The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  “You’re implying the fugitives can make it to the Potomac without ever having to surface?”

  “I’m certain there are scores of abandoned tunnels and pipes heading in that direction.”

  Nikola nodded absently. Dennis’s details backed his decision not to commit any forces to the sewers. It would have been a pointless exercise. “But the system must have been maintained and renewed, no?” He hoped the network of sensors and security measures had been extended.

  “It has. But enlarging a tunnel or pipe is a nightmare. Instead, the engineers have sunk new ones at different levels, often using parts of the old ones. There have been tunnels, private railway lines, shelters, deep stores, you name it, piled on top or below one another.”

  As they neared his property, a house isolated in a cul-de-sac, Nikola reached to unfasten his seat belt and paused when the dashboard screen changed color, followed by an insistent beep behind them.

  Dennis stopped the van a few feet away from the already-opening wrought-iron gate, then maneuvered the vehicle to the driveway fronting the house. He killed the engine, swiveled his seat, and moved over to his console. After switching off the wireless link to his pad on the dashboard, Dennis brought the equipment online and started scrolling screens, interrogating scores of subsystems. “We had a signal and lost it.”

  “Location?”

  “Nope. It was a weak signal captured only by a single direction finder. Without a longer broadcast, pinpointing the signal is impossible.”

  “General direction, then?”

  Dennis hunched his shoulders as he started the routine of transferring links to the equipment in the house. “East.”

  The river lay due east, but so did highways, towns, and scores of residential areas. Three lawyers—one of them dead—a doctor, and a shift supervisor: an unlikely commando unit with a maverick plan and a mystery prisoner. Rather than the thrill of the hunt, Nikola’s mind thickened with foreboding.

  chapter 19

  01:42

  The man waiting for them by the tracks had not volunteered anything beyond a curt “Follow me.” He cast an imposing figure in a long drab coat that almost brushed the floor, a yellow electrical cord tied around his waist as a belt. In another incarnation, the coat must have belonged to a giant. Salt-and-pepper hair, unkempt and matted, fused with a bushy beard and mustache, and a greasy stench preceded him by a good six feet.

  “Friend or foe?” Floyd whispered in her ear.

  Laurel eyed him warily. “He doesn’t look like the DHS to me, so let’s find out. Besides, what choice do we have?”

  After filing through a two-hundred-yard stretch of tunnel, they entered a dimly lit scene worthy of Francis Bacon. Laurel had heard of homeless people living with rats in dark caverns underneath the city: nightmarish tales of pain, filth, violence, and romance. But nothing could have prepared her for this. Scores of people, scattered along the rail bed and the platforms, moved along an abandoned passenger station. They huddled around open fires or scurried into cardboard-box burrows. Flames cast dancing shadows on the curved walls, and voices mingled with grunts and the crackle of whatever burned in the fires.

  The man walking ahead stopped before a figure squatting by a huge samovarlike contraption, which rested on a tripod over a camping stove. He turned to the fugitives. “Refreshments,” he said. “I’m Henry Mayer. Henry will do.”

  The group stood rooted to the spot. Laurel looked around the station. It was a long structure, three or four hundred feet, split into two levels: the track bed—perhaps twenty feet wide—from which the rails had been long removed, flanked by ample passenger platforms a few feet higher up. The walls, covered in grimy tiles that once must have been white, curved to form a vaulted surface overhead.

  “Over there.” Henry pointed up to a yellowish glimmer issuing from an entrance roughly in the center of the right platform wall. “We have prepared a flat surface for …” He scratched his beard. “Your colleague.”

  Floyd nodded to Raul. They stepped back to climb a wooden ramp between the rail bed and the higher platform—a few planks with battens nailed at intervals to afford a grip. Once on the raised area, they carried Russo over to the side entrance.

  Henry remained impassive. Then his eyes darted a quick glance toward Lukas before staring back at Laurel.

  She cleared her throat and said to Lucas, “Er … Floyd will need a hand with Russo, and I need Raul down here. Could you?”

  Lukas nodded once and dashed over toward the ramp, as if eager to hide somewhere out of the open.

