The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [4]
In his ten years at the company, he’d accompanied a dozen wretches into areas that didn’t exist in the station’s formal layout or its architectural drawings. It was a clever ploy. Where to hide a tree? In the woods, of course. Where to hide a body? In a tank full of them. Yes, the C area looked innocent enough, but it was a limbo for anonymous souls.
Lukas pecked at his tablet PC and the holograph grew. Laurel. The Spanish name of a splendid Mediterranean shrub: Laurus nobilis, bay. He tasted the name of the woman in the photograph, pondering that Romans used bay’s aromatic leaves to make triumphal crowns for victors. Laurel—what an encouraging name. He’d risked storing the files Donald Duck had supplied on his tablet to learn the faces and names he otherwise would have never known.
The first time he had heard the quacking voice on his cell phone—obviously filtered through a distorting circuit—Lukas thought someone was having fun and severed the call. That was before two men pushed him into the back of a car as he was leaving for work, drove him to an abandoned warehouse, and made him stand before a quacking speaker. He’d never met the voice’s owner, but it belonged to a persuasive man. A few days after his abduction, Lukas fielded a call from Cuzco, Peru, to learn from his awed bank manager that Donald Duck was not only persuasive but also true to his word.
After selecting one of his files, Lukas placed it on standby. During the minutes following an inmate’s intubation, the program locked on to a routine to coax his or her body into deep hibernation—a tamper-proof routine coupled to scores of fail-safe sensors. Once the inmate was stabilized, the program looped into its maintenance subroutine; this was the spot where Lukas had to slip the patch provided by Donald Duck’s men. The lines of code would override the maintenance program, hiking the Thermogenin dosing into Laurel’s bloodstream—a protein to uncouple the electron transport chain from the reaction producing adenosine triphosphate. As a result, her body would produce heat by thermogenesis and ward off the onset of hypothermia. Then the rogue patch would loop yet again into the reanimation sequence. When Lukas finished, he adjusted Laurel’s mixture of gases and set a timer to launch his patch for ten minutes after immersion in the fluid. A tiny set of numerals appeared on the top of the middle screen and remained static.
Lukas bit his lower lip and ran his hands down the front of his lab coat again. Within a few hours, he would be on his way to Peru with Elena. In the land of the Inca Empire and Machu Picchu, they would build a big house and settle as wealthy landowners, to her family’s chagrin. “He’s a loser; a jailer,” her brothers had insisted. “And twice your age.” Or perhaps they said a jailer and a loser, but the order of words didn’t matter. Her father had spat at his feet and had slapped Elena’s face. That had mattered, had stuck in his gut like a branding iron.
Over the three plasma panels on his desk, Lukas glanced through the bubble isolating his office from the main control room. He weighed the expressions and postures of his staff. Normal, routine faces, a tinge of boredom here and there. He looked at an expanse of synoptic boards, counters, and the myriad screens of the network controlling the station. Normal. No flashing lights out of sync. From Lukas’s vantage point, the control room could have been in any power station. At desks bristling with overrides, screens, and communications terminals, four men and a woman followed the automatic processing of inmates into the station. From a peak