The Prisoner (27 page)

Still, the call was interesting. No kid or nomadic hillbilly behind the voice. It was refined, hectoring, its message succinctly put. He wouldn’t have referred to the cloak-and-dagger intrigues of the oil industry as
nihilistic
, an adjective better reserved for revolutionaries and other pests favored by intellectuals the world over.
Raze it to the ground
. A little melodramatic, but then, the caller had a weakness for theater, obviously. Attila the Hun: the Scourge of God who left destruction in his wake, riding a horse under whose shoes the grass withered. The infamous khan would be proud of the caller’s use of his moniker.

Nikola resumed poring over Laurel’s dossier. “Let me know if anything develops.”

Thirty minutes after leaving from the station camp, the group split up. They had divided the 280 pounds of high explosives into four heavy loads of seventy pounds each, yet Susan and Jim, the smallest-framed of the quartet, didn’t seem to struggle. When they reached a fork in the tunnel, they stopped to say good-bye. After the men exchanged backslaps and good-luck wishes, Laurel sought Barandus. “Can I ask you something?”

Barandus nodded.

She lowered her voice further. “What’s your name?”

He darted a sideways glance, as if priming to run away, blinked, and his eyes deepened. Then he licked his lower lip. “James … James Marshall.”

She stood on tiptoe and pecked him on a patch of skin devoid of hair and close to his nose. “Thank you, James,” she whispered.

Charlie huffed. “What has he got?”

Laurel neared Charlie and Jim. “Jeez, but you’re a jealous bunch.” After pecking both of them, she turned to Susan and hugged her. “You take care, hear?” Then she joined Henry to set off through the right tunnel of the fork while the group with the explosives followed along the other passageway.

Her lips tingled but not from recent activity. Laurel had
sent Shepherd another two messages since their return to warn him of their impending trek to the meeting point and to update him on Russo’s status. “Stable” was all that Floyd had said, but that had been after engulfing her in a bear hug and kissing her neck, cheek, and lips. She drew her fingers to her mouth, letting her gaze stray to Floyd, just a few feet ahead and holding on to the rear end of Russo’s stretcher, and felt heat creep up her neck.

They trudged along an abandoned sewer tunnel as quickly as they could. Henry led with an unerring sense of direction and urged them on without pausing to take bearings; this ghastly place obviously was familiar to him. Laurel plodded next to Lukas, closing the rear. The section of the tunnel had been excavated through schist: bedrock formed millions of years before. No tunneling machine had bored the passage. Laurel sensed ghosts filling the hollow space—the spirits of the workers who’d toiled to dig it a century and a half before, the countless homeless people who must have lived there, and the graffiti artists who had once ventured through with their spray cans.

“There’s a passageway close to the surface,” Henry’s voice boomed from the front, “but it’s terrible to negotiate. Too much yellow rain, metal gratings dogs like to pee on.”

Raul huffed. “Great.”

After a few hundred yards, they branched sideways into a narrower tunnel—damp, the air thick with constant sounds of dripping water. Laurel stepped around little pools of liquid collecting in hollows along the floor.

Henry stopped, motioning to Raul and Floyd to rest the stretcher on a dry patch. “We go through there.” He pointed to a narrow round opening, perhaps three feet across. “It’s the only way up. It narrows a little farther on and it will mean dragging the stretcher, but it can’t be helped.”

A few minutes later, Laurel marveled at Henry’s understatement. Reaching the upper gallery involved a rugged crawl facefirst through an opening no wider than two feet and two high, but mercifully it was only thirty feet long. As Raul and Floyd belly-crawled ahead of her, pushing and pulling the stretcher over jagged rocks, Laurel waited for a
birth-canal joke that never came.
Raul must be exhausted
. They finally reached the upper level—a large sewage tunnel with sidewalks and a shallow river of effluent slowly flowing across. Henry pointed to a ladder and a service hole in the ceiling. “That’s it. Lights off.”

