The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [8]
“I’m Beecher,” he said, extending a handshake upward.
Standing above him, Clementine looked down and shook her head. “No. You’re a moron,” she said, clearly pissed.
But as the crowd dissipated and Clementine strode across the schoolyard, Beecher sat up and could swear that as he was watching Clementine walk away in the distance… as she glanced over her shoulder and took a final look at him… there was a small smile on her face.
He saw it.
Definitely a smile.
3
Today
Washington, D.C.
Thirty-two minutes later, as Clementine and I are waiting for the arrival of the documents she came looking for, I swipe my security card and hear the usual thunk. Shoving the bank vault of a door open, I make a sharp left into the cold and poorly lit stacks that fill the heart of the Archives. With each row of old files and logbooks we pass, a motion sensor light goes off, shining a small spotlight, one after the other, like synchronized divers in an old Esther Williams movie, that chases us wherever we go.
These days, I’m no longer the short kid. I’m blond, tall (though Clementine still may be a hair taller than me), and dressed in the blue lab coat that all of us archivists wear to protect us from the rotted leather that rubs off our oldest books when we touch them. I’ve also got far more to offer her than a nosebleed. But just to be near this woman who consumed my seventh through tenth grades… who I used to fantasize about getting my braces locked together with…
“Sorry to do this now. I hope you’re not bored,” I tell her.
“Why would I be bored? Who doesn’t love a dungeon?” she says as we head deeper into the labyrinth of leather books and archival boxes. She’s nearly in front of me, even though she’s got no idea where she’s going. Just like in junior high. Always prepared and completely fearless. “Besides, it’s nice to see you, Beecher.”
“Here… it’s… here,” I say as the light blinks on above us and I stop at a bookcase of rotted leather-bound logbooks that are packed haphazardly across the shelf. Some are spine out, others are stacked on top of each other. “It’s just that we have a quota of people we have to help and—”
“Stop apologizing,” Clementine offers. “I’m the one who barged in.”
She says something else, but as I pull out the first few volumes and scan their gold-stamped spines, I’m quickly lost in the real treasure of this trip: the ancient browning pages of the volume marked November 1779. Carefully cradling the logbook with one hand, I use my free one to pull out the hidden metal insta-shelf that’s built into each bookcase and creaks straight at us at chest height.
“So these are from the Revolutionary War?” she asks. “They’re real?”
“All we have is real.”
By we, I mean here—the National Archives, which serves as the storehouse for the most important documents of the U.S. government, from the original Declaration of Independence, to the Zapruder film, to reports on opportunities to capture bin Laden, to the anthrax formula and where the government stores the lethal spores, to the best clandestine files from the CIA, FBI, NSA, and every other acronym. As they told me when I first started as an archivist three years ago, the Archives is our nation’s attic. A ten-billion-document scrapbook with nearly every vital file, record, and report that the government produces.
No question, that means this is a building full of secrets. Some big, some small. But every single day, I get to unearth another one.
Like right now.
“Howard… Howard… Howard,” I whisper to myself, flipping one of the mottled brown pages and running my pointer finger down the alphabetical logbook, barely touching it.
Thirty-four minutes ago, as we put in the request for Clementine’s documents, a puffy middle-aged woman wearing a paisley silk scarf as a cancer wig came into our research entrance looking for details about one of her relatives. She had his name. She had the fact he served in the Revolutionary War.
And she had me.
As an archivist, whether the question comes from a