“Well, I have three”—Charley was about to say gorillas, but checked his words—”DHS officers here, but otherwise normal.”
“Let’s be philosophic about this. Chalk it up to a security exercise.”
“Will do.”
Hulk Three changed posture and shook his leg. It suddenly occurred to Charley that inside the bulky armor, scratching an itch had to be a bitch. “I doubt they’ll be here much longer. Several squads are checking—”
The room trembled. Red lights flashed over the control panels as earthquake detectors triggered a warning. The room shook again and a deafening siren, reminiscent of yesteryear submarines announcing a crash dive, blared in the confined space.
“Scram!” Charley kicked back his swivel chair and bolted upright, only to be stopped by a paw slamming down on his shoulder. He jerked around to face the towering figure of Hulk One.
“Where are you going?”
“Alarm control panel.” He pointed to the far right of the main-reactor control panel. “I need to shut the reactor down.” Hulk One did nothing for a couple of heartbeats but stare back at him with splendid blue eyes. After tiny lights flickered to a side of his helmet, he stepped back and nodded. “Go ahead.”
Charley bolted past Sherry and across the control room, skidding to a stop before a panel to press a blue + button twice, raising the installation status to emergency levels. Then he slammed a large square pad stenciled Immediate Emergency Commence. To his left, another, smaller panel, Emergency Confirm, glowed red. After a moment’s hesitation, he pressed it, cutting the current to electric motors operating the control rods. Without brakes, powerful springs would ram the rods down into the reactor’s core in less than four seconds, halting the nuclear reaction and shutting the plant down.
Hands trembling, Charley stepped back and glanced at Sherry’s and Dieter’s frightened faces. A swarm of green lights over the diagram of the reactor core slowly faded. The rules were clear about the procedure to follow after the earthquake trembler switches tripped, but Charley understood their shock. Restarting the reactor after an emergency shutdown would take several weeks and cost millions of dollars in lost production and the replacement of parts damaged during the shutdown process. He tried a reassuring smile he didn’t feel, then had to lean on the control panel to arrest a sudden weakness in his legs. The siren finally stopped, and a canned female voice announced, “Reactor shutdown successful.”
The sudden silence thickened the air, disturbed only by a creak when one of the hulks changed position. Then the ground shook again and Sherry screamed. The three DHS officers stood still at their stations. Then, as if primed by hidden clockwork, they marched to the open doors and exited the room. Hulk One turned around from the corridor. “Bolt yourselves in. We’re under attack.”
“Now what?” Laurel asked.
Silence.
Laurel glanced around the dim interior of the van, one side occupied by Russo in his stretcher and the other by Raul, Lukas, and, next to her, Floyd. The steel floor was hard and cold. “Tyler?”
“We wait.”
They had exited the sewers in a disused warehouse a scant few yards from a dark van with no windows. Shepherd—who had since introduced himself as Harper Tyler—had stood by the utility hole, helping everyone in turn and lending a hand with the stretcher before hustling them toward the vehicle. After reaching inside the cabin and lugging out black garbage bags—heavy, by the looks of them—he had turned toward Henry.
“What will you do, Sergeant?” Tyler asked in a low voice.
Henry had reached for the bags. “A quarter goes to Santos and another quarter to the old-timers helping out with this little stunt of yours; everyone involved will take a powder until things cool down a bit. With the rest, I’ll move to Honduras. I have a friend there. I’ll set up a chinchilla farm in the mountains.”
“Chinchillas?”
“Rich bitches love their fur.”
“Sounds good. What about the others?” Tyler nodded toward the gaping utility hole.
“It’ll be hell for a while, moving about and hiding, but they’re used to living rough. Most of them wouldn’t be able to live any other way.” He offered his hand.
Tyler brushed the hand aside and hugged Henry, a strong waft of decay spreading like spores from a bursting seedpod.
“Take care, my friend.”
“It’s been a pleasure.” His eyes bright, Henry knotted the mouths of the bags together, dropped them down the utility hole, and, with a departing wave, disappeared down the shaft.
As soon as Henry left, Tyler had opened the warehouse’s creaking sliding door and driven the vehicle to the end of a narrow alley, where he killed the engine. “Half a mile down that road there’s a police patrol.” Tyler nodded at the windshield. “As it is, we can’t get through. Within the next few minutes, however, we hope the police will remove their barriers and thus grant us safe passage.”
Next to Laurel, Floyd made a face of resignation. Then he unfolded his hand palm up. Laurel turned to glance into his eyes, dimly lit by a streetlight half a block down the road, and realized his extended palm held a deeper meaning. Raul and Lukas didn’t miss the gesture and also stared at Floyd’s hand. She glanced at the empty metallic wall above Russo’s reclining shape, Floyd’s palm unmoving in her peripheral vision. Of course, she’d read her share of romances in her teenage years and fantasized about princely proposals, but these belonged in fairyland. Reality was his hand, now, in a dark van reeking of sweat and sewage, with a dying man on the floor and a syrette loaded with cyanide pressing against her breast in her top pocket. She didn’t surrender her hand to his straightaway. Some things were far too important to rush—such as letting him know she understood—and took precedence over the promise of warmth. Then she reached for his hand and held on to it. Raul and Lukas breathed again. Laurel closed her eyes. His grip felt like a toast to life.
