The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  “But the organization … They bombed the power station. … If it comes out—”

  “Then we’ll pull the plug.”

  He suddenly leaned forward, like a snake about to strike. “We can’t do that.”

  “Mmmm?” Her belly glowed. “Why not?” But, of course, she knew the answer.

  “We will have to pay. … Not only that, there could be … reprisals. Those people—”

  She shuffled in her seat and slowed down. “You mean the mob? There, sweetheart, I fear you’re on your own. I never dealt with them. I don’t exist. Your sugar cubes, your tanks …”

  Vinson raised himself, his veins swollen, cheeks flushed; he was angry. His camera zoomed in and out a couple of times, until it locked on his face once more. “The fuck I’m on my own.” His words hissed, like fat dripping from a roast onto the fire. “You took your cut. We’re partners, equals.”

  Odelle narrowed her eyes before twisting the knife. “I don’t agree. Not intellectually.”

  Back in the early ‘50s, the Krasnaya Mafiya had discovered the wonders of hibernation. Some people were troublesome enough to merit a quick bullet or worse. But permanent measures often meant a waste of talent that could be useful in the future. Russian sugar cubes weren’t safe, but U.S. facilities fit the bill admirably. Thus, Vinson had hammered out a cold-storage contract with the dons and cut Odelle in on the deal.

  “It’s not only money. … These people—”

  “Yes, money. I’ve been reading your report. You are asking for increases of almost eight percent. A little heavy, non?”

  “Maintenance costs are soaring, and wages, and consumables.”

  “You mean inmates?” She silently bet he would miss the funny side of it.

  “Chemicals, drugs, equipment.”

  He did. “I’ve been checking your papers. Inflation doesn’t justify what you’re asking.”

  “Will you endorse the increment?”

  Odelle sensed movement. She glanced over her shoulder. The bed’s netting moved with more intensity. She would leave a note for the housekeeper to have the air-conditioning flow checked. The pin camera whirred faintly. On the screen Vinson’s irises gleamed. Still she waited.

  “Half a percent?”

  She did a quick calculation. After the increase, Hypnos’s daily housing fees would peak at two hundred dollars per inmate. With a sugar cube population of a little over one million, half of one percent meant a million dollars a day. She could push Vinson for twice as much, but greed could backfire one day. “My friend, would I leave you in the cold?” She would without batting an eyelid, regardless of the money, but mobsters had long memories and she didn’t want to enlarge her bodyguard retinue. “Yesterday I ordered slight rearrangements. You know? Nothing drastic. A few inmates shifted from the centers to the sides and conversely. It’s numbers that count, isn’t it?”

  On the screen, Vinson metamorphosed. Muscles relaxed and conformed to the arrangement that made people trust him—an air of competence and self-confidence. Odelle knew Vinson’s chameleonic savvy well and focused on the avalanche of sensations warming her loins.

  “You’re—”

  “Brilliant?” she interrupted.

  “Beautiful.”

  Although he could see only her face, subliminal tendrils must have mixed with the digital bytes streaming from her set. Her reflection was disturbed by a quiet cough. Odelle stared into Vinson’s smiling eyes.

  “Er—there’s a problem with your camera.”

  Odelle arrested the motion of her fingers and checked the tiny light signaling the device’s operation.

  “What’s up?”

  “That would be of no interest to you. But your camera changed to wide angle a while ago.”

  Odelle sat on the bathroom’s chaise longue, replaying her conversation with Vinson. There’s a design behind this madness. She frowned and scraped up the last of her raspberry mousse. Indeed there was. And Nikola had not zeroed in on the designer. Yet. But he would. Nikola was a patient man—thorough and a loyal mercenary. Loyal, because he knew she could destroy him, drag him down in her wake if things got hairy. She stood, reached to her earlobes, and removed her glossy studs, depositing them with care on a crystal tray. Pulling the plug and pulping a few inmates so that the number tallied would leave only Russo and his helpers as loose ends. The young lawyers were no longer minor felons but murderers, after culling their comrade. The lot could go down for life, and she would make sure they did. If—she quickly corrected herself—when they cleaned up the mess, she would set up a different set of rules for center use, perhaps to the point of doing away with the scheme altogether, and to hell with Vinson and his freebies. Well, perhaps not completely if she could recover Russo. Life consists of compromises and missed opportunities, thought Odelle, as she reached for a glass of Pellegrino. Then she grinned and took a sip. She’d seized too many opportunities to be entitled to complain.

