The Prisoner (20 page)

Yes, Floyd was damaged but cuddly and comfortable, like a worn teddy bear. She drifted in and out of dreamless sleep until his hand pressed her arm with insistence.

“Mmmm?”

“My, but you are verbose. Henry is moving.”

She roused instantly, her mind clear as a foggy road after a strong wind. Maybe his pep pills worked after all. Laurel leaned over and pecked his cheek. “Thank you.”

“Er, I didn’t catch that. Could you repeat it?”

She stood and ran a hand over the seat of her trousers in an unconscious gesture to shake off the dirt. Her fingers caught on something slimy. She refused to look. “No.”

At the end of the tunnel, Henry stood with the other men, waving for them to approach. Laurel neared Raul and leaned over to run a hand over his head. “Something is happening.”

Raul made a wry movement with his mouth, reached for her hand, and held it an instant. “Latte, large, scrambled eggs on toast, and juice.”

“Served by odalisques from a nearby seraglio?”

“Perfect. No veils, please; they only get in the way.”

She squeezed his hand and moved over to Lukas. Out of the corner of her eye, she detected Floyd squatting next to Russo and listening to his chest before shaking his head.

“Come on, let’s go see Henry.” She peered into Lukas’s eyes. All the adrenaline-triggered resolve was gone, leaving only fear in its wake. “Come,” she repeated, offering her hand. “We’re going to be all right.” There was no reason for
the encouragement, but, like someone hopelessly in love, his eyes begged for a charitable lie.

As Laurel neared the group, Henry slapped one of the men on the shoulder. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Henry fingered his matted beard, then nodded to Laurel. She eyed the grimy faces of men and a woman, dressed in a bewildering assortment of rags, their sunken eyes ablaze with a strange inner light. Hope or drugs? She couldn’t make up her mind. Like a quarterback calling the play, Henry stepped slightly inside the circle.

“You know Barandus,” Henry said, gesturing to the tall, morose man on his right. Then he raised a hand to encompass the other three. “Jim, Susan, and Charlie. Good friends, and knowledgeable.”

The nature of their knowledge filled Laurel with dread, but she managed a smile. “What are we doing?”

“With luck, the DHS will be busy for a while—not for too long, though. We need to arrange a small diversion to draw all the city forces away from your extraction point. To do that, we need some goods. I propose we go get them.”

Laurel returned Henry’s stare. He hadn’t named the place they were supposed to meet Shepherd, but he hadn’t explained anything about his plan either. “But we have no money.”

Henry nodded. “My word is good enough where we’re going.”

“Who’s going with you?” Raul asked.

“La crème de la crème—Laurel, you, and the five of us. That should be enough. The doctor can look after his charge, and Lukas can help him.”

Henry seemed to have sorted out in his mind who belonged where.

Raul edged forward and cleared his throat. Obviously something was bothering him. “Enough for what?”

“My friend … does it matter?” Henry raised a hand before Raul had a chance to reply. “You’re fucked. I mean, really fucked. You need to get your pal out there to a safe place. We can try to help you achieve your goal, but you do it our way. Or … you’re welcome to try it on your own.”

Raul stood very straight, his lips pressed tightly together.

“Let me get something straight. Down here we operate as a group, and I lead. You will do as I say. No questions. If something happens to me, Barandus takes over.”

“Are we in the army now?”

“I wish we were, son. This is a tad harsher, with fewer rules and no safeguards. Of course, if you have a problem, you can stay here.” Henry squared his shoulders and waited.

Raul pursed his lips and nodded once. “Understood.”

“That’s not enough. Here we depend on one another. You will do as I say.”

“Cut it out, guys. Of course we’ll go along. You’re the expert,” Laurel said in exasperation.

Still Henry waited, his eyes never leaving Raul.

“I’ll do as you say,” Raul agreed.

Laurel darted a glance toward Russo. “Are we going far?”

“About three miles in a straight line. Problem is, we have to go deep first. Say an eight-mile round trip.”

“How long?”

Something flickered across Henry’s eyes and Laurel braced herself for a sharp rebuke, but it never came. “Five hours, perhaps six, if we don’t run into problems.” He raised a hand to forestall the next question. “As to the possibility and nature of the problems, your guess is as good as mine.” He turned to the woman he’d introduced as Susan and muttered something.

She trotted to a far corner of the station to rummage in a large cardboard box propped against a pile of others in a corner—their stores, Laurel guessed.

Laurel neared Floyd and Lukas. “You heard the man—five or six hours. Try to catch some shut-eye.”

Floyd nodded. “And you take care.” He reached over and brushed his fingers across her cheek.

Lukas hadn’t recovered his color and looked positively sick. She neared and gripped his arm. He blinked and nodded once. Laurel guessed that a tank full of an oily mixture was on the supervisor’s mind. “Be prepared. As soon as we get back, we can go home.” She hoped her voice would carry conviction, but it failed.

Raul hadn’t moved, probably smarting from Henry’s tug at
the leash. She stepped over and draped an arm around his waist. “Angry?”

“No. He’s right. This is terra incognita for us, and they’ve been here for years. It’s just that I hate being blindsided.”

“We’ll figure it out sooner or later.”

He threw an arm around her shoulder and drew her closer. “What do you reckon?”

“About what?”

“Those two. The doctor and Woody boy.”

“They’ll behave, at least for the time being. They have nowhere to go. We are their only chance.”

Raul lowered his head as if to check something on the floor. “And the derelicts?”

“I don’t know about the rest, but Shepherd trusts Henry with his life. His words, not mine.”

“And heavy words at that.”

