The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  Laurel blinked and a single letter flashed on the computer’s screen: >E. She smiled.

  “That way.” She pointed east.

  Raul and Lukas let out breaths of relief.

  “Am I missing something?” Floyd asked.

  “Yes, the fat.” She grabbed her flashlight, stepped past the group and into the trough of the branch line, and crossed over to the walkway running along the opposite wall of the main sewer. Behind her, the men huffed, lifting the stretcher with Russo.

  After a couple of hundred yards, the walkway disappeared and they had to wade through twelve inches of slowly moving fluid, its surface broken by bobbing lumps. Laurel kept glancing at the pipe openings on the walls, which spewed gushes of milky fluid, and the wider holes piercing the curved roof, half-expecting a blinding light and armor-clad men to drop through at any moment. She checked the computer. Nothing. In the main sewer tunnel, they were sitting ducks. As any cretin could see by checking a sewer map, the only way out of Nyx was through the spur line and into the main tunnel. Two small groups, one at each end, could hem them in like rats. As they reached the first intersection, the screen went crazy, with coordinates scrolling down it and then stopping at a flashing prompt, the numbers dissolving under a colored diagram, a red line snaking through a maze of brown lanes of different widths.

  “Right,” she announced, and swung her flashlight into the opening.

  The smaller tunnel looked newer; it had smooth concrete walls, weeping as if suffering from ineffable sadness. They climbed onto a narrow sidewalk and slogged one hundred yards before reaching a domed vault with four smaller openings. Laurel pointed to the one on their far left and tramped across, giving wide berth to large clothed lumps arranged in the center. She shivered to think what lay inside.

  Obviously, Shepherd had planned a circular route to thwart any attempt to track them through the sewers. After changing course at each new intersection at least a dozen times, she guessed it would take a large force to find them. Infrared sensors wouldn’t work: too many hot spots of decaying matter. Motion detectors wouldn’t be of much use either; large objects moved continually through the sewers, particularly in the wider tunnels. That left sound, but their splashing noises were swallowed by cascading water and the intermittent thumps when larger objects fell from side pipes or when rats, some as large as cats, dove into the filth.

  “It seems you were right; there’s nobody here,” Nikola said.

  Jeremy had the sense to press his lips together instead of offering an excuse.

  Nikola panned the shower room, wrinkling his nose at a pile of discarded oilskins and filthy rubber boots. He nodded to an FDU soldier blocking the door. “Get hold of your scientific officer.”

  Nikola peered at the torn remains of a lead apron. So this is how you did it. Most enterprising. He sniffed. Under a strong smell of disinfectant, he caught the sweet odor of lanolin. Again, he turned to the FDU officer, who shadowed him like a ghost. “Seal this floor and the ones below. Have a forensics team run over it.” He nodded to the machines. “I want the data from those.” After a last look around, he turned to the young man in charge of the Nyx security detail. “Is there access to the sewers, Jeremy?”

  “You mean our waste-treatment plant?”

  “No, Jeremy. I mean the city sewers.”

  “Two floors down, sir.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Nikola followed Jeremy down emergency stairs to a service floor crammed with machinery, then down more steps to an unkempt cellar of bare concrete pillars and crates piled high everywhere: a storage area. “How do you move these about?”

  Jeremy pointed to large steel doors at the end of the room. “Through the cargo lift, sir.”

  After a cursory look around, Nikola strode to a sizable door on solid hinges, its security lock pried open. A crowbar was leaning against one wall.

  “The sewers?”

  Jeremy nodded, his face pale as an alabaster statue. With a little more character, his face would have been perfect. But perfection, as the old Greek proverb warned, was incompatible with good and truth.

  “Open it up.”

  “Jeremy Clark, twenty-five,” Nikola’s ear set droned. “Five-ten, college dropout, at Nyx for five years. One year in charge of the night shift. Married, three kids.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. They were fined heavily for the third child.” Nikola pictured Dennis accessing court records. After the 56th Constitutional Amendment, producing more than two children was a serious offense. “He explained to the judge it was an accident; condom interruptus.“

  “See to him,” Nikola said in a low voice.