  On the edge of the bathtub, she lowered a foot into the scalding water with agonizing slowness, biting her lower lip to ward off a cry. Time seemed to slow until Odelle could plant the sole of her foot on the bathtub’s bottom, the muscles of her other leg bunching in a painful cramp. She repeated the movement until both her feet settled under eighteen inches of water. To sit down needed a slow ballet lasting several minutes. When she could relax her neck, water lapping her chin and her feet propped on the bathtub’s edges, Odelle surrendered to the steaming water. Her submerged skin had turned an angry red, and the built-up tension in her groin screamed for release.

  She slipped her hand under the water.

  Eons ago, Miko—a Tayü or first-class Oiran, in Ginza—had taught her the mysteries of a hot bath and shown her a bewildering array of funny-looking things she carried in a long sandalwood case. I must go back to Ginza. Soon. Then Odelle started to shake and the scalding water lapped against the marble sides, darkening the teak slats as it sloshed over. She ground her teeth and shook her head from side to side. Then her mouth sagged as a low-pitched wail escaped her lips.

  day four

  Inferno, Canto XXXI: 57–59

  For where the mind’s acutest reasoning

  is joined to evil will and evil power,

  there human beings can’t defend themselves.

  The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI

  chapter 35

  00:06

  When Genia Warren finished poring over the thick wad of documents, it was past midnight. She’d been in and out of meetings all day with her staff, drafting security proposals, following the passage of several bills through Congress that affected FBH, and waiting for a summons from DHS Director Odelle Marino. A summons that never came. During a recess, she’d exchanged a few words with Lawrence Ritter, the Federal Bureau of Hibernation security director. He hadn’t heard from Odelle either but knew that she’d been closeted in her offices after canceling or rescheduling all outstanding appointments.

  Out of habit, and before turning in, Genia checked her personal e-mail in-box. She read of her mother’s concerns for the pounding her flowers were taking in the fickle weather, and there was a short update from Clare, Genia’s sister doing a postgraduate degree in Europe. There were also a handful of funding requests from her parish and voluntary organizations, but nothing of note. Then her secure console beeped and RA scrolled across the screen, followed by a succinct Check The Post. She read the advance headlines on the newspaper’s Web site and went to bed with the foreboding that her rest would be brief.

  One of Odelle Marino’s most maddening idiosyncrasies was to call meetings with the same forewarning Caligula gave his senators, often gathering directors or staff from the agencies of her fiefdom in the middle of the night, in particular to deliver bad news. Genia had managed four hours of sleep when the telephone blared, announcing Odelle’s ultimatum—a hairbreadth short of a subpoena.

  Genia’s security detail, permanently stationed outside her house, would already have been alerted by her night duty staff. By
the time she managed a hasty shower and a gulped-down cup of espresso, they had gathered her routine three-car motorcade to whisk her down to the Department of Homeland Security headquarters—a thirty-minute race through half-deserted streets. Once tucked inside her car, she called Lawrence Ritter’s number twice—unaccountably busy at such an early hour—before checking the screen of her communications pad to discover he was trying to reach her. Odelle had also ordered Lawrence to the conclave.

  “Know what this is all about?” His voice suggested high spirits.

  “No idea,” she lied. “Any developments on the breakout?”

  “Nope. Yesterday I requested updates from the DHS. Twice. So far unanswered. I’m limited to whatever they see fit to filter down. As you know, I was asked—no, make that ordered—to keep away from their investigation. Yesterday I also tried to raise the staff at the Washington, D.C., sugar cube. No dice. Whoever is running the show has clamped down the facility to any outside office, and that includes us.”

