Children of the Underground (11 page)

Sixteen

Michael's first target was a fat man. It was strange looking at the details of a life, laid out so meticulously, knowing that it was these details that would ensure that the life would soon be over. I thought of something my father used to tell me: the devil is in the details. If he only knew. It felt like we were being shown everything about this man's life so that we'd know exactly what we were taking away. The envelope contained dozens of pictures taken from different angles, showing the fat man doing various things. I couldn't even begin to imagine how they'd gotten some of the photos. They seemed so close, almost intimate. I found photos of his house somewhere in the country. One of the last pictures showed the fat man's three Doberman pinschers.

The fat man was five feet, eleven inches tall and weighed a touch over four hundred pounds. He was forty-seven years old. He was single. He lived alone, not counting his dogs. On the physical condition line, he was listed simply as
unfit
. In the section where the target's skills are noted, it said
Intelligence/strategy management
. I scanned down the page to the subsection titled
Combat Skills
. I looked across the page at the words
None known
. Then I flipped to the next page.

The reports contained page after page of the target's professional and personal history. I skimmed them, knowing that Michael would be out of his bath soon. The target was the younger of two sons. His father had been the head of intelligence for the Eastern seaboard for more than twenty years. He was killed in a raid when a boat that he was on blew up, killing him and three of his enemies. The story in the press was that the boat blew up due to a gas leak and some faulty wiring. According to the report given to Michael, the fat man's father sacrificed his own life to save critical intelligence for his side. Their father a hero, his sons quickly moved up the ranks in the War. His older son became a soldier and was killed in action at the age of twenty-nine. He had more than twenty confirmed kills when he died. His younger son, Michael's target, went into intelligence. He had no combat experience. He'd never fought a single fight in his life. Instead he rose through the ranks based on his father's and his brother's reputations. Despite having no fighting experience of his own, it was the fat man's job to identify individuals or families for “customized, small-scale extermination.” He was one of the ones who picked their targets—he drafted the list of the dead.

I heard Michael unplug the bath and heard the water swirling down the drain. I had gotten through most of the contents of the envelope. I glanced at the remaining pages, trying to absorb what information I could. The fat man was a bit of a recluse. He saw other people only for work. His identity had been discovered just a few months ago. It had been a tip. He'd been betrayed by someone on his own side, someone with a grudge. They had gathered all this information in a few months. I flipped to the last page of the envelope. It was titled
Personal Connection
. Only one entry was on the page, about halfway to the bottom. A year was listed. It was nineteen years ago. I read the sentence opposite the year and felt my heart stop for a moment. The bathroom door opened. I flinched when it did, looking up at Michael. He stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. “I feel better,” he said, looking at the contents of the envelope in front of me. Then he walked over to his duffel bag and took out a hairbrush and some deodorant. When he did, I got a clear view of his back. He had kept the bandages off, airing out the blisters and scabs. “So what did you learn?” He rubbed deodorant under his arms and walked back to the bathroom with his hairbrush. He left the bathroom door open. “Who do they want me to kill?” he asked.

I started to say the fat man's name, but Michael cut me off before I could even finish the first syllable. “No,” he said. The word was sharp and cutting. I looked at Michael reflection in the mirror. He was shaking his head. “We never use their names. The targets don't get names.”

I hesitated, thinking about asking him why, but I knew. It wasn't because the targets didn't deserve names; it was because naming them might make it harder. “Then what should I call him?”

“Pick a defining characteristic.”

I could see Michael's reflection in the bathroom mirror as he brushed his hair. “He's fat,” I said. I could hear the nervousness in my own voice.

Michael laughed. “Then we'll call him the fat man. Tell me more.”

“He lives in some town north of here called New Paltz.”

“I know the town. I used to hike there,” Michael said. He finished combing his hair and took out a razor and some shaving cream. “Keep going.”

