The Prisoner (44 page)

18:04

“My name is Lukas Hurley …”

Enrique Castillo jerked upright and blinked repeatedly at his screen laser tracker to shift input onto the keyboard, then routed the call to the speaker system and slammed a pad to his left. Overhead, a small mirror dropped to reflect the intense light of a powerful xenon projector, highlighting his booth like a beacon.

Bill Anderson was in charge of the scores of people fielding the telephones. Having commandeered a full floor of SINTA, a corporation providing telephone support for government services, the operators sifted, around the clock, through thousands of calls reporting sightings of suspicious-looking people or vehicles. So far, and however well-intentioned the calls, none amounted to anything beyond wishful thinking.

Enrique craned his neck and spotted Bill barreling down the corridor to crash-stop before his booth, the side panels rattling with the impact.

“… shift supervisor of the Washington, D.C., hibernation facility.” A short pause. “ID number 17395878 XCJ.”

Bill made a rolling motion with one hand, the other busy with a cellular pad. “Could you repeat, please?”

“No.”

“Pardon?”

“If you missed something, listen to the recording. Testimony is slated for day after tomorrow at ten-thirty
A.M
. at the ABC TV studios down Rhode Island Avenue Northeast. We’ll be there an hour before.”

The line went dead.

“Twenty-two seconds,” Enrique announced. Not enough.

“Prepaid SIM,” someone yelled.

“Radio mast at Meridian Hill Park,” another voice shouted. “Sander transmitter.”

“Switched off,” a third voice rattled.

Enrique exchanged glances with Bill. The caller knew the system. Had he kept his cell phone switched on, the direction finder could have zeroed in on it, given another minute or so.

Text started scrolling against his screen. The SIM had been bought three days before in a pack of five from a machine dispenser at Union Station.

Bill Anderson nodded. “Log the recording into the system; I’ll download it into my station.”

Enrique followed Bill’s retreating figure as it marched along the corridor to his glass-walled office, where he closed the door and reached for a secure phone.

20:30

After bridging its alarm circuit, George Wilson picked the lock and pushed open the heavy steel door. Hefting a long polymer guitar case, he stepped onto the rooftop and closed the door. A knee to the floor, he fished in his coat pocket for two slim neodymium wedges and rammed them between door and casing.

The sun had set minutes before, and its feeble residual
light was drenched in red. Wilson peered around the Paige Building’s deserted roof—a vast esplanade capping a hundred-story skyscraper, with a huge water tank and a room housing the air-conditioning machinery. Carrying his case, he strolled to the southernmost edge of the building and the foot-high parapet that topped the roof. From his vantage point, Wilson spotted long chains of streetlights coming alive. Eight hundred feet below, the already heavy evening traffic snaked down New York Avenue toward John Hanson Highway and the suburbs. A mile ahead in a bend of the road stood Mason Tower, his target.

A four-foot-wide puddle, left by rain the day before and stretching almost the length of the roof, rippled in the breeze. The construction workers must have been sloppy, probably eager to head for a beer at ground level. It was a ridiculous puddle, no deeper than an inch, but he would have to lie in it, perhaps for hours on end. Wilson hawked a wad of phlegm and spat it to the side. Sloppy. In time, the puddle would cause dampness on the lower floors. Not that the workers cared, and that was the problem: no pride in workmanship—a trait Wilson possessed in spades.

With a final look around in the rapidly waning light, Wilson rested the case on the ground, squatted, and threw its catches open.

Based on the venerable CheyTac M100 rifle, the CT-16XBO had evolved into a wonder of precision engineering and electronics, delivering stunning accuracy at two thousand yards in the hands of a rookie. With thousands of hours clocked at ranges and a bunch of soft target interdiction scores—the euphemism for sniper kills—Wilson was anything but a rookie.

After assembling the rifle’s collapsible stock, IR laser, and scope, Wilson linked the weapon’s Kestrel—a squat box housing temperature, wind, and atmospheric-pressure sensors—to his computer pad and set the weapon down on its squat tripod in the water. Then he assessed the puddle. He could try to lie partially on top of the case, but that would hamper his hold on the rifle. With a huff, he laid the case open on the water
and next to the weapon, removed his jacket, folded it with care, and lowered himself into the puddle, stretching prone in the water. After turning and twisting to get as comfortable as possible, he reached to a side pocket in the rifle case and picked out a plastic box by feel.

Although designed almost five decades earlier, the precision-machined .408 cartridge remained state of the art: supersonic at over two thousand yards and with more punch than a .50 at shorter ranges. Out of habit, Wilson selected each gleaming projectile and rubbed it over the crook between his chin and lower lip for a film of body oil that wouldn’t affect the bullet’s performance but would give good luck. When the six-projectile clip was full, he rammed it in its housing, turned his cap around, leaned on the stock, and adjusted his eye to the scope, a finger slowly rotating the focusing piece until the view leaped into crisp detail. Slowly, Wilson panned vertically until he found the windows he sought: the upper story of a pent house in a building a mile away.

Although his bodyguards had not turned around when he got into the car, Lawrence Ritter recognized their necks and the mounds of solid flesh curling like doughnuts over stiff white collars: Demorizi and Bancroft, good ex-army muscle, loyal and unhampered by high IQs. His personal assistant, Bernard Gluck, traveled in a car behind with another security officer, although at times they would maneuver ahead or to the sides, in particular when slowing down at intersections or at traffic lights.

Ritter patted his case and was about to unclasp it when he thought better of it. The documents weren’t that important, and he had to think about the piece of flimsy paper with machine-code lines burning in his jacket’s inner pocket, returned to him—after the program was lodged in the satellite—by a friend from infancy who happened to have risen to the higher echelons of the NSA.

