“Okay, then. Electrolytes build up and osmotic pressure goes wild, with off-the-chart levels of basophilic activity.”
“What’s that?”
“A white cell, which in turn triggers releases of histamine, heparin, and serotonin—the markers of allergic reactions.”
“You mean people in hibernation develop allergies?”
“Right. Let’s face it, the body rebels against any unnatural state, and hibernation is the most unnatural of them all for a human.” He paused and his eyes twinkled. “I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t expect your charge to be in such bad shape. You didn’t know?”
“None of us did.”
Floyd pursed his lips.
Laurel glanced toward Raul. He was staring at them and had obviously been following their exchange. His mind would be reeling with the realization that, had Shepherd and his master known that Russo was a barely living corpse, they would have never entertained such a complex operation. And Bastien would be alive. She ran a finger under the ragged edge of the lead collar.
Floyd nodded. “I’ll remove the transmitters as soon as we have a thirty-minute window.”
“Thank you.” She closed her eyes and leaned back until her head rested against the damp concrete.
After a few minutes, they got to their feet and followed the red line on the computer screen. Crossing the main sewage tunnel, they entered the narrow passage. Laurel, marching point, could hear the men’s shoulders scraping against the smooth concrete walls. The air changed. Hot wafts beat down the tube at intervals. After slow progress through a brick corridor strung crazily with obsolete electric wires and plodding through a foot-deep sour-smelling mud, they stumbled across a threshold and the passage opened into a circular chamber pierced by several openings. Laurel stood aside while the rest of the group trooped in. She glanced toward Raul and froze. “Your neck!”
Raul lowered the stretcher, his face a mask of confusion. Then his hand flew to his bare neck. He swore, pivoted on his heel, and charged out of the chamber into the corridor they had just left.
Lukas’s lips moved as if in prayer. Laurel bunched her fists as heavy thumps echoed from the passageway at their back. She glanced around at walls covered with fungi like misshapen tumors. The stone looked diseased in the stale atmosphere. Then Raul burst into the chamber, his hand holding the piece of lead apron, now dripping gunk, around his neck.
“How long?” Lukas asked.
Floyd rummaged in his bag, drew out a roll of adhesive tape, and secured Raul’s strip with a couple of extra turns. “A couple of minutes at most. He had it on when we entered that narrow passage.”
Laurel glanced at her watch—almost one-thirty—and turned to Lukas. “Can they locate us?”
He shrugged. “I doubt it. We’re deep underground, but I don’t know how these fucking things work.”
“We better get going.” Laurel pointed to one of the openings—an entrance that had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but the hinges remained.
Ten minutes later, the passage opened into a set of steps descending into a flooded chamber, the only exits three brick arches on the opposite wall. The foul water was capped by thin fog that left only a twelve-inch clearance at the top.
She surveyed the shocked expressions of the three men, heard a splash, and saw several spots moving across the water, like the snorkels of miniature submarines.
“Through there?” Raul’s voice had lost color.
“Middle one,” Laurel said.
“How far?” Lukas asked.
Laurel checked her computer. The red line ran straight to the top of the screen and ended in a flashing dot. They were approaching the point of the final coordinate lodged in the Metapad. After that, they would have to wait for further input. She tapped the screen, but with her nails trimmed back, the computer couldn’t identify the instruction. Swearing under her breath, she fished out the stylus and pecked at the red line, aghast at the result. “Two hundred feet.”
“Through there?” Raul sounded like a faulty recording.
“And with company.” Floyd nodded at the wakes crisscrossing the water.
The men’s faces were ghostly in the light bouncing off the milky water. A lump bobbed lazily across, and the dots in the water veered to explore. Laurel looked at Raul. “There goes one of your hairy balls.”
Nobody laughed.
“Zip Russo all the way up. We don’t want his face scraping the roof. Lukas, douse your flashlight and carry that bag above the water. Let’s go,” Laurel said.
With a resolve she didn’t feel, she locked her gaze on the opening at the other side of the chamber and stepped forward, placing each foot with care. The water level rose until it licked the fringe of her neck wrap. On the edge of her consciousness, she fought an image of hungry rodents swimming toward her, sharp teeth laced with rabies and scores of other plagues. Another step; a splash. Something soft brushed past her thigh, the sensation sharp through the cold fabric of her suit. Another step; more splashes. Behind her, huffs, curses, and the sound of moving water. Her vision blurred. She saw a majestic oak in bright sunshine and underneath it a swing with a little girl in a white dress, giggling at each push of her father’s brawny arms. Laurel had reached the opening when she heard Lukas’s quivering voice launch into the first verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Thicker voices joined in, and she knew they would make it to the other side of the corridor.
Senator Palmer waited for the second set of beeps before answering, as DAPHNIS flashed on the screen of his secure set.
“Palmer.”
“I sent them off to the moles.” A carillon of code beeps, a snap, and then silence.
Palmer removed his reading glasses, a tribute to a bygone era; he’d refused intraocular surgery, preferring the old-fashioned lenses.
