Laurel’s thighs were on fire, and each stride strained her muscles painfully. She couldn’t take this pounding much longer. Behind her, Raul huffed in rhythm with his feet. Then another noise, finer and stringy, joined the thuds.
“Stop!” Lukas yelled.
The splashing stopped, but the strange noise increased.
“Run! Pig!”
Pig? You bastard!
Lukas overtook them from the rear along the left-hand side, climbing halfway up the tube and sprinting ahead. Even in underpants and fancy sneakers, the bastard could run.
“Pig!” he yelled.
Laurel ground her teeth and barreled forward in pursuit.
Fifty yards ahead, Lukas’s light stopped. He jumped upward and his feet thrashed in midair to disappear through the lip of the utility hole and into the vertical shaft.
“Hurry,” Raul grunted, just behind her. “Climb up and I’ll pass Russo to you.”
When they were underneath the access hole, Laurel sprang to grab a rung with both hands. She was about to swing a leg up to get some purchase on the tube wall when a large hand smashed into her buttocks and propelled her upward.
“Grab his collar, damn it!”
The strange grinding noise filled the air like a rain of nails. In a daze, Laurel threaded her arm through an upper rung and lowered her other hand to grip Russo’s neck ring. Suddenly an overpowering weight jerked Laurel’s arm downward, and she was holding on to the full weight of Russo with one hand. She gritted her teeth as the ring started to slip from her fingers. Raul darted past her and over, squeezing her against the rungs. Laurel’s arm trembled under the unbearable slipping weight, and then the load disappeared in a flash when Raul hoisted Russo into the crowded tube. The sound reached a crescendo as it grew into a scratching shriek. The tube vibrated. A screech like millions of fingernails on a blackboard exploded in a flurry of sparkles as something thundered by beneath their feet.
They huddled together, their combined lamps highlighting patches of reddened flesh intertwined with the green net and a large running shoe capped by a skinny ankle.
“What the fuck was that?” Laurel croaked.
“A pig.” Lukas’s voice had thinned. “That’s what the pipeline people call them: a self-powered robot used to keep the tunnel free of excrescences. We can get down now. It’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“For now.” Lukas’s voice dropped.
After a few seconds of squirming, sliding past one another, and lugging the cocoon containing Russo, they descended from their hiding place. The scratching noise had faded in the distance, almost a memory.
Laurel blinked and panned her light over the tunnel’s curved walls; they shone with a myriad of sparkles. She reached a hand to the wall. The surface had a slight bite, like a dull nail file. If a similar machine had cleaned the tank’s drains, the rough surface would have skinned them alive. She glanced at the rags on her feet, already threadbare. Nobody had brushed the welds; the machine did. The void in her stomach deepened. To form the tiny furrows in the hard steel, the brushes must be powered with awesome force. The machine would have turned them to mincemeat in a heartbeat.
“Hurry up!” Lukas looked paler than ever.
Laurel was already running, her painful legs forgotten. The thumping and splashing resumed behind her.
“Whoever sent the pig down knows how far out we could have traveled. Once they’re sure we couldn’t have gone any farther, they’ll put the pig in reverse.”
“Great,” Raul grunted.
After leaving two more access holes behind, Laurel’s legs lightened. Four hundred yards to go.
“Do we climb the next utility shaft?” She couldn’t wait to get out of the damn tube.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Lukas said. “These shafts are capped by covers. You can see them at intervals in the aisle between the lanes, when driving on the ring road around the cube. The covers are high security and computer-controlled. By now there will be hundreds of DHS Special Forces out there. In fewer than ten minutes, operators will overrule the computer program, the hatches will pop open, and the heat will pour down.”
“Cut the crap,” Raul growled. “How do we get out?”
“Through a side door.”
“I thought you said the utility holes were the only means of access.” Laurel strained her ears. It could be tinnitus or her imagination, but she could have sworn the tunnel was filling with the grating sound again.
“I did.”
They reached the final access hole and the sound increased. It wasn’t in her mind; it was coming toward them.
“Run!”
