The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

“And the money?”

  “It was wired to an account we opened in Laurel’s name to pay for her studies.”

  “Please let me have a bank statement with details of the account.”

  “Look, Mr.—I mean, Nikola. I don’t think—”

  “You don’t think? You don’t want your daughter returned?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “Give it to him.” Jenny was now standing. She looked close to collapse.

  Sean handed over the card. It was a blank business card, aged and dirtied by grubby fingers, with a string of numbers penned in blue ink. A moment later, after rummaging in the drawer of a side table, he returned with a bankbook from the local Wells Fargo, showing a balance of $6,316.82.

  “That’s what’s left of her money. She used it to pay for her studies. We never touched a penny.”

  Nikola placed the card inside the bankbook and slipped both into his jacket pocket. Then he turned on his heel and walked toward the door, whispering hurried instructions to Dennis via the microphone on his collar. As he climbed into the van, he darted a glance at the group of armor-clad men spewing out of an unmarked truck, heading toward the house.

  chapter 28

  22:11

  A motley crew lined the platform to see them off, like a congregation of derelict souls waiting for a train.

  As soon as they’d returned, burdened with the bulky backpacks full of explosives, Henry had excused himself and retreated to a quiet corner to write with a cheap ballpoint pen in a grimy notebook, pausing often to glance away or adjust his dangling flashlight. Laurel and Raul sat nursing fresh mugs of the wicked brew that passed for coffee and recounted their explosive-gathering odyssey to Floyd and Lukas, mentioning only a warehouse—thus omitting the army base and any reference to Santos Hernandez.

  Lukas seemed a little more spirited than when they’d left, no doubt thanks to Floyd’s pep pills, and Russo remained, according to Floyd, stable. During their absence, one of Henry’s pals—a young African-American man with the strange nickname of Pinky—had delivered a box containing assorted IV bags of ionic solutions, new and probably stolen minutes before. The drips had begun to rehydrate Russo and to restore the mineral imbalances in his blood. The plasma, blood units, and other bits and pieces Floyd had requested would be waiting when they arrived at the safe house.

  When Henry finished writing, he neared the group, then leaned over a wizened old woman and whispered something. The woman scampered away, returning a few seconds later with a glassine bag housing a seemingly new cellular phone. Henry reached into the inside pocket of his coat and drew out a lump of crumpled banknotes. After much straightening, he selected four ten-dollar bills—the lowest denomination in circulation after the 2036 monetary change. The woman grabbed the notes and waited. Henry huffed, picked out a tightly creased one-hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it into her waiting hand. Then he nodded to Barandus and offered both the cell phone and the notebook. “Can you read the text in those pages? I mean aloud, to make a recording in the phone’s memory?”

  Barandus drew out a pencil flashlight, ran it over the notebook, and nodded. He then vanished in the gloom. Instants later, his flashlight came alive thirty feet away, where he’d sat down by a thick vertical pipe.

  When Barandus returned with the phone, Henry pocketed it and smiled when his second-in-command fed the handwritten note into the fire and waited until it burned before stirring the ashes with a stick.

  Henry nodded to Floyd and Raul. “You better get your friend zipped up. We’re going.” Then he turned to Metronome, the boy who had released the rat a few hours before, and squatted beside him. “I have a favor to ask, a small service.” He reached into his pocket and produced the cell phone. “I want you to go in that direction,” he pointed to the mouth of the tunnel on the right, “as far as you can in one hour.”

  The boy blinked twice, his head ticking away.

  “Then, at eleven-thirty precisely, you must press this button here, the one with a star. The phone will dial a number. When this little dot lights up red, you must press this other button with a square. After waiting one minute, get rid of the phone. Throw it down a sump or a deep hole. Then run back here.”

  Metronome looked troubled.

  “Ah, yes.” Henry scratched his head, turned to Laurel, and looked pointedly at her wrist. “You have no way of knowing when it’s eleven-thirty.” He made a sheepish face. “I noticed you checking out her watch a couple of times.”

