That was why Jared had been called in—because he was old. “I think he’s a kid. I think everybody’s getting all worked up over an ordinary kid. The luck will run out and everybody’s going to feel stupid for caring so much. And I’m not just talking about us. I’m talking about the rebels too. These things, they come and go.” Jared waved his hand in front of him as if he were shooing away a fly.
“You’re probably right,” Peter said, to Jared’s relief. “This place is a fucking vault anyway. Nobody can get in here—not alive. Remember the last group that tried? How far did they get, the front door? It was like a war zone in here and they never even got the door open.”
Jared remembered. He nodded to Peter. The last group that tried weren’t rebels. They were from the other side. Normally, when the other side discovers one of your locations, you move it. Not this time. This time, they kept it as a sign of strength. It was a message. We don’t care that you know we’re here because you can’t get in anyway. But those guys didn’t know what Jared knew. They didn’t know the holes in the system. They didn’t have the right plan.
Peter kept talking. “Do you remember what you did to that one guy to make him talk?” Jared nodded again. He remembered. “I’ve never seen someone beg for mercy so fast.”
“I don’t play games,” Jared said to Peter. “Speaking of which, can I go? Are you satisfied that we don’t have anything to worry about?”
“You can go,” Peter said, waving Jared away with his hand. Jared stood up and started to walk toward the door. “I’m still going to double the security, though,” Peter said. “Just in case.” Jared stopped. If they doubled the security, his plan wouldn’t work. Jared knew it. If they doubled the security, no plan would work. They would fail and everyone would fail with them.
Jared turned back toward Peter. He could still save this. “Okay, you want me to send out the orders? We can probably bulk up the security by tomorrow night.” All we need is tonight, Jared thought.
“No,” Peter told him. “I’ll tell everybody. No offense to you, but if I tell them they’ll get the extra security in place now. We won’t have to wait until tomorrow night. When I tell them to jump, they don’t ask how high. They just fucking jump.”
Jared tried to think about his options. He tried to think about what card to play here. “You want to put it in place now? I’m telling you, Peter, you’re going overboard. You’re going to scare people.”
“Scaring people doesn’t bother me,” Peter said. “People work harder when they’re scared.”
Jared needed another tack, another plan. “You know, now that you mention spies, I do have something I might want to show you. It didn’t really register with me until now, but it might be interesting.”
Peter gave Jared a skeptical look. “What is it?” he asked.
“It’s in my office,” Jared told Peter. “Do you want me to go get it and show it to you?”
“You tell me you have something about spies and then you ask me if I want to see it? What do you think? Stop wasting my time. Go get it and bring it back here.”
“I’ll be right back,” Jared said. Then he turned and opened Peter’s office door. He glanced at the desks surrounding Peter’s office. They were all empty. Almost everyone was at lunch. “Give me two minutes,” Jared called back to Peter. Jared rushed back to his cramped little office. People would be coming back from lunch soon. There was paper on Jared’s desk. It was blank. And a metal pen. Jared grabbed them both. He felt quick on his feet again, like he used to feel when he was young. He jotted something down on one of the pieces of paper and then put them all under his arm. He put the pen in his pocket. Then he walked back toward Peter’s corner office. Jared thought for a second about what exactly he should tell Peter. The truth was, if the rebels were going to fail, Jared would be far better off if he had nothing to do with them.
Back at Peter’s office Jared knocked on the door and again waited for permission to enter. “Come in, damn it,” Peter, ten-years-Jared’s-junior, yelled at Jared.
Jared held up the blank paper in his hand, only the top sheet having any writing on it. “We should do this in private,” Jared told Peter. “Can I close your blinds?”
“This better be real,” Peter said, nodding in consent to Jared’s request. Jared walked from window to window and closed the blinds. Then he closed the office door. It was like they were in a cave now.
A small, dark wood table sat in the corner of the office opposite Peter’s desk. It had three chairs huddled around it, perfect for small meetings. Jared walked over to the table and put the papers on it. “Do you want to come over here so I can show you what it is I think you need to see?” Jared asked Peter, trying to hide the hatred in his voice.
“Fine,” Peter said. He stood up from his desk and began walking over. Peter didn’t suspect anything. He was incapable of it. He’d seen what Jared was capable of, but it was all at Peter’s or someone else’s request. To Peter, Jared was merely a tool, as unlikely to turn on him as a hammer or a gun lying on a table. Peter only wondered what information Jared had. Spies. If Peter could find spies, he would surely take another step toward the top.
Jared stood next to the table. He pulled a chair out for Peter to sit in. He spread the blank papers over the table and turned the one piece of paper with writing on it toward Peter’s chair. He put his one hand in his pocket and gripped the pen. Nobody would be doubling security today. Jared wasn’t sure if the plan he’d given Christopher and Reggie was going to work. Others had tried in the past and failed. The only thing that Jared was sure of was that he wasn’t going to let Peter be the one to stop it. “You’re going to want to sit down for this,” Jared said to Peter. Then he waited for Peter to sit down.
