The Prisoner (16 page)

As she straightened, a distinct snap sounded a few yards ahead. Not the soft scurrying sound of an animal, but a heavy step. Once more, she switched the light off and retreated toward the men. They must have heard the noise. She bumped into a shape.

“Shhhhhh.” A whisper.

Long fingers sought hers. She gripped them like a castaway would driftwood.

Another crack, closer this time. She gripped the anonymous fingers tighter.

Ahead of them something moved, followed by a cackling laugh. “Plan to hold hands all night?”

01:32

“Resourceful.” Dennis Nolan fingered a sample of the lead apron used to shield the transmitters.

“How would you have done it?” Nikola asked.

Dennis leaned over and dropped the sample on Nikola’s lap.

“Ouch!”

“Yes, lead is a good electromagnetic shield, great density, but they could have wrapped foil around their necks or wound up a copper wire a few times. I suppose the radiation apron is more elegant and foolproof, though.”

Nikola glanced at one of the overhead clocks and turned to peer through the van’s tinted window at the imposing Nyx building. The DHS scientific team would be sifting through the crime scene, and their silence could only mean there was little, if anything, of importance in the reanimation rooms or the basements. He sniffed and ran his hands over the remains of the lead apron. Not that he expected a trail of crumbs, but often frightened people behaved in the dumbest of ways.

Without a clue to their whereabouts or their sensors acting as homing beacons, the fugitives were as good as gone. The Fast Deployment Units he’d dotted through the city were mostly for show. He closed his eyes. Over a century earlier, during the Warsaw uprising in WWII, thousands of people had moved across the city through the sewers despite having masses of German troops over their heads. The Germans hated the sewers and were scared to enter them. And, after a short incursion a couple of years earlier to inspect a clandestine laboratory, Nikola understood their reluctance. Instead of keeping company with the rats, the Germans would lower
listening devices and wait patiently for any noise that didn’t belong. Then they would hurl stick grenades down the utility holes. But the groups moving about through the sewers were anything but stupid. They shunned flashlights, and talking was forbidden. Anytime Nikola met any reference to sewers in his daily work, a bizarre image flashed in his mind—a macabre procession of silent shadows in the choking darkness of a sewer.

“You have a theory how they found out about the transmitters?” Nikola asked.

“It was an oversight. I should have known.”

“Go on.” Nikola knew what Dennis was about to say, but he wanted to hear it anyway.

“When their signature flared over at Nyx, it should have been obvious they would try to reanimate Russo or, at least, stabilize him. That would mean sophisticated equipment, and nowadays they use wireless sensors. As soon as another transmitter entered the monitor’s radius of detection, it would show.”

“Yes, that was my guess.” When he spotted the machine in the surgery room, Nikola had come to a similar conclusion.

Dennis flicked his fingers over a pad and the screens refreshed with data. “There’s one thing I can’t figure out, though.”

Nikola reached by feel to a small fridge built in by his seat for a water pack—a flat, soft polymer container with a nipple to one side—and tore its seal. “Go on.”

“If these things broadcast all the time, why don’t they interfere with the equipment in the tanks?”

Dennis’s best and most useful feature was a beautiful mind, Nikola thought. “That was an obstacle when I oversaw the design, and a dead end until someone found the answer. As you know, the inmates have their sensors precisely implanted, so the transducer choker circling their necks will never be farther than a quarter inch from its receiving surface. The sensors need little power to relay signals to a receptor so close, but to be effective as tracking devices they need to broadcast with more power.”

“And that would mess with other equipment nearby,” Dennis
mused. “I suppose that scores of separate signals radiating in the close quarters of a tank must have played hell with the other receivers.”

“Precisely. The answer was to have them switched off as locators when immersed.”

“How did you manage that? A signal tripping a relay?”

“Much simpler. A junior engineer at Hypnos, almost a kid, figured it out. He wired a microscopic bimetallic strip switch to the casing.”

“A temperature switch?”

“Correct. When the inmates sink into the tank and their body temperature drops, the transmitter switches off.”

“How long can the implants broadcast?”

“Indefinitely. The erbium accumulators inside recharge from the natural current in living bodies.”

“And outside a body?”

“Almost a year. So, if they remove the implants, they’d better smash them to bits instead of keeping them as a souvenir. They are pretty things, you know?”

Dennis nodded. “You reckon they’re still wearing them?”

“Well, they didn’t have the time to take them off at Nyx. Now”—Nikola shrugged—”they have a doctor with them.” He cocked his head again to look toward the Nyx building and sighed. “I don’t think the brainiacs gathering bits of fluff down there will find anything else. Let’s go home.” He stood and stepped over to the front of the van.

Dennis’s hands flew over one of his keyboards to set the equipment on standby, then he unplugged a flat screen, perhaps six inches by eight, moved over to the driver’s seat, and clipped the pad into a docking station. A red throbbing light flashed on the device. Dennis stared into the flickering light and blinked several times. The screen flared green before dissolving into a maze of superimposing lines. Now, from the front seat, Dennis could control the sophisticated equipment in the back of the van. Nikola stared ahead. Driving with an interactive video device in the cockpit would cost anyone his or her driver’s license, but Nikola doubted that anyone, after checking the registration, would have the nerve to try it in his van.

