The Prisoner (13 page)

A door opened on the far end of the room, and a short, overweight man in lab whites trotted toward them. “I’m Dr. Henkel,” he offered with a bland smile. “Director of—” He clamped his mouth shut at Nikola’s raised hand.

“Give your name to the lieutenant over there.” Nikola glanced over his shoulder. “I have no need of you.” He’d decided the security boy would be easier to deal with. “What’s your name, son?”

“Jeremy, sir. Jeremy Clark.”

Nikola pointed to a hologram model of the buildings floating over a wider section of the reception counter. “Let’s start again, Jeremy. This complex has five buildings laid out like disks on the vertices of a pentagram. We are in this one.” He nodded to the pentagram. “I suppose this is admission and administration, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And these are the hibernation wards?” His hand waved through the ghosts of four orange-colored iridescent blocks.

“Yes, sir.”

He eyed the young man but found no sparkle in his eye. “And this?” He pointed to the remaining building—a blue cylinder, the precise location where the coordinates from the broadcasting sensors had crossed.

“Laboratories and research.”

“How many ways in or out?”

“One. Through here, sir.”

Jeremy’s voice would have been pleasant if fear had not ratcheted it tight. Nikola glanced around the cavernous reception space. As at Hypnos, hibernation stations, whether penitentiary or private, had only underground accesses.

“And vehicles?”

“Below us, but there’s only a single access.” Jeremy pointed to a glazed wall to one side that opened onto a wide ramp blocked by a squat black armored truck.

“Who’s at the labs now?” Nikola asked.

“Nobody, sir. Employees leave at six and the janitors don’t start until midnight.”

“Could you check?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Please?” Nikola was aware of how unnerving his full scrutiny could be on whoever was with him and that it had often proved more than some could tolerate. He smiled and watched the boy darting a nervous glance to the men spreading through the reception area—large men clad in black uniforms with shiny body armor, hard hats, and serious-looking hardware cradled in their arms. Jeremy turned on his heel and marched to the reception counter. Nikola cocked his head to speak into his lapel mic. “Get the police, the National Guard, and the army. Ring the city with roadblocks and flash images and descriptions to airports and public transport stations.” He listened to Dennis’s question and shook his head. “No escaped convicts. Terrorists. Four: a woman and three—” He paused. “There could be four or five terrorists: a woman and three or four men, one of them sick or unconscious, possibly on a stretcher or in a wheelchair. Armed, dangerous, no contact, kill on sight.”

It couldn’t be helped. Nikola would have dearly loved to
interview the doctor, the lawyers, or the controller if they traveled together, but he couldn’t risk anyone listening to them before he got there. He leaned onto the counter, his eyes never leaving the young man’s face. Not a bad face—a predatory nose, almost patrician, above firm lips and jutting over a delicate jaw. High and intelligent forehead—an illusion. Most people with high foreheads seemed bright until they opened their mouths. He glanced at the young man’s fingers and flinched at the rough and ragged cuticles, the nails bitten to the quick. Nails, not the eyes, were the mirror of the soul. Abused nails belonged to throwaway people.

“I—I’m sorry, sir.” Jeremy blanched, and whatever appeal he had deserted his face.

“Yes?”

“Dr. Carpenter.”

“What about Dr. Carpenter?”

“He’s not checked out; he’s still in the research block.”

“See, I knew we would get somewhere. Lead the way.” He nodded to the lieutenant in charge of the FDU team and followed the young security officer. His earpiece blipped.

“Floyd Carpenter, Caucasian, forty-one, five-eleven, medical graduate, Maryland, class of forty-four, AMM doctorate, Houston, class of forty-sev—”

“What’s that?”

“Advanced Mammalian Metabolism.”

“Family?”

“Divorced, no children. His mother is the only surviving relative.”

“Pick her up.”

Silence.

“Confirm,” Nikola insisted irritably.

“That may be difficult. Cecilia Carpenter, née Hailey, is the high priestess of Twilight’s Children, last heard of in Pidakkesh.”

“Where’s that?”

“Northern Pakistan, a stone’s throw from Afghanistan and China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. She’s running an enlightenment mission there.”

“Try to find her, anyway.”

“Will do.”

