The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  But the chopper wreckage was too hot to rummage inside, and the fighters must have been in a hurry to leave the area. After a while, before he passed out again, the pilot stopped hearing their elated chatter.

  Back at the post, Major Marino was already writing his report to justify having lost his flying detail when the beacon signal tripped a receiver at the comms shack. An excited sergeant brought the news and the hope of someone still alive after the fiasco, but Marino put on a face of deep regret and cited the lack of pilots. Then the sergeant meekly quoted from memory the seven Army Core Values, stressing the fourth, Selfless Service: Put the welfare of the nation, the Army, and your subordinates before your own.

  When the sergeant’s eloquence failed to elicit any reaction, he further pointed out that Marino was a certified chopper pilot. Naturally, Marino didn’t plan on piloting a chopper into the growing dusk, with the light swiftly waning beyond the mountains, and into hot mujahideen territory. He wouldn’t have changed his mind but for the regulation sidearm the sergeant pushed against Marino’s temple as he started a slow yet firm countdown.

  That evening, as Major Marino basked in the glory of rescuing the downed pilot, he ordered the sergeant’s arrest.

  When the pilot was finally discharged from the military hospital where they had tried to rebuild his leg, the sergeant had already been court-martialed and dishonorably dismissed. With an almost useless leg, the pilot accepted a generous pension deal, resigned his commission, and went looking for the ex-sergeant.

  Tyler shook his head. He gripped his left knee, and all the bitterness it had come to represent receded into the misty background of his mind. Then he keyed a string of numbers into the safe’s keyboard, leaned over a dark oval window, and inserted his index finger into a slot. With the biometric check complete, something snapped within the bowels of the steel monolith and its door swung on silent hinges. The lower shelf held a stack of data disks, slim computer hard drives, and a bunch of inexpensive cell phones in a plastic bag. The top shelf was crammed with neat bundles, four deep, each holding $100,000. The cash was the second payment provided by the senator for the doctor and the controller, and it would also serve as the slush fund to cover other operational expenses. Altogether enough to bankroll a new life. Or several new lives.

  Leaving the safe door open, Tyler turned to the window overlooking a corner of his farm.

  Finding the sergeant had been a bitch. Almost a decade later, the pilot, ex–Chief Warrant Officer Harper Tyler, tracked Henry Mayer, the sergeant, to the Washington, D.C., sewers.

  “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” Senator Palmer whispered Van Dyke’s poem to silent bookshelves. Locked in his study, he was surrounded by books on ancient literature, history, and political philosophy. He hoped for, and at the same time dreaded, the ring of the secure phone. He felt powerless, reduced to the role of a mere observer to the drama unfolding before his eyes.

  Bastien’s death had been a blow, later expanded tenfold by the discovery of the sensors’ hidden role, as was Russo’s appalling condition. Palmer felt outraged by the transmitters’ deception and overwhelmed by the young lawyer’s death. He would mourn Bastien, the dear boy, for the rest of his life. In his grief, Palmer would reach for an end to justify the means he’d used. But if he didn’t succeed, if Russo’s deterioration or the sensors were their undoing, Bastien’s death would serve no purpose. It would be put down to the deranged idealism of an old man, and Palmer wouldn’t be able to live with that.

  Laurel, Raul, and Russo, with Dr. Carpenter and Lukas Hurley tagging along, were still in the sewers, perhaps a little more comfortable thanks to Shepherd’s agencies but still holed up. Springing them through the formidable gauntlet the DHS had thrown around the city while keeping Russo alive would require a regrettably scarce commodity: a miracle.

  He stepped over to the sliding doors that opened to the garden and pushed them aside. The sky was the color of peat. Overhead, clouds marched quickly through thick air and against an increasingly angry sky.

  At intervals during the previous hours, Palmer had heard muted thumps. He panned over the lawn, rosebushes, trimmed paths, and across the clump of trees until he spotted the culprit. Someone, probably Timmy, had left the door to the garden shed ajar. Not that it mattered, but it was an unkempt detail in an otherwise spotless garden, and a playful wind had nothing better to do than to bang it against its frame at intervals.

