The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  “Leave it open,” Henry said, once the chunk of metal was vertical. The men dragged the lid two feet and propped it by the opening. The cover was heavily corroded on the exposed lower side, with lumpy orange excrescences that glistened under the tight beams of the flashlights. Barandus returned the crowbar and stepped down first.

  Laurel eyed Barandus’s head as it disappeared below the rim of the utility hole and thought, not for the first time, that she’d barely heard the strange man utter more than single words. What kind of name is Barandus, anyway? One by one they followed.

  The shaft, perhaps twelve to fifteen feet deep, connected with a vast rotunda, its center occupied by a derelict turbine. On the other side of the machine, they descended two metal ladders down to another level and a narrow dry tunnel. After rounding a sharp corner, the group spread out in a single line trailing through a network of pipes with obvious signs of maintenance.

  “Gas and water mains,” announced Henry from the front. A few tight turns later, Henry stopped at an arched side opening and stepped through. The others followed. The brick passageway opened onto a larger tunnel, but Henry stopped a few steps short. “Lights off.”

  One by one the bright LAD flashlights dimmed until there was nothing but thick darkness. Laurel stepped back, a hopeful hand moving toward Raul’s.

  “Charlie,” Henry called. “See to motion and light sensors.”

  A rustle of steps, silence, then a curious wet twang. After a few seconds, they again heard a strange thwack, followed by a pause. “Done,” a voice echoed, far ahead.

  An LAD flashlight flooded the enclosure with painful intensity, then dimmed. “Lights at minimum setting,” Henry said, and marched ahead to a concrete-lined structure. There, they shambled down a seemingly endless six-foot-wide tunnel lined with spaghettilike green cables. “Fiber-optic security wiring; our nation’s secrets beam along these tubes.” Twice more, Henry stopped and ordered the lights doused before directing Charlie to deal with the sensors. After the second time, Raul pointed to a squat box on the top of the arched roof, dripping black gunk.

  Laurel peered at the device as they passed under it. “But … how?”

  “A catapult,” muttered Susan. “A pellet of tar and rat shit.”

  “In the dark?” There was a hint of awe in Raul’s voice.

  “Nah.” Susan hawked and spat. “Sensors have LED lights so maintenance crews can see at a glance if they’re working. Easy to see in pitch darkness.”

  “But won’t blinding them trigger an alarm?” Raul asked.

  “Alarm? These are passive detectors.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Okay, imagine these are switches. If a light detector is blanked, it receives no light and remains switched off, or inactive, if you prefer. Same with a motion detector. They work by bouncing an infrared beam and timing its return. No return, no alarm.”

  Laurel smiled. “You were concerned about tunnels with security measures? There’s your answer, and it didn’t need rocket science.” She jabbed Raul with her elbow.

  Raul huffed, but in the bounce of a stray beam she could see his teeth gleam. She reached for her Metapad, selected a search engine, and typed >Barandus.

  Ahead, the tunnel branched. Henry purposefully marched into the left fork before stopping almost at once before a small steel door, its gray paint flaking and missing in parts where reddish tracks wept.

  Once more, Barandus stepped forward, fingered a padlock, and reached inside his coat to produce bolt cutters. After another descent through a round shaft, Laurel cringed at the reek of sewage. Here we go again. They hit a tunnel layered with viscous black goop that sucked at their boots and released a horrific stench; it opened after a hundred yards onto a sizable sewer with a walkway on one side and a whitish stream gurgling along its floor. After a prolonged bend, a large grille with two-inch bars blocked the tunnel. No bolt cutter could deal with those. She glanced at Raul, who shrugged.

  “Fear not,” Henry said. He walked slowly along the grille, his fingers brushing the vertical bars. He stopped at one, grabbed it, and rocked it until it broke loose from its moorings. When everybody had slid through, Henry replaced the iron bar in its slot.

  “That guy knows his sewers,” Raul admitted.

  “I told you,” Susan mumbled.

  Laurel checked her watch. Over an hour and a half since they’d left Russo, and they had made good progress. We must be getting near. Then her Metapad issued a faint beep and its screen lit up. >Barandus. One of the two wise men in the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena; Apocalypse; the Gospel According to Peter.