  “How long?”

  “Until this is over.”

  “Will do.”

  Jeremy yanked the door open, letting in a waft of almost tangible stench. “You said something, sir?”

  Nikola reached to Jeremy’s face and drew the tip of his finger lightly across his fine jaw before clapping a friendly arm around his shoulder.

  “Nothing, son. Nothing that should concern you.”

  day two

  Inferno, Canto VI: 10–12

  Gross hailstones, water gray with filth,

  and snow come streaking down across the shadowed air;

  the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.

  The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI

  chapter 16

  01:15

  “Pet. No calls.” When a thin bar atop her communications console flickered from green to red, Odelle stood, laid a hand on her desk, and reached down to remove her shoes. She eyed the door of her office. “Pet. No visitors.” There was a dry metallic snap as the lock released its bolts.

  A few steps from the center of the room, Odelle glanced through the vast panoramic window of her office at the DHS headquarters to a forest of skyscrapers dotting the night like the fruit of strangely prolific vines. “Pet. Privacy.” The glazed surfaces flickered and frosted over.

  Splaying her toes like a cat’s to grip the carpet’s luscious pile, she stood on the balls of her feet and stretched both arms toward the ceiling, an almost forgotten memory pushing to the forefront of her mind. Nothing is impossible if you keep trying, her mother had once scolded Sonia, Odelle’s kid sister. The little girl wanted to give up after trying to place a piece in a puzzle for two full minutes. Sonia had looked up at her mother, her three-year-old face set in the patronizing expression one uses to address the dim-witted. “Can you shape water?”

  After that, Odelle’s memory was hazy. She couldn’t recall Mother’s reaction or her likely retort, but Sonia’s question had remained forever etched in Odelle’s mind. She relaxed her feet and pushed to stand again on tiptoe, her calves bunching with a welcome ache.

  Through a door flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases crowded with legal texts, she padded into the bathroom. After unbuckling her belt, Odelle sat on the toilet, trousers pooling over her feet. Pet.

  They had been impossibly young, students at a godforsaken college in the middle of nowhere, hemmed by fields of wheat stretching for miles around: wheat the color of Araceli’s hair. Between classes, they would run back to their room and hold hands, and hug, and kiss, and splash water on their faces to hide telltale redness.

  Odelle sidestepped over to the washbasin. The faucet detected her nearness and released warm water.

  After graduation, they’d moved to a dingy apartment, transformed into heaven with eggshell-colored wall paint, posters, and love. The writing is always on the wall, Felipe Ho, her Sino-Spanish professor of criminal law, would insist as he tugged at a few sparse hairs dangling from his chin. Odelle agreed, but only to a point. Sometimes it wasn’t writing but posters. She should have understood that the placards with caricatures of a brutal government on their apartment walls weren’t idealistic delusions of the impossibly young but a testimony of commitment. Could she have altered destiny? Would van Gogh’s cornfields and Turner’s fogs have made any difference? Probably not, but she wouldn�
�t have felt so foolish at Araceli’s betrayal, given that the evidence had stared into her face for years.

  Like a thief, Araceli had left before dawn to join a coterie of activists, the dangerous ones, old enough to be beyond puny idealism. When Odelle finally found her, there was only a husk left of the Araceli she had known—a meek pregnant creature who made calf eyes at Eliot Russo, the Lord of Dreamers. The scene was etched in her mind, as painful as a brand: Russo’s expression of pure contempt as Odelle foolishly wondered if Araceli molded to his body as she had molded to hers.

  Three days later, the riot police charged a group of demonstrators. In the confusion, Araceli’s man, the mighty Lord of Dreamers, scuttled away like a startled crab, leaving Araceli sprawled on the tarmac after she’d tripped—at the mercy of storming shields, truncheons, and rubber bullets. Odelle had studied a film of the demonstration, painstakingly recorded by NBC cameras, a thousand times; she’d frozen three frames to store in the darkest repository of her memory. In one, a fallen Araceli stretched an arm, fingers splayed, toward her fleeing hero, confusion and betrayal pasted in eyes grown too large for her face. In another, Eliot Russo, after stopping mid-stride to look back at Araceli, ran to the safety of a waiting car, his features rutted with terror.