  The man looking after the huge kettle reached into a cardboard box for a mug and, with a hand wrapped in something that once was a woolen mitten, grabbed the spout and pulled. The contraption, obviously set on gimbals, pivoted to spew a gush of dark liquid into the mug. Then the man held it in midair and waited.

  Henry huffed and reached into his pocket.

  Laurel blinked when Henry’s arm continued to sink past its natural stopping place, almost to his elbow, only to surface clenching a grimy ten-dollar bill.

  The man at the kettle reached for the bill with one hand and advanced the mug with the other. Beyond Henry, Laurel spotted Raul returning, leaping down from the platform to the rail bed.

  “Here.” Henry grabbed the mug and turned toward Raul.

  Raul reached over. After a sharp intake of breath, he cursed, lowered the mug onto the floor, and blew on his hands.

  “Tender, are we? Next you’ll ask for cream and sugar.”

  When another mug was pointed in her direction, Laurel hid her hands inside her suit sleeves and reached over. Henry beamed.

  “Can I have two more?” Raul asked, and glanced up toward the side entrance where Floyd and Lukas tended to Russo. Then he bent down to pick up a flat piece of wood and held it before him, arms outstretched.

  Henry chuckled. “My, but we’re quick learners.”

  Laurel and Raul settled with their grimy mugs of something hot and wet away from the groups around the fires or the sleeping shapes on cardboard mattresses, while Henry dragged a crate over and settled down in a flurry of alarming creaks.

  “How did you know where to meet us?” Laurel asked.

  “I gave the coordinates to your boss.”

  “How?”

  “Phone.”

  “Where—”

  Henry waved a hand. “We have a portable repeater, now a mile away from here. Our contact lasted thirty seconds, not long enough for trackers. We can’t use it again, not until we reprogram a different handle.”

  “Handle?”

  “Address,” Raul clarified.

  “Where can I use this?” Laurel drew from her pocket the sturdy Metapad computer.

  “Squirt?”

  Laurel nodded.

  “Be my guest.”

  Laurel didn’t move.

  “Over there.” Henry pointed to an empty area on the far end of the platform.

  Laurel stopped by the side entrance where she’d seen the men take Russo. They had propped the stretcher on top of two wooden crates and opened the bag. Now, with the black material skirting the boxes, Russo’s white body reminded Laurel of a photograph she’d once seen of an Indian cremation. Floyd was moving a pad over Russo’s chest, peering at a handheld device with a bright blue screen.

  “How is he?”

  Floyd opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he shook his head. “Stable.”

  “What does that mean?” On the fringe of her vision, Laurel noted the still figure of Lukas holding Floyd’s bag.

  Floyd breathed deep. “It means he’s holding on. As for how long … your guess is as good as mine.”

  She was about to remind him that he was a doctor and an expert in hibernation side effects, before the surrealism of their predicament stilled her tongue. “Thank you. I’m trying to work us out of here. I’ll be back.”

  Floyd held her gaze an instant and nodded.

  Laurel continued along the platform to a secluded corner, beh
ind a pile of junk, bundles of copper wiring, and sacks of rags. After booting her Metapad—a rugged military-issue combination of GPS Squirt messenger and computer—she opened the instant-message program and pinged Shepherd. He replied instantly, as if he’d had the text ready to beam: >Explain your circumstance, in detail.

  Over the next few minutes she exchanged messages—first to bring Shepherd up to date about their desperate plight and later to figure a way out. There was none. The police had effectively sealed the city with checkpoints at major and most minor roads. In addition, patrol cars were conducting spot checks on suspect vehicles and, according to Shepherd, almost anything on wheels qualified. The river was also out; it was teeming with police speedboats. As their conversation progressed, Laurel’s feeling of dejection deepened. Their carefully built plan had vanished. Shepherd could drive a van to a point four miles away on the city’s south side, hide the van in a disused warehouse, and wait to pick them up there, but he couldn’t get any closer. Besides the police, several DHS Fast Deployment Units had spread downtown and at cardinal points around Washington, D.C., ten minutes away from almost any spot within the city limits. They were hemmed in the sewers with a dying man.

  >Problem is, Shepherd wrote, anything that distracts the police away wouldn’t necessarily bother the DHS, and conversely.

  >Is there anything that would distract them both or cause the DHS to call off the police?