“Where to?” she screamed. “It’s coming at us!”
“Ahead!”
“Ahead? Where? We’ll never make the next one!”
Twenty yards farther down the tube, a powerful yellowish light flared through a square opening.
The grinding sound filled the tube. Blindly, the rags propelling her legs at odd angles, Laurel reached the opening and dove in.
In quick succession, like late commuters piling into a speeding bus, Raul, with Russo over his shoulder, and Lukas flew after her, landing in a mushy quagmire. The roar grew, expanded by the void of a huge concrete tunnel.
Laurel opened her eyes in time to see a blur of sparks flash by the entrance, and her nose filled with a waft of rabid stench.
“Shit!”
A rueful chuckle issued from the entrance, half drowned by the receding sound of the brushing machine. “Precisely.”
Laurel turned toward the voice. At either side of the opening, an old man in yellow oil clothes and tall waders hefted a curved section of steel into place. A third man fired a high-powered gas lance to weld it back.
Before sliding black goggles over his eyes, the welder gave her a quick once-over.
“Nice color.”
chapter 10
18:33
Senator Jerome Palmer darted a quick glance over his reading glasses toward the door of his study. He remembered leaving it ajar a while ago when he went to the kitchen for a drink, but now the gap was widening by inches. Hiking his glasses up the bridge of his nose, Palmer turned a page of the thick, legal-bound document he had been reading and lowered his head, keeping tabs on the door out of the corner of his eye.
When the gap was a foot wide, the prowler scurried in, wielding a large revolver. He flattened his back to the far corner of the bookcases lining the room and closed in, moving with measured steps.
Palmer waited until the intruder was almost upon him before letting go of the document and raising both hands above his head.
“I surrender.”
Choking with delighted giggles, his grandson, Timmy, returned his plastic .45 to a holster that almost reached the floor and rushed to wrap tiny arms around Palmer’s legs.
“Yup, you got me this time, Timmy. I didn’t have a chance. You’re getting good.” Palmer ruffled the child’s hair. “What are you today?”
“The law.” Timmy pointed to a shiny plastic star clipped to his T-shirt.
“I see. But only yesterday you were a Comanche warrior.”
“Yesterday was Sunday.”
Palmer frowned. “And?”
“Men don’t come see you on Sunday.”
“Go on.” Palmer stood. “Tell me about it.”
“It’s a secret.”
“You can trust me. I won’t tell a soul.”
“When you talk with men, I keep you covered.”
“In case someone pulls a gun on me?”
Timmy nodded.
“Well, I’m relieved; I feel much safer now.”
“I saw the man with the uniform open his case. But it had no gun inside, or I would have shot him.”
Palmer smiled. General Weston would have been mighty upset had he known a gun was trained on him. He ruffled Timmy’s hair again and froze.
“Say, how could you see what was inside his case?”
“My rifle has a tube that
makes things bigger.”
Palmer turned his head and looked over the back of his seat and out the sliding doors to the lawn outside. “And where were you?”
“In my house.”
At the far end of the garden, a clump of large trees offered a degree of privacy to the property that was valuable here in Georgetown. Palmer narrowed his eyes, but he couldn’t see a thing. Then he recalled his son building a tree house a few months before.
On his desk, a red light on the phone started flashing.
“I have a very important call now, but when I finish, will you show me your house?”
Timmy nodded.
Lifting the boy, Palmer kissed his forehead. Then he lowered him onto the carpet and patted his butt. “Off you go; inspect the grounds and make sure there are no bandits about, Sheriff.”
“Right, partner.” The sheriff tried a salute and bolted.
“Palmer.”
Silence, followed by what sounded like a burst of static. He knew the sizzling noise wasn’t static but a two-way stream of encoding data to synchronize the scrambler in his secure phone with the caller’s. After a few seconds, the screen on the terminal flashed HORUS.
“A partial success so far.”
Palmer was familiar with the unrecognizable voice, without accent or syllabic stresses: a voice digitized, expropriated of everything but meaning, and recomposed by a speech synthesizer.
“You can’t have partial success. Success or failure?”