  Laurel neared and also squatted before the boy. She reached into her vinyl jacket’s top pocket, ripped open its pressure fasteners, and fished out another watch—a copy of the one she wore. “This one is precious.” She cleared her throat, but emotion clogged her words. “It belonged to a dear friend, and it’s only fair you should have it.” Tears overflowed her eyes. “He would have wanted you to use it and help us out of here.”

  The boy’s head didn’t arrest its movement, but his eyes gleamed.

  Henry reached and gently pried the timepiece from her shaking fingers. “Once you finish your mission, keep it.” He waved a hand to the boy to come closer and, with delicate movements of huge fingers, fastened the watch around the piece of cord holding his trousers up. “When you are done, ask someone to make more holes in the strap so you can wear it on your wrist. Now it’s too large.” Henry rested a hand on Metronome’s shoulder. “Please, son, don’t keep the phone; very bad men will zero in on it and come after you.”

  Henry glanced first at Russo, then at Raul and Floyd: the stretcher bearers.

  The newspaper’s tiny first edition had finished rolling an hour before, and most copies would already be piling up outside the few kiosks still in operation or speeding through the city on the back of delivery vans.

  Brenda Neff hated the graveyard shift. With each passing year, the number of printed copies dwindled, and there were rumors they soon would disappear altogether. The Washington Post was down to 250,000 copies, and lesser fish weren’t faring any better. Bad news for printers, but the soaring costs of pulp and ever-changing reading habits of people didn’t affect a newspaper’s usefulness. The world still needed news—either wrapped in paper or computer bits. And no matter the vehicle for the news, the world still needed editors, reporters, and graveyard-shift staffers at the news desk waiting for the phone to ring.

  It rang.

  Brenda jerked and stared in disbelief at a squat red device she’d never heard ringing before: a secure government terminal with a direct line bypassing the newspaper’s telephone exchange. General calls to the newspaper filtered through a department tasked with assessing the caller’s identity and purpose before transferring the link on to the intended recipient’s screen.

  She touched two spots on her screen to call up Mark Cummings, the night staff editor, and Marcia Gomez from security to share in the call before reaching over to the obsolete handset on its fourth ring.

  “News desk, Brenda Neff.”

  After a brief pause, punctuated by a soft click, a distinguished voice said, “I will not repeat or add to any part of this statement, otherwise academic since you’re recording the call and can transcribe its contents at leisure. Your government’s continuous meddling in the affairs of the Christian Republic of Uzbekistan has fostered untold strife and hardship among our citizens, stretching our patience to its limit.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Brenda spotted Mark’s lanky figure barreling toward her, a wireless terminal to his ear, chased by Marcia and other people she couldn’t name.

  “I, the Scourge of God, will no longer watch idly while your corporations plunder our nation with nihilistic tactics and bribes to corrupt officers. You need to be taught a lesson. In thirty minutes, my children will unleash an attack on your nuclear power station and raze it to the ground. Beware, this is only the beginning. Unless your government stops all activity in Uzbekistan, I will reduce your country to a radioactive wasteland.”

  Silence and a hiss of static.

 
Mark’s hand circled in midair, urging her to keep the caller talking.

  Brenda leaned forward. “Sir? Could you—”

  There was a click, and the tiny red light on the secure phone faded. The call had been severed.

  “Got the number and location!” someone yelled from across the room.

  Brenda replaced the handset and peered at the expectant faces of the people crowding around her desk. “A prank?”

  “That’s a secure phone,” Marcia said. “It needs a complex code besides the number. I don’t know who has access, but the last time I logged a call was in 2042, from the White House after the Taiwan invasion.”

  Mark flicked his cell phone and dropped it in his top pocket. “Nicely done, Brenda. We’ll take it from here.”

  “Where to?”

  “I mean we’ll handle it.” He turned to Marcia. “Get me the police and the DHS.”

  As everybody scampered back to their posts, Mark reached for Brenda’s box of licorice lozenges and popped one in his mouth. “You’re right. This is probably a prank; a hacker must have cracked the code. I don’t think the heat will take this seriously, but you never know.”

