The Prisoner (41 page)

Outside, the clouds must have parted, because a sudden beam of moonlight subdued by tinted windows caught her eye. Ritter and Genia’s behavior, however unprofessional, didn’t even count as a misdemeanor in an age where interdepartmental personal relationships had stopped being frowned upon, thanks to the damn Constitution. She closed her eyes and ran their earlier meeting through her mind, as her stomach knotted with mounting spasms of badly repressed fury. They had been playing her like a fool. For an instant, she entertained the idea of reaching for the phone, giving an order, and spying through a little hole as the bitch and her lover swallowed green hoses. But it was only wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the pair was too high up in the federal service, and there were limits to what she could do. For endless minutes she seethed.
What do you know about loss and longing?
Then Odelle straightened with a jerk. Perhaps she could teach Genia Warren the meaning of loss. She rubbed her hands—suddenly clammy—over her skirt and rolled her chair to the desk.

“Pet, George Wilson.”

It was time for a counterattack.

23:20

The lights flickered once, went through a series of erratic hiccups, and faded. A choked cry echoed from the end of the corridor. “What’s happened?” Laurel’s voice ratcheted high.

“Damn generator!” Antonio shouted. He stood amid a rustle of paper as the screen of the cellular phone flared from its cradle on the mantelpiece, bathing the room in ghostly light before it, too, died away. “I thought you’d topped it up,” Antonio complained.

“Sorry, it must have slipped my mind.” Tyler’s voice issued from the direction of the door. “I’ll fix it.” He turned toward the room where Laurel stood guard by Russo. “Don’t worry. I can see lights on in the farm buildings. There’s no danger.”

“I’ll come with you.” Antonio’s voice. “Where’s the flashlight?”

“Right here, in the hall.”

Floyd followed the sounds as they left the room, blinking to clear dancing lights before his eyes in the sudden pitch darkness. Somewhere to his left, leather creaked, followed by the rustle of rubber-soled shoes as Lukas stood. The man had not uttered a word since the TV announcement hours before. He’d sat on the edge of a sofa, his face set in a semi-catatonic expression, his eyes unfocused. At first, everyone had tried to mouth comforting words and offer a glimmer of hope: Once Russo revealed the truth, they would have to back off Lukas’s woman and her family. But the promises had sounded hollow and unconvincing. Lukas didn’t react, and after a while they gave up and left him alone. Faint crunchy treads sounded on the gravel outside. From inside the house, a faint high-pitched sound echoed—the power-failure alarm
of Russo’s cardiac monitor. It would continue recording for thirty minutes, its screen doused to conserve energy.

Floyd made his way over to the living room’s door, panning an outstretched arm before him like the feeler of an insect.

“I’m checking on Russo,” he said over his shoulder.

Lukas, somewhere in the living room, didn’t answer. With a shrug, Floyd stepped into the corridor, dimly lit by a sliver of moonlight from the open door.

At the end of the corridor, the scant light gave way to a thick penumbra. The beep sounded louder. Floyd reached ahead of him, caught the tip of his fingers on a surface laid at an odd angle, and pushed the door ajar.

An instant before bare arms wrapped around his neck, he sensed her scent—a mix of the unimaginative strawberry shower gel they had all been using and her skin. “Are you sure everything is all right?” Her voice wavered.

“I checked; there are lights all over. It’s only the house.” He understood her nervousness. His first thought had been that they were under attack. Then her mouth sought his, and Floyd closed his eyes to chart the moment and store it away in all its intensity for future reference. Laurel’s body adjusted to his, and Floyd marveled at the uncanny perfection with which her shape seemed almost purposely made to fit his body.

Then the lights flickered and came back on at full strength.

Laurel chuckled and drew away from Floyd. “Saved by the bell.”

“But, madam, in my condition—” Then he froze. The day they arrived at the farm, he’d been out with Antonio, stretching his legs and looking around. In a shed attached to the house were stores, timber, snow gear, and a generator, a powerful twenty-horsepower Honda. He pictured the brightly painted machine hooked to a five-hundred-gallon fiberglass tank, enough to last a long winter. Topping up? The generator didn’t need any topping up. The generator was a backup for emergencies. Floyd remembered Lukas and the cell phone nestled on its charger atop the mantelpiece, and something icy coursed through his veins. Tyler had arranged the blackout as a ruse, to trick Lukas into—

“Come.” He tendered a hand to a frowning Laurel as the front door opened and heavy treads echoed down the corridor.

At the hall, they almost crashed into Raul as he barreled down the steps, somehow roused from his sleep.

When they reached the living room, Antonio and Tyler were already there, standing in the middle of the room and staring at Lukas, stationary by the window.

“I may be an idiot, but I’m not crazy,” Lukas said in a strangely detached voice.

