The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  Bill Anderson nodded. “Log the recording into the system; I’ll download it into my station.”

  Enrique followed Bill’s retreating figure as it marched along the corridor to his glass-walled office, where he closed the door and reached for a secure phone.

  chapter 47

  20:30

  After bridging its alarm circuit, George Wilson picked the lock and pushed open the heavy steel door. Hefting a long polymer guitar case, he stepped onto the rooftop and closed the door. A knee to the floor, he fished in his coat pocket for two slim neodymium wedges and rammed them between door and casing.

  The sun had set minutes before, and its feeble residual light was drenched in red. Wilson peered around the Paige Building’s deserted roof—a vast esplanade capping a hundred-story skyscraper, with a huge water tank and a room housing the air-conditioning machinery. Carrying his case, he strolled to the southernmost edge of the building and the foot-high parapet that topped the roof. From his vantage point, Wilson spotted long chains of streetlights coming alive. Eight hundred feet below, the already heavy evening traffic snaked down New York Avenue toward John Hanson Highway and the suburbs. A mile ahead in a bend of the road stood Mason Tower, his target.

  A four-foot-wide puddle, left by rain the day before and stretching almost the length of the roof, rippled in the breeze. The construction workers must have been sloppy, probably eager to head for a beer at ground level. It was a ridiculous puddle, no deeper than an inch, but he would have to lie in it, perhaps for hours on end. Wilson hawked a wad of phlegm and spat it to the side. Sloppy. In time, the puddle would cause dampness on the lower floors. Not that the workers cared, and that was the problem: no pride in workmanship—a trait Wilson possessed in spades.

  With a final look around in the rapidly waning light, Wilson rested the case on the ground, squatted, and threw its catches open.

  Based on the venerable CheyTac M100 rifle, the CT-16XBO had evolved into a wonder of precision engineering and electronics, delivering stunning accuracy at two thousand yards in the hands of a rookie. With thousands of hours clocked at ranges and a bunch of soft target interdiction scores—the euphemism for sniper kills—Wilson was anything but a rookie.

  After assembling the rifle’s collapsible stock, IR laser, and scope, Wilson linked the weapon’s Kestrel—a squat box housing temperature, wind, and atmospheric-pressure sensors—to his computer pad and set the weapon down on its squat tripod in the water. Then he assessed the puddle. He could try to lie partially on top of the case, but that would hamper his hold on the rifle. With a huff, he laid the case open on the water and next to the weapon, removed his jacket, folded it with care, and lowered himself into the puddle, stretching prone in the water. After turning and twisting to get as comfortable as possible, he reached to a side pocket in the rifle case and picked out a plastic box by feel.

  Although designed almost five decades earlier, the precision-machined .408 cartridge remained state of the art: supersonic at over two thousand yards and with more punch than a .50 at shorter ranges. Out of habit, Wilson selected each gleaming projectile and rubbed it over the crook between his chin and lower lip for a film of body oil that wouldn’t affect the bullet’s performance but would give good luck. When the six-projectile clip was full, he rammed it in its housing, turned his cap around, leaned on the stock, and adjusted his eye to the scope, a finger slowly rotating the focusing piece until the view leaped into crisp detail. Slowly, Wilson panned vertically until he found the windows he sought: the upper story of a pent house in a building a mile away.

  Although his bodyguards had not turned around when he got into the car, Lawrence Ritter recognized their necks and the mounds of solid flesh curling like doughnuts over stiff white collars: Demorizi and Bancroft, good ex-army muscle, loyal and unhampered by high IQs. His personal assistant, Bernard Gluck, traveled in a car behind with another security officer, although at times they would maneuver ahead or to the sides, in particular when slowing down at intersections or at traffic lights.

  Ritter patted his case and was about to unclasp it when he thought better of it. The documents weren’t that important, and he had to think about the piece of flimsy paper with machine-code lines burning in his jacket’s inner pocket, returned to him—after the program was lodged in the satellite—by a friend from infancy who happened to have risen to the higher echelons of the NSA.

