Underground Airlines(76)

“Which I’ll never be able to do.”

“You got it.”

And as for Jackdaw, Jackdaw’s body, precious cargo: he went out in a barrel.

The trucks are loaded in a secure area, of course, and plantation security checks and double-checks every single item: they open every crate, shine their lights into every box on every pallet. But see, the good guys are smart, too; the good guys are always working, too. There’s a workshop down in the Great Dismal Swamp, a Panthers-funded research center, with honest-to-God engineers down there, building all kinds of crazy shit, looking for those golden-ticket ideas: how to slide people past all those checks and double checks. Turns out one thing that doesn’t get opened up for a final check after it’s packed is medical waste. So what about a man-size rubber bladder fitted with a thin reed, like the one a scuba diver wears, so a person could survive in there, down in all that waste? What about you get a man to the infirmary, make it look like he burst loose and leaped out a window when really he’s coming out in a barrel?

Ada described it, and that was a feeling you could feel. A feeling that I could feel. Wrapped up tight and clammy in some kind of rubber suit, folded over and jammed in a bucket, entombed. Rolled end over end, helpless, banging against the sides, the darkness and the heat and the stink. And then with the poison sloshing in your guts, cleaners and chemicals…and add to it the terror, the certainty as you were wheeled out of worker care toward the loading dock: capture was coming. This could not and would not work.

“So that’s it,” Ada said. “That’s the hard part. Boy’s in the truck, truck clears the gates, clears the Alabama border. Freedomland.”

Ada clapped her hands together as if knocking dust off of them—like, Mission accomplished.

“That’s what happened?”

Ada looked at me sideways. “That was the plan, I’m saying. Far as I know, yes, that’s what happened. We know the truck came out. We know the nurses did their part. That’s what we know.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

But it wasn’t okay. Not even close. I had learned nothing that I needed to know. Kevin leaves in a barrel, and the package is in the driver’s pocket. What then?

“Where did the boy get out of the truck?”

“That’s not my part of it. That’s the driver.”

“Where does the driver give him the package? How does he get the rest of the way north, after he’s off the truck?”

“You don’t listen, man. I’m telling you, I don’t know.”

My coffee cup was empty. I stood up. I looked out at the lawn, the sunlight. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t close to enough. I looked down at Ada, still sitting on the patio chair.

“I want to talk to the nurses.”

“Well, that’s gonna be hard, because they don’t exist.” She smiled. “They never existed.”

I was agitated. I was unhappy. Get to the lawyer, Barton had said, and he will point you in the right direction. So here I was, and what did I have? The sun was slowly rolling out across the lawn, brightening the green of the grass inch by inch. Closer every moment.

“All right, then, the driver. How do I get in touch with the driver?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ada. Please.”

“I’m telling you straight, man, I don’t know. The nurses came from a guy Marlon knew, a guy from Atlanta, and the nurses got to the driver once they were already working there.”

“How?”

“Two pretty nurses? How you think? Listen. Okay? I got no connect with the truck driver. I don’t have a name or number. You’d have to walk into GGSI and ask.”

“How do I do that?”

She barked a laugh. Looked at my face and stopped laughing.

“We help people out of these places, son. Not in.”

Ada stood up. We were done. She yawned, spilled the dregs of her coffee onto the ground around one of Counselor Russell’s flowering trees.

“And what about the girl?” I said quietly.

Ada waited before she answered; waited so long that when she said, “What girl?” I knew it was a lie.

“Luna.”

This time the answer came too fast. “I don’t know that name.”

“You do. She’s the one who got hold of the package in the first place.”

I didn’t know how, and Ada sure as hell didn’t know how, but Luna had done the hard part. She was the one who got your precious evidence. Jackdaw, weeping, standing in the river. She took all the f*cking risks.

Ada, though, was shaking her head, setting her chin. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do.”

I closed my eyes, thinking of Jackdaw, of Kevin, his life flown out of him.

“And I think you know,” I said to Ada, “that she thought she was getting free.”

“Yeah, well,” said Ada, and it was a kind of miracle, because even though she said she didn’t know who I was talking about, and even though she said she had never heard the name before, she said, “Well, it wasn’t her time.”

“I guess not.”

“Whatever promises were made to that one, they were not made by me, you understand?” Her face now was downright defiant; the face of the woman I’d seen on the square, the one who had scowled and stared while the others were beating me into the car. “Those promises were not made by me.”