The Prisoner (8 page)

She blinked and locked eyes with Genia. The FBH director could have set the manhunt in motion, sealed the city, and deployed the muscle; it fell within her authority. Instead, she had deferred any decision to Odelle.
Too hot for you to handle, dear? Are you learning, at last, who is in charge?
Odelle turned to face George.

“Call Nikola Masek.”

18:21

After the first tentative strides, it became obvious that running barefoot along the smooth tunnel would be much more difficult than Shepherd had expected. In the painstaking analysis of every step of the plan, several issues had remained unresolved—one of them their ability to run naked and barefoot through a stainless steel tube. Every proposal—galoshes, flip-flops, or even socks—had crashed against Lukas’s capacity to carry them past scanning X-ray machines and into the hibernation station. Lukas had stolen the pads and syrettes with minimal risk from a low-security store on the same day of the breakout, but there was nothing remotely suitable to improve the grip of their “well-calloused soles.”

They halted, and Lukas had to give up his canvas trousers and shirt. With teeth and powerful tugs, they tore the garments into strips. Laurel and Raul—sitting against the curved wall and keeping the cocooned Russo between them—wrapped their feet as best they could.

Laurel ran a hand over the surface of the six-foot stainless steel tube, polished to a faint brushed finish. A few inches to her right, Laurel spotted a seam, welded flush and brushed with the same pattern of tiny scratches as the rest of the tube. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but there was something odd in the homogeneous finish. Laurel leaned over the inert shape of Russo, pressed her fingers into his neck, and held her breath. “Still there. Let’s go.”

Raul once more hefted the jelly net with Russo inside.

Laurel stepped forward, plodding awkwardly until she got the hang of the wraps. Then she lengthened her stride. Behind her, his head hunched over, Raul sounded like a charging elephant. Laurel marched point for a while, her tiny flashlight casting a ring of light around the tube, the void before her dark as a pocket.
If there’s an obstacle or a valve in our path, there will be no time to avoid it. I’ll run straight into it
. Then she spotted a dark shape overhead.

“Utility holes?” She stopped underneath the four-foot opening of a vertical shaft, one side bristling with the rungs of a ladder.

Raul drew near and straightened, obviously enjoying the respite allowed by the extra headroom. “Looks like it,” he said.

“How far apart?” Laurel asked.

Lukas joined them and ran a finger on the edge of the vertical tube. “The sewer authorities class this spur as a secure mainline. There’s an exit like this every four hundred yards.” A pause. “These are the only means of access to this section.”

“How many more to go?”

“Five.”

Laurel trained her flashlight into the thick darkness ahead and started jogging. Her feet weighed a ton. The oily fluid at the bottom of the tube had soaked the rags, and her legs were beginning to ache. They traveled through a barrage of
sounds—wet thuds mixing with labored huffs and the weird squelching noise of Lukas’s shoes. The air was cool and had a slight tang of cold cream.

“What makes the fluid oily?” Laurel shouted over her shoulder without breaking stride as she cleared another utility hole.

“An emulsion of lanolin and nutrients,” Lukas replied.

“How long is this tube?”

“Three miles,” Lukas’s voice echoed from the rear. “It runs parallel to the city sewer up to a treatment plant, where they remove lanolin and other fatty substances before it empties into the city network.”

Laurel’s thighs were on fire, and each stride strained her muscles painfully. She couldn’t take this pounding much longer. Behind her, Raul huffed in rhythm with his feet. Then another noise, finer and stringy, joined the thuds.

“Stop!” Lukas yelled.

The splashing stopped, but the strange noise increased.

“Run! Pig!”

Pig? You bastard!

Lukas overtook them from the rear along the left-hand side, climbing halfway up the tube and sprinting ahead. Even in underpants and fancy sneakers, the bastard could run.

“Pig!” he yelled.

Laurel ground her teeth and barreled forward in pursuit.

Fifty yards ahead, Lukas’s light stopped. He jumped upward and his feet thrashed in midair to disappear through the lip of the utility hole and into the vertical shaft.

“Hurry,” Raul grunted, just behind her. “Climb up and I’ll pass Russo to you.”

When they were underneath the access hole, Laurel sprang to grab a rung with both hands. She was about to swing a leg up to get some purchase on the tube wall when a large hand smashed into her buttocks and propelled her upward.

“Grab his collar, damn it!”

The strange grinding noise filled the air like a rain of nails. In a daze, Laurel threaded her arm through an upper rung and lowered her other hand to grip Russo’s neck ring. Suddenly an overpowering weight jerked Laurel’s arm downward,
and she was holding on to the full weight of Russo with one hand. She gritted her teeth as the ring started to slip from her fingers. Raul darted past her and over, squeezing her against the rungs. Laurel’s arm trembled under the unbearable slipping weight, and then the load disappeared in a flash when Raul hoisted Russo into the crowded tube. The sound reached a crescendo as it grew into a scratching shriek. The tube vibrated. A screech like millions of fingernails on a blackboard exploded in a flurry of sparkles as something thundered by beneath their feet.

They huddled together, their combined lamps highlighting patches of reddened flesh intertwined with the green net and a large running shoe capped by a skinny ankle.

“What the fuck was that?” Laurel croaked.

