The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [142]
“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?”
101
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.
We’re not the only ones.
The narrow thin cavern is about as wide as a truck, and on our right a painted red steel door is set deep into the rock, like a hanging red tooth on a jack-o’-lantern. Above the door, a military flag hangs down from the ceiling. I know the logo. U.S. Army. As the golf cart picks up speed, there’s another door fifty yards down from that—and another flag hanging from the ceiling. Marines.
It’s the same the entire stretch of the cavern: