The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  From the beginning of the wretched breakout episode, he’d been disturbed by a strange premonitory feeling. A practical man, never burdened with spiritual or supernatural accoutrements, the overwhelming sensation of danger he felt was playing hell with his otherwise acute capacity for analysis and concentration. On one hand he had the facts: Three young people had sentenced themselves into a sugar cube. Two of them, helped by a civil servant, had sprung an obscure and seemingly inconsequential illegal inmate. Through the sewers, they had reached a commercial hibernation facility for the rich, discovered they were broadcasting their location, and fled once more into the sewers with another confederate: a medical doctor well versed in revival techniques.

  On the other hand, he had an unexplained riddle: Who had sentenced Russo to a living death? Odelle herself, or was she acting on someone’s behalf? Who had the means and the clout to pull off such a stunt—complex, expensive, and needing awesome intelligence and logistic resources? And the most worrisome detail: Why? No doubt the missing threads were interwoven, but the picture was blurry, as if viewed through a fogged glass.

  Nikola was well acquainted with the hibernation penal system and the sordid reality of its creation, development, testing, and the internecine wars between the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Hibernation for control. In the end, Odelle Marino, the DHS empress, had won and trampled over the FBH.

  The hibernation concept was sound; it had done away with an obsolete network of crime universities and transformed the penal system into a tool to empty the streets of criminals at an affordable cost. Yet it was fitting that perfection eluded human endeavors. The system was flawed. Hypnos, like any enterprise ruled by marketing, tried to cut corners and economize on the design, surveying, and maintenance of the facilities while maximizing their profits. Nothing wrong with trying. The DHS had enlisted Nikola and two other security consultants to supervise the design, propose improvements, and rein Hypnos in. Nikola could also understand the empty center tanks—a little extra capacity for experimentation and testing, in particular if Uncle Sam footed the bill. The crafty way in which the issue of the center spaces was palmed through both Houses—four-inmate tanks within a large tank, really—meant that not only Hypnos but also government agencies had access to an advanced meat chiller to preserve guinea pigs and the kind of subjects who couldn’t or shouldn’t be killed outright but kept available, just in case. The illegality of the scheme was nothing new, but issues like legality had certainly never bothered politicians before, providing the scheme was kept under the exacting constraints of the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not be found out.

  He sniffed his rum and peered with regret at the scant inch left at the bottom of the bottle. Intensely powerful nose: toffee, prunes, old marmalade, dates, overripe mango, caramel, vanilla, allspice … After a little sip, Nikola let the flavors develop on his tongue, swallowed, and made a wry gesture when an image of dank sewers intruded upon his bliss.

  Nikola probably knew the Washington sewers better than anyone alive—not the pipes and tunnels carrying the citizenry’s wastes, but the warrens of power bursting with indescribable filth. Yet, rather than becoming dulled from continuous exposure to the stench of greed and hypocrisy, his nose had remained delicately sensitive—a trait that had kept him alive after forty years of shady work. From his beginnings as a CIA operative, then later a chief of station, and eventually director of internal security at the DHS, his nose had unerringly steered him away from disaster. When he realized the value of his nose in the open market, he was a shade away from his fiftieth birthday. Nikola quit the civil service and became a security consultant—a euphemism favored by elitist mercenaries the world over.

  He blinked at the sensor in his desktop screen to call up Eliot Russo’s file—a fascinating document with a physical description and a few professional, educational, and personal background notes. Nikola found it fascinating not because of the scant information it contained but for the glaring voids. Someone had used the system to settle a score, of that he was certain. Another party was bent on exposing the sham, and Nikola was caught in the middle.

  As a mercenary, Nikola had an unshakable code of values; he owed fidelity to the customer—in this instance the DHS. But this case was different. The customer was playing her own game by keeping critical cards close to her chest, leaving Nikola in the uncomfortable position of having to question his loyalties to avoid getting caught in the cross fire.

