The Prisoner (12 page)

Dr. Carpenter—Floyd—seemed nice. No, he was gorgeous; tanned and with unruly blond hair that screamed for a woman’s fingers to comb through it. Despite her queasy stomach, she felt giddy.
It must be all that rocking
. After they dropped Russo at the surgical theater, he’d herded them into the showers, making a face as they discarded waders and oilskins. She’d glanced across at him, and her eyes locked on his raw gaze. He was ogling her, the soft weight of his smile pressing against her breasts, belly, and thighs.

A loud bang outside jolted Laurel from her reverie, hands flying to clear her eyes of the running water.

“Get out, now!” The male voice was tinged with hysteria.

Laurel slammed both hands on the enclosure door and jumped outside, to collide with a bewildered-looking Lukas and Raul. Floyd Carpenter was showing a different face from the man who had greeted them at the sewer entrance. Gone was the calm demeanor, replaced by panic.

“Your implants are broadcasting!” he yelled.

She reached to the lump in her neck. “Broadcasting? What are you talking about?”

“Come with me, fast.” He turned on his heel in a whirl of lab whites.

Raul jerked his head toward Lukas. “You know anything about that?”

The little man darted a drizzle of nervous glances between Laurel and Raul. “I-I swear, I had no idea—”

“Well, you do now.” Raul dashed to a pile of towels on a metal rack, grabbed one, threw another to Laurel, then bolted out the door, leaving a trail of wet footprints and water drops in his wake.

Twenty yards down an impersonal corridor, they piled through a set of double doors into a surgery room crammed with equipment, screens, and blinking lights.

“Look!” Floyd pointed to a large screen where, superimposed on a heartbeat track, another complex line spiked and fell in a fast sequence. “These implants are emitting high-frequency signals.”

Laurel narrowed her eyes. Someone with enough insight must have demanded that the designers include a transmitter. It made sense. The cunning addition gave Hypnos an ace up their sleeve. A card they had kept secret, even from Congress and the committee that approved the hardware.
Damn!
She stared at the trace on the screen, her mind churning with the implications.
Another detail we didn’t know. How many more are we yet to discover?

“Do you have X-ray machines here?” she asked.

“Well, yes, but—”

“Then get an apron.”

Floyd opened his mouth a couple of times like a floundering
fish. Then his eyes froze as the penny dropped. In two strides, he hurtled through the doors, his footsteps echoing down the corridor.

“I swear—” Lukas started.

“Don’t waste your breath.” Raul slapped Lukas between the shoulder blades. The small man winced as his towel dropped off. “Hypnos has probably been discreet about whatever extras they have packed in their sensors.”

Even from the government
, Laurel thought. The air was thick with bactericides and the penetrating smell of lanolin wafting from Russo’s body. “I wonder what else they forgot to publicize.”

Laurel stepped over to a gleaming table. Under the harsh light of an overhead LAD array, Russo’s emaciated and unnaturally pale body—bare of hair or nails—resembled a cross between a model of a giant fetus in its early stages of development and the larvae of a stick insect. She gaped, aghast, at the wasted shape. His pruned skin, with an unnatural sheen, twitched at intervals as if subject to electric shocks. Laurel neared the head of the table and reached to pry open one of Russo’s eyelids. In slow motion, his pupil contracted. She glanced at the steady rhythm of his heartbeat on the screen. So far, so good. A peppering of wireless pads dotted his chest and head, while two lines snaked from IV ports in his hands to unlabeled bottles dangling from a frame. From his penis, a catheter drew whitish fluid into a transparent bag. She spotted tiny perfusion marks on Russo’s neck and several discarded ultrasonic syrettes on a rectangular tray atop a wheeled cart. Dr. Carpenter had probably been working to stabilize Russo and scrub the sedatives from his blood.

A series of sharp beeps issued from a bank of automatic analyzers.