“Here we go,” Tyler muttered.
The inside of the van started to flicker in blue as the sound of sirens grew. Tyler ducked in the front seat to hide beyond the dashboard. “Everybody down!”
The sirens neared, reached a crescendo, then lowered in pitch and began to fade.
After a couple of minutes, Tyler straightened up and fired the engine. “At the next bend in the road, we cross the point of no return.”
“What a bundle of fun,” Raul muttered from the back.
“You want me to sing?” Tyler asked.
As the curve in the road unfolded before her eyes, Laurel realized she was gripping Floyd’s hand so tightly that one of his finger joints popped.
The road was deserted.
After a few moments, Tyler slammed his hand over the dashboard. “Damn! We’re through,” he said to a chorus of relieved curses from the rear of the van.
“Let me have it back,” Floyd said.
She let go of his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I meant the syrette.”
day three
Inferno, Canto V: 1–3
So I descended from the first enclosure
down to the second circle,
that which girdles less space but grief more great,
that goads to weeping.
The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI
chapter 30
14:53
“Let’s not waste any more time.” Genia Warren, director of the Federal Bureau of Hibernation, scrolled down her thin tablet computer and stabbed its corner with a stylus before pushing the pad away from her and toward the center of the table. “We know what’s happened. I’ve read the report. Before long, the DHS will be breathing down our necks, and I need to have answers.”
“Answers? What answers?” Lawrence Ritter, Genia’s executive director of security, sometimes pretended to be slow-witted in a bid to gain time for his sharp mind to race ahead.
“The only kind I know: solutions to problems. Madam Director will want a scheme to guarantee, beyond reasonable doubt, that a breakout cannot happ
en again anywhere in the system. She’ll also demand a scapegoat to take the blame for what’s happened.”
Ritter wasn’t taking any notes, but he stared at her, his frown deepening. In his fifties and without a hair on his head, Ritter oversaw the security of all the government hibernation centers in the U.S. Since joining the FBH in 2049, he’d never once altered his dressing habits: black suits, black shoes, black turtleneck sweaters, and a beret. Once, when Ritter was required to go before a Senate select committee, a conservative senator had made a wry remark about his professional decorum. Ritter replied by rattling off, from memory, eighteen rules that specifically forbade federal personnel, in particular law, security, and intelligence officers, from wearing suits and ties. After the general dress-code relaxation imposed by the new generations of civil servants, people with suits and ties stuck out like a sore thumb. That day, the hapless senator discovered Ritter’s phenomenal memory, and the then-new director of security at FBH became a minor legend.
“It had to happen, you know?”
Genia didn’t answer. From the oblong meeting table occupying the far end of her office, she glanced toward her desk and the slanted patterns thrown across the carpeted floor by the light streaming in through the venetian blinds. She looked across her desk to the limp flags flanking it—one the star-spangled banner, and the other a blue ensign with stars circling three letters, FBH, and a motto: To protect the public through efficient and effective management of offenders.
The Federal Bureau of Hibernation had replaced the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the prison agencies of all fifty states and the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, drawing the responsibility of running a new generation of jails and penitentiaries into a single entity. Municipal and county jails, houses of correction, juvenile detention centers, work camps, and municipal lockups—all typically holding inmates sentenced to three months or less, as well as people in various stages of the criminal-justice system—remained the responsibility of state authorities, but their number and size had been reduced to less than a quarter of 2050 levels. Although the FBH was a federal law-enforcement agency and responsible for managing the new hibernation system, it had ceased to be a subdivision of the Department of Justice. It was now part of the Department of Homeland Security. And that meant Odelle Marino.
Odelle ran the DHS as her private fiefdom. Her first deed in office had been to rewrite the original charter of the prison system: To protect the public, protect staff, and provide safe, secure, and humane supervision of offenders. Grudgingly, Genia had to admit the genius behind the bland words. Naturally, after hibernation went into operation, Odelle had ordered the old promise, to provide inmates with opportunities that support successful community reintegration, removed from every printed document and government Web site.
“The center,” Ritter said, “as originally created, was ethically sustainable, though still vigilante, to punish those who had managed to evade justice through an error or a loophole and as a lab to improve the technology. Anything else is morally untenable.” He raised a hand to forestall her retort. “That includes Hypnos’s opacity. From the start, Congress allowed Hypnos to run the center spaces without control other than having to supply a code name and the number of subjects involved in each of their research projects. No names or location within the system. This means we don’t really know what Hypnos is doing in the center spaces.”
“That’s besides the point. Anything concerning center operation is beyond my authority.” Genia drummed the fingers of one hand on the table. “And yours. Center management is the exclusive domain of Hypnos and is supervised directly by Odelle Marino.”
“You know Memok?”
Genia nodded. “Hypnos’s code name for one of their long-term research projects.”
“Indeed.” He reached into his jacket pocket, drew out a handheld, and scribbled with a stylus before sliding the device over to her.