“A pig.” Lukas’s voice had thinned. “That’s what the pipeline people call them: a self-powered robot used to keep the tunnel free of excrescences. We can get down now. It’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“For now.” Lukas’s voice dropped.

After a few seconds of squirming, sliding past one another, and lugging the cocoon containing Russo, they descended from their hiding place. The scratching noise had faded in the distance, almost a memory.

Laurel blinked and panned her light over the tunnel’s curved walls; they shone with a myriad of sparkles. She reached a hand to the wall. The surface had a slight bite, like a dull nail file. If a similar machine had cleaned the tank’s drains, the rough surface would have skinned them alive. She glanced at the rags on her feet, already threadbare. Nobody had brushed the welds; the machine did. The void in her stomach deepened. To form the tiny furrows in the hard steel, the brushes must be powered with awesome force. The machine would have turned them to mincemeat in a heartbeat.

“Hurry up!” Lukas looked paler than ever.

Laurel was already running, her painful legs forgotten. The thumping and splashing resumed behind her.

“Whoever sent the pig down knows how far out we could
have traveled. Once they’re sure we couldn’t have gone any farther, they’ll put the pig in reverse.”

“Great,” Raul grunted.

After leaving two more access holes behind, Laurel’s legs lightened. Four hundred yards to go.

“Do we climb the next utility shaft?” She couldn’t wait to get out of the damn tube.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Lukas said. “These shafts are capped by covers. You can see them at intervals in the aisle between the lanes, when driving on the ring road around the cube. The covers are high security and computer-controlled. By now there will be hundreds of DHS Special Forces out there. In fewer than ten minutes, operators will overrule the computer program, the hatches will pop open, and the heat will pour down.”

“Cut the crap,” Raul growled. “How do we get out?”

“Through a side door.”

“I thought you said the utility holes were the only means of access.” Laurel strained her ears. It could be tinnitus or her imagination, but she could have sworn the tunnel was filling with the grating sound again.

“I did.”

They reached the final access hole and the sound increased. It wasn’t in her mind; it was coming toward them.

“Run!”

“Where to?” she screamed. “It’s coming at us!”

“Ahead!”

“Ahead? Where? We’ll never make the next one!”

Twenty yards farther down the tube, a powerful yellowish light flared through a square opening.

The grinding sound filled the tube. Blindly, the rags propelling her legs at odd angles, Laurel reached the opening and dove in.

In quick succession, like late commuters piling into a speeding bus, Raul, with Russo over his shoulder, and Lukas flew after her, landing in a mushy quagmire. The roar grew, expanded by the void of a huge concrete tunnel.

Laurel opened her eyes in time to see a blur of sparks flash
by the entrance, and her nose filled with a waft of rabid stench.

“Shit!”

A rueful chuckle issued from the entrance, half drowned by the receding sound of the brushing machine. “Precisely.”

Laurel turned toward the voice. At either side of the opening, an old man in yellow oil clothes and tall waders hefted a curved section of steel into place. A third man fired a high-powered gas lance to weld it back.

Before sliding black goggles over his eyes, the welder gave her a quick once-over.

“Nice color.”

18:33

Senator Jerome Palmer darted a quick glance over his reading glasses toward the door of his study. He remembered leaving it ajar a while ago when he went to the kitchen for a drink, but now the gap was widening by inches. Hiking his glasses up the bridge of his nose, Palmer turned a page of the thick, legal-bound document he had been reading and lowered his head, keeping tabs on the door out of the corner of his eye.

When the gap was a foot wide, the prowler scurried in, wielding a large revolver. He flattened his back to the far corner of the bookcases lining the room and closed in, moving with measured steps.

Palmer waited until the intruder was almost upon him before letting go of the document and raising both hands above his head.

“I surrender.”

Choking with delighted giggles, his grandson, Timmy, returned his plastic .45 to a holster that almost reached the floor and rushed to wrap tiny arms around Palmer’s legs.

“Yup, you got me this time, Timmy. I didn’t have a chance. You’re getting good.” Palmer ruffled the child’s hair. “What are you today?”

“The law.” Timmy pointed to a shiny plastic star clipped to his T-shirt.

“I see. But only yesterday you were a Comanche warrior.”

“Yesterday was Sunday.”

Palmer frowned. “And?”

“Men don’t come see you on Sunday.”

“Go on.” Palmer stood. “Tell me about it.”

“It’s a secret.”

“You can trust me. I won’t tell a soul.”

“When you talk with men, I keep you covered.”

“In case someone pulls a gun on me?”

Timmy nodded.

“Well, I’m relieved; I feel much safer now.”

“I saw the man with the uniform open his case. But it had no gun inside, or I would have shot him.”

Palmer smiled. General Weston would have been mighty upset had he known a gun was trained on him. He ruffled Timmy’s hair again and froze.

“Say, how could you see what was inside his case?”

“My rifle has a tube that makes things bigger.”

Palmer turned his head and looked over the back of his seat and out the sliding doors to the lawn outside. “And where were you?”

“In my house.”

At the far end of the garden, a clump of large trees offered a degree of privacy to the property that was valuable here in Georgetown. Palmer narrowed his eyes, but he couldn’t see a thing. Then he recalled his son building a tree house a few months before.

On his desk, a red light on the phone started flashing.

“I have a very important call now, but when I finish, will you show me your house?”