David Koepp - Cold Storage

When he was ready, Roberto dialed. The phone rang once, and the same woman’s voice answered.

“Fenelon Imports.”

“Zero-four-seven-four blue indigo.”

“Thank you, Mr. Diaz.”

“What’s up?”

“We’re getting a temperature breach alert from a decommissioned facility in the Atchison mines in eastern Kansas.”

He paused. I’m here now.

“Mr. Diaz?”

“Yeah. I’d wondered about that. Given the weather changes.”

“Are you—”

“I wrote a memo in 1997 on that very subject,” he said.

“I don’t see it in the file.”

“And I called, about five years after that. And six or seven years after that.”

“So you are familiar with that situation?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it something we need to worry about?”

“Yes, it’s something you need to worry about.”

“We thought, as a decommissioned facility—”

“What time did the alert come in?” he asked.

He heard a pause and some keys clicking while she checked on a computer. “Three eleven P.M. central standard time.”

“And you’re just calling me now?”

“It took some time to figure out whom to call.”

“What if I didn’t answer?” he asked. “Who does it say you call next?”

“It doesn’t.”

Roberto took a breath and looked out the window. “Okay. I’m seventy-three miles from Seymour Johnson. I can be there in ninety minutes. I’ll need a plane from there and a car waiting on the other end. I’ll drive the car myself. Nobody else goes.”

“Is it your opinion that this qualifies as a Heightened Threat?”

“My opinion is it qualified as an Exceptional Threat at three eleven P.M.”

She paused. “I’ll see what I can do about transportation.”

“I’m not finished. I don’t have any equipment.”

“What do you need?”

“Everything on the list.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Diaz, I’m just not familiar with—”

“I wrote an ECI white paper in ’92. It’s compartmented and stored in the clean vault. It was twenty-five years ago, you’ll need different software to read it, but I archived the program along with it and a floppy drive to run it. Get Gordon Gray to clear you. Only Gordon Gray, you don’t need to call anybody else. Read the report and have everything listed in appendix A—I mean everything, every single thing—in the car in Kansas when I land. Understood?”

“I can’t do all that without multiple authorizations.”

“What’s your name?”

“You know we’re not—”

“Just your first one. Even a fake one. Something to call you.”

She hesitated. “Abigail.”

Definitely not her real name, the slight rise in her voice gave that away. She enjoyed the flight of fancy. Good for her, it’s probably why she got into this line of work and she didn’t get to use it much, handling dead-file outcalls at Fort Belvoir in the middle of the night.

“Okay, Abigail. Remember those good grades you got in high school? And the sports you trained your ass off for? The college you fought to get into. The number of times you said no when people wanted to go out and party and you knew you had to stay in and study. Remember the looks your family gave you when you told them what you wanted to do for a living, the abuse you put up with your first year in the department, and the personal life you’ve given up for the last, I don’t know, from your voice it sounds like maybe ten, twelve years now?”

“Eight.”

“Okay, so it’s getting to you quick. That happens. But all those sacrifices, all the shit you’ve had to eat just because you wanted to do what was right for your country? This is what it was for, Abigail.”

“Yes, sir.”

He could tell by the tiny quaver in her voice that he could still give a good we’re in the shit now speech when he needed it.

“Get the stuff on the list. I’ll be at Seymour at two fifteen A.M. EST.”

He hung up.

ANNIE WOKE UP, UNPROMPTED, ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER. FAST ASLEEPone second, wide-awake the next. She came out to the kitchen, where there was one light on, over the sink. She knew what she’d find in there even before she came in the room. Roberto would have washed and dried the mug from his tea and put it away, the same with the strainer. The kitchen would be unchanged from the way they’d left it when they went to bed, except for the snow globe. It would be sitting on the counter next to the coffee machine, on top of a single sheet of plain white paper, on which he would have drawn a heart with a red Sharpie.

That’s how it was.

Annie stared at the snow globe for a moment. She picked it up and gave it a shake. Snow fell on the kids and their sleds. On the one hand, it was kind of nice to see the thing again; it had been more than three years since it had been out of the safe.

On the other hand, she wished to hell they’d picked something else to use for the signal.

However long most people imagine it takes to chip half a dozen coats of dried paint and a thin overspread of concrete away from the grooved edge that runs around a manhole cover, it was way longer than Teacake and Naomi had figured. If they hadn’t found the wide-slotted screwdriver in the tool cabinet, they might never have gotten it open at all.

They took turns with the tools. You couldn’t strike more than six or seven hammer blows in a row without needing a break from the painful vibrations that shot through your hands, as if you’d just hit an inside fastball with the thin end of the bat. Twice Teacake hit the screwdriver too hard. He’d thrown both tools down and rolled around on the floor, clutching his palms between his thighs, showing off the breadth and originality of his curse-word vocabulary. Naomi was more methodical, aiming her blows carefully and measuring their impact. Her progress was steady and considered, and hers was the final blow, the one that chipped away the last chunk of paint and concrete and made the cover move a fraction of an inch.

“You got it.”

“Get the pry bar,” she said.

He grabbed it from the closet, wedged it into one of the four slots evenly spaced around the circumference of the cover. The metal disk came up with a slight whoosh of decompression as the fetid air from below swapped places with the clean air above. Teacake wedged the bar in farther, pushed down on it as hard as he could, and got the handle end almost all the way down to the floor.

“Stand on it!” he told her.

She did, one foot at a time, pinning the bar to the ground once all her weight was on it. Teacake wiggled his fingers into the three-inch gap between the cover and the ground.

“Don’t put your fingers in there,” she said, but he didn’t answer, because they were this far, and there was no other obvious, easy way. Plus she hadn’t said it with much conviction, and he knew that what she really meant was “Put your fingers in there!”

But that was okay, because they were on the same page at this point, in it together all the way.

He strained like hell, wishing he’d stayed with the chest and upper-body work he’d done for a year and a half at Ellsworth. He would have dearly loved for her to see some of that now, because he had been cut, man, and he’d been really proud of it, it was such a change, he’d been a skinny kid for as long as he could remember. But almost the minute he got out he felt puffy and ridiculous, so he’d cut out the gym work and hadn’t missed it at all. Well, maybe he missed the feelings right after, when everything was flowing and you felt sort of happy and angry at the same time, that sensation was cool, but really, if she could have seen him then although you know I don’t look that bad now, was she just looking at my biceps a second ago? or, oh shit! His mind had wandered and he was losing his grip, the thing was slipping, he was going to drop it.