  Nikola had pushed his slippers away with one bare foot and was about to reach for a mug of coffee he’d just carted from the kitchen when Dennis pushed his swivel chair away from his desk. “Developments. I think you’re going to like this one.”

  Nikola blinked to arrest Laurel Cole’s file scrolling down his center screen and rubbed his eyes.

  “I will not repeat or add to any part of this statement, otherwise academic since you’re recording the …” He listened to the full recording, his mind racing. Children of Uzbekistan? “What’s the DHS doing?”

  Dennis fiddled with his keyboard, his screens flashing messages, flags, and other traffic between different police and paramilitary departments. “They triangulated a call to a location between Ellsmere Avenue and Forest Drive, at Lundy, Units are on their way.”

  “A prank?”

  Dennis didn’t answer at once but continued to work with his computer. “If so, it was a complex one, involving access to a restricted system and a hard code.”

  “How restricted?”

  “Obviously not enough. White House, Congress, Pentagon, and DHS. Hundreds of people could have access.” He flicked through screens. “They change the code weekly. Yesterday was the last time.”

  “Get me a list,” Nikola said. Lundy was north, a new residential district, and Villiard power station was due south of it. The whole thing was absurd. Like every other nuclear power station, Villiard was in the center of concentric security rings, each more strict than the last. Even a tank couldn’t get to within a half mile of the reactor. The rest—stores, administration buildings, and personnel quarters—had little if any strategic value. Besides, the divisional army barracks were a stone’s throw down the road.

  Still, the call was interesting. No kid or nomadic hillbilly behind the voice. It was refined, hectoring, its message succinctly put. He wouldn’t have referred to the cloak-and-dagger intrigues of the oil industry as nihilistic, an adjective better reserved for revolutionaries and other pests favored by intellectuals the world over. Raze it to the ground. A little melodramatic, but then, the caller had a weakness for theater, obviously. Attila the Hun: the Scourge of God who left destruction in his wake, riding a horse under whose shoes the grass withered. The infamous khan would be proud of the caller’s use of his moniker.

  Nikola resumed poring over Laurel’s dossier. “Let me know if anything develops.”

  Thirty minutes after leaving from the station camp, the group split up. They had divided the 280 pounds of high explosives into four heavy loads of seventy pounds each, yet Susan and Jim, the smallest-framed of the quartet, didn’t seem to struggle. When they reached a fork in the tunnel, they stopped to say good-bye. After the men exchanged backslaps and good-luck wishes, Laurel sought Barandus. “Can I ask you something?”

  Barandus nodded.

  She lowered her voice further. “What’s your name?”

  He darted a sideways glance, as if priming to run away, blinked, and his eyes deepened. Then he licked his lower lip. “James … James Marshall.”

  She stood on tiptoe and pecked him on a patch of skin devoid of hair and close to his nose. “Thank you, James,” she whispered.

  Charlie huffed. “What has he got?”

  Laurel neared Charlie and Jim. “Jeez, but you’re a jealous bunch.” After pecking both of them, she turned to Susan and hugged her. “You take care, hear?” Then she joined Henry to set off through the right tunnel of the fork while the group with the explosives followed along the other passageway.

  Her lips tingled but not from recent activity. Laurel had sent Shepherd another two messages since their return to warn him of their impending trek to the meeting point and to update him on Russo’s status. “Stable” was all that Floyd had said, but that had been after engulfing her in a bear hug and kissing her neck, cheek, and lips. She drew her fingers to her mouth, letting her gaze stray to Floyd, just a few feet ahead and holding on to the rear end of Russo’s stretcher, and felt heat creep up her neck.

  They trudged along an abandoned sewer tunnel as quickly as they could. Henry led with an unerring sense of direction and urged them on without pausing to take bearings; this ghastly place obviously was familiar to him. Laurel plodded next to Lukas, closing the rear. The section of the tunnel had been excavated through schist: bedrock formed millions of years before. No tunneling machine had bored the passage. Laurel sensed ghosts filling the hollow space—the spirits of the workers who’d toiled to dig it a century and a half before, the countless homeless people who must have lived there, and the graffiti artists who had once ventured through with their spray cans.

