Children of the Uprising (29 page)

Christopher listened to the footsteps and waited. He needed to time this right or all was lost. When the man with the knife was only a few feet from him, Christopher jumped. He had climbed halfway up the rock wall, as high as he could go without falling. He was barely noticeable in the shadows before he jumped. When he jumped, he came out of the darkness like the devil himself.

Christopher landed on top of the man with the knife. He led with his elbows, jamming his left elbow into the crook of the man's neck. He felt the flesh give way and heard the man grunt in pain before he fell to the ground. The man still had the knife in his hand as he lay on the cobblestones, but Christopher took care of that quickly too. He stomped on the man's hand, breaking at least one finger and probably more. The knife came loose and Christopher picked it up. Christopher was surprised at how easy this all was. He'd thought that he was supposed to be fighting against professionals. Max had told him not to expect them to underestimate him ever again.

Christopher held the knife in one hand and reached down and grabbed the man by the scruff of his neck with the other. He lifted the man to his feet and pushed him against the rock wall. He held the knife against the man's neck. The man began to cry, quickly and without hesitation. First came the tears and then the smell. Christopher looked down and saw that the man had pissed himself.

“Tell me what you know,” Christopher ordered the man as he touched the man's skin with the knife blade. Something wasn't right.

“I know nothing,” the man whimpered in broken English in between fearful sobs. “Please don't hurt me.”

“If you don't know anything, why were you chasing me?” Christopher pressed the knife farther into the man's skin. He could see the skin on the man's neck compress under the blade of the knife, but it didn't break. Not yet.

“I don't know anything,” the man repeated, and Christopher saw confusion in the man's eyes. “I'm sorry.”

“WHY WERE YOU CHASING ME?” Christopher yelled at the whimpering man now. He seemed so much smaller than he had before.

“Money,” the man said. “I want your money. You are American, no? I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“You're a thief,” Christopher said with disdain, spitting the words out of his mouth. “That's it? You came after me because I'm white, not because you know who I am?”

“I know nothing,” the man pleaded for the third time.

Christopher stepped away from the man. The man immediately hunched down on the ground into a protective ball of piss and tears. “How can I be sure?” Christopher asked himself out loud. He touched the blade of the knife with his thumb. It was sharp. “Guess my name,” Christopher ordered the ball of a man in front of him.

“I don't know!” the man cried.

“Guess,” Christopher said, aiming the knife at the man again.

The man looked at Christopher and then he looked up at the sky. “George,” the man guessed, and it wasn't a bluff. The man was clearly unsure if it was better to guess wrong or right.

“Fuck,” Christopher muttered to himself. This man was no one. He was nothing. He was meaningless, to Christopher anyway. Christopher wasn't home in Maine. He was a world away from home. He was as far away as anyone could possibly ever get. He threw the knife back on the ground near the whimpering man. “Don't follow me,” he ordered the man and began to walk away, backward at first, watching the man. The man made no attempt to even get up, let alone follow him. Then Christopher turned around and moved more quickly. It took a few blocks for him to get his bearings again. He used the river and the Blue Mosque as visual guideposts. Once Christopher knew where he was, he didn't waste any more time. He headed straight back to the hotel. This time he kept his head down and tried to walk in the shadows as much as possible.

Reggie was awake when Christopher got home. “Where have you been?” he demanded, sounding more like a father than a friend.

“I wanted to go for a walk to think,” Christopher answered.

“How did that go?”

“Fine,” Christopher replied.

“I'd prefer it if you didn't do it again,” Reggie said, trying to find the right balance of respect and authority with his words.

“Don't worry,” Christopher promised him. “I got it out of my system. I'm not going for another walk alone until this War is over.”

“Good,” Reggie said. He didn't ask for any more details. “I know that I'm putting too much on you, that you're too young for this,” he said, as if apologizing.

“The world doesn't wait for you to be ready,” Christopher replied. Then he turned the lights off and climbed back into his bed.

Jared walked down the halls of his New York office building carrying a folder full of papers that he needed to get approved.
Action Items,
they were called, but Jared thought nothing could be less worthy of the moniker. Jared wore the clothes that he always wore to the office—khaki pants, dark brown shoes, and a dark blue shirt with a white collar. He used to wear a suit, but by now, at forty-four years old, he'd given up on the idea that that might help him get anywhere. Now, when he went downstairs into Grand Central Station or walked up Park Avenue for lunch, no one could differentiate him from any of the other human worker bees trudging in and out of offices. Even Jared's hair, which had turned gray years ago, was beginning to thin out in the back, and his once startling physique now sagged around the middle. He still believed that his mind was as sharp as it had ever been, though. The problem was that nobody seemed to notice or care.

