The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [85]
Next to Laurel, Floyd made a face of resignation. Then he unfolded his hand palm up. Laurel turned to glance into his eyes, dimly lit by a streetlight half a block down the road, and realized his extended palm held a deeper meaning. Raul and Lukas didn’t miss the gesture and also stared at Floyd’s hand. She glanced at the empty metallic wall above Russo’s reclining shape, Floyd’s palm unmoving in her peripheral vision. Of course, she’d read her share of romances in her teenage years and fantasized about princely proposals, but these belonged in fairyland. Reality was his hand, now, in a dark van reeking of sweat and sewage, with a dying man on the floor and a syrette loaded with cyanide pressing against her breast in her top pocket. She didn’t surrender her hand to his straightaway. Some things were far too important to rush—such as letting him know she understood—and took precedence over the promise of warmth. Then she reached for his hand and held on to it. Raul and Lukas breathed again. Laurel closed her eyes. His grip felt like a toast to life.
“Here we go,” Tyler muttered.
The inside of the van started to flicker in blue as the sound of sirens grew. Tyler ducked in the front seat to hide beyond the dashboard. “Everybody down!”
The sirens neared, reached a crescendo, then lowered in pitch and began to fade.
After a couple of minutes, Tyler straightened up and fired the engine. “At the next bend in the road, we cross the point of no return.”
“What a bundle of fun,” Raul muttered from the back.
“You want me to sing?” Tyler asked.
As the curve in the road unfolded before her eyes, Laurel realized she was gripping Floyd’s hand so tightly that one of his finger joints popped.
The road was deserted.
After a few moments, Tyler slammed his hand over the dashboard. “Damn! We’re through,” he said to a chorus of relieved curses from the rear of the van.
“Let me have it back,” Floyd said.
She let go of his hand. “I’m sorry.”
“I meant the syrette.”
day three
Inferno, Canto V: 1–3
So I descended from the first enclosure
down to the second circle,
that which girdles less space but grief more great,
that goads to weeping.
The Divine Comedy, DANTE ALIGHIERI
chapter 30
14:53
“Let’s not waste any more time.” Genia Warren, director of the Federal Bureau of Hibernation, scrolled down her thin tablet computer and stabbed its corner with a stylus before pushing the pad away from her and toward the center of the table. “We know what’s happened. I’ve read the report. Before long, the DHS will be breathing down our necks, and I need to have answers.”
“Answers? What answers?” Lawrence Ritter, Genia’s executive director of security, sometimes pretended to be slow-witted in a bid to gain time for his sharp mind to race ahead.
“The only kind I know: solutions to problems. Madam Director will want a scheme to guarantee, beyond reasonable doubt, that a breakout cannot happen again anywhere in the system. She’ll also demand a scapegoat to take the blame for what’s happened.”
Ritter wasn’t taking any notes, but he stared at her, his frown deepening. In his fifties and without a hair on his head, Ritter oversaw the security of all the government hibernation centers in the U.S. Since joining the FBH in 2049, he’d never once altered his dressing habits: black suits, black shoes, black turtleneck sweaters, and a beret. Once, when Ritter was required to go before a Senate select committee, a conservative senator had made a wry remark about his professional decorum. Ritter replied by rattling off, from memory, eighteen rules that specifically forbade federal personnel, in particular law, security, and intelligence officers, from wearing suits and ties. After the general dress-code relaxation imposed by the new generations of civil servants, people with suits and ties stuck out like a sore thumb. That day, the hapless senator discovered Ritter’s phenomenal memory, and the then-new director of security at FBH became a minor legend.
“It had to happen, you