The Prisoner (52 page)

Lukas lowered his head, his lips moving, and Laurel thought there couldn’t be a much better reason to pray.

“Stop the vehicle and switch off the engine,” boomed a voice with a Hispanic accent coming out of nowhere and everywhere at once. Raul jerked and slammed on the brakes. Barandus resumed his singing in a low voice.

“Stay in the vehicle. Don’t attempt to leave it,” the same voice echoed once more.

Raul yanked out the van’s ignition card. The chunky piece of plastic swung from a thin chain attached to the steering wheel, clicking against the dash. Otherwise, there was silence.

“Now what?” Laurel asked.

Raul placed both hands on the steering wheel at ten and two. “Now they blow us to kingdom come.”

Lukas sat straighter.

Ahead, the trucks disgorged never-ending lines of armor-clad DHS FDU teams, who deployed in an advancing semicircle. Through the driver’s-side mirror, Laurel eyed a dark wave approaching from the rear. She thought the ancient Roman legions must have looked like that. Not like individuals but one unit: an army. Then the ranks ahead parted to allow a squat tracked vehicle—like a miniature tank—through, with what looked like a cannon mounted on top.

“They’re going to fire.” Laurel closed her eyes when Lukas joined with Barandus in singing, “We shall overcome, one day …” in a trembling voice.

“Someone is coming.” Raul glanced at his mirror, almost filled by a dark van approaching from behind at a sedate pace.

The tiny tanklike vehicle slowed to a standstill thirty feet ahead, then it swerved to the right and continued moving at an angle to take up station ten feet to their side, the cannon rotating on top as if preparing for a broadside.

“It’s a camera,” Laurel said.

“What is?” Raul asked.

“The cannon. It’s a camera.”

The contraption drew closer, motors whirring. Three feet from their van, it stopped, and the tube rose on concertina arms like the eye of an alien cyclops. Then powerful projectors fired, bathing the interior of the van in bluish light. Laurel flinched and her knees started to shake. After endless seconds, the lights doused and the contraption whirred away, its rubber tracks producing curious flapping noises.

On their left side, some fifty feet away, the dark-blue van stopped and its side door slid back to disgorge a slight man in an old-fashioned hat, smart tweed overcoat, and thick
glasses. The man raised his face to the sun, then turned toward a single DHS officer standing to one side and nodded. When the officer drew near, the man in the hat reached into his jacket pocket and handed him a piece of paper. He waited until the officer finished reading and recovered the paper. Then, hands deep in his coat’s pockets, he strolled in their direction, lazily glancing right and left.

Around them, scores of DHS FDU officers, their black armor gleaming under the strong sun, deployed in a circle perhaps one hundred feet in diameter containing both vans. Their weapons were trained steadily on the fugitives.

“That van is just like ours—same model, same year, same color,” Lukas said, looking straight ahead into the black ring of DHS forces.

“And same plate number,” Raul muttered.

Laurel looked at the parked vehicle. The driver, a young man with wraparound sunglasses, had descended, hefting a large shoulder bag, and marched purposefully toward the other side of the road. The tracked vehicle with the camera turned around when it reached the ring of troops, and its arm swung to train its camera on the van the young man had just vacated. The officer who had conferred with the man in the hat marched before the line of DHS troops and pointed toward the other van.

“How do you know?” Laurel asked.

“I checked as it approached.”

When the newcomer stopped, his nose scant inches from their van’s driver’s side, Raul reached to his door and lowered the window. “Wh-what do you want?” Raul asked, his hands back on the steering wheel at ten and two.

The man didn’t answer but peered with piercing china-blue eyes at Raul’s head, slowly traveling his face and chin, then panned over to Lukas, his lips blossoming into a slight pout, as if ready to blow a kiss. He sidestepped to the passenger window and leaned both arms on the windowsill, his nose inside the vehicle.

Laurel caught a slight whiff of cinnamon and something else, perhaps citrus but equally pleasant, like a warm cake.

Then the man must have caught Barandus’s song, even though it had died down to a whisper. He cocked his head and narrowed his eyes in concentration for what seemed a very long time before nodding once. “Indeed you shall.” Slowly he straightened, rested a hand with soft fingers on the sill, and spoke into his lapel. “Blast it.”

