The Prisoner Read Online Free PDF

seal the room where the wretch happened to be at the time, then, after sedating the prisoner with gases, a security crew would have to carry him physically to the intubation bed. The procedure would add a good three minutes to the schedule. No. There was no need to risk cutting it too close.
    A man’s image filled the center screen. Lukas frowned. The guy must be pushing seventy. Thin as a rake, he shook like a tree caught in the crosswinds. The nose plugs had slipped twice through his fingers. If he carried on, they would have to use the gas.
Damn!
    Again he blinked toward his communications console. “Audio.”
    “Relax. Bend over, let your arms hang loose, and breathe deeply. Relax. Breathe deeply once more. Good. Relax. Again, breathe deeply. Relax.” Lukas listened to Sandra Garcia’s soft voice issuing from the yellow box and nodded. She had overridden the computer and was coaxing the old man through the plugging.
Come on, Granddad. Stick the plugs up your nose. Piece of cake
.
    The inmate straightened, reached for a plug, and rammed it up his nose.
    “Attaboy! Now the other.”
    After a short delay, the thin man staggered toward the intubation bed, both green balls dangling over his upper lip.
    “Control Room.”
    A pause.
    “Line to controller Garcia.”
    Lukas straightened his back and looked over his screens to a station where a young woman swiveled in her seat to look in his direction.
    “Excellent job, Sandra.”
    She gave him a thumbs-up.
    The screen on his right zoomed in on the old man as he swallowed the coupling plug.
Douglas Stern, 72, 5’
2”. Caucasian, Retired executive. 50 years, 761
. Lukas scrolled down his pad to Douglas’s holograph. He remembered the face from the news. The little old man had drowned four cats, a Labrador dog, and his three grandchildren—aged six, three, and eighteen months—in the family’s bathtub.
    He turned to the left screen. No wonder the man was nervous. Fifty years was a death sentence. Although Congress had abolished capital punishment in 2046, prisoners served their terms in full. With sentences often running to hundreds of years, the abolition was a farce. Many inmates entered hibernation knowing they would never walk again. At least not in this valley of woe.
    Down by tank 913, the woman had discarded the protective net and, after a stint of heaves, was on all fours watching the black man pop up from the tank. Lukas zoomed in on the crawling figure. Red as a beetroot. Nice ass.
    He darted a look at the clock: seventeen fifty.
    Suddenly a white line at the bottom of the screen started to flash. Lukas jerked. “Holy mother—” He felt his gut clench. The line froze and changed to an angry red.

chapter 6
     

     
    17:50
    The cocoon with Bastien inside maneuvered through a swarm of wires almost to the far edge of the room before turning and heading in Laurel’s direction, like a strange hive at the end of a sagging branch. The ceiling over the tank was a grid of metal rails and guides holding square plates, each fitted with two suspension wires and a greenish tube. Laurel watched the moving plate shunting past other squares, guided by a thick cylinder, probably a hydraulic arm. After more clicks and whines, the mess of jelly cords with Bastien inside traveled overhead along the platform surrounding the tank, leaking steady dribbles of clear fluid.
    She waited—as one waits for the last strain of an organ note to die out before leaving church. A few paces beyond the heap of her discarded netting, the bundle slowed to arc in sluggish swings, as if buffeted by unseen winds. Glistening threads stretched to pool on the floor below. Then it lowered. Laurel gathered her legs and tried to stand, her eyes intent on Bastien’s upturned face, distorted by thick lips stretched around the green tube.
Why doesn’t he yank his goggles off?
Her toes gripped the textured floor.
    With a loud click, clasps fastening the wires to Bastien’s harness snapped and his body