When Nikola was a child, his father would take him to an old bookshop in Chicago. There he would leave the boy to roam through dusty bookshelves while he disappeared to do “research” with Mrs. Gibbs, the owner, on the upper floor. About two hours later, Nikola’s father would descend a spiral staircase, at times freshly showered. Nikola suspected his father’s “research” might have something to do with water, but he’d never asked.
During his waiting periods, the attendant, Vito—a small old man with a florid face—would suggest a book or an illustrated tale. Vito would complain about the waning habit of reading. Customers, eager to flaunt their cultural prowess, would fill their bookcases with yards of books with correctly colored spines to match the decor. A new fashion, Vito had confided in whispers redolent of cheap booze, was to sell only the book spines pasted to a board. Lighter and more manageable. Nikola sighed and snapped back from his reverie, still wondering if the medical tracts on the gleaming wood shelves had any pages attached to their covers. “No, Dr. Hulman. I think you are a liar, and a bungling one at that.”
“How dare you?” Hulman reached under his desk, his face set.
Nikola didn’t move or try to stop his call for help or react when he felt the door opening at his back. He stared into Dr. Hulman’s slowly widening eyes, intent on the sudden flash of fear scuttling across his irises.
The door closed.
A huge black mass clouded Nikola’s peripheral vision as Sergeant Cox, clad in regulation body armor, approached the desk. At his back, another officer would be blocking the door.
“Where were we? Ah, yes: a liar, and a damn poor one.”
The thud wasn’t too loud, perhaps hushed by the Kevlar padding under the ceramic articulations covering Cox’s fist, but blood gushed from Dr. Hulman’s mouth and shattered nose as his head slammed back against the leather executive chair. For a moment, he didn’t move. Then his reading glasses, miraculously dangling from one of his ears, surrendered to gravity and dropped to the floor. Blood traced rivulets to collect under his chin and bloom like poppies on his shirt and lab coat. Then he snorted or sneezed, and a spray of red droplets dewed the desktop, peppering the documents in an open folder with curious marks, as if a child had been let loose with a red marker.
Slowly, Dr. Hulman reached to his mouth with a trembling hand to retrieve a tooth, and he looked at it with the same suspicious intent one has when peering at an unidentified lump found in a meat pie. He then pursed his lips into an almost perfect bloody O and, without transition, started to cry—deep sobs racking his chest.
“Please, Sergeant, there was no need for such violence,” Nikola said in a conversational tone. “So messy. … Restrain yourself. Let us conduct this conversation in a civilized manner.” Nikola pushed his chair back, noting with distaste a tiny drop of blood marring his trousers. He sighed and nodded.
Cox grabbed Dr. Hulman’s hand and slammed it on the desk.
“What a wonderful sight—friends holding hands.” Nikola tried a wolfish grin. “I will pose a few questions and you will answer them truthfully. If you don’t, this officer will break one finger, and then another, then another. Of course, fingers don’t last as long as conversations, but you also have toes, and countless other bones. How many bones?”
Dr. Hulman made a croaking sound and opened his mouth, reddish bubbles foaming over it; the sound grew into a scream punctuated by a sickening snap when Cox folded the doctor’s middle finger against the back of his hand as if turning the page of a book.
“Sergeant! Don’t be so hasty; give the man time. You must excuse him, Doctor, he’s young and eager. How many bones?”
“Two hun—two hundred six,” Hulman moaned.
“Wonderful. Excellent. And more than half that number are in your hands and feet. Amazing, isn’t it? Let’s start again. I suggest you open that safe while you still have some operational fingers and give me the notebook where you wrote about the father. The father of the girl you delivered to Araceli Goldberg.”
chapter 33
22:38
Laurel glanced from her book to Russo’s reclining figure and tried to make out, for the umpteenth time, some familiar line along his nose, jaw, ears, or mouth. After almost twenty-four hours at Tyler’s farm, she’d committed every detail of Russo’s anatomy to memory. He had wasted to an extent that his own mother might have had trouble recognizing him, but still Laurel searched his face for something familiar, with the same intensity that she rooted within herself for a flicker of feeling for the stranger named Eliot Russo. Before the operation, during the long months of preparation and training, she’d been consumed with loathing for the man who had left her real mother at the mercy of the riot police. She’d longed for the moment when she could confront him. Later, his pathetic condition had filled her with pity; no one, regardless of the crime committed, deserved such punishment. Now she felt nothing. Over the bed, where Russo battled to heal bruised synapses and rid his organs of toxins, an array of dated equipment monitored his vitals. Still no change after the more than fifty-two hours since he was raised from the tank. He was alive—at least, a spiky trace on an oscilloscope certified there was electrical activity in his emaciated body—but barely. Fear returned, as it had at ever shorter intervals, and fluttered in her chest like a bird caught in a net struggling for freedom. Springing Russo from the tank had been nightmarish but nothing compared to their future if he didn’t recover coherent consciousness. Which was a long shot, according to Dr. Floyd Carpenter.
