The Prisoner (49 page)

Odelle Marino was much more intelligent than he’d given her credit for, Palmer conceded. Rather than fighting a battle she couldn’t possibly win, she was willing to step down, as long as she could keep the spoils. It wasn’t surrender but a negotiated armistice.

“And if I don’t?”

“I spotted your grandson earlier. Timmy, isn’t it? Hiding in his tree house, adorable.”

Palmer knew what was coming next. Predictable. “You have no shame. …”

“None. We’re talking survival, Senator. As a student of history, you should take Sun Tzu’s counsel and leave a gap for your enemy to flee. A cornered foe is as formidable as its desperation.”

She’d shown her ace, and she wasn’t bluffing.

“When I get back downtown, I plan to announce the imminent recapture of the fugitives. Twenty-four hours, Palmer. That’s how long you have to hand over Russo.”

“What about the others?” he asked grimly.

“They’re irrelevant in the scheme of things. Keep your granddaughter and the young lawyer as a consolation prize. The doctor won’t ever be able to practice again, but he’s young. The turncoat can elope to Peru and sire dozens of cinnamon-skinned bastards; I couldn’t care less. Get them new identities and make sure they keep their noses clean. I’ll send photos to the press showing a few prisoners returned to justice, and that will be that.”

Palmer backed up a pace to recover his personal space. She stared—not at him, but through him.

“You can hide him in a vault, Palmer, in Switzerland or Tierra del Fuego, but I will find your Timmy. And, when I do, so help me God, you’ll never see him again. So don’t fuck with me, and don’t push me any further. I can use the full resources of the DHS to get that boy, and his mother, and his father, and his father’s father, and all of your wretched kin. You’ll get me, eventually, but it will cost you.”

“Are you done?”

She smiled. “I am, but … I would love to hear you accept my reasonable offer.”

Palmer pasted a suitably shaken grimace on his face.

“Will you deliver Russo within twenty-four hours?”

I will, indeed
. Palmer stared at her, then nodded.

She swiveled toward the copse of trees and waved a hand. “Don’t be a fool, Senator. I could have snatched your grandson an hour ago.” She paused, raised an arm, and snapped her fingers. “Just like that.”

23:36

“What will you do after?” Floyd asked.

“After what?”

“After tomorrow.”

“What tomorrow?” Laurel reached into her trousers pocket for a nonexistent piece of gum—a shameful ruse to give her hands something to do. The house was quiet. After a marathon of brainstorming and Tyler’s continuous trips carrying his communications pad, he had laid out the plan. Some details were still hazy. He’d kept the means of transport close to his chest, as well as who would be going and where, but the gist of the plan was deceptively simple. The group would split into two. While one team would ostensibly drive toward the ABC TV studios on Rhode Island Avenue, the other, with Russo, would head for the Capitol and Congress, where Senator Palmer and his confederates would be waiting. Somewhere along the way, the first team would detour and head for Congress also.

Harebrained
would be a merciful adjective to describe the ploy, but Tyler seemed very much in control and everybody agreed they were alive thanks to his, so far, passable scheming. But tomorrow held too many unknowns. Hypnos and the DHS would not stand on the sidelines while a bunch of fugitives apparently headed toward one of the most prominent TV facilities in the country. And the Capitol, after the White House, was the most secure building in the world. How the police or DHS forces would play their hand was anybody’s guess, but the consensus was they would shoot first and answer questions later. Yet Tyler had disclosed that there was another force at play—someone helping them from the
shadows—and that his or her intervention could make the difference. Who? He didn’t know. The highlight came when Lukas asked directly what their chances were. Tyler had drawn from his already extinguished pipe, producing a strange sound between crackling and gurgling, before deadpanning, “Ten percent.” And even that sounded unreasonably optimistic.

Russo looked good—still as helpless as a newborn, but with a seething resolve to speak. Halfway through one of their long conversations, Floyd had mashed the tip of a banana and given him a tiny morsel on the tip of a spoon. Russo had kept the mush in his mouth for an inordinately long time, shifting it from right to left, his eyes narrowed as if in a trance. Later he offered a weak smile before mouthing a single word: “Ambrosia.”

Laurel reached for Floyd’s hand. “We can live only one day at a time, and a day is all we have.”

“I meant—”

“I know. You meant us, and that requires time—time we don’t have. Yet. We’re strangers. How long have we known each other? Four days? Five?”

“Six.” Floyd put a hand around her shoulder and drew her closer. “I know all about the acceleration of emotional processes in the presence of impending doom.”

“I know you do, and I’ve done my best to exorcise any thoughts of continuity from my mind. I don’t want to engage in pyrrhic dreaming exercises about what might be, when chances are we’ll be dead tomorrow.”

