The Prisoner (5 page)

17:50

The cocoon with Bastien inside maneuvered through a swarm of wires almost to the far edge of the room before turning and heading in Laurel’s direction, like a strange hive at the end of a sagging branch. The ceiling over the tank was a grid of metal rails and guides holding square plates, each fitted with two suspension wires and a greenish tube. Laurel watched the moving plate shunting past other squares, guided by a thick cylinder, probably a hydraulic arm. After more clicks and whines, the mess of jelly cords with Bastien inside traveled overhead along the platform surrounding the tank, leaking steady dribbles of clear fluid.

She waited—as one waits for the last strain of an organ note to die out before leaving church. A few paces beyond the heap of her discarded netting, the bundle slowed to arc in sluggish swings, as if buffeted by unseen winds. Glistening threads stretched to pool on the floor below. Then it lowered. Laurel gathered her legs and tried to stand, her eyes intent on Bastien’s upturned face, distorted by thick lips stretched around the green tube.
Why doesn’t he yank his goggles off?
Her toes gripped the textured floor.

With a loud click, clasps fastening the wires to Bastien’s harness snapped and his body sagged onto the floor. Rather than standing, Laurel edged toward Bastien on all fours, her arms and knees wobbly.

The green hose tightened, lifting Bastien’s head a few inches from the floor before sliding from his throat. As the tube contorted toward the machinery above, Bastien’s head thumped back onto the polymer floor.

Laurel lunged over to him, reaching behind his head for
the fastener holding together his jelly net and tugging at his protective goggles. His eyes stared, fixed, unfocused, to a point somewhere over their heads.

Oh, no, you don’t
. She yanked his neck ring and tore at the net, but she couldn’t remove it without lifting his slick body. “You bastard!” she screamed. He was too heavy to maneuver out of the jelly mess. With quick movements, she removed his nose plugs and lowered her ear to his gaping mouth. He wasn’t breathing. She rammed her fingers into his neck to check his carotid pulse; nothing. She pulled back one of Bastien’s eyelids, but his pupil didn’t react.

“You bastard,” she insisted.
Chest compression is more important than ventilation
. Laurel strained to remember the precise details from a first-aid course she’d attended several years before. Swinging a leg over his body, she straddled Bastien.
One, two, three …
She lowered her weight and rammed her stacked hands on his sternum.
At least one hundred a minute. Ten, eleven, twelve …
Laurel jerked her head, scanning the bare walls for a defibrillation station. Nothing.
Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three
… At thirty, she stopped. He needed a shock to restart his heart.

Again, she glanced quickly around the room for anything electric, a service outlet she knew wouldn’t be there. Still nothing.
One, two three
… A whine and two sharp clicks. Something moved overhead.
Seven, eight, nine …
Time for Raul. Laurel pushed and counted, her stomach twisted into a painful knot. Stopping again at thirty, she peered into Bastien’s unseeing eyes and started over.

Either Bastien had suffered a cardiac arrest or something had malfunctioned in the life-support equipment. She knew there was someone helping them out from the inside, though she didn’t know his identity. But their plan hinged on the helper’s ability to bypass a high-level program and insert a subroutine to slip in a few lines of code. Perhaps the rogue program had conflicted with other computer instructions. It was a miracle she was alive. She darted a glance to the center of the tank—the limbo of forgotten souls—and to the twin wires separated from the others. Their goal. Laurel shuddered, her mind torn with conflicting emotions. For more than eight
years, Eliot Russo had floated under those wires, kept in the perfect form of bondage by a sadist. Eliot Russo, a man she’d never met but had learned to hate the moment she discovered his existence. A man probably insane after his ordeal. Yet, insane or not, he was proof of the system’s criminal abuse by the government. Laurel had sworn to expose the corruption in the Federal Bureau of Hibernation, but doing so by springing out the man she knew only as Eliot Russo was the ultimate paradox. Resentment burned her stomach.

There were more whines and clicks as the hydraulic arm moved to raise another sac of sinew and bone from hibernation. What if Raul was dead or unconscious? She might as well dive into the icy fluid and breathe deep—anything but hibernation for life.
Thirty
. Again, she leaned to peer into Bastien’s eyes and, grinding her teeth with rage, resumed the cardiac massage with renewed vigor.

