Children of the Underground Read online

  Our footsteps echoed on the wooden slabs of the boardwalk as we walked. In my head, each echo announced to everyone around us that we didn’t belong there. Only a few people walked past us on the boardwalk. Those that did pulled their collars up around their chins, battling the wind. The people we passed looked old and hard, like they’d survived something. Some people eyed us suspiciously. Others walked by us without giving us a second glance. I’d learned to be more worried about those that didn’t look at us than those that did. Paranoia is your friend. Your father taught me that.

  We were walking for about fifteen minutes before we could see the Second Street gazebo. It jutted out onto the beach in front of us. Under the gazebo, I could see the old men staring down at chessboards on tables built into the boardwalk. Most of the tables were empty. Three were occupied. The two tables closest to the boardwalk, farthest from the water, had men sitting at either side of the table, facing each other. They were all old men with white hair and deep wrinkles in their faces. They hunched over the chessboards, contemplating their next moves.

  As we got closer, I could see the tiny chess pieces, like little black and white toy soldiers, standing on the tables between the men. Farther from the boardwalk, closer to the ocean, sat a solitary man at one of the tables, his back to us, facing the sea. We stepped into the gazebo and began walking toward him. If he wasn’t alone, he would have looked like all the other old, hunched men Michael nodded to as we passed them. Michael didn’t like walking past them and leaving our backs open to an ambush. Michael didn’t trust the old men. Michael didn’t trust anyone. “We must be mad,” he whispered under his breath to me as we stepped closer to the man sitting alone at the end of the gazebo.

  When we neared the lone man, he stood up with a jerk. He hadn’t even looked back at us. For a moment, I thought Michael was right. The whole thing was a trap. My heart pounded and my hand reached down toward my knife. It was reflex now. Fight or flight weren’t mutually exclusive anymore. Luckily, the lone man simply stood up, turned, and walked around to the other side of the table. He looked up at us for a second and then, without even acknowledging our presence, sat down facing us this time, his back to the ocean. He immediately began studying the pieces again. He was playing both sides of the game, first black, then white. Michael and I slowed our walk. I took a glance behind us. The four other old men were still engrossed in their games. The lone figure’s hair was dark and curly. His eyebrows were unruly and wild. He could have passed for the son of any of the other four men at the tables. Michael and I stepped up to him. We were early. It wasn’t even eleven thirty yet. The man didn’t look up at us. Michael glanced at me. “Palti?” I asked.

  Without answering me, the man continued to stare down at the pieces on the chessboard. I looked down at the game. If someone who knew nothing about chess looked at this board, they would never be able to guess the positions of the pieces when the game started. Each side had lost about a third of its pieces. From what I could tell, however, the game looked even. After a few minutes of silence, the man reached down. He pushed one of the remaining white pawns farther into black’s territory. “You’re Maria,” he said to us, looking up at me after making his move. “You’re early.” He didn’t sound excited to see me.

  “We’re sorry,” I said. “We can come back if you’d like.”

  “No,” the man said, “we might as well get this over with.” He looked down at the board again, as if trying to remember the position of all the pieces in case the wind blew them away. “We can sit at one of the empty tables.” I could hear the waves crashing on the beach behind us. “I didn’t know that there would be two of you,” he said, sitting down on the bench at the empty table next to his.

  “This is Michael,” I said. “He’s working with me. I hope it’s okay that he’s here.”

  Palti looked Michael up and down. “It’s fine. I was actually nervous that you were going to try to pull this craziness off by yourself. Are you one of Clara’s people?” Palti asked Michael.

  Michael shook his head. “No.”

  “Michael was friends with the boy’s father,” I said to Palti, filling in the blanks that Michael did not, “the boy we are trying to find. I thought Clara would have told you about him.”

  “Clara doesn’t tell me much,” Palti said, taking a loose cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lighting it. “I don’t think she trusts me.” He smiled a humorless smile. “Smoke?” he asked, pulling another loose butt out of his jacket.

  “No, thank you,” I answered. Michael shook his head. Palti put the cigarette back in his pocket. “What did Clara tell you?” I asked.

  “She told me who you were. She didn’t need to go into too many details. I already knew all about you—the legendary Maria.” The way he said it made me uncomfortable, but I tried not to show it. “She asked if we had information about your son. I told her that we did.” My heart sped up. “She asked if I could help you get into the building, if I could tell you where the information was.” He flicked the ash of his cigarette down onto the wooden floorboards beneath us. “And I said no. I told her that I had no interest in getting you killed, that you’d been through enough already.” He stopped speaking then, as if that was the end of the story.

  “What made you change your mind?” I asked, prodding him to continue, hoping that the story didn’t actually end there.

  “Clara told me not to underestimate you, that she’d made that mistake.” I heard Michael chuckle under his breath. “Clara never told me exactly what you want, though.”

  “I want to find out where my son is so that I can find him and save him,” I said. I had practiced being as concise as possible.

  “Save him from what?” Palti asked.