Peter was beginning to get excited. Maybe the old-timer really knew something. Maybe somebody had confided in him because of his ties to the kid. Peter took another step toward the chair Jared was standing next to and sat down. When he sat, Jared pushed the chair in closer to the table with a single thrust and Peter was suddenly surprised at how strong the old man seemed.
Jared listened for any sounds coming from outside of Peter’s office. He was trying to determine if anyone was out there and, if they were, if they would be able to hear what was happening inside. He didn’t hear anything. Either nobody was out there or the walls muffled the sounds. Either way, nobody would hear.
“Okay, what do you have for me?” Peter said without looking down at the papers on the table.
“Read,” Jared said, giving orders to the man who usually gave orders to him. It felt good.
Peter looked down at the papers. At first he was confused. Most of the papers spread out over the table were blank. Then his eyes found the one closest to him, the one with writing on it. The words were handwritten, like words on a note passed in confidence. He read the words scrawled hurriedly in ink, in all capital letters. STRUGGLING WILL ONLY MAKE IT WORSE. Peter looked up at Jared, who was hovering over him now. “What is this supposed to mean?” he said, his voice angry. He hadn’t yet realized that he should be afraid.
Jared pulled the pen out of his pocket. He placed his free hand on Peter’s shoulder, holding him firmly in place. “It means what it says,” Jared whispered into Peter’s ear. Peter heard the tone of Jared’s voice and finally knew to be scared.
Peter looked up at Jared, confused. It still didn’t make sense to him that this could be happening. “Why?” he asked.
“Because I’m sick of all the bullshit,” Jared said. Then Jared took the pen he was holding in his fist and jammed it deep into Peter’s neck. He made sure to aim the wound away from him so that he wouldn’t get any blood on his clothes. As much as he could, he aimed the blood toward the paper on the table. Some of it got on the floor, but it wasn’t excessive. Jared moved his free hand up and covered Peter’s mouth with it so that he couldn’t make any sound, though it would have been hard for him
anyway with the hole in his throat. Then, leaving one hand over Peter’s mouth, Jared pulled the pen out of Peter’s throat and thrust it into his chest. After that, it was only a matter of letting Peter bleed out.
Jared held Peter’s body over the paper until the bleeding stopped. The life stopped well before the bleeding did.
When Jared left Peter’s office, he locked the door behind him from the inside. The office appeared to be empty. The only signs that anything had happened were the body in the closet, the blood-covered papers in the trash can under the desk, and the small stains of blood on the carpet near the table. Jared walked up to the woman who sat outside Peter’s office. “Peter had to leave on important business,” Jared said to the woman. “He wanted me to finish up something in there, but other than that, he told me to tell you that no one is to go inside. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
The woman looked up at Jared. “Okay,” she said with a shrug and a nod. Then Jared went back to his tiny office to sit for another four hours, once again trying to act like everything was normal before leaving for the day a few minutes early.
Sixty-one
It was six hours before the start of the Uprising when Addy and Evan’s car pulled up in front of the warehouse in Brooklyn. Maria was driving. She had two passengers in the car with her, one in the front and one in the back. “This is it,” she said. “He’s inside.” The woman in the backseat nodded. She seemed unconcerned by the location. The woman in the passenger seat looked like she was on the verge of tears, but she’d looked that way for pretty much the whole ride anyway. Maria guessed that she’d looked like that for quite some time now.
Inside the warehouse, Evan woke up with a start. He’d been napping, trying to get as much rest as he could before nightfall. He didn’t know how late the plan would go. He didn’t know what time it would be when he would be called on to fire a bullet into the Intelligence Center and start a fire that would erase hundreds of years of history. So he tried to rest now so he would be sure to be at the top of his game then. He didn’t have any qualms about destroying the history. It wasn’t a good history. It was a history of absurd violence, a history that bred nothing but hate. And it wasn’t his history anyway. Even so, Evan’s sleep was full of nightmares. When he finally woke, he was covered in sweat and he could feel his heartbeat in his fingers and toes. He pulled himself up in his cot.
“The nightmare again?” Addy asked him. She was sitting across the makeshift room from him on her own cot. The longer they stayed there, the more Evan thought the whole warehouse began to look like some weird fallout shelter.
“Yeah,” Evan answered. “I thought they would stop when we found Christopher.”
Addy shook her head. “After tonight they’ll stop. After tonight it’ll all be over.”
“Do you believe that?” Evan asked Addy. Everyone but Evan seemed to be putting a lot of faith in tonight’s outcome. Addy chose not to answer him.
“I’m coming with you tonight,” Addy informed Evan.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m coming with you. I’ll be with you when you make the shot. I don’t think it is safe for you to go alone. While you watch Christopher, I’ll watch you.” Evan almost asked Addy who was going to watch her, but he knew the answer to that. Addy didn’t need anyone to watch her.
“You sure that’s okay?” Evan knew how intricately the plan had been laid out.
“I already asked Reggie and he’s okay with it.”
“You asked Reggie or you told Reggie?” Evan smiled at Addy. The red was almost gone from her hair now. Her natural dirty blond color was coming through. Evan liked the natural color better. It looked more real. He found it strange that in all this madness he’d found Addy, the best thing in his life.
