Another Life (28 page)

* * *

“W
ould they have it online?”
“The subway, for sure,” Terry said. “The sewer system, I don’t
think
so, but I can check.”
“I don’t need subway maps, kid. I can grab one at any station. What I need is
under
the underground. I know there’s stations all over the city where no train ever stops. Some abandoned, some never put into service. Stations mean tunnels, and tunnels stay open even if no trains go through. It’s one of
those
that we need.”
“The sewer system
has
to be on the city’s computers, so they could locate any problem immediately.”
“But not on some Web site?”
“I don’t think so. Especially now, with all the terrorism scares.”
“I’ve got an address,” I told him. “There’s no subway stop close by, but we can walk there from one of the abandoned stations I already know about. It’s the sidewalk that counts. They have to lay the concrete over
something,
right? I want to get as close to that sidewalk as I can. And that means we have to find the route from underneath, see?”
“I can try.”
I handed him a briefcase. “There’s a laptop in there. Brandname. All factory parts, but there’s no record of it existing. No serial number, not even on the components. Supposed to be the latest thing going; just came off the assembly line last week.”
“That’s great if it gets seized, but the IP—”
“There’s a building in Cleveland that’s slated for demolition,” I interrupted. “Somebody ran a T1 line into the basement. I’m not sure how they did it, but I think it was bridged from a downtown brokerage house. I don’t want you on any security cameras, anywhere. So you and me, we’re going to take a drive, okay?”
He nodded, waiting for the rest.
“We leave here about seven tonight, you’re plugged in and running by three in the morning,” I told him. “That gives you about two hours to crack into their system and grab what I need. In case that’s not long enough, I’m bringing enough extra batteries to power that thing for a month. Gets too near daylight, I got a place we can stay, come back the next night. What do you say?”
“I’ve only got one class this afternoon,” Terry answered, without looking up. “I’ll be ready to go anytime after four. But we’ll only get the one try, Burke. The second they detect an attempted intrusion, they’ll lock it all down.”
“Fair enough.”
“Pick me up at school,” he said. “I don’t want to have to explain to—”
“Me, either,” I assured him.

* * *

A
nybody asked, I was taking my nephew on a road trip, a last bonding experience before he left home.
We didn’t stop for food. Mama had us supplied with enough steel-canistered stuff to last a week. And the roadside darkness was all the restroom either of us needed.
I kept the Roadrunner at a steady nine-over all the way. Too much turnpike means too many troopers. But I did promise the kid we’d do something on the way back.

* * *

T
he key I’d paid a lot of money for let us in. And my blue-lensed LED Mini Mag found the promised T1 jack. While Terry was setting up, I made a seat for him out of some wood pilings. The windows were already boarded, but I draped a mesh shroud over Terry and the machine anyway.
“Jesus!” he said a few minutes later.
Then I heard the battery-powered printer go into action.

* * *

W
e left pieces of the computer and printer—
small
pieces, those things don’t seem to handle claw-hammer blows real well—in a couple of dozen different places on the way back. The last traces went flying out the window somewhere past Youngstown.
The building itself was coming down on Monday. The printouts were in the trunk, in the hidden slot beneath the fuel cell.
“I can’t believe it,” Terry said. “The Department of Environmental Protection has got
everything
under the city mapped. See, it’s the clearinghouse, so any other agency, or even a private contractor, can find what they—”
“What’s so amazing?” I cut him off.
“What’s amazing is, it’s like they had
no
protection on it at all. I could have cracked in even without—”
“Safety first,” I told him, as a Porsche blew by us like wind past a building.
The kid gave me a look. By the time we caught the Porsche, we were just a little over the century mark. I held the left lane until the other driver got insulted enough to try us. I dropped down a gear and let him stare at taillights until we disappeared.
“Holy—”
Before Terry could finish, I was already pulling over and killing the lights, waiting for the Porsche to fly past, chasing a ghost.
“Want to drive her?” I asked him.