  Genia smiled in the gloom of the partitioned compartment. Lawrence’s reply was unnecessarily lengthy and convoluted, strictly for the benefit of eavesdroppers. “We’ll find out soon. Where are you?”

  “Outside the building. I’ll meet you by the elevators at the parking lot.”

  “Roger that.” Genia severed the communication and retreated into a corner of her mind, the only place she felt safe from the increasingly obtrusive DHS surveillance, to weigh for the umpteenth time the slowly unfolding events and dangers ahead. A string of weak presidents had looked the other way as the DHS mushroomed out of congressional control, sucking power from scores of other agencies like a vortex. No, she corrected herself, more like a black hole from which not even light could escape. Genia suspected that no one, not even Odelle Marino, had planned to monopolize so much power. But, like a chain reaction, control had radiated from the DHS to permeate decision-making layers of government to a point where constitutionally elected bodies became paralyzed and a travesty of their former selves. Yes, the DHS needed powerful light shining on its bowels and a thorough flushing of its bilges.

  When her car finally stopped feet away from the bank of elevators at the DHS restricted parking lot, five stories below street level, she rushed out, swinging her legs without much elegance and, judging by Lawrence’s cocked eyebrow, forgoing her ingrained decorum. Calm down, girl, you’re racing.

  “Good morning,” Lawrence greeted her, flashing his ID card past a long slot by the farthest elevator.

  Genia eyed his signature uniform—black suit, gleaming black loafers, and cashmere black turtleneck—before glancing at his face, blinking at his faultless beret, and stopping at his sparkling brown eyes. “How you manage to look so awake is beyond me.” She flicked her wrist to steal a glance at her timepiece—05:26.

  “I don’t sleep, that’s why.” He stood aside when the elevator doors opened. As she walked past him, he reached to her neck. “You don’t look so bad. I say, forgot to check the mirror, did we?” He leaned over. “It’s on the news,” he whispered, and tugged at the otherwise perfect neck of her blouse. “There, much better.”

  As the elevator doors closed silently, she smiled. “Why the fake British accent? You should try French. Last I heard, you were from Manitoba.”

  “It gets me better tables at eateries. You should try it.”

  Genia nodded once. Ritter knew. He could have been forewarned as she had, not by her source but by his own staff. But the most likely origin of his knowledge would have been a quick scan through the digest prepared by his round-the-clock press department as soon as he received Odelle’s summons.

  After exiting the elevator at the executive floor and submitting to the routine body scan and the surrender of their weapons, George Wilson, Odelle Marino’s personal assistant—a fastidious middle-aged man with a slight limp and green eyes—ushered them through a long corridor onto a small rotunda with double doors flanked by a pair of oil paintings depicting blurry seascapes. At the doors, George glanced at a small brass panel to one side and its slowly pulsing green light before sliding the panels open and stepping aside.

  Genia nodded before striding in. Years before, she had studied Odelle’s bodyguard’s file: George Wilson, a full ex-colonel from the British SAS, untainted by the political loyalties besieging American personnel—a killing machine.

  “This is unacceptable.” Odelle Marino stepped into the boardroom from her inner office and hurled a folded newspaper across the table. Then she marched to the head of the large oval table, slipped into a high-backed chair, and waved a hand for them to sit.

  Genia reached for the newspaper. On the front page, tucked on the right-hand side of the headline announcing a major bomb scare in Paris, was a piece by Louis Hamilton, opening with a question: Are our prisons as secure as we’ve been led to believe? It was followed by a carefully worded article based on rumors not categorically denied by the FBH.

  “Do we have any idea who leaked it?” Genia asked, careful to sound outraged but without overdoing it.

  “I was hoping Mr. Ritter, your director of security, would be able to enlighten us,” Odelle said.

  “I’m afraid not.” Ritter hadn’t glanced at the paper.

