The Prisoner

by Carlos J. Cortes

  At dawn, Laurel had flown with her parents into Washington, D.C., courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, to join Tyler and his lot at the farm. Laurel still couldn’t get over her shock when she stepped out of the car to face four vaguely familiar military officers. They stood at attention before a crowd of farm workers, with Floyd Carpenter and Antonio’s family, the children waving tiny American flags.

  Raul had arrived a few minutes later with his family, his mother clutching his arm possessively. Then Lukas’s entourage had made a grand entrance, cars disgorging cinnamon-skinned men and women in their Sunday best, hair slicked and new shoes gleaming under the weak sun. Lukas seemed taller, very serious, gripping the hand of a pretty young woman whose eyes were glued to his face.

  When the limousines arrived at the church where the service would be held, General Erlenmeyer was standing at the foot of the stairs with a group of military officers and civilians. He stepped over as Henry, Barandus, Antonio, and Tyler lined up for inspection. The sound of conversation quieted, and Laurel grinned at the general’s raised eyebrow when he peered at the men’s chests. Then he paced to a stop in front of each of them, to draw a stiff hand to his cap before shaking their hands in turn. Henry, the fearless Lord of the Sewers, his dishonorable discharge revoked by presidential order, couldn’t take it. As the general saluted him, he started to cry.

  It seemed impossible that only four days separated the harrowing ride to Congress and Bastien’s funeral.

  Beyond the approaching hearse, Laurel eyed the media gathering endless footage and taking notes. Another group of men and women wove continuously in and out of the crowd, their eyes shielded behind dark glasses. Secret Service. She had seen Senator Palmer hugging Bastien’s parents, braving the mother’s angry eyes. Everywhere she caught half-smile exchanges between the politicians, obviously relieved at Odelle Marino’s timely departure. But for the gravity of the occasion, many would have indulged in backslapping.

  The military escort was already in position when the hearse transferring the casket from the church to Arlington Cemetery slowed to a stop and uniformed men started moving. Behind them, at Patton Circle, stood a black artillery caisson pulled by six horses. Astride three of the horses, soldiers sat straight and stiff. Behind the caisson an officer held another horse by the halter.

  After the body bearers transferred the casket to the caisson, the procession moved into the cemetery.

  Laurel pressed her eyes shut and wished for a human touch. Miraculously, Floyd’s fingers cradled her hand. Then she felt a tentative tug on her sleeve and lowered her gaze to Russo’s wraparound glasses, his bony fingers twitching as if begging for alms. Holding their hands, she stepped forward as General Erlenmeyer wheeled Eliot Russo ahead of him—the silence of the procession broken only by the rhythmic clip-clop of hooves. Behind the caisson marched a caparisoned horse, wearing an empty saddle with the rider’s boots reversed in the stirrups. Laurel swallowed. Bastien, their warrior, would never ride again.

  Senator Palmer joined them to walk very straight, followed by Henry, Tyler, Antonio, and Barandus. Raul and Lukas brought up their rear in dark suits and ties.

  As the procession moved toward the grave site for the private service, the army band played Johann Pachelbel’s Canon, and a composite battalion made up of a company each from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force closed the cortege.

  The saluting battery fired nineteen guns, spacing the rounds so that the last one was fired as the caisson reached its destination.

  Bastien was to be laid to rest in Section 260. The sod looked fresh. Laurel thought that people usually have a physical address when living and Bastien, even in death, was to have one: Arlington 260, 1346.

  A crowd had gathered around the grave site. Row upon row of folding chairs faced swaths of artificial grass strewn around a rectangular hole in the ground, rigged with the contraption to lower the casket.

  Friends, acquaintances, and a few members of the family had dissolved in a gaggle of bureaucrats, agency executives, military officers, Secret Service agents, and politicians, all trailed by a crowd of media reporters hauling cameras and digital recorders.

  In the distance, a baby cried. Laurel turned toward the wail to see another guard unit filing into the columbarium.

  Bishop Ramfis led the way to the grave, followed by the casket team. In a well-rehearsed movement, they set down the casket, stretched out the United States flag, and lowered it over the coffin.

  A gentle breeze rippled the grass and shook the tops of trees. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In a few minutes the crew would tamp the churned dirt into the earth. Then they would roll up the artificial grass, fold the chairs, and immediately drive them to a different section of the grounds to set up again.

  Bishop Ramfis read from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. The bishop, with his white surplice, reminded Laurel of a long-legged waterfowl scurrying from one place to another. A tall and gangling man, his robes rode high on his legs, baring spindly ankles disappearing into large shoes. But, Laurel had to concede, he was a talented professional. She had seen him in action at church. With the damp gaze of one familiar with the species’ miseries, he’d dished out words of wisdom, handshakes, and hugs. Even so, Laurel marveled at the feeling of emptiness smothering her grief.

