Cold Storage

by David Koepp

  Ironhead stepped up beside him. “Whoa, Griffin, your shit’s fucked up. What kind of place you run here?”

  “I’m gonna fucking rip him a new one what the fuck did that little fucker do to my fucking place of business?!”

  Cedric and Garbage seemed to think it was kind of funny. Ironhead hopped over the desk, drawn by the blinking lights behind the wall. “There’s a whole bunch of electronics and shit back here. What is this?”

  Dr. Steven Friedman stepped up next to Griffin, sober and sympathetic. “Looks like you have some personnel problems, Darryl.” Griffin hated Dr. Friedman, even though he was the only one who used Griffin’s Christian name.

  Griffin pulled out his phone and stabbed a thick finger at Teacake’s number again, but the Rev’s voice boomed through the lobby, impatient. “We doing this, or what?”

  Griffin hung up. He would kill Teacake later. “Yeah. This way.” He walked to the gate that led to the storage units and swiped his card again. The gate buzzed, and they pushed through, headed into the back.

  As they made their noisy way down the corridor and into the depths of the storage facility, Cuba heard a sound to her left and turned to look. They were passing the open mouth of another hallway. She got a glimpse of a person: not a security guard, but a slightly puffy guy in too-tight jeans and a work shirt that was green-spattered and strained at the buttons, as if he’d put on a lot of weight recently and refused to buy new clothes. The guy was looking their way as he walked through another intersection a hundred feet away. They made eye contact and she found his look disconcerting, his face as swollen as the rest of him and his stare a bit too intense. She saw him only for a second or two and then he passed out of sight, moving parallel to them in the same direction, as if following them from one corridor away.

  Cuba—who had not one ounce of Latina blood in her but did enjoy ropa vieja—wondered what kind of weirdo would hang out in a self-storage place at four o’clock in the morning.

  She hurried to catch up with the others.

  Twenty-Two

  Trini turned off the lights when they were half a block away and rolled to a quiet stop on the suburban street. Roberto, who’d known enough not to ask questions of Trini until they were immediately relevant, asked the obvious one now. “Where are we going?”

  Trini killed the engine, unzipped her purse, and rummaged around until she found a small rolled leather pouch. “Where item seven is.” She got out of the car, looked up and down the deserted street, and headed off, staying just beyond the throw of the infrequent streetlights.

  Roberto got out, closed his door softly, and caught up. He didn’t say anything, just kept pace with her as she counted off the houses. The lights were out in all of them, no respectable person up at this hour. Trini stopped just before a pleasant-looking two-story, stepped up off the street, and started across the grass toward the house. She didn’t bother with the front door; instead she went into the narrow yard, about fifty feet of space between the house and the one next to it. She reached a side door, dropped to her knees on the cement slab just outside it, and unrolled the leather pouch on the ground in front of her. “A little light, please?”

  Roberto pulled out a key chain with a tiny Maglite on it and bent down, to contain the beam. He clicked it on and held the beam on the pouch. As it rolled open the light glinted off a pick set, half a dozen metal tools of varying shapes and sizes. “Forget your keys?” he whispered.

  Trini didn’t answer. The less he knew the better, so she offered nothing. She skimmed her fingers over the torsion wrench and the offset pick, glanced up at the style of the lock on the door, and selected an L rake. She wiggled it into the lock and maneuvered it carefully, listening.

  Roberto looked around, then back at her in mild annoyance. “This is really the best storage plan you could come up with?”

  “Worked for thirty years, didn’t it?” She kept wiggling the L rake but wasn’t getting anywhere, so she pulled it out, switched to a diamond offset pick, and went back to work with that. “Only pain in the ass was when they moved. Took me six weeks of very creative lying to get them to let me pack the basement by my— There we go!”

  The lock had clicked. She turned it gently, using the pick. The door opened a crack. She slid the tools back into the leather roll, tied it quickly, and shoved it in the back of her pants as she stood up. She looked at Roberto, expecting praise but not getting any, then shrugged. There’s no pleasing some people. She opened the door and stepped inside. Roberto followed.