In the garden outside, intermittent gusts of wind blew the leaves up and down. But Senator Palmer wasn’t watching their movements; his unfocused gaze was lost in the distance. He jolted, pivoted around, and dashed to his desk in two strides to reach for the secure phone a fraction of a second after the first blip.

“Palmer.”

For an instant he thought he’d been rash and messed up the link, but after a short delay, the scrambler kicked in its sizzling stream of exchange data before
HORUS
flashed on the terminal’s screen.

A metallic cackle. “That was quick. Are we nervous, Senator?”

Palmer waited.

“Your boys are having a spot of trouble. Onuris tracked them to Nyx Corporation a few minutes ago.”

An eddy started to swirl in his stomach. “How?”

“That’s the beauty of technology. It appears the sensors carried by the inmates are also location transmitters.”

“That’s impossible.” But after he said it, Palmer closed his eyes.

“Is it? One must agree it’s a logical feature.”

“Kept secret?”

“Well, that’s not exactly true. The DHS knew.”

“And so did Hypnos,” Palmer said.

“Precisely.”

Palmer’s mind raced.
Your boys
meant Horus didn’t know the names of those involved. The voice had sounded even, almost nonchalant. They had not been caught. There had to be hope.

“They lost them,” the voice said.

Dragging words from Horus was like getting credit from a hooker.

“A few minutes before the troops arrived, they lost the signal.”

“Meaning?” Palmer asked.

“Either they removed the transmitters or found a way to interfere with the signal.”

“And now?”

“Onuris has lost their scent.”

Silence.

“Senator, your boys are running, probably frightened, and frightened folks are unpredictable.”

After a burst of static, the screen went blank. Palmer stood from his desk, neared a credenza, and poured a shot of malt whiskey from a decanter into a cognac glass. As he was about to drink, he frowned, peered into the liquid, and sniffed. Right glass, wrong stuff—or the other way around. He downed it in one gulp and returned to his desk. He had to warn Shepherd.

The tunnel passing under the bowels of the Nyx station was a dead end; they could only retrace their steps. Laurel trotted ahead toward the main sewer, as the men huffed behind her in single file and kept to the dry sidewalk flanking a trough filled with a lazy whitish fluid. With a flashlight in one hand slashing wildly over the crumbling brick surfaces, she reached by feel to the side of her computer to bring it online. Laurel glanced at a bunch of fluffy-looking stalactites dangling from the curved roof. Above their heads, the DHS would be positioning their awesome assets. A Machiavellian paradox, but the DHS involvement and the identity of the man on the stretcher worked to their advantage, affording them a slim chance of escape.

Had Russo been a common criminal, the DHS would have mustered every agency and corps in the land: police, National Guard, the army, and even the fire brigades. Within minutes, the sewers would have been swarming with soldiers. They wouldn’t have had a chance. But Russo was a secret, a genie the DHS couldn’t afford to let out of the bottle. If they involved other agencies, the DHS would have to offer explanations and someone might recognize Russo—although after seeing his emaciated face, Laurel doubted even his mother would. No. The DHS would go solo. They might use forces from other agencies, but only to secure a perimeter of
roadblocks and mass transport exit points. Their crack Fast Deployment Units, the dreaded FDUs, numbered a scant three hundred men scattered all over the nation. At short notice, the DHS could muster fewer than a third of their elite forces. Those had been Shepherd’s precise words.

“Now what?” Dr. Floyd Carpenter’s voice echoed behind her as they piled out into the main sewer.

A warm waft of rancid, fatty air enveloped her like a shroud. She moved forward to a wider section of the ledge so the others could move into the tunnel. On GPS mode, the Metapad displayed a digitized map of the sewers, courtesy of WASA’s Documents and Permits Section and exchanged for a large wad of cash from a supervisor at the Blue Plains sewage-treatment plant. Red lines identified sanitary sewers, blue lines storm sewers, and an overwhelming layer of brown lines identified combined sewers—a gargantuan network with almost two thousand miles of pipes and tunnels. Laurel peered at an alien universe of colored dots: flow-metering stations, storm-water-pumping stations, and thousands of catch basins, infalls, and utility holes.

Hampered by the wrap around her neck, Laurel gazed into the impenetrable darkness to her left and the fat fields. The stench grew and, with it, the uncanny sensation of fat dribbling down her throat. Floyd stepped away from the stretcher resting on the floor, bent in two, and spewed forth a thick gush of vomit. Lukas joined him with a Morse code of dry heaves. Laurel swallowed, intent on the Metapad screen.

