The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [87]
“There you’re wrong. The workers at the station, security personnel, and the DHS men there know. What can the DHS do? Sink the whole bunch into the tank centers? Kill them?”
“The thought must have crossed their minds.”
“This is ridiculous. The team pulling off the breakout had superb, almost military backup. They rattled a nuclear power station with hundreds of pounds of high explosive, just for a diversion. The fugitives are almost irrelevant, except one.” He held a hand out and counted on his fingers. “Laurel Cole and Raul Osborne must keep low, to watch over their shoulders until they die or the DHS’s memory fades, whichever comes first. Lukas Hurley and Dr. Floyd Carpenter are probably lying facedown in a ditch or floating down a canal with sundry body piercings courtesy of artisans unknown; I doubt the organization behind this will risk loose ends. That leaves the wretch they sprang from the center. Who is he?”
Genia cradled her fingers and slowly shook her head. Ritter was a sucker for challenges. By fobbing him off, she was making sure his priority would be to find out about Russo before the day was over. Naturally, he already knew the wretched account of the third member of the maverick team: Bastien Compton. He hadn’t mentioned his name. “I’m sorry. Need to know.”
Ritter held her gaze for a couple of heartbeats. “Fine. But why would anybody stage such a complex operation to spring an unknown man? And, further, how many people in their organization know about center inmates?” Ritter shook his head. “There are too many people involved, mostly uncontrolled. This will hit the news within two weeks, mark my words.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Without someone who has been illegally hibernated and supporting witnesses, there wouldn’t be a case.”
“What about the rest? According to my data, besides the human guinea pigs in Hypnos’s research projects, there are scores of men and women hibernating without trial. If a whiff of it reached the press, Congress would slap a compulsory inspection on all sugar cubes. A recount of inmates by in de pendent parties would follow.”
“And what would they find?”
Ritter drew a hand over his head and narrowed his eyes. “You mean getting rid of the evidence? They would have to be out of their minds.”
“Look at it this way. The DHS and Hypnos must have anticipated such an eventuality. They have bright people—not many, but enough. If tomorrow morning the papers carried an uncorroborated rumor about people in hibernation without trial, by the time inspectors reached the nearest facility, they wouldn’t find anything amiss.”
“You mean the drains?”
Genia nodded. “The Washington sugar cube is the exception. Having to ship their waste to a remote location for processing stemmed from a fluke. A weird salt-dome formation prevented Hypnos from sinking more than three levels underground.”
Ritter’s head came up. He was like a dog on point. “I know the Washington sugar cube is the odd man out without in-house waste processing, but I don’t know the history.”
Genia nodded. “As I said, it was a fluke. The site chosen for the sugar cube—a triangle of land hemmed in by highways—had never been built on before. As you know, when planning a building, the first step is to check all existing drawings for things that may lie underneath.”
“You mean utility lines, pipes, and the like?”
“Right. And, in a city like Washington, sewers and old tunnels.”
“I doubt any drawing will show tunnels built a hundred or more years ago.”
“That’s why, after checking the drawings, engineers drill a pattern of holes covering the entire site to map the subsoil and find out the best foundations.”
“And the depth they can go with basements. No?”
“As luck would have it, the engineers drilled into rock at every test hole, but when it came time to dig, they uncovered a void.”
Ritter nodded. “I get it. Once the containment walls were in place, they started digging to find a big void somewhere in the site.”
“With most of the excavation done, it was too late by the time they found out,” Genia continued.