“But dreaming marks the difference between us and other creatures in the cosmos.”

“You got it,” Russo said.

They both turned toward the couch where Russo lay. He’d removed his dark glasses and was looking at them with remarkably bright eyes.

“Why does a blade of grass push its way through scorched earth in the middle of a battlefield? Chances are it will be obliterated by the next blast, but it will still try. We’re not that different from any other creature except we can imagine, dream, and hope. Emotions are what keep us alive.”

Laurel stood up and padded to Russo to fluff up a cushion under his head and offer him a drink of juice. “It’s very bad manners to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.”

“Then you should keep the volume down.” He sucked on the straw and attempted a smile. “But you’re right inasmuch as it makes little sense to plan certain things around the unknown. You’re nice people, and the species is rare, probably heading for extinction. Later, if there’s time to be had, you should spend it learning about each other.”

“What would you do if there were time?”

Russo smiled. “Here we go again, daydreaming.”

“That’s one of the things we do best as a species,” Floyd said. “Please don’t tell me you’ve not given a second’s consideration to the possibility of winning.”

“Touché
. If by the fickle hand of fate we pulled through, I would attempt to set up the machinery to oversee the hibernation system.”

“Revenge?” Floyd asked.

“Not at all. The past is gone and the future has not happened yet, hence we cannot travel to either, or undo it, or recover any part of it save through dreaming. To seek redress would serve no purpose. Laurel spoke about pyrrhic dreaming, and vengeance would be indeed a pyrrhic exercise.”

Laurel caught the odd glimmer in Russo’s eye and turned to Floyd in time to spot his frown.

“By pyrrhic you mean pointless?”

“I’m sorry.” Russo chuckled. “This is the problem of our era—to append imaginary meanings to the things we don’t understand instead of simply asking for an explanation. Pyrrhus was a Spartan king who won a battle against the Greeks at the cost of losing his entire army.
Pyrrhic
means a bitter victory: a victory won at such great cost to the victor that it is tantamount to a defeat.”

Floyd nodded. “You have a point. We find it difficult to simply ask for an explanation of something we don’t grasp. In my job, I know from the halfhearted nods I get from patients or their families that they don’t understand anything of what I’m saying, yet they seldom ask me to clarify.”

“Do you like your job?” Russo asked.

Laurel turned to Floyd. It was a question she’d often thought of asking him and never had.

“I can help people.”

“You’re sidestepping the question,” Russo said.

“I keep forgetting you’re a lawyer. Yes, I like my job. I only hope that more resources will be allocated to basic research on the mechanics of hibernation.”

“Independent research?” Russo insisted.

“Nothing else can be true research. Corporate research is necessarily biased to match their goals. If these goals coincide with the public good, everybody wins, but that’s wishful thinking.”

“I agree. Hibernation in itself is the solution to an age-old problem of civilization: what to do with those who represent a danger to society. But to place the responsibility in corporate hands is madness.”

Laurel straightened, suddenly aware that Russo was outlining something to which he must have given much conscious thought. “You mean the hibernation system should be government run?”

“No, I don’t. If governments ran the system, it would soon become bogged down in bureaucracy, departments would fight over allocations, and eventually it would mushroom into a quagmire of complexity and expense, defeating its original purpose. This new prison system is inherently sound. It’s well suited to be run by a corporate concern, but only with the right safeguards in the hands of government and independent bodies. But no corporation should be allowed to own the technology and conduct its own research.”

“Talk about dreaming.” Floyd chuckled.

Russo grimaced. “Well, as Tyler said, we have a one in ten chance.”

“I fear Harper Tyler is an inveterate optimist,” Laurel said.

“Still,
dum spiro spero,”
Russo whispered.

Floyd frowned.

Laurel smiled. She’d seen the quote on her parents’ home mantelpiece every day since childhood. “While I breathe, I hope.”

“Amen,” Floyd said.

“And you? What would you do if there’s a tomorrow?” Russo asked.

For a while Floyd didn’t answer, then he drew a hand over the incipient stubble on Laurel’s head, as if caressing a newborn. “I would go for broke and ask her out for coffee.”

As his hand warmed her scalp, Laurel suddenly felt as if tomorrow was real.

08:10

The noise of an approaching engine drew a flurry of glances and nervous gestures from Raul and Lukas. Laurel turned to Tyler, who sat on a stool by the kitchen peninsula, seemingly unconcerned. She leaned over Russo and ran a hand over his brow. “Don’t worry; they’re friends.” She hoped.

Russo nodded once.

Lukas stepped over to the window overlooking the front porch, slid his fingers to widen a gap between the blinds’ horizontal slats, and peered outside. “Shit,” Laurel heard him mumble.