The Prisoner (23 page)

“Its exact composition is open to debate, but it’s probably algae that live off the decaying materials commonly found here. Harmless, though. Let’s check for fumes.” He flicked a gas lighter and peered at the flame. Then he returned it to one of the cavernous pockets in his greatcoat. “Had there been a tinge of orange in the flame, it would mean trace levels of natural gas. But we’re all right.”

“All right?” Laurel looked around. “I mean, is there no end to the shit?”

Henry’s voice took on a patronizing tone. “This is the lower world. It’s a paradox that we know more about space, stars, and galaxies light-years away than about the sewers beneath our city streets. No government has ever thought of exploring, much less cleaning, these regions.”

“People need to know about this and do something about it. I mean, these should be cleaned, or sealed—” Laurel bit her lip. Her thoughtless comment reeked of high school idealism.

Barandus neared and breathed deep. He panned his flashlight up and down the tunnel, painting a swath across the crumbling brick. Charlie and Jim drew near, their eyes never leaving Barandus, and Laurel could have sworn they were holding their breath. “People don’t want to know what happens to their shit.” Barandus spoke with a strangely measured voice, pronouncing every word with care, as if addressing a congregation. “Excrement, like everything else, has become a heritage industry. Out of sight, out of mind. For most people, shit, like death, is a private matter. Once it leaves the body, its afterlife is up to whoever collects the taxes.”

He paused and his voice lowered. “Civilization has its mirror in the sewers. The filth of men falls into this pit of reality, where social class ends. Engulfed by their latrines, the rich and the powerful mingle again with their humbler brethren here.” He raised a leg and brought the toe of his rubber boot to the surface of the effluent, where it created a miniature eddy. “This brew is a confession. There’s no more hypocrisy, no cosmetics to disguise upbringing. Here there’s nothing left but the terrible shape of our shared miseries. There, a syringe speaks of oblivion, a mop head of domesticity; there, an effigy of the Virgin Mary reverts to cheap plastic, hobo spittle meets noble puking, and, farther on, the lost engagement ring jostles the razor blade that severed a dreamer’s veins. And you wonder why people deny sewers? A sewer doesn’t keep secrets or keep appearances. Here we’re surrounded by truth.” Again he breathed deep before shifting in his rubber boot, as if testing the ground under the filth. Then he hunched his shoulders and started to plod ahead.

Laurel’s head spun. She had no idea how the Paris sewers must have felt to Victor Hugo, but his source of inspiration for
Les Misérables
now seemed obvious. And Barandus had shamelessly borrowed from the French master for his impromptu speech.

Raul shook his head. “He doesn’t speak much, but when he does …”

“What?”

“I wish he’d kept his mouth shut.”

“Depressing, huh?” Laurel asked.

Henry looked around as if taking a bearing and followed Barandus. “Reality always is.”

Raul rubbed his hands. “How much longer?”

“Half an hour,” Henry said. “We’re almost there.”

As he severed the communication with Shepherd, Senator Palmer knew the meaning of fear as never before. Shepherd had sent the storm warning to Laurel but didn’t get confirmation or an answer, so he’d called Palmer. It was raining hard. Through the patio doors came sounds like the percussion section of a high school band. He watched, mesmerized,
as sheets of water slid down the glass expanses to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning: a classic of late-summer Washington, D.C. Then the storm ended abruptly, as though bored. Outside, the lawn steamed. Palmer slid open the patio doors to the smell of electricity in the air, his mind thick with foreboding.

They continued single file along a passage without sidewalks, trampling slimy water in their wake. Soggy clothing dripped, boots and rags squelched. The piercing beams of LAD flashlights highlighted wisps of steam rising from the hair and misshapen coats of the marchers.

“My children,” Henry’s voice boomed from the head of the line, “let reality shine into your dark consciences. The world is swimming in shit.”

“Amen,” Laurel grumbled.

“Ah, but sewers are the conscience of the city,” Raul offered.

Nobody commented.

Laurel glanced down to hide a rueful smile.
How fitting
, she thought. Raul was also borrowing from Victor Hugo.

“Shhhh.” Henry suddenly stopped, waving his arms to command silence.

Laurel held her breath, her ears registering dripping noises. Then, far away, a faint and low sound intruded.

Henry reached into his coat, produced his cheap lighter once more, and flicked its flame into life, an instant before bellowing, “Flash flood!” Then he swung around and started to run.

13:30

From a small niche in the corridor between the living room and his study, Nikola selected a bottle of rum, only shreds of its faded label still clinging to the glass. He reached for a small cut-glass tumbler and carted the lot to his desk, musing that his 1959 Lemon Hart was the greatest British achievement in the West Indies.

He glanced to Dennis’s vacant workstation; the young man was catching a few hours of shut-eye now that the incoming reports had trickled down to nothing. As an afterthought, he drew the sleeve of his worn house coat to his nose and nodded. He’d warned Mrs. Sotomayor, the housekeeper, against experiments with new soaps and fabric softeners. Last time she tried, his house clothes had a smell that vividly reminded Nikola of a Turkish brothel. After a long hot shower, a couple of hours of dreamless sleep, a few minutes in the sauna until he broke a decent sweat, and a dip in a tub of water—chilled just above freezing—he certainly felt renewed.

