The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [175]
Jerome Palmer resigned from the Senate, but his absence from the corridors of power was short-lived. Before President Hurst’s reelection, she cajoled him over a bottle of excellent cognac in Palmer’s study to be her secretary of state.
Inside a fortnight of her predecessor’s suicide, Genia Warren was sworn in as the new director of the DHS, coinciding with Lawrence Ritter’s resignation. Less than six months after Ritter accepted his congressional appointment as CEO of Hypnos, he moved into Genia’s family home, but not before yielding to Father Damien’s demands. The priest refused to acknowledge him as a neighbor unless he married her first.
In addition to accepting an undisclosed settlement from the United States government, Eliot Russo became president for life of the Hibernation Monitoring Agency. He lives with a remarkably attractive housekeeper at a converted lighthouse in Maine, where he tends to his orchids under the tower’s glass dome. He keeps several tiny rooms—more like monastic cells—ready to accommodate his frequent visitors.
Nikola Masek runs a security company in the Dominican Republic. In association with his in-house hacker, Dennis Nolan, he offers computer security services to governments and private corporations. Dennis married his woman, and the family laundry business has branched out into neighboring Haiti.
After another congressional commendation and a princely award, also undisclosed, Henry Mayer continued his interrupted trip to Honduras, where he failed to locate his friend and took to tramping the high sierras, looking for a suitable place to farm chinchillas. His carefully laid plans, however, didn’t take into consideration the staff at Trujillo’s Registro de la Propiedad, the government office where land ownership deeds are registered. After Henry stood in line all morning to ascertain the status of a wonderful tract of land high on the Cerro San Jorge, the pretty young woman staffing the counter slipped a Cerrado sign on her desk and gathered her handbag, on her way to lunch.
Emilia Gutierrez must have felt a pang of guilt at seeing the bewildered expression of the giant gringo in dusty lizard-skin boots and sweat-stained Stetson, because she stopped for an instant to reassure him she would be back in two hours. Henry tagged along with her to a local watering hole for sandwiches and a soft drink to outline his plans.
Emilia, a fisherman’s daughter, was aghast at the thought of growing furry things to craft into expensive coats for high-maintenance American women, and she suggested Henry should scout the coast to get other business ideas. Since it was already Friday and she didn’t work the weekend, she would show him around. A few weeks later, Emilia Mayer succeeded in getting her dazed husband to buy a fish farm with her father and two brawny brothers as hired help, and Henry blesses the day he stood on line at the Trujillo Registro de la Propiedad.
bibliography
For information on sewers I’m indebted to a number of sources, the most important being: The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City by Jennifer Toth, Cloacina: Goddess of the Sewers by Jon C. Schladweiler, American Sanitary Engineering by Edward S. Philbrick, Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations by Donald Reid, The World Beneath the City by Robert Daley, Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration by Ninjalicious, Invisible Frontier: The Jinx Book of Urban Exploration by David Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo, Beneath the City Streets by Peter Laurie, and New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City by Julia Solis.
I consulted several publications dealing with explosives, in particular: The Longest Walk: The World of Bomb Disposal by Peter Birchall, The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell, and the superb Jane’s Explosive Ordinance Disposal 2005–06 by Colin King.
Finally, I also checked a wealth of particulars on the subject of mammalian physiology, especially: Mammalian Hibernation III by Kenneth C.