The man with one of the corner offices was on the phone when Jared arrived, even though Jared showed up right at the scheduled time. The man's door was closed, but Jared could see him through the window next to the door of the man's office. He held up a single finger to tell Jared to wait outside because he would only be one more minute. Jared knew that the man was never only one more minute. Jared considered himself lucky whenever he was forced to stand outside the man's office for less than five minutes. He'd waited longer than that in the past. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Every time, Jared wanted to walk away, but he knew that the repercussions would be too great. He would get the lecture again, the talk about learning to be a team player. The decisions that Jared had once made in his life had real repercussions—life-and-death repercussions—but now the thing he feared most in the world was getting that dull, condescending lecture. It wasn't so much the lecture itself that he feared. It was the way the lecture reminded him of what his life had become. So Jared waited in the hallway as the man, a man who was actually at least seven years younger than Jared, finished talking to whoever it was that he was talking to on the phone. Then the man hung up the phone and waved Jared in.

Jared opened the door and walked inside. “Jared,” the man said, “sorry about that. That was the wife.” The man smiled and his smile made Jared wonder if the man had ever managed a single genuine smile. Jared wondered if the man even knew how. “You know how wives can be, right?” the man asked with a laugh, even though he knew that Jared wasn't married.

“Sure.” Jared laughed back while nodding his head.

“Anyway, what have you got for me there?”

“We wanted to get your sign-off on these Action Items,” Jared said, handing the folder over to the man behind the desk. Jared said
we
even though he didn't give a shit about the Action Items, but the guy with the corner office on the other side of the building didn't walk folders around for signature himself.

“Let's see here,” the man behind the desk said, opening the folder and flipping the pages. He propped his feet up on his desk as he read. He lifted a pen to his lips and began to suck air through the pen's cap, making a horrible whistling sound. Then he started to shake his head. Jared always knew it was bad when he shook his head. “No, no, no,” the man said. He sat back up in his chair again and wrote on one of the documents with his pen. “This doesn't look right to me at all. This isn't what we agreed on.” Jared watched as the man crossed out whole sections of the paper with his pen and then began scribbling notes in the margins. “I think you guys are going to have to keep working on this,” the man said, handing the single piece of paper back to Jared.

“What about the others?” Jared asked, looking at the other seven pages in the folder that the man hadn't bothered to look at.

“Let's get this one right first,” the man said. “Then I'll look at the others. Okay?”

“Sure,” Jared said to the man. Then the man handed the entire folder back to Jared.

“Thanks, Jared. You can close the door behind you when you leave,” the man said before Jared began to walk away.

“Sure,” Jared said. Then he left, closing the door behind him, as requested. He probably should have taken the marked-up page across the floor to the other corner office. He probably should have worked with everyone to iron out their differences and get his documents finalized. But what was the point? He'd be walking back and forth through the halls from one corner of the building to the other all day. Week? Month? Year? Even if Jared got the documents finalized and signed off on, he knew that he would have new documents on his desk tomorrow. So he tucked the papers under his arm and walked back to his office, glancing out the windows of the building as he went. The office was up on the thirty-seventh floor of the MetLife Building. The view could make an atheist believe in God. Every window opened up on to another swath of New York City so that if you did one lap around the office, you'd see the whole damn thing. The offices used to be on lower floors but, as other tenants left, they slowly moved up in the world. They had five floors, and the thirty-seventh floor was the highest one they had. They still had a ways to go before they reached the top. Jared had begun to think that maybe that was what their real goal was. Fuck winning the War. What was really important was the view.

Jared's office wasn't on a corner. Jared's office wasn't even along an outer wall. Jared had a small, inner office with a window that looked into the hallway. If he craned his neck, he could look through his window, into the office of the woman across the hall from him, and out her window, where he could see a small sliver of sky. Jared dropped the folder on his desk and closed his office door behind him. At least he had a door that he could close. He was grateful that he hadn't screwed things up so badly that they refused to give him a door.