The clicks stopped and the fluid rippled before Raul’s head surfaced. Underneath, the liquid boiled and lazy wavelets radiated from Raul’s torso. His enmeshed arms thrashed at the net, and a hand snaked through to reach for his goggles.

Laurel closed her eyes as a wave of relief washed over her. She paused and drew in a deep breath, looked once more at Raul’s writhing shape, then resumed the compressions.

Even before the wires supporting Raul had snapped free, he was already releasing the neck ring and tugging at his ear and nose plugs. When the hydraulic arm removed the mouth plug, Raul rolled on the floor as he tore out of the gelatinous mess, lurching heavily from side to side, then crawled toward her.

“Move,” he croaked. “Let’s get this mess off him.”

Good old Raul; no questions. In the short flight over the tank, he’d pressed through his horror and assessed the problem.

Raul pushed both hands under Bastien’s head and jerked the unconscious man to a sitting position to free the net so Laurel could slide it down.

“Take over chest compression. I’ll do the mouth-to-mouth,” Laurel said.

“How long has he been like this?” Raul started pounding away at a good rhythm.

Laurel had lost count of the maneuvers. “Six or seven minutes.” Keeping his airway free, she breathed hard into his mouth. It tasted of hibernation fluid—metallic with a hint of sweetness.

Still no reaction. Laurel blew into his lungs again. The window for successful bridging until defibrillation was ten to eighteen minutes. They were running out of time.

Raul compressed Bastien’s chest with vigor, eyes darting around.

“Don’t bother. I checked. No defibrillator,” Laurel said.

“Bastards!”

“It would be needless overkill. The machines hoist the meat straight up to revival labs above us. Why should they have emergency equipment around the tanks? This is a clean room, sterile. To handle emergency life support outside the tank, you’d need real people with real germs.”

“What about maintenance?”

“Automatic. Only a major breakdown would bring anybody here through the personnel corridors and service galleries.”

“Which way is the entrance?”

She cocked her head. “Behind me, but you can forget it. Shepherd’s notes were clear; it opens from the other side and won’t work until Russo surfaces and our contact joins us.”

When Raul paused, Laurel lowered her head and tried to breathe life into Bastien’s inert body. Raul continued pushing and heaving. Her mind raced. The machine would pluck Eliot Russo from the tank any minute now. Then they would have ten minutes to grab him and run before the alarms went off. They would never make it.

“What went wrong?”

“The program or his heart. Does it matter?”

She scowled at his bleak look, and his eyes lowered, disappearing into shadow.

Bastien’s muscled body rippled under Raul’s onslaught. She’d read of people reviving after lengthy revival maneuvers, but not under such conditions. Laurel eyed Raul, his face grim, determined, slamming down onto Bastien’s chest
like a battering ram,
twenty-nine, and thirty
. She leaned over, fastened her lips to Bastien’s cold mouth, and blew. Pause. Another breath and Raul resumed his pounding. She ran a hand over Bastien’s shaved head, following the ridges of his left temporal bone, cold and slimy.

Throughout her life, Laurel had attached herself only to cherished scenes, hoarding them like amulets against disaster. An image flashed through her mind now: Trees burned in the autumn sunlight, ablaze in a riot of red leaves, and the three of them—Bastien, Raul, and her—lounged on the grass, drinking Sonoma Riesling straight from the bottle. Bastien had a serious expression. “At a monastery, the prior asks a novice to replace an almost exhausted candle in the chapel. The young man forgets. After prayers, the prior sends for the novice and confronts him with a spluttering wick in a pool of molten wax. ‘Where’s the candle?’ he demands, and the young monk replies, ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it?’” Raul had shot a confused look at Bastien. Then the penny dropped—
“Wears
the candle?”—and they all roared with laughter.
Thirty
. She leaned over one more time and blew anger into Bastien’s lungs.
Breathe, my friend, breathe
. Laurel peered into Bastien’s face. His eyes had dulled. She closed his eyelids.

Raul looked up, as though to speak, but his mouth froze. Laurel followed his gaze and saw a shadow shifting overhead.