  They were in a kitchen, a busy family one, from the looks of it. Even in the dark they could make out the counter, crowded with olive oil jugs and spice bottles and half-read books and somebody’s homework and assorted plastic crap. Trini nodded her head and Roberto followed her across the room, silently, to a section of the wall that was covered by a pinboard filled with kids’ drawings and ribbons and schedules and reminders. Trini reached down to a half-hidden handle, turned it, and opened the door. “Light again?”

  Roberto shined his tiny Maglite ahead of them, revealing a staircase that led to a basement. They glided down the stairs. He kept his light on this time, shining a path ahead of Trini as she moved through the half-converted downstairs space, past the ratty sofa and the broken, permanently reclined recliner, around the bumper pool table, and to another door at the far end of the room.

  She turned the handle and pushed into an unfinished storage room. The family had lived there for quite a while and there must have been a number of kids, spread out over a fairly wide age range, because there was everything down here from old Big Wheels to a rack of frequently used skis. The back half of the storage room was curtained off, and whatever was piled back there bulged, threatening to push right through the curtain. Trini pulled it aside.

  The character of the stuff in the back half of the room was different. There was no kid paraphernalia back here, just a lot of beat-up old crates and cases packed on top of one another, unsentimental keepsakes like camp trunks and an old snowblower. There was a narrow path through the cases, a definite method to someone’s pack-rat madness, and Trini held her hand out for the light. Roberto gave it to her and she turned sideways, making her way between the cases toward the very back of the very back.

  There was a large storage container there, locked in three places along its front edge. Trini pulled out a set of keys, handed the light back to Roberto, and opened the locks, then the lid. Inside the trunk was a large, flat wooden tray with divisions of all shapes and sizes, filled with colorful pieces of paper. Roberto’s first thought was that it was currencies—maybe Trini had a run box down here—but on closer examination the paper wasn’t money at all, it was much too small and square. Trini drew her breath in sharply, as if she’d forgotten what was in the box, and he flicked the light up to her face.

  She was grinning like a six-year-old. “My stamp collection!” She ran her fingers lightly over the rows of neatly mounted stamps, sorted by country and continent, each one on a tiny piece of stiff cardboard, its date and origin neatly lettered beside it. She picked one up, fascinated. “Kampuchea! That’s rare!”

  “Maybe not right this second?”

  “Sorry. Forgot it was here.” She spread her arms out, reaching all the way to both sides of the five-foot-long box, and locked her hands around the wood frame of its top tray. She wiggled it a little and lifted, pulling the whole tray out, the way you would the top level of a footlocker. She turned, found a flat place nearby, and while she set it down, Roberto turned the light back to the trunk. Beneath the top shelf was a mountain of bubble wrap. He started pulling it aside, Trini turned back and pulled the rest out, and finally they uncovered what they’d come for.

  The thing was big and shaped like a water barrel that had been cut in half vertically. The flat portion had a series of straps and ropes and buckles and clamps, and they wrapped around the barrel itself with three or four leather straps. As a container it was meant to be lightweight, but with that size there was
n’t much of a chance it actually was. The exterior was covered in a light-colored canvas, with some kind of hard shell underneath.

  It was exactly as Roberto remembered it from thirty years ago. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought it would be any different. “Looks old.”

  Trini shrugged. “So are we. We still work.”

  True, but they were human bodies, meant to age and decay and malfunction from time to time, and the half-barrel backpack was a T-41 Cloudburst, a selectable-yield man-portable nuclear weapon. If Trini’s or Roberto’s body broke down, they’d die, and a few people would cry for a while. If the T-41 broke down, everybody within a ten-mile radius died.

