The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [123]
He didn’t need to listen anymore. Henry turned on his heel and walked purposefully away from the booth toward the exit. Once on the street, he sought a secluded corner between two buildings, lowered his backpack to the ground, and rummaged in its pocket. When he found his new cellular phone, Henry flicked it open and keyed in the number he’d memorized. Now he knew why he’d missed the Tampa bus, and, besides, his fucking new boots hurt like hell.
chapter 40
20:45
“What do you think?”
Nikola glanced at the single sheet of paper with a list of Egyptian deities, the names appended after them, and the notes in red ink penned on the margins with Dennis’s all-capitals print. At the bottom of the page was an underlined and circled address—a hog farm an hour away from downtown Washington, D.C.
“Fitting. The sewers and now this.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of a category he called the slimy—a state with no fixed edges where existences flow into one another. The slimy is a soft clinging, there is a sly… complicity of all its leach-like parts followed by a flattening out that is emptied of the individual, sucked in on all sides by the substance. He flicked his eyes at the IR sensor atop the twin screens on his desk and searched the files. Mercenaries, misfits, cripples, and idealists, laced with indescribable doses of heroism. Then he focused on Senator Palmer’s photograph. No general could hope for a finer army. “We wait.”
If Dennis was surprised by Nikola’s lack of enthusiasm, he didn’t show it. He just sat taking measured sips from his Coke can. Finding out the fugitives’ hiding place had been a feat of sleuthing worthy of Holmes. Dennis had collated all the bills, committee work, and any scrap of paper where Senator Palmer’s name appeared, fused them into a database, and set to work. Eventually a strange thing emerged—a hog-farm-cum-research-station with a score of grants and land acquisitions promoted by Palmer. Running a check on the farm had yielded the names of two army veterans—one a national hero, and both crippled in action. A cursory scan of Antonio Salinas’s service file had produced nothing beyond heroism by the truckload. The other file belonged to Harper Tyler, Air Force Chief Warrant Officer 4, chopper pilot, with a damaged left leg, pensioned lump sum, and hog farm. But Dennis was thorough. He spotted a void: a full year between an entry in Tyler’s service file and the date of his hospitalization.
After his return from a memorable cold lunch with the Brownells, Nikola had taken over Dennis’s investigation, called in an old debt, and stopped over at the Pentagon for a brief glance at a top-secret file.
Harper Tyler had been in Iran. His commanding officer—now a retired colonel—was Major Scott Marino, Odelle’s dad. Reading the top-secret file of Major Marino’s exploits had been a revelation and explained Tyler’s involvement. But Nikola couldn’t understand why Tyler had not killed the bastard and been done with it.
Then Nikola had shuffled his painstakingly collated information and dealt hands for Odelle, Russo, Palmer—the puppeteer behind the scenes—and himself; a few cards he planned to play close to his chest. In this game, instead of concentrating on the hand held by the defense, he’d had to waste precious time and resources to figure out what cards Odelle held, to the point of openly cheating by lowering her hand and looking. Such a waste. Nikola checked the time at the base of one of the screens and sighed. He would need to get going for his meeting with her soon. He glanced at the can in Dennis’s hand. “I could do with one of those.”
Dennis nodded, stood, and went to the kitchen.
Nikola shook his head. He was now a part of the plot. There could be no redemption for him, and he smiled faintly when he determined that he didn’t seek any. Perhaps a little fresh air, and light, and the warmth of the sun—he loved the sun licking his face—but no redemption.
He reached for the