A whine and clicks. Laurel closed her eyes, grief welling in her chest. Bastien’s candle had worn down and guttered into darkness. Now it was time for the man they had come to spring from this hell.

It was time for Russo.

17:59

Mocking the immutable laws of science, time became softer—stretching into a distorted reality, viscous like molasses. Liquid air transformed unconscious breathing into strenuous labor. Lukas stared at the red digits framed high over the control panels: 17:59. They hadn’t moved in hours. With glazed eyes, he queried the frozen numerals, his tongue pressed against his teeth. Hard lumps dug into his belly. Under his belt, the envelopes seemed to have lost their padding, and his usually tame bladder screamed for release.

Lukas lowered his gaze to the angry red line blazing on his screen. Once more, the program supplied by Donald Duck had done its job. No alarm had triggered, and it was obvious nothing had shown on the screens of the operators outside his office. As the drama unfolded at tank 913, he’d watched, transfixed—not with anxiety but with detached calm. The man … what was his name? Bastien. Lukas had spotted his metabolism flatline as it happened. The man had died of heart failure. To the pair battling to revive their friend’s corpse, it was an inexplicable piece of bad luck, but Lukas knew better. Cardiac arrest was a common event when undergoing reanimation. Naturally Hypnos had kept the plethora of side effects hidden. Full return from torpor, unlike partial periodic arousals, needed supervision by expert medical personnel with an awesome array of revival equipment at their disposal. Technical wizardry and human intervention ensured that the casualties remained at a reasonable two percent. But outside a surgical theater and in the dreary conditions of the platform surrounding a tank, Bastien’s chances were almost nonexistent. If the plan was thorny to start with, now
it was almost impossible: The woman, however well trained, couldn’t replace a strong man, and Lukas was no match even for her. But there was no going back now.

Lukas forced his gaze back to the clock. Suddenly the light grew to flood the control center in blinding clarity, sound thundered in his ears, and the slothful numbers dimmed to configure a new reading: 18:00. Then whatever machine had caused the time warp meshed into gear and time raced. In a blink, the clock moved to 18:01.

Holding on to his desk to buttress his shaking legs, Lukas stood to glance at controllers leaving their posts for their short break while the computer entered the backup routine. A haze of fear threatened to void his bowels. Lukas made it to his office door, carefully dried his sweaty fingers on his lab coat, offered his finger to the lock for a full biometric scan, and exited to the corridor.

“Hi.” Sandra’s voice had a cheerful ring. “I thought the old guy was gonna croak on the spot.”

Lukas fought an impulse to check his watch and stopped beside Sandra. A few paces farther on and leaning over the guardrail of a fire exit corridor girdling the tank blocks, Frank, another controller, dragged on a misshapen cigarette.

“New look?” She nodded to his feet. “I’ve never seen you wear sneakers before. I like it.”

“You did a great job with that old guy.” He made a face of dire discomfort and nodded to a door opening thirty feet ahead. “You mind? Tacos for lunch. Went right through me.”

Sandra nodded in understanding.

He strode toward the salvation of the door, repressing an urge to break into a run.

“Do you want anything? A cup of tea?” Sandra asked.

“Yes, please.” Without turning his head, Lukas slammed down the handle and hurtled through the door to the echo of Sandra’s laugh.

Past four doors opening right and left, each marked with unisex pictograms, Lukas stopped at the entrance to the service area, flashed his ID card past an open slot, and leaned over for a retinal scan. A red light changed to green and the lock clicked open. When the door snapped closed, Lukas was
already one hundred feet away, barreling ahead as terror gripped his gut.
901
. A panel marking the entrance to a hibernation tank flashed by. In seven minutes, the computer would be online and his unauthorized entry logged. Then a chain of events would unfold with clockwork precision—and not in slowed-down time but the real stuff. A signal would flash to maintenance.
902
. The workers on duty would run a trace to confirm the access. That would take thirty seconds. After confirmation, a second signal would flash to security. The officers there would analyze his heat signature and plot his movements from the instant he’d entered the service area.
903
. Lukas had seen it before in tests and exercises—a three-dimensional hologram with a red line snaking along the route followed by whoever had breached security. That would take another thirty seconds. At 18:11, the mother of all alarms would go off and unleash the computer program to seal every door. Tight.
904
.