“He lives alone,” I said, “but he's got guard dogs.” My voice trailed off, not knowing what else to say. Michael was shaving in long slow strokes from the bottom of his neck up. He looked at my reflection in the mirror, waiting for me to continue. “He's never fought. He works in intelligence.”

“What does he do?” Michael asked. His voice was calm. Half his face was now cleanly shaven.

“He decides who they're going to kill. He analyzes their intelligence and picks the people they should target.” I could see Michael nodding to himself in the mirror, either because he now understood why they wanted this man dead or because he now knew that he wouldn't have any qualms killing him. Maybe it was both.

“Anything else?” he asked as he whisked the last bit of shaving cream off of his face with his razor.

“Yes,” I answered, my voice weak.

“What is it?”

The last page. “He's the one who decided to have your mother and father killed.” I watched Michael's face in the mirror. I didn't want to see him any more hurt than he already was, but his expression didn't change.

“They gave me some crap to rub on the blisters on my back,” he said, ending a painful silence. “I can't reach back there.”

“I'll do it,” I told him.

“After that, we're going to have to find you another place to stay.” He said the words so casually that it took a second for them to sink in. Even when I finally understood the words, they did nothing but confuse me. I thought he was kicking me out because of something I said.

“What?” I mumbled. “Why?”

“You can't stay here,” Michael answered. “They were here. They went through our things. They came once already. They'll come again. We were lucky that you weren't here this time. If they find you, it's all over.” Michael came over and sat on the bed with his back to me. He handed me a tube of some sort of antibacterial gel. I squeezed some out onto my fingers and rubbed it gently on the raised skin on Michael's back. I could feel the muscles in his back tense up and then relax as I touched them. “I'll stay here,” Michael said. “Leaving would look suspicious. We'll have to find you someplace where you can stay cheap, where we can pay in cash. We can't leave any paper trail.” I didn't care where I stayed. I'd been staying in flea-bitten, pay-by-the-hour motels for most of the past seven months. I could deal with the lack of amenities. All the same, I didn't have any desire to be alone again. I didn't tell Michael that, though.

“Why don't you stay with me?” I asked. “You can keep this hotel room, but you can stay with me. If they come looking for you, you can say that you were out.”

“We'll see,” Michael answered. My fingernail caught on the edge of one of his blisters. His back tensed but he didn't flinch. “Let's find you your place. Then let me do this first job. Then we'll see.”

“Okay.” I had to settle for what I could get. “Can I ask you a question?” Michael nodded. “Do you know why they gave you this person to kill? Why now?”

“They're trying to retrain me,” Michael said. “It's like I'm eighteen again. The first job they give you is someone utterly unsympathetic, someone who clearly deserves to die. If they can make it personal”—Michael paused—“all the better. The first person that I ever killed was a sixty-five-year-old man. Before the job, they showed me a video of the guy killing an unarmed nineteen-year-old girl with a crowbar. That's all I knew.” I finished rubbing the gel onto his back. He stood up and walked over to his bag to get some clothes. “So I killed the old bastard. Hopefully, there's no video of what I did to that old man to inspire any of their soldiers.”

Michael got dressed. We found a place for me to stay, a small apartment in Alphabet City that the owners are basically running as an unlicensed hotel. They didn't ask questions. We paid for four nights up front and told them that I'd probably be staying longer. Michael went back to his hotel room. He promised that he'd stop by in the morning to check on me.

I can't sleep. My mind keeps racing back to the pictures of the fat man. He looks harmless. If he wasn't so fat, he'd look like a million other people you might see on the street. One of the pictures was taken through a store window. The fat man was inside, talking to the woman behind the counter. He was smiling, reaching into his pocket for money. Sensing that sleep wasn't coming, I took out the baby-development book. Since I met Michael, you've crossed over into another month. You're more than nine months old now. You're probably standing up. I should sleep. Hopefully, it will be your image that haunts my sleep and not the fat man's.

Seventeen

I made Michael go over his entire plan with me. “It's sweet. You're worried about me,” he said when I pressed him.

