The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  As she leaned on the kitchen counter to fix a slipper that kept coming off, her pager buzzed. She reached to her bathrobe pocket and drew the device to the light to stare at the single word: HEAVEN? The sender was Ritter.

  “I’ll be …” Her mind went into overdrive. She checked the kitchen clock. whatever had driven Ritter into seeking her help must have taken place in the past two hours and probably involved the department. She thought of calling Mason Tower’s security but discarded the idea at once. If something had happened there, her call would be flagged. After dousing the living-room lights, she stepped to the bow window to peek through a gap in the curtains. The car with her bodyguards inside was stationed, as usual, up her drive. As a high-level executive, she merited twenty-four-hour protection, and her house was under constant surveillance by a security team whenever she happened to be in. Like now.

  The house brimmed with extra security systems and panic buttons in the most unexpected places, including bathrooms and bedrooms; her neighbors had been security-vetted, and she had to carry a small capsule with a geolocator around her neck. That in itself had been a small victory, still hotly debated at intervals by the NHS honchos who insisted that all sensitive government personnel should carry the capsule in their necks.

  Most people subject to high surveillance wrongly assumed the security measures sought to protect them. But Genia, having developed many of the procedures, knew better. The security schedules were meant to protect the system by making it almost impossible to abduct or otherwise take advantage of the knowledge such high-echelon individuals possessed. It should be much more difficult to capture rather than kill a high government executive.

  With the goons outside, Ritter couldn’t walk through the front door without being recorded by at least five or six departments. But, providing he’d gotten rid of his own locator, nothing prevented him from sneaking through the back door—barring the local parish priest. With a sigh, Genia keyed her neighbor’s address on her pager, pressed the button to send, and moved over to her study, rehearsing the tall story she was about to deliver to Father Damien over the phone.

  After switching off the lights, Genia padded barefoot into her backyard, skirting the pool and sitting at a bench under the large grapefruit trees she kept threatening to chop down. She hated grapefruit, and, as revenge, the trees exhibited an obscene fertility.

  After a while she spotted movement by the plum tree’s branches, which sat almost on top of the fence. Ritter was trying the easy approach. Then she saw him swinging from a branch, followed by the sounds of a loud curse, the sickening rip of tearing cloth, and a thud. She stood and walked over to the fence, choking with ill-contained laughter.

  “Boy, you make a lousy thief.”

  Ritter also made a lousy patient. Between gasps, hisses, and countless sharp intakes of breath, Genia thoroughly cleaned the literally hundreds of tiny cuts on his face and scalp, most of them little more than pimple size. After swabbing the nicks with peroxide, she applied dabs of a spray-on dressing, then stood back to examine her handiwork. He looked like someone with a bad dose of chicken pox.

  “Have you eaten?” Ritter stood from the kitchen stool where he’d endured her maintenance work, removed his jacket, made a face at the ripped pocket, and hung it from a wall hook next to the kitchen towels.

  She was about to explain about her queasiness, then realized she was miraculously hungry and shook her head.

  “I’ll make supper,” he said, and moved to the fridge. Genia climbed onto his vacated stool, tightened her robe, and settled in for the performance. He rummaged through the freezer to unearth a tray of leathery-looking chicken legs and a few odd vegetable lumps. Over the next hour, with pasta, eggs, sour cream, and other bits and pieces he’d scrounged from the kitchen, Ritter produced a huge bowl of luscious fettuccini. And throughout the culinary exhibition, he related his version of the sniper attack, his exit from Mason Tower, and the drive to her house, without omitting the providential coaching by his anonymous caller. She wasn’t overly surprised. Whoever was listening to her exchanges with Palmer was doing an excellent job as guardian angel. Except by now she had narrowed her list of possible candidates to one: Nikola Masek. War was indeed a strange scenario, and mercenaries fickle in their allegiances.