  Genia Warren’s moxie the day before had taken him by surprise. Her codes to lodge what amounted to a dead-man’s handle in the satellite routing at Hypnos’s traffic, and the program printed on the paper, had needed deft footwork and time. Genia had an army of computer specialists and could have cashed in a quiet favor for the program, but the codes were another matter and hinted at someone high up. Yet Ritter found the details irrelevant before the real issue: time. Such a devious plan to cancel the disposal of center inmates needed not only intimate knowledge of the system but the time to mull over its chinks, gather the data, and shape the package. Since such a scheme would be useful only if the disclosure of Hypnos’s shenanigans was imminent, either Genia had developed the ploy since the breakout or she knew earlier that it would happen. Ritter had thought of little else since the day before, arriving at the unshakable conclusion that Genia hadn’t had the time to work out the intricate details since the prisoners escaped.

  So, you’re planning a coup. Genia had been in Odelle Marino’s sights for a long time. He’d watched from the sidelines as Genia bowed to Odelle’s whims with a meekness he’d found maddening and at odds with Genia’s character and intellect. Now the pesky pieces slotted nicely into the puzzle, but Ritter viewed the evolving picture with foreboding. Odelle was a formidable opponent and wielded enormous power. He patted his jacket and felt the soft crunch of paper. For an instant, he pictured Genia’s fingers slipping into her bra, closed his eyes, and enjoyed the warm feeling. That he would never allow her to go solo—however harebrained her scheme—had little to do with loyalty, honor, or a sense of duty, but she didn’t know that.

  The deed was done and the program in place. Now what?

  A rapid series of sharp beeps pulled him from his reverie. From a holder clipped to his belt, Ritter drew his secure phone. CALL WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR APARTMENT, read the message in its bright orange screen. No greeting. No name. No need.

  Back in the ‘20s, the forty-sixth U.S. president, Edwina Locke, had blown a fuse when a delicate private conversation with her teenage daughter was posted word for word on the Web, years before the Internet rules changed. With the virtual disappearance of landlines and increased sophistication of electronic eavesdropping, it had become impossible to guarantee privacy with portable devices working on the cellular network. President Locke had scoured MIT and Caltech for unorthodox brains and shanghaied them into a think tank accountable only to the White House. Soon dubbed EBD, or Edwina’s Boffin Department, by security directors, she tasked her group to develop a system of secure communications for high-ranking government officers. The group discovered that such a system existed, developed and run by the army. When the military stonewalled the EBD, Locke tore a broad strip from a four-star general’s hide and forced him to release the technology. Thus the SSC1, or Secure Squirt Communication equipment, became an essential accessory for high-ranking civil servants.

  Shaped like a thin cellular phone, the SSC 11×7 in Ritter’s hand was the latest model of a pager—useless as a regular phone, and devoid of popular gadgets such as a 3-D screen or theta-wave relax, but so secure that after thirty years it remained hacker-proof to anyone but the NSA, who kept the keys.

  When the user spoke, the device identified, compressed, and encrypted each word, to squirt it as a pulse lasting nanoseconds in the pauses between sounds. The receiver could read remarkably crisp plain text on a screen barely larger than a wristwatch and in the top left-hand corner a three-digit number identified the caller. An iris scan and a devilish DNA comparer prevented unauthorized use.

  Ritter glanced through
the darkened side windows as they crossed Florida Avenue, five minutes from his apartment at Mason Tower. On the corner of Brentwood Road, he caught sight of Enzo Semprini, closing his fruit shop for the day.

  After the 2026 building act allowing construction higher than the Capitol in Washington, D.C., scores of high-rise buildings had forever changed the capital’s image. Washington boasted several buildings with high-security ratings, but none like Mason Tower. The condominium had been privately built back in the ‘30s and all its residents were government employees. In a bid to guarantee protection at reasonable costs, federal agencies encouraged their more sensitive personnel to move into a secure property. Those who couldn’t be convinced to take up an address at a secure condominium required expensive twenty-four-hour protection by a rotating team of bodyguards, which put an incredible strain on the system. Genia Warren was one of those who had refused to leave her family home in Galesville, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay.

