The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [67]
“That guy knows his sewers,” Raul admitted.
“I told you,” Susan mumbled.
Laurel checked her watch. Over an hour and a half since they’d left Russo, and they had made good progress. We must be getting near. Then her Metapad issued a faint beep and its screen lit up. >Barandus. One of the two wise men in the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena; Apocalypse; the Gospel According to Peter.
I’ll be damned, Laurel thought.
A few minutes later Henry stopped at another side entrance but didn’t go in. “We must go through the crumbly, and that’s dangerous, but there’s no other alternative,” he announced.
“What’s that?” Raul asked.
Henry glanced at Barandus before answering. “The crumbly are the oldest sewers, narrow and lined with crumbling bricks. Cave-ins are frequent. I hear the city honchos are sinking new lines to eventually condemn these, but they are still in use.”
Harper Tyler neared the old bay window in his study, nursing a squat tumbler with a splash of bourbon over a handful of ice cubes.
Suddenly a bright red tractor trailing a liquid-manure spreader broke through the green wall of poplars separating the farm buildings and his house from the stables and fields. Tyler shielded his eyes and peered at the machine driven by Mateo Salinas—Antonio’s son, decked in orange coveralls.
After Tyler’s “accident,” a mousy woman with colonel stripes had paid him a hospital visit to “plan your future.” When a couple of medals and a promotion to a cushy desk job at a sunny location failed to elicit much enthusiasm, she offered him a sweet pension deal unreasonably fattened by a score of arcane items and payable in a lump sum with no deductions or commissions. That was the carrot. The stick was a lengthy document placing a short interval of his military career above top secret and threatening fire and brimstone should he be foolish enough to whisper a word about his time in Iran. When he requested time to study the papers, the colonel made a face and shook her head. “The wording is irrelevant,” she confided. “It’s the spirit that matters. The army wants you to have well-earned peace of mind. It’s only fair we demand the same in exchange.” She didn’t say “or else,” but Tyler was too weary and in pain from his shattered leg to consider rivaling Don Quixote’s charge against the towering windmills of the military establishment. Major Marino was probably irrelevant. But his daughter, Odelle—the blazing star in the DHS firmament—was another matter. The army couldn’t risk upsetting her. He signed on the dotted line and initialed each page before eyeing the colonel’s departing derriere and upgrading his earlier rating of mousy to that of feline.
Thus ex–Chief Warrant Officer 4 Harper Tyler bankrolled a self-sufficient hog farm.
Mateo was heading to an earthed lagoon where the slurry from the pens collected before flowing slowly down a cement trench. Manure was an important element on Tyler’s farm. From the trench, the waste not used on the fields was instead poured into underground pits, where an anaerobic biogas digester rotted the waste and extracted methane gas, which was then fed to his turbine. Pig manure provided all the energy the farm needed and was a source of income from the surplus-electricity feed to the grid.
The solid waste produced a valuable fertilizer. The remaining liquids would be returned to a nearby stream at the end of the process as clean water—the biodigestion having removed any pathogens or other potentially dangerous contamination from the pig waste. The water-filtration process involved a series of pools with plants that cleaned the water as they grew and made good pig feed, further reducing the need for off-site energy inputs. The system, a model of ingenuity and sound engineering, had been implemented by Antonio Salinas, the army veteran who—along with his wife, three sons, and boundless energy—ran