  After supper, they moved into the living room, dimly lit by whatever spilled over from the kitchen, with a coffee tray, snifters, and a bottle of cognac that had once belonged to Genia’s father.

  “That was my bit. Now, care to tell me what’s going on?” Ritter asked.

  Genia sipped her cognac and shelved devious thoughts. Her stomach hadn’t begrudged the five-star treatment. She had eaten more at one sitting than in the previous week. “The DHS has been keeping illegal prisoners in the tanks.”

  “We’ve already been through this. I take it ‘illegal’ means people who weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. You mean innocent people?”

  “People who have not been sentenced by the courts.”

  “That means nothing. Innocent?”

  She stalled.

  He waited.

  “People sent into cold storage by the Russian Mafiya.” There, she’d said it.

  “How many?”

  “Many.”

  Ritter swirled his liqueur, sniffed it, and swirled some more. He was a cool customer, but his reaction had been too tame.

  “You knew?”

  “Since the unveiling of the first sugar cube there have been rumors of illegal inmates, but I would have never guessed that someone was using the tanks as storage. It makes sense, though.”

  “Unsubstantiated rumors?”

  “Persistent, as befits the inevitable. Once humanity had firecrackers, nothing could stop the advent of the cannon. Throughout history, we’ve used prisons to house not only the delinquent but also the troublesome. Now you tell me someone is renting stays in our sugar cubes. Someone getting filthy rich in the process.” He paused and sniffed his liqueur. “The first weird tale I heard about the hibernation system was in connection with the Bova brothers.”

  Genia nodded. Nine years before, two young men had been acquitted on a technicality, although they were guilty of murdering six children aged two to six in nasty satanic séances. A year later, they both disappeared. “I remember.”

  “I recall hearing at the time that if the Bovas weren’t in a tank, they should be. It stands to reason. If there’s a system with a possible function, someone will use it eventually. Unless you render it impossible.”

  “How?”

  “Transparency. As it is, the system is opaque, and that can only mean some of its uses wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.” At last Ritter took a sip, and, judging by the time he kept his eyes closed, it must have met his expectations. When he spoke, his voice dropped a semitone. “I take it Odelle is in this up to her neck.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I thought the idea was to fill me in, not practice sounding-board techniques.”

  She waited.

  “Odelle Marino is desperate and becoming more so by the day. What happened this evening confirms it. If the operation involved other departments in the government, she would be resigned to take her fall with the rest of the agencies or people involved. But to me it reads as if she would be taking the rap alone, and that can only mean it’s been her setup all along. Who’s pulling the rug out from under her?”

  Genia rested her warm snifter on a side table, shocked at the speed with which the moment had presented itself. But to bring Ritter in meant revealing the identities of the others involved. She bit her lower lip. Yet Ritter had committed himself by accepting the codes. “Jerome Palmer.”

  Ritter paused his swirling. “I should have known.” He chuckled. Then he turned, his profile in darkness, highlighted by a buttery moon filtering through the sheer drapes. “Who got out?”

  “Two young lawyers and—”

  “I’ve read the report; three went in and only two got out. But those peopl
e just got in. What I meant is, who did they spring out?”

  “Eliot Russo.”

  Ritter whistled without actually producing any note. “Not bad. Because of his political activism?”

  “No. Strictly personal.” She sketched a spurned woman’s vendetta.

  “No wonder Odelle Marino is rattled. What surprises me is that she hasn’t cleaned the stables already.”

  “She can’t. The men of the Mafiya can’t be trifled with. They command armies and billions of dollars. Also, Russo is sufficiently important to be a credible witness, not to mention the other two. She will attempt to cover her tracks as soon as they’re captured, not before.”

  “Why not? It would be a preemptive safeguard.”

  “I don’t think it’s that easy. We know that Eliot Russo has been her personal prisoner, but she needs time to deal with the others.”

  “I still don’t follow.”