Jared sat down at his desk. He stared at his blank computer screen and wondered, as he had countless times before, where the last eighteen years had gone. They had forgiven him for Joseph. What Joseph had done didn't hurt Jared. In fact, the way Jared had handled his best friend's betrayal even looked for a little while like it was going to help his career. Sure, it wasn't great to be associated with someone who causes such a giant mess, but when you're the one who cleans up the mess, such associations are forgiven. If Joseph had been the only mess that Jared had been involved in, he would have come out of everything with the luster still on his rising star. After all, anyone can get caught up in one mess. The first mess is a coincidence. The second mess is a stain. Jared knew that he had only himself to blame. He knew that he never should have given Michael the information that led Maria to Christopher. If he hadn't given Michael that information, then maybe Michael would still be alive and Jared would be somebody—somebody who made decisions that mattered—and not the shell of a man that he'd become. And the Child? Joseph's child? Christopher? Jared truly believed that he would have been better off being part of the War instead of a poster child for misplaced hope. But what Jared believed and what he wished he had done didn't matter anymore.

Jared's phone rang.

Jared let it ring twice before picking up. He knew that people could hear the phone ring through his office's thin walls. He didn't want to seem too eager. “Hello,” he said when he finally answered.

“Are we still on for this evening?” asked the voice on the other end of the connection.

“Yeah,” Jared said. Then he looked at the folder of Action Items on his desk. “But I can meet earlier than that if you still want to.”

“How early?” the voice asked.

Jared looked at his watch. “Give me an hour.”

“You want to meet at the same place as last time?”

“Sure,” Jared said. “That should still work.”

“Okay. I'll see you in an hour then.”

“In an hour,” Jared echoed before hanging up the phone. He looked out the small window of his office to see if anyone was watching him. He strummed his fingers on his desk for a moment nervously. Then he stood up. If he was going to make it to Battery Park in an hour, he didn't have much time to waste. It took eighteen years, but Jared finally decided that even misplaced hope beat the living hell out of no hope at all.

Umut waited until the midday call to prayer before he walked up to Christopher and Reggie. He used the call to prayer as cover. Christopher and Reggie were standing in the large courtyard next to the Süleymaniye Mosque, surrounded by streetside cafés and passing students. As the call to prayer echoed over the city, Umut casually walked up to Reggie, appearing out of nowhere, and whispered something in Reggie's ear. The sounds of the prayer made it impossible for anyone but Reggie to hear what Umut whispered. Reggie gave Umut a quick nod to let him know that he understood. Then Reggie motioned to Christopher to come closer to him. “Follow Umut,” Reggie said to Christopher. “He'll take you to the tribunal.”

“What about you?” Christopher asked, fearing that he already knew the answer to his question.

Reggie shook his head. “They want to meet you alone.”

“We can say no,” Christopher said. “We can make demands too.”

The call to prayer ended. For a moment, the city of twenty million people was silent. Their cover gone, Reggie shook his head solemnly and start walking away. Christopher turned his gaze back to the thick-browed Umut. Umut gave Christopher a quick nod that was meant to convey a million words. It was meant to give Christopher comfort. It didn't. Christopher followed Umut anyway.

They walked along the steep, narrow streets leading away from the Süleymaniye Mosque. Umut took turn after turn and Christopher began to feel like he was walking through a maze. “Where are you taking me?” he eventually asked Umut.

“You can't be too careful,” Umut replied to Christopher and kept making turns, walking without a pattern to keep them from being followed.

They walked for nearly forty minutes before stopping in front of a nondescript building on a street that looked the same, to Christopher, as every other street that they had walked down. For all Christopher knew, they had been walking in circles. Umut rang the building's buzzer. A tall man with dark, weathered skin opened the door. The tall man looked at Umut and then at Christopher and then stood aside so that the two of them could enter. Once they were inside, the tall man closed the door but not before taking a few extra glances up and down the street.

Once the door was closed, The tall man turned toward Umut. “Everyone is upstairs,” he said in English in a deep, gravelly voice.

“How many people came?” Umut asked the man.

“As many as we allowed. Fifteen are here. We had to turn away about thirty others. We didn't want to overwhelm the Child,” the tall man said, glancing at Christopher.

He led them down a long hallway to a wooden door that opened into an ancient elevator. The three of them stepped inside with barely enough room to breathe. “How did you decide who got to come?” Christopher asked the tall man as the elevator slowly pulled the three of them up to the building's third floor.

