Children of the Uprising Page 30

  “The kid must be a firebrand,” Jared said, thinking back to the baby he’d taken away from his best friend eighteen years ago.

  “They tell me that he’s growing into the job.”

  “Can I meet him?” Jared asked.

  The request caught Brian by surprise. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?” Jared asked, wondering which of the million possible excuses Brian would use.

  “We don’t know how Christopher would react to meeting you. Besides, we’re not even sure that we can trust you yet.”

  “Fair enough,” Jared said, willing to abandon the request for now—at least until he had more leverage. “Then what is it you want me to do?”

  “We want your help devising a plan to destroy the New York Intelligence Center.”

  “My office?” Jared laughed again. “You think you’ll beat the War by destroying my office? The people in that office are bureaucrats. They’re not warriors.”

  “You know as well as anyone that one bureaucrat can do the damage of hundreds of soldiers. Besides, we don’t care about taking out the bureaucrats. All we care about is destroying the information inside. So, are you interested in helping us?”

  Jared looked around him. He looked past the river and past Brian. For the first time, he noticed a woman sitting on the grass to his right, pretending to read a magazine. Then he looked to his left and saw a man sitting on another bench reading a book. Both of them glanced up every few seconds to stare at him and Brian. “Do I have a choice?” Jared asked. He was armed—he had a small gun in his pocket. The problem was that he’d been pushing pencils for years. He’d known even before he came down here that the only thing the gun would do for him was make sure he took one man out with him if they double-crossed him. His days of winning fights where he was outnumbered three to one were long gone.

  “You always have a choice,” Brian said. “There’s just no guarantee that you’re going to like all your options.”

  “If I help you with this, what’s the rest of the plan?”

  Brian shook his head. “You don’t need to know the rest of the plan.”

  “If you guys don’t trust me, then why are you asking me for help?”

  “Because you have the knowledge and the grudge that we look for in informers. Putting your personal history aside, you don’t merely fit the profile of an informer. You are the profile.”

  Jared knew that Brian was right. They were asking him for the same reasons that Jared was considering saying yes. “I’ll help,” Jared said.

  “Good,” Brian replied. “Now go back to work. Make sure no one gets suspicious. I’ll contact you again soon so that we can begin working on the details.”

  Jared stood up to go. “You don’t like me, do you, Brian?” he said before walking away.

  Brian didn’t look at him. “I can’t think of anyone in the world that I like less,” he answered.

  “Well, this is going to be fun,” Jared said, letting the sarcasm poison every word that he spoke. Then he turned to his right and walked away. He winked at the woman sitting in the grass as he walked past her. She didn’t respond. She was probably hoping she’d get to kill me, Jared thought to himself as he walked toward the street to hail a cab.

  Fifty-three

  They were told that it was too risky to meet Christopher at the airport. It would be too much of a scene to meet in public. Instead Addy was given the address of a warehouse in Brooklyn. They were told to go to the warehouse and wait. They had no idea how long they would have to wait. They didn’t know who was going to meet them at the warehouse. No one would even promise them that Christopher was coming. And still Maria, Evan, and Addy were brimming with excitement as they climbed into the car to leave the motel. Each of them was excited for a different reason, but that didn’t mean they weren’t unified by their excitement. They all wanted to find Christopher. None of them could predict where things would go from there.

  Christopher and Reggie once again found themselves on a plane together, flying halfway around the world. But this time they were going home. They were on a direct flight from Istanbul to New York. “You’re making me nervous,” Christopher said to Reggie when they were well over the Atlantic Ocean. He’d been riding an almost supernatural high since he’d found out that the trip to Istanbul had been a success.

  “Why’s that?” Reggie asked.

  “Because you’re not staring at me. You’re always staring at me on planes when I’m trying to sleep. Why aren’t you staring at me?”

  “I figured that you’d done enough. I thought I’d give you a rest,” Reggie lied. The truth was that Reggie felt too guilty to even look at Christopher. Reggie could hardly reel off all of the half-truths and secrets he’d been keeping from Christopher. He was counting on Maria. She was Reggie’s gift to Christopher that was supposed to make Christopher forgive the fact that Reggie hadn’t told him about the attack on Addy and Evan’s compound in California. Her sudden appearance was supposed to make up for the fact that Reggie had never even told Christopher that Maria was still alive. Finally, and maybe most importantly, Maria’s existence was supposed to distract Christopher from the fact that they’d enlisted Jared’s help to bring down the New York Intelligence Center. “Go to sleep,” Reggie ordered Christopher. “We still have a lot of work to do in New York.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” Christopher said. Then he closed his eyes.

  When they first got to the warehouse in Brooklyn, Addy, Evan, and Maria thought they must be in the wrong place. The warehouse sat in an industrial dead zone near the Gowanus Canal. It was like a ghost town. The street was lined with buildings, but all of them were covered in graffiti and appeared to have fallen out of use. The sidewalks were empty. No cars drove by. Addy, Evan, and Maria felt like they’d been sent to the one barren space left in all of New York City.