The air burst into an earsplitting cacophony of explosions as the troops fired a never-ending rosary of high-caliber bullets into the van parked scant yards away. Windows shattered, tires burst, and the sickening crunch of twisting metal followed when the vehicle exploded in a fireball.

Laurel closed her eyes and screamed, hands drawn to her ears in a useless effort to stop the clamor of smashing bullets. Then a whoosh of hot air buffeted her face, and she threw out her hand to grasp on to something. When the roar subsided, she opened her eyes to sparkling blue eyes watching her a few inches to her left.

Outside, like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, a low mist had fallen on the road. The ghostly soldiers in their black fatigues turned on their heels, moving toward their vehicles through swirling smoke redolent of cordite and burned rubber.

“Can I have it back?”

Laurel gazed, realized she was gripping his hand, and immediately let go. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He squinted. “The Capitol is that way.” He nodded toward the next intersection and, giving wide berth to the burning vehicle, turned toward the young man waiting with his shoulder bag.

10:12

The view past the heavy brocaded curtains and sheers framing the window was different from what Odelle Marino remembered. The grass stretching past the granite monolith of the fountain built over the Senate garage seemed dull, as if all color had been leached from it. Even the lion-head spouts on the fountain looked somber. In the distance, blurry through a gauzy morning mist, the rectangular mass of the Robert A. Taft Memorial and Carillon also appeared featureless and dull.

Yes, today Capitol Hill looked different—not so much a place of glory and recognition but of reckoning.
I have nothing to worry about; everything is under control
. She turned and panned slowly across the magnificent room, obviously not an office despite its furniture: a desk with two easy chairs, and two sofas flanking a low table framed by the backdrop of twin windows. No doubt the room was used as an antechamber for meetings or a sweat room for witnesses and experts to cool their heels. That she had been made to wait for a shamefully long time was something she had filed away in her repository of scores to settle.

After a slight rap, the door opened and a slender, immaculately groomed young man with half-closed eyes, whose badge read
Anthony
, stood straight. “They are waiting for you, madam.”

Although both she and Vinson had been summoned, the committee wanted them in separately. Genia Warren, the little bitch, was also supposed to appear before the committee, but so far she was nowhere to be seen. Odelle glanced at the
orderly, then did a double take. The sleepy-lidded young man was looking around with the calculating poise of a professional killer. Only an idiot would fail to recognize a superbly trained professional. She stifled an inward curse before turning toward Vinson Duran. They had been contained for the best part of an hour in the Russell Senate Office Building. Vinson glanced at his cellular-phone screen and pressed his lips together into a thin line.

Still no news. Nikola had demanded full authority over the DHS FDU units to oversee the mopping up. Yes,
demanded
was the correct term. The man was becoming hectoring in his old age and had probably outlived his usefulness.
One thing at a time
.

“Give me a minute.”
The inquisitors can also wait
, she thought.

“Yes, madam.” The young man nodded and left the room, softly pulling the door behind him.

“Wait. Have the sergeant at arms come over.” Odelle cocked her head but didn’t turn to face the orderly. “Please,” she added, as an afterthought.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The device in Vinson’s hands pinged and he lowered his face to it, as if closeness could speed reception. Odelle clenched her hands for an instant, eyes on the grass outside, marshalling her body language to disguise her trepidation.

“Done,” Vinson said, his face creasing into a cockeyed smile. “A van was stopped at a checkpoint on Rhode Island Avenue, halfway to the ABC building.”

“Spare me the geography,” she snapped.

He didn’t raise his eyes from the tiny screen. “From the video feed, the scanner positively identified Lukas Hurley, Raul Osborne, and Laurel Cole with over ninety percent certainty and Eliot Russo with over fifty percent.”

“Why only fifty percent?”

“The man was prone on a stretcher and wrapped in blankets. Reasonable, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t.” The tightness in her chest relaxed a fraction. “Go on.”

“When the fugitives refused to leave their vehicle and reached for concealed weapons, the officer in charge had no option but to order his men to open fire. Those were Mr. Masek’s exact words.”

Odelle waited.

