The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [141]
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.
100
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