She scanned the printout scrolling from the printer. “Holy—”

“That man has not had his blood scrubbed in ages. No maintenance, nothing. Nobody told me. He needs a total transfusion.” Floyd stood just beyond the swinging doors, a buff sheet
folded in his hand. “Right now he’s a toxic dump. His blood is laced with complex chemicals and heavy metals.”

Laurel nodded. Another detail they hadn’t known. According to Shepherd, Russo would be unconscious and weak but not a living corpse.

“Total transfusion? More like a new body. You have large scissors?”

Floyd nodded to a door set flush on the wall to a side of the theater. Laurel opened it and selected the largest shears she could find. “Bring the apron over.”

Cursing under her breath at the toughness of the lead and polymer-fabric sandwich of the radiation protector, she managed to cut three-inch strips. When she finished, Laurel hurled one to Raul, another to Floyd for Russo, and wrapped the last around her neck. Then she stepped back to the wall cupboard to retrieve the adhesive bandages she’d spotted earlier.

When they finished, Russo and Raul looked like accident victims after having their necks immobilized. Laurel didn’t hold any illusions of looking better. On the screen, the spiky trace had disappeared, leaving only Russo’s heartbeat sailing across.

“Now what?” Lukas croaked.

Laurel darted a glance at Raul; it was her decision, but her legs had started to quiver again. After hearing an incredible tale from a man she’d never seen or met, judiciously doled out in several telephone conversations, she’d volunteered to help in springing Russo from the DHS’s clutches. Shepherd’s original plan contemplated enlisting three ex-professional soldiers to make up the team, but it was clear from the onset that it wouldn’t work. Men with proven military records would stick out like sore thumbs when they went through the sham trial. She had recruited Raul and Bastien, in the process becoming the team leader.

“Now we get the hell out of here.” Raul made a show of looking at an overhead digital clock. “The DHS’s legions must be massing outside.”

“Get out? Beam out is more likely.” Floyd seemed to have recovered his wits.

Raul wrinkled his nose and Laurel felt her stomach heave. “We go the same way we came in.” It was their only chance. To seal the sewers, the DHS needed an army they didn’t have. To enlist the police, they would need to broadcast the breakout, and they wouldn’t do that. Not yet.

“You’ve got to be joking.” Lukas held on to his towel and jerked his head around like a caged animal.

“Be my guest.” Raul shrugged. “You can try the front door if you like.”

“Better get him ready to travel.” Floyd had moved to the table and was drawing the catheter from Russo.

Laurel stared at Floyd. “You can’t stay here,” she said.

“A brilliant conclusion.”

“Look—”

“Plan to hit the sewers decked in towels?” Floyd sounded amused.

Laurel turned to Raul and froze as the image of waders with an inch of fatty sewage inside flashed through her mind. Unconsciously, she bunched her toes. “Shit.”

From the far side of the theater, Floyd unfolded a thermal sack to place Russo in and nodded to Raul for help. He then reached for the sack’s fastener and ripped. “Another brilliant conclusion.”

22:01

Their script gone, Laurel fought the waves of terror radiating from her belly, blanking reason with images of dark corners where she could curl up and cry. Their carefully researched plan called for a precise set of steps. Once Russo had been stabilized and housed at Nyx, Dr. Carpenter would have driven them to a prearranged meeting point on the
northern fringes of the city to rendezvous with Shepherd. Then they would have laid low for as long as necessary until Russo recovered. Not long, according to Shepherd. Now, like cornered animals, they could only run. But where? She was racing toward the showers to throw the filthy gear back on when Floyd grabbed her arm and pointed to a storeroom where the cleaning detail kept clean wet suits, waders, and tools. Laurel could have hugged him, hard. A minute later, when Lukas, Raul, and Laurel rushed back into the surgical theater, Floyd had already cocooned Russo in a bag, probably one of those used to move cadavers to incineration. She recalled Shepherd mentioning that, even with the lavish care bestowed by Nyx, often the bodies were so badly damaged after protracted commercial hibernation—by whatever sickness had gotten them there in the first place—that the only thing the family ever got back was condolences.

