The Prisoner (7 page)

Lukas checked his watch. “The bottom valve will close in twenty seconds. I’ll go first.” He pointed at Russo’s neck ring. When Raul had a grip on it, Lukas splashed toward the hole like an ungainly duck and jumped.

“You next,” Raul said.

Laurel was about to protest when Raul interrupted. “I need you down there to arrest Russo’s drop. He’ll fall like a sack.”

He was right. She gripped his arm and, refusing to think about what she was about to do, covered the distance to the hole in long strides and jumped feetfirst into the drain.

When darkness swallowed her, Laurel braced for the impact, but it never came. She dropped for a long time, her mind feebly registering that Lukas must have lied. The chute must be hundreds of feet long, even thousands. Then something hard and slimy touched her shoulders and butt, pressing harder and harder until she had to release the breath she’d carefully held. Her legs and arms shot up the walls of a smooth cylinder, its surface racing under her touch. She surrendered to gravity and momentum, choking a gasp when sharp pain radiated from her left buttock. Then a pinprick of light below her pierced the gloom. The light grew, with it she
saw a rapidly approaching circle and, beyond, a figure with a striking likeness to Woody Allen. She almost laughed, but in the next instant she cannoned out of the tube, slammed down a couple of feet into a much larger cylinder, and climbed halfway up its wall before crumpling down into a heap in four inches of liquid flowing along the curved floor.

“Who’s next?” Lukas sounded impressed.

“Russo.”

“We had better try to grab him as he exits. He’ll be much faster. Switch on your flashlight and aim it inside the drain.”

She picked herself up and stumbled to the mouth of the tube, fingers fumbling at her flashlight.

Lukas aimed his light into the drain, illuminating a ball form hurtling rapidly toward them. “Here he comes.”

They stood on either side of the opening, one hand each stretched to catch him.

In a flash, the bundle barreled from the drain, dragging them to the opposite side of the sewer. A loud thump echoed from the mouth of the drain. Laurel froze. It wasn’t a good sound.

“That’s the valve closing,” Lukas said. “Within four or five minutes, the tank will be full again. An automatic security routine to prevent the inmates’ core temperature from rising.”

Had Raul made it? She had no way of knowing. The seconds stretched. What could she do with Woody in the sewers? Despite Russo’s slight weight, neither she nor Lukas was strong enough to carry him any distance.
Do we leave him?

An instant later, Raul followed, his light blazing around his neck. He slid sedately the last few feet to the point where the drain met the main sewer and stayed seated on its rim, surveying their tangle of arms and legs. “A hell of a ride.”

Laurel reached to her left buttock, then checked her bloody fingers.

Lukas trained his flashlight on her and she instinctively shrank back. “Let me have a look,” he said.

She felt soft fingers, then pressure, then a sharp stab. “Ouch!”

Lukas held something small between thumb and forefinger.
“A toenail. They drop off the inmates.” He flicked it aside, stood, and checked his watch. “We have twenty-nine minutes to leave this tube and a mile and a half to cover. We’d better get going, fast.”

Laurel darted a look to Raul.

Although they didn’t know how they would get to the sewers, Shepherd had insisted it was “need to know” information; they had rehearsed a technique to carry Russo several miles through the sewer network. First they’d trained in a dark abandoned warehouse and later across open ground at night, always naked and barefoot. “You will need well-calloused soles,” Shepherd had said. Raul and Bastien had carried a net between them with one hundred pounds of rocks for up to three hours. Laurel marched point with a flashlight. Shepherd would follow with another light. They had repeated the exercise daily for two months, combining their night races with hard exercise during the day. The key to their results rested on the men’s similar height and arm reach, added to their excellent physical conditioning and strength. She couldn’t pair with Raul; her shorter frame meant he would carry most of the weight and hamper their mobility. Lukas would be even worse.

As if reading her mind, Raul stood, loosened his muscles, leaned over Russo, and, with a quick movement like hefting a sack of potatoes, pulled the inert form up over his shoulder.

Laurel stood. “You can’t do that.”

“Wanna bet?”

Raul and his trick bets, always on the weirdest of subjects. Years before, their campus had suffered an invasion of locusts.

How fast you reckon a locust can fly?

I don’t know. Ten miles an hour?

Some can do sixty and more
.

You’re out of your mind
.

Wanna bet?

Raul had grabbed a few of the insects, dropped them inside a paper bag, affixed the bag under the windshield wiper of his car, and raced around the campus.

He won the bet, but it cost him a speeding ticket.
Win some, lose some
, he’d said.

“What would you bet?” Laurel thought Raul’s humor could be unnerving at times, as she began jogging down the secure sewer, her flashlight beam slashing the darkness ahead.

“I bet our lives,” he said. “Yours, mine, and Woody’s over there.”

18:14

From the vantage point of the platform that held the presidential table, Odelle Marino’s eyes followed a pencil-size cylinder in a depression on the ceiling—an ultradirectional microphone, now scanning the crowd, its circuits overridden by the swell of applause after her introduction by Vinson Duran, the president of Hypnos. The banquet was over, tables cleared, but the army of guests wouldn’t feel sated without her words. After a calculated pause, she pushed her chair back, gathered her notes, and stood.

“Thank you, Vinson.” The microphone swung in her direction and locked. “As director of the Department of Homeland Security, I’m honored to join you in celebrating the tenth anniversary of Hypnos’s inauguration of their first hibernation station.” Odelle’s gaze swept the crowd, a sea of known faces from all levels of power: the few who had it and the others who wanted it. “Today we celebrate a success story—our country’s decision to abandon an obsolete correctional system for a new, more humane arrangement.

