The Prisoner (9 page)

Timmy nodded.

Lifting the boy, Palmer kissed his forehead. Then he lowered him onto the carpet and patted his butt. “Off you go; inspect the grounds and make sure there are no bandits about, Sheriff.”

“Right, partner.” The sheriff tried a salute and bolted.

“Palmer.”

Silence, followed by what sounded like a burst of static. He knew the sizzling noise wasn’t static but a two-way stream of encoding data to synchronize the scrambler in his secure phone with the caller’s. After a few seconds, the screen on the terminal flashed
HORUS
.

“A partial success so far.”

Palmer was familiar with the unrecognizable voice, without accent or syllabic stresses: a voice digitized, expropriated of everything but meaning, and recomposed by a speech synthesizer.

“You can’t have partial success. Success or failure?”

“A little of each. A member of your team, the black man, didn’t make it.”

Palmer drew a hand to his forehead and sidestepped to flop down into his chair.
Bastien, the lawyer who would change the world. The dear boy …
He blinked, his eyes suddenly blurred. Horus’s time was precious. “What happened?”

“Heart failure.”

“And the others?”

“Too early to say, but they will have to move fast. Seth has sent for Onuris.”

Another burst of static, and then the screen went blank.

Palmer replaced the telephone in its cradle, his heart heavy. He pinched the bridge of his nose as images of what Laurel and Raul must be going through—having to deal with the tragic loss of their friend as they carted an inert Russo through dark, putrid pipes—flashed through his mind. Their chances had thinned almost to nothing.

Russo had burned to death in 2051, one late October Friday after the car he drove hit a tree and caught flames on a country road, somewhere between Culpeper and Charlottesville—at least according to the death certificate
issued by a Dr. James Child after perusing the results of DNA tests. Russo’s charred remains had prevented any other sort of identification.

Five years would pass before a costly misunderstanding revealed that Dr. Child had been duped, or forced to lie.

From the hibernation system’s inception, the congressional grapevine had been rife with hushed rumors—often preposterous—of irregularities in the DHS operation of the hibernation facilities. One particular piece of gossip kept cropping up at regular intervals: the existence of illegal prisoners—men and women who had never been sentenced by the courts. The concept intrigued Palmer, and one day he decided to indulge in a little investigation.

Each hibernation facility was organized into a series of tanks, each holding a number of inmates. The distribution and identity of the prisoners was housed in a secure database shared by Hypnos and the DHS and was available to the Senate committee overseeing the hibernation system. It occurred to Palmer there would be a relatively simple—though probably expensive—way to ascertain if the inmates in any given tank matched the records. Each prisoner’s DNA markers were stored in the database, and the hibernation fluid was a chemical soup laced with biologic wastes. A sample of fluid from a given tank could be cross-matched with those supposed to be there. Unidentified genetic material would stand out. His mind made up, Palmer set out to obtain hibernation fluid. When Nadia Shubin, a mousy-looking laboratory technician at the Washington, D.C., hibernation facility, demanded five million for the samples, Palmer had almost fainted. But no amount of bargaining could convince Mrs. Shubin to lower her fees. Six months later, almost to the date, the wily technician delivered.

Palmer had expected a handful of jars, never a van loaded with three large polymer cases—each holding one hundred carefully labeled test tubes: one from every tank at the Washington, D.C., facility.

To cross-match every tube would have cost a fortune, and Palmer wouldn’t think of it. Instead, he used a statistical-probability program to choose a reasonable sample. Forty
tanks. Only one test tube from the original sampling yielded an unknown signature. It belonged to a man whose DNA wasn’t registered in any American database. After the find, Palmer couldn’t stop. He made the owners of a small Mexican testing lab very happy when he ordered tests on the remaining tubes, only to find another eight abnormalities. Seven tubes produced eleven unknown markers. The eighth contained the DNA of a man who had haunted Palmer’s dreams since his youth, a man who had been dead five years: Eliot Russo.

Mercenaries, even good ones, could be had for a fraction of what he’d already spent on tests. But, in the feverish months that followed his discovery, Palmer discarded adventurers. Instead, he reached for two people for whom Russo held a meaning that transcended money or ideals: Laurel and Shepherd.

When their plan started to take shape, Shepherd had insisted on three men of similar build to attempt springing Russo, and he drew up a list of candidates. But Laurel had her own ideas. She drafted Raul and Bastien and announced she would complete the team.

Naturally, Shepherd went ballistic and threatened to quit. Over the secure phone, Palmer pleaded and tried every trick he knew to change Laurel’s mind. Later—when Russo returned to the land of the living—she would be irreplaceable, but the breakout needed muscle. Still, Laurel wouldn’t budge. She proved obstinate as a mule, and Palmer, after soberly reviewing her ancestry, surrendered.

A staccato of taps, like a bird pecking seeds from a dish, brought Palmer out of his reverie. He looked toward the sliding patio door where Timmy waited, his eyes expectant.

In a daze, he followed his trotting grandson across the lawn and into the clump of old oaks.

“We’re almost there, Grandpa.”

Palmer bowed his head to avoid a large branch.
Onuris
.

Timmy climbed a stout wooden ladder with commendable speed for his short legs, and Palmer followed, maneuvering his bulk with difficulty to a fenced platform, perhaps ten feet
from the ground, one of its corners occupied by a square construction with a small door and a window.

“I don’t think I’ll fit through there.”

“You can try on your knees.”

Palmer obliged and crawled inside the small house, leaving his rump sticking outside the door. On a miniature table, he spotted several jars with water—one of them murky and with something alive inside—bottle corks, a pot full of glass marbles, and a forbidden item: a box of matches.

“Timmy, you shouldn’t play with matches. They’re dangerous. Please, give them to me.”

The boy, far from looking chastised, smiled and handed him the box.

This time Palmer didn’t fall for Timmy’s mischief. Suspicious, he drew the box close to his ear and shook it. A scratching noise issued from within. “What’s inside?”

“Jiminy.”

Palmer reached to his top pocket for his reading glasses and opened the box a fraction. A glossy, cockroach-looking insect peeked its feelers out. “I see. But you shouldn’t keep Jiminy in a dark box. Would you like to be in a dark box?”

Timmy shook his head emphatically.

“I tell you what: You come with me to the garage, bring your cricket, and we’ll make a little home with wire. Then you can hang its cage up here, feed it, and hear it chirp. Would you like that?”

The boy nodded. “What does Jiminy eat?”

Palmer scratched his head and frowned.
One of the eldest serving senators in the country and I don’t know a damn thing about what crickets eat
.

“Mmmm, I’ll look it up.” He glanced to a corner where a sizable toy rifle stood, half hidden beneath bulky feathered headgear. His knees were killing him, but he inched forward to peer out the window. Through a gap in the tree’s foliage, he could see inside his study.

“So you keep me covered from here?”

“Yup. I protect you.”

“Thank you. Here.” He handed the child his box. “Bring Jiminy along and we’ll fix him a home.” Then he glanced
once more toward his study. “Er, let me have a look at your weapon, please.”

Timmy reached for his rifle and passed it over.

Sitting on his haunches on the platform outside the little house, Palmer held the toy and inspected it. Made of a sturdy plastic, it was a faithful reproduction of a real weapon, except for its size. He checked the barrel, the sights, and the scope, nodded, and handed it back to the expectant boy. “Excellent weapon, partner. Make sure you keep it in good condition. I depend on you.”

Timmy giggled, pride in his eyes.

As Palmer descended the ladder, Bastien’s face flashed across his mind, and grief welled in his chest. He reached firm ground and looked upward to watch his grandson’s expert descent. Bastien’s face blurred, replaced by that of a spear-wielding man, one of his arms upraised, decked in an embroidered robe and a crown with four high plumes. Onuris, the ancient Egyptian “bringer of fear,” the god of war and the hunt. A most fitting moniker for Nikola Masek.

18:42

In the thirty minutes since the alarm tripped, Sandra Garcia had done nothing but sit at her station while Kosmerl shouted orders and paced the room. She hated the phony half-Slav. She hated his starched blue fatigues, his tall lace-up boots with thick soles that added another two inches to his already towering stature, and his eye. His milky eye was sickening, especially when he closed his good one and play-stared with the white one. Why he didn’t have his cataract, or whatever it was, removed was beyond her. And then there was his phony accent. The idiot would use
ze
for
the
whenever he could. But
above all she hated his joke.
Der ver zwei peanuts valking down der strasse and von vas … assaulted! Peanut
. Sandra wrinkled her nose in distaste. She’d heard the stupid joke ten times, at least. Once, Sandra had caught a glimpse of his personnel file, and many other goodies, when programmers were rescheduling files to another memory stack. The imbecile was from Massachusetts. His parents were from Slovenia, not Germany, and he’d never traveled abroad.

She still couldn’t believe Lukas Hurley had entered the restricted area to help hibernators escape. Sandra darted a glance toward Kosmerl. He looked back and closed his good eye.

Probably Lukas, running with the shits, had mistaken the doors. No, wishful thinking. The door to the restricted area needed a high-security card and the toilet door only a push.

“Is the pig back?” Kosmerl yelled to a couple of security guards entering the control room.

“Yes, but no luck.”

“No luck?”

“We may have turned it around too soon, sir.”

“Too soon? They could go no farther in twenty minutes. They must have hidden up one of the utility shafts.”

Sandra typed the intro code in her keyboard, but the screen remained frozen.

“You check the pig? Any blood?” Kosmerl asked.

One of the officers, overweight and with a cherub’s face, mopped his forehead and nodded. “We check. No blood.”

Good for you
, Sandra thought, and then recanted. The young man probably wasn’t making fun of Kosmerl; he was only nervous.

“Should we send it out again?” the officer asked.

“For what porpoise?”

Sandra gritted her teeth. He could probably speak better English than she could. Why the affectation?

Kosmerl turned on his heel and his boots squeaked on the polymer floor. “When can we get the doors unlocked?”

At least he’d not tried
ze doors
this time.

Pete, one of her shift mates, nodded to a telephone hooked into a landline. “I’m waiting for clearance codes.”

“You can do nothing?”

Pete shrugged.

Sandra narrowed her eyes and glanced at the clock: 18:48. Processing should have been back online ages ago. For an instant, she thought of the unprocessed prisoners cooking inside the truck, still waiting. Then her mind turned to practicalities. She would probably be home late, today of all days, when Pedro would drop by and with any luck spend the night. The home-cooked meal she’d planned was out. By the time she managed to get out of the station and back to the apartment with Chinese takeout, Pedro would be snoring or gone.
Shit!

Kosmerl reached to his belt, which was bristling with all sorts of objects dangling from carabiners, and unhooked a shortwave two-way radio. Cellular phones didn’t work in the station for an area of two hundred yards around the building, to thwart camera phones beaming pictures to friend or foe.

“Any heat signatures?” Kosmerl barked.

A screech issued from the contraption. Kosmerl adjusted the device and turned the volume down.

“No signatures,” replied a tinny voice Sandra recognized as belonging to Rafael Sosa, a good-looking man from Aguas-calientes. Just her luck he was happily married with two kids.

A loud snap at the main door to the control room startled everyone. Two large men who looked like linebackers stood at the entrance, casting quick, menacing glances in all directions.

Sandra straightened and pulled at the hem of her skirt, eyeing the newcomers with caution. Dark suits, turtleneck pullovers, and close-shaven heads seamlessly fused to beefy necks.
The cavalry?