Floyd threw loaded syrettes, an instrument case, and handfuls of drugs from a shelf into a duffel bag and nodded for Raul to carry Russo. Then he bolted down the corridor to return almost at once with a lightweight folded stretcher, which he handed to Lukas. “Two floors down. Same way you came.” Floyd pointed to a door at the end of the corridor. “I’ll catch up with you.” He turned on his heel and pushed the door to the cleaner’s storeroom shut.

In the basement, they recovered their discarded flashlights and stood by the metal door leading to the sewers.

“Good stuff.” Raul pinched the dark-gray material of his suit and rubbed it between his fingers.

“Steam disinfecting gear,” Lukas said.

Raul nodded. “But they have no tanks.”

Suddenly Laurel jerked, pivoted, and ran toward the stairs. “The computer!”

She almost collided with Floyd, who was barreling down the steps.

“Where’re you going?” he yelled.

“Forgot the Metapad. We’re fucked without it.”

“We’re fucked anyway, but hurry up!” He squeezed past her and crashed through the basement door.

When Laurel returned, wheezing from the effort—the
computer dangling from her neck—the men had already strapped Russo onto the stretcher with stout woven belts.

“Here.” Floyd handed his bag to Lukas, nodded to Raul, then bent over to grab one end of the stretcher.

Sixteen minutes and thirty seconds after discovering the broadcasting implants, they were back in the sewers.

Nikola stood, his back to the security air locks joining the reception area with the underground accesses. Whoever had designed the complex didn’t believe in feng shui but understood human nature. Nyx’s reception area was a hangarlike monstrosity—a domed void rising one hundred feet into the air and spanning a circle of perhaps three hundred feet, with a doughnut-shaped counter in its center. The rest was empty but for clusters of plush seats arranged at the edge of the circle. Like an ancient temple builder, the architect had designed the brutal empty volume to awe visitors into insignificance.

As he waited outside for the arrival of the DHS Fast Deployment Units, Dennis’s voice had crackled in his earpiece. “Signatures gone.” A short sentence that altered the rules of the game.

“All of them?”

No hesitation on Dennis’s reply. “Yes.”

“At the same time?”

“Within seconds of one another, anyhow.”

To destroy the locators required surgical removal, and the fugitives hadn’t had enough time. Besides, if someone had surgically excised the sensors and left them lying around, they would still be live. Yet all three sensors had stopped broadcasting nearly in unison, and unless the fugitives had a large team of surgeons, it was an impossible feat. No. They had neutralized the sensors, and that could only mean the bastards had learned of their dual role as beacons. Nikola sighed and ran a hand over the sleeve of his wool jacket—one of his affectations. Real wool—not the smart synthetic fiber that would change color and texture at its owner’s whim. The wool felt warm to the touch, as if it still remembered the heat of the animal it had come from.

The waning signal left him blind and offered the fugitives
two alternatives. They could have holed up in the research building and hoped to remain undetected—but this was a naive assumption, and whoever had planned the operation was anything but naive. On the other hand, they could be in the sewers, ready to surface almost anywhere. And he didn’t have the personnel to scour hundreds of miles of city bowels
and
seal the city exits. But he could seal the city, and the fugitives would have to come up sooner or later. He stepped forward to a dozen security guards lined up by the FDU lieutenant and eyed a row of frightened faces. “Who’s in charge?”

A young security officer, almost a boy, straightened. “I am.”

Nikola peered into the young man’s eyes, ready to deliver a rebuke that died before it left his tongue. Interrogation was an art where one posed questions and the other delivered answers. Problem was, if the questions were stupid, the answers would be even more so. He had wanted to know who the highest executive in the building was, but he hadn’t been clear. And the boy replied accordingly; he was in charge of the security detail.

“Where are the medical personnel?”

“In their offices or labs, sir.”