The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  Ritter raised an eyebrow, a gesture that gave his face a curious Mephistophelian look, and whispered, “Heroic gestures have the strangest effect on me.”

  At the parking lot, Ritter held the doors from closing and leaned toward her as she squeezed past him. “She wasn’t alone. Someone was listening from her office.”

  When Genia Warren and Lawrence Ritter left, Nikola Masek opened the connecting door between Odelle Marino’s office and boardroom and stepped through, inwardly aghast at her handling of Ritter. She was clearly outmatched. The man was a walking encyclopedia of rules, laws, and legislation.

  She turned to face him. “Who leaked it to The Post?”

  “It could have been anyone.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I have the tape—a synthetic voice. Its identity is irrelevant, for the time being at least. But my bet is, whoever organized the escape leaked it to the press.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re losing their nerve or Russo has died or both.”

  “And how did Ritter get accurate details of the explosion?”

  Over the past few minutes, eavesdropping on Odelle’s careless display of brute force, Nikola had weighed what his answer should be to her predictable question. “Anybody could have given him that information, from within the DHS. More than two hundred operatives were involved, and he’s the director of security. Only an idiot would fail to judge that the explosion was meant to be all thunder and no damage. Anyway, disclosing the breakout was a rash move, and a welcome one; it will spare me the hassle of feeding the breakout to the press myself.”

  Silence.

  Nikola sighed. “We made a gross mistake in keeping the escape under wraps. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the linchpin of their plan was our predictability. They wagered we would keep the lid down and we fell for it.”

  “Why do you keep using the plural? It was your call.”

  “No, it wasn’t. You insisted the damage had to be contained.”

  “Would you have acted differently if I hadn’t demanded discretion?”

  “I wouldn’t; that’s why I use the plural. But it was a mistake; it limited our resources and the scope of our response. In an all-out hunt, we would have drawn in the police and the army. After sealing the city and flushing the sewers, these bastards would have been history.”

  “Inside job?”

  “You mean the government?”

  She nodded.

  “It would seem likely. At least, someone very high up.”

  “What would you do?”

  Her choice of pronoun was telling. You, not we. Nikola sighed, his resolve strengthening. “Everything hinges on Russo. Is he alive? Is he coherent? The stakes are too high to ignore the possibility, however remote, that the answer to one or both questions could be yes. Without an insider’s help, your chances of impeding eventual disclosure are almost nil.” He raised a hand to forestall her comment. “I know you can probably cover your tracks as if nothing ever happened, or at least try to.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know the details, but it’s a matter of respect.” Or the lack of it. That was the crux of the issue. “I would have made sure I could, and I have no reason to doubt you’ve not considered the eventuality.”

  “You mentioned insider’s help.”

  That Odelle still kept part of her brain, regardless of her drowning thrashes, gave Nikola a glimmer of hope that she would remain predictable. “By elimination, your possible sources are limited to one. Forget about the idealistically committed; you can’t bribe them. But there are a few mercenaries involved, and a large chunk of money may sway their loyalty. Among the hired help, there’s someone with a face and name: Lukas Hurley. I doubt you can tempt him with money. If he’s dead, he doesn’t need it, and if not, he has too much already. But his honeypot is another matter. The fool joined the fray to bankroll a future with his Peruvian princess.” He darted a glance at his timepiece, nodded once, and stepped toward the door. “I have a flight to catch. Can we meet this evening? I will have most of the information you’re seeking by then.”

  She stared at him fixedly before pursing her lips and nodding. “Nine o’clock. Can you make it then?”

  “I’ll try.”

  chapter 36

  09:51

  Adaptation, a trait shared by the San and Inuit alike, underlies success in otherwise harrowing environments. After a nap on his way to the Air Force base, a simple breakfast of cereal, juice, and tea while he waited for the pilot to ready his machine, a short flight from Washington to Chicago, and a pleasant drive to Kenosha—across the state border in Wisconsin—Nikola felt ready to tackle his next call.