Russo’s blood was new, thanks to the supply stolen by Antonio Salinas, Harper Tyler’s farm foreman and, Laurel suspected, comrade-in-arms. Throughout the first twelve hours after they arrived in the safe house at Tyler’s farm, Floyd had used over fifty bags of blood products and scores of packed red-blood-cell units in a series of transfusions to replace Russo’s blood. Among the items on Floyd’s shopping list that she’d beamed from the sewers was a hemodialysis machine, a special three-way valve, and supplies of bicarbonate for rinsing the machine. But regardless of the intensive blood replacement, Floyd worried that some readings remained alarmingly irregular. He had not been forthcoming, but it was obvious that extended hibernation without maintenance could cause long-term side effects. To reverse it, according to Floyd, would entail lengthy therapy.
They decided to take eight-hour shifts supervising Russo, keeping the steady drip from the IV lines flowing, noting the volume of his waste every hour, and ensuring his vitals remained within the limits prescribed by Floyd. She preferred the hollow hours between dusk and dawn and had volunteered for the night shift, seeking a little peace and quiet away from Lukas Hurley’s frightened face. Everybody had carefully avoided any mention of Bastien, as if silence could somehow deny the harrowing reality of his death.
Laurel jolted after hearing a floorboard close to the door creak. She held her breath and released it slowly when Floyd’s figure, clothed in jeans and a loose plaid shirt from the supply provided by Tyler, materialized. A far cry from the debonair figure he’d cast when he welcomed them from the sewers, but a sight better than the refuse-encrusted man he’d been at the subway station. Laurel could still feel the cauterizing fear she felt before the fat fields. “Damn, you scared me,” she muttered.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to. Everybody is knocked out?”
She checked her watch—22:45—and nodded. “You couldn’t sleep?”
He didn’t answer but stepped over to Russo, checked the machine readings, drips, and lines, then neared the settee.
Laurel gathered her legs and moved aside to make room.
“That man is incredible.” Floyd nodded toward the bed.
She waited.
“When I first saw him, I was shocked. I was expecting someone who had been serving a hibernation sentence for a few years, not a living corpse.”
“What do you mean?”
“At the sugar cubes, the inmates are monitored constantly. Once their vitals show signs of decay, they are raised to the medic
al facility. There, an army of specialists backed with advanced instruments flush their organs of built-up toxins and redress most of the damage.” He nodded again in Russo’s direction. “I doubt that man was ever brought up from his tank.”
Laurel didn’t know, but Floyd was probably right.
“Back at Nyx, I would have given him a one in ten chance of recovery, maybe. If he were one of my patients, I would have recommended he be terminated.”
“You’d have killed him?”
“No. I wouldn’t have tried to revive him.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Life is not an absolute, but death is. Some patients decay to such an extent that recovery is almost impossible. Yes.” He turned to look into her eyes. “You can be ninety-nine percent dead with an active brain. Before we return a patient from torpor, we must always weigh how alive the patient will be when we finish. This is an issue we have to consider daily in my line of work.”
“You play God?”
“That’s a spiny subject. We play at being God whenever we extend life by artificial means.”
She picked up her book, placed the beer coaster she’d been using as a bookmark between the pages, and closed it, laying it down on a small side table. “And now? What are his chances?”
“I don’t know. His metabolism is responding and his blood chemistry is much better. Not normal—that will take a long time—but acceptable. The problem is what will happen after I withdraw sedation.”
“His mind?”
“If they’d do this to his body, what did they do to his mind? Yes. I’m familiar with standard hibernation side effects—the physiological imbalances and systemic damage—but in my work we’re careful to keep mental activity monitored and vitals within tight limits. Whoever did this to him must have hated him beyond reason.”
For a while they shared a silence, punctuated only by the faint beeps from the machines.
“I’m sorry about your other friend, er—Sebastian.”
“Bastien. Bastien Compton.”
“I’m sorry.”
Her eyes filmed over. “Why did it happen?”
“What you did was a crazy stunt—much more dangerous than any of you could have guessed. Sinking into torpor only to be roused a few minutes later subjected your body to a huge systemic shock.”
“You mean we all could have died?”
Floyd didn’t answer at once. When he did, his voice seemed to come from somewhere farther away. “Yes. In a way, it’s a small miracle Raul and you pulled through intact.”
She straightened, aghast at the implication. Floyd shook his head, as if he could follow her train of thought. “Don’t be harsh on Tyler and the others who planned the operation. They probably didn’t know.”
“How could they not?”
“I spoke with Tyler earlier; that’s when he told me about Bastien. He couldn’t understand what had happened to your friend either. The truth is, little has leaked from Hypnos, or any of the companies offering commercial hibernation, about the drawbacks of the technology.”
“Couldn’t you have warned them?”
“How could I? All I knew was that a group of people would bring an inmate over to Nyx through the sewers. I had no idea of the details.”
She leaned back and shook her head. Had I known all the risks, would I still have done it? It came as no surprise that the answer was yes, but their ignorance had come at a harrowing cost.
Floyd turned again toward the shape on the bed. “Who is he?”
