The Inner Circle

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: red steel door after red steel door after red steel door. Air Force. Navy. Department of Defense.

“I’m surprised they put their names on them,” Dallas says as we pass one for the FBI.

“Those are the rooms they want you to see,” Gina says with a laugh. “We’ve got over twenty-two miles of tunnels back here. You don’t want to know how much more space they’ve got.”

I pretend to laugh along, but as we go deeper into the cave I can’t take my eyes off the ceiling, which seems to be getting lower.

“You’re not imagining things,” Gina says. “It is getting lower.”

Dallas shoots me a look to see if I’m okay.

Throughout the cavern, the jagged rock walls are painted white, and there are fluorescent lights hung everywhere, presumably to make it feel more like a workplace instead of an anthill.

To my surprise, it works.

On our right, two employees wait at an ATM that’s built into the rock. Next to that, there’s a red awning over a fully functioning store called the “Roadway Cafe.”

I thought being this far underground would feel like I was being buried. Instead…

“You’ve got a full-blown city down here,” Dallas says as we pass a new group of construction workers-this one putting the finishing touches on an area that holds vending machines.

“Almost three thousand employees. Think of us as the Empire State Building lying on its side and buried three hundred feet underground. We got a full-service post office… our own water treatment plant to make the toilets work… even good food in the cafeteria-though of course, it’s all brought in. There’s no cooking permitted on site. We get a fire and-forget burning the files that’re stored down here-y’know what kinda death trap we’d be standing in?” she asks with a laugh.

Neither Dallas nor I laugh back-especially as we both look up and notice the cargo netting that’s now running along the length of the ceiling and keeping stray rocks, cracked stalactites, and what feels like the entire cavern from collapsing on our heads. Back by the cafe and the ATM, we were in the cave’s version of Times Square. But as the employees thin out and we head deeper into the catacombs, this is clearly one of its darker alleys.

“Home sweet home,” Gina says, flicking on the golf cart’s lights.

Straight ahead, it looks like the cave dead-ends. But as the golf cart’s lights blink awake, there’s no missing the yellow police tape that keeps people from turning the corner, or the enormous red, white, and blue eagle-part of the National Archives logo-that’s painted directly on the cave wall. Above the eagle’s head is a partially unrolled scroll with the words: Littera Scripta Manet, the Archives motto that translates as “The Written Word Endures.”

Damn right it does, I think to myself, hopping out of the golf cart and darting for the bright red door that serves as the entrance to the Archives’ underground storage facility.

102

'Anything else I can help with?” Gina calls out, standing in the cave, outside the threshold of the open red door.

“I think we’re fine,” I tell her.

Dallas is already inside the storage unit.

I’m anxious to follow.

Gina never leaves her spot. As a sales rep, she’s in charge of clearing our visit with Mr. Harmon and the Presidential Records Office, checking our IDs, and even putting in the six-digit code that opens the steel door (and the secondary door that sits just behind that). But without the necessary security clearance, she can’t join us in here.

“Both doors open from the inside,” she assures us as the cold air pours out from the room. Just inside the door, I take a quick glance at the hygrothermograph on the wall. The temperature is at a brisk fifty-eight degrees, which is colder than we usually keep it.