  The T-41 was a product of the Operation Nougat tests in the early 1960s, after Eisenhower had first authorized and implemented the concept of battlefield nuclear weapons. Subsequent models were refined and deployed throughout the late ’60s, most of them to various Western European hotspots. The idea behind the weapons was that they could be used to stave off a Russian invasion. They were to be delivered where needed by U.S. Army Green Light Teams, elite squads of soldiers specially schooled in the care and activation of portable nuclear weapons. The weapons were designed so that they could be carried behind enemy lines by a one- or two-man squad, set with a timer or radio detonator, and used to destroy strategic locations such as bridges, munitions dumps, or tank encampments. They could also be delivered by parachute or into water, or buried to a depth of up to twenty feet, although detonation was significantly less reliable than when accompanied by a technician.

  The T-41, like most of the W54 series of special atomic demolition munitions, SADMs, could be adjusted to a yield as low as ten tons or as high as one kiloton, which was enough to destroy either two city blocks or the entirety of the country of Lichtenstein. In the latter circumstance, the safe escape of the Green Light Team was highly in doubt, and the soldiers who had taken the job had been told to view it as a kamikaze mission.

  This particular T-41 had been built and deployed in 1971, for use in the Fulda Gap in West Germany. Strategically critical for most of the modern era, the Fulda Gap contains two corridors of lowlands through which it was feared Soviet tanks might drive in a surprise attack on the Rhine River Valley, their entrance to Western Europe. To prevent a drawn-out tank battle, the idea was that a single T-41 would remove the threat in a controlled burst of destruction. Nuclear weapons, in those early days, were viewed by some in the Pentagon as just bigger and more effective versions of conventional bombs. By 1988 sentiment had changed, the INF Treaty had taken firm hold, and the last three hundred SADMs were removed from Western Europe, decommissioned, and dismantled.

  Except for this one. For three years after confirmation of the success of the Kiwirrkurra firebombing, Roberto, Trini, Gordon Gray, and two other cohorts in the DTRA had been on a fruitless and frustrating quest to warn their superiors of the need for a contingency plan should Cordyceps novus ever escape its confinement beneath the Atchison mines. The nature of the storage facility was ideally suited to a controlled detonation of a nuclear device, they’d argued. With proper planning and placement, they could closely limit loss of life. Even an underground nuclear blast would be impossible to conceal, they granted, but after all, this was a break-the-glass scenario that would likely never have to be used. Still, shouldn’t they be ready for it?

  Rebuffed or ignored at every turn, they had finally taken matters into their own hands. As disarmament activities swept through Western Europe, they falsified movement records within the Joint Elimination Coordination Element, and, thirty years later, here it was. The contingency plan, in a box in a basement, underneath Trini’s stamp collection.

  Roberto started to lift the unit out of the crate and felt a twinge in his back. He stopped immediately—Don’t push it, moron—bent his knees, straightened his torso to vertical, and lifted. The T-41 weighed fifty-eight pounds, heavier than he expected or remembered. He set it on the edge of the crate and looked up at Trini. “Hold on to that for a second, will ya?”

  She reached out and steadied it. He turned around and squatted down, facing away from it. He looped his arms through the straps, tightened them as much as he could, exhaled, and stood up again. He could feel it in his thighs already. This thing was heavy, and he was not the man he used to be. “Okay to go.”

  She turned, shined the light on him, and laughed.

  “What?” he asked.

  “The shit we get ourselves into.”

  “Keeps retirement interesting,” he said. “After you.”

  They headed off, back to the other side of the curtain in the unfinished storage area, around the bumper pool table, past the broken recliner, and to the stairs that led to the kitchen. She was on the fourth step up and Roberto had his foot on the very first one when the basement fluorescents all switched on.

  They froze, momentarily blinded. They looked up, wincing at the light, and could make out the silhouette of a man at the top of the stairs, a guy in boxer shorts and a Kansas City Chiefs T-shirt, pointing a shotgun at them.

  Roberto’s mind flicked through options and found none, not with this refrigerator strapped to his back, and not in this position, second up at the base of a flight of stairs facing a guy who already had the drop on him with a twelve gauge. For the first time in a long while, he searched his mind, instincts, and experiences and came up with exactly nothing. “Uh,” he said.

