Underground Airlines(84)
“I tell you what, Jane,” said poor dumb Newell. “Let’s head up to the cafeteria, and I’ll buy you some lunch. Okay? We’ll have some lunch and…and you can tell me what you got to tell me. Don’t have to fuss around with all the tech and all that. You just lay it out for me, and we shall discuss it. Would that be all right?”
Her look of abject gratitude—Newell the savior, Newell the gentleman—was a thing of wonder.
“Oh, Matty, that would be so kind of you. And we really do have a remarkable product.”
“Of course,” he said. “And I’d sure like a chance to hear about it.”
He stood up. She closed the laptop, which we had loaded with exactly one slide, and followed him to the door.
“Oh, wait,” she said, glancing at me for just one half a second, just a quarter second to make sure that this was still our play. I nodded, a degree of head tilt well below Newell’s notice, and Jane Reynolds said, “Is there somewhere my boy can wait?”
“Oh.”
Newell stopped, flummoxed. I do believe the man had genuinely forgotten that I was in the room. “Well, he can wait right here, as a matter of fact. This door’ll lock behind me, and it won’t open until we come back. That all right with you?”
He wasn’t asking me, of course. Jane Reynolds said that it would be just fine with her, and he guided her with a hand on her back out into the hallway.
I waited five minutes after the door shut. I stood perfectly still and counted. Three hundred seconds.
While I was counting I stood as Jane Reynolds would expect to find her boy standing—in the corner with my head lowered, touching nothing, like a powered-down robot.
At three hundred I sprang into motion and the beautiful new music appeared in my head, the wild rhythms from the lawyer’s basement. It kicked up in me loud, so as I got to work it was with the urgency of that music. I moved through that small office like a drumroll, like an ascending scale.
I rolled Newell’s chair over to the bookshelf and stood on the seat and ran my finger along the topmost row of binders: dust. Same with the second level, and so on down to the floor: dust, dust, dust, all the thick binders and regulatory volumes so much set dressing.
I rolled the chair back to the desk. I already knew where this was going—I knew I would end up having to get into Newell’s computer. This was the twenty-first century: any kind of important document, anything that mattered, would be on the hard drive or on the server. But I did not want to be hacking if I could help it, so I was praying for a break here; I was hoping like crazy. I tugged open the narrow drawer of the desk, rifled past the stapler and the scissors, then I ducked over to the filing cabinet while I bent a paper clip into a twist.
Martha and I had agreed on twenty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes in Newell’s office to get the two pieces of information we were after, one for me and one for her, plus a five-minute margin on either end.
Nine minutes had already passed, five minutes of silent counting and four minutes of work, as I threaded the tip of the paper clip into the chintzy lock of the filing cabinet. I felt as I had at Saint Anselm’s Catholic Promise, seven days ago now, Thursday to Thursday and a lifetime in the past. Break into a building, crack a desk: these were the easy assignments, the small projects outside of thought or contemplation, beyond regret or conscience. A hard deadline, a specific task. I twisted, caught the hook of the child’s-play mechanism, twisted again, and felt it give. The music played, jumping, triumphant, in my head.
There were five drawers to the filing cabinet. I worked from the top to the bottom.
Purchase orders, record keeping, maintenance logs—one thick folder with the details of a hundred different trucks and trailers. My forefinger ran along the spines of hanging folders. Forty-five seconds per drawer: pull open, quick examination, push it closed. Accident reports, insurance documents, vehicle registrations. The bottom drawer was financials: purchase orders and invoices, summaries of fuel expenditures quarter by quarter, reports on cost for overall fleet maintenance.
Buried on the bottom of the bottommost drawer, hidden beneath the thickness of the hanging files, was a curled bundle of papers wrapped in a rubber band.
What I was looking for would not be hidden, but I reached for this rolled-up sheaf anyway, tugged it up from its hiding place. It was a manuscript, typeset, dog-eared, with nervous doodles around the edges. I Love You, Too, Sir: A Tale of Forbidden Romance, by Matthew R. Newell.
“Jesus Christ, Matty,” I muttered and slipped it back where it had been. “Jesus f*cking Christ.”
I turned back to the desk and moved Newell’s mouse to make the computer blink out of its standby sleep. I cracked my knuckles. I did not sit. I hovered over the desk, back bent, and got to it.
Once, in Chicago, someone had slipped me the URL for the US Marshals Service open cases page. I sat in horror in a library carrel, blocking the screen with my body, blocking from the world the sight of my own five-year-old file photo. Is that what I look like? I remember thinking. I clicked on the thumbnail picture to make it large. Those eyes—those eyes—I drew back from the picture of myself on that screen as if from a picture of the devil himself. Had that really been me?
My knowledge of computers, my ability to hack a database, to punch through firewalls, all that came later. That was all Bridge’s people. Four months of training in Arizona, plenty of that time in dark rooms navigating databases, penetrating secure servers, learning to follow the traces of men across the Internet.