  After more than an hour poring over the fugitives’ files and preparing a list of notes—most of them questions—Nikola downloaded the lot into his hybrid data-and-communications pad. He decided against leaving a finger of the precious rum in the bottle and, with a sigh, he poured the rest into his tumbler. Then he stood and padded over to his bedroom, carrying the glass, to get dressed for his first visit. The legend of Alexander the Great’s expedient maneuver to untangle the Gordian knot was a sobering lesson, its substance unimpaired by the passage of millennia. If the ends are hidden, with no thread to pull from to resolve the tangle, hack through the knot.

  chapter 26

  13:34

  As if powered by unseen clockwork, the group bolted forward at once, splashing madly through twelve inches of effluent. Laurel’s Metapad blipped once, sharp—an incoming message. She charged ahead into a chaos of flying whitish water, ragged gasps, and the unnerving splash of boots falling.

  “Climb, climb!” Henry had reached a string of rusty handholds rising through the curved tunnel wall to a small opening, barely three feet across near its top.

  “Climb, damn you!”

  When Susan reached the spot where Henry stood yelling, Charlie and Jim were already climbing like cats. Susan jumped halfway up, grabbed the handhold, and hauled herself up with one swift movement. The trio scrabbled for purchase on the rusty treads and dove headfirst into the upper culvert.

  Five feet from Henry and Barandus, who stood at either side of the handholds, Laurel heard the roar and Raul’s shout. She looked behind at a rush of water coming toward her and the barreling shape of Raul, his mouth wide open.

  Barandus turned and was stretching a hand toward her when the water hit.

  She leaped for the handholds, missing by inches, her legs suddenly nowhere. Water rammed her back, knocking the wind from her lungs. She screamed and saw Henry’s light flash past a fraction of a second before something large and hard, probably a piece of flotsam, slammed into her back. She jerked and had drawn a big gulp of water when her harness tightened like a leash, halting her forward rush. Then an irresistible force pulled her head out of the water and smashed her against the rungs. No piece of flotsam, but Henry’s hand. Eyes shut, coughing and spluttering, Laurel frantically gripped the rusty bars until a massive paw slammed against her butt and hurled her upward, where other hands dragged her sideways.

  She opened her eyes in a cavern, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, with a large round opening high up one wall. No ladder went up. They were trapped. She coughed, water dripping from her nose. Raul crawled out of the hole, followed by Barandus, who looked like a wild spirit with his long black hair plastered down the side of his face. Then Henry bolted behind Barandus and pushed him roughly aside.

  “The pipes. Hang on to the pipes and climb!” Henry yelled.

  Opposite the high opening, a dozen rusty pipes rose to the domed ceiling. Already, bundles of rags were taking positions and scaling the tubes, grabbing at the hoops holding them in place.

  Instants later, with a deep whooshing sound, water exploded from the narrow passage they had just traveled and hit the opposite side of the cavern, climbing halfway up its wall to crash down in a flurry of foam. Then the water level started to climb. Eyes stinging and stomach heaving, Laurel reached upward, feeling strangely light until she felt Raul’s hand hauling on her safety harness. Then the roar ceased as swiftly as it had started, replaced by gurgling sounds as the water rose. They climbed even higher, the narrow beams of their LAD flashlights slash
ing across the black surface of the water below.

  After a splash, a huge shape disappeared into the filthy water, which looked like a cauldron of rancid beef stew, to suddenly surface, grip the pipe, and tower above her. She turned to bury her face in Henry’s chest, and his wet ripeness and his voice snapped her out of her shock.

  “W-what?”

  “Did you swallow?” Henry asked.

  Laurel nodded.

  “You should induce vomiting to empty your stomach.” He showed the technique by sticking two grubby fingers down his throat. He dry-retched a few times until a yellowish gush belched out through his matted beard into the rising water. Laurel didn’t need to use her fingers. Between retches, she heard Barandus’s voice ring somewhere to her left. “The water is leveling off through the spill pipe. It won’t rise anymore.” And, after a pause, “It’s over. The level is stable. It should start to drop in a minute or two.”

  Henry slapped a hand on the pipe. “That was close. The goddess of sewers must have taken pity on us.”

  “Are you kidding?” Laurel croaked. “Goddess of sewers?”

  “Right, Cloacina; she was an Etruscan goddess of fucking.”

  “Gimme a break,” she moaned. “What has fucking got to do with sewers?”

