Underground Airlines(77)

She went toward the door, and I followed her, and now all I could think of was Luna—I bet Kevin had told her what they had told him; I bet she had taken some poison, too, some chemical or cleaner, gotten herself sick and gotten herself taken to worker care, and then she woke to find that Jackdaw was gone and she was still there. Left behind. The only thing worse than a lifetime of slavery: that taunting instant of hope, gone in a flash. And I knew of course what happened to her next. When the package was discovered missing and Luna was found to have helped in its disappearance, she was tortured then, Bridge had said; tortured and killed—that piece of it from Cook.

That had been the last thing for Kevin. That’s what had finally done him in, hearing that, when Cook gave that sad report. She’s dead. Okay? She’s dead.

Subdued, then tortured, then killed.

But that was the aftermath. Carnage in the wake. The job itself had gone off without a hitch: Kevin had gotten himself to worker care, the nurses had packed him up in a barrel of blood and gotten him onto a truck, and then they made themselves disappear. The package to the trucker. Everything as planned. So where the hell was it?

“Hey. Hey!”

Marlon was coming out fast, crashing into Ada going in. But he was yelling at me. He took me by both my arms, sudden and fierce. “Hey! Do you know some f*cking white girl?”





5.



Marlon had been washing the lawyer’s three old Cadillacs, pulling them out onto the driveway, one at a time, keeping a lookout for lurkers, peepers, anything strange out on the street. And he’d found something: a pink South African hatchback, obnoxiously visible on the sedate and moneyed suburban street, with a white girl in the front seat dozing.

Down in the basement, he insisted on holding Martha at gunpoint.

I said it wasn’t necessary, and Ada agreed with me, but Marlon said, “We don’t know what the f*ck this girl is,” and Shai said, very quietly, about me, “We don’t even know who he is,” which I was glad nobody heard. So we sat in an awkward arrangement around the table, back down in the basement kitchen, a very different place in the morning: last night’s dishes were a precarious pile in the sink; thin bars of sunlight found sticky patches on the concrete floor.

It was me and then Martha, her knee bouncing with nervousness, her face bleary with worry or fear. Then Shai, Marlon beside Shai, opposite Martha, aiming his .45 at her while she told her story. Ada stood by the sink, arms folded, listening.

“I saw you getting…I saw these people”—Martha caught herself—these people. She winced. “I saw you getting beat up. I was scared.” Without her cat’s-eye glasses, without any drugstore knickknack in her hair, she looked more like an adult than I was used to. “I followed the car. I tried to be careful.”

“I guess that was a stupid f*cking thing to do,” said Marlon.

“I guess we need to be more careful about being tailed.”

That was Ada, from over by the sink, and the reproach didn’t much help Marlon’s mood. He hissed and leaned back, sneering. Shai, very gently, laid her hand on his shoulder, and I saw it work, saw the tension ease out of his body. Love at work.

“All right,” said Ada, impatient. “Look.” She pointed back and forth between Martha and me.

“You know this person?”

“Yes.”

Pointed to me, then back to Martha. “You trust her?”

I hesitated a half beat, and into the hesitation welled up the horror of what I was, what I was doing. It wasn’t Martha I distrusted; it was myself.

“Yes.” I nodded. “I trust her.”

“All right.” Ada shrugged. “You still want to go in there and find that truck driver?”

Ada was a maker of plans—a hatcher of plots. Like Father Barton, like Officer Cook, like me. She came and pulled a chair up to the table and explained what she was thinking. Martha could be of use now for the same reason she had been useful in getting me across the border—because of the color of her skin. While Ada laid it out, walked through the way it could work, I watched Martha from the corner of my eye and could tell how carefully she was listening. Her eyes, which I was used to seeing jump all over the place, were focused and intense. She was getting herself ready.

The plan was crazy. Risky as hell, no question about it. There were a very few things that Ada and her group could tell me about GGSI, about the layout and security arrangements of its headquarters. Most of what they knew was secondhand or thirdhand, and much of it was outdated. Rumors, whispers, gossip about the inside. Of my specific questions, they could only answer a couple: yes, we would be screened in on arrival and checked out on departure. There were cameras, yes, all over the campus, but not in the areas that were restricted to white workers only; Alabama state law forbade the surveillance of employees without cause.

It occurred to me to ask if Ada knew anything about that one building whose identity I could not figure out from the overhead map in the full file—that unlabeled structure jammed in behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation—but of course I could not ask about it, because then I would have to explain where and how I had seen such a map.

We came to the end of the conversation. The plan was formed, as formed as it was going to get, and still Martha remained quiet. Her hands, too, were still; not fiddling with her rings, not tucking a lock of hair into the corner of her mouth. I had the odd sense of seeing her real self rise up out of the motionless form of her present body: like the person who had been inside the other person all along.