Brad Meltzer - The Inner Circle

For that reason, she had a perfect view of the poor creature that was a mess of twisted red and black organs covered in flies.

For Carla, the mother and Maltese owner, that was the worst part of her bad day-being stuck with that image in her head.

She couldn’t shake the image as she turned onto Brachton Road.

She couldn’t shake it as she pulled into the enormous employee parking lot that sat across the road from the underground storage facility known as Copper Mountain.

And as she left her car, stepped into the cold wind that was whipping off the nearby Pennsylvania hills, and rushed for the arriving white school bus that served as the employee shuttle, she still saw that mess of red and black.

It was that image, still floating in her mind, that took all of her attention as she and her fellow employees packed together to get on board the arriving bus.

It was because she was thinking of that image that Carla didn’t even notice, in the usual crush to get on the bus, the young black-haired woman standing so close behind her.

“Please-go ahead-you were first,” Clementine said, flashing a warm smile and motioning politely.

“Thanks,” Carla replied, climbing aboard without even noticing how much Clementine’s hair and overall coloring matched her own.

Within minutes, the white school bus rolled through security and pulled up to the main entrance at the mouth of the cave. After all these years, Carla was used to working underground. But as they entered the cave, and a long slow shadow crept across the roof of the bus and swallowed the remaining daylight, Carla felt that familiar wiggle in her belly. Spotting the armed guards that always greeted them as they stepped off the shuttle, she then reached into her purse, fished for her ID, and-

“Craparoo,” she whispered to herself. “I need to go back,” Carla called out to the bus driver.

“Everything okay?” Clementine asked.

“Yeah. I think I just left my ID in my car.”

“I do that all the time,” Clementine said, heading for the front of the bus, where she took out the ID she’d lifted from Carla’s purse, flashed it at the guard, and followed the other employees along the concrete path into Copper Mountain.

Carla Lee was definitely having a bad day.

But Clementine, so far, was having a great one.

Especially if they’d found the file she was looking for.

" It’s under us,” Dallas says.

“Whattya mean?” I ask.

“The place. The caves,” Dallas explains as the narrow two-lane road sends us rising and falling and rising again over yet another set of low twisting hills, which are getting harder to see as the 4 p.m. sky grows dark. “That’s why the road’s like this. I think the caves are right under us.”

I nod, staring down at my phone, which casts a pale blue glow in the car and is still getting enough signal for me to search the websites of all the D.C. TV stations to see if anyone’s covering the story.

I search for Nico’s name… for my name… even for the word homicide or murder . Nothing. No mention of St. Elizabeths, no mention of a dead barber, and most important, no mention of me being wanted as a fugitive.

“Now do you understand why no one’s heard of us in two hundred years?” Dallas asks, once again trying to put me at ease. It almost works-until I gaze out at the snow-covered trees and we blow past the red, white, and blue road sign with the picture of George Washington.

Welcome to the Washington Trail-1753

It’s silly and a meaningless coincidence, but I can’t help but imagine Nico’s joy if he knew that we were driving the same path that George Washington marched on back in 1753.

“Beecher, stop thinking what you’re thinking,” Dallas warns.

“You have no idea what I’m thinking.”

“I saw the sign. It’s not an omen.”

“I never said it was an omen.”

Dallas hears my tone. He believes me. “Though it is kinda haunted house,” he admits.

“It’s definitely haunted house,” I say with a nod.

With a few quick turns, Dallas weaves us deeper into the hills, where at every curve in the road the nearest tree has a red reflector sunk into its trunk. Out here, the roads don’t have lights, which we need even more as the winter sky grows black.

“You sure this is right?” I ask.

Before he can answer, my phone vibrates in my hand. Caller ID tells me who it is.

“Tot?” Dallas asks.

I nod. It’s the fourth time he’s called in the last few hours. I haven’t picked up once. The last thing I need is for him to fish and potentially figure out where we are.

As we round the final curve, the hills level out and a brand-new glow blinds us in the distance, forcing us to squint. Straight ahead, giant metal floodlights dot the long field that stretches out in front of us. A familiar churn in my stomach tells me what my eyes can’t see.

“This is it, isn’t it?”

Dallas doesn’t answer. He’s staring at a white bus that slowly rumbles through the brightly lit parking lot on our left.

The only other sign of life is a fluorescent red triangle that looks like a corporate logo and is set into a haystack-sized man-made hill and serves as the sole welcome mat. You don’t come this way unless you know what you’re looking for.

Just past the red triangle, at the only intersection for miles, a narrow paved road slopes down to the left, toward a high-tech check-in building, then keeps going until it dead-ends at the base of the nearby stone cliffside that surrounds the little canyon that we’re now driving in.

But as we make the left toward the check-in building, it’s clear that the road doesn’t dead-end. It keeps going, into a black archway that looks like a train tunnel, inside the cliff and down underground.

“Stay in your car! I’m coming to you,” a guard calls out in a flat western Pennsylvania accent, appearing from nowhere and pointing us away from the check-in building and toward a small freestanding guardhouse that looks more like a construction shed.

I look again to my right. There are two more sheds and a bunch of workers wearing hard hats. The check-in building is still under construction.

“Here… right here,” the guard says, motioning us into place outside the security shed-and into view of its two different security cameras. “Welcome to Copper Mountain,” he adds as Dallas rolls down his window. “I assume you got an appointment?”

Racing in the golf cart, our hair blows in a swirl as Dallas and I whip down one of the cave’s long cavities.

“… just so glad to have you both here,” gushes Gina Paul, our driver, a short, overfriendly woman with a pointy-beak nose, smoker’s breath, and straight blonde hair that’s pulled back so tight, it acts as a facelift.

“I’m sorry it’s such short notice,” I tell her.

“Short notice… it’s fine. Short notice is fine,” she says as I realize she’s just like my aunt who repeats everything you say. Her nametag says she’s an account manager, but I don’t need that to know she’s in sales. “So, so great to finally meet you, Beecher,” she adds even though she doesn’t mean it.

She doesn’t care who I am.

But she does care where I work.

Fifty years ago, this cave was one of Pennsylvania’s largest limestone mines. But when the limestone ran dry, Copper Mountain, Inc., bought its 1,100 acres of tunnels and turned it into one of the most secure off-site storage areas on the eastern seaboard.

And one of the most profitable.

That’s a fact not lost on Gina, who, by how fast this golf cart is now moving, realizes just how much money the National Archives spends here every year.