The Prisoner (15 page)

01:23

Three hours after their descent into the sewers, Laurel stopped on a dry platform before another main branch, larger and older than the first. She peered at the Metapad screen and gauged the width of the brown lane depicted on the map. Where a red line—the path they were supposed to follow—crossed the brown, there should have been a narrow opening. She glanced up, but she could barely make it out on the
opposite wall. Eyeing the volume of effluent moving through the center of the tunnel and its speed, Laurel guessed this was the main trunk line. She suppressed a shudder. Engorged by rain, flash floods would roar down the tunnel.

“Let’s take a short break.” She wedged her back against the curved wall and slid to sit down on the concrete, thinking that someone on the surface would be dancing for the gods of rain to deliver. A flash flood would carry their bodies all the way to the Potomac.

Floyd squatted. After checking Russo’s pulse, he reached into his bag, pushed the pad of a pressure sensor into Russo’s neck, and shook his head. “I don’t know how, but he’s hanging in there. His resilience is incredible.” After digging in his bag again, Floyd produced a syrette, ripped a section of the bag open, and rammed it onto Russo’s thigh.

Laurel blinked. An intramuscular shot would spread through Russo’s metabolism at a much slower rate. That meant Russo was stable. For months she had pored over the scant literature Shepherd could find dealing with hibernation and its aftereffects, but nothing in the books she’d read could account for Russo’s ravaged state.

His ministrations complete, Floyd stood and looked around. He stepped over to sit close to her. “Do we have much farther to go?”

She cocked her head, wincing at the strain of her neck wrap. “Half a mile.”

“And then?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. We wait, I suppose.”

“That man won’t take much more of this. He needs blood.”

“You mentioned blood back at Nyx, and I saw scores of red lines on the machine’s printout. What do you people poison them with that they need a change of blood?”

“Ask Hypnos.”

“I’m asking you.”

“That man,” he pointed his chin toward the stretcher, “has had no maintenance. I’ve examined people who’d served a few years in Hypnos’s tanks. With a little fine-tuning, they were as good as new. Most of them walked away from sugar cubes after a week of convalescence, but I’ve never seen anybody
like him. He shouldn’t be alive with what is coursing through his veins.”

She bit her chapped lower lip. “I’m sorry. I know you didn’t do anything to him, but you are an expert and use a similar setup.”

“We constantly monitor our patients and regularly flush their systems free of toxins. Besides, our setup, as you call it, may be similar, but it is much more sophisticated and expensive.”

“How so?”

“The fluid temperature is critical for keeping a subject in ideal condition throughout hibernation. At commercial stations like Nyx, we use individual tanks to suspend the patients. Clearly, in a communal tank, with scores of individuals, the temperature is a compromise, an average. Shortages can be overcome only by altering the blood’s chemistry with drugs. Don’t forget renal functions are also down. Over time, impurities build up. At Nyx, we survey hematology, electrolytes, liver enzymes, nitrogen elements, protein, lipids, ratios, differentials, you name it. When counts reach a critical level, we dialyze the patients. You know, scrub their blood.”

“I know a little about dialysis.”

“How come? I thought you were a lawyer.”

“My aunt suffered a kidney failure. She went to a clinic three times a week to be hooked for hours to a machine. Sometimes I would keep her company.”

“Okay, then. Electrolytes build up and osmotic pressure goes wild, with off-the-chart levels of basophilic activity.”

“What’s that?”

“A white cell, which in turn triggers releases of histamine, heparin, and serotonin—the markers of allergic reactions.”

“You mean people in hibernation develop allergies?”

“Right. Let’s face it, the body rebels against any unnatural state, and hibernation is the most unnatural of them all for a human.” He paused and his eyes twinkled. “I couldn’t help but notice you didn’t expect your charge to be in such bad shape. You didn’t know?”

“None of us did.”

Floyd pursed his lips.