  I’ll be damned, Laurel thought.

  A few minutes later Henry stopped at another side entrance but didn’t go in. “We must go through the crumbly, and that’s dangerous, but there’s no other alternative,” he announced.

  “What’s that?” Raul asked.

  Henry glanced at Barandus before answering. “The crumbly are the oldest sewers, narrow and lined with crumbling bricks. Cave-ins are frequent. I hear the city honchos are sinking new lines to eventually condemn these, but they are still in use.”

  Harper Tyler neared the old bay window in his study, nursing a squat tumbler with a splash of bourbon over a handful of ice cubes.

  Suddenly a bright red tractor trailing a liquid-manure spreader broke through the green wall of poplars separating the farm buildings and his house from the stables and fields. Tyler shielded his eyes and peered at the machine driven by Mateo Salinas—Antonio’s son, decked in orange coveralls.

  After Tyler’s “accident,” a mousy woman with colonel stripes had paid him a hospital visit to “plan your future.” When a couple of medals and a promotion to a cushy desk job at a sunny location failed to elicit much enthusiasm, she offered him a sweet pension deal unreasonably fattened by a score of arcane items and payable in a lump sum with no deductions or commissions. That was the carrot. The stick was a lengthy document placing a short interval of his military career above top secret and threatening fire and brimstone should he be foolish enough to whisper a word about his time in Iran. When he requested time to study the papers, the colonel made a face and shook her head. “The wording is irrelevant,” she confided. “It’s the spirit that matters. The army wants you to have well-earned peace of mind. It’s only fair we demand the same in exchange.” She didn’t say “or else,” but Tyler was too weary and in pain from his shattered leg to consider rivaling Don Quixote’s charge against the towering windmills of the military establishment. Major Marino was probably irrelevant. But his daughter, Odelle—the blazing star in the DHS firmament—was another matter. The army couldn’t risk upsetting her. He signed on the dotted line and initialed each page before eyeing the colonel’s departing derriere and upgrading his earlier rating of mousy to that of feline.

  Thus ex–Chief Warrant Officer 4 Harper Tyler bankrolled a self-sufficient hog farm.

  Mateo was heading to an earthed lagoon where the slurry from the pens collected before flowing slowly down a cement trench. Manure was an important element on Tyler’s farm. From the trench, the waste not used on the fields was instead poured into underground pits, where an anaerobic biogas digester rotted the waste and extracted methane gas, which was then fed to his turbine. Pig manure provided all the energy the farm needed and was a source of income from the surplus-electricity feed to the grid.

  The solid waste produced a valuable fertilizer. The remaining liquids would be returned to a nearby stream at the end of the process as clean water—the biodigestion having removed any pathogens or other potentially dangerous contamination from the pig waste. The water-filtration process involved a series of pools with plants that cleaned the water as they grew and made good pig feed, further reducing the need for off-site energy inputs. The system, a model of ingenuity and sound engineering, had been implemented by Antonio Salinas, the army veteran who—along with his wife, three sons, and boundless energy—ran the farm for Tyler.

  Rather than heading for the s
lurry lagoon, the tractor stopped. Tyler frowned, watching as Antonio dashed toward the tractor, propelled by his prosthetic legs, his arms moving like the wings of a bird about to take flight. The quiet existence at the farm had given the battered Antonio a new lease on life. Still, the last time Tyler shared supper with the Salinas family, he was aghast at the tuna–noodle casserole with crumbled potato chips on top, followed by Jell-O laced with canned mandarin-orange slices and shredded carrots. A far cry from the Mexican feast Tyler had hoped for.

  By the poplars, Antonio continued his gesticulation, pointing up and waving his son toward the machinery shed.