Please, not west
. The main sewer ran east to west. The roaches and the slabs of clotted, festering fat lay a few hundred yards due west. She propped the flashlight on the floor, pointing upward, and glanced at Raul, who stood like a statue, with his stiff neck encased in a white band. From a depression on the computer’s rubber housing, Laurel fished a stylus and tapped the screen to transmitter mode. When a keyboard scrolled at the bottom of the display, she tapped with her stylus.

>
Help
.

Laurel jerked to a loud snort on her right. The edge of the band around her neck rubbed her chafed skin.

Floyd leaned over her shoulder. “Calling for Mom?”

“Look, Doc—”

“Drop the title. I’m Floyd.” His breath had a tang of hydrochloric acid.

The screen remained blank, a tiny prompt flashing white.

“The goons above will thank you for the beacon,” Floyd noted.

“No, they won’t. This uses a military-issue Squirt transmitter. It alters outgoing signals. After scrambling, it packs any transmission into a burst lasting a few microseconds.”

Where are you?
She was using the emergency procedure Shepherd swore they would never need. If this failed, she had nothing else to try. Once more, she tapped her stylus on the screen.

>
Help
.

“Mom must be out of earshot.” Floyd sounded amused.

The Metapad’s screen flashed.

>
Coordinates?

She addressed the GPS and clicked a window.

Lukas had finished retching and now squatted, his back to the curved wall of the tunnel. For a paper pusher, he was behaving with commendable restraint. The tunnel echoed with wet, slurpy sounds. She screwed her eyes to focus on a round opening on the opposite bank, a pipe hiccuping gushes of liquid. It didn’t sound like water but something thicker, like bile.

Laurel blinked and a single letter flashed on the computer’s screen: >
E
. She smiled.

“That way.” She pointed east.

Raul and Lukas let out breaths of relief.

“Am I missing something?” Floyd asked.

“Yes, the fat.” She grabbed her flashlight, stepped past the group and into the trough of the branch line, and crossed over to the walkway running along the opposite wall of the main sewer. Behind her, the men huffed, lifting the stretcher with Russo.

After a couple of hundred yards, the walkway disappeared and they had to wade through twelve inches of slowly moving fluid, its surface broken by bobbing lumps. Laurel kept glancing at the pipe openings on the walls, which spewed
gushes of milky fluid, and the wider holes piercing the curved roof, half-expecting a blinding light and armor-clad men to drop through at any moment. She checked the computer. Nothing. In the main sewer tunnel, they were sitting ducks. As any cretin could see by checking a sewer map, the only way out of Nyx was through the spur line and into the main tunnel. Two small groups, one at each end, could hem them in like rats. As they reached the first intersection, the screen went crazy, with coordinates scrolling down it and then stopping at a flashing prompt, the numbers dissolving under a colored diagram, a red line snaking through a maze of brown lanes of different widths.

“Right,” she announced, and swung her flashlight into the opening.

The smaller tunnel looked newer; it had smooth concrete walls, weeping as if suffering from ineffable sadness. They climbed onto a narrow sidewalk and slogged one hundred yards before reaching a domed vault with four smaller openings. Laurel pointed to the one on their far left and tramped across, giving wide berth to large clothed lumps arranged in the center. She shivered to think what lay inside.

Obviously, Shepherd had planned a circular route to thwart any attempt to track them through the sewers. After changing course at each new intersection at least a dozen times, she guessed it would take a large force to find them. Infrared sensors wouldn’t work: too many hot spots of decaying matter. Motion detectors wouldn’t be of much use either; large objects moved continually through the sewers, particularly in the wider tunnels. That left sound, but their splashing noises were swallowed by cascading water and the intermittent thumps when larger objects fell from side pipes or when rats, some as large as cats, dove into the filth.

“It seems you were right; there’s nobody here,” Nikola said.

Jeremy had the sense to press his lips together instead of offering an excuse.

Nikola panned the shower room, wrinkling his nose at a pile of discarded oilskins and filthy rubber boots. He nodded
to an FDU soldier blocking the door. “Get hold of your scientific officer.”