With the flashlights turned off, the space became a sensory-deprivation tank but for the noises seemingly all around them.

“The FDU squad has located the phone.”

Over the years, Nikola had memorized the little nuances in Dennis’s voice when delivering snippets of information. He waited a moment, but only to confirm no added details would be forthcoming without a prompt. “Where?”

“The sewers.”

Nikola was still, his face twitching as if recovering from an impromptu slap. His eyes darted to a clock over the antique marble mantelpiece: 23:53—twenty-three minutes since the ridiculous threat and only minutes away from its deadline. Every DHS unit was deployed on the northern side of town, leaving the south squarely in the hands of the police, their roadblocks the only way to prevent an escape. Roadblocks … soon to be hurriedly unmanned as all units rushed to contain a major terrorist attack.

“There’s more.”

This time he didn’t offer a prompt.

“Bellevue Hospital has just reported a theft. An unknown person or persons have broken into their emergency supply room and made off with several pieces of equipment—and forty pints of type-O blood. The police are there with a scientific team. It seems one of the thieves left a set of strange footprints in the garden outside.”

Nikola bunched both fists on his desktop until his knuckles whitened.

“Prosthetic legs.”

23:58

“Carry on as usual. Imagine we’re not here.”

Charley Navarre swallowed hard, eyeing the three black-clad hulks weaving past the consoles at Villiard’s nuclear power station control room.
How can I ignore them?
Whoever designed the shiny body armor of the DHS FDU teams must have liberally copied the bad guys’ gear from a fifty-year-old film saga depicting intergalactic conflict. Heavy helmets bristling with dimples and lumps, probably housing communications gear, were mated with face masks that hid the wearer’s expression except for the eyes. They were the only hint that a sentient being was actually inside the articulated Kevlar carapace. Their boots were enormous. Charley wondered if, besides protecting the bearer’s feet, the monstrous contraptions doubled as some kind of storage.

He glanced at Hulk One, from which the voice originated, and at the object cradled in his arms: a rectangular box roughly the size to carry a dozen long-stemmed roses. But it was black, dotted with tiny lights and other mean-looking bits. Then Charley nodded at Sherry and Dieter, working the other two consoles, and looked down into the array of screens flanking his semicircular desk without registering the otherwise-normal diagrams sneaking across the displays. The Scourge of God? A terrorist attack? The whole thing somehow sounded too far-fetched.

His comm console flashed. “Navarre,” he said.

“Everything fine with you?” The voice of Dave Vela, the night-shift plant director, sounded harried.

“Well, I have three”—Charley was about to say
gorillas
,
but checked his words—”DHS officers here, but otherwise normal.”

“Let’s be philosophic about this. Chalk it up to a security exercise.”

“Will do.”

Hulk Three changed posture and shook his leg. It suddenly occurred to Charley that inside the bulky armor, scratching an itch had to be a bitch. “I doubt they’ll be here much longer. Several squads are checking—”

The room trembled. Red lights flashed over the control panels as earthquake detectors triggered a warning. The room shook again and a deafening siren, reminiscent of yesteryear submarines announcing a crash dive, blared in the confined space.

“Scram!” Charley kicked back his swivel chair and bolted upright, only to be stopped by a paw slamming down on his shoulder. He jerked around to face the towering figure of Hulk One.

“Where are you going?”

“Alarm control panel.” He pointed to the far right of the main-reactor control panel. “I need to shut the reactor down.” Hulk One did nothing for a couple of heartbeats but stare back at him with splendid blue eyes. After tiny lights flickered to a side of his helmet, he stepped back and nodded. “Go ahead.”

Charley bolted past Sherry and across the control room, skidding to a stop before a panel to press a blue + button twice, raising the installation status to emergency levels. Then he slammed a large square pad stenciled
Immediate Emergency Commence
. To his left, another, smaller panel,
Emergency Confirm
, glowed red. After a moment’s hesitation, he pressed it, cutting the current to electric motors operating the control rods. Without brakes, powerful springs would ram the rods down into the reactor’s core in less than four seconds, halting the nuclear reaction and shutting the plant down.