“How good are these sewer maps you have?” Nikola asked.

“As good as they come. These are the working layouts of WASA, the D.C. Water and Sewage Authority.”

“Accurate?”

“To a point, but these cover only the upper levels.”

“How many levels are there?”

“No idea, but at least a dozen.” Dennis slowed down, then turned at an intersection.

“No maps?”

“Not even records. Sewers are the weakest spot in most old cities. An army could move through the many forgotten and unexplored levels. The authorities have tried to separate the sanitary and storm systems and have even installed sensors in some new lines—in particular those near strategic areas—but it’s a useless exercise.”

“Why?”

“As I said, only the upper levels are covered. One can install detectors on the ground floor of a house and feel protected. Problem is the many uncharted basements under the property.”

“Yes, but they still have to come up to the ground floor to get to you.”

“True,” Dennis conceded, “but they would be inside the property already. Combined systems is another problem; a nightmare.”

Nikola stared ahead as Dennis maneuvered to overtake a lumbering truck.

“Like many older cities, most of the D.C. sewers were built at the end of the nineteenth century as combined systems to carry, in the same pipe, both sanitary sewage and storm water to the treatment plant.”

“Here in Washington, D.C., I suppose that means the Blue Plains plant.”

“Right. The ideal separate system would channel sewage through one set of pipes, while storm water would flow through a separate set of pipes to the rivers. But old cities rarely have an ideal prototype of anything. Washington evolved as a combined system, with newer, separated networks only in the more recently constructed areas.”

Nikola frowned. “What’s up with a combined system?”

“The system works reasonably well in dry weather, but the main lines can’t hold both wastewater and storm water during heavy rainfall, so they divert the lot into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers, Rock Creek, and other tributaries.”

“You’re implying the fugitives can make it to the Potomac without ever having to surface?”

“I’m certain there are scores of abandoned tunnels and pipes heading in that direction.”

Nikola nodded absently. Dennis’s details backed his decision not to commit any forces to the sewers. It would have been a pointless exercise. “But the system must have been maintained and renewed, no?” He hoped the network of sensors and security measures had been extended.

“It has. But enlarging a tunnel or pipe is a nightmare. Instead, the engineers have sunk new ones at different levels, often using parts of the old ones. There have been tunnels, private railway lines, shelters, deep stores, you name it, piled on top or below one another.”

As they neared his property, a house isolated in a cul-de-sac, Nikola reached to unfasten his seat belt and paused when the dashboard screen changed color, followed by an insistent beep behind them.

Dennis stopped the van a few feet away from the already-opening wrought-iron gate, then maneuvered the vehicle to the driveway fronting the house. He killed the engine, swiveled his seat, and moved over to his console. After switching off the wireless link to his pad on the dashboard, Dennis brought the equipment online and started scrolling screens, interrogating scores of subsystems. “We had a signal and lost it.”

“Location?”

“Nope. It was a weak signal captured only by a single direction finder. Without a longer broadcast, pinpointing the signal is impossible.”

“General direction, then?”

Dennis hunched his shoulders as he started the routine of transferring links to the equipment in the house. “East.”

The river lay due east, but so did highways, towns, and scores of residential areas. Three lawyers—one of them
dead—a doctor, and a shift supervisor: an unlikely commando unit with a maverick plan and a mystery prisoner. Rather than the thrill of the hunt, Nikola’s mind thickened with foreboding.

01:42

The man waiting for them by the tracks had not volunteered anything beyond a curt “Follow me.” He cast an imposing figure in a long drab coat that almost brushed the floor, a yellow electrical cord tied around his waist as a belt. In another incarnation, the coat must have belonged to a giant. Salt-and-pepper hair, unkempt and matted, fused with a bushy beard and mustache, and a greasy stench preceded him by a good six feet.

“Friend or foe?” Floyd whispered in her ear.

Laurel eyed him warily. “He doesn’t look like the DHS to me, so let’s find out. Besides, what choice do we have?”

After filing through a two-hundred-yard stretch of tunnel, they entered a dimly lit scene worthy of Francis Bacon. Laurel had heard of homeless people living with rats in dark caverns underneath the city: nightmarish tales of pain, filth, violence, and romance. But nothing could have prepared her for this. Scores of people, scattered along the rail bed and the platforms, moved along an abandoned passenger station. They huddled around open fires or scurried into cardboard-box burrows. Flames cast dancing shadows on the curved walls, and voices mingled with grunts and the crackle of whatever burned in the fires.

The man walking ahead stopped before a figure squatting by a huge samovarlike contraption, which rested on a tripod over a camping stove. He turned to the fugitives. “Refreshments,” he said. “I’m Henry Mayer. Henry will do.”

The group stood rooted to the spot. Laurel looked around the station. It was a long structure, three or four hundred feet, split into two levels: the track bed—perhaps twenty feet wide—from which the rails had been long removed, flanked by ample passenger platforms a few feet higher up. The walls, covered in grimy tiles that once must have been white, curved to form a vaulted surface overhead.

“Over there.” Henry pointed up to a yellowish glimmer issuing from an entrance roughly in the center of the right platform wall. “We have prepared a flat surface for …” He scratched his beard. “Your colleague.”