“I'm worried that you're not taking this seriously enough.”

“You don't have to worry about that.”

“Just go over the plan one more time.”

“I'm going to go at night,” he said. “According to our information, he leaves two of his guard dogs outside at night and keeps one in the house. I'm going to bring some hamburger meat for the dogs outside and use it to drug them. I'll bring some rope with me so that I can tie them up once they're drugged.”

“Why do you need to tie up the dogs if you already drugged them?” I asked.

“I'm going to give them tranquilizers. I'll tie them up while they're unconscious so that I can get out without having to deal with them if the drugs wear off. The dog on the inside will be a bit harder, but I think that I can collar him and lock him in another room.”

“It seems like a lot of work for a couple of dogs.”

“I'm not killing any fucking dogs,” Michael said. It was clear from the look on his face that it wasn't up for discussion.

“Won't the fat man hear you by the time you get rid of the third dog?”

“Sure, but that dog stays on the ground floor and the mark will be on the second floor, so there's no way for him to escape without going through me. He's a fat man with no fighting experience. Maybe he'll take out a gun that he doesn't know how to aim. If he does, he'll end up shooting at shadows. Once the dogs are out of the way, the fat man doesn't scare me.”

“How are you going to kill him?” I asked. The question made me queasy until I reminded myself what the fat man did for a living.

“Knife,” Michael answered.

“Isn't that messy?”

Michael laughed. “You sound like Joe.” The words weren't an insult. They were full of nostalgia. “Look, everyone has their preferred methods for this stuff. Joe was a strangler. He strangled people because it was neat. He strangled people because he didn't like messes. Knives are bloody, but if you know how to use them, they're quick. You can reduce your victim's pain and terror. It's a trade-off. I've always been okay dealing with the mess.”

“Why not a gun?”

“We don't use guns—not if we think there's any other way. Guns are hard to cover up and easy to trace. If you want me to get back in their good graces, then guns aren't an option.”

“Okay,” I conceded. “Will you call me when the job is over?” Michael shook his head. “Then how am I going to know that you're okay?”

“See? I knew you were worried about me,” Michael answered, smiling. “You have to have a little faith, Maria. They'll be monitoring this job to see how I do. I can't take chances contacting you. You stay here. I'll come back as soon as it's safe.”

“If you wait until it's safe, you'll never come back,” I said, only half joking. Michael half chuckled in response.

“I have something for you,” he said to me, changing the subject. He reached into his pocket.

“Don't give me anything. I'm already asking too much of you. I don't want to owe you any more than I already do.” Michael pulled a wallet-sized picture out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was one of Joseph's old class pictures. It was a bit scuffed at the edges, but even though I'd never seen this picture before, I recognized Joe's eyes immediately. “Wow. How old is he in this picture?”

“Thirteen,” Michael said, “three years before I met him. I nicked it from his mother's dresser the first time I was ever invited to his house.” I smiled at that, knowing that Michael deserved the photo so much more than Joe's mom ever did. “It sounds weird, but when I was a kid, I used to like to pretend that me and Joe had been friends ever since we were little kids. I used to like to pretend that it was more than the War that brought us together.”

I held the photo in my hand. “Why are you giving this to me?”

“Because I know that you don't have any pictures.”

“Of Joseph?” I asked.

“Of Christopher,” Michael answered. “I thought you might be able to see some of Christopher in Joe's picture.”

I felt a knot twist in my throat. I could see you. Looking at that picture was like looking into a time machine and seeing you in twelve years. “Do you have any other pictures of Joseph?” I asked. Michael shook his head. “Then I can't keep this,” I said, even though I wanted to keep it. “It means too much to you.”

“You can give it back to me when you find your kid and you don't need the picture anymore.”

“I will,” I promised. “Thank you,” I added, hoping that Michael realized how much I was trying to thank him for. I keep the picture in this journal. I look at it frequently. I can't wait to give it back.