Free The Prisoner by Carlos J. Cortes

warrior.”
    “Yesterday was Sunday.”
    Palmer frowned. “And?”
    “Men don’t come see you on Sunday.”
    “Go on.” Palmer stood. “Tell me about it.”
    “It’s a secret.”
    “You can trust me. I won’t tell a soul.”
    “When you talk with men, I keep you covered.”
    “In case someone pulls a gun on me?”
    Timmy nodded.
    “Well, I’m relieved; I feel much safer now.”
    “I saw the man with the uniform open his case. But it had no gun inside, or I would have shot him.”
    Palmer smiled. General Weston would have been mighty upset had he known a gun was trained on him. He ruffled Timmy’s hair again and froze.
    “Say, how could you see what was inside his case?”
    “My rifle has a tube that makes things bigger.”
    Palmer turned his head and looked over the back of his seat and out the sliding doors to the lawn outside. “And where were you?”
    “In my house.”
    At the far end of the garden, a clump of large trees offered a degree of privacy to the property that was valuable here in Georgetown. Palmer narrowed his eyes, but he couldn’t see a thing. Then he recalled his son building a tree house a few months before.
    On his desk, a red light on the phone started flashing.
    “I have a very important call now, but when I finish, will you show me your house?”
    Timmy nodded.
    Lifting the boy, Palmer kissed his forehead. Then he lowered him onto the carpet and patted his butt. “Off you go; inspect the grounds and make sure there are no bandits about, Sheriff.”
    “Right, partner.” The sheriff tried a salute and bolted.
    “Palmer.”
    Silence, followed by what sounded like a burst of static. He knew the sizzling noise wasn’t static but a two-way stream of encoding data to synchronize the scrambler in his secure phone with the caller’s. After a few seconds, the screen on the terminal flashed
HORUS
.
    “A partial success so far.”
    Palmer was familiar with the unrecognizable voice, without accent or syllabic stresses: a voice digitized, expropriated of everything but meaning, and recomposed by a speech synthesizer.
    “You can’t have partial success. Success or failure?”
    “A little of each. A member of your team, the black man, didn’t make it.”
    Palmer drew a hand to his forehead and sidestepped to flop down into his chair.
Bastien, the lawyer who would change the world. The dear boy …
He blinked, his eyes suddenly blurred. Horus’s time was precious. “What happened?”
    “Heart failure.”
    “And the others?”
    “Too early to say, but they will have to move fast. Seth has sent for Onuris.”
    Another burst of static, and then the screen went blank.
    Palmer replaced the telephone in its cradle, his heart heavy. He pinched the bridge of his nose as images of what Laurel and Raul must be going through—having to deal with the tragic loss of their friend as they carted an inert Russo through dark, putrid pipes—flashed through his mind. Their chances had thinned almost to nothing.
    Russo had burned to death in 2051, one late October Friday after the car he drove hit a tree and caught flames on a country road, somewhere between Culpeper and Charlottesville—at least according to the death certificateissued by a Dr. James Child after perusing the results of DNA tests. Russo’s charred remains had prevented any other sort of identification.
    Five years would pass before a costly misunderstanding revealed that Dr. Child had been duped, or forced to lie.
    From the hibernation system’s inception, the congressional grapevine had been rife with hushed rumors—often preposterous—of irregularities in the DHS operation of the hibernation facilities. One particular piece of gossip kept cropping up at regular intervals: the existence of illegal prisoners—men and women who had never been sentenced by the courts. The concept intrigued Palmer, and one day he decided to indulge in a little investigation.
    Each hibernation facility was organized into a series of tanks, each