  “If the fugitives are captured, my take is that she will ensure the dons remove their property from her tanks as soon as possible. After the hints The Post has been dropping, there’s bound to be an investigation. The inspectors would find nothing amiss, and that would be that.”

  Ritter nodded slowly. “And if they manage to fob off the manhunt?”

  “She will probably switch the Russians about and make the numbers tally. To physically check the identities of every inmate in the system would take months, perhaps years. At least that’s Palmer’s take.”

  “And the hearing?” Ritter asked.

  “Day after tomorrow, in the morning.” She finished her drink and outlined the overall strategy.

  “Where’s your computer?”

  Genia grabbed the bottle and headed toward her study.

  day six

  Paradiso, Canto VII: 54–56

  But I now see your understanding tangled

  by thought on thought into a knot,

  from which, with much desire,

  your mind awaits release.

  The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI

  chapter 50

  09:36

  “My uncle Hector used to pick me up from boarding school on Fridays and drive me to his cabin in the mountains. …” Russo’s voice trailed off, to pick up an instant later in a lower tone. “He lived there with a quiet woman, Beth. I never called her anything else. I don’t think they were married, but they shared the kind of relationship I’ve sought all my life. I remember their faces and shapes, even their smell, but the image that keeps coming to mind is of moving lips. They spoke to each other often, in low voices, almost whispers, so that I couldn’t overhear their conversations. But she frequently blushed and lowered her eyes with a smile.

  “In the evenings, Beth would sit by the fire, hum, and rock her chair until I settled at her feet. Then, without taking her eyes from the fire, she would reach to a shelf by her side and pick up a book. She had many books, and I think the random selections added to her pleasure. Sometimes it was Kipling, other times Virginia Woolf, or Pasternak, or Capote. She would read in the same tone of voice that she spoke—low and throaty, as if she kissed the words. My uncle would join us, having lit a huge briar pipe, much stained by age. He would close his eyes and seem to doze but for the glow of his tobacco and the wisps of smoke escaping his lips. Some evenings I fell asleep at Beth’s feet; on other nights, she would glance at the clock and close the book. Then my uncle would stand, pocket his pipe, and walk me to my room while Beth closed the house for the night. They never went to bed together—I mean, not at the same time. From my door left ajar, I could look down the corridor and peek at Beth entering their bedroom. A little later, freshly shaven, my uncle would tiptoe in like a thief. A smiling thief.”

  Floyd Carpenter reached for a glass of juice and placed the straw between Eliot’s parched lips.

  “I got lost in the snow when I was eleven. We weren’t far from the house, just checking a few traps my uncle had laid for rabbits. I still don’t know what happened, but the wind hurled powdered snow into the air and I was blinded. I shouted his name, but I couldn’t beat the wind. I had seen a clump of pines a few hundred yards to my left and headed there. My uncle had taught me well. When I reached the tree line, I dug out a hole, tore a few low branches to cover it up, and slipped underneath with a long stick to keep poking open an air vent. It was cold and pitch-dark and I couldn’t stop shivering. I knew I was going to die. In that endless night, I learned the pliable nature of time. All that I could remember afterward was blackness and cold stretching into eternity and Beth’s voice as she narrated Marco Polo’s splendid travels.

  “When I saw light at the end of the hole, I dug myself out. No.” Russo made a wry movement with his mouth and shook his head a fraction. “My hands were numb and I couldn’t move my arms well, so I gathered impetus and stood up, banging my head on the roof of twigs. It took a few tries but I managed it. Beth was only twenty yards away, with eyes grown too large for her face. Then she started screaming. I had never heard her do that before.”

  “Is that what sustained you?” Laurel’s question sounded redundant, but she voiced it anyway.

  “I must have denied the tank.”

  “What do you mean?” Lukas asked.

  “Things exist only if you acknowledge them. An insult is only sound; it needs your collaboration to have impact.”

  Lukas nodded. “So you refused to accept the tank’s existence and shrank instead into the cold and darkness of your childhood snow hole.”

