seriously disrupting her sleep years ago.
Roberto loved being in the North Carolina house more than any other place he’d ever owned, rented, or visited. It wasn’t a great house, not by a long shot. It was late ’80s construction and the walls were too thin; you could hear water in the pipes no matter where you were. They probably should have torn the whole thing down and built a new one ten years ago when they bought it, but aside from the fact that it would have cost a fortune they didn’t have, a teardown seemed incredibly wasteful. Mean, almost. The house had behaved well in the world, it had done what was asked of it with minimal complaint for twenty years, and it deserved better than a bulldozer.
They bought it as is, recognizing its flaws, and made plans to repair and remodel in two stages. They fixed and painted the inside first, right after they bought it, and put off the decaying exterior for as long as possible, until the rotting porch and the leaking roof and the patchy siding, riddled with wasp nests, could no longer be ignored. Finally, they took a deep breath, got out the checkbook, and started the exterior work four years ago, just before they both retired. They ran out of cash with half the roof and none of the porches done.
They didn’t actually run out of money, not literally, but there were financial lines they had long ago said they’d never cross, loans they would not take out, T-bills that would not be sold, and dammit if they were about to break their own rules now, when they were so close to having enough to leave a decent college fund for each of the grandkids.
So Roberto learned roofing himself, and how to build a deck, and how to grin and put up with the manly condescension when he went back to the hardware store for the third time in the same day with more dumb questions. Just before Thanksgiving of last year, two and a half years after the last professional help had left the premises, almost four years after they’d started work on the outside, and a full decade after they’d bought the place, the house at 67 Figtree Road was done.
There was a chair on the back porch, a rocker that was good for Roberto’s bad back, just to the left of the screen door. It was his favorite spot in the world as he knew it, and he knew a fair amount of the world. That spot was where he sat now, waiting for the kettle to boil, wondering at the warm, misty March air that should have been neither warm nor misty.
Back in the kitchen, he got to the kettle before it had a chance for a full-throated scream. He poured the hot water into the strainer. He stared out the window while he let it steep—$6,200 to move the kitchen window from the driveway side to the backyard side, the most extravagant thing he had ever done, and he regretted it for not one minute since—and poured a few drops of milk into the tea after exactly three minutes. He’d picked up the milk habit while on the London detail. Turns out the milk cuts the tiny bit of acidity in the tea leaves. The things you learn.
He took a sip and went to the broom closet on the far side of the room. It was a funny angled one that wasn’t much good at holding anything, but it was the compromise solution to a thorny electrical problem he’d run into when he insisted on designing and building this one corner of the cabinetry himself. He’d allowed no help from anyone else, wouldn’t even let anybody in the room while he was working on it.
Now Roberto took the brooms and mops out of the closet, pulled out the tall vases from where they were stored in the back, and took out the small mixer that couldn’t seem to find a home anyplace else. He used a hidden key to unlock the lock on the angled panel inside, swung it open, and entered the combination into the safe.
He felt a tiny surge of adrenaline when he threw the safe handle and it made that solid, satisfying clunking sound. It wasn’t excitement, far from it, but something more like self-preservation, the old system gearing up in case it was needed. Fight or fight.
The safe was small. It didn’t need much in it, just a few currencies and passports that were probably expired by now. It wasn’t a proper run box anymore, just a place to put the secure phone and the snow globe, the one they’d bought at a gas station in Vermont, the slightly cheesy one they couldn’t resist because it had three kids sledding inside it, two girls and a boy, like theirs. He took out the emergency phone, turned it on, and the screen showed the dull red outline of a battery with a big red line through it. Roberto was surprised it even had that much juice in it. He grabbed the cord, plugged it in by the sink, and looked out the window, drinking his tea while he waited for it to charge up.
After a while, the phone binged and turned itself on. He looked at it for an extra moment, not thinking much but not grabbing it either. He wasn’t going to rush; it was just over five minutes now since he’d asked for that many, and the world wasn’t going to end if he took an extra thirty seconds. That was one of the nice things about being older, how comfortable you became with the idea of conservation of energy, of deliberateness of style. Youth was all wasted movement and noise production, thinking that the more you looked like you were doing something, the more you really were, when in fact the opposite was most often true. Do you have the patience to remain completely still until the dirty water settles and you can see clearly? Not if you’re under fifty, you don’t.
When he was ready, Roberto dialed. The phone rang once, and the same woman’s voice answered.
“Fenelon Imports.”
“Zero-four-seven-four blue indigo.”
“Thank you, Mr. Diaz.”
&n
bsp; “What’s up?”
“We’re getting a temperature breach alert from a decommissioned facility in the Atchison mines in eastern Kansas.”
He paused. I’m here now.
“Mr. Diaz?”
“Yeah. I’d wondered about that. Given the weather changes.”
“Are you—”
“I wrote a memo in 1997 on that very subject,” he said.
“I don’t see it in the file.”
“And I called, about five years after that. And six or seven years after that.”
“So you are familiar with that situation?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Is it something we need to worry about?”
“Yes, it’s something you need to worry about.”
“We thought, as a decommissioned facility—”
“What time did the alert come in?” he asked.
He heard a pause and some keys clicking while she checked on a computer. “Three eleven P.M. central standard time.”
“And you’re just calling me now?”
“It took some time to figure out whom to call.”
“What if I didn’t answer?” he asked. “Who does it say you call next?”
“It doesn’t.”
Roberto took a breath and looked out the window. “Okay. I’m seventy-three miles from Seymour Johnson. I can be there in ninety minutes. I’ll need a plane from there and a car waiting on the other end. I’ll drive the car myself. Nobody else goes.”
“Is it your opinion that this qualifies as a Heightened Threat?”
“My opinion is it qualified as an Exceptional Threat at three eleven P.M.”
She paused. “I’ll see what I can do about transportation.”
“I’m not finished. I don’t have any equipment.”
“What do you need?”
“Everything on the list.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Diaz, I’m just not familiar with—”
“I wrote an ECI white paper in ’92. It’s compartmented and stored in the clean vault. It was twenty-five years ago, you’ll need different software to read it, but I archived the program along with it and a floppy drive to run it. Get Gordon Gray to clear you. Only Gordon Gray, you don’t need to call anybody else. Read the report and have everything listed in appendix A—I mean everything, every single thing—in the car in Kansas when I land. Understood?”