  Tyler let the curtain fall and hobbled across the room to his maps, his mind shifting from pig manure to Laurel’s latest signal. He remembered well the army technician Sergeant Santos Hernandez. How could he forget? One of the rare wizards of Explosive Ordnance Disposal, his team was often called upon to deal with seemingly impossible tasks, like removing the belt from a repentant suicide bomber whose charge had failed to go off. The brass had suggested clearing a wide area and letting a sniper detonate the explosives attached to the bastard. Sergeant Hernandez would have none of it. Decked in his body armor, he walked the wretch to the middle of a field and sweated for two endless hours under a merciless sun to remove fifty pounds of high explosives fiendishly attached to a much-booby-trapped harness. In the end, it was a useless gesture. Once freed of his load, the man tried to make a run for it and the sniper carved another notch into his weapon.

  Explosives. Tyler’s eyes roamed the Washington, D.C., map. Henry was a strangely honorable man in a dishonorable world. No blood. No innocents. How much explosive could six people carry? Thirty pounds each? Forty? He continued to scan the map. Capitol Hill, the White House, and the Pentagon were out of the question. Too many security measures. That left airports, power stations, road junctions, gasworks, trains … Henry would be planning a rattle. A mighty rattle. Then he froze and did a quick double take. He wouldn’t dare. Tyler turned on his heel, and a searing pain shot from his left knee. He limped to his desk, his eye on the secure phone to warn the senator. He rested his glass, now mostly water, on a small area clear of papers—and stopped cold. The light had changed. Tyler charged toward the window and slapped the curtain aside, suddenly realizing what Antonio had been warning Mateo about. Storm clouds had quickly gathered overhead, and the poplars leaned as if pushed by unseen hands. Sweet Lord, no! He watched in dismay as large drops of rain threw themselves in heavy snatches on the terra-cotta tiles fronting the house.

  Henry’s “crumbly” was nightmarish. After going down three more shafts, they landed in an oval tunnel of bricks in all shades of gray and black. Oozing gray excrescences dangled from the ceiling like an upside-down forest.

  “Holy—” Laurel gasped.

  At her side, Susan hawked and spat a glob of phlegm onto the wall. “They’ve been called snotsicles, shitsicles, and you-name-it-sicles. By any name, bad news.”

  “Why?” Laurel jumped at the opportunity to get her taciturn companion to talk.

  Susan withdrew a scarf from her pocket that once must have been printed with flowers but now was a confusion of grime and brown streaks. She tied it tightly around her head. “That dangling, jiggly fucking slime gets in your hair like a gel and dries into a hard, crisp coat.”

  Laurel lowered the dome of her head toward Susan. “I have an advantage.”

  “How right you are.” A cackling laugh followed. “Look.” Without breaking stride, Susan reached high and grabbed a handful of the spaghettilike formations. They wriggled in her hand like live worms. “Their consistency is similar to very thick come. See?” She squeezed. “The outermost layer is slippery, wet, and shiny. Just beneath this is a rubbery substance.”

  Henry stepped aside and stopped, waving his arms to keep the rest of the group walking. When they drew level, he grinned, his head already coated in the slimy things.

  “Its exact composition is open to debate, but it’s probably algae that live off the decaying materials commonly found here. Harmless, though. Let’s check for fumes.” He flicked a gas lighter and peered at the flame. Then he returned it to one of the cavernous pockets in his greatcoat. “Had there been a tinge of orange in the flame, it would mean trace levels of natural gas. But we’re all right.”

  “All right?” Laurel looked around. “I mean, is there no end to the shit?”

  Henry’s voice took on a patronizing tone. “This is the lower world. It’s a paradox that we know more about space, stars, and galaxies light-years away than about the sewers beneath our city streets. No government has ever thought of exploring, much less cleaning, these regions.”

  “People need to know about this and do something about it. I mean, these should be cleaned, or sealed—” Laurel bit her lip. Her thoughtless comment reeked of high school idealism.

  Barandus neared and breathed deep. He panned his flashlight up and down the tunnel, painting a swath across the crumbling brick. Charlie and Jim drew near, their eyes never leaving Barandus, and Laurel could have sworn they were holding their breath. “People don’t want to know what happens to their shit.” Barandus spoke with a strangely measured voice, pronouncing every word with care, as if addressing a congregation. “Excrement, like everything else, has become a heritage industry. Out of sight, out of mind. For most people, shit, like death, is a private matter. Once it leaves the body, its afterlife is up to whoever collects the taxes.”