When he’d entered codes in his secure scrambler, Palmer had hesitated to assign Daphnis to Shepherd. Yes, Daphnis, the son of Hermes and a Sicilian nymph, was a shepherd, but his name originated from the Greek daphne. He’d looked up the word’s etymology, to discover daphne meant laurel or bay tree. And now Laurel would place her life and that of her companions in the hands of strangers. Laurel, my brave dear girl. There had to be a hidden meaning in the coincidence.
Palmer closed his eyes. His only hope now lay in people who had lost hope in society. The mole people.
Progress through the flooded tunnel was painstakingly slow. Twice Laurel stopped when her boot caught on an immersed obstacle, soft and squishy. Keeping the flashlight above water to light the way for her companions, she sidestepped, calling out, “Lump!” The air wafted hot over the water. Halfway through, she had to wave the flashlight ahead to clear her way through a tangle of brown spaghettilike excrescences issuing through cracks in the brickwork.
“Someone had a busy weekend.” Floyd moved two paces behind her, followed by Raul. He had rested the poles on his shoulders and draped one of the belts across his forehead. At his back, Raul held the opposite end of the poles against the roof, keeping the end of the bag with Russo’s head clear of the water. Lukas closed the ranks.
Laurel saw a large clump of condoms floating past and cast a thin smile back at Floyd.
After another ten minutes of slow progress, something new crept into the fetid atmosphere. A flurry of soft noises traveled over the surface of the water. Laurel froze and switched her flashlight off. “Quiet!” Darkness crashed down on them. Tiny yellow lights scuttled across her eyes. She blinked and the lights faded.
“What is it?” Floyd whispered, almost on top of her.
“I don’t know. I thought I heard something.”
She toggled the flashlight to its minimum setting before switching it on again. They continued in silence for twenty or thirty feet, finally landing in a vast rotunda, its domed ceiling curving a good twenty feet overhead. The walls were jagged, the bricks splintered and fissured, with tufts of brown moss growing in the cracks.
“An exchange,” Lukas sai
d.
“What?” Raul asked.
“Minor branches empty here to flood into the main line.” He pointed to a tunnel mouth gaping to their left. They waded to the edge of the rotunda and climbed a set of slippery concrete steps onto a dry sidewalk.
“So this is it?” Floyd asked.
Laurel checked the computer, glanced at the flooded tunnel they had just left, and switched the flashlight back on full beam. “No. Now we climb.” She held the light’s beam on rusty ladder rungs to an opening ten feet off the ground.
“Now you climb and we do the Sherpa routine,” Raul said.
Laurel edged along the sidewalk to the rungs and tried them. Although covered in a thick layer of crunchy rust, the metal looked sound enough to hold their weight. When Laurel reached the opening at the top, she shone the flashlight down as the men struggled to maneuver the stretcher up the steps and parallel to the wall, Russo’s shape firmly secured with straps.
The narrow passage they entered was set on a slight incline and was dry, without watermarks. After a couple of minutes, they found themselves in a vast tunnel, the air warm and thankfully lacking the stench of sewage, although they carried plenty of the gunk dripping from their suits. A glint flashed a few feet ahead and she killed the flashlight.
“Now what? You saw something?” The rich timbre of Floyd’s voice was laced with irony.
In darkness, Laurel advanced one foot in front of the other to a point where she squatted and reached with her hand. “A fucking rail.” Again she ratcheted down the light setting and pressed the flashlight’s power switch. A dim glow highlighted two sets of standard railway tracks: an abandoned subway tunnel.
As she straightened, a distinct snap sounded a few yards ahead. Not the soft scurrying sound of an animal, but a heavy step. Once more, she switched the light off and retreated toward the men. They must have heard the noise. She bumped into a shape.
“Shhhhhh.” A whisper.
Long fingers sought hers. She gripped them like a castaway would driftwood.
Another crack, closer this time. She gripped the anonymous fingers tighter.
Ahead of them something moved, followed by a cackling laugh. “Plan to hold hands all night?”
chapter 18
01:32
“Resourceful.” Dennis Nolan fingered a sample of the lead apron used to shield the transmitters.
“How would you have done it?” Nikola asked.
Dennis leaned over and dropped the sample on Nikola’s lap.
“Ouch!”
“Yes, lead is a good electromagnetic shield, great density, but they could have wrapped foil around their necks or wound up a copper wire a few times. I suppose the radiation apron is more elegant and foolproof, though.”
Nikola glanced at one of the overhead clocks and turned to peer through the van’s tinted window at the imposing Nyx building. The DHS scientific team would be sifting through the crime scene, and their silence could only mean there was little, if anything, of importance in the reanimation rooms or the basements. He sniffed and ran his hands over the remains of the lead apron. Not that he expected a trail of crumbs, but often frightened people behaved in the dumbest of ways.
Without a clue to their whereabouts or their sensors acting as homing beacons, the fugitives were as good as gone. The Fast Deployment Units he’d dotted through the city were mostly for show. He closed his eyes. Over a century earlier, during the Warsaw uprising in WWII, thousands of people had moved across the city through the sewers despite having masses of German troops over their heads. The Germans hated the sewers and were scared to enter them. And, after a short incursion a couple of years earlier to inspect a clandestine laboratory, Nikola understood their reluctance. Instead of keeping company with the rats, the Germans would lower listening devices and wait patiently for any noise that didn’t belong. Then they would hurl stick grenades down the utility holes. But the groups moving about through the sewers were anything but stupid. They shunned flashlights, and talking was forbidden. Anytime Nikola met any reference to sewers in his daily work, a bizarre image flashed in his mind—a macabre procession of silent shadows in the choking darkness of a sewer.
