The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [86]
Genia didn’t answer. From the oblong meeting table occupying the far end of her office, she glanced toward her desk and the slanted patterns thrown across the carpeted floor by the light streaming in through the venetian blinds. She looked across her desk to the limp flags flanking it—one the star-spangled banner, and the other a blue ensign with stars circling three letters, FBH, and a motto: To protect the public through efficient and effective management of offenders.
The Federal Bureau of Hibernation had replaced the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the prison agencies of all fifty states and the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, drawing the responsibility of running a new generation of jails and penitentiaries into a single entity. Municipal and county jails, houses of correction, juvenile detention centers, work camps, and municipal lockups—all typically holding inmates sentenced to three months or less, as well as people in various stages of the criminal-justice system—remained the responsibility of state authorities, but their number and size had been reduced to less than a quarter of 2050 levels. Although the FBH was a federal law-enforcement agency and responsible for managing the new hibernation system, it had ceased to be a subdivision of the Department of Justice. It was now part of the Department of Homeland Security. And that meant Odelle Marino.
Odelle ran the DHS as her private fiefdom. Her first deed in office had been to rewrite the original charter of the prison system: To protect the public, protect staff, and provide safe, secure, and humane supervision of offenders. Grudgingly, Genia had to admit the genius behind the bland words. Naturally, after hibernation went into operation, Odelle had ordered the old promise, to provide inmates with opportunities that support successful community reintegration, removed from every printed document and government Web site.
“The center,” Ritter said, “as originally created, was ethically sustainable, though still vigilante, to punish those who had managed to evade justice through an error or a loophole and as a lab to improve the technology. Anything else is morally untenable.” He raised a hand to forestall her retort. “That includes Hypnos’s opacity. From the start, Congress allowed Hypnos to run the center spaces without control other than having to supply a code name and the number of subjects involved in each of their research projects. No names or location within the system. This means we don’t really know what Hypnos is doing in the center spaces.”
“That’s besides the point. Anything concerning center operation is beyond my authority.” Genia drummed the fingers of one hand on the table. “And yours. Center management is the exclusive domain of Hypnos and is supervised directly by Odelle Marino.”
“You know Memok?”
Genia nodded. “Hypnos’s code name for one of their long-term research projects.”
“Indeed.” He reached into his jacket pocket, drew out a handheld, and scribbled with a stylus before sliding the device over to her.
Neatly printed on the screen was a single word: MEWOK. She stilled her fingers. “Cyrillic?”
“Bag or sack.”
“Probably a coincidence,” Genia said in a voice she hoped would sound even. The Memok project involved dozens of subjects at the Atlanta and other neighboring facilities. Of course, she also knew of numerous unidentified Russian aircraft takeoffs and landings—sanctioned by the DHS—at a nearby military airfield.
“You knew. And that proves my point. The existence of center spaces and unidentified guests poses a perverse security problem. There are far too many people in the know. Perhaps three or four in this building alone, a score or more at the DHS, God knows how many at Hypnos, and an unknown number at each sugar cube: supervisors, security people, technicians, and perhaps even the cleaners. All told, that makes several hundred people. In my mind, it was never a question of if but when.”
“The DHS has thrown a blanket over it. Nobody knows about the breakout,” Genia said, to test whether Ritter