From the beginning of the wretched breakout episode, he’d been disturbed by a strange premonitory feeling. A practical man, never burdened with spiritual or supernatural accoutrements, the overwhelming sensation of danger he felt was playing hell with his otherwise acute capacity for analysis and concentration. On one hand he had the facts: Three young people had sentenced themselves into a sugar cube. Two of them, helped by a civil servant, had sprung an obscure and seemingly inconsequential illegal inmate. Through the sewers, they had reached a commercial hibernation facility for the rich, discovered they were broadcasting their location, and fled once more into the sewers with another confederate:
a medical doctor well versed in revival techniques.

On the other hand, he had an unexplained riddle: Who had sentenced Russo to a living death? Odelle herself, or was she acting on someone’s behalf? Who had the means and the clout to pull off such a stunt—complex, expensive, and needing awesome intelligence and logistic resources? And the most worrisome detail: Why? No doubt the missing threads were interwoven, but the picture was blurry, as if viewed through a fogged glass.

Nikola was well acquainted with the hibernation penal system and the sordid reality of its creation, development, testing, and the internecine wars between the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Hibernation for control. In the end, Odelle Marino, the DHS empress, had won and trampled over the FBH.

The hibernation concept was sound; it had done away with an obsolete network of crime universities and transformed the penal system into a tool to empty the streets of criminals at an affordable cost. Yet it was fitting that perfection eluded human endeavors. The system was flawed. Hypnos, like any enterprise ruled by marketing, tried to cut corners and economize on the design, surveying, and maintenance of the facilities while maximizing their profits. Nothing wrong with trying. The DHS had enlisted Nikola and two other security consultants to supervise the design, propose improvements, and rein Hypnos in. Nikola could also understand the empty center tanks—a little extra capacity for experimentation and testing, in particular if Uncle Sam footed the bill. The crafty way in which the issue of the center spaces was palmed through both Houses—four-inmate tanks within a large tank, really—meant that not only Hypnos but also government agencies had access to an advanced meat chiller to preserve guinea pigs and the kind of subjects who couldn’t or shouldn’t be killed outright but kept available, just in case. The illegality of the scheme was nothing new, but issues like legality had certainly never bothered politicians before, providing the scheme was kept under the exacting constraints of the eleventh commandment: Thou shalt not be found out.

He sniffed his rum and peered with regret at the scant inch left at the bottom of the bottle. Intensely powerful nose: toffee, prunes, old marmalade, dates, overripe mango, caramel, vanilla, allspice … After a little sip, Nikola let the flavors develop on his tongue, swallowed, and made a wry gesture when an image of dank sewers intruded upon his bliss.

Nikola probably knew the Washington sewers better than anyone alive—not the pipes and tunnels carrying the citizenry’s wastes, but the warrens of power bursting with indescribable filth. Yet, rather than becoming dulled from continuous exposure to the stench of greed and hypocrisy, his nose had remained delicately sensitive—a trait that had kept him alive after forty years of shady work. From his beginnings as a CIA operative, then later a chief of station, and eventually director of internal security at the DHS, his nose had unerringly steered him away from disaster. When he realized the value of his nose in the open market, he was a shade away from his fiftieth birthday. Nikola quit the civil service and became a security consultant—a euphemism favored by elitist mercenaries the world over.

He blinked at the sensor in his desktop screen to call up Eliot Russo’s file—a fascinating document with a physical description and a few professional, educational, and personal background notes. Nikola found it fascinating not because of the scant information it contained but for the glaring voids. Someone had used the system to settle a score, of that he was certain. Another party was bent on exposing the sham, and Nikola was caught in the middle.

As a mercenary, Nikola had an unshakable code of values; he owed fidelity to the customer—in this instance the DHS. But this case was different. The customer was playing her own game by keeping critical cards close to her chest, leaving Nikola in the uncomfortable position of having to question his loyalties to avoid getting caught in the cross fire.

After more than an hour poring over the fugitives’ files and preparing a list of notes—most of them questions—Nikola downloaded the lot into his hybrid data-and-communications pad. He decided against leaving a finger of the precious rum in the bottle and, with a sigh, he poured the rest into his tumbler.
Then he stood and padded over to his bedroom, carrying the glass, to get dressed for his first visit. The legend of Alexander the Great’s expedient maneuver to untangle the Gordian knot was a sobering lesson, its substance unimpaired by the passage of millennia. If the ends are hidden, with no thread to pull from to resolve the tangle, hack through the knot.

13:34

As if powered by unseen clockwork, the group bolted forward at once, splashing madly through twelve inches of effluent. Laurel’s Metapad blipped once, sharp—an incoming message. She charged ahead into a chaos of flying whitish water, ragged gasps, and the unnerving splash of boots falling.

“Climb, climb!” Henry had reached a string of rusty handholds rising through the curved tunnel wall to a small opening, barely three feet across near its top.

“Climb, damn you!”

When Susan reached the spot where Henry stood yelling, Charlie and Jim were already climbing like cats. Susan jumped halfway up, grabbed the handhold, and hauled herself up with one swift movement. The trio scrabbled for purchase on the rusty treads and dove headfirst into the upper culvert.

Five feet from Henry and Barandus, who stood at either side of the handholds, Laurel heard the roar and Raul’s shout. She looked behind at a rush of water coming toward her and the barreling shape of Raul, his mouth wide open.