  “This can’t be right,” Evan said, looking at the utter lifelessness around them. Back in Maine, the absence of people meant trees and animals. This was concrete as far as the eye could see.

  “This is the address they gave me,” Addy said. She looked out the car window at the building they were parked in front of. It was a two-story warehouse. The only windows were small, grime-covered windows near the very top of the building. She couldn’t see any movement inside.

  “I’ll go check to see if we’re in the right place,” Maria said. She opened her car door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. When her foot hit the sidewalk, her memories of New York, of Brooklyn, flooded back to her like she’d been struck by a wave. Eighteen years had passed since she’d watched a man with a gun chase Reggie over the Brooklyn Bridge to somewhere not far from where she was standing. Eighteen years had passed since she rode a subway with Michael to Coney Island to meet with the spy who would unlock the doors to help her and Michael find Christopher. She remembered riding the subway to meet with the spy, looking out the windows of the elevated train, staring at the seeming endlessness that was Brooklyn, and thinking that surely, if that much humanity existed, Christopher could escape inside all of it. Eighteen years, gone as if it had all happened in a single flash of light. Now she was back; Christopher hadn’t escaped; and the endlessness that was Brooklyn turned out to be another casualty of the War. She rang the bell next to the door of the warehouse.

  Nobody answered. She didn’t hear any sounds coming from inside. Could that crazy girl have screwed this up? Maria thought to herself about Addy. She turned back to the car, ready to take control and try to figure out where they were really supposed to be. As she turned away, the massive loading dock door behind her began to open.

  Maria watched the door as it finished opening. Two men were standing inside. “You Maria?” one of the men called out to her.

  “I am,” Maria called back to the man. “I guess we’re in the right place.”

  The man who called out to her laughed
. “Tell Addy to pull the car inside. We’ve been waiting for you guys to get here.”

  “Is he here?” Maria asked tentatively.

  “Who? Christopher?”

  Maria nodded. He was the only one anybody cared about.

  “Not yet. They’re not scheduled to arrive for another few hours. Let’s get everybody inside for now. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

  So Maria walked back to the car, opened the rear door, and said to Addy, “We’re here. They want us to go inside.” Addy drove the car through the open loading dock door. Once they were inside, the two men who’d beckoned them in shut and locked the door behind them.

  It didn’t take long after the door was closed for Addy, Evan, and Maria to be surrounded by dozens of people. Reggie and Christopher weren’t inside the warehouse, but everyone else seemed to be. The warehouse had been retrofitted into some sort of hybrid office building and dormitory. Makeshift rooms had been arranged throughout the space. Some were turned into bedrooms, others into conference rooms. Men and women from at least eleven different countries were there—people from South America, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Canada. They began coming up to Maria, Evan, and Addy and introducing themselves. They spoke to Maria differently than they did to Evan and Addy, with a bit more reverence and awe.

  “You’re smaller than I thought you would be,” a woman from South America who had introduced herself as Simone said to Maria.

  “Why is that?” Maria asked her, confused by all the special attention.

  “I don’t know,” Simone told her. “I guess it’s that the stories about you are so big. You know?”

  “No.” Maria shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Simone was caught for a second, not knowing what to say next. At that moment Addy intercepted Simone and walked her away, whispering something in her ear as they went. Brian waited until the very end to go up to Maria. Until Brian, Maria had generally been handling the reverence and awe with sarcasm and scorn. “It’s nice to meet you, Maria,” Brian said to her. “You might not know it, but we’ve got some history together.”

  Maria’s head was spinning from all of the attention. She only wanted to see her son. She hadn’t bargained for the rest of this. “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “I was Joseph’s handler until he met you. After he met you, they didn’t trust that I could handle him anymore.” Brian offered Maria a smile. “I’m quite certain that they were right.”

  “You warned us once that we were in danger.” Maria remembered that night in Charleston when they ran away after finding a bloodied body on the side of the road.

  “I considered Joseph a friend,” Brian said to her. “I hope we can be friends too.”

  “I’m fifty/fifty when it comes to Joe’s old friends,” Maria told Brian, thinking about Michael and Jared. “I’m not sure that I want to press my luck.”

  “I’m also friends with Reggie,” Brian said, “and about two weeks ago I drove your son from California to New Jersey.”

  “Okay,” Maria said to Brian. “Let’s talk.”

  Jared sat down at the desk in his sparsely furnished, tiny two-room apartment in New Jersey. He’d taken the bus to work that morning the same way he did every morning, the same way he would have if nothing had changed. Jared went about his daily routine the same way he went about his daily routine every day, the same way he would have if he hadn’t decided to abandon everything he’d ever worked toward. He got to the office. He waited in line in the kitchen for coffee. He sat at his desk, staring at his computer. For Jared, it was like stepping outside of his life and seeing for the first time how depressingly monotonous it had become. But that day he didn’t feel like he was drowning in the monotony. That day, the monotony was merely cover. Nine hours of monotony acting as cover for those twenty other minutes spent slipping into rooms he wasn’t supposed to be in and flipping through files he wasn’t supposed to see. Jared’s life had once again become something it hadn’t been in over a decade. It had become something meaningful.