“You bet. In another incarnation, they must have been close. Shepherd mentioned that it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That he trusted Henry with his life? Probably the army, then.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Shepherd’s ways, and his attention to detail and discipline. He’s ex–armed forces, and so is Henry, and probably that other man, Barandus. I would bet on that.”

“What would you bet?”

“Get lost.”

Susan returned with what seemed like a brace of ribbons. As she neared the group, she dug into the shapeless mass and shook a handful of dark tapes free.

Henry grabbed some and passed them on to Raul and her. “Here, harnesses. Strap ‘em on.”

The two-inch strips of webbing were stoutly stitched together in places and peppered with buckles. Laurel reached for the contraption and untangled its folds, trying to work out what went where.

“That’s it.” Henry blinked. “Your legs go through those hoops and your arms through there. Then you clasp it shut and tighten it by pulling this end.”

“Where are we going, then?”

Henry’s contortions to work the webbing around his colossal anatomy released a thick waft of stench. “Sewers. Dangerous places.”

“I know about sewers and fat fields … and roaches.” As she spoke, it dawned on Laurel that the word
sewers
had issued darkly from Henry’s lips.

“I mean deep sewers. Sewer workers seldom go below levels four or five, and they always wear a harness and rubber waders that come up to the crotch like yours. We don’t have waders.”

Her mind clouded with foreboding. “Deep?”

Henry nodded to her Metapad resting atop an upturned gallon can. “The map you carry covers only three levels and sections of another two deeper down. Those are the systems in service. A cross-section of central Washington has fifteen levels in places, plunging as deep as three thousand feet, and mostly uncharted.”

Questions jostled for priority in Laurel’s mind, but she chose the bliss of ignorance for what lay ahead and didn’t ask anything else.

Henry switched on his LAD flashlight. A bright circle of light appeared at his enormous rubber-boot-encased feet. “So, you know your roaches, yes?” He tilted his body and the light caught a glossy insect, almost black. “Here we have an illegal immigrant,
Blatta orientalis
, the oriental cockroach; this one must be lost, because they favor moist and warm places.” He stepped over it and a faint crunch followed a high-pitched hiss. “But there we have the locals.” His flashlight panned the floor and shapes scurried in all directions. “These are
Periplaneta americana
, our very own, and above all survivors, like all of us. Wonderfully designed scavengers. They need only warmth, water, and a little decaying matter to survive.” With the light coming from underneath, Henry’s face had gained a disturbing chiaroscuro of shifting shadows. “They’re excellent climbers, as people on the surface know too well. They climb up drains to kitchen sinks and counters with leftover food, where they feed, leaving in their wake hard, cylindrical droppings that resemble fragments of pencil lead.”

The bastard was doing it on purpose and enjoying himself.

Henry straightened and switched off his flashlight. “The males have wings and occasionally fly. But the best is … they can swim.”

Barandus neared with an armload of what seemed like folded cloth, but on closer inspection Laurel determined they were new backpacks. “A factory closed down,” he explained, “and we grabbed a few boxes. Have one.”

She darted a glance to Lukas, who had followed the roach lecture, his face tinged with an unhealthy green hue.

“I don’t understand why we should wear these.” She jerked the webbing tight around her waist with what she hoped would seem fearless certainty. “Surely we don’t have to be roped together like climbers.”

Henry cocked his head. “No, but it’s easier to drag a body out when there’s a harness to grab hold of.”

09:45

Nikola glanced at the tiny infrared laser tracking his eye movement from the screen’s frame and flicked his eyelids. LTG? What a waste of a talented young man. He scanned the résumés under the photographs of Laurel and Raul on separate screens. Same university, same years. No honors. With
another blink of his eyelids, Nikola scrolled down Bastien’s file. Solid Presbyterian family. A large one, predating the two-child law. Two younger brothers, one studying business administration, the other medicine. An elder sister, Laura, doctorate in AI. Father a circuit judge. Clean. What a waste.

After a final sip of his already cold coffee, he scanned the other files. All three had been sentenced for the same crime, obviously staged to get them into the tank. Raul Osborne had one brother, also a lawyer. His father was a local government official; his mother, an ophthalmic surgeon. Clean. Laurel Cole. No brothers or sisters, father a gardener—He stopped reading, drew the cup to his lips, tipped it back, and, unrewarded, placed it on the tabletop, his eyes never moving from the screen. Mother, waitress. A gardener and a minion? Harvard? Laurel had preyed on his mind from the onset: the odd piece. Why team a young woman with two linebackers to spring an inmate, a task needing notable muscle? There could be many reasons, but they were not obvious ones, and he loathed forcing the pieces of a puzzle to match.

Nikola stood, stretched his legs, and crossed the open office he shared with Dennis. The young man had napped for a few hours. Nikola hadn’t slept a wink.

“Anything?” Nikola asked. It was a silly question delivered instead of a greeting. Any signal from the police, the DHS, or the NSA’s listening networks would have beeped loud enough to awaken a mummy.

Dennis scanned his screens. “No reports. The usual fuck-ups at checkpoints. A group of kids tried to turn around, stoned out of their minds and without a driver’s license. Another incident involving a member of Congress and a minor; that sort of thing.”

Nikola nodded. Dennis hadn’t said the kids would be returned to their parents inside black bags, but a measure of collateral damage was to be expected in any large-scale operation.

On a box trailing a bunch of wires atop an equipment rack, a yellow light started to throb, keeping rhythm with a high-pitched beep. Dennis pecked at his keyboard, and a single
line of text scrolled on the center screen. He glanced at it and moved to leave.

Nikola reached for his arm. “Stay.” Then he stood, leaned over the box, and placed his index finger on a small window by the flashing light. The drilling tone of high-speed synchronizing data poured from overhead speakers.