The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [50]
“Can I have two more?” Raul asked, and glanced up toward the side entrance where Floyd and Lukas tended to Russo. Then he bent down to pick up a flat piece of wood and held it before him, arms outstretched.
Henry chuckled. “My, but we’re quick learners.”
Laurel and Raul settled with their grimy mugs of something hot and wet away from the groups around the fires or the sleeping shapes on cardboard mattresses, while Henry dragged a crate over and settled down in a flurry of alarming creaks.
“How did you know where to meet us?” Laurel asked.
“I gave the coordinates to your boss.”
“How?”
“Phone.”
“Where—”
Henry waved a hand. “We have a portable repeater, now a mile away from here. Our contact lasted thirty seconds, not long enough for trackers. We can’t use it again, not until we reprogram a different handle.”
“Handle?”
“Address,” Raul clarified.
“Where can I use this?” Laurel drew from her pocket the sturdy Metapad computer.
“Squirt?”
Laurel nodded.
“Be my guest.”
Laurel didn’t move.
“Over there.” Henry pointed to an empty area on the far end of the platform.
Laurel stopped by the side entrance where she’d seen the men take Russo. They had propped the stretcher on top of two wooden crates and opened the bag. Now, with the black material skirting the boxes, Russo’s white body reminded Laurel of a photograph she’d once seen of an Indian cremation. Floyd was moving a pad over Russo’s chest, peering at a handheld device with a bright blue screen.
“How is he?”
Floyd opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then he shook his head. “Stable.”
“What does that mean?” On the fringe of her vision, Laurel noted the still figure of Lukas holding Floyd’s bag.
Floyd breathed deep. “It means he’s holding on. As for how long … your guess is as good as mine.”
She was about to remind him that he was a doctor and an expert in hibernation side effects, before the surrealism of their predicament stilled her tongue. “Thank you. I’m trying to work us out of here. I’ll be back.”
Floyd held her gaze an instant and nodded.
Laurel continued along the platform to a secluded corner, behind a pile of junk, bundles of copper wiring, and sacks of rags. After booting her Metapad—a rugged military-issue combination of GPS Squirt messenger and computer—she opened the instant-message program and pinged Shepherd. He replied instantly, as if he’d had the text ready to beam: >Explain your circumstance, in detail.
Over the next few minutes she exchanged messages—first to bring Shepherd up to date about their desperate plight and later to figure a way out. There was none. The police had effectively sealed the city with checkpoints at major and most minor roads. In addition, patrol cars were conducting spot checks on suspect vehicles and, according to Shepherd, almost anything on wheels qualified. The river was also out; it was teeming with police speedboats. As their conversation progressed, Laurel’s feeling of dejection deepened. Their carefully built plan had vanished. Shepherd could drive a van to a point four miles away on the city’s south side, hide the van in a disused warehouse, and wait to pick them up there, but he couldn’t get any closer. Besides the police, several DHS Fast Deployment Units had spread downtown and at cardinal points around Washington, D.C., ten minutes away from almost any spot within the city limits. They were hemmed in the sewers with a dying man.
>Problem is, Shepherd wrote, anything that distracts the police away wouldn’t necessarily bother the DHS, and conversely.
>Is there anything that would distract them both or cause the DHS to call off the police?
>No, but perhaps we can distract them separately.
>How? Laurel clutched at straws.
A long pause.
>A major accident, a fire.
In other words, Shepherd had no idea.
>Still have the sensors? Shepherd asked.
>Yes.
>Henry should be able to use them to draw the DHS away from you.
>And the police?
For more than a minute, the prompt flashed on the screen without any new input. Then three words scrolled across