His question traced a line in the sand; she could cross it or maintain her silence. But she’d crossed the line when she reached for his hand in the van. “His name is Eliot Russo.”
Floyd stood, his brow creased. He wandered randomly around the room, his restless fingers touching a tube or a container as if looking for something to do. At the top of the bed, he paused to look at the taut skin over Russo’s skull. “I remember. … A lawyer, a political activist, ostensibly killed in a car accident, five, six years ago?”
“Eight.”
Floyd sucked air and smacked his lips. “Shit.”
“You can say that.”
“So it really is him and us.”
“I don’t follow.” Laurel did, but she wanted to hear his voice.
“You do. I presume this operation is about exposing what’s happened to him.”
She waited.
“To do that, he must recover and keep his mental faculties, at least a little. If he dies or turns up insane, we’ll never make it. Whoever did this to him will make sure.” Floyd paced back to the settee and slumped at her side without much elegance. “How many more like him are there?”
She looked up to find his eyes searching her face. “I don’t know. I once heard Shep—Tyler speak of many.”
After removing his moccasins, Floyd coiled his long body into the settee and curled up his legs, hiking his feet onto the seat so that their toes touched. “Hopeless.” His voice grew darker.
“There’s always hope.”
“Hope is the denial of reality.”
Laurel bunched her toes over his. “Where have you pilfered that quote from?”
“No idea. How can the government tolerate such bestiality?”
“In this case, because they know nothing about it,” Laurel said.
“Impossible.”
“Is it? Governments have grown pyramidal—too large, complex, and fragmented. Those at the top don’t know what happens at lower levels. Providing the waters remain calm and the bottom line tallies, they have no reason to dig into the bowels of any one department.”
“So is this a DHS operation?” Floyd asked.
“In cahoots with other intelligence agencies.”
“And Hypnos? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why?”
“Something like this couldn’t be kept secret forever. Eventually someone would blow the whistle.”
“That’s what we’re hoping to do.” Under the soles of her feet, he splayed his toes like a cat.
“So you’re crusaders championing the ideal of omnipotent justice.” There was a hard tinge to his voice, as if people fighting a corrupt system for the sake of ideals embodied something shameful, even dangerous.
“What’s troubling you?” Laurel asked.
“You are.” He waved a hand toward the door, and Laurel realized he’d used the plural. “You seem like good people, but you know next to nothing about whoever is pulling the strings or their motives. Ideals have a nice ring, but this reeks of a political struggle—one of the age-old battles for power after which nothing ever changes. Chances are, the players will regroup to tally up their wins and losses after mopping up the spent pawns in the field.”
“You mean that regardless of the outcome, even if it becomes public, what the DHS …”
“Right. If it ever becomes public. Perhaps the threat of blowing the lid is all our unknown master puppeteers need to achieve their ends. If so, we are nothing more than a troublesome loose end.”
“Twenty years ago, a cover-up like this couldn’t have happened,” Laurel said.
“You mean the Internet?”
Back in the ‘30s, artists and writers had waged a vicious campaign to change the rules, or lack of them, governing the Internet. Naturally, film, play, book, media, and music producers had supported the initiative with enthusiasm. As a result, the last glimmer of real freedom the world had ever known disappeared almost overnight. The exercise had been a remarkably simple two-step operation under the cover of intellectual property protection. Part one of the process entailed placing government-controlled server farms in high-security buildings buttressed by a new generation of supercomputers. Once the hardware was in place, individuals and organizations were given six months in which to migrate to the new servers. Then part two came into effect: Before a private server, network, or Web site could be housed, every piece of content needed a hard-crypto electronic signature to identify its author.
&nbs
p; Against all predictions, the public uproar faded rapidly, because authorities leveled a morally unshakable argument: The new laws didn’t reduce anyone’s freedom to post whatever they wanted, providing it hadn’t been stolen.
Surfing remained unchanged; anybody could browse the World Wide Web and download at leisure in relative anonymity. But uploading was a different matter. To upload content, the files entered a short quarantine until the sender’s identity could be certified—a procedure lasting a few minutes. Whoever published an item whose authorship was disputed became blacklisted from further postings until the matter was settled. Any content backed with a banned signature would never reach the server. Naturally, dissidents—and a few nations—had tried to fool the system, and some managed to upload “delinquent” material. But it was a short-lived victory. After a flurry of stiff prison sentences and even banning entire countries from the Web for protracted periods while the software was purged of glitches and the procedure fine-tuned, anonymity was eradicated from every scrap of data on the Web. Like its predecessor, the Wild West Web had finally been tamed.
Laurel straightened but didn’t shift her feet. “I follow your line of thinking, but you’re wrong. This is not only a matter of ideals.” The silky feeling of his warm toes was too delicious for words.
He waited.
“He’s my father.”
Floyd jerked his head toward Russo as if harboring the hope she could be referring to somebody else. “I—I’m sorry.”
“So am I, but parents are hard to choose.”
“I meant—”
“I know.”
“So puny idealism had little to do with your involvement in this operation.”
The Prisoner Page 22