  >No, but perhaps we can distract them separately.

  >How? Laurel clutched at straws.

  A long pause.

  >A major accident, a fire.

  In other words, Shepherd had no idea.

  >Still have the sensors? Shepherd asked.

  >Yes.

  >Henry should be able to use them to draw the DHS away from you.

  >And the police?

  For more than a minute, the prompt flashed on the screen without any new input. Then three words scrolled across the top of the display.

  >Bring Henry in.

  >How far?

  >All the way.

  >Repeat.

  There was a pause, then: >I trust that man with my life.

  And our lives, Laurel thought, before switching the Metapad off.

  When Laurel returned to the lower rail area, Henry and Raul hadn’t moved. They sat in the same spot and seemed frozen in time but for their empty mugs. She reached for her now-tepid drink and made a face, but she was thirsty.

  “Shepherd says you’re our only hope.”

  “Shepherd?”

  “Your friend, our … boss.” She darted a glance to Raul.

  “I see.” Henry’s beard contorted, and Laurel supposed he was smiling. “Shoot.”

  Laurel briefed him about their scheme and replayed her exchange with Shepherd.

  Henry nodded when she finished. “He’s right. Drawing the DHS away, if those things you have on your necks work as locators, is simple enough. But what about them?” Henry glanced toward the side entrance.

  “What do you mean?”

  Henry rubbed the sole of a scuffed boot on the floor. “You said they were hired help.”

  “That’s right, but after the fiasco they share our boat. Out there they’re dead, and they know it.”

  “To clear the police roadblocks would require a major incident,” Henry said.

  “Those were Shepherd’s words. A fire?”

  “I doubt it. Fire brigades and a few police perhaps, but even a plane crash wouldn’t clear the roads unless it was in a highly populated area, and that’s out of the question.”

  Henry closed his eyes and seemed to doze for a couple of endless minutes. “There could be a way, but we would need more people and equipment. I can volunteer my services and contacts but can’t speak for the others. I don’t have any money. Mercenaries and gear can be expensive.”

  “Can you get us out?”

  “I can try.”

  Laurel had already booted her Metapad and was frantically pecking at its screen. After a few seconds, the first reply flashed across the screen.

  >Done. What do you need?

  She tilted the screen so Henry could see and waited.

  “Twenty,” he deadpanned.

  “Million?”

  Henry nodded once.

  She hesitated, then typed: >20.

  A second later: >Done.

  And then: >Where? When? How?

  Henry glanced at the screen and must have pursed his lips, because the mass of hair on his face swelled. “Where can he pick you up?”

  She told him the location Shepherd had described in a disused warehouse. “He can’t get any closer.” Then she held her breath.

  Henry reached out his pawlike hand and held her wrist in a delicate grip, as if wary of breaking it. Laurel did a quick double take to discover he was peering at her watch—02:16—before closing his eyes once more. “His pickup point is good, in eight hours. Split the money into three bags: two with five and one with ten. Make that garbage bags. It has a poetic ring to it.”

  chapter 20

  02:26

  A white dash flashed twice on his screen and faded to black. Once the link was severed, Harper Tyler peered down the lines of text on the screen, the trail of a carefully planned exercise gone wrong. To one side, the racks of sophisticated equipment he’d used to eavesdrop on the DHS and police movements blinked in a slow cadence. Traffic was low and the wolf pack on standby, ready to pounce at the slightest move of their prey. The idea of a carefully planned exercise was a euphemism. The success or failure of any action depended on strategy, which in turn hinged on sound intelligence. It was now obvious that the senator’s intelligence and his own sucked. Russo hadn’t been in true hibernation; he had been condemned to a slow death. His status, according to Laurel, could only be described as comatose. It was painfully obvious that the enemy had kept a card up its sleeve—an ace that Tyler didn’t factor into the delicate equation of springing Russo from the Washington sugar cube. That he couldn’t have known the inmate’s neck sensors doubled as homing beacons was no excuse. Had he designed the sensors, he would have insisted on such a simple and inexpensive circuit addition.