  Soon Ritter’s motorcade reached the approaches to the building—a vast rotunda with synthetic lawn and a flagstaff at its center. Instead of approaching the main door at street level, they continued down a circular ramp sinking under the building. Two floors underground, the ramp leveled and straightened into a clear three-hundred-foot stretch, ending in a burnished steel wall, which blocked further progress.

  The two-car motorcade had slowed to a standstill, the front car only a few yards from the gleaming wall, when a low-frequency thump echoed from behind.

  Ritter ignored the noise, adjusted his beret, and reached for the suitcase as the windows lowered. He knew that another wall of three-inch-thick steel had dropped behind them, to isolate them from the rest of the world while sensors ran inside and outside the vehicles.

  When a small yellow light flickered on a plate in the near wall, he stared fixedly at it until it dimmed. It required concentration; even a glance at the sensors deployed at either side of the plate would have triggered a silent alarm to draw the security troops down into the basement like flies to rotten meat. Then the wall ahead started to disappear into a slot in the ceiling.

  At the elevator bank, Ritter stepped out of the car and gave cursory nods to his assistant and the driver before entering the waiting elevator. As the doors closed, he noted the delighted looks passing between his retinue. Since he’d not given them any special instructions, they were free to go home for the night.

  In the loneliness of the elevator, Genia’s words wouldn’t leave his mind. She was going all the way along a road with no possibility of turning back. He felt apprehension, elation, and no little curiosity. Who was backing her? Obviously, it was someone with clout. And clout meant someone high in the government.

  After dropping his briefcase on a sofa, Ritter approached the kitchen counter, opened a bottle of scotch, and poured a finger of it into a tumbler. He downed it in one gulp and repeated the procedure before heading for the stairs, his skin tingling at the prospect of a long shower. The liquor sloshed in the glass as Ritter climbed the steps. He couldn’t recall when he’d taken to splitting his homecoming drink into two, but it wouldn’t feel natural anymore if he didn’t. Some habits grew ingrained, like woodworm, and once settled, they were almost impossible to excise without killing the host.

  As he padded into his suite, the lights grew brighter and the strains of Grieg’s “Anitra’s Dance” rose, to complete the homecoming Ritter had programmed into the system years before. He shrugged off the holster with his regulation weapon and laid it at the foot of the bed. Then his pager buzzed.

  Ritter stopped, exchanged the hand holding the tumbler, and reached to his belt, as the curtains on the curved panorama window overlooking the cityscape opened noiselessly, having detected his nearness.

  He frowned at the string of zeros flashing on the device’s tiny screen, a number not included on his list and one he’d never seen before. Then a message scrolled in flashing bold capitals: MOVE AWAY FROM THE WINDOW. The air thickened.

  Another second ticked before Ritter, as if trying to swim through molasses, released his grip on the tumbler and dove onto the bed just as the curved plate glass imploded with a deafening roar. Over the next two or three seconds, Ritter experienced the weird sensation of inhabiting an alien body with its own agenda. After blinking when tiny glass shards peppered his face, his body rolled away from the middle of the bed, with Ritter a simple observer being taken for a ride. Then he dropped over the far edge as the bedcovers swelled and burst into a shower of snowlike mattress fragments.

  “Lights off,” he yelled. A stupid command, because the sniper would probably have infrared sights and, besides, the system wouldn’t understand. When Ritter programmed the house lights, he’d kept his prompts to single words, like Television or Sleep. In a rare display of wishful thinking, he’d also logged Fun, but he hadn’t used that one in a long time.