“A little of each. A member of your team, the black man, didn’t make it.”
Palmer drew a hand to his forehead and sidestepped to flop down into his chair. Bastien, the lawyer who would change the world. The dear boy … He blinked, his eyes suddenly blurred. Horus’s time was precious. “What happened?”
“Heart failure.”
“And the others?”
“Too early to say, but they will have to move fast. Seth has sent for Onuris.”
Another burst of static, and then the screen went blank.
Palmer replaced the telephone in its cradle, his heart heavy. He pinched the bridge of his nose as images of what Laurel and Raul must be going through—having to deal with the tragic loss of their friend as they carted an inert Russo through dark, putrid pipes—flashed through his mind. Their chances had thinned almost to nothing.
Russo had burned to death in 2051, one late October Friday after the car he drove hit a tree and caught flames on a country road, somewhere between Culpeper and Charlottesville—at least according to the death certificate issued by a Dr. James Child after perusing the results of DNA tests. Russo’s charred remains had prevented any other sort of identification.
Five years would pass before a costly misunderstanding revealed that Dr. Child had been duped, or forced to lie.
From the hibernation system’s inception, the congressional grapevine had been rife with hushed rumors—often preposterous—of irregularities in the DHS operation of the hibernation facilities. One particular piece of gossip kept cropping up at regular intervals: the existence of illegal prisoners—men and women who had never been sentenced by the courts. The concept intrigued Palmer, and one day he decided to indulge in a little investigation.
Each hibernation facility was organized into a series of tanks, each holding a number of inmates. The distribution and identity of the prisoners was housed in a secure database shared by Hypnos and the DHS and was available to the Senate committee overseeing the hibernation system. It occurred to Palmer there would be a relatively simple—though probably expensive—way to ascertain if the inmates in any given tank matched the records. Each prisoner’s DNA markers were stored in the database, and the hibernation fluid was a chemical soup laced with biologic wastes. A sample of fluid from a given tank could be cross-matched with those supposed to be there. Unidentified genetic material would stand out. His mind made up, Palmer set out to obtain hibernation fluid. When Nadia Shubin, a mousy-looking laboratory technician at the Washington, D.C., hibernation facility, demanded five million for the samples, Palmer had almost fainted. But no amount of bargaining could convince Mrs. Shubin to lower her fees. Six months later, almost to the date, the wily technician delivered.
Palmer had expected a handful of jars, never a van loaded with three large polymer cases—each holding one hundred carefully labeled test tubes: one from every tank at the Washington, D.C., facility.
To cross-match every tube would have cost a fortune, and Palmer wouldn’t think of it. Instead, he used a statistical-probability program to choose a reasonable sample. Forty tanks. Only one test tube from the original sampling yielded an unknown signature. It belonged to a man whose DNA wasn’t registered in any American database. After the find, Palmer couldn’t stop. He made the owners of a small Mexican testing lab very happy when he ordered tests on the remaining tubes, only to find another eight abnormalities. Seven tubes produced eleven unknown markers. The eighth contained the DNA of a man who had haunted Palmer’s dreams since his youth, a man who had been dead five years: Eliot Russo.
Mercenaries, even good ones, could be had for a fraction of what he’d already spent on tests. But, in the feverish months that followed his discovery, Palmer discarded adventurers. Instead, he reached for two people for whom Russo held a meaning that transcended money or ideals: Laurel and Shepherd.
When their plan started to take shape, Shepherd had insisted on three men of similar build to attempt springing Russo, and he drew up a list of candidates. But Laurel had her own ideas. She drafted Raul and Bastien and announced she would complete the team.
Naturally, Shepherd went ballistic and threatened to quit. Over the secure phone, Palmer pleaded and tried every trick he knew to change Laurel’s mind. Later—when Russo returned to the land of the living—she would be irreplaceable, but the breakout needed muscle. Still, Laurel wouldn’t budge. She proved obstinate as a mule, and Palmer, after soberly reviewing her ancestry, surrendered.