  Running the DNA of everyone involved in the Washington, D.C., sugar-cube fiasco through the federal database would have saved him many hours of painstakingly collating details and reading files, but it wouldn’t have solved the riddle. It was now clear what the connection was between Laurel, Eliot Russo, and Araceli Goldberg. Yet the mystery remained, and Araceli’s past was a good next place to search.

  After collecting his rented car from the airport—an almost-new Kioshi Matador—Nikola drove north on Route 45 to Miner Street and then took 94 past Skokie Boulevard to the coastal road bordering Lake Michigan. Soon, the smoke of chimneys from another era, stretched and torn against a gray sky, became part of the fleecy canopy that hung over the lake and the fields.

  Martha and Vance Brownell, the subjects at his next port of call, were different animals from the Coles—a similar phylum but a different class. In the ever-changing social tapestry of civilization’s third millennium, class was no longer determined by birth, upbringing, or even money but by power—the age-old currency of rulers.

  On the flight, eyes closed to ward off any attempt at conversation from a major sharing the cabin, he’d mulled the nature of power. Many years before, when Nikola still harbored hopes of redeeming humanity, a disenchanted political science professor and itinerant lecturer, Marcus Lassiter, had spoken to an audience of young people eager to discover the ways of the world. Power, Professor Lassiter had reflected, was about change, about forcing others to do what they would never have done of their own accord. And, like everything about our wretched species, change had its own mechanics. After reaching for his glass of water and moving it about without raising it to his lips, Lassiter had gone on to explain that the mechanics of change revolved around three tools: love, money, and fear.

  The professor had carried on his monologue for almost two hours while his spellbound audience soaked in his words, at times laced with a left-wing touch carefully designed to delight his listeners. Toward the end, he’d offered a gem, one that Nikola had saved in his repository of useful data. Stability, status quo, and security—however illusory the security may be—and the possibility of losing these, floated to the uppermost layer of our fears in later years when most other dreads had been tamed into submission.

  The Brownells were successful, professional, rich, and well connected. The retired couple—Martha, the ex-dean of a prestigious university, and Vance, an old-fashioned four-star general—didn’t fear much. Now in their seventies, they had surrendered to the unstoppable ravages of time, had more money than they could ever spend, and their family had long since disappeared or climbed to respectable heights on the social ladder. Socially, they were untouchable, and threatening them with changes to their physical integrity or their life span was out of the question. If prodded, they could tap into the awesome power of friends and relatives.

  As Nikola sped north, weighing how much Mrs. Brownell valued her peace and security, he relaxed behind the wheel. He read the names of the towns as he passed—Winnetka, Glencoe, Ravinia—rolling the words over his tongue like wine, and he toggled the entertainment panel until he found music worth listening to. As a wistful oboe filled the car with the notes of Mikhail Kinsky’s “Rhapsody for Steppes and Silences,” the skies got wider and brighter, the horizon flatter and longer.

&nb
sp; The previous day had yielded a precious puzzle piece: a corner, an anchor to which other pieces could be attached. Dr. Hulman had a prodigious memory after Sergeant Cox paved the way with a conscientious dose of the world’s best oil: three broken fingers. With the help of the plentiful notes in a notebook jealously stashed away in his safe—with scores of other pads and agendas—the obliging doctor remembered calling a young man to Araceli’s deathbed. He had nodded to the page in the agenda where he’d noted the man’s name and address; pointing would have been difficult under the circumstances.

  In retrospect, Laurel’s father’s identity was almost predictable, and Nikola could have kicked himself after reading the name in Dr. Hulman’s spidery longhand. Laurel’s adoption by the Coles and the identities of her natural parents explained the young woman’s involvement—a relationship that Nikola could have learned at once had he ordered comparisons from the fugitives’ DNA.

  Damn! Araceli Goldberg had been Eliot Russo’s woman, and heavy with his child.

  Dennis had pulled the images of Araceli’s last minutes from a film archive. Sobering. After the demonstration, when she fell before a trooper’s well-aimed kick, Eliot, with remarkable political savvy, ran away. Afterward, when the good Dr. Hulman humored his dying patient by calling her absent lover, he refused to admit his paternity. A moot point now. The DHS had genetic material from both Russo and Laurel. Within a few hours, Nikola had a lab report confirming that Laurel was Russo’s daughter.