  On all fours, covered by the bulk of the bed, he scuttled to the door and dove out of the line of fire headlong into the corridor as the door frame also exploded, scant inches over where his head had been a split second before. Then his body sagged, as if its hayride driver had abandoned the vehicle. One hand on the banister and the other still clutching his pager, Ritter barreled down the stairs. On the lower floor, Ritter caromed off the newel post and slammed to a stop against the sanctity of a side wall, his breath coming in ragged gasps; the contraption in his fist purred again. NICE. Ritter swore. His head felt wet. Eyeing the blood-smeared palm he’d just swiped over the top of his head and face, he swore again, breathed deep once, twice, and neared the kitchen sink. After dropping the pager on the counter, Ritter rubbed his hands under the faucet and splashed tepid water on his face and head.

  Two blocks away, on a side street, Nikola flicked his pager closed and handed it over to Dennis. “Hold on to it, just in case.” He peered once more at the crisp satellite images on the plasma screens flanking Dennis’s workstation in the van.

  Dennis accepted the device, an eyebrow raised.

  “I logged your statistics in the pager. You have access.” Then Nikola nodded once and made up his mind. “Retain the satellite link and drive over to the Paige Building’s underground parking lot.”

  As Dennis busied himself to move onto the driver’s seat, Nikola reached to a side. Lodged against the van’s bodywork was an old Malacca cane, a walking stick he used at times when strolling through the park. He had too much work to do to waste any more time playing babysitter and worrying about Wilson’s repeat performances.

  Ritter knew the layout and security measures of the building intimately. The alarm wouldn’t have gone off. Perhaps bits of glass had rained down below, but it would take time before someone noticed and pinpointed his window. The shooter would be gone, but not the contract. It would mean endless hours or days spent inside a flak jacket, cringing each time he was in the open, until the shooter was caught or his aim improved. He knew who was after his guts, and the building’s security detail was formed entirely of DHS personnel. The men were professionals, and probably clean, but they obeyed orders from the top. And that might include driving him to a point where the killer couldn’t miss his car. He had to get out of the building. Alone.

  The fire stairs were out of the question. As soon as he pushed the panic bar, alarms would trigger and pandemonium would follow; security personnel would flock to the exit on the ground floor and shut down the building. He would be trapped. That left the elevator—not much better. There were four security men in the garages and two staffing the room with the recording equipment on the ground floor. He paused to picture the small door opening from the recording room to the rear of the building.

  On the ground floor, there would be four armed men: two by the door, one at the desk, and another by the elevator. Regardless of how much weight he tried to pull, they wouldn’t allow him out of the building without a phalanx of bodyguards. He needed to draw all available personnel away from the entrance hall and get into the recording room.

  Ritter shut off the
tap, reached for a thick roll of paper towels, and dried his hands and face. Then he opened the oven door, shoved the roll inside, and turned the broiler on full before marching toward the door. At the pent house lobby, he reached under a wall shelf with drawers, ripped off the weapon he had taped underneath, and slipped it inside his trouser band. Then Ritter opened the door and sprinted along the corridor for the benefit of the video cameras. His beret must be somewhere in his bedroom with his other weapon, but he wasn’t about to go looking for it.

  The landing was predictably deserted, as his apartment was the only one on that level. The four floors below housed as many agency directors and their families, all ensconced in their own private fiefdoms.

  The iris scan by the elevator doors took an unreasonable time to lock on, its red beam flickering on and off until Ritter’s eyes were awash in tears. Once inside the car, he swept a glossy black card in a slot to override the machine’s instructions. Instead of the parking lot programmed into the machine, he keyed in the main lobby. He doubted the sniper would have backup but, if he did, the most likely point to watch would be the underground garage and his car.

  As the elevator plummeted, Ritter stole a glance at a smoked mirror covering half of the wall facing the sliding door. He choked back a curse. His face and head glistened with innumerable cuts, giving him the vague appearance of raw hamburger. He patted his trouser pocket for a handkerchief and froze when his fingers caught his now-silent pager. He pushed back an overwhelming sensation of foreboding as he returned the device to his belt holster and turned around to the slowly opening elevator doors and a sea of wide-eyed faces. To try wiping his face now would only make things worse. Ritter straightened, tried a painful smile, and stepped forward, the men parting as if to present honors or make him run a gauntlet.