  “The War,” I answered quickly.

  Palti laughed. “I was afraid of that,” he said without elaborating. “I can tell you where the information about your son is. I can help you get into the building. I can disarm the back-door alarm. I can get you a key to the door and tell you the guards’ schedules. But I can’t be there when you go in. I give you the information. I give you the key, and then you forget I exist.”

  “Why?” Michael asked, sounding more curious than confrontational.

  “Clara gave me strict orders.” Palti smashed the end of his cigarette butt into the empty stone table between us.

  “And why do you listen to Clara’s orders?” Michael asked.

  “I’ve given up on the War,” Palti said to Michael, not insulted by his question. “I haven’t given up on order. I’m not an anarchist.”

  “Just a spy,” Michael said, finishing Palti’s sentence.

  Palti smiled again, showing his crooked teeth. “Just a spy,” he echoed.

  “Okay,” I said to Palti, interrupting the back-and-forth. “What can you tell us?”

  Palti looked away from Michael and back at me. “The building has five stories,” he said. “Each one is guarded separately. The first floor is primarily storage. It’s full of office supplies, computers, and furniture. There’s nothing of interest. It’s designed that way on purpose. If anyone accidentally comes inside the building, they’ll see nothing of value. The second floor has the nonproprietary information,” Palti said.

  “What does that mean?” Michael asked.

  “It has the information that we’ve collected about the other side,” Palti said. “Information from spies, information that we’ve stolen, information that we’ve been given through negotiation, information that we’ve gotten from our own research—it’s all there on paper, at least the piece of it that’s stored in our building. We keep only paper files. Nothing gets stored electronically. No matter how good your security is, once you put things on networks, you’re begging to be hacked.” I could almost feel Michael’s muscles tighten as Palti spoke. The information on floor two might have been the information that got Michael’s family killed. It was all there, blandl
y, coolly, on paper.

  “What about backups?” Michael asked out of the blue.

  “Other buildings,” Palti said. “I don’t know where. No single bit of information is kept exclusively in one building. Everything is duplicated and spread out. I don’t know exactly where any of the other buildings are. I know only this one.”

  “How long have you been at this one?” I asked.

  “Twenty-four years,” Palti answered. He couldn’t have been older than his midforties. He must have started there when he was close to my age.

  “That’s a long time,” I said without thinking.

  “Thanks for reminding me,” Palti answered with another wan smile. He took another cigarette out of his jacket pocket and lit it. “Anyway,” he continued, “the third floor and half of the fourth floor contain proprietary information.” Palti looked at Michael. “Information about our side, information that we’ve kept and modified and expanded over the years. When someone on our side has children or gets married or gets promoted, if their file is assigned to us, that information goes on either the third or the fourth floor. The files are kept more or less alphabetically.”

  “What do you mean more or less?” I asked.

  “Well, sometimes people change their names,” Palti answered. “We don’t reassign them if they do. Instead, each person is assigned a ten-digit number when their file is created. That number never changes.”

  “Do people know their own numbers?” Michael asked. I knew he was trying to figure out if his side did it the same way, if he had a number, if your father had a number.

  “No,” Palti answered. “We don’t even know our own numbers. Our files, the files about me and the people I work with, are kept at other sites. We could probably come pretty close to guessing our numbers based on the files we have, but we don’t know.”

  “Who knows?” Michael asked.

  “The numbers are assigned in one of the three central units. Those units have the keys needed to figure out which information cell has any specific piece of information. Without those units, it’s like a library with no card catalogue, the Internet with no search engines. But we’re getting off track.”

  “So, my son. He’s going to be in the Ws,” I said to Palti, picking the first letter in your father’s last name.

  Palti shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not your son’s name. Not in the system. Your son’s file was created when he was given to his current parents.”

  “So where’s his information?” I asked. “What’s his name?”

  Palti told me the name they gave you. It’s a name I’ll never use and I hope you forget. Some things you’re better off not knowing.

  “His file is on the third floor?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Palti said. “It’s on the third floor.” I’d heard enough. I was ready to talk about how we were going to get inside. Michael kept asking questions.

  “What’s on the fifth floor?” Michael asked.

  Palti looked at Michael as if he’d been waiting for Michael to ask him the question. “The fifth floor,” Palti said, “and a growing portion of the fourth floor, has the historical information. The information here is kept chronologically, not alphabetically like the rest of the building.”

  “What do you mean, historical information?” Michael said breathlessly.

  “It’s the information that we’ve kept about the War, going back hundreds of years, at least the portion of it that’s stored in our location. The newer information is stored on the fourth floor. The older information is on the fifth.”

  “Have you been up there?” Michael asked, staring at Palti now. “Have you been to the fifth floor? Have you looked at the files?”

  “I don’t go to the historical information often,” Palti said. “We’re not supposed to dig where we’re not needed. They call me a Historian. That’s the job title they’ve given me, like they call men like you soldiers. But I’m a file clerk. I don’t pretend otherwise.”