Genia Warren’s moxie the day before had taken him by surprise. Her codes to lodge what amounted to a dead-man’s handle in the satellite routing at Hypnos’s traffic, and the program printed on the paper, had needed deft footwork and
time. Genia had an army of computer specialists and could have cashed in a quiet favor for the program, but the codes were another matter and hinted at someone high up. Yet Ritter found the details irrelevant before the real issue: time. Such a devious plan to cancel the disposal of center inmates needed not only intimate knowledge of the system but the time to mull over its chinks, gather the data, and shape the package. Since such a scheme would be useful only if the disclosure of Hypnos’s shenanigans was imminent, either Genia had developed the ploy since the breakout or she knew earlier that it would happen. Ritter had thought of little else since the day before, arriving at the unshakable conclusion that Genia hadn’t had the time to work out the intricate details since the prisoners escaped.

So, you’re planning a coup
. Genia had been in Odelle Marino’s sights for a long time. He’d watched from the sidelines as Genia bowed to Odelle’s whims with a meekness he’d found maddening and at odds with Genia’s character and intellect. Now the pesky pieces slotted nicely into the puzzle, but Ritter viewed the evolving picture with foreboding. Odelle was a formidable opponent and wielded enormous power. He patted his jacket and felt the soft crunch of paper. For an instant, he pictured Genia’s fingers slipping into her bra, closed his eyes, and enjoyed the warm feeling. That he would never allow her to go solo—however harebrained her scheme—had little to do with loyalty, honor, or a sense of duty, but she didn’t know that.

The deed was done and the program in place. Now what?

A rapid series of sharp beeps pulled him from his reverie. From a holder clipped to his belt, Ritter drew his secure phone.
CALL WHEN YOU ARRIVE AT YOUR APARTMENT
, read the message in its bright orange screen. No greeting. No name. No need.

Back in the ‘20s, the forty-sixth U.S. president, Edwina Locke, had blown a fuse when a delicate private conversation with her teenage daughter was posted word for word on the Web, years before the Internet rules changed. With the virtual disappearance of landlines and increased sophistication of electronic eavesdropping, it had become impossible to
guarantee privacy with portable devices working on the cellular network. President Locke had scoured MIT and Caltech for unorthodox brains and shanghaied them into a think tank accountable only to the White House. Soon dubbed EBD, or Edwina’s Boffin Department, by security directors, she tasked her group to develop a system of secure communications for high-ranking government officers. The group discovered that such a system existed, developed and run by the army. When the military stonewalled the EBD, Locke tore a broad strip from a four-star general’s hide and forced him to release the technology. Thus the SSC1, or Secure Squirt Communication equipment, became an essential accessory for high-ranking civil servants.

Shaped like a thin cellular phone, the SSC 11×7 in Ritter’s hand was the latest model of a pager—useless as a regular phone, and devoid of popular gadgets such as a 3-D screen or theta-wave relax, but so secure that after thirty years it remained hacker-proof to anyone but the NSA, who kept the keys.

When the user spoke, the device identified, compressed, and encrypted each word, to squirt it as a pulse lasting nanoseconds in the pauses between sounds. The receiver could read remarkably crisp plain text on a screen barely larger than a wristwatch and in the top left-hand corner a three-digit number identified the caller. An iris scan and a devilish DNA comparer prevented unauthorized use.

Ritter glanced through the darkened side windows as they crossed Florida Avenue, five minutes from his apartment at Mason Tower. On the corner of Brentwood Road, he caught sight of Enzo Semprini, closing his fruit shop for the day.

After the 2026 building act allowing construction higher than the Capitol in Washington, D.C., scores of high-rise buildings had forever changed the capital’s image. Washington boasted several buildings with high-security ratings, but none like Mason Tower. The condominium had been privately built back in the ‘30s and all its residents were government employees. In a bid to guarantee protection at reasonable costs, federal agencies encouraged their more
sensitive personnel to move into a secure property. Those who couldn’t be convinced to take up an address at a secure condominium required expensive twenty-four-hour protection by a rotating team of bodyguards, which put an incredible strain on the system. Genia Warren was one of those who had refused to leave her family home in Galesville, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay.

Soon Ritter’s motorcade reached the approaches to the building—a vast rotunda with synthetic lawn and a flagstaff at its center. Instead of approaching the main door at street level, they continued down a circular ramp sinking under the building. Two floors underground, the ramp leveled and straightened into a clear three-hundred-foot stretch, ending in a burnished steel wall, which blocked further progress.

The two-car motorcade had slowed to a standstill, the front car only a few yards from the gleaming wall, when a low-frequency thump echoed from behind.

Ritter ignored the noise, adjusted his beret, and reached for the suitcase as the windows lowered. He knew that another wall of three-inch-thick steel had dropped behind them, to isolate them from the rest of the world while sensors ran inside and outside the vehicles.

When a small yellow light flickered on a plate in the near wall, he stared fixedly at it until it dimmed. It required concentration; even a glance at the sensors deployed at either side of the plate would have triggered a silent alarm to draw the security troops down into the basement like flies to rotten meat. Then the wall ahead started to disappear into a slot in the ceiling.

At the elevator bank, Ritter stepped out of the car and gave cursory nods to his assistant and the driver before entering the waiting elevator. As the doors closed, he noted the delighted looks passing between his retinue. Since he’d not given them any special instructions, they were free to go home for the night.

In the loneliness of the elevator, Genia’s words wouldn’t leave his mind. She was going all the way along a road with no possibility of turning back. He felt apprehension, elation, and no little curiosity. Who was backing her? Obviously, it
was someone with clout. And clout meant someone high in the government.