Addy smiled back at him. “I talked to Reggie,” she said. “Let’s try to get some more rest.” Then she lay back down on her cot, stared up at the ceiling, and pretended that there was some way she’d be able to fall asleep.
Jared didn’t go home after work. He didn’t see any point in heading back to New Jersey when all the action was happening in the city. Instead of going home, he went to a bar in midtown about ten blocks from his office. He got there around five o’clock and started drinking. He was already five drinks deep by seven o’clock. He’d taken everything worth keeping from his office, knowing that if everything went according to plan, anything left behind would be incinerated. Everything Jared had that was worth keeping didn’t amount to much. He had a couple old pictures—no frames or anything, just pictures on paper, frayed at their edges. One was a picture of an old girlfriend. The relationship never amounted to much, but it was the closest Jared ever came to something serious. The second picture was a picture of him at the beach when he was about twenty years old. He was young and tan. He was shirtless, standing with his arms wrapped around his two best friends, Joseph and Michael. They were all smiling. It was the only picture all three of them had ever taken together. They weren’t supposed to take pictures like that. They were told it was too risky, that it would endanger the other two if any one of them ever got caught. Jared laughed at that now. He remembered when they’d had the picture taken. It was Jared’s camera. That’s how he ended up with the photo. He normally used the camera to help him case the homes of his targets. That day, though, there were a bunch of cute girls on the beach. It was Michael’s idea. The picture was his ruse to break the ice with the girls. “Just ask one of them to take our picture,” Michael begged Jared. “Then they’ll have to talk to us.”
“No way,” Jared had said. “We’re not supposed to take pictures together.”
“Yeah, but we’re not supposed to be hanging out off the clock together either,” Joseph had chimed in.
“Come on,” Michael prodded Jared. “You should want to do this. It’s the perfect plan. Not only will they have to talk to us, but they’ll have to look at us through that camera. It’ll look like a moment and everyone wants to be part of a moment. Look, after we meet the girls and you get the film developed, you can throw the picture out.” Jared finally relented. Michael asked the prettiest girl of the bunch to take the picture. The plan worked. Michael and the girl who took the picture spent the night together. Jared never threw the photo out. At the time, he wasn’t sure why he’d kept it. At the time, he never would have guessed that the photo would outlive two of its subjects, Jared’s two best friends, by nearly two decades.
“Another scotch,” Jared said, motioning to the bartender.
“Maybe you should think about pacing yourself,” the bartender replied.
“I think it’s a little late for that,” Jared answered.
Counting Addy, twenty-five of them had active roles in the plan. Addy and Evan were the ultimate trigger men. Ten of them were stationed at various spots throughout the city, near where the explosives had been planted. It was their job to be the eyes and ears on the ground. They were supposed to report back what they saw and heard to Evan and Addy. They were supposed to make sure that no order emerged in the chaos. They were supposed to make sure that no one was called away from the chaos to go back to defend the Intelligence Center. If people were being called away to defend the Intelligence Center, they were supposed to do whatever they had to do in order to stop them. Brian was the thirteenth man. He was the one that was going to set the explosives off. They were set to detonate via cell phone. A single number was supposed to set off all of the explosions. A single number was supposed to light up the night skies of New York like they had never been lit before. Brian would be on a rooftop in Gramercy Park. From there, he could dial in the number and see to it that everything worked. If any of the explosions failed to go off when Brian dialed the number, it was the job of one of the ten men on the ground to make the failed explosion happen.
That left twelve men. Six of the twelve would be stationed as security around Grand Central Station. The whole building was to be evacuated at ar
ound eleven thirty that night. Jared had told them about the building’s evacuation procedures. He’d told them the easiest way to trip the alarm. Jared had also warned them that just because everyone was supposed to evacuate the building when the alarm went off, that didn’t mean that everybody would. A trained security team would stay behind in the Intelligence Center. They would stay even if their mission was a suicide mission. They were the most dangerous people of all. The six men on the ground didn’t have to worry about them, though. Their only job was to make sure that once everyone else left the building, nobody went back in.
The final six were the six people, five men and one woman, who were carrying the gas canisters into the building. Reggie and Christopher were among them. Christopher laid the guns he’d been given for the mission out on the cot in front of him. Every one of the six of them would be carrying an automatic rifle and a handgun. They’d need them to get inside. They could slip into the building while everyone else was rushing out, but after that they would need the guns. They had backpacks big enough to hold everything they were taking with them on their mission: most importantly their rifles, their gas masks, and their canisters of flammable gas, which were the size of small scuba tanks. Christopher opened up his backpack. The tank of gas was already inside. He picked up the rifle, unscrewed the barrel, and put that into the backpack too. Then he grabbed his gas mask. He slipped it back onto his head one more time to make sure it was adjusted properly. When he put on the mask, he felt like he was stepping back out of the world, like reality was nothing more than a movie or a video game. The mask was adjusted perfectly. He took it off and dropped it into his backpack too. Then he reached down to lift the backpack, to test its weight. It was heavy. They’d have to carry the backpacks up more than thirty-five flights of stairs. Christopher took solace in the fact that the backpacks would be much lighter on the way back down.