The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [80]
Barandus drew out a pencil flashlight, ran it over the notebook, and nodded. He then vanished in the gloom. Instants later, his flashlight came alive thirty feet away, where he’d sat down by a thick vertical pipe.
When Barandus returned with the phone, Henry pocketed it and smiled when his second-in-command fed the handwritten note into the fire and waited until it burned before stirring the ashes with a stick.
Henry nodded to Floyd and Raul. “You better get your friend zipped up. We’re going.” Then he turned to Metronome, the boy who had released the rat a few hours before, and squatted beside him. “I have a favor to ask, a small service.” He reached into his pocket and produced the cell phone. “I want you to go in that direction,” he pointed to the mouth of the tunnel on the right, “as far as you can in one hour.”
The boy blinked twice, his head ticking away.
“Then, at eleven-thirty precisely, you must press this button here, the one with a star. The phone will dial a number. When this little dot lights up red, you must press this other button with a square. After waiting one minute, get rid of the phone. Throw it down a sump or a deep hole. Then run back here.”
Metronome looked troubled.
“Ah, yes.” Henry scratched his head, turned to Laurel, and looked pointedly at her wrist. “You have no way of knowing when it’s eleven-thirty.” He made a sheepish face. “I noticed you checking out her watch a couple of times.”
Laurel neared and also squatted before the boy. She reached into her vinyl jacket’s top pocket, ripped open its pressure fasteners, and fished out another watch—a copy of the one she wore. “This one is precious.” She cleared her throat, but emotion clogged her words. “It belonged to a dear friend, and it’s only fair you should have it.” Tears overflowed her eyes. “He would have wanted you to use it and help us out of here.”
The boy’s head didn’t arrest its movement, but his eyes gleamed.
Henry reached and gently pried the timepiece from her shaking fingers. “Once you finish your mission, keep it.” He waved a hand to the boy to come closer and, with delicate movements of huge fingers, fastened the watch around the piece of cord holding his trousers up. “When you are done, ask someone to make more holes in the strap so you can wear it on your wrist. Now it’s too large.” Henry rested a hand on Metronome’s shoulder. “Please, son, don’t keep the phone; very bad men will zero in on it and come after you.”
Henry glanced first at Russo, then at Raul and Floyd: the stretcher bearers.
The newspaper’s tiny first edition had finished rolling an hour before, and most copies would already be piling up outside the few kiosks still in operation or speeding through the city on the back of delivery vans.
Brenda Neff hated the graveyard shift. With each passing year, the number of printed copies dwindled, and there were rumors they soon would disappear altogether. The Washington Post was down to 250,000 copies, and lesser fish weren’t faring any better. Bad news for printers, but the soaring costs of pulp and ever-changing reading habits of people didn’t affect a newspaper’s usefulness. The world still needed news—either wrapped in paper or computer bits. And no matter the vehicle for the news, the world still needed editors, reporters, and graveyard-shift staffers at the news desk waiting for the phone to ring.
It rang.
Brenda jerked and stared in disbelief at a squat red device she’d never heard ringing before: a secure government terminal with a direct line bypassing the newspaper’s telephone