  Odelle splashed warm water on her face and peered in the mirror. Her perfectly lined eyes were rimmed with eyelashes dewed with tiny water drops, and she caught a glimpse of something written in her face that she had not seen before. Her features bore a new familiarity, as though a mask had been removed, revealing the face of another woman—the woman she used to be, though when and where she couldn’t tell. She put her face closer to the mirror to inspect the sparkling blue shine on her eyelids and the strong carmine of her lips, then reached to a stand and rubbed her face dry with a fluffy cotton towel, the third frame flashing against her closed eyelids.

  The third frame captured the instant when a huge, steel-capped boot crashed into Araceli’s elfin face.

  Odelle dropped the spotless towel into a basket and glanced again at her undisturbed makeup—the wonders of intradermal pigmentation. Now the Lord of Dreamers had fled again, not carried off by his treacherous feet but by those of another generation of world-changers. Lukas, the mercenary, and the lawyers: Bastien, Raul, and Laurel. Laurel … Was Bastien your man? Did you snap his neck yourself?

  On her way to her desk, she detoured to stand between two bookcases and fumbled behind a molding to press a button. A wooden panel slid upward to reveal a small, old-fashioned safe. Odelle keyed a code on an alphanumeric pad and reached for a walnut-size wooden box sitting between a leather-bound notebook and a wad of Japanese currency.

  She settled on her leather chair and rubbed the soles of her feet before feeling blindly for her pumps. Yes, there was a way of shaping water. After freezing it, you attacked it with hammer and chisel.

  Often, objects earned different names as a function of their use. An ice pick could become a murder weapon if found jutting from the ear of a person seemingly asleep, and a ringlet of hair metamorphosed from trash—if swept from the floor of a barbershop—into a treasure if clipped from a lover’s head. Odelle examined the tiny box she’d taken from her safe. It was cylindrical, a little over an inch in diameter, its lid intricately carved by a laser in Indonesia and sold as genuine Native American artistry. A gift from Araceli, bought during a trip through Baja California and Mexico. A trip spent in a continuous state of drunkenness from sun, laughter, and wine. This is a dream box, a salesclerk decked in shaman garb had assured them. Place an object inside or a scrap of paper with a wish, hold the box against your heart, and your dream will come true. Incredibly young and foolish, Odelle had treasured the little box and hidden a tuft of Araceli’s hair inside. When Araceli eloped with her dreamer, Odelle cried herself to sleep with the box pressed between her breasts, and when she woke up it had left an angry mark.

  Much later, she rechristened the object “my FY box.”

  Sometimes people—in particular women with a trace of common sense—stashed away a “fuck you” fund: the means to disappear and start anew rather than suffer blows and sex laced with stale beer breath. Other women would put up with that and more—like being marooned in a house full of echoing rooms, with sore nipples, while somewhere an infant screamed to be fed. Idiots. Odelle had not one but several funds salted away in sunny islands—the largest in Antigua—but her FY box was unique and priceless. Brushing her dark mane out of the way, Odelle removed her diamond stud earrings and set them aside. Then she twisted the lid of the box, and from a cushion of wavy hair she removed two studs: two tiny dark-red spheres mounted in gold, which she fixed on her earlobes. She dropped her diamond earrings in the box and replaced its lid.

  As she drew figure eights with the tip of her finger on her glazed desktop, Odelle pondered that Russo’s resilience went beyond her wildest imagination. Without regular maintenance, he’ll be dead within a year. Those had been Vinson Duran’s exact words. But the years went by, and the Lord of Dreamers had refused to die. An omen? His breakout had been a blow, but it was nothing compared to the sober realization that someone powerful, resourceful, and clever was after her ass. Not many people could pull off such a stunt, and she would flush him or her out eventually. But there was a possibility, however remote, that Russo would get away. That’s why she’d resolved to use her FY box. At her direction, a Chinese artisan had covered two minuscule gelatin balls with coats of red lacquer until they shone like small pearls. Lacquer was hard but brittle; a sharp blow or a determined bite would shatter it and release the gelatin pouch in its core: two milligrams of ricin, enough to kill a horse in ten seconds.