  “There’s a passageway close to the surface,” Henry’s voice boomed from the front, “but it’s terrible to negotiate. Too much yellow rain, metal gratings dogs like to pee on.”

  Raul huffed. “Great.”

  After a few hundred yards, they branched sideways into a narrower tunnel—damp, the air thick with constant sounds of dripping water. Laurel stepped around little pools of liquid collecting in hollows along the floor.

  Henry stopped, motioning to Raul and Floyd to rest the stretcher on a dry patch. “We go through there.” He pointed to a narrow round opening, perhaps three feet across. “It’s the only way up. It narrows a little farther on and it will mean dragging the stretcher, but it can’t be helped.”

  A few minutes later, Laurel marveled at Henry’s understatement. Reaching the upper gallery involved a rugged crawl facefirst through an opening no wider than two feet and two high, but mercifully it was only thirty feet long. As Raul and Floyd belly-crawled ahead of her, pushing and pulling the stretcher over jagged rocks, Laurel waited for a birth-canal joke that never came. Raul must be exhausted. They finally reached the upper level—a large sewage tunnel with sidewalks and a shallow river of effluent slowly flowing across. Henry pointed to a ladder and a service hole in the ceiling. “That’s it. Lights off.”

  With the flashlights turned off, the space became a sensory-deprivation tank but for the noises seemingly all around them.

  “The FDU squad has located the phone.”

  Over the years, Nikola had memorized the little nuances in Dennis’s voice when delivering snippets of information. He waited a moment, but only to confirm no added details would be forthcoming without a prompt. “Where?”

  “The sewers.”

  Nikola was still, his face twitching as if recovering from an impromptu slap. His eyes darted to a clock over the antique marble mantelpiece: 23:53—twenty-three minutes since the ridiculous threat and only minutes away from its deadline. Every DHS unit was deployed on the northern side of town, leaving the south squarely in the hands of the police, their roadblocks the only way to prevent an escape. Roadblocks … soon to be hurriedly unmanned as all units rushed to contain a major terrorist attack.

  “There’s
more.”

  This time he didn’t offer a prompt.

  “Bellevue Hospital has just reported a theft. An unknown person or persons have broken into their emergency supply room and made off with several pieces of equipment—and forty pints of type-O blood. The police are there with a scientific team. It seems one of the thieves left a set of strange footprints in the garden outside.”

  Nikola bunched both fists on his desktop until his knuckles whitened.

  “Prosthetic legs.”

  chapter 29

  23:58

  “Carry on as usual. Imagine we’re not here.”

  Charley Navarre swallowed hard, eyeing the three black-clad hulks weaving past the consoles at Villiard’s nuclear power station control room. How can I ignore them? Whoever designed the shiny body armor of the DHS FDU teams must have liberally copied the bad guys’ gear from a fifty-year-old film saga depicting intergalactic conflict. Heavy helmets bristling with dimples and lumps, probably housing communications gear, were mated with face masks that hid the wearer’s expression except for the eyes. They were the only hint that a sentient being was actually inside the articulated Kevlar carapace. Their boots were enormous. Charley wondered if, besides protecting the bearer’s feet, the monstrous contraptions doubled as some kind of storage.

  He glanced at Hulk One, from which the voice originated, and at the object cradled in his arms: a rectangular box roughly the size to carry a dozen long-stemmed roses. But it was black, dotted with tiny lights and other mean-looking bits. Then Charley nodded at Sherry and Dieter, working the other two consoles, and looked down into the array of screens flanking his semicircular desk without registering the otherwise-normal diagrams sneaking across the displays. The Scourge of God? A terrorist attack? The whole thing somehow sounded too far-fetched.

  His comm console flashed. “Navarre,” he said.

  “Everything fine with you?” The voice of Dave Vela, the night-shift plant director, sounded harried.