  Odelle leaned forward. “You don’t seem surprised about the news, Mr. Ritter.”

  “I’m not. I read the article an hour ago in the digest prepared by my press staff. It was predictable.”

  “What was?”

  “That sooner or later the press would get a whiff of something foul, in particular after the power station’s fireworks.”

  “You call a terrorist attack at a nuclear installation ‘fireworks’?”

  Ritter sighed and pursed his lips. Genia flinched; she knew his body language and guessed what was coming next.

  “With all due respect, madam, although high explosives were used, other than tickling the trembler alarm switches of the station, the facility was never in any real danger. The charges were placed in the sewers a mile away, clinically arranged so the blast would travel under the station and trip the alarms. Had the so-called terrorists wanted to inflict harm, they could have easily positioned the charges right under the reactor and probably fissured it. Then we would have had a major nuclear emergency on our hands. It’s my view that the explosions were part of an elaborate ruse to divert your forces so the fugitives could escape.”

  “Where did you get that information?”

  “It’s my job.”

  “That was a direct question.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Marino.”

  Odelle Marino placed both hands on the table and had started to rise when Genia felt compelled to intervene, inwardly cursing Ritter’s chutzpah. “He has a right to protect his sources. If such information is classified and an offense has been committed, Mr. Ritter will answer in writing on a documented request from your office.”

  Odelle stood, eyes narrowed. When she spoke, her voice had dropped several decibels to slightly above a whisper. “I order you to tell me the source of that information at once.”

  Ritter stepped away from the table and stood erect, his eyes on the door leading to Odelle’s inner office. “No, madam, I will do no such thing. Article 612, section four, paragraph two: Executive personnel will not answer questions relating to security or classified issues but to the director of his agency, Congress, or the President, and, to my knowledge, your office doesn’t qualify as any of those things.”

  “How dare you?” Odelle turned slowly to face Genia. “I expect the source of that information on my desk within the hour, along with his resignation.”

  Before Genia could answer, Ritter continued without having moved or shifted his gaze. “Director Warren can have the information and my resignation as soon as she sees fit to demand it.”

  It had to happen. That it was happening so fast was further proof that Odelle was losing her cool. Her outburst was petty. Still, there were limits. “Ms. Marino, I beg you to reconsider,” Genia said. “The resignatio
n of a senior officer in federal service must be served to his agency director with a copy to the Congress’s permanent committee: article 163, section six, subsections two and three of the disciplinary code. Such a resignation must include the superior officer’s certification of the reason or reasons why such a resignation was tendered. No doubt Mr. Ritter will draft intent of personal reasons, but I am honor bound to add that the resignation was demanded by you because of his refusal to obey an illegal order.” She didn’t add that Ritter’s revelation painted an appalling picture of incompetence in the handling of the affair by the DHS. But Genia could swear Odelle had caught her drift.

  In a chameleonic turnabout, Odelle Marino’s face relaxed and a faint smile curved her lips. “You’re right, of course. But this wretched episode will soon be over. Then I’m sure we’ll have a suitable opportunity to review this conversation.” Her face set. “That will be all, for now.”

  In silence, Genia Warren and Lawrence Ritter collected their regulation weapons and communication pads from the security desk and headed for the elevator. As soon as the car doors closed, Ritter yanked off his beret and, in a movement too fast to follow, slapped the black beret over the surveillance camera, grabbed for Genia’s waist, and pulled her to him, kissing her with something close to ferocious urgency. Genia tried to gasp but only managed to accept his tongue. She could have reached for her piece or rammed a knee into his groin, but she did neither. Of its own accord, her hand moved to the nape of his neck, to bask in the fact that unconsciously she’d been dying to feel his smooth skin for ages. With the same haste, Ritter released her, grabbed his beret, slapped it on his head, and regained his habitual deadpan expression. Genia blinked, her breath coming out in hurried gasps, wondering if she’d imagined the whole episode. Her lips tingled. “What was that?” she breathed.