  Yet, in the family portrait forming in Nikola’s mind, there were two figures in the shadows: one, whoever had stored Russo in the center of tank 913 in Washington, D.C., and, two, Laurel’s still-anonymous benefactor. Number one’s identity was slowly forming in Nikola’s mind, and the emerging shape filled him with foreboding. Then there was number two, whose persona had to be inextricably linked to the subjects in the picture, but he couldn’t figure out how or why. Nikola knew that as soon as he determined the why, a name would emerge.

  To flesh out numbers one and two, Nikola had compiled a hand of playing cards, a list of names tied, however thinly, to Araceli, Laurel, and Russo—family, friends, relatives, and a few professionals like medical doctors and teachers who could perhaps shed a little insight into their lives. In Nikola’s game, the Brownells were almost insignificant. The card they represented, if it existed, wasn’t an ace but a little one in a side suit. Of course, in the endgame, when all the trumps and big guns had been laid down, the humble card they held might afford Nikola a missing trick and net him the contract.

  As a student of human frailty, Nikola knew the richest depositories of treasure didn’t hide in safes or vaults but in the dark recesses of wardrobes. Nikola frowned on coincidence, but the fortuitous discovery of a noisy skeleton lurking in Martha Brownell’s wardrobe had given him a tool.

  Before Martha’s election to preside over Grimes University in 2036—an appointment she held until her retirement in 2047—she’d run the privately owned Paulson College for over twenty years. It was widely acknowledged that, under Martha’s tutelage, Paulson had grown from insignificance into an elite institution for grooming young women with powerful or wealthy pedigrees.

  After Martha resigned her post three years after Araceli’s death—ostensibly to claim her rightful place at the top of academia—Candace Bishop, her second-in-command, had taken over as principal. Both had been Araceli Goldberg’s teachers and mentors.

  Seemingly intelligent people do the dumbest of things in the name of self-mortification, like writing diaries. It’s well known that diaries are written for others to read, but only one degree of sublime stupidity can improve on committing compromising or even criminal events into the permanence of text: entrusting the data to the treacherous care of a computer.

  Dennis Nolan had sifted through Paulson College’s computer more as a pastime than to look for anything specific. Nikola had expected him to skim over Araceli’s college record, perhaps noting a few peccadilloes, but Dennis was curious and loved to track archives with long roots.

  Candace’s diary, tucked at the end of a score of subdirectories, inside a calendar-making program but unaccountably accessed daily, was a sobering read. Martha had not left Paulson College of her own choice. Rather than meeting twice a week with the college’s benefactors, Martha had been exercising Candace’s husband, Edward, for the previous ten years on Mondays and Thursdays. In itself, the affair wouldn’t have merited exposure but for a tiny detail: Martha and Edward loved to invite a few chosen pupils to share in the fun. To beef up her case, and before pulling the rug from under Martha’s feet, Candace had secured the services of an obliging detective. The sleuth had compiled a bulky, graphic document brimming with acrobatic competence and bound to delight the vice squad. Instead of raising a stink, Candace had counseled Martha into seeking greener pastures and surrendering her post, but not before heartily recommending herself as successor—or else. A shrewd move, at odds with the recklessness of leaving the incriminating evidence on her hard disk.

  After parking the car in front of the house, Nikola strolled past a well-tended lawn, breathing the tangy mid-morning air and eyeing the beds of pansies and marigolds. Pendulous figs, almost black with ripeness, hung from a generous tree. Nikola stopped to admire a small rectangular pond, its margins fashioned from old bricks. No faun with water spurting from its mouth or similar ghastly statuary but a simple rippling sheet carpeted with water lilies, broad and bright. To a side, a band of sparrows competed over a spray of bread crumbs in the grass. He paused at the door to tune his mind to the task ahead and pressed a brass button on the nose of a small lion’s head.