  “You really want to know?” The light dangling under Henry’s chin suddenly shifted to give him a definite sinister look.

  “Roman logic could be twisted, but Henry is right,” Raul butted in right over her. “The Romans employed Cloacina as overseer of the Roman drainage system—a very important office.”

  Laurel swallowed. True to character, Raul was an endless repository of scatological trivia. She reached for her Metapad and typed > We’re still alive.

  Forty-five minutes after their narrow escape, they started to climb down, leaving behind the older, flat-sided, arch-topped tunnel when it connected with an intercepting sewer. The new tunnel featured scores of adjoining branches, all spewing milky slop to engorge the two-foot-deep water running through its trough. Henry bellowed instructions down the line to walk single file, holding on to a cast-iron pipe bolted to one of the walls. Every few yards they found clumps of rags that must have caught on the pipe supports during the flood: tights, nylons, condoms, sanitary napkins, disposable diapers, dishcloths, dusters, and all the nonbiodegradable things that people flushed down the toilet. Susan followed Raul’s gaze and offered what passed for a smile. “Rags don’t bother the authorities. Q-tips do.”

  Raul drew closer, his face suddenly animated. “Why is that?”

  “When shit reaches the station, they filter it to separate solids in perforated drums. Q-tips fit neatly in the holes in the drums, and they have to get rid of them with high-pressure jets.”

  “Cool.” Raul had just picked up another snippet of his favorite trivia.

  “I hear you went through fat fields.”

  Laurel grimaced. “Have you been there?”

  “Ha, now it’s not so bad. Months ago a tunnel was clogged with a fatberg. It took a team of workers a month to move it.”

  “How? Steam, pickaxes?”

  “I don’t know, but I heard a large food chain offered to buy it back for recycling to its customers.”

  Raul grinned. “You got to be kidding.”

  “I am.”

  Heading downstream, they came to a short passageway leading to a circular, dome-topped brick chamber, capped with a circular manhole. The chamber must have been fifteen feet high from the manhole cover at its top to the water’s surface below. Down one side were the remains of ladder rungs. The pins fastening the old iron hoops into the brick looked smooth and without much rust.

  Henry announced the obvious. “They’ve cut the rungs.”

  “Who are they?” Laurel asked.

  “I don’t know.” Henry shrugged. “Workers from the Sewer Authority, I suppose.”

  On one side of the manhole cover, a tree root had long ago begun a hunt for moisture and had spanned the fifteen-foot fall, its many tapered and split rootlets like the tongue of a strange reptile.

  They returned to the intercepting sewer and continued along, holding on to the cast-iron pipe. Soon a noise started to build up. Laurel glanced around, but nobody seemed concerned. Susan smiled. “It’s coming from downstream. No flash flood. Waterfall.”

  The floor turned slippery and a dull roar echoed from somewhere up ahead.

  Soon the tunnel vented into a vast chamber, where water roared down toward one side to overflow into a wide tunnel. Laurel cringed at a whoosh of warm air, the hiss of fast-running sewage, and an ancient, sulfurous stink. Humidity thickened the air, making it unbreathable. On the opposite side of the fall were a series of steps large enough to be called terraces. The group climbed to reach a rectangular opening leading to a second chamber, smaller and dry. Then they came to a second set of steps leading to a passageway that ended in a circular vertical shaft, this time with an intact carbonate-encrusted ladder.

  Climbing up the shaft holding on to the iron handholds turned out to be a very unpleasant exercise. The drenched clothes of the climbers released a rain of fetid drops. Laurel and Raul at the rear received the worse of it.

  “God is dead. Shit lives,” Raul grunted, careful not to look up.

  Through a utility hole, they climbed into a vast empty room that looked like a disused warehouse. Henry waved to draw everybody closer. “Lamps at minimum setting and silence from this point on.” Then he strode to the other end of the room and another set of handholds, which climbed to a square opening in the ceiling.

