The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  “I checked; there are lights all over. It’s only the house.” He understood her nervousness. His first thought had been that they were under attack. Then her mouth sought his, and Floyd closed his eyes to chart the moment and store it away in all its intensity for future reference. Laurel’s body adjusted to his, and Floyd marveled at the uncanny perfection with which her shape seemed almost purposely made to fit his body.

  Then the lights flickered and came back on at full strength.

  Laurel chuckled and drew away from Floyd. “Saved by the bell.”

  “But, madam, in my condition—” Then he froze. The day they arrived at the farm, he’d been out with Antonio, stretching his legs and looking around. In a shed attached to the house were stores, timber, snow gear, and a generator, a powerful twenty-horsepower Honda. He pictured the brightly painted machine hooked to a five-hundred-gallon fiberglass tank, enough to last a long winter. Topping up? The generator didn’t need any topping up. The generator was a backup for emergencies. Floyd remembered Lukas and the cell phone nestled on its charger atop the mantelpiece, and something icy coursed through his veins. Tyler had arranged the blackout as a ruse, to trick Lukas into—

  “Come.” He tendered a hand to a frowning Laurel as the front door opened and heavy treads echoed down the corridor.

  At the hall, they almost crashed into Raul as he barreled down the steps, somehow roused from his sleep.

  When they reached the living room, Antonio and Tyler were already there, standing in the middle of the room and staring at Lukas, stationary by the window.

  “I may be an idiot, but I’m not crazy,” Lukas said in a strangely detached voice.

  Tyler nodded to Antonio, who neared the fireplace, peered at the cell phone, and shook his head once.

  “Odelle Marino’s offer is a trap; even a child can see that. Our only chance—and that includes mine and my family’s—rests with Russo’s capacity to testify. Besides,” Lukas glanced toward the cell phone, “I bet the fucking thing doesn’t even work.”

  Floyd neared Antonio and Tyler without letting go of Laurel’s hand and stared, dumbfounded, at the sorrowful Woody Allen look-alike by the window. Raul edged around them and slumped on a sofa, his eyes never leaving Lukas.

  “But it occurred to me we could use her offer to our advantage,” Lukas continued. “You don’t need to disclose your plans. Just tell me what to say when I call that number.”

  Tyler paced over to Lukas and towered over him for an instant before slapping his shoulder, making the shorter man wince. Then he turned to the others. “I propose a war council.” With that, he marched to a corner bookcase, removed a few books, tweaked something that produced a few clicks, and returned to the center of the room, a device the size of a small book in his hand. “Communications,” he explained.

  Antonio reached to his neck, pulled out a glossy black cord, fingered a rounded object threaded on it to recover a tiny plastic sliver, and slotted it on a side of Tyler’s device.

  “Who are we calling?” Laurel asked.

  “That’s irrelevant,” Tyler answered. “What matters is who will be listening.”

  day five

  Purgatorio, Canto XXII: 30–32

  Indeed, because true causes are concealed,

  we often face deceptive reasoning

  and things provoke perplexity in us.

  The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI

  chapter 43

  06:45

  Although their brainstorming had lasted until late, Floyd was already up at dawn, soon joined by everybody else. He insisted Russo be moved from the den at the rear of the house to the living room. “I’ve withdrawn the last of the sedation.” He nodded to the sofa they had moved to face a wall with the TV panel. “Let’s make him comfortable on the couch. Our talk and the TV chatter may reassure him this is not Hypnos or the DHS.”

  Once Floyd had removed the lines tethering Russo to the IV stands—but kept the intravenous ports in place—Raul hefted the emaciated figure with the same care he would have a baby and carried him to the living room. At the couch, they propped Russo on cushions while Floyd once more secured a bag to his penile catheter and reconnected the IV lines. Then he motioned with his hand for Lukas to lower the blinds and switch on a low-wattage lamp in a corner.