* * *

“T
his would not be precise,” the Mole said, studying the printouts.
“I know.”
“No,” the pudgy little man said, firmly. “You do not. This is a time-and-distance problem.”
He drew a circle on a sheet of graph paper, then darkened the center boxes. “The object is in motion.” He began to inch the point of a blue marker from an edge of the circle toward its center. “Speed can be estimated only imprecisely, at best. So, the more powerful we make
this
”—tapping the dark center boxes inside the circle—“the more certain of…success.”
I just nodded, knowing what was coming, steeled for it.
“The closer to the center, the better. But we cannot control for closeness, so we must expand the center. That means anything with
in
that center will also be…”
“We can cut down those odds some, but it’s still going to be a dice-roll,” I admitted.
“Is there no other way?” he asked, clearly pained by what my plan could cost.
That’s when I told him the stake we were playing for.

* * *

“I
…believe I understand,” he said, minutes later. “But this is the quintessential chain-reaction formula: one faulty link and the whole thing fails.
One.
”
“We won’t even
get
to this part unless everything else is already in motion, Mole.”
“How will you ever—?”
“I
have
to be right,” I told my brother. “It’s as simple as that. I have to be. If it happened any way except the way I believe it did, it’s
already
over.”
“But even if you
are
right, even if you could make it all work, there would be…consequences. The pursuit would be relentless.”
“Mole, can I ask you something?”
He looked at me, as expressionlessly menacing as an Easter Island statue.
“If the Nazis had pulled it off, exterminated every Jew on earth, would they have stopped there?”
“No,” he answered, giving away nothing.
“After the Gypsies, after the homosexuals, what then?”
“Anything not—”
“Come on, Mole. We’re not doing politics here. When someone gets called an ‘anti-Semite,’ that means—what?—he hates Jews, right?”
The underground man moved his head a fraction.
“But that’s inaccurate, isn’t it?” I said, deliberately using the language of science, not politics. “Aren’t the Arabs also Semites? Aren’t they as close to your biological brothers as anyone on earth?”
“In Europe—”
“Don’t go there, brother. God couldn’t have written the Bible, otherwise it would read the same in
every
language, never mind this Old and New Testament thing. Men created God, not the other way around. And where was the birthplace of that creation? The cradle of civilization itself? Come on! You know it wasn’t Eden, so where was it? Where did we start?
All
of us, I mean.”
“Evolution probably was occurring in different places simultaneously,” he said, calmly. “There was no single starting point.”
“I buy that. Okay. But tell me Jews and Arabs didn’t spring from the same seed.”
He went so still that I could only sense his presence. He was doing what he was best at. I was, too. Which is why I outwaited him.
“This is likely true,” he finally conceded. “But, today—”
“I’m not running for boss of the fucking UN, Mole. I’m telling you why this could work.”
“Because the pursuers would believe it was—?”
“I don’t know where they’d look,” I told my brother. “But I know where
nobody
would be looking.”

* * *

“M
y people didn’t need no Einstein to discover infinity,” the Prof said, his voice bitter enough to etch glass. “The trail never ends, ’cause there’s nothing
at
the end. I can preach, I can teach, and I can reach. This is pure truth: the only place we go when we’re gone is where we’ve already been.”
“What we do here—”
“
That’s
what stays behind, Schoolboy. The
only
thing. They used to tell us, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. And we believed it, ’cause it was the only way to make sense out of the life we had. But that pie was a lie, and some of us, we felt that like a fire inside us. A fire you have to
keep
inside, because you don’t want it ever put out, and the whole world is nothing but steady rain.
“This fire, it burns so bright, it
makes
you see the light. The light you follow. I
know
some of us, we fed those slaveholders a whole lot of pie before
we
died. Look back with me,” he said, closing his eyes. “You see it?”
“Yes.” And I did.
“But I still believe,” the old man said, fiercely. “Not in that hustler’s handbook they preach from, but in the Word.”
“I don’t—”
“I believe in the truth,” he said, reaching for my hand. He folded my hand into a fist. “You can’t punch through the wall, son. Maybe you can’t even make a little crack in it. But if you believe, you’ll keep on hitting it until you can’t hit no more, see? Then someone comes up behind you, hits that wall in the same spot. And someone else after that.
“And someday—not tomorrow, not next year, but some glorious day—that wall starts to look like a windshield that got hit by a rock. Spiderweb cracks all over it, and now you
know:
long as we keep punching, it’s not gonna hold.
That’s
the Word.
“You know why? I’m here to tell you. We on one side of that wall; they on the other. And you know what they doing over there? They ain’t waiting on a fight; they getting ready to run. Motherfuckers are all froze up with fear, like a field mouse when a hawk’s high in the sky. They know we coming. And we ain’t taking prisoners.”
“Amen.”
“They got it all wrong, son. Money’s the wall; blood’s the punch. You got to pay the cost, all right. But not ‘pay the cost to be the boss’ that rhyme is past its time. You pay the cost so
nobody
gets to be the boss. You tell the Mole to play his role. Tell him I’m going down the road with you. Right to the end.”
I kissed his cheek. Thanking my father for backing my play this one last time.