“They separated everybody by region and then had each region draw straws.”

“And you drew a winning straw?” Christopher asked.

The tall man smiled. “I didn't have to. No one else was from my region.”

“Where are you from?”

“Afghanistan,” Tor Baz answered Christopher.

“You're Tor Baz?” Umut said to the tall man, smiling.

“I am,” Tor Baz answered, smiling back, excited to be known. The elevator stopped moving. The door opened onto a white-walled room that covered the entire floor. Tor Baz held the door so that Umut and Christopher could step inside the room.

Christopher counted the people in the room. True to Tor Baz's word, there were fourteen. Tor Baz made it an even fifteen. About half of them had dark skin, a few with skin even darker than Tor Baz's. The other half had light skin.
Europe,
Christopher thought as he scanned the faces of the people in the room.
Africa. The Middle East.
The people in the room—nine men, six women—stared back at him.

“C'est l'Enfant,” a man in the back whispered to himself. “It's the Child,” Xavier then said in English when he realized that everyone could hear his whisper over the almost overbearing silence.

“Welcome,” a woman said, stepping forward to greet Christopher. Her accent was lush and her voice husky. It sounded to him the way Istanbul smelled.

“This is your house?” Christopher asked the women.

“Yes,” she answered.

“It's lovely,” he told her.

“Thank you,” the woman said to Christopher. Then she turned to Umut. “Umut, shall we begin?”

Umut seemed to think that there would be more formality first, perhaps even introductions. Christopher could see it on Umut's face. Yet Umut knew that anything he said would reflect on Christopher. So he turned back to the woman. “If you're ready,” he said.

Christopher had been so busy looking at the faces that he hadn't noticed the chairs. Sixteen tall leather chairs were set up in the middle of the room. Fifteen of them had been arranged in a semicircle, facing inward. The sixteenth was placed at what would have been the center of the circle, alone, facing the rest.

Christopher knew which of the chairs was his. He knew what was at stake, and he was afraid. The running and the fighting and the killing and the hiding all scared him, but not like this. So Christopher did what he always did when he was afraid. Without waiting for an invitation, Christopher walked toward the sixteenth chair, the one in the middle, and sat down. “Let's get this started,” he said to no one in particular. Christopher didn't catch the smiles on Umut's, Tor Baz's, and Xavier's faces at his act of brazenness, because after Christopher sat down he only stared at the fifteen empty chairs. And soon all of the chairs were occupied.

The chairs filled up quickly. Everyone knew where to sit. The seats had been assigned ahead of time. Umut was left without a chair, a mere spectator. He stood near the elevator door. Tor Baz was stuck on one end of the semicircle. The host sat in the middle. Xavier sat two chairs to her left. The twelve others filled in the remaining seats. “We've been impressed by what we've heard about your trip to the Far East,” the woman began, “and we've all heard about the plan.” She looked around at the others, all of them staring at Christopher. “But we have questions.”

“I would hope so,” Christopher said coolly, trying to remember everything that Umut had told him and Reggie the night before so that he would maybe, possibly have satisfactory answers.
They believe in Christopher's ability but they're unsure of whether or not they believe in the plan,
Umut had told them. Christopher wished that Reggie was with him to help him describe the plan or that Addy was there with him to help him be brave or that Evan was there with him to be a true ally. Christopher was alone, but he didn't let anyone see his fear. “Fire away,” he said, scanning the faces of his interrogators.

The questions started out easy enough. In the beginning, Christopher had answers. They were answers to questions that he and Reggie had already discussed.

“How will the planning for the destruction of each Intelligence Center be done?”

“We'll leave it up to the local people to plan. They'll know better than anyone else what will work. Nobody can micromanage something this big.” Christopher wasn't sure he believed that answer. He hadn't been sure he believed it when Reggie first said it to him. Reggie had explained to him why it had to be done that way though. It was as much political as practical. Reggie knew that they wouldn't get people to agree to be subjects in their own homes. Not these people anyway. After all, everyone in that room was already a rebel.

“How do we know that the people in other cities can be trusted to do the jobs?”

“Everybody knows the ramifications of what we're doing here. They all know what it would mean if we failed. And we're not picking people off the streets for this. These are people who have already proven themselves. They're leaders in the Underground.”

“What order will the cities go in?”

