The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [89]
As a teenager, Genia had hidden money in her bra so her brothers wouldn’t steal it from her pockets. Now she fumbled with two buttons on her blouse and reached inside a cup to draw out a folded paper with scores of machine-code lines typed on one side. With deliberation, she slid the paper across the table, keeping a finger over it.
“You can stand up and walk out that door without this paper.”
Ritter stared at her fingernail, his face set, before turning his gaze to her unbuttoned blouse.
“My sister used to hide love letters in her bra.” Then he reached for the paper.
chapter 31
15:12
A continuous sound of crunching gravel shattered Ethel’s concentration. She lowered her book and glanced at a bulky figure wrestling to keep his bicycle within the margins of the narrow path. The man was bent over the handlebars, his face obscured by a bandana drawn almost to his eyes. He needed the exercise, no doubt about that, considering the jiggly lumps his light weight tracksuit strained to contain. Ethel sighed at the view of vast buttocks dwarfing the machine’s tiny seat as he pedaled past. No amount of exercise will get rid of that. The sound decreased as the rider approached the next bend, missing a trash can by inches, to disappear into memory when the bicycle faded from view.
After cycling around the park twice more, Senator Jerome Palmer finally spotted another bicycle rider sitting on a bench next to a ratty clump of eucalyptus. Palmer was out of breath and his butt hurt. He almost fell after fumbling with the brakes, wildly twisting the front wheel to keep balance. After dismounting with a remarkable lack of grace, he rested his bike next to the other one—an old and muddy machine, brown paint flaking in sections off its steel frame.
“You look awful.” Palmer eyed the black tights hugging Tyler’s spindly legs—and his deformed left knee. The pants disappeared under a nondescript windbreaker with more than a passing likeness to a deflated parachute.
“Seen yourself lately?” Tyler reached for a metal bottle clipped to his bicycle frame, flicked it open, and offered it with an outstretched arm.
The brandy was rotgut, but it warmed Palmer’s belly with a welcome glow.
Over the next thirty minutes Palmer listened to Tyler’s monologue of recent events, interrupting to ask for clarification or to take his turn at the flask traveling back and forth between them.
“Now what?” Palmer glanced sideways at an enterprising squirrel diving into a trash can, climbing back an instant later in a flurry of scratches as its tiny claws fought for purchase over the smooth metal.
“We wait. There’s not much else we can do.”
“Will he make it?” Palmer asked.
“As I said—”
“I know what you said. It’s the unsaid that worries me.”
“Floyd Carpenter is resilient and knows his stuff. I was afraid he’d buckle under the pressure and try to bring Russo out of torpor prematurely just to get the job done and over with.”
“But he hasn’t.”
“Right, and that takes guts. Floyd must have guessed that every minute counts. The DHS goons are turning the city upside down. Yet he’s chosen a slow procedure, to build up Russo’s metabolism before attempting arousal.”
“Will Russo make it?” Palmer persisted.
Birds paused in their song as if glutted with sound. Tyler waited until a jogger and his companion, a panting dachshund, were out of earshot around a clump of tall grasses. “My gut feeling is that Floyd will bide his time in an attempt to give Russo a real chance and … yes, he’ll bring Russo around. But as for the state of his mind … I don’t know. He’s been subject to calculated deterioration. Floyd had never seen anyone in such wasted condition—his own words, according to Laurel. Still, had the escape continued according to plan, we would be in the same situation.”
“Hardly the same.”
“We would. Everything hinges on Russo’s mental capacity, or lack of it. Without a witness, we’re shafted. At Nyx, Floyd would have had state-of-the-art equipment at his disposal and all the time in the