  She sighed and fingered one of her new studs absently, her mind racing, weighing alternatives and courses of action. Then her concentration wavered, and she closed her eyes as her thoughts dissolved to coalesce in an image—the same face that haunted her dreams. Pet.

  When the technicians had installed the voice-activated system, they asked for a word to precede any command. It had to be a special word. A word she would never utter other than within the walls of her office in any context. It had been easy. She had never called Araceli by her name, even when angry.

  chapter 17

  01:23

  Three hours after their descent into the sewers, Laurel stopped on a dry platform before another main branch, larger and older than the first. She peered at the Metapad screen and gauged the width of the brown lane depicted on the map. Where a red line—the path they were supposed to follow—crossed the brown, there should have been a narrow opening. She glanced up, but she could barely make it out on the opposite wall. Eyeing the volume of effluent moving through the center of the tunnel and its speed, Laurel guessed this was the main trunk line. She suppressed a shudder. Engorged by rain, flash floods would roar down the tunnel.

  “Let’s take a short break.” She wedged her back against the curved wall and slid to sit down on the concrete, thinking that someone on the surface would be dancing for the gods of rain to deliver. A flash flood would carry their bodies all the way to the Potomac.

  Floyd squatted. After checking Russo’s pulse, he reached into his bag, pushed the pad of a pressure sensor into Russo’s neck, and shook his head. “I don’t know how, but he’s hanging in there. His resilience is incredible.” After digging in his bag again, Floyd produced a syrette, ripped a section of the bag open, and rammed it onto Russo’s thigh.

  Laurel blinked. An intramuscular shot would spread through Russo’s metabolism at a much slower rate. That meant Russo was stable. For months she had pored over the scant literature Shepherd could find dealing with hibernation and its aftereffects, but nothing in the books she’d read could account for Russo’s ravaged state.

  His ministrations complete, Floyd stood and looked around. He stepped over to sit close to her. “Do we have much farther to go?”

  She cocked her head, wincing at the strain of her neck wrap. “Half a mile.”

  “And then?”
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  “Your guess is as good as mine. We wait, I suppose.”

  “That man won’t take much more of this. He needs blood.”

  “You mentioned blood back at Nyx, and I saw scores of red lines on the machine’s printout. What do you people poison them with that they need a change of blood?”

  “Ask Hypnos.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “That man,” he pointed his chin toward the stretcher, “has had no maintenance. I’ve examined people who’d served a few years in Hypnos’s tanks. With a little fine-tuning, they were as good as new. Most of them walked away from sugar cubes after a week of convalescence, but I’ve never seen anybody like him. He shouldn’t be alive with what is coursing through his veins.”

  She bit her chapped lower lip. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t do anything to him, but you are an expert and use a similar setup.”

  “We constantly monitor our patients and regularly flush their systems free of toxins. Besides, our setup, as you call it, may be similar, but it is much more sophisticated and expensive.”

  “How so?”

  “The fluid temperature is critical for keeping a subject in ideal condition throughout hibernation. At commercial stations like Nyx, we use individual tanks to suspend the patients. Clearly, in a communal tank, with scores of individuals, the temperature is a compromise, an average. Shortages can be overcome only by altering the blood’s chemistry with drugs. Don’t forget renal functions are also down. Over time, impurities build up. At Nyx, we survey hematology, electrolytes, liver enzymes, nitrogen elements, protein, lipids, ratios, differentials, you name it. When counts reach a critical level, we dialyze the patients. You know, scrub their blood.”

  “I know a little about dialysis.”

  “How come? I thought you were a lawyer.”

  “My aunt suffered a kidney failure. She went to a clinic three times a week to be hooked for hours to a machine. Sometimes I would keep her company.”