Children of the Underground

  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.

  I stepped inside the stairwell. No light leaked through the cracks around the doors to the stairwell. It was pitch-black inside. Michael followed me and, as gently as he could, closed the door behind us. When the door closed, I saw the first flicker of light. It was a single flash like a silent bolt of lightning from over the horizon. Then it vanished. A second later, it flashed on and off again. Michael saw it too. We looked up the dark stairwell. Each flight of stairs between floors snaked around and ascended in the direction opposite from the flight below it, so the stairs leading from the second floor to the third floor were directly above our heads. This created a small platform at each floor where the stairs changed direction. The door to each floor was on this platform. We looked up. We could still hear the footsteps on the stairs. Whoever was walking down the stairs was carrying a flashlight and swinging it as he walked, creating the flashes of light and making the shadows in the stairwell dance. The footsteps were getting louder. “He has to be at least two stories up,” I whispered to Michael. Michael nodded. I could barely make out the movement of his head in the darkness. The plan was an intricately timed dance. For it to work, we had to silently get to the top of the first flight of stairs, near the door to the second floor, before the guard from the third floor reached the second floor.

  We moved up the stairs, side by side in the darkness, as fast as we could without making any noise. I could almost feel the weight of Michael’s injured leg as we made our way up. He couldn’t limp silently, so he refused to limp, gritting his teeth and ignoring the pain. I moved in front of him. We made it to the top of the first flight of stairs. We stopped only three or four steps below the second-floor platform. As practiced, we leaned our backs against the wall to the stairwell. I looked down at Michael. He was standing two stairs below me. I could see his shadowy silhouette in the darkness. He had one of his knives in his hand. I held my gun in front of me. We didn’t want to be seen, but we were ready in case we were.

  The footsteps that we’d heard were the footsteps of the guard on the fourth floor moving down to the third. Once we stopped moving, we heard the sound of the door on the third floor being opened. As it opened, light flooded the stairwell. I looked down at Michael again. He looked ridiculous in the light, standing with his back against the wall, hiding in plain sight like a toddler who doesn’t yet understand the game of hide-and-seek. In the light, we were the most obvious things in the world. The only chance we had was that no one would look at us in the light and no one would notice us in the darkness. Michael had questioned this part of the plan when we mapped it out with Palti. “So, we’re just supposed to stand there and hope no one looks at us?” he asked. Palti nodded, explaining the shape of the staircase again, explaining that there would never be any reason for anyone to look in our direction. “It’s not that you have to hope that they don’t look at you,” Palti told us. “They won’t look at you. They won’t look at you because they don’t want you to be there. To look is to suppose you might exist.” The door to the third floor closed again, swallowing the light. Then the third-floor door opened one more time, this time so that the relieved guard on the third floor could come down to the second. We heard his footsteps. We saw the beam of his flashlight hit the second-floor platform above us. The guard was whistling. I recognized the song. It was a song that my father used to play for me on the jukebox at my favorite diner when I was a kid. I squeezed the handle of my gun with both my hands, trying to stay focused.

  The guard reached the second-floor platform. He was so close to us. If I reached out, I could touch him. As Palti predicted, he didn’t turn toward us. He didn’t shine his flashlight in our direction. The guard reached out and pulled open the door to the second floor. Once again, light flooded the stairwell, this time shini
ng directly on Michael and me. If the guard had turned around, it would have all been over. Instead he walked through the second-floor door, letting it close behind him.

  “Now,” I whispered to Michael. We had to move fast. We had to get out of the way before the guard on the second floor walked down to the first. As quickly and quietly as we could, we climbed up to the second-floor platform, past it, and then up three or four more steps. If the guard took the stairs, he’d have no more reason to look up at us than the other guard had to look down. Plus, as long as he was on the stairwell, we’d know that the alarm was disabled. We could watch him walk down toward the first floor and, when he walked through the first-floor door, we could slip through the door to the second floor before he had time to reactivate the alarm. Then we could end our little ballet, for an hour at least, and get down to work.

  After only a minute or two, I saw the door open and the final guard step onto the stairwell. Though we’d already heard the footsteps of three of the five guards, this was the first one that I saw. It was a woman. She wasn’t large but she wasn’t small either. Her shoulders were broad compared to her waist. She let the door close behind her without looking up toward us. She stood there, waiting for the darkness before she flicked on her flashlight. Then she began walking down the stairs toward the first floor, chasing the beam of light in front of her.

  Michael and I waited again, not saying a word, not needing to. So far the plan had worked perfectly. It worked exactly like Palti, Michael, and I had diagrammed it, exactly like Michael and I had practiced it. Unknowns stood in front of us, though. We had to walk through that door to the second floor with no way of knowing where the guard patrolling the second floor might be. We had to be ready to attack. We hadn’t found any other way. We looked. Believe me, we looked. Violence was simply inevitable. Then, after dealing with the guard, we would have to start our search for the Historian. He was the only one who could get us inside the archives where your information was. The Historian literally held the key.