  The gravel crunched underfoot as he walked to the shed. The pronouncement from Shepherd replayed in his mind. Police patrols have sealed all roads and Russo is dying, tied to a stretcher in an abandoned subway tunnel. My contact there will try to spring them.

  At the shed, he peeked inside to check for Bum, Timmy’s dog, just in case he had resolved to spend the night among the tools and his archenemies: two squat robotic lawn mowers that drove the nervous beast mad as they entered and left the shed from a trapdoor on one side. But everything looked fine. The lawn mowers were suckling their power from outlets on one wall, and Bum was nowhere in sight. As Palmer was about to latch the wooden door, he spotted a basket of bulbs on a shelf, packages of dormant life, and an image of Hypnos’s tanks intruded in his thoughts. He leaned on the open door and made up his mind.

  On his way back to the study, Palmer glanced up. The night was heavy, blanketed by featureless clouds. He glanced at his reflection on the windowpane. Sometimes he didn’t recognize the face looking back at him from mirrored surfaces. “I can stand the thought of someone dying, but not for nothing,” he whispered to the gods of the stars, if there were any. Then, with a conscious effort, he fought to marshal his thoughts.

  One of the finest cures for a headache was a hammer blow to a finger, or so the joke went. Fresh agonizing pain soon replaced a dull head throb. Palmer stepped inside, closed the doors, and drew the curtains, shutting out the night.

  chapter 21

  08:46

  Laurel awoke to the smell of frying bacon. Scent sometimes triggered half-forgotten scenes in her mind. Details became fresh, moments she’d never paid attention to as they slipped by remembered. When walking through a department store past the men’s section, a whiff of an ex-lover’s cologne could bring a flash of memory, how he looked and felt. Now the smell of Washington sewers had so overwhelmed her pituitary that she wondered if she would ever smell anything without the tang of lanolin or shit again.

  Her neck ached—a dull throb in the spot where Floyd had removed the sensor earlier. “Just a nick,” he’d said, but it had hurt like hell. Nursing a neat sterile pad over adhesive stitches, she’d wedged her back into a corner to rest for five minutes, but the anesthetic must have knocked her out. She didn’t remember falling asleep.

  Laurel flicked her eyes open for a heartbeat, two, three, before closing them again to coax her senses into alertness. When the heavenly smell of bacon once more displaced the rancid stench of poverty and unwashed bodies, she opened her eyes. Before falling asleep, she’d climbed to the platform and settled on a spot next to the archway where Floyd tended to Russo. Now she leaned over and peered into the opening. A few feet away, Floyd dozed, curled up by a pile of flattened cardboard boxes. Lukas sat in a corner, his head lolling. Raul was nowhere in sight.

  “Well, if it’s not Sleeping Beauty returning to the land of the living!” Raul emerged from the gloom between two fires farther down the platform, followed by Henry, another man, and a scrawny kid carrying a box. She could have retorted there had been no kiss from a handsome prince, but she felt too weary and drowsy. Rather than the land of the living, the abandoned tunnel felt like someone’s deep, dark thoughts buried and repressed in an empty room of the brain, accessible only by nightmares and shrinks.

  “This is Metronome,” Henry said.

  She nodded and focused on the boy; he was perhaps ten to twelve years old, although his age was difficult to guess und
er a coat of grime. His head swung nonstop from side to side, a thin dribble of spit dangling from wet lips. Regardless of the motion, his intelligent eyes remained riveted on hers.

  Laurel sat upright. Henry reached for two small empty crates and kicked a third one ahead of him.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Laurel asked.

  “Almost four hours, but don’t worry, you haven’t missed anything,” Raul answered.

  “And him?” She glanced toward Russo.

  Raul paused before answering. “As the doctor says, stable.”