“You have a theory how they found out about the transmitters?” Nikola asked.
“It was an oversight. I should have known.”
“Go on.” Nikola knew what Dennis was about to say, but he wanted to hear it anyway.
“When their signature flared over at Nyx, it should have been obvious they would try to reanimate Russo or, at least, stabilize him. That would mean sophisticated equipment, and nowadays they use wireless sensors. As soon as another transmitter entered the monitor’s radius of detection, it would show.”
“Yes, that was my guess.” When he spotted the machine in the surgery room, Nikola had come to a similar conclusion.
Dennis flicked his fingers over a pad and the screens refreshed with data. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though.”
Nikola reached by feel to a small fridge built in by his seat for a water pack—a flat, soft polymer container with a nipple to one side—and tore its seal. “Go on.”
“If these things broadcast all the time, why don’t they interfere with the equipment in the tanks?”
Dennis’s best and most useful feature was a beautiful mind, Nikola thought. “That was an obstacle when I oversaw the design, and a dead end until someone found the answer. As you know, the inmates have their sensors precisely implanted, so the transducer choker circling their necks will never be farther than a quarter inch from its receiving surface. The sensors need little power to relay signals to a receptor so close, but to be effective as tracking devices they need to broadcast with more power.”
“And that would mess with other equipment nearby,” Dennis mused. “I suppose that scores of separate signals radiating in the close quarters of a tank must have played hell with the other receivers.”
“Precisely. The answer was to have them switched off as locators when immersed.”
“How did you manage that? A signal tripping a relay?”
“Much simpler. A junior engineer at Hypnos, almost a kid, figured it out. He wired a microscopic bimetallic strip switch to the casing.”
“A temperature switch?”
“Correct. When the inmates sink into the tank and their body temperature drops, the transmitter switches off.”
“How long can the implants broadcast?”
“Indefinitely. The erbium accumulators inside recharge from the natural current in living bodies.”
“And outside a body?”
“Almost a year. So, if they remove the implants, they’d better smash them to bits instead of keeping them as a souvenir. They are pretty things, you know?”
Dennis nodded. “You reckon they’re still wearing them?”
“Well, they didn’t have the time to take them off at Nyx. Now”—Nikola shrugged—”they have a doctor with them.” He cocked his head again to look toward the Nyx building and sighed. “I don’t think the brainiacs gathering bits of fluff down there will find anything else. Let’s go home.” He stood and stepped over to the front of the van.
Dennis’s hands flew over one of his keyboards to set the equipment on standby, then he unplugged a flat screen, perhaps six inches by eight, moved over to the driver’s seat, and clipped the pad into a docking station. A red throbbing light flashed on the device. Dennis stared into the flickering light and blinked several times. The screen flared green before dissolving into a maze of superimposing lines. Now, from the front seat, Dennis could control the sophisticated equipment in the back of the van. Nikola stared ahead. Driving with an interactive video device in the cockpit would cost anyone his or her driver’s license, but Nikola doubted that anyone, after checking the registration, would have the nerve to try it in his van.
“How good are these sewer maps you have?” Nikola asked.
“As good as they come. These are the working layouts of WASA, the D.C. Water and Sewage A
uthority.”
“Accurate?”
“To a point, but these cover only the upper levels.”
“How many levels are there?”
“No idea, but at least a dozen.” Dennis slowed down, then turned at an intersection.
“No maps?”
“Not even records. Sewers are the weakest spot in most old cities. An army could move through the many forgotten and unexplored levels. The authorities have tried to separate the sanitary and storm systems and have even installed sensors in some new lines—in particular those near strategic areas—but it’s a useless exercise.”
“Why?”
“As I said, only the upper levels are covered. One can install detectors on the ground floor of a house and feel protected. Problem is the many uncharted basements under the property.”
“Yes, but they still have to come up to the ground floor to get to you.”
“True,” Dennis conceded, “but they would be inside the property already. Combined systems is another problem; a nightmare.”
Nikola stared ahead as Dennis maneuvered to overtake a lumbering truck.
“Like many older cities, most of the D.C. sewers were built at the end of the nineteenth century as combined systems to carry, in the same pipe, both sanitary sewage and storm water to the treatment plant.”
“Here in Washington, D.C., I suppose that means the Blue Plains plant.”
“Right. The ideal separate system would channel sewage through one set of pipes, while storm water would flow through a separate set of pipes to the rivers. But old cities rarely have an ideal prototype of anything. Washington evolved as a combined system, with newer, separated networks only in the more recently constructed areas.”
Nikola frowned. “What’s up with a combined system?”
“The system works reasonably well in dry weather, but the main lines can’t hold both wastewater and storm water during heavy rainfall, so they divert the lot into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, Rock Creek, and other tributaries.”
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