The Prisoner (56 page)

afterword

 

 

Shortly after Bastien Compton’s burial, Leona Hurst, the fifty-first President of the United States, convened a second press conference to elaborate on the abridged one served four days earlier. In this meeting with the press, she awed the nation with the outcome of her personal crusade to bring the mightiest government agency and one of the world’s largest corporations to heel. In her brief, she stressed her role as the mastermind of the scheme that exposed the existence of an illegal prisoner within the system, who had marshaled her most trusted officers and advisers into a fearless thrust to dismantle the power network knitted by Hypnos and the DHS. As commander in chief, she extolled the courage of General Erlenmeyer in obeying her direct orders to secure the Capitol grounds. On January 20, 2061, she was inaugurated for a second term after winning by a landslide. Since the Constitutional amendment of 2033 had extended the number of terms a president could serve to three, four years later, in 2064, she won her third and final mandate.

In the wake of her public disclosure, 117 public servants and officers were served subpoenas to appear before a Senate special committee. Every one of them was dismissed from public office and left after having signed their confessions and sundry documents to guarantee their discretion.

Lukas Hurley received a commendation and, shortly after, emigrated to Peru, where he lives with his wife, Elena, and their twin daughters, Eva and Rosa. Elena’s relatives help the Hurleys run their ten-thousand-acre estate of pastures and farmland.

After an extraordinary session of the ad hoc Special Hibernation Committee, it was decreed that Odelle Marino’s
ashes should be placed in a specially constructed hermetic urn and suspended in tank 913 of the Washington, D.C., hibernation facility for a period of one hundred years. Shortly after, President Hurst signed an order to confiscate all of Odelle’s possessions, but it became apparent that her ill-gotten fortune had disappeared the same morning of her suicide from a numbered account at Banca Fleishmann in Antigua. Although the SWIFT organization cooperated fully to track the funds, they hit a dead end. Following six rapid transfers, the money reached Gibraltar and then branched outside the SWIFT system to accounts in Liechtenstein and the Isle of Man. Onward from these two points, the funds vanished.

Harper Tyler retired to his pig farm with Antonio Salinas and enlarged the operations by purchasing adjacent land. A month later he descended into the Washington sewers to look for a boy, whom he found suffering from a fractured leg. After a brief passage through a clinic to set his leg and diagnose his condition, Joshua—aka Metronome—adjourned to the farm, where he receives special tutoring from a score of newfound uncles and two remedial teachers. In his spare time, he helps his newly adopted father in the layout and construction of a huge 0-gauge model railway in the cellar. James Marshall—aka Barandus—runs an expanded O’Malley Cleaning Services and offers fluid-management consultancy.

The American government slapped an unheard-of two-hundred-billion-dollar fine on Vinson Duran, the owner of Hypnos. To cover the fine, Vinson had to relinquish his majority shareholding. The money, in full, served to pay compensation to the center inmates and to bankroll two foundations: Theta, for the research of hibernation technology, and HMA (Hibernation Monitoring Agency), to oversee the operation of suspension centers with an army of independent inspectors drawn from the ranks of retired government officers. The United States Congress enacted a bill, later transformed into law, to partially nationalize Hypnos and supervise its board by appointing a chief executive officer nominated by Congress. After an absence of two years, Vinson Duran returned to the limelight by founding a corporation to research full-body transplants.

Laurel Cole moved in with Floyd Carpenter after dating for more than a year. Following Dr. Carpenter’s appointment to run Theta, they married, and soon after Laurel gave birth to their daughter Eryn. Raul Osborne took a year’s sabbatical, during which he traveled throughout Europe. On his return to the United States, he teamed with Laurel to lead a civil rights organization.

Jerome Palmer resigned from the Senate, but his absence from the corridors of power was short-lived. Before President Hurst’s reelection, she cajoled him over a bottle of excellent cognac in Palmer’s study to be her secretary of state.

Inside a fortnight of her predecessor’s suicide, Genia Warren was sworn in as the new director of the DHS, coinciding with Lawrence Ritter’s resignation. Less than six months after Ritter accepted his congressional appointment as CEO of Hypnos, he moved into Genia’s family home, but not before yielding to Father Damien’s demands. The priest refused to acknowledge him as a neighbor unless he married her first.

In addition to accepting an undisclosed settlement from the United States government, Eliot Russo became president for life of the Hibernation Monitoring Agency. He lives with a remarkably attractive housekeeper at a converted lighthouse in Maine, where he tends to his orchids under the tower’s glass dome. He keeps several tiny rooms—more like monastic cells—ready to accommodate his frequent visitors.

Nikola Masek runs a security company in the Dominican Republic. In association with his in-house hacker, Dennis Nolan, he offers computer security services to governments and private corporations. Dennis married his woman, and the family laundry business has branched out into neighboring Haiti.

After another congressional commendation and a princely award, also undisclosed, Henry Mayer continued his interrupted trip to Honduras, where he failed to locate his friend and took to tramping the high sierras, looking for a suitable place to farm chinchillas. His carefully laid plans, however, didn’t take into consideration the staff at Trujillo’s Registro de la Propiedad, the government office where land ownership deeds are registered. After Henry stood in line all morning to
ascertain the status of a wonderful tract of land high on the Cerro San Jorge, the pretty young woman staffing the counter slipped a
Cerrado
sign on her desk and gathered her handbag, on her way to lunch.

Emilia Gutierrez must have felt a pang of guilt at seeing the bewildered expression of the giant gringo in dusty lizard-skin boots and sweat-stained Stetson, because she stopped for an instant to reassure him she would be back in two hours. Henry tagged along with her to a local watering hole for sandwiches and a soft drink to outline his plans.

Emilia, a fisherman’s daughter, was aghast at the thought of growing furry things to craft into expensive coats for high-maintenance American women, and she suggested Henry should scout the coast to get other business ideas. Since it was already Friday and she didn’t work the weekend, she would show him around. A few weeks later, Emilia Mayer succeeded in getting her dazed husband to buy a fish farm with her father and two brawny brothers as hired help, and Henry blesses the day he stood on line at the Trujillo Registro de la Propiedad.

bibliography

 

For information on sewers I’m indebted to a number of sources, the most important being:
The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
by Jennifer Toth,
Cloacina: Goddess of the Sewers
by Jon C. Schladweiler,
American Sanitary Engineering
by Edward S. Philbrick,
Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations
by Donald Reid,
The World Beneath the City by
Robert Daley,
Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration
by Ninjalicious,
Invisible Frontier: The Jinx Book of Urban Exploration
by David Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo,
Beneath the City Streets
by Peter Laurie, and
New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City
by Julia Solis.

I consulted several publications dealing with explosives, in particular:
The Longest Walk: The World of Bomb Disposal
by Peter Birchall,
The Anarchist Cookbook
by William Powell, and the superb
Jane’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal 2005–06
by Colin King.

Finally, I also checked a wealth of particulars on the subject of mammalian physiology, especially:
Mammalian Hibernation III
by Kenneth C. Fisher,
Physiology of Natural Hibernation
by Ch. Kayser,
The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments
by Claude A. Piantadosi,
The Human Factor: A Requiem for Darwin
by A. J. DiChiara,
Temperature Regulation in Humans and Other Mammals
by Claus Jessen,
Metabolic Regulation: A Human Perspective
by Keith Frayn, and
Alcor Life Extension Foundation: An Introduction
by Jerry B. Lemler.