Laurel glanced toward Raul. He was staring at them and had obviously been following their exchange. His mind would be reeling with the realization that, had Shepherd and his master known that Russo was a barely living corpse, they would have never entertained such a complex operation. And Bastien would be alive. She ran a finger under the ragged edge of the lead collar.

Floyd nodded. “I’ll remove the transmitters as soon as we have a thirty-minute window.”

“Thank you.” She closed her eyes and leaned back until her head rested against the damp concrete.

After a few minutes, they got to their feet and followed the red line on the computer screen. Crossing the main sewage tunnel, they entered the narrow passage. Laurel, marching point, could hear the men’s shoulders scraping against the smooth concrete walls. The air changed. Hot wafts beat down the tube at intervals. After slow progress through a brick corridor strung crazily with obsolete electric wires and plodding through a foot-deep sour-smelling mud, they stumbled across a threshold and the passage opened into a circular chamber pierced by several openings. Laurel stood aside while the rest of the group trooped in. She glanced toward Raul and froze. “Your neck!”

Raul lowered the stretcher, his face a mask of confusion. Then his hand flew to his bare neck. He swore, pivoted on his heel, and charged out of the chamber into the corridor they had just left.

Lukas’s lips moved as if in prayer. Laurel bunched her fists as heavy thumps echoed from the passageway at their back. She glanced around at walls covered with fungi like misshapen tumors. The stone looked diseased in the stale atmosphere. Then Raul burst into the chamber, his hand holding the piece of lead apron, now dripping gunk, around his neck.

“How long?” Lukas asked.

Floyd rummaged in his bag, drew out a roll of adhesive tape, and secured Raul’s strip with a couple of extra turns. “A couple of minutes at most. He had it on when we entered that narrow passage.”

Laurel glanced at her watch—almost one-thirty—and turned to Lukas. “Can they locate us?”

He shrugged. “I doubt it. We’re deep underground, but I don’t know how these fucking things work.”

“We better get going.” Laurel pointed to one of the openings—an entrance that had formerly been closed by a grating of which nothing but the hinges remained.

Ten minutes later, the passage opened into a set of steps descending into a flooded chamber, the only exits three brick arches on the opposite wall. The foul water was capped by thin fog that left only a twelve-inch clearance at the top.

She surveyed the shocked expressions of the three men, heard a splash, and saw several spots moving across the water, like the snorkels of miniature submarines.

“Through there?” Raul’s voice had lost color.

“Middle one,” Laurel said.

“How far?” Lukas asked.

Laurel checked her computer. The red line ran straight to the top of the screen and ended in a flashing dot. They were approaching the point of the final coordinate lodged in the Metapad. After that, they would have to wait for further input. She tapped the screen, but with her nails trimmed back, the computer couldn’t identify the instruction. Swearing under her breath, she fished out the stylus and pecked at the red line, aghast at the result. “Two hundred feet.”

“Through there?” Raul sounded like a faulty recording.

“And with company.” Floyd nodded at the wakes crisscrossing the water.

The men’s faces were ghostly in the light bouncing off the milky water. A lump bobbed lazily across, and the dots in the water veered to explore. Laurel looked at Raul. “There goes one of your hairy balls.”

Nobody laughed.

“Zip Russo all the way up. We don’t want his face scraping the roof. Lukas, douse your flashlight and carry that bag above the water. Let’s go,” Laurel said.

With a resolve she didn’t feel, she locked her gaze on the opening at the other side of the chamber and stepped forward,
placing each foot with care. The water level rose until it licked the fringe of her neck wrap. On the edge of her consciousness, she fought an image of hungry rodents swimming toward her, sharp teeth laced with rabies and scores of other plagues. Another step; a splash. Something soft brushed past her thigh, the sensation sharp through the cold fabric of her suit. Another step; more splashes. Behind her, huffs, curses, and the sound of moving water. Her vision blurred. She saw a majestic oak in bright sunshine and underneath it a swing with a little girl in a white dress, giggling at each push of her father’s brawny arms. Laurel had reached the opening when she heard Lukas’s quivering voice launch into the first verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Thicker voices joined in, and she knew they would make it to the other side of the corridor.