  The guy at the top of the stairs sighed. He pulled the gun back, looking at Trini. “Mom. Really?”

  Trini smiled. “Hi, sweetie.” She looked him up and down. “You look heavy.” It was true, Roberto noticed; that T-shirt was a little clingy in the paunch.

  The man came down a few steps, cautious with the shotgun and even more careful with his voice, keeping it low. “What are you doing?”

  Trini continued up the stairs toward him, and Roberto followed. “Oh, just grabbing something,” she said. “Out of your hair in two seconds.” Remembering she wasn’t alone, she turned around. “Sorry, Anthony, this is my friend Roberto—”

  Roberto came up another step, reaching a hand past her to shake. “We met. I think you were about three years old.”

  Anthony took it reflexively. “Uh-huh.” He turned back to Trini. “Janet would kill you. And me.”

  Trini made a zipping motion across her lips, gestured up the stairs, and Anthony turned. He trudged back upstairs, reached the kitchen, and stepped out of the way, letting them pass. He couldn’t help but see the enormous military-looking thing Roberto had strapped to his back, but he just rolled his eyes and looked the other way. He went to the kitchen door and opened it, showing them out wordlessly. Trini turned back to him when they got outside.

  “Maybe Thanksgiving?”

  “Maybe. I’ll work on it.”

  “Love you, sweetie.”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  The door closed softly. As they made their way back across the darkened lawn to the minivan, Roberto couldn’t take the silence.

  “Seems like he turned out nice.”

  “Yeah, good kid.”

  Roberto looked at her as they approached the van. “I’m just wondering . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, the, uh, location. That you chose to store this.”

  “What about it?”

  “Um—the children?”

  Trini rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s not like they know how to activate it. Jesus, you’re overcautious.”

  Roberto dropped it. Trini was Trini, and that’s what he liked about her.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, THEY WERE PARKED OUTSIDE TRINI’S HOUSE, HER work done. Roberto was behind the wheel now, item number seven in the back. He’d been on the ground in Kansas for thirty-two minutes.

  Trini gestured, pointing down the street. “Turn right here, second left after that, you hit the on-ramp in about half a mile. It’s a straight shot up the 73.”

  “How long to Atchison?”

  “Twenty-five minutes. Sure you don’t
want me to—” She cut off, going into a hacking cough that sounded painful.

  Roberto looked at her. The night had drained her almost completely, and they both knew there was no way she could or should go with him. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “You still got it, you know.”

  She shook another cigarette out of the box and lit it. “You will try to get those two out, won’t you?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Try. Okay?”

  He looked at her. “You’re getting soft in your sunset years.”

  Trini smiled. “Sun’s already down, guapo. The fireflies are out.” She took a deep drag off the cigarette and blew out a big, billowy cloud. It swirled and wrapped around her head in the still night air.

  Roberto reached a hand out the window and rested it on her shoulder. She tilted her head toward it, grateful for the human touch. “You call me up any time you want,” he said. “I’ll sling all the bullshit you can handle.”

  She smiled. “That’d be nice.”

  Twenty-Three

  Mary Rooney had fallen asleep on the daybed in her storage unit hours ago and might well have slept there all night, if it weren’t for Mike’s gunshots. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d spent the night in good old SB-211; in fact, she’d found that lately it was the only place she slept well at all anymore. She’d started with short naps every once in a while, just taking a few extra minutes to spend with her lifetime of memories. But once she’d moved the daybed out of the guest room at home and into storage, things got awfully cozy in here. The naps got longer and longer. Where else was it completely peaceful, where else could she be surrounded by her loved ones’ things, and where else did she feel as safe? Certainly not in her apartment, with the ill-advised roommate she’d taken in at the insistence of her kids, who were worried about her living alone. Mary had come in today with the last of Tom’s things, a couple of shoeboxes filled with his mementos and certificates of meritorious service from his time on the force. As she’d set about putting it all in its proper bin, the walk down memory lane became exhausting, and she’d lain down and drifted off.