  Dying, she thought. The men moved the boxes to form a semicircle around her. Metronome lowered his box—a polymer container with a wire mesh stretched over its top. The other man remained erect, as if standing at attention, close to the curved platform wall and away from the light. He was almost as tall as Henry, and gaunt. Decked head to toe in a long black overcoat, he looked like an old photograph she had once seen of Grigory Rasputin, the mad monk of czarist Russia, complete with lank hair plastered down the sides of his face and a matted beard reaching to his chest. Laurel swallowed.

  “I’ll get some light.” Henry turned on his heel and entered the opening in the curved wall, reappearing a few seconds later with a rusty stand, like those used in hospital wards to hang IV drips on half a century before. He reached under Russo’s stretcher to pick up one of their LAD flashlights, turned it on, and hooked it to the contraption. Its last user must have set it on low, but it cast a pleasant white circle on the floor.

  Henry settled on his crate, clearly disturbing whatever festered underneath the greatcoat and sending forth a sharp waft of stench. Laurel peered toward the fires, wishing someone would resume cooking, then glanced once more toward the unnerving figure standing straight in the gloom.

  Henry followed her gaze and swiveled toward the silent man. “Barandus.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My friend Barandus. He’s offered to help. Good man.” With that, he turned away, and Laurel suspected no further information would be forthcoming.

  Floyd had roused. He stretched, looked around the area he’d commandeered as his domain, squatted somewhere beyond Russo, and returned with a self-heating unlabeled bag. He offered it to Laurel. “You must be starving. Here. Henry gave me a few. It’s only rice, but your stomach can’t take much more than this anyway. How long since your last meal? Thirty-six hours? Forty-eight?”

  “Something like that.” She inspected the bag; it looked intact but old and grimy. With a sigh, she pulled a red tab that would cause two chemicals to mix in its base and produce heat. When she felt it warming, she settled it against the wall to cook.

  Henry followed her motions. “It’s good rice, organic; none of that cloned stuff. My wife hoarded tons of it.”

  “You live here with your wife?” Laurel asked, aghast.

  A cloud passed across his eyes. “I had a mate, a wonderful woman, fat and homely. Before descending to live in this hell, she worked at a natural-foods cooking school. Even after that, she would surface to go to a feminist vegetarian restaurant owned by anarchistic lesbians, and she’d return with loads of rice bags. She died last winter.” He darted a glance to the box. “Rats. Mighty fine woman.”

  “Rats …?” Laurel turned to Floyd.

  “Weil’s disease?” he asked.

  Henry nodded.

  Floyd settled down on his haunches. “It’s a much-named horror, transmitted through contact with urine from infected animals. It’s biphasic. First, flulike symptoms, which soon disappear. The second phase may involve renal and liver failure and often meningitis. It’s a complicated disease to cure even with ample resources.” Floyd looked around, then lowered his eyes. “Here, she wouldn’t have a chance.”

  Metronome’s head continued its slow sway.

  Unconsciously, Laurel drew her legs tight to her body when a frantic scratching issued from the box at the boy’s feet. “What’s that?”

  Henry rubbed his hands. “Our friend here has agreed to help us. She’ll get the heat off our backs by carrying the locators away.”

  Laurel focused on a noise to her left. Floyd had stepped over to Russo’s stretcher and picked up something from the floor. Then he returned with a crumpled lump she recognized as the wraps they had worn around their necks.

  “Don’t worry. I tucked the locators into the lead strips,” Floyd said.

  With his foot, Metronome pushed the box into the circle of light. Something huge moved inside.

  “Shit, is that a rat?” Laurel asked.

  Henry’s beard parted to reveal a dark hole she supposed was his mouth. “Not just a rat. A very rare specimen.”

  She reached for her bag of rice, tore its top, and fished inside for the plastic fork.

  Henry nudged the box with his foot. “Beautiful, isn’t she?”

  The rat shifted, its pointed nose trembling, and let out a tiny cry. Laurel cringed. “She’s enormous.”