  While Antonio rustled up a fresh pot of coffee, the others dragged furniture around to compensate for the new arrangement and stopped to hear a news announcement: Congress had launched an inquiry into the breakout. Genia Warren, the FBH director, and Odelle Marino, the director of Homeland Security, had been subpoenaed to appear before the congressional select committee overseeing the penitentiary system in two days.

  Laurel sat on the edge of the sofa at Russo’s feet, absently rubbing her hand over his alien-looking toes, bone-thin and sans nails.

  “They won’t grow back, you know,” Floyd said.

  “Why not?”

  “Prolonged immersion in the fluids softens keratin. Nails continue to grow at a good clip, perhaps an eighth of an inch a month. With the subject’s spasmodic movements within the protective net, nails catch and tear from their bed. Although the nails continue to grow for a time, they can’t anchor to a softened bed. The new stumps catch and rip. After a few years, those in suspension lose the capacity to regenerate nails.”

  “And their hair?” She unconsciously reached to her head. It felt funny, the stubble catching on the palm of her hand.

  “That’s a different issue. Some people retain follicular activity and others lose it.”

  Tyler neared the peninsula on the kitchen side and grabbed a mug of coffee. “Antonio and I will leave shortly. I suggest you take it easy for the rest of the day and try to sleep.” He turned to Raul. “You were up all night.”

  Raul stifled a yawn and nodded.

  They had agreed that phone calls or any other means of communication from the house were an unnecessary security risk. It seemed Tyler had considered all eventualities. After using the Squirt transmitter of his Metapad twice the night before, he had decided to stop using it at the farm. It was supposedly safe, but he didn’t discount the possibility that repeated use could be detected. Every day, Tyler and Antonio had gone on errands, using the travel as their excuse to send and receive expensive messages: expensive because no two consecutive texts could be beamed anonymously from a single m-phone.

  It made sense the DHS would pay special attention to traffic from m-phones. Specially designed for teenagers, m-phones were available at vending machines—cheap at two hundred bucks each—and were sealed disposable units with no other feature than about a month’s worth of local messaging; they were useless for long distance or international. Once used for a single message, Tyler ran each phone through an industrial bone-meal processor and dusted the resulting powder in a septic tank to join the house effluent and the pigs’ waste. Laurel followed Tyler as he pocketed the Metapad he’d taken from the bookcase the night before and thought that, in this instance, the communications Tyler had to make would involve more than short messaging.

  After Antonio and Tyler left, Lukas and Raul went outside to stretch their legs. Laurel nestled by Floyd, their couch angled between Russo’s and the TV, which was showing two human mountains crashing together in a sumo-wrestling championship.

  Floyd draped his arm around Laurel’s shoulders and drew her to his chest. “What’s next?”

  “I suppose Tyler will come up with a plan to move Russo in the next few days to a place where he can make some sort of declaration.”

  “But he can’t speak.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” Laurel asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve caught him awake once or twice, his half-closed eyes following me around the den as I checked his vitals. I think he could have said something but chose not to.”

  “And Lukas?” Floyd asked.

  “What about him?”

  “How can we use his offer?”

  “My take is that Tyler
will make his contacts and structure his plan today. When he’s ready to go for broke, he’ll ask Lukas to contact the DHS, probably this evening or tomorrow, and give details to send our enemies like a pack of wolves in the opposite direction. That’s what I would do, anyway.”

  “Makes sense. Ever thought about the identity of whoever planned the breakout?”

  “Many times. It has to be someone high up in government. Probably a group.”

  For a while neither spoke. Floyd took one of her hands and kissed the tip of each finger in turn. She peered into Russo’s placid face. He was awake and sentient, easy to determine after the previous days.

  Unlike the common pattern of average sleepers, Russo thrashed and moaned constantly in his sleep, his brain probably racked by nightmares. He reverted to immobility only in wakefulness. Floyd had suggested they prepare a quart of watered-down broth, and Laurel had pushed a straw down the side of Russo’s mouth from time to time when his breath and heartbeat steadied. Then, although Russo didn’t seem to move, the level in the glass did. His body wouldn’t hold anything solid, not even soft foods, but Russo’s ability to process salty broth was a giant leap to jump-start his digestive system—a critical step toward his recovery.