  When the bishop concluded his service and backed away, the NCOIC stepped up to the coffin, froze, and then backed away as President Leona Hurst stood and walked over to stand beside the flag-draped casket.

  “My words may not be politically correct, but this is not a rally. It is a reunion of friends to honor our departed hero, Bastien. Our nation is full of double-barreled nationalities. Seldom has a minute gone by without hearing of African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, and the like—as if being an American wasn’t enough and an individual needed other signs of identity. Bastien Compton’s family has African and Scottish roots, but he was simply an American, the kind forged in the trenches of Concord or Bunker Hill.” She turned to the Compton family in the front row and locked eyes for an instant with Bastien’s mother. “Although not a member of the armed services, Bastien distinguished himself conspicuously by his gallant and intrepid actions, above and beyond the call of duty. The young man we honor today volunteered to serve his country and, in doing so, made the ultimate sacrifice—a devotion that cost him his life.”

  As the President scanned the grounds until she spotted Senator Palmer, Laurel marveled at the capacity of politicians for mendacity.

  “Words are inadequate before our loss,” Leona Hurst continued. “My late father would read excerpts from Romeo and Juliet at bedtime. As the Right Reverend spoke, I vividly remembered some of those lines:

  “When he shall die,

  Take him and cut him out in little stars,

  And he will make the face of heaven so fine

  That all the world will be in love with night,

  And pay no worship to the garish sun.

  “I am proud of Bastien and proud to be his compatriot.” She stepped back away from the coffin.

  The firing party released three volleys as the sound and echo of “Taps” sounded from across the field, played by two buglers. Whispers died and everybody turned toward the music, right hands over their hearts while the men and women in uniform rendered a rigid hand salute.

  The team by the casket folded the flag into the triangle reminiscent of the cocked hat from the American Revolution. The President gathered the folded flag and offered it to Mrs. Compton, leaned over to whisper something in her ear, then hugged the woman, who was now racked by sobs.

  Laurel retreated into her shell and put on a brave face, zeroing in on small details like the whine of the electrical motors lowering the casket into the grave, the hands of the two very different men she held in hers, and the absence of birdsong.

  The casket bearers left, pausing once to render a last hand salute to Bastien, and a sonorous rumble echoed down the path.

  Everybody craned their necks
as the USAF pipe band, led by a drum major, slowly marched toward the grave to the strains of the redeeming “America the Beautiful.”

  Then grief welled in Laurel’s chest and she wept, the sound of the drum’s somber muffled beat etching into her memory.

  afterword

  Shortly after Bastien Compton’s burial, Leona Hurst, the fifty-first President of the United States, convened a second press conference to elaborate on the abridged one served four days earlier. In this meeting with the press, she awed the nation with the outcome of her personal crusade to bring the mightiest government agency and one of the world’s largest corporations to heel. In her brief, she stressed her role as the mastermind of the scheme that exposed the existence of an illegal prisoner within the system, who had marshaled her most trusted officers and advisers into a fearless thrust to dismantle the power network knitted by Hypnos and the DHS. As commander in chief, she extolled the courage of General Erlenmeyer in obeying her direct orders to secure the Capitol grounds. On January 20, 2061, she was inaugurated for a second term after winning by a landslide. Since the Constitutional amendment of 2033 had extended the number of terms a president could serve to three, four years later, in 2064, she won her third and final mandate.

  In the wake of her public disclosure, 117 public servants and officers were served subpoenas to appear before a Senate special committee. Every one of them was dismissed from public office and left after having signed their confessions and sundry documents to guarantee their discretion.

  Lukas Hurley received a commendation and, shortly after, emigrated to Peru, where he lives with his wife, Elena, and their twin daughters, Eva and Rosa. Elena’s relatives help the Hurleys run their ten-thousand-acre estate of pastures and farmland.

  After an extraordinary session of the ad hoc Special Hibernation Committee, it was decreed that Odelle Marino’s ashes should be placed in a specially constructed hermetic urn and suspended in tank 913 of the Washington, D.C., hibernation facility for a period of one hundred years. Shortly after, President Hurst signed an order to confiscate all of Odelle’s possessions, but it became apparent that her ill-gotten fortune had disappeared the same morning of her suicide from a numbered account at Banca Fleishmann in Antigua. Although the SWIFT organization cooperated fully to track the funds, they hit a dead end. Following six rapid transfers, the money reached Gibraltar and then branched outside the SWIFT system to accounts in Liechtenstein and the Isle of Man. Onward from these two points, the funds vanished.

  Harper Tyler retired to his pig farm with Antonio Salinas and enlarged the operations by purchasing adjacent land. A month later he descended into the Washington sewers to look for a boy, whom he found suffering from a fractured leg. After a brief passage through a clinic to set his leg and diagnose his condition, Joshua—aka Metronome—adjourned to the farm, where he receives special tutoring from a score of newfound uncles and two remedial teachers. In his spare time, he helps his newly adopted father in the layout and construction of a huge 0-gauge model railway in the cellar. James Marshall—aka Barandus—runs an expanded O’Malley Cleaning Services and offers fluid-management consultancy.