  “You said you don’t go often. That means that sometimes you do go. What have you seen?” I was surprised by Michael’s sudden interest. Of course, Michael probably never thought he’d be sitting in front of a strange little man who had the ability to do something Michael could never do. He had the ability to peek behind the curtain.

  “Nothing,” Palti said, shaking his head. Michael’s shoulders slumped. Palti continued, “I go to the historical records because sometimes current records become historical and need to be filed. You don’t know how many times I’ve been asked to pull a nonproprietary file. They never tell me why. Then, a few weeks later, they ask me to refile it in the historical information section. Or sometimes, out of the blue, I’ll be asked to file a file whose last entry was a wedding or the birth of a child in the historical information section. I’ll date it and I’ll file it. When I started, our historical information section was exclusively on the fifth floor. Every day it grows.”

  “So, how do we get inside?” I asked, hoping Michael was ready to move on.

  Palti reached into his jacket pocket, the one opposite the one he’d been pulling his cigarettes from. He took out a large key with a square head. He placed it on the table in front of him.

  “That’s it?” Michael asked.

  Palti nodded. “That’s a copy of the key to the back door. I’ll disable the exterior alarms. I can make it look like a system failure. You’ll still have to avoid tripping the interior alarms. I can tell you how to get to the third floor without tripping them. Then there are the guards. They work in shifts. There are gaps in those shifts. No one has ever tried to break into our cell before, so the guards aren’t very diligent, but that doesn’t mean that this will be easy.”

  “You say that no one has ever tried to break into your cell before. What about other cells?” I asked.

  “There was a building in San Diego about twelve years ago. Five men attempted a breach. The building was razed, burned to the ground.”

  “The men who broke in burned it down?” I asked.

  “No,” Palti said. “We burned it down. The information was compromised. We couldn’t trust it in that state anymore. We had the redundancy we needed to re-create all the information we lost and the intelligence to change the information we had to.”

  “What happened to the five men?” I asked.

  “They were still in the building when we lit it on fire,” Palti answered. “I updated two of their files myself. No matter what I do for you,” Palti said, staring straight at me, “the odds of you making it out of the building with the information you want and without bloodshed is almost zero. Someone’s blood will be spilled. If you’re lucky, you’ll be the one who gets to decide whose.”

  “Then why don’t you just get the information and give it to us?” Michael asked.

  “If you want to act on the information,” Palti answered, “you need to steal it, or they’ll figure out that there’s a spy. When are you planning on breaking in?”

  “As soon as possible,” I answered, not wanting to waste another moment. He told us that he needed two days to figure out the best way to disable the exterior alarm. He also advised us to attempt the break-in at night. It would be simpler. The streets would be empty. There would be fewer guards and they would be tired. Then Palti diagrammed the guard schedule, pointing out the gaps. I studied the paper. Michael studied Palti’s face.

  When Palti was done telling us everything he knew about the guard’s movements, Michael ask him one final question: “Why should we trust you?”

  “I’m a liar, a thief, and a traitor,” Palti answered him, “but some people have found me useful. The call is yours to make.”

  We sat with Palti in the cold wind beside the gray ocean for another two hours, going over details of the building and descriptions of the employees who would be working there at night. We had to trust him. We had no choice. Michael and I ha
ve spent nearly every waking moment since we met with Palti going over the plan and scoping out the building. We make our move tomorrow night. We’ve practiced our parts, rehearsed them like dancers practicing for opening night. It’s going to work, Christopher. It has to. Sitting in a building only a few blocks from where I am right now is a file with a piece of paper that is going to lead me to you. Iron doors and walls of fire couldn’t stop me now.

  Forty-four

  I’m staring out the window of a train, heading west. I’m coming for you, Christopher. I’m alone now, but I’m coming.

  You need to know what happened that night. You need to know what Michael did for you. We waited until a little after one in the morning before heading to the intelligence cell. We knew that the plan, even if successful, could take hours. Palti told us that the night shifts start at ten o’clock. By the time we got inside, the security team would have already been on duty for almost four hours. They’d be tired and bored. Michael doubted it at first. These people were guarding the most important weapon either side had: information.

  Palti questioned Michael. “You are a soldier, correct?” Michael nodded. “Do you know why you were selected to be a soldier?” Michael shrugged, unwilling to tell this spy that he believed that he was selected to be a soldier because someone saw something special in him. “You were selected because they knew that they could train you. You were born to follow. Even if you lead, you lead people to follow the orders of others. That’s why all of you are chosen. The people working in these intelligence cells—we weren’t selected to be soldiers. We were selected to be glorified security guards and file clerks—even if they call us Facility Patrolmen and Historians. Most of us have worked at this site for more than ten years and nothing has ever happened. Can you imagine what it would be like to work at a job where nothing happens for ten years? If you are going to have any success, it’s because my colleagues think of you as the bogeyman, and everyone knows that the bogeyman doesn’t exist.”