Brad Meltzer - The Inner Circle

" Beecher, it’s me… ” Orlando says in the message, his deep voice showing just a crack of flat Wisconsin accent.

My legs go numb, then my chest.

“Beecher, lookit this!” Tot yells behind me, though I swear to God, it sounds like he’s talking underwater.

“Tot, gimme one sec,” I call back.

My Lord. How can-? Orlando. That’s… Orlando…

“You need to see this, though,” Tot insists, shuffling toward me with a thick stack of paper held by a binder clip.

Still gripping the phone, I lean forward in my chair, lurching for the keypad and pounding the 3 button. This isn’t… focus!.. start over… just focus…

Beep.

“ Beecher, it’s me ,” Orlando begins again. He pauses a moment.

“Y’ever see this?” Tot interrupts, waving the pages.

“Tot, please… can it wait?”

I hit the 3 button again to buy some time. The phone’s not near my ear, but I still hear Orlando’s opening. “Beecher, it’s me.”

“You want to know if that was George Washington’s dictionary or not?” Tot asks. “Just listen: When George Washington died, Mount Vernon made a list of every single item in his possession-every candlestick, every fork, every piece of art on his walls…”

I hit 3 again. “Beecher, it’s me.”

“… and of course, every one of GW’s books,” Tot says, tossing me the copy of Entick’s Dictionary . It hits my desk with a dead thud.

“Okay… I get it, Tot.”

“The more you rush me, Beecher, the slower I’m gonna talk.”

“Okay, I’m sorry, just… please .” I press 3 again. “Beecher, it’s me.”

“The point is,” Tot continues, “the only way to find out if this is really GW’s book is to first find out if he even owned a copy.”

I hit 3 again. “And?”

“According to this, he had one.” He points to the list. One copy. Entick’s Dictionary. “Though if this is even the same copy, that still doesn’t explain how it found its way here.”

“Or even if it found its way here,” I say. “For all we know, this isn’t even part of our collection.”

“Actually, that’s easy enough to find out.” Stepping toward my computer, Tot shoos me from my seat. “C’mon… Up!.. Old man needs to sit,” he says as I hop aside, stretching the phone cord to its limits. He’s already clicking at the keyboard. Perfect. I turn my attention back to the phone…

“ Beecher, it’s me ,” Orlando begins again. He pauses a moment. “Crap, I don’t have your cell phone.” He pauses again, then his voice picks up speed. “I need you to call me. What you did…”

What I did?

“ Just call me ,” he finishes.

I hit the button and replay it again.

“Crap, I don’t have your cell phone.”

He pauses after that. Is that panic? Is he panicking? Is he sick?

“Crap, I don’t have your cell phone.”

I listen closely, but I was wrong before. His voice isn’t picking up speed. It’s fast, but no faster than usual.

“I need you to call me. What you did…”

There it is. The only moment his voice strains. Just slightly on the word did. I hit the rewind button again.

“What you did…”

He means finding the dictionary.

“What you did…”

There’s definitely an emphasis on the last word.

“What you did…”

It’s just three syllables. Three dumb words. It’s no different than looking at a photo of a happy, grinning child and then being told he died in a brutal car accident. No matter what you want to see, all you see is… it’s not just loss or sadness. To hear these words… uttered by this-this-this-ghost…

“What you did…”

All I hear is blame.

“ Just call me ,” Orlando finally says at 4:58 p.m. yesterday.

As his voice fades, I feel my body churn, straining for its own equilibrium. It doesn’t come. I’m squeezing the phone so hard, streams of sweat run from my fist down the inside of my wrist, seeping into my watchband.

It’s not until I look down that I spot Tot arching his head toward me, studying me with his good eye. If he heard…

He stares right at me.

Of course he heard.

I wait for him to judge, to warn, to say that I need to get rid of Orlando’s message.

“You’re not alone in this, Beecher.”

“Actually, I kinda am,” I say as I hear a beep on the other line. I look down at caller ID, which reads Security . I don’t pick up. The last thing I need right now is Khazei quizzing me again about Orlando’s death. Instead, I forward Orlando’s message to my cell and delete it from voicemail.

Tot shakes his head. “I’m telling you, you’re not alone. You need to hear that.”

“That’s fine-and I appreciate when someone says something nice to me, Tot, but… I’m just… I don’t think I can do this.”

“Do what?”

“ This. Any of this. Tracking old books that’re hidden for Presidents… playing Spy versus Spy… getting guilt and spooky messages from dead people…”

“Guilt? What’re you talking about?”

“Didn’t you hear Orlando’s message? When he said, What you did… — heart attack or murder-he might as well have added… when you caused my death. ”

“You really think Orlando was calling you for some bitter scolding?”

“What else am I supposed to think?”

At his jawbone, just below his ear, Tot twirls a few stray hairs of his wizard beard between his thumb and pointer-finger while eyeing the gutted copy of Entick’s Dictionary . “Maybe he was amazed you found it. Maybe he just realized the consequences: What you did…” He lowers his voice to sound like Orlando: “… you just uncovered something no one knew existed. President Wallace was… God knows what he was up to, but you found it, Beecher. You’re a hero.”

“A hero? For what? For spilling coffee? For trying to impress a girl from high school in the hopes of forgetting about my fiancee? I mean it, Tot. I woke up this morning with my feet sweating! Name one hero who has sweaty feet!”

I wait for him to answer-for him to pull some historian nonsense and tell me that Teddy Roosevelt was known for his sweaty feet, but instead Tot just sits there, still twirling his beard.

My phone again starts to ring. Like before, caller ID reads Security. Like before, I don’t pick it up.

Nodding his approval, Tot takes a deep breath through his nose. “Beecher, y’know what the best part of this job is? For me, it’s this sheet of paper,” he says, picking up a random sheet of paper from my desk and flapping it back and forth. “On any given day, this sheet is just another sheet in our collection, right? But then, one day-9/11 happens-and suddenly this sheet of paper becomes the most vital document in the U.S. government .” He tosses the paper back to my desk. “That’s what we’re here to witness, Beecher. We witness it and we protect it. We’re the caretakers of those sheets of paper that’ll someday define the writing of history.”

“Tot, I think you’re being a little dramatic about paper.”

“You’re not listening. It’s not just with paper. It also happens with people .”

At the far end of the office, the front door opens and there’s a quiet metallic clunk on our magnet board. Like a periscope rising from a submarine, I peer above the cubicles and spot my fellow archivist Rina, who offers a surprisingly warm Mona Lisa smile considering how pissed she was yesterday at coming in number two in our internal rankings.