“As you will remember, the world was up in arms against our choice. Our country and its leaders suffered an unprecedented tide of criticism from both the foreign press and our own.”

Odelle paused and reached for a cut crystal tumbler of water with a sliver of lime floating in it. She wet her lips, then locked eyes for the briefest of moments with Louis Hamilton from
The Washington Post
. The bastard had used the paper as his personal soapbox and harangued the do-gooder rabble into opposing the hibernation bill. Thanks to him, it had been touch and go.

“In the year 2049, we approved a bill to close down the prisons and incarcerate those already serving time and all newly convicted criminals not in cages, where they were treated—and learned to behave—like animals, but in hibernation. Truly a more humane solution.

“In that same year, Chairman Xu Wa closed China’s borders and launched the Second Communist People’s Republic. I hope you agree with me that Ms. Wa has made Chairman Mao seem like a moderate.”

She waited until the chuckles ebbed and then gifted Louis Hamilton with another piercing glance.
So you know I’ve not forgotten, mister
.

“Yet instead of demonizing China’s butchery and their new forced-labor rice fields, the press had a field day with us. Foreign nations recalled their ambassadors, while agitators, fueled by the filth pouring from the world’s media,” she darted one more quick glance at Louis Hamilton, “attacked our embassies and demanded we return to a traditional prison system—a system that never worked; a system that couldn’t work because it was built on hypocrisy.”

The audience interrupted with thunderous applause. Odelle lowered her reading glasses and smiled. She was giving them their pound of flesh.

“Thank you. Can I bore you with a little history?” She scanned the room, alive with nodding heads, like those bobble-headed plastic dogs a few old-fashioned cretins still carried on the rear shelf of their automobiles. “The goals of the penal institution have changed through the ages, from retribution and vengeance—the biblical eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth—to deterrence, making the inmates an example to themselves and others. Other issues, such as reform and correction, arrived much later—their goals being to repair
the prisoners’ character shortages and return them as productive members of society. Yet all of these approaches, however well intentioned, proved in effective in the end. Vengeance couldn’t work, as there was no real way to adapt the punishment to the offense. The example idea floundered for how can a citizen serve as an example when he can just remove to a distant location and start a criminal career anew? Reform didn’t work either. Our prisons became true universities of crime, where seasoned felons had their own fiefdoms and petty criminals graduated, often with honors.”

Again, she reached for her glass. Not only was delivering a tirade cloaked as a speech thirsty work, but the audience needed time to register half-forgotten facts.

“As I said before, the old prison setup was built on hypocrisy: not just from the government but from its citizens. We wanted an effective penal system to remove those individuals unable to conform to the laws of society and to do so in a way that would deter others, but we were too entrenched in a quagmire of moral half-truths to get the job done properly. Those with money or good lawyers could hamstring the system with countless appeals and other such tricks until we were left with a system containing obscenely revolving doors.

“We were at a crossroads and chose to safeguard our fellow citizens from repeat offenders by locking them up for extended periods, often for life. This idea almost brought our nation to its knees. Long-term prison sentences and other obsolescent methods of warehousing criminals became so expensive that they threatened to bankrupt our nation.”

Odelle removed her glasses and rested them on the table with her now-useless notes: She knew the rest of her speech by heart.

“Our government was desperate. Twelve years ago, with a prison population of more than six million and the national debt skyrocketing, the only solution was to reduce prison sentences, to put hardened criminals back on the streets. Criminals who, statistics showed, would only kill, murder, steal, or rape again.

“Then Hypnos proposed a groundbreaking new approach
to prisons, Congress approved it, and we built the first hibernation station and tested it over two years. The rest is history.” She held a hand over her head, her thumb outstretched, like Caesar granting life to a fallen gladiator, and hiked her voice a semitone. “We have reduced the prison network’s costs to ten percent of 2050 levels.” Her index finger joined her thumb. “We have shrunk criminal offenses by seventy-five percent.” Another finger. “We have doubled the time felons are removed from our society.” A fourth finger joined the other three. “In ten years we’ve had no breakouts, no mutinies, and no disturbances, with a fraction of the workforce the old setup needed.” Finally, she offered her hand, all fingers splayed to the audience, but her words were for Hamilton.
Soon I’ll get my pound of your flesh
. “Eventually the media had to eat humble pie, when the foreign governments recanted. In only ten years, eighty-six nations—the same that tore at their vestments and recalled their diplomats when we passed the change—have adopted the Hypnos system of humane hibernation.”

Close to five hundred guests at the convention hall stood to drown her last words in a thunderous ovation.

Odelle darted a glance toward the central exit door, where George Wilson, her personal assistant, had appeared next to Genia Warren, the inept bitch overseeing the Federal Bureau of Hibernation. George removed his shades and stared. Odelle nodded.

When the applause dwindled and feet started to shuffle, she looked toward the microphone.

“Thank you, my friends, but I don’t deserve your applause; the man who made this miracle possible does.” Odelle turned to Vinson Duran and clapped her hands.

Those who had returned to their seats sprang upright again to applaud.

She reached for Vinson’s arm and dug her nails into his biceps to draw his attention. “Got to go. Back as soon as I can.”

Careful to keep a blinding smile pasted to her face, Odelle strode past tables full of well-heeled men in tuxedos and high-maintenance women toward the doors where George stood, deadpan.

“What’s the matter?”

George leaned over and whispered in her ear. She listened, clenching her hands until her long nails bit into her palms. Then her fingers relaxed as a powerful eddy swirled in the pit of her stomach. Odelle closed her eyes when George finished his report. The fourth point in her closing gimmick wasn’t true anymore, and that small distinction could mean her promotion for life to a posting four inches below the surface of a tank.