The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [70]
“My children,” Henry’s voice boomed from the head of the line, “let reality shine into your dark consciences. The world is swimming in shit.”
“Amen,” Laurel grumbled.
“Ah, but sewers are the conscience of the city,” Raul offered.
Nobody commented.
Laurel glanced down to hide a rueful smile. How fitting, she thought. Raul was also borrowing from Victor Hugo.
“Shhhh.” Henry suddenly stopped, waving his arms to command silence.
Laurel held her breath, her ears registering dripping noises. Then, far away, a faint and low sound intruded.
Henry reached into his coat, produced his cheap lighter once more, and flicked its flame into life, an instant before bellowing, “Flash flood!” Then he swung around and started to run.
chapter 25
13:30
From a small niche in the corridor between the living room and his study, Nikola selected a bottle of rum, only shreds of its faded label still clinging to the glass. He reached for a small cut-glass tumbler and carted the lot to his desk, musing that his 1959 Lemon Hart was the greatest British achievement in the West Indies.
He glanced to Dennis’s vacant workstation; the young man was catching a few hours of shut-eye now that the incoming reports had trickled down to nothing. As an afterthought, he drew the sleeve of his worn house coat to his nose and nodded. He’d warned Mrs. Sotomayor, the housekeeper, against experiments with new soaps and fabric softeners. Last time she tried, his house clothes had a smell that vividly reminded Nikola of a Turkish brothel. After a long hot shower, a couple of hours of dreamless sleep, a few minutes in the sauna until he broke a decent sweat, and a dip in a tub of water—chilled just above freezing—he certainly felt renewed.
From the beginning of the wretched breakout episode, he’d been disturbed by a strange premonitory feeling. A practical man, never burdened with spiritual or supernatural accoutrements, the overwhelming sensation of danger he felt was playing hell with his otherwise acute capacity for analysis and concentration. On one hand he had the facts: Three young people had sentenced themselves into a sugar cube. Two of them, helped by a civil servant, had sprung an obscure and seemingly inconsequential illegal inmate. Through the sewers, they had reached a commercial hibernation facility for the rich, discovered they were broadcasting their location, and fled once more into the sewers with another confederate: a medical doctor well versed in revival techniques.
On the other hand, he had an unexplained riddle: Who had sentenced Russo to a living death? Odelle herself, or was she acting on someone’s behalf? Who had the means and the clout to pull off such a stunt—complex, expensive, and needing awesome intelligence and logistic resources? And the most worrisome detail: Why? No doubt the missing threads were interwoven, but the picture was blurry, as if viewed through a fogged glass.
Nikola was well acquainted with the hibernation penal system and the sordid reality of its creation, development, testing, and the internecine wars between the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Hibernation for control. In the end, Odelle Marino, the DHS empress, had won and trampled over the FBH.
The hibernation concept was sound; it had done away with an obsolete network of crime universities and transformed the penal system into a tool to empty the streets of criminals at an affordable cost. Yet it was fitting that perfection eluded human endeavors. The system was flawed. Hypnos, like any enterprise ruled by marketing, tried to cut corners and economize on the design, surveying, and maintenance of the facilities while maximizing their profits. Nothing wrong with trying. The DHS had enlisted Nikola and two other security consultants to supervise the design, propose improvements, and rein Hypnos in. Nikola could also understand the empty center tanks