“It all has to be simultaneous. We can't give them any time to warn each other. We can't give them a chance to bolster their defenses. We're outgunned and outnumbered. Surprise is the only real weapon we have.”

“And then the War is just supposed to end?”

“No,” Christopher told them. “It doesn't just end. The War ends because we give people a reason to believe that it's over. That's what most people want. We're giving them the excuse they've been waiting for. How can people keep fighting a War when they don't know who their enemy is? What do you do when you no longer know who it is you're supposed to hate? Strangers can become strangers again. The paranoia can finally come to an end. That's what people want to believe, and we think we can make them believe it.”

“Won't some people remember who their enemies are?”

“On the fringes, sure, but the numbers will be small. A few people will remember a few enemies. Some will even keep fighting, but how long can they keep fighting when they have no support and no hope of ever winning?”

“But what do we get to keep?”‘

Christopher looked at the man who had asked him the question. He was a stocky white man with an accent that sounded Eastern European. For the first time in nearly two hours of questions, Christopher didn't know how to respond. It had been going so well. “I don't understand what you're asking,” Christopher said.

“After we destroy the Intelligence Centers,” the man clarified, “what do we get to keep?”

“Nothing,” Christopher told him, still confused. The room went dead silent. “Everything has to be destroyed.”

“We can't destroy everything,” one of the women gasped.

“Why not?” Christopher turned toward her and asked.

“That's our history,” one of the black men chimed in. “We can't simply destroy it all.”

“Your
history
,” Christopher said the word as if he wanted to spit, “is what's feeding the War. That's how we end the War. We starve it. You can't keep your history and still end the War. That's the whole point.”

“You're a book burner!” shouted a shocked voice. Christopher didn't even see who shouted it.

Christopher stared at them all. “What is it that you think you'll find in that history? What do you believe is in there that's worth keeping?” The room went silent. Nobody wanted to say anything. Then Christopher remembered his conversation with Reggie on their plane ride from Malaysia to Istanbul. Reggie had asked Christopher why he never asked about how the War started. Reggie had hit on Christopher's blind spot. Now Christopher looked at the people sitting in front of him. They all knew what they hoped they would find in those histories, but nobody wanted to say it out loud. “You think you'll find absolution in there,” Christopher said to the row of silent faces after it hit him. “Even you, a room full of rebels who claim to hate the War, you still think that you'll find something in the past that will justify the things that you did before you left the War, the things that your friends did, the things that your family did. You want history to wash away your sins.

“Don't you all understand by now that it doesn't work that way?” If Christopher couldn't get them to understand, then the whole plan was hopeless. “None of it matters. You think it matters, that it makes some sort of difference, but it doesn't. It doesn't matter who started the War. It doesn't matter why the War started. All of you still think that something in that history will prove that you have always been the good guys. But knowing how the War started or who started it wouldn't change anything. It wouldn't change what you've done or what you watched be done in your name or what you allowed to be done while doing nothing to stop it. Nothing that happened in the past can absolve you of sins you've already committed. All that matters is what we do now.”

“So we'll never know the truth?” someone asked.

“You'll become the truth,” Christopher said, needing to give them something. The faces of the men and women in the room were expressionless—utterly blank. “We'll all become the truth,” Christopher finished.

The late-afternoon sun dipped in the sky and began to shine directly through the windows into the room. The room began to heat up. No one spoke for what seemed like a very long time. Christopher could feel sweat rising on his skin. He wanted to say something, but he had nothing more to say. Then the heavyset Eastern European man huffed, “He's a kid. What does he know anyway?” Christopher thought the man's comment would be met by nodding heads and murmurs of agreement, but it was met by even more silence. For the longest time after that, nobody even moved. It was almost like everyone in the room was in a state of shock.

“Are we done here?” Umut eventually asked, walking up and placing a comforting hand on Christopher's shoulder.

“I think so,” the woman who owned the house said.

So Christopher stood up. He turned toward the others, readying to say good-bye, to tell them that he hoped they would make the right decision. As he turned, Umut squeezed his shoulder with a grip like none Christopher had ever felt before. He held Christopher in place, keeping him from facing the tribunal again. “Don't say more,” Umut whispered to him. “You've said enough.” Steering with the hand that was gripping Christopher's shoulder, Umut maneuvered Christopher toward the elevator. Neither of them looked back. They waited for the doors to open. Then they stepped into the elevator. A moment later the doors closed behind them and they once more descended towards the city.