  He paused and his voice lowered. “Civilization has its mirror in the sewers. The filth of men falls into this pit of reality, where social class ends. Engulfed by their latrines, the rich and the powerful mingle again with their humbler brethren here.” He raised a leg and brought the toe of his rubber boot to the surface of the effluent, where it created a miniature eddy. “This brew is a confession. There’s no more hypocrisy, no cosmetics to disguise upbringing. Here there’s nothing left but the terrible shape of our shared miseries. There, a syringe speaks of oblivion, a mop head of domesticity; there, an effigy of the Virgin Mary reverts to cheap plastic, hobo spittle meets noble puking, and, farther on, the lost engagement ring jostles the razor blade that severed a dreamer’s veins. And you wonder why people deny sewers? A sewer doesn’t keep secrets or keep appearances. Here we’re surrounded by truth.” Again he breathed deep before shifting in his rubber boot, as if testing the ground under the filth. Then he hunched his shoulders and started to plod ahead.

  Laurel’s head spun. She had no idea how the Paris sewers must have felt to Victor Hugo, but his source of inspiration for Les Misérables now seemed obvious. And Barandus had shamelessly borrowed from the French master for his impromptu speech.

  Raul shook his head. “He doesn’t speak much, but when he does …”

  “What?”

  “I wish he’d kept his mouth shut.”

  “Depressing, huh?” Laurel asked.

  Henry looked around as if taking a bearing and followed Barandus. “Reality always is.”

  Raul rubbed his hands. “How much longer?”

  “Half an hour,” Henry said. “We’re almost there.”

  As he severed the communication with Shepherd, Senator Palmer knew the meaning of fear as never before. Shepherd had sent the storm warning to Laurel but didn’t get confirmation or an answer, so he’d called Palmer. It was raining hard. Through the patio doors came sounds like the percussion section of a high school band. He watched, mesmerized, as sheets of water slid down the glass expanses to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning: a classic of late-summer Washington, D.C. Then the storm ended abruptly, as though bored. Outside, the lawn steamed. Palmer slid open the patio doors to the smell of electricity in the air, his mind thick with foreboding.

  They continued single file along a passage without sidewalks, trampling slimy water in their wake. Soggy clothing dripped, boots and rags squelched. The piercing beams of LAD flashlights highlighted wisps of steam rising from the hair and misshapen coats of the marchers.

  �
�My children,” Henry’s voice boomed from the head of the line, “let reality shine into your dark consciences. The world is swimming in shit.”

  “Amen,” Laurel grumbled.

  “Ah, but sewers are the conscience of the city,” Raul offered.

  Nobody commented.

  Laurel glanced down to hide a rueful smile. How fitting, she thought. Raul was also borrowing from Victor Hugo.

  “Shhhh.” Henry suddenly stopped, waving his arms to command silence.

  Laurel held her breath, her ears registering dripping noises. Then, far away, a faint and low sound intruded.

  Henry reached into his coat, produced his cheap lighter once more, and flicked its flame into life, an instant before bellowing, “Flash flood!” Then he swung around and started to run.

  chapter 25

  13:30

  From a small niche in the corridor between the living room and his study, Nikola selected a bottle of rum, only shreds of its faded label still clinging to the glass. He reached for a small cut-glass tumbler and carted the lot to his desk, musing that his 1959 Lemon Hart was the greatest British achievement in the West Indies.

  He glanced to Dennis’s vacant workstation; the young man was catching a few hours of shut-eye now that the incoming reports had trickled down to nothing. As an afterthought, he drew the sleeve of his worn house coat to his nose and nodded. He’d warned Mrs. Sotomayor, the housekeeper, against experiments with new soaps and fabric softeners. Last time she tried, his house clothes had a smell that vividly reminded Nikola of a Turkish brothel. After a long hot shower, a couple of hours of dreamless sleep, a few minutes in the sauna until he broke a decent sweat, and a dip in a tub of water—chilled just above freezing—he certainly felt renewed.