  With measured movements, they negotiated the rungs to another seemingly disused warehouse. But this one was different. Laurel turned to grip Raul’s arm. A row of dirt-encrusted windowpanes lined the nearest wall. Through broken glass, she could see the outline of gorgeous clouds. Laurel stepped forward with slow steps, her blurry eyes fastened to the fragment of sky framed by shards of glass. Tears streamed down her cheeks. At the window she breathed deep—clean air, crisp, perhaps tinged with a whiff of kerosene but as sweet as French perfume. Through the opening, she saw masses of dark trees a hundred yards away. She turned to the group standing by the hole on the floor. They hadn’t moved. Then she heard a metallic noise at the far end of the warehouse an instant before lights exploded, bathing the room in blinding clarity.

  Laurel stood rooted to the spot, like a rabbit pinned in the open by oncoming headlights, her hands darting up to shield her eyes. Heavy treads followed. She lowered her hands a fraction to see a mountainous shape in formal army fatigues bearing down on her, backlit by truck headlights. The figure marched past the group and stopped a few feet away from her.

  Closer, the soldier looked smaller. He was a tall man but not physically imposing. She blinked to clear her eyes, squinting to make out his features against the light glare. Over his short sleeves she counted the stripes: three, but with two bars underneath. A sergeant, but not an ordinary one. His dark eyes shone, then his mouth parted and she caught a glint of white. The man was smiling. “Who are you?” He had a pleasant voice.

  “Cole. Laurel Cole.”

  Silence.

  Laurel walked a step forward. “And you are?”

  “Drooling down my shirt.”

  “I can see that. But what do they call you if they want you to answer?”

  “Santos. Santos Hernandez.”

  A guffaw echoed from the group as Henry strode past Barandus, his hand outstretched. “Already measuring up the talent? Have you no shame?”

  Sergeant Hernandez pivoted on his heel, gripped Henry’s hand, and pumped. Then he reached for his forearm and jerked his hand back. “Shit, you’re soaking wet, and”—he made a face and turned toward the group—”you stink!”

  “Pardon me, sir, I forgot. I’ll gargle with Chanel before our next date.”

  Hernandez walked before the group, as if inspecting recruits. “Holy mother …” he muttered. When he drew abreast of Raul, he gave him a quick once-over. “And him?” he call
ed over his shoulder.

  “The other lawyer,” Henry said.

  He sniffed loudly and nodded once. “Get in the back of the truck.” Then he marched with long strides toward the blazing headlights.

  After a ten-minute drive skirting an airfield, the truck slowed down to a stop. Lying on the floor of the truck like felled timber, Laurel held her breath, but no hand parted the canvas flaps to inspect the vehicle. The muffled sound of conversation followed, then laughter, before the engine revved and the vehicle moved. Then the floor tilted and she slid against Susan, who was lying next to her. They were descending a ramp of sorts.

  They exited the truck in a cavernous hangarlike room brightly lit with mercury lamps, its center occupied by a gigantic machine almost one hundred feet long and set on railway tracks. The contraption consisted of a huge tube, perhaps six or seven feet in diameter, with one rounded end. The other end was separated and set on tracks so it could push or pull a table of sorts into and out of the tube. When closed, the thing would look like a colossal double-ended sex toy.

  “So that’s it?” Henry asked, stepping forward and laying a hand on the separated end.

  Santos joined him. “That’s her. A beauty, wouldn’t you say?”

  Under the lights, Laurel watched her companions. With no shadows or darkness to disguise edges, colors, or textures, she couldn’t think of a single word to describe the humanity beneath the layers of drab, soggy rags. Raul and she, with their plastic suits and lack of hair, could pass for filthy workers back from a day cleaning cesspits, but the others looked like a malignant species of … trolls, that was it. Trolls. Barandus, tall and thin and decked head to toe in a long black overcoat, looked more than ever like a filthy Rasputin. By his side, Susan, short and plump, in a horrid raincoat four sizes too large and her nondescript scarf tied around her head, added to the illusion of a scene from the aftermath of a nineteenth-century Russian pogrom. Thin-as-a-rake Jim and well-padded Charlie seemed to have dropped from a mud fight in a Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy comedy. But Henry eclipsed his companions. Standing beside Santos—unblemished in his fatigues and shiny boots—Henry looked like a nightmare. In his drab coat tied at the waist with a length of electric wire, the towering hulk of filth embodied the bogeyman with which parents threatened insomniac children.