  Laurel reached for Floyd’s hand and breathed deeply, awed before the capacity of the human mind to clutch at selected memories to survive and feeling sorry for the lonely being imprisoned in Russo’s skin and skull. Most men would be raving mad after what Russo had gone through, and that would have played heavily in Tyler’s mind when planning the breakout. Had Russo been insane, their endeavor was doomed to start with.

  For a while nobody spoke. Raul and Antonio sat together, their eyes never leaving Russo’s face, now placid and seemingly dozing. Tyler leaned against the living room’s door frame, a can of beer in his hand, probably warm; he hadn’t sipped from it since Russo started to speak. Each seemed lost in their own thoughts, perhaps wondering how they would survive a tank—a frightening possibility considering their circumstances.

  Then Russo’s eyelids fluttered and again he moved his mouth as if to dislodge a bad taste. “Cold, darkness, and Beth’s voice.”

  “Marco Polo?”

  Laurel glanced at the Woody Allen look-alike, surprised to notice that Lukas fixed Russo with an intense stare as if he was sending or waiting for a vital secret.

  “Yes. And The Jungle Book, and Kim, and … ‘Gunga Din.’”

  “Did they wake you often?” Floyd stretched his arm again to slip the straw between Russo’s lips.

  “I suppose so. It was numbing cold and dark. Then, after a long time, I would drift back to sleep and the darkness of my nightmares.”

  Behind her, Laurel heard ice cracking and chinking against the sides of a glass as Tyler trickled a drink over the cubes.

  “How long?” Russo asked.

  Laurel jerked upright and dug her fingers into Floyd’s hand. She had been dreading the question. Probably they all had, but nobody voiced it. The air seemed to pulse and flow like water running under ice.

  A faint smile tugged at Russo’s lips. “That long?”

  She realized all eyes were on Floyd.

  “Eight years, two months, and six days.” Floyd’s voice rang with the brutality of truth.

  “Thank you.” The smile never left Russo’s lips.

  “You knew …” Laurel blurted.

  “A rough guess only.”

  “But, how …?

  “You. Difficult without hair, but mid-twenties is my guess. And you,” he turned his face toward Raul, “also helped to fish me out?”

  Raul nodded.

  “Thank you,” Russo repeated. Then the dark sunglasses Russo had permanently stolen from Tyler rotated, and Laurel could s
ense his eyes settling on her. “Why?”

  It was a personal question voiced in public—a question she couldn’t answer yet. “First we need to win this war.”

  Russo nodded once.

  “How did they do it?” Lukas asked.

  Russo turned his head a fraction in his direction. “I don’t follow.”

  “I mean, they said you died in a car crash.”

  “Ah, that. I don’t remember much. It was done in a tunnel. As I neared the exit, I spotted two cars blocking it; behind me was another car. A police car. As I reached for my driver’s license, an officer hit me with an electric prod. When I woke up it was cold and dark.”

  “But why?” Lukas insisted.

  “I can answer that,” Laurel intervened. “The vendetta of a spurned woman.” She highlighted the salient details from the story her anonymous recruiter had hinted at in their telephone conversations and from the dossier Tyler had let her read when she knew him only as Shepherd. Laurel detailed the tragic relationship between Odelle Marino and Araceli Goldberg, stopping the narration after Russo’s abandonment of the pregnant young woman before the police’s charge.

  “I was twenty-three,” Russo whispered. “And a coward.” He paused. “I still am.”

  “Well, she extracted her pound of flesh,” Floyd said.

  Russo moved an almost translucent arm to his emaciated thigh and squeezed. “Rather more, I fear.”

  “Still.” Floyd pinched his lower lip. “I can’t figure something, though. Why did she wait so long? There were almost twenty years between Araceli’s death and his abduction.”

  “Clout,” Russo said. “Up until ten years ago, Odelle Marino wasn’t powerful enough to get away with it.”