  The American government slapped an unheard-of two-hundred-billion-dollar fine on Vinson Duran, the owner of Hypnos. To cover the fine, Vinson had to relinquish his majority shareholding. The money, in full, served to pay compensation to the center inmates and to bankroll two foundations: Theta, for the research of hibernation technology, and HMA (Hibernation Monitoring Agency), to oversee the operation of suspension centers with an army of independent inspectors drawn from the ranks of retired government officers. The United States Congress enacted a bill, later transformed into law, to partially nationalize Hypnos and supervise its board by appointing a chief executive officer nominated by Congress. After an absence of two years, Vinson Duran returned to the limelight by founding a corporation to research full-body transplants.

  Laurel Cole moved in with Floyd Carpenter after dating for more than a year. Following Dr. Carpenter’s appointment to run Theta, they married, and soon after Laurel gave birth to their daughter Eryn. Raul Osborne took a year’s sabbatical, during which he traveled throughout Europe. On his return to the United States, he teamed with Laurel to lead a civil rights organization.

  Jerome Palmer resigned from the Senate, but his absence from the corridors of power was short-lived. Before President Hurst’s reelection, she cajoled him over a bottle of excellent cognac in Palmer’s study to be her secretary of state.

  Inside a fortnight of her predecessor’s suicide, Genia Warren was sworn in as the new director of the DHS, coinciding with Lawrence Ritter’s resignation. Less than six months after Ritter accepted his congressional appointment as CEO of Hypnos, he moved into Genia’s family home, but not before yielding to Father Damien’s demands. The priest refused to acknowledge him as a neighbor unless he married her first.

  In addition to accepting an undisclosed settlement from the United States government, Eliot Russo became president for life of the Hibernation Monitoring Agency. He lives with a remarkably attractive housekeeper at a converted lighthouse in Maine, where he tends to his orchids under the tower’s glass dome. He keeps several tiny rooms—more like monastic cells—ready to accommodate his frequent visitors.

  Nikola Masek runs a security company in the Dominican Republic. In association with his in-house hacker, Dennis Nolan, he offers computer security services to governments and private corporations. Dennis married his woman, and the family laundry business has branched out into neighboring Haiti.

  After another congressional commendation and a princely award, also undisclosed, Henry Mayer continued his interrupted trip to Honduras, where he failed to locate his friend and took to tramping the high sierras, looking for a suitable place to farm chinchillas. His carefully laid plans, however, didn’t take into consideration the staff at Trujillo’s Registro de la Propiedad, the government office where land ownership deeds are registered. After Henry stood in line all morning to ascertain the status of a wonderful tract of land high on the Cerro San Jorge, the pretty young woman staffing the counter slipped a Cerrado sign on her desk and gathered her handbag, on her way to lunch.

  Emilia Gutierrez must have felt a pang of guilt at seeing the bewildered expression of the giant gringo in dusty lizard-skin boots and sweat-stained Stetson, because she stopped for an instant to reassure him she would be back in two hours. Henry tagged along with her to a local watering hole for sandwiches and a soft drink to outline his plans.

  Emilia, a fisherman’s daughter, was aghast at the thought of growing furry things to craft into expensive coats for high-maintenance American women, and she suggested Henry should scout the coast to get other business ideas. Since it was already Friday and she didn’t work the weekend, she would show him around. A few weeks later, Emilia Mayer succeeded in getting her dazed husband to buy a fish farm with her father and two brawny brothers as hired help, and Henry blesses the day he stood on line at the Trujillo Registro de la Propiedad.

  bibliography

  For information on sewers I’m indebted to a number of sources, the most important being: The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth, Cloacina: Goddess of the Sewers by Jon C. Schladweiler, American Sanitary Engineering by Edward S. Philbrick, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations by Donald Reid, The World Beneath the City by Robert Daley, Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration by Ninjalicious, Invisible Frontier: The Jinx Book of Urban Exploration by David Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo, Beneath the City Streets by Peter Laurie, and New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City by Julia Solis.

  I consulted several publications dealing with explosives, in particular: The Longest Walk: The World of Bomb Disposal by Peter Birchall, The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell, and the superb Jane’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal 2005–06 by Colin King.

  Finally, I also checked a wealth of particulars on the subject of mammalian physiology, especiall
y: Mammalian Hibernation III by Kenneth C. Fisher, Physiology of Natural Hibernation by Ch. Kayser, The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments by Claude A. Piantadosi, The Human Factor: A Requiem for Darwin by A. J. DiChiara, Temperature Regulation in Humans and Other Mammals by Claus Jessen, Metabolic Regulation: A Human Perspective by Keith Frayn, and Alcor Life Extension Foundation: An Introduction by Jerry B. Lemler.

  The Prisoner is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Spectra Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2009 by Carlos J. Cortes

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.