Hands trembling, Charley stepped back and glanced at Sherry’s and Dieter’s frightened faces. A swarm of green lights over the diagram of the reactor core slowly faded. The
rules were clear about the procedure to follow after the earthquake trembler switches tripped, but Charley understood their shock. Restarting the reactor after an emergency shutdown would take several weeks and cost millions of dollars in lost production and the replacement of parts damaged during the shutdown process. He tried a reassuring smile he didn’t feel, then had to lean on the control panel to arrest a sudden weakness in his legs. The siren finally stopped, and a canned female voice announced, “Reactor shutdown successful.”

The sudden silence thickened the air, disturbed only by a creak when one of the hulks changed position. Then the ground shook again and Sherry screamed. The three DHS officers stood still at their stations. Then, as if primed by hidden clockwork, they marched to the open doors and exited the room. Hulk One turned around from the corridor. “Bolt yourselves in. We’re under attack.”

“Now what?” Laurel asked.

Silence.

Laurel glanced around the dim interior of the van, one side occupied by Russo in his stretcher and the other by Raul, Lukas, and, next to her, Floyd. The steel floor was hard and cold. “Tyler?”

“We wait.”

They had exited the sewers in a disused warehouse a scant few yards from a dark van with no windows. Shepherd—who had since introduced himself as Harper Tyler—had stood by the utility hole, helping everyone in turn and lending a hand with the stretcher before hustling them toward the vehicle. After reaching inside the cabin and lugging out black garbage bags—heavy, by the looks of them—he had turned toward Henry.

“What will you do, Sergeant?” Tyler asked in a low voice.

Henry had reached for the bags. “A quarter goes to Santos and another quarter to the old-timers helping out with this little stunt of yours; everyone involved will take a powder until things cool down a bit. With the rest, I’ll move to Honduras. I have a friend there. I’ll set up a chinchilla farm in the mountains.”

“Chinchillas?”

“Rich bitches love their fur.”

“Sounds good. What about the others?” Tyler nodded toward the gaping utility hole.

“It’ll be hell for a while, moving about and hiding, but they’re used to living rough. Most of them wouldn’t be able to live any other way.” He offered his hand.

Tyler brushed the hand aside and hugged Henry, a strong waft of decay spreading like spores from a bursting seedpod.

“Take care, my friend.”

“It’s been a pleasure.” His eyes bright, Henry knotted the mouths of the bags together, dropped them down the utility hole, and, with a departing wave, disappeared down the shaft.

As soon as Henry left, Tyler had opened the warehouse’s creaking sliding door and driven the vehicle to the end of a narrow alley, where he killed the engine. “Half a mile down that road there’s a police patrol.” Tyler nodded at the windshield. “As it is, we can’t get through. Within the next few minutes, however, we hope the police will remove their barriers and thus grant us safe passage.”

Next to Laurel, Floyd made a face of resignation. Then he unfolded his hand palm up. Laurel turned to glance into his eyes, dimly lit by a streetlight half a block down the road, and realized his extended palm held a deeper meaning. Raul and Lukas didn’t miss the gesture and also stared at Floyd’s hand. She glanced at the empty metallic wall above Russo’s reclining shape, Floyd’s palm unmoving in her peripheral vision. Of course, she’d read her share of romances in her teenage years and fantasized about princely proposals, but these belonged in fairyland. Reality was his hand, now, in a dark van reeking of sweat and sewage, with a dying man on the floor and a syrette loaded with cyanide pressing against her breast in her top pocket. She didn’t surrender her hand to his straightaway. Some things were far too important to rush—such as letting him know she understood—and took precedence over the promise of warmth. Then she reached for his hand and held on to it. Raul and Lukas breathed again. Laurel closed her eyes. His grip felt like a toast to life.