A staccato of taps, like a bird pecking seeds from a dish, brought Palmer out of his reverie. He looked toward the sliding patio door where Timmy waited, his eyes expectant.
In a daze, he followed his trotting grandson across the lawn and into the clump of old oaks.
“We’re almost there, Grandpa.”
Palmer bowed his head to avoid a large branch. Onuris.
Timmy climbed a stout wooden ladder with commendable speed for his short legs, and Palmer followed, maneuvering his bulk with difficulty to a fenced platform, perhaps ten feet from the ground, one of its corners occupied by a square construction with a small door and a window.
“I don’t think I’ll fit through there.”
“You can try on your knees.”
Palmer obliged and crawled inside the small house, leaving his rump sticking outside the door. On a miniature table, he spotted several jars with water—one of them murky and with something alive inside—bottle corks, a pot full of glass marbles, and a forbidden item: a box of matches.
“Timmy, you shouldn’t play with matches. They’re dangerous. Please, give them to me.”
The boy, far from looking chastised, smiled and handed him the box.
This time Palmer didn’t fall for Timmy’s mischief. Suspicious, he drew the box close to his ear and shook it. A scratching noise issued from within. “What’s inside?”
“Jiminy.”
Palmer reached to his top pocket for his reading glasses and opened the box a fraction. A glossy, cockroach-looking insect peeked its feelers out. “I see. But you shouldn’t keep Jiminy in a dark box. Would you like to be in a dark box?”
Timmy shook his head emphatically.
“I tell you what: You come with me to the garage, bring your cricket, and we’ll make a little home with wire. Then you can hang its cage up here, feed it, and hear it chirp. Would you like that?”
The boy nodded. “What does Jiminy eat?”
Palmer scratched his head and frowned. One of the eldest serving senators in the country and I don’t know a d
amn thing about what crickets eat.
“Mmmm, I’ll look it up.” He glanced to a corner where a sizable toy rifle stood, half hidden beneath bulky feathered headgear. His knees were killing him, but he inched forward to peer out the window. Through a gap in the tree’s foliage, he could see inside his study.
“So you keep me covered from here?”
“Yup. I protect you.”
“Thank you. Here.” He handed the child his box. “Bring Jiminy along and we’ll fix him a home.” Then he glanced once more toward his study. “Er, let me have a look at your weapon, please.”
Timmy reached for his rifle and passed it over.
Sitting on his haunches on the platform outside the little house, Palmer held the toy and inspected it. Made of a sturdy plastic, it was a faithful reproduction of a real weapon, except for its size. He checked the barrel, the sights, and the scope, nodded, and handed it back to the expectant boy. “Excellent weapon, partner. Make sure you keep it in good condition. I depend on you.”
Timmy giggled, pride in his eyes.
As Palmer descended the ladder, Bastien’s face flashed across his mind, and grief welled in his chest. He reached firm ground and looked upward to watch his grandson’s expert descent. Bastien’s face blurred, replaced by that of a spear-wielding man, one of his arms upraised, decked in an embroidered robe and a crown with four high plumes. Onuris, the ancient Egyptian “bringer of fear,” the god of war and the hunt. A most fitting moniker for Nikola Masek.
chapter 11
18:42
In the thirty minutes since the alarm tripped, Sandra Garcia had done nothing but sit at her station while Kosmerl shouted orders and paced the room. She hated the phony half-Slav. She hated his starched blue fatigues, his tall lace-up boots with thick soles that added another two inches to his already towering stature, and his eye. His milky eye was sickening, especially when he closed his good one and play-stared with the white one. Why he didn’t have his cataract, or whatever it was, removed was beyond her. And then there was his phony accent. The idiot would use ze for the whenever he could. But above all she hated his joke. Der ver zwei peanuts valking down der strasse and von vas … assaulted! Peanut. Sandra wrinkled her nose in distaste. She’d heard the stupid joke ten times, at least. Once, Sandra had caught a glimpse of his personnel file, and many other goodies, when programmers were rescheduling files to another memory stack. The imbecile was from Massachusetts. His parents were from Slovenia, not Germany, and he’d never traveled abroad.
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