  “Yes, she is. They seldom grow larger than twelve inches or weigh over a pound. She’s an exception—heavy, almost two pounds, and pregnant. You know anything about Rattus norvegicus?”

  Silence but for the muted whisper of voices echoing from the station dwellers.

  “They live for about twelve months, and females reach sexual maturity in ten weeks. That leaves them four-fifths of their lives to reproduce. Since their gestation period is twenty-two days, they can have four to seven litters in a year. At eight to ten offspring a litter, a pair of rats can produce forty or fifty descendants.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Not really.” Henry nudged the box again. “That’s the mechanism of an advanced survival machine. The horrible bit, as you put it, is their yearly waste: fifty pounds of pellets, a gallon of urine, and a million hairs—all of it laced with rare germs. They are territorial, you know? They seldom move out of an area of one hundred feet around their lair.”

  “I don’t understand,” Laurel muttered, her mouth full of hot rice. “Does that mean the thing can carry the sensors only a hundred feet away?”

  “I told you, she’s special. Not from this area but from a maze of crumbling old sewers a mile away, unconnected by foot to these tunnels. Since she’s pregnant, she will do her damnedest to get back home; it will take her an hour. There’s a shortcut, but she can’t take it. Rattus norvegicus are poor climbers.”

  “Norvegicus? Does it mean these horrors are from Norway?” Laurel asked.

  “No, it doesn’t. Someone christened the species and the name stuck.” Henry shifted to produce a set of rusty wires from his pocket and started pulling and adjusting them into a large hollow bracelet.

  Floyd leaned over. “How’s your neck?”

  “Sore.”

  “I kept the cut to the same size the machine made to insert it. Half an inch. It should heal well, and any cosmetic clinic will remove the scar for next to nothing.”

  Laurel nodded and dug back into her rice—warm, firm, and with a nutty flavor.

  “Let’s get this beauty loaded,” Henry said.

  Raul drew near and offered Henry the bundle of lead apron strips.

  Metronome’s hands, encased in a butcher’s mesh gloves, moved into the light. With uncanny dexterity, he flicked the lid open and pounced on the animal inside.

  Raul recoiled, and Laurel pressed her back harder against the curved wall.

  Henry unwrapped the strips and produced three hazelnut-shaped forms, like tiny Easter eggs, their surfaces rippling under the light, and slotted them inside the wire contraption.

  Metronome grabbed the rat by its neck with one hand and gripped its hind legs with the other.

  “Here.” Henry fastened the wires around the rat’s midriff, then draped one of the lead-fabric strips over it and secured it with another length of wire. Then he nodded to Metronome. “Hurry up, boy, let her loose by the waterfall after you remove this piece of cloth. She’ll find a way to her lair.”

  Laurel eyed Metronome’s retreating figure. “Wi
ll she be able to get the wires off?”

  “I doubt it.” Henry’s voice didn’t show concern for the rat’s welfare.

  “Won’t this get you in trouble?” Raul asked.

  Henry’s eyes twinkled and he panned the tunnel. “More trouble?” The hole in his beard lengthened sideways.

  “I meant—”

  “I doubt the goons will do anything. They’ll guess some mole—that’s what they call us—has helped you out, but there are over twenty settlements. Besides, we may soil their neat tanks. Nah. They’ll be pissed as hell but can’t do shit about it. They’ll know you’ve fled and they’ll look elsewhere. As soon as Metronome returns—say, thirty minutes—we’ll be on our way.”

  “You like it here?” Raul was ripping the tab from a bag of rice.

  Henry cocked his head, as if he were taking Raul’s measure. “We have almost everything. Hooking up wires for electricity is easy, and discards from the city provide all the material comforts we need. Only running water is lacking, but, in a way, it’s an advantage; dirt and grime help us blend in with the darkness. To answer your question: No, I don’t like it, but it’s home, and crowded with extraordinary people.”

  Laurel nodded. She understood about home and extraordinary people. Bastien. A lump formed in her throat, and the light dangling from the IV stand seemed to break into myriad sparkles.