“The vehicle exploded. No survivors.”

Odelle peered through narrowed eyes at the Capitol grounds. The light had changed and the mist must have shifted; in the new aching clarity, vegetation and monuments sharpened into focus. The doctor was missing, but he was of little consequence. So much for Palmer’s witnesses.

“Now you can pull the plug.”

Vinson’s face lit up as he jabbed a code into his cell phone. Then there was a soft rap on the door and Odelle turned to find Edward O’Keefe, the Capitol’s head of security, personally handpicked by her several years before. As the Senate’s chief law-enforcement officer, the sergeant at arms traditionally maintained order and security on the premises and was independent of any agency or the army. But that was before the providential takeover of Capitol Hill by an extreme-left group in the fall of 2049. After taking a score of senators and other lesser officers hostage, a standoff ensued, in which it was clearly demonstrated that the resident security forces were ill-equipped to deal with such an emergency. While Thomas Corvus, then the aging and incompetent president, agonized, surrounded by his advisers, she had sent in her Fast Deployment Units. After a show of tactical virtuosity transmitted live by all the major networks, in less than two hours Odelle’s team had killed all the terrorists—and only two senators were wounded in the cross fire. That the “terrorists” ranged from age sixteen to twenty-one and were armed with weapons loaded with blanks was carefully kept from the public view.

Fueled by a vindictive press and riding the crest of the ensuing outcry, Odelle had managed to change an ancient rule and substituted DHS forces for Capitol security.

“At ease.”

On the sunny side of fifty, Edward O’Keefe was no sergeant but a full colonel, and he cast an imposing figure in
black fatigues. The ex-marine had always refused to don any apparel more congenial with his office.

“As they tried to reach these grounds,” Odelle said, “the fugitives from the Washington, D.C., suspension facility were spotted at a checkpoint. Regretfully, they’re all dead.”

O’Keefe didn’t move or relax his stance, eyes fastened on a small print and its oversize frame on the opposite wall. Yet the man had an unnerving aura about him: the body language of someone who actually knew how to break people’s bones.

“Naturally, we know nothing of their supporters—the organization that masterminded the breakout,” she continued.

Vinson pocketed his cell phone. “I’ll use a computer at the security center,” he said, dropping his voice into the age-old lilt of the marketplace. Slipping past O’Keefe, he opened the door and disappeared, leaving a trail of laughter in his wake, like the Cheshire cat’s smile.

Odelle cringed at Vinson’s childish behavior and continued. “I’ve heard a rumor, so far unconfirmed: There’s a possibility such a criminal group may attempt a repetition of the 2049 fiasco.” Nothing wrong in adding a little overkill security. “Suggestions?”

“I will power the antitruck hydraulics throughout the Hill, call in additional FDU units, and place my men on maximum alert.”

“Sounds good, Colonel. Seal the grounds tight. Don’t let anyone in. In particular, all access to this building: Constitution Avenue, First Street, Delaware Avenue, and C Street.” Then she threw him a morsel. “I’m counting on you.”

When she was alone, she neared the window again and looked toward the fountain. Her eyes blurred. She treasured a hoard of private memories of Araceli’s face, her voice, and her form, but none like the images of a distant morning when Araceli had danced in that same fountain and together they had to flee before the shouts of an irate gardener.

Then training took over. She swallowed hard, stepped over to the desk where she’d propped her briefcase, and marched purposefully out of the room and into the corridor where Anthony, the killer aide, waited.

Partway down the hallway, he stopped before a door, reached for the handle, and opened it, standing aside.

A long line of military trucks snaked to a stop before the roadblock at the confluence of Pennsylvania and Independence Avenues.

Edward O’Keefe, the Capitol sergeant at arms, rested both hands on the back of the swivel chair occupied by Sergeant Thomas, the shift officer at the Capitol Security Center, peering over his shoulder at the computer screen on the desk.

“Zoom in,” he said.

The screen filled with the cabin of the first truck and the insignia stenciled on the door:
Marine Corps. What are they doing here?
A sergeant appeared around the front of the vehicle to hand over a sheet of paper to the Capitol security platoon leader. The security officer seemed to scan the page, then shook his head.