  When the day was over, Jared took the bus back to his apartment in New Jersey. Only that day, Jared didn’t leave the office empty-handed. He had papers with him, plans and schedules. In twenty minutes, he had gathered most of what he hoped he would need. Jared remembered fondly a time in his life when he had a reputation built on his ability to devise a plan. Michael was the party. Joseph had the heart. Jared made the plans. The heart and the party were long gone. Jared figured he had one last chance to do the one thing that he was born to do.

  Jared looked out the window of his apartment. He stared over the tops of the trees outside his window and looked across the river at the lights on the tops of the tallest buildings in Manhattan. One of them was the building that his office was in. It was his job to figure out how to snuff out that light like a candle. Jared opened his briefcase. He slid his fingers over the top of the briefcase’s felt liner until he found the fold. He pinched the fold with two fingers and pulled, tearing the liner away from the briefcase where Jared had glued it in place earlier that day. Behind the liner were the papers he had stolen. He took them out and laid them on the desk in front of him.

  Jared knew before he even started that merely hitting the building wasn’t going to be enough. They would need to do more. The papers confirmed that. The papers confirmed what Jared had always heard as a rumor, that an attack on the Intelligence Center would lead to a citywide response. The response wouldn’t be limited to members of the War. The response would come from civilian forces too, forces that wouldn’t know the real reason they were being called in. They had put the citywide response in place when the Underground started getting out of hand. The theory was that since the Underground wasn’t part of the War, there was no need to follow the War’s rules when fighting against them. Nobody sane talks about animal rights when swatting at flies. They had enough people inside the police department to make it happen. Jared knew that the rebels didn’t have the numbers or the time to weather that type of response—not unless they created a diversion first. If the police were already busy somewhere else, their response to an attack on the Intelligence Center could be cut by as much as three-quarters. Jared’s brain began to hum with the possibilities. They couldn’t just attack the Intelligence Center. They needed to attack all of New York City. They needed to rock the whole city to its foundation.

  Nobody came to meet Christopher and Reggie at the airport. Christopher knew that it was silly to expect anyone there and he didn’t care when no one showed. They were home. He could feel it, even though he’d never been to New York before. Christopher and Reggie could once again walk through the airport without standing out like creatures from another planet. Reggie was no longer a head taller than everyone they walked past. Christopher’s skin was no longer two shades paler than every person around them. They were normal again, even if only on the surface. JFK Airport was busy, and Reggie and Christopher made their way through the crowds quickly and with purpose. Reggie walked in front. Christopher followed a step or two behind him. At the taxi stand outside the concourse, they got into a cab. “Brooklyn,” Reggie told the cabdriver. “Eighth Street and Second Avenue.”

  The cabdriver turned around in his seat and looked at Reggie. “Are you sure you have the right address?” the cabbie asked with a thick Pakistani accent that Christopher actually recognized. “I can take you, but I must warn you. There’s nothing there—just warehouses and empty buildings. Maybe you want Eighth Avenue and Second Street, on the park? No?”

  Reggie waved a hand at the cabbie, motioning for him to turn around and start driving. “No, it’s Eighth Street and Second Avenue. We know where we’re going. You don’t have to worry. I’m from here.”

  “Okay,” the cabbie said before putting the cab in gear.

  They rode in silence at first. Christopher stared out the window. Nothing Christopher had seen
had looked like this—not Singapore, not Istanbul—nowhere else looked like New York. Reggie sat fidgeting in the seat next to him. “Are you okay, Reggie?” Christopher asked. Reggie’s face looked ashen and long.

  “I’m okay,” Reggie answered him. “It’s just that we’re finally coming to the end.”

  “One way or the other, right?” Christopher laughed sardonically.

  “One way or the other,” Reggie agreed softly.

  It took them forty minutes to get from JFK to the low area around the Gowanus Canal. When they drove over the Pulaski Skyway, Christopher got his first unadulterated view of the Manhattan skyline. It didn’t look real to him. It looked more like a comic book or the set of a science fiction movie. Christopher wanted to tell the cabbie to pull over, to stop right there on the bridge, traffic be damned, so that Christopher could stare at the view longer, at the tall buildings and the bridges. His eyes darted from skyscraper to skyscraper. Until that moment, Christopher had never thought about what the word skyscraper literally meant, but now, as he stared at the true leviathans reaching into the air, he understood. Those buildings really did scrape the sky. He didn’t know it then, but it was going to be his job to blow one of those buildings out of the sky. Christopher didn’t actually ask the cabbie to stop. He rode and stared and didn’t think for a second about what was going to happen when the cab ride ended. But it did end.

  “You sure this is where you want me to drop you?” the cabbie asked again as he pulled up in front of a graffiti-covered warehouse.

  Reggie took a hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket. “This is good,” he said, handing the bill to the cabbie. “Now, forget that you dropped anybody here.” They got out of the cab, stood on the empty sidewalk and watched the cab drive away. When it disappeared from view, Reggie turned toward the building and waved. Only then did the building’s loading dock door begin to open.