Senator Palmer waited for the second set of beeps before answering, as
DAPHNIS
flashed on the screen of his secure set.

“Palmer.”

“I sent them off to the moles.” A carillon of code beeps, a snap, and then silence.

Palmer removed his reading glasses, a tribute to a bygone era; he’d refused intraocular surgery, preferring the old-fashioned lenses.

When he’d entered codes in his secure scrambler, Palmer had hesitated to assign
Daphnis
to Shepherd. Yes, Daphnis, the son of Hermes and a Sicilian nymph, was a shepherd, but his name originated from the Greek
daphne
. He’d looked up the word’s etymology, to discover
daphne
meant laurel or bay tree. And now Laurel would place her life and that of her companions in the hands of strangers.
Laurel, my brave dear girl
. There had to be a hidden meaning in the coincidence.

Palmer closed his eyes. His only hope now lay in people who had lost hope in society. The mole people.

Progress through the flooded tunnel was painstakingly slow. Twice Laurel stopped when her boot caught on an immersed obstacle, soft and squishy. Keeping the flashlight above water to light the way for her companions, she sidestepped,
calling out, “Lump!” The air wafted hot over the water. Halfway through, she had to wave the flashlight ahead to clear her way through a tangle of brown spaghettilike excrescences issuing through cracks in the brickwork.

“Someone had a busy weekend.” Floyd moved two paces behind her, followed by Raul. He had rested the poles on his shoulders and draped one of the belts across his forehead. At his back, Raul held the opposite end of the poles against the roof, keeping the end of the bag with Russo’s head clear of the water. Lukas closed the ranks.

Laurel saw a large clump of condoms floating past and cast a thin smile back at Floyd.

After another ten minutes of slow progress, something new crept into the fetid atmosphere. A flurry of soft noises traveled over the surface of the water. Laurel froze and switched her flashlight off. “Quiet!” Darkness crashed down on them. Tiny yellow lights scuttled across her eyes. She blinked and the lights faded.

“What is it?” Floyd whispered, almost on top of her.

“I don’t know. I thought I heard something.”

She toggled the flashlight to its minimum setting before switching it on again. They continued in silence for twenty or thirty feet, finally landing in a vast rotunda, its domed ceiling curving a good twenty feet overhead. The walls were jagged, the bricks splintered and fissured, with tufts of brown moss growing in the cracks.

“An exchange,” Lukas said.

“What?” Raul asked.

“Minor branches empty here to flood into the main line.” He pointed to a tunnel mouth gaping to their left. They waded to the edge of the rotunda and climbed a set of slippery concrete steps onto a dry sidewalk.

“So this is it?” Floyd asked.

Laurel checked the computer, glanced at the flooded tunnel they had just left, and switched the flashlight back on full beam. “No. Now we climb.” She held the light’s beam on rusty ladder rungs to an opening ten feet off the ground.

“Now you climb and we do the Sherpa routine,” Raul said.

Laurel edged along the sidewalk to the rungs and tried
them. Although covered in a thick layer of crunchy rust, the metal looked sound enough to hold their weight. When Laurel reached the opening at the top, she shone the flashlight down as the men struggled to maneuver the stretcher up the steps and parallel to the wall, Russo’s shape firmly secured with straps.

The narrow passage they entered was set on a slight incline and was dry, without watermarks. After a couple of minutes, they found themselves in a vast tunnel, the air warm and thankfully lacking the stench of sewage, although they carried plenty of the gunk dripping from their suits. A glint flashed a few feet ahead and she killed the flashlight.

“Now what? You saw something?” The rich timbre of Floyd’s voice was laced with irony.

In darkness, Laurel advanced one foot in front of the other to a point where she squatted and reached with her hand. “A fucking rail.” Again she ratcheted down the light setting and pressed the flashlight’s power switch. A dim glow highlighted two sets of standard railway tracks: an abandoned subway tunnel.