Underground Airlines(85)

I didn’t have to breach any firewalls to get to sweet dumb Matty Newell’s desktop, because he’d written his passwords in scratchy pencil on the back of the picture of himself with his wife and his dog. I trawled his hard drive. I entered search terms; I refined them; I found a spreadsheet, living on his desktop but cloned on an intranet server, called Contract Drivers Database, updated most recently ten days ago.

The truck drivers were identified here with four-character codes, and from Angie at Whole Wide World Logistics I had HR59, and now I was able to give HR59 a name: William Smith.

William Smith. I stopped, staring at the screen, my hands at rest on either side of the keyboard. The clock on the upper right corner of Newell’s screen gave me nine more minutes. There was no phone number listed for William Smith. No e-mail. No evident means of communication whatsoever.

I stared at the name, feeling time slip out from under me, hearing the mad acceleration of the music in my head, wondering how many f*cking William Smiths there had to be in the state of Alabama. How many Willys and Billys and Bills were we talking about in the Birmingham metro area alone? In lieu of a phone number for Mr. Smith was a six-digit number that had to be a driver’s license number, and, after a couple of slashes, more indecipherable coding: FWH 9, B8. Numbers and letters. William Fucking Smith.

I made a fist and pounded it down onto the desk, and the computer jumped and shivered. Easy, Victor. Easy, Brother. Easy, now.

If I couldn’t find my man, I could find Martha’s. Fulfill my other responsibility—the other reason I was here. I memorized William Smith’s tangle of identifying numbers and closed out the spreadsheet, tunneled back into the hard drive, typing furiously, breathing hard. I had seven and a half more minutes, and it took me just three of them to find what Martha had been prepared to drop almost thirty grand on—the infamous TorchLight database: every person in bondage, all across the Four. The three million, listed by service name, by PIN, by marks and scars, all organized and straightforward and user-friendly.

Here he was; here was Samson. Martha’s love and Lionel’s father. The man and his fate, in black and white on the screen before me. I hovered there, hunched forward, eyes wide, frozen for a minute’s contemplation.

“Well, damn it,” I said quietly.

I read it again, as simple a story as it was. Preparing myself to explain it to her. This is what she wanted to know, and now she would know. Worst-case scenario.

Two beeps from the hallway. I jerked my head toward the door as it slowly pushed open.

Three minutes early.

There was no hiding. I had no weapon. I made my hands into fists as the door came open and saw Newell in the doorway, his loafers on the carpet, his big belly, his thick right hand frozen on the handle. His eyes wide with confusion, trying to make sense of what he could see: a black man upright at his desk, fingers on the keys of the keyboard; to Mr. Newell I might as well have been an ape or a horse, upright and clacking away. Martha was in the shadow behind him, still in the hallway, eyes flashing, pleading apology—I held him as long as I—

“What…” he said. “What—what on earth are you doing?”

“Stay,” I said, hard and flat. “Stay,” but Newell followed some ridiculous manful instinct and put his body in front of Martha’s, protecting his guest from the one-man slave uprising in his office. But Martha, thinking quickly herself, had stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. She made a gun of two fingers and jammed them into his back, and Newell fell immediately for the oldest trick in the goddamn book. He stuck his hands up in the air.

“My God,” he said to her. “You’re…” A pink flush came into his thick neck. His eyes were wet with confusion. “Are you a part of this? What is this?”

Martha didn’t answer. I kept talking to Newell as though he were in obedience school.

“Step forward slowly,” I said. “Your arms raised.”

He obeyed. He raised his hands higher, bending his poorly tailored sport coat out of shape, tugging the hem of his dress shirt out of his waistband.

“Just…I never—I never did anything to hurt any Negro,” he said. “I never did.” Sincerely he said it. Believing it.

“Get down on your knees. Lace your hands behind your head.”

He lowered himself down, a series of ungainly motions, a fat, scared, graceless man trying to move unthreateningly. Down on his knees Mr. Newell risked a longing glance at his desk, at the panic button, at the telephone. He knew that he was dead. He had known for all his life in that dire, dark, late-night-fearful part of his bourgeois brain that this moment was coming, was always coming. This was the terror that was the underside of mastery. He worked in a multimillion-dollar company, economy as big as Rhode Island, built on the backs of black people kept in cages, and so there had to be a reason they were in cages—it couldn’t just be because their suffering sowed the cottonseeds and ran the bundling machines; how could it be so? It had to be because under their skin, under the smiles GGSI had painted on their faces, they were monsters.

Now here, at last, the moment had come. I stared down at him, just me, no weapon in my hand, and he literally trembled, his moon cheeks and the thickness of his neck quivering.

“Listen, Matt,” I said, calm as calm could be. “What does FWH mean?”

Newell blinked. “What?”