  Tyler blinked at the double digit on the screen. Twenty million was a hefty chunk of cash—its worth plummeting rapidly but still a lot of money. Tyler sighed, rubbed his knee, and panned along a row of cramped bookcases to a wall facing the curtained bay window and a stout safe flanked by maps. He had the money and more, in used and untraceable thousand-dollar bills embedded with a passive chip that so far had thwarted the efforts of forgers to reproduce them. Nanotechnology developed and produced in the weightlessness of the U.S. space facility had its advantages. The cash was earmarked for the doctor and the supervisor, but they would have to wait their turn.

  He stood, grimaced, and shifted his weight to his good leg, before limping over to a map of Washington, D.C., with the network of active sewers superimposed in clear acetate. He peered at the maze of colored lines, sadly aware that the graphic represented only a fraction of the subterranean realm, with countless levels, forgotten tunnels, and flooded galleries. On the opposite side of the safe, pinned to a board, was a laminated wall map of the world. Like countless times before, his gaze drifted along the Tropic of Cancer to the Gulf of Oman and then north into Iran and South Khorasan and its mountains—home to goats and a race of people that clung to their land like lichen to rock. Tyler narrowed his eyes. He knew better than most about botched operations and homing beacons. Shepherd? Rather than guiding his flock, Tyler had driven them into a blind alley.

  During the last Iranian war, Major Scott Marino—the young scion of a wealthy warrior’s dynasty, eager to show his worth—had recklessly scrambled three choppers on a dubious piece of intelligence. The ambivalent and choppy signal hinted at having spotted, at long last, the elusive mujahideen’s headquarters at the bottom of a gorge. The location didn’t make any sense and went against everything—admittedly little—they knew about their fabled chieftain, Mullah Akim.
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  There were several reasons why the information should have been filed instead of acted on. Theirs was just an outpost commissioned to gather intelligence and relay it to U.S. headquarters at Kabul, in friendly neighboring Afghanistan. Out of the five able chopper pilots on duty at the post, one had been shipped home in a black bag the previous day after taking a stroll in the countryside and meeting one of their own mines, stealthily sown months before by a passing aircraft and unrecorded. Another awaited extraction at their makeshift infirmary with large chunks missing from a leg, courtesy of an explosive shell that had almost downed his craft on an ill-fated inspection flight. But none of these petty details swayed Major Marino, already starry-eyed at the thought of a commendation-worthy action.

  To the north of the camp, ink-black rivers cut plunging gorges toward Chah-e Mezrab. To the south, eleven-thousand-foot peaks rose in a ring above the valley, itself more than a mile high, with the town of Khvoshab and the Mahesh gorge roughly in the middle. Off went the crafts into the gorge and into a barrage of anything that could fly, from small-caliber artillery shells and rifle fire to the silly Chinese TIP missiles—little more than firecrackers but deadly when released in droves.

  All three crafts took hits. Two exploded in midair. The third managed to wobble for a few miles before crashing into the barren russet ridges that folded one on the other in the wastes to the side of the gorge.

  Miracles sometimes happened, and the pilot had already punched his harness release when the craft hit the rocks. The explosion hurled him a good thirty yards away from the wreck, where he landed in a heap of mangled flesh, a shattered leg, and a half dozen cracked ribs. The badly damaged pilot had the presence of mind to crawl into a cleft between rocks but passed out before he was able to activate his radio beacon.

  When he regained consciousness, he could hear the cheering cries of local fighters picking over the wreck of his aircraft. He managed to crawl even deeper into the crevice. He was delirious, his torn body screaming for repairs, but he reached to a side pocket in his trousers and activated his radio beacon. The glorious Russian army had in the distant past rained explosive devices on the area—devices designed to look like toys, shaped like butterflies, kites, or brightly colored plastic, to attract the curiosity of unsuspecting children. Clearly the purpose of whoever had dreamed up the devices was to murder and maim children before they could mature into fighters. The downed pilot knew the mujahideen held a dim view of the policy; they simply handed over anyone with a shred of foreign uniform to their women. Many Iranian mountain women had lost their young to the brightly colored presents dropped from the sky. The pilot also knew that these women were adept at skinning sheep and kept remarkably sharp knives for the purpose. He crept still further into the cleft, pulled out his sidearm, and shoved its barrel in his mouth, ready to pull the trigger.