Neatly printed on the screen was a single word: MEWOK. She stilled her fingers. “Cyrillic?”
“Bag or sack.”
“Probably a coincidence,” Genia said in a voice she hoped would sound even. The Memok project involved dozens of subjects at the Atlanta and other neighboring facilities. Of course, she also knew of numerous unidentified Russian aircraft takeoffs and landings—sanctioned by the DHS—at a nearby military airfield.
“You knew. And that proves my point. The existence of center spaces and unidentified guests poses a perverse security problem. There are far too many people in the know. Perhaps three or four in this building alone, a score or more at the DHS, God knows how many at Hypnos, and an unknown number at each sugar cube: supervisors, security people, technicians, and perhaps even the cleaners. All told, that makes several hundred people. In my mind, it was never a question of if but when.”
“The DHS has thrown a blanket over it. Nobody knows about the breakout,” Genia said, to test whether Ritter shared her fears.
“There you’re wrong. The workers at the station, security personnel, and the DHS men there know. What can the DHS do? Sink the whole bunch into the tank centers? Kill them?”
“The thought must have crossed their minds.”
“This is ridiculous. The team pulling off the breakout had superb, almost military backup. They rattled a nuclear power station with hundreds of pounds of high explosive, just for a diversion. The fugitives are almost irrelevant, except one.” He held a hand out and counted on his fingers. “Laurel Cole and Raul Osborne must keep low, to watch over their shoulders until they die or the DHS’s memory fades, whichever comes first. Lukas Hurley and Dr. Floyd Carpenter are probably lying facedown in a ditch or floating down a canal with sundry body piercings courtesy of artisans unknown; I doubt the organization behind this will risk loose ends. That leaves the wretch they sprang from the center. Who is he?”
Genia cradled her fingers and slowly shook her head. Ritter was a sucker for challenges. By fobbing him off, she was making sure his priority would be to find out about Russo before the day was over. Naturally, he already knew the wretched account of the third member of the maverick team: Bastien Compton. He hadn’t mentioned his name. “I’m sorry. Need to know.”
Ritter held her gaze for a couple of heartbeats. “Fine. But why would anybody stage such a complex operation to spring an unknown man? And, further, how many people in their organization know about center inmates?” Ritter shook his head. “There are too many people involved, mostly uncontrolled. This will hit the news within two weeks, mark my words.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Without someone who has been illegally hibernated and supporting witnesses, there wouldn’t be a case.”
“What about the rest? According to my data, besides the human guinea pigs in Hypnos’s research projects, there are scores of men and women hibernating without trial. If a whiff of it reached the press, Congress would slap a compulsory inspection on all sugar cubes. A recount of inmates by in de pendent parties would follow.”
“And what would they find?”
Ritter drew a hand over his head and narrowed his eyes. “You mean getting rid of the evidence? They would have to be out of their minds.”
“Look at it this way. The DHS and Hypnos must have anticipated such an eventuality. They have bright people—not many, but enough. If tomorrow morning the papers carried an uncorroborated rumor about people in hibernation without trial, by the time inspectors reached the nearest facility, they wouldn’t find anything amiss.”
“You mean the drains?”
Genia nodded. “The Washington sugar cube is the exception. Having to ship their waste to a remote location for processing stemmed from a fluke. A weird salt-dome formation prevented Hypnos from sinking more than three levels underground.”
Ritter’s head came up. He was like a dog on point. “I know the Washington sugar cube is the odd man out without in-house waste processing, but I don’t know the history.”
Genia nodded. “As I said, it was a fluke. The
site chosen for the sugar cube—a triangle of land hemmed in by highways—had never been built on before. As you know, when planning a building, the first step is to check all existing drawings for things that may lie underneath.”
“You mean utility lines, pipes, and the like?”
“Right. And, in a city like Washington, sewers and old tunnels.”
“I doubt any drawing will show tunnels built a hundred or more years ago.”
“That’s why, after checking the drawings, engineers drill a pattern of holes covering the entire site to map the subsoil and find out the best foundations.”
“And the depth they can go with basements. No?”
“As luck would have it, the engineers drilled into rock at every test hole, but when it came time to dig, they uncovered a void.”
Ritter nodded. “I get it. Once the containment walls were in place, they started digging to find a big void somewhere in the site.”
“With most of the excavation done, it was too late by the time they found out,” Genia continued. “The sugar cube could be built, with stores and parking lots, but there was no room underneath to process the waste.”
“I hope they fired the geologists who did the preliminary ground studies,” Ritter grumbled. Then he drummed his long fingers on the table’s surface, his eyes focused somewhere on the opposite wall. “So, since all the other sugar cubes have processing plants, you’re implying that someone would order the disposal of the bodies?”
“Why not? You know the system as well as I do. The processing plants are simple decanting pools, where they mix the emulsions with flocculants to separate the parts.”
“And an untraceable graveyard for nonexistent people you don’t want others to know about.”
“Yes. In ten minutes, the computer would release the inmates from their harnesses and, as the tanks emptied, their bodies would be sucked into the system and reduced to slurry, their solids separated, packed, and shipped to the incinerator. Gone without a trace.”
The Prisoner Page 20
