The Orion Plan (18 page)

His frown deepened. Torelli didn't believe her. He reached into the pocket of his jumpsuit again and pulled out his handheld voltage detector, the one he'd used on the tampered traffic light pole. First, he waved the wandlike device near the feeder line. Then he lowered the detector, bringing it close to the thin, gleaming cable.

This made Sarah nervous, although she didn't know exactly why. “What are you doing?”

“I'm trying to see if the current from the feeder is actually going through that little—”

White light suddenly flashed across the manhole, accompanied by a tremendously loud
pop.
Torelli fell backward into the muck, his hands over his eyes. “Fuck!” he screamed. “The current's arcing!”

Because Sarah had been looking at Torelli, not the cables, the flash hadn't blinded her. She smelled smoke and turned to see what was burning, and in that moment she realized what had caused the electricity to arc through the air. The thin cable was pulling away from the 13,000-volt line, breaking the connection. The tip of the gleaming black strand withdrew from the feeder line and the bracket underneath it. It slid down the wall, slowly but surely, as if someone on the other side of the concrete was tugging the cable through the perfectly round hole. Within a second or two it would disappear.

Sarah couldn't let that happen. She
needed
this evidence. Desperate, she lifted the ax and swung it at the retreating tip of the cable.

It was a good strong swing, and her aim was true. The ax head swished below the horizontal arm of the bracket and slammed into the wall just above the round hole. The blade hit something hard, harder than concrete, and then bounced right off it. The handle of the ax vibrated in Sarah's palms, and a moment later she saw the black strand again. It was undamaged, hardly a scratch on it. The tip of the cable withdrew into the hole and vanished from sight.

Meanwhile, Torelli sat in the muck and rubbed his eyes. He blinked several times, slowly recovering his vision. “Jesus,” he muttered. “I hate manholes.” Still blinking, he looked up at Sarah. “Just give me a second, okay? Then we'll get the hell out of here.”

His flashlight had also fallen into the muck, but luckily it was waterproof. Sarah picked it up and shook it, flinging drops of filthy water across the room. Then she pointed its beam at the ax blade.

She smiled. On the blade's cutting edge was a small black smudge.

 

TWELVE

In his nightmare Joe ran down an endless hallway. It stretched as far as the eye could see, dark and deserted. There were wooden doors on both sides of the hall and they all looked the same: no signs on them, no numbers, not even any doorknobs. Joe ran past them, sick with guilt and grief. He was looking for his daughter.

He couldn't remember how he'd lost Annabelle. He'd forgotten her, neglected her, looked away for a moment when he should've been paying attention. Now she was trapped behind one of those countless doors, but he didn't know which one. He screamed her name but heard no answer.

Frantic, he chose a door at random and threw his shoulder against it. He barged into a brightly lit hospital room, one of the private rooms at St. Luke's where he used to work. His daughter lay on the hospital bed, face up, eyes closed. She was motionless and very pale. He screamed “Annabelle!” again and rushed toward her. At the same time, she sat up in bed and opened her eyes.

He bent over her, panting, relieved but still frightened. He quickly examined her to see where she was hurt. She had no visible wounds or other signs of trauma, but when he asked her what had happened she just looked at him blankly. She recognized him but didn't seem to understand what he was saying. She opened her mouth and moved her lips but no words came out. It was as if she'd forgotten how to speak English.

He pointed at her. “Annabelle. You're Annabelle.” Then he pointed at himself. “And I'm your dad. Come on, I know you can say it. Say ‘Daddy.'”

She tried to do it, spreading her lips and