Children of the Underground (8 page)

She didn't bother to close the door behind her. She placed the tray on the table and sat down next to me. “We thought you might be hungry, Maria,” she said, sliding the tray toward me. I ate. Whatever was going to happen to me, I thought I'd need my strength. The woman sat and watched me eat.

“What have you done with Michael?” I asked when I was finished, deciding that I would simply repeat the question until I got an answer.

“He's fine,” she said. “He's here with us.”

“But they shot him. I saw it.”

“It was a Taser,” the woman answered, “painful but not harmful to someone in Michael's condition. We don't normally use them, but things didn't go as we expected yesterday.”

“Nobody helped us,” I said out loud, remembering what happened.

“It's amazing what you can get away with in D.C. with a dark suit and an earpiece, Maria.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Michael told us who you are,” she answered, “but we already knew a lot about you.”

“Who are you?”

“We're trying to help,” she answered. She smiled when she spoke.

“What now?” I asked.

“When Michael wakes up, Clara wants to talk to you both.”

“Who's Clara? Why is Michael still asleep? Are you sure he's okay?”

“Michael's fine. He was up late last night. We were trying to get him to talk to us. He refused to tell us anything without you there. Eventually, we gave up.” The woman stood up and walked toward the door. “I'm going to leave the door open,” she said. “But we'd appreciate it if you stayed here until we come back to get you.” I nodded. Michael was here. I had no reason to leave. The woman walked away, leaving the door open as promised.

When the woman and another man came for me, they led me back up the flight of stairs to the main floor and through the maze of desks and computers. I tried to listen to the conversation of one man who was talking on the phone, but he was speaking Spanish. We turned down another hallway. I could see a room at the end. Inside, a confident-looking gray-haired woman sat behind a large desk.

“That's Clara?” I whispered to the woman in front of me, not knowing why I whispered.

“Yes,” she answered.

When we stepped into the room, I saw Michael sitting in a chair. He stood up when he saw me and put his arms around me. I grabbed him and held him tightly. We had touched only two times before, and one of those times Michael was holding a knife to my throat, but I held him now like I would fall if I let him go. “Are you okay, Maria?” he asked.

“I'm fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“Alive,” Michael answered.

I eased my grip on him and stepped back. “Who are these people?” I asked, knowing that he would tell me the truth.

“They're the Underground,” Michael answered. “They're the people we're looking for.” I looked around the room at the faces of the man and the woman who escorted me here. I looked at the woman behind the desk. I expected them to look different.

“Please sit down,” the woman behind the desk said, motioning to the two chairs facing her. It was impossible to tell how old the woman was. Her gray hair was pulled back into a ponytail, but the skin on her face was taut. She looked strong. Michael sat back down. I sat in the other chair. The woman closed the door behind us, but both she and her colleague stayed inside, standing by the door. “My name is Clara,” the woman behind the desk said to me.

“Is that your real name?” Michael asked before I had time to respond.

Clara looked at Michael. “It's nice to see that you're talking now, Michael. It's not my given name, if that's what you mean. We all take pseudonyms when we start working here, hoping that if word got out, it might help to protect our families.” She looked at Michael again. “My given name doesn't mean anything anymore.” I glanced out the windows behind the woman at the thick, green forest.

“Do you have any other questions you'd like to get out of the way, Michael?” Clara asked. From her tone of voice, I got the impression that she'd had this conversation before.

“Whose side were you on?” Michael asked without looking away from her.

“It doesn't matter,” Clara answered. She picked up a pen and rolled it between her fingers.

“It matters to me,” Michael answered.

“It shouldn't. People here come from both sides of the War. Any other questions?” Clara asked, looking at Michael. When Michael didn't say anything, she looked at me.

“What do the poems mean?” I asked.

“What poems?” Clara asked.

“The ones on the postcards.”

“Nothing,” Clara said. “They don't mean anything. We have a system. We target certain people that we think could use our help. When we identify one of these people, on either side”—she looked at Michael—“we send them the postcards. The only important information in the letters is the place and the day. We keep a list of who might show up and send teams out to pick them up if they do. The poems simply distract people. They're easier to contact if they have something else on their mind.”

“So, what happened yesterday?” I asked, confused.

“Simple. When we reached out to Michael, he ran. Our teams know that when that happens, the safest thing to do is to subdue the target and bring him in. If he gets away, we have to worry about our own safety. Secrecy is what keeps us alive. We thought Michael might be running from us so that he could turn us in. We didn't know that he was running to you.”

“How do you know who to target?” I asked.

“We have spies,” Clara answered. “We have spies in the intelligence groups on both sides. They tell us about the people who get into trouble and the people who run.”

“You have spies?” Michael asked, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

“Yes,” Clara answered. “There are spies all over this War. Both sides have spies working inside the other's organizations. There are double agents. It's like any other war.” Clara laughed. “And we have spies too. That's how we heard about you, Michael.”

They had spies. They could have helped us. They could have hidden us. They could have hidden me and you and your father and we could still be together. We could be a normal family. “If you have spies,” I said, staring at Clara, “why didn't you help me and Joseph?”

Clara stared back at me. Her eyes were full of regret. “We tried, Maria. We tried to help you, but it was too dangerous. All we could do was try to warn you when they got close. We did that once. When you were in Charleston, one of our spies reached out and warned Joseph that they were coming for you. We were still monitoring you, waiting for it to be safe to contact you, but you were constantly being watched. Then it was too late.”

I felt my heart breaking all over again. People had been trying to help us. It made the pain worse. “I'm sorry, Maria,” Clara said. I nodded to her, but I wasn't able to accept her apology.