  “Good morning. Can I help you?”

  Nikola appraised the starched uniform of a prim Asian woman. Outside old bondage books, he hadn’t seen a maid’s uniform in years. “I have an appointment with Mrs. Brownell.” Nikola reached into his coat pocket and offered a card from an obscure government department but with his real name.

  She stood aside to allow Nikola into the hall. “Please, wait here.”

  Nikola glanced around, taking in the art—a passable Mac-Tarvish oil on canvas of a stormy sea and a group of watercolors he couldn’t identify. Subdued but expensive. Class. The room was a reflection of its owners—neat and with a tightly controlled atmosphere of wealth and orthodox good taste. A slight noise drew his gaze to the facing wall and a display of schiavonas, rapiers, foils, and a couple of smaller side swords. Underneath, a clepsydra—an ancient time-measuring device worked by a flow of water—whispered and clicked. Nikola stepped closer and peered at tiny cups slowly filling and emptying into larger ones. It wasn’t a reproduction.

  “Mr. Masek?” A tall thin man with the gait of the career soldier marched across the hall, one hand outstretched.

  Nikola caught a glint of determination in his light-blue eyes and arrested a reflexive move to accept his hand.

  “Let me see your credentials.” Delivered in a measured tone, but an order.

  Nikola produced a wallet and offered the ID he’d chosen for this particular errand without taking his eyes from the general. With a carefully combed-back mop of white hair and trim mustache, General Brownell didn’t look a year older than sixty, although Nikola knew he was seventy-two. In khaki trousers, a dark-brown wool jacket, and tan loafers, he cast the imposing figure of a driver of men—an illusion, because General Brownell had never seen real fire besides the one blazing in the adjoining living room.

  “What’s your department’s interest in my wife?”

  After stowing away his wallet, Nikola squared his shoulders and straightened. “None, sir. Our inquiry concerns an alumnus of Paulson College, from the time Mrs. Brownell was the principal.”

  “Shouldn’t you address the college authorities?”

  “I would, sir, but it’s a sensitive matter.” He lowered his voice a fraction. “Terrorism. If possible, we want to restrict the matter to the highest levels without involving people who might not be familiar with security realities.” />
  General Brownell stood even more erect. There, you loved the “highest levels” bit, associating you with the patricians instead of the commoners. After the “security realities” line, I bet your ears rang with “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “I see.”

  I doubt it.

  “Please, keep it short. My wife is recovering from a long illness and she’s not strong.” General Brownell marched to a set of double doors at the end of the hall. The doors slid open, revealing paneled and tapestried walls flanking another lined with bookcases and a woman sitting in a wheelchair. Slender, with high cheekbones and silver hair held off her face with tortoiseshell pins, her sage-green shirt and matching trousers seemed to glisten and reflect the light. With a thick gold choker at her neck, she looked like an aging Egyptian princess.

  “It will take only a few minutes,” Nikola said.

  When Nikola heard the door latching behind him, he approached Mrs. Brownell’s wheelchair, which rested beside a gleaming leather Chesterfield sofa, and tendered another card.

  She glanced at it and dropped it on a glass tray resting on a small side table. “Never heard of this department.”

  “We are attached to the DHS, dealing with sensitive matters.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Pardon?”

  “You heard me. I listened to the way you soft-soaped my husband.” She glanced at a squat intercom resting on a sizable desk. “Nicely worded, but it won’t do for me. What do you want?”

  A change of tack was compulsory. Nikola stepped to the couch, picked the creases of his trousers between thumb and forefinger, and sat down on its edge, his eyes on Mrs. Brownell’s as he shelved his carefully prepared speech. He hated needless insults, and his sense of aesthetics cringed at addressing an intelligent woman like a dimwit. Nikola studied her face. She had a high, intelligent forehead and a predatory nose over full lips—too full to owe nothing to a surgeon’s needle. An attractive face but not altogether pleasing—too sensuous, hinting at stubbornness and self-will rather than firmness or strength. This woman controlled her passions and never burned by any fires other than those of hate, worldly ambition, or anger.