The Keepers of the Library by Glenn Cooper Read Free Book Online Page B

frequent. There was a tradition at Area 51. On their first day, new employees would be escorted by the Executive Director of the Research Lab for a personal tour, but there hadn’t been a newbie in a good while.
    Stony-faced watchers with sidearms would flank the steel doors. Codes would be punched, and the bomb-proof doors would swing open. Then the newcomer would be led into the enormous, softly lit chamber with the rarefied atmosphere of a deserted cathedral and stand in awe at the sight before them.
    The Library.
    But now the existence of the physical Library had become something of an afterthought, fading into the dim recesses of collective memory. But in the midst of his first major crisis as the head of security, Kenney suddenly felt a need to connect with the past.
    He emerged, the only soul on the Vault level. Outside the massive doors he entered the appropriatecodes and stooped slightly for the retinal scan which triggered the hydraulics.
    He stepped into the chilled dehumidified atmosphere and began walking, first a few feet, then a few dozen, finally a few hundred. He periodically looked up at the domed, stadium-like ceiling. As he walked among the bookcases he randomly touched some of the bindings, something that would lead to a reprimand if it were detected and reported up the chain. He assumed one of his own men was watching on CCTV from the sixth floor but no one would be filing a report on him.
    The leather was smooth and cool, the color of mottled buckskin. Tooled onto the spine were years, escalating as he moved toward the rear: 1347—replete, no doubt, with victims of the Black Death in Europe, 1865—Abraham Lincoln’s name was buried inside one of these volumes, 1914—filled with World War I victims. At the rear were the last volumes, thousands for the present year, 2026, but many fewer for 2027. The last recorded date was February 8.
    He made his way to one side of the Vault, where a narrow stairway took him to a high catwalk. There, he leaned into a railing and took in the totality of the Library.
    There were thousands of steel bookcases stretching into the distance, over 700,000 thick leather books, over 240 billion inscribed names. He took it in, absorbing the enormity of it all.
    Area 51 was seventy-nine years old. There had been a total of sixteen security heads since inception. He would be the last. Each man had sworn an oath to protect the security and integrity of the Library. Each, he was quite sure, had stood on this exact spot and contemplated that oath and the spiritual implications of the Library’s very existence.
    Only one of his predecessors, Malcolm Frazier himself, had faced a breach of security as massive as the present one, and he had paid for it with his life.
    Was that the fate that awaited him too?
    Kenney played things by the book, but then and there he decided to look himself up in the database.

I t was chilly, and it irritated Will that he needed a coat to take his walks. Down in Florida it was sunny and warm, but Reston, Virginia, was still in the grip of winter.
    He’d always hated everything about their neighborhood—the cookie-cutter houses, the small, square backyards, each with a deck and a barbecue grill, the ubiquitous cul-de-sacs, which looked like lollipops on aerial views. Every morning at 7 A.M. a mass exodus occurred as one or both members of each household clutched their briefcases, got in their cars, and headed to nearby Washington. The March of the Lemmings, he called it.
    Theirs was a modest three-bedroom house, comfortable, not luxurious. They’d never made much money, not that he particularly cared. Nancy’s salary was fine at her level, he had a pension from the FBI and he had his social security, though receiving the monthly payments made him feel geriatric. He’d made a few dollars from his book years earlier but the money had gone mostly into boat refittings, a coveted car and a college fund for Phillip (in case there was a Beyond after the