The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [71]
He sniffed his rum and peered with regret at the scant inch left at the bottom of the bottle. Intensely powerful nose: toffee, prunes, old marmalade, dates, overripe mango, caramel, vanilla, allspice … After a little sip, Nikola let the flavors develop on his tongue, swallowed, and made a wry gesture when an image of dank sewers intruded upon his bliss.
Nikola probably knew the Washington sewers better than anyone alive—not the pipes and tunnels carrying the citizenry’s wastes, but the warrens of power bursting with indescribable filth. Yet, rather than becoming dulled from continuous exposure to the stench of greed and hypocrisy, his nose had remained delicately sensitive—a trait that had kept him alive after forty years of shady work. From his beginnings as a CIA operative, then later a chief of station, and eventually director of internal security at the DHS, his nose had unerringly steered him away from disaster. When he realized the value of his nose in the open market, he was a shade away from his fiftieth birthday. Nikola quit the civil service and became a security consultant—a euphemism favored by elitist mercenaries the world over.
He blinked at the sensor in his desktop screen to call up Eliot Russo’s file—a fascinating document with a physical description and a few professional, educational, and personal background notes. Nikola found it fascinating not because of the scant information it contained but for the glaring voids. Someone had used the system to settle a score, of that he was certain. Another party was bent on exposing the sham, and Nikola was caught in the middle.
As a mercenary, Nikola had an unshakable code of values; he owed fidelity to the customer—in this instance the DHS. But this case was different. The customer was playing her own game by keeping critical cards close to her chest, leaving Nikola in the uncomfortable position of having to question his loyalties to avoid getting caught in the cross fire.
After more than an hour poring over the fugitives’ files and preparing a list of notes—most of them questions—Nikola downloaded the lot into his hybrid data-and-communications pad. He decided against leaving a finger of the precious rum in the bottle and, with a sigh, he poured the rest into his tumbler. Then he stood and padded over to his bedroom, carrying the glass, to get dressed for his first visit. The legend of Alexander the Great’s expedient maneuver to untangle the Gordian knot was a sobering lesson, its substance unimpaired by the passage of millennia. If the ends are hidden, with no thread to pull from to resolve the tangle, hack through the knot.
chapter 26
13:34
As if powered by unseen clockwork, the group bolted forward at once, splashing madly through twelve inches of effluent. Laurel’s Metapad blipped once, sharp—an incoming message. She charged ahead into a chaos of flying whitish water, ragged gasps, and the unnerving splash of boots falling.
“Climb, climb!” Henry had reached a string of rusty handholds rising through the curved tunnel wall to a small opening, barely three feet across near its top.
“Climb, damn you!”
When Susan reached the spot where Henry stood yelling, Charlie and Jim were already climbing like cats. Susan jumped halfway up, grabbed the handhold, and hauled herself up with one swift movement. The trio scrabbled for purchase on the rusty treads and dove headfirst