* * *

“W
e’re going to have it right here,” Michelle told Clarence. The poor kid was trapped in my booth at Mama’s, Michelle towering over him in her heels, hands on hips, bending forward to punch home every word.
I would have felt sorry for him, but I’d spent enough time with Taralyn to know he might as well get used it. I remember Clarence complaining to the Prof: “That girl, in a
second,
she can switch from cane sugar to what they use to cut it with,” he said, lost in puzzlement and love. “I don’t mean she’s bossy. It’s not like she nags or anything. No man could want a sweeter woman. But, mahn, when she plants her feet, you could not budge her with a bulldozer.”
“What other kinda woman you
want,
fool?” the Prof demanded. “Didn’t I explain all that to you already? Her kind, they mate for life, understand? You play her wrong, she ain’t gonna jump in your lunch, go all ghetto on your sorry ass. No. You do that, she gonna die inside.
“You
hear
me, boy? A woman like your Taralyn, even if you buy yourself twenty years Inside, you don’t ever need to worry about Joe the Grinder comin’ to call. She’s gonna stand her ground, go every round. So if you ain’t ready to go all the way, don’t you even
try
and play, hear?”
“Yes, Father. I was not—”
“Don’t be developing those habits, son.”
“What do you mean?”
“You hear the Max-man talk about his woman?”
“Yes,” Clarence said, putting his palm over his heart to imitate Max’s gesture.
“That ain’t talking
about
her, boy; that’s talking about his feelings
for
her. You want to tell your buddies you love your woman, go on with it. But don’t you
ever
complain, because you end up having to
explain.
Always gonna be some moke who don’t get the joke, see?”
“Yes,” Clarence said, nodding.
“A true-hearted woman like your Taralyn, you can’t buy her, you can’t sell her, and you sure as hell can’t
tell
her. You think she some no-pride bitch you can stay out all night on, buy her some jewelry and that’ll make it right? No! You leave that kind of game to this one,” he mocked, nodding in my direction.
“Yes, sir.”
Poor bastard. And now he had to sit through Michelle “explaining” that the
only
place he could formally propose would be in a restaurant where ptomaine goes to die, the dirt is thicker than the carpet, and the vinyl had lost its virginity before he was born. “What were
you
going to do?” she mocked. “Take her out to eat, bury the ring in the dessert, some cheesy stunt like that?”
From the look on Clarence’s face, apparently so. Me, I pretended I was somewhere else.
“We’ll redecorate!” she said, half orgasmic at the very prospect. “You won’t recognize the place, I swear.”
“But this is not our—”
Mama strolled over from her perch by the cash register, tracking straight as a steel-hulled icebreaker.
“For one night,” she said, closing the deal. “We get a car—” She cut herself off in mid-sentence, seeing Clarence start to open his mouth. “Not
your
car. Limousine. All special. Flowers, crystal. Make perfect.”
“Mama, I so very deeply appreciate everything. But I would be…embarrassed, if I had to—”
“You think
we
be here?” Mama stared him down. “Sure,
someplace
here. But not in room. Waiters come, sure. Serve all special dishes. But not stay. You finish food, you signal, everybody disappear. Okay?”
“But the
minute
she accepts, then we can all—?”
“Yes, little sister,” he said to Michelle, grinning despite his anxiety.
Everyone was quiet, breathing in the moment.
“
After
we finish the job,” I reminded them all, breaking the spell.