“If you believe so much in your cause, why don't you fight for it?” Michael asked.

“You can't fight war with war. I believe that. And what do you think, Michael?” Clara asked. “You came to us, remember. We just told you how to get here.”

“I think you're a cult,” Michael answered.

“If that's what you think,” Clara began, “why did you stop fighting?”

Michael shook his head. “I didn't stop fighting. I just stopped taking orders.” It was the same line that he'd fed me.

Clara sat there for a few moments, tapping the pen in her hand on her desk. She was staring at Michael, seemingly trying to determine if he was worth her effort. “Do you even know what you're fighting for, Michael?”

“I know why I fight,” Michael answered with pride.

“Sure you do,” Clara responded. “But the War. Do you have any idea what the War is about?”

“I've heard stories,” Michael said, wary of falling into Clara's trap.

“Slaves?” Clara asked. Michael nodded his head in affirmation. “And you're the good guys, trying to keep the other side from enslaving the world?” Michael didn't respond. “You don't really believe the slave story. Do you, Michael? You're better than that.”

“How can you be so sure that it's not true?” Michael asked.

“I know that story's a bunch of horseshit because I've heard people on both sides tell it. And no matter who tells it, they're always the hero and the people on the other side are always the ones trying to enslave the world.”

“Okay,” Michael said to Clara, “then what is the War about?”

Clara shook her head. “I have no idea. That's why I do this. All I know is that a lot of people get a lot of power from this War, people who would be nothing without this War but who are, instead, virtually kings. Those people, the really powerful people, they don't have much incentive to end the War, and every reason to keep it going.”

“So you're saying that they don't want to win?” Michael asked.

Clara nodded.

“I can't believe that,” Michael said. He was staring down at the floor. “I know too many people who've already died to believe that.”

“We can help you, Michael. We can get you out. We couldn't do it for Joseph, but we can help you.”

Michael sat there in silence. No one in the room said anything. Then Michael spoke. “I don't want your help.”

“Then why are you here?” Clara asked.

“For her,” Michael said, motioning toward me.

Clara glanced at me for less than a second. “She's not part of this, Michael. We can't do anything to help her.”

“My son,” I said, not knowing how to finish the sentence. Clara looked at me again and then looked right back at Michael. I was holding my breath.

“Michael?” I pleaded.

Michael was sitting low in his chair, sliding farther down as Clara tried to dismantle his entire world. He sat back up. “I want you to help Maria find her son,” Michael said to Clara. I began to breathe again.

“That's not what we do,” Clara said. She leaned back in her chair, shaking her head.

“You have spies,” I said, talking quickly. “You can find out where he is. You can find out where they've taken him.”

“I can't risk my spies on that,” Clara answered. “We're in the business of helping people escape the War. We're not in the kidnapping business.”

“But my son will be part of this War,” I said. I leaned in toward Clara's desk. I was in a panic. If she wouldn't help me, who would? “If I don't save him, he'll be a part of the War. You can save him from the War now. You don't have to wait.”

Clara shook her head. “Your son already is part of the War, Maria—whether you like it or not. When he's old enough to make his own decisions, hopefully we'll still be here to help him. But he's got to decide for himself.”

“Why?” I asked. It didn't make any sense. These people seemed as brainwashed as everyone else. They're not innocent. You still are. You can still be saved. If they couldn't see that, then they're still blind.

“That's how it works,” Clara answered. I couldn't even think of a way to respond.

“What can you tell us?” Michael asked, breaking the silence. “Do you have any idea where Maria's son is?”

“No,” Clara answered. She looked at Michael. “Are you sure this is what you want, Michael?”

“Tell us what you know,” Michael answered.

Clara glanced at me again. I braced myself for what she was going to say next. “We don't know where your son is, Maria,” she said. “We don't even know where they're keeping that information. We don't track children. We concentrate on saving people who want to be saved.” She took out a blank piece of paper. “All I can do is explain the system for you.” She started drawing on the paper. She drew one large box in the middle of the page surrounded by a circle of smaller boxes. “It's a shockingly low-tech, paper-only system,” she said. “There are different locations, each with different information.” She pointed to the boxes on the outer rim of the page. “There's redundancy built in. No one piece of information is kept in only one spot.” She drew letters in each of the boxes. A few of the boxes contained some of the same letters. “Both sides are afraid of having one of their intelligence cells raided, so they won't centralize the actual information. Then there are central hubs that contain the keys that map out the information.” Clara pointed to the box in the middle of the page. “If you want to find out where your son is, you need to find out where they keep that information.” She pointed to all the boxes on the edge of the page, the ones with the letters in them. “To do that, you either need to go to the central location to find that information or you need to find someone who already knows it. The central location is nearly impenetrable. So I'd suggest trying to find someone who might know where the information is first.”

“Then what?” I asked. “What do we do when we find out where they keep the information?”

“You either break in and get the information or you bribe someone to get it for you. This War is not as pure as Michael thinks.”

“I can't do that on my own,” I muttered at Clara. “I need your help.”

“I'm sorry, Maria,” she said. “I can't risk one of my men on a child who's in no immediate danger.”

They didn't realize how important this was, because it seemed small to them. They didn't realize that it was my whole world. I felt cold, like I'd been stripped naked and pushed into icy water.

Clara turned back to Michael. “If you want to escape, we can help you.” Then she looked at me. “If you want to go the other way, if you want to go deeper inside the War, you have to do that by yourself.”

Michael stood up. “Take us back to D.C.,” he said.

“Are you sure that's what you want?” Clara said. “We're not going to contact you again. If you leave now, you're on your own forever.”