  Sucking required a conscious effort, however feeble. Floyd had also removed all traces of sedatives and the IV lines but kept the pulse monitor clipped to one of Russo’s fingers, its volume turned down to a weak blip, its tempo now steadily accelerating as Russo probably sank back into his dreams of cold horror. At intervals, Floyd had drawn a few drops of blood from a port on Russo’s hand to monitor his SATs—the oxygen levels in his blood. After such a protracted time relying on mechanical respiration, Floyd was worried about Russo’s lungs’ ability to provide enough oxygen to his body.

  “Will he remember?” Laurel asked now.

  Floyd didn’t answer straightaway but drew her closer. When he spoke, his voice sounded strangely muffled. “We have different types of memory. Procedural memory is where we store functions, like walking, laughing, how to use a knife and fork, or how to perform mechanical tasks. A singer doesn’t think about singing when he sings, or a driver how to adjust to different flows of traffic when he drives. If he had to, his responses would be too slow and would cause an accident. Then we have semantic memory to store facts: What is a book? What are garters? What is a keyboard?”

  “So, in semantic memory, you have the clue about what a keyboard is, but the ability to use it resides in your procedural memory?”

  “More or less. Then there’s episodic memory, the most volatile, residing principally in the frontal lobes of the brain. Picture episodic memory like flypaper—a strip of material with two critical properties: area and stickiness. Over time, the flypaper surface crowds with flies. As its coating becomes less sticky, some flies drop and make room for others, but the new ones don’t adhere as strongly.”

  “But I thought the capacity of our brain was almost unlimited.”

  “Almost, but like any other system, the brain deteriorates with age. Our brain shrinks at a rate of one percent a year after the age of thirty. Granted, there are one hundred billion neurons packed into our three-pound brain, constantly sending and receiving signals, but over time the signals weaken.”

  “And we lose our capacity to remember?”

  “It isn’t as simple as that. Fortunately for Russo, the frontal lobes are the ones that shrink earlier and faster. There’s where our capacity to recall events lies.”

  “You mean he will eventually forget his ordeal?”

  “Not totally, but it will become hazy and, I hope, bearable.”

  “I remember.”

  They both turned to Russo, and to a voice so ragged it seemed like an old recording. His face was serene and his eyes were closed, though his heartbeat raced, but the words had come from him. Laurel shifted her legs to sit straighter.

  “Who are you?” Russo’s lips moved but he didn’t open his eyes.

  “He’s Floyd Carpenter, a medical doctor and hibernation specialist from Nyx, a corporation offering commercial hibernation services. I am …” The surreal nature of her relationship with Russo suddenly crashed down on Laurel. “I am a lawyer.”

  “Have I been released?”

  Laurel glanced at Floyd. He nodded once. “No. We sprung you out.”

  Russo’s head lolled in their direction, and the line where his eyelids met widened a fraction of an inch. After so much darkness, even the dim light of a floor lamp on the other end of the living room and the TV panel’s luminance must have seemed painfully bright.

  Floyd stood to step out of the room and returned moments later with a pair of sunglasses. “I noticed Tyler kept a pair in the hall drawer.” He leaned over Russo and slipped the sunglasses on.

  “Who is ‘we’?” Russo asked. In dark wraparound shades, Russo’s alien appearance deepened. His hand reached to his crotch and seemed to scratch, although Laurel wasn’t sure if his fingers were attempting to relieve an itch from the catheter or trying to ascertain if other parts of his anatomy remained unimpaired.

  Over the next thirty minutes, Laurel recounted in broad strokes their scheme and some of the events that occurred after they broke him out of the Washington sugar cube. Throughout the monologue, Russo didn’t move much and she couldn’t be sure if his eyes were open or shut, but the beep of his cardiac monitor remained strong and steady.

  “Why?”

  “To prevent the DHS from doing what’s been done to you again.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I told you: a lawyer.”

  Russo made a wry movement with his mouth, as if trying to erase an unpleasant taste. Laurel stepped over and slipped the straw from the mug of broth between his lips. He made a face. “Water … please?”

  After fixing a glass of water so Russo could suck an inch worth through the straw, Floyd withdrew it and patted his parched lips with a moist towel. “Too much and it won’t stay down,” he admonished.

  Russo’s response was directed to Laurel. “I’ve asked twice who you are, and all I get out of you is your profession. You are indeed a lawyer.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “Should I ask again?”

  “I’m your daughter.”

  Russo’s face tensed and the beeps from the monitor increased in pace. “I have no daughter.”

  “I agree, but you impregnated Araceli Goldberg, and she gave birth to me.”

  “She died.” His weak voice came out as dry as a wasteland.

  “Not before giving birth.” Laurel clenched her fists. “You denied paternity to the doctor, but that’s a moot point. Things have changed, but not the infallibility of DNA matching.”

  “Do you recall awakening at intervals?” Floyd interrupted, obviously to change the drift the conversation was taking.

  For a while Russo didn’t answer. “After the first time, I decided it must be a dream, a recurring dream. I refused to accept that it could be real.”

  “An unconscious decision that shielded your mind from disintegrating,” Floyd observed.

  “Taking notes for a paper, Doctor?”

  “Now that you mention it …”

  “And you say you’ve never met the person who planned the breakout?” Russo asked, his voice gathering color.

  Laurel shook her head. “No, we never met.”

  “I suppose the old bastard can be persuasive.”

  Laurel exchanged a quick glance with Floyd. “Do you know his identity?”

  “If, as you say, you are my daughter, he’s got to be my father: Senator Jerome Palmer.”

  “Senator Palmer? Your father?” My grandfather?

  “It runs in the family. Jerome Palmer was earmarked for political greatness.” Russo paused. “When in his sophomore year he impregnated, as you said, his high school sweetheart, his father tried to force an abortion. My mother was young and silly but high on ethics, and she refused.” He stopped and breathed deeply. “So your grandfather arranged an adopti
on. I found out only in my late twenties, by a stupid coincidence.” He paused, obviously exhausted by the effort of speaking. Floyd was moving to his side when Russo continued, his voice barely above a whisper. “I met him once, to spit in his face and tell him what a bastard he was, but it was ironic. I’m no better.”

  chapter 44

  11:10

  A harried woman straining to untangle two leashes—one holding a vociferous toddler and the other a playful puppy—blocked the entrance to the bank. Nikola paused, sighed, and stood aside while the mother got her act together. I can’t be all bad. Wasn’t it W. C. Fields who said, ‘Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad’?

  Nikola eyed the pretty brunette and even stole a quick look at her pert, freckled breasts when she bent over the dog. But he had to concede he didn’t qualify, hate being a burning passion better spent on worthy enemies. No, Nikola was indifferent to brats, although he found the mechanics of producing new ones a challenging exercise if addressed with curiosity and a zest for innovation. With a last assaying glance at her departing derriere, he mulled that, innovative or not, someone must have had a hell of a time, perhaps someone yearning for that woman at this precise moment.

  He sighed and reflected, not for the first time, that he was alone not because he had chosen to be but because every turn his life had taken had ensured it. His was a different order of mind. Nikola had never tried to hide his intelligence but had attempted never to show it off or point it directly at anyone. Lesser intellects immediately felt threatened, and his equals didn’t need the advertising; they recognized it at once. Nursing a great intellect was like owning a precious watch, he’d often thought. When Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, probably the twentieth-century’s grandest coloratura soprano, was arraigned before a court of victors at the end of World War II to answer charges of collaboration, she had been heard to state that she performed only for the elite. “For whom else could I sing?” she answered to the panel of judges. Indeed. Only the elite could understand the breathtaking beauty of her voice as she caressed Mozart’s lieders.