Tyler nodded to Antonio, who neared the fireplace, peered at the cell phone, and shook his head once.

“Odelle Marino’s offer is a trap; even a child can see that. Our only chance—and that includes mine and my family’s—rests with Russo’s capacity to testify. Besides,” Lukas glanced toward the cell phone, “I bet the fucking thing doesn’t even work.”

Floyd neared Antonio and Tyler without letting go of Laurel’s hand and stared, dumbfounded, at the sorrowful Woody Allen look-alike by the window. Raul edged around them and slumped on a sofa, his eyes never leaving Lukas.

“But it occurred to me we could use her offer to our advantage,” Lukas continued. “You don’t need to disclose your plans. Just tell me what to say when I call that number.”

Tyler paced over to Lukas and towered over him for an instant before slapping his shoulder, making the shorter man wince. Then he turned to the others. “I propose a war council.” With that, he marched to a corner bookcase, removed a few books, tweaked something that produced a few clicks, and returned to the center of the room, a device the size of a small book in his hand. “Communications,” he explained.

Antonio reached to his neck, pulled out a glossy black cord, fingered a rounded object threaded on it to recover a tiny plastic sliver, and slotted it on a side of Tyler’s device.

“Who are we calling?” Laurel asked.

“That’s irrelevant,” Tyler answered. “What matters is who will be listening.”

06:45

Although their brainstorming had lasted until late, Floyd was already up at dawn, soon joined by everybody else. He insisted Russo be moved from the den at the rear of the house to the living room. “I’ve withdrawn the last of the sedation.” He nodded to the sofa they had moved to face a wall with the TV panel. “Let’s make him comfortable on the couch. Our talk and the TV chatter may reassure him this is not Hypnos or the DHS.”

Once Floyd had removed the lines tethering Russo to the IV stands—but kept the intravenous ports in place—Raul hefted the emaciated figure with the same care he would have a baby and carried him to the living room. At the couch, they propped Russo on cushions while Floyd once more secured a bag to his penile catheter and reconnected the IV lines. Then he motioned with his hand for Lukas to lower the blinds and switch on a low-wattage lamp in a corner.

While Antonio rustled up a fresh pot of coffee, the others dragged furniture around to compensate for the new arrangement and stopped to hear a news announcement: Congress had launched an inquiry into the breakout. Genia Warren, the FBH director, and Odelle Marino, the director of Homeland Security, had been subpoenaed to appear before the congressional select committee overseeing the penitentiary system in two days.

Laurel sat on the edge of the sofa at Russo’s feet, absently rubbing her hand over his alien-looking toes, bone-thin and sans nails.

“They won’t grow back, you know,” Floyd said.

“Why not?”

“Prolonged immersion in the fluids softens keratin. Nails continue to grow at a good clip, perhaps an eighth of an inch a month. With the subject’s spasmodic movements within the protective net, nails catch and tear from their bed. Although the nails continue to grow for a time, they can’t anchor to a softened bed. The new stumps catch and rip. After a few years, those in suspension lose the capacity to regenerate nails.”

“And their hair?” She unconsciously reached to her head. It felt funny, the stubble catching on the palm of her hand.

“That’s a different issue. Some people retain follicular activity and others lose it.”

Tyler neared the peninsula on the kitchen side and grabbed a mug of coffee. “Antonio and I will leave shortly. I suggest you take it easy for the rest of the day and try to sleep.” He turned to Raul. “You were up all night.”

Raul stifled a yawn and nodded.

They had agreed that phone calls or any other means of communication from the house were an unnecessary security risk. It seemed Tyler had considered all eventualities. After using the Squirt transmitter of his Metapad twice the night before, he had decided to stop using it at the farm. It was supposedly safe, but he didn’t discount the possibility that repeated use could be detected. Every day, Tyler and Antonio had gone on errands, using the travel as their excuse to send and receive expensive messages: expensive because no two consecutive texts could be beamed anonymously from a single m-phone.

It made sense the DHS would pay special attention to traffic from m-phones. Specially designed for teenagers, m-phones were available at vending machines—cheap at two hundred bucks each—and were sealed disposable units with no other feature than about a month’s worth of local messaging; they were useless for long distance or international. Once used for a single message, Tyler ran each phone through an industrial bone-meal processor and dusted the resulting powder in a septic tank to join the house effluent and the pigs’ waste. Laurel followed Tyler as he pocketed the Metapad he’d taken from the bookcase the night before and thought that, in this
instance, the communications Tyler had to make would involve more than short messaging.

After Antonio and Tyler left, Lukas and Raul went outside to stretch their legs. Laurel nestled by Floyd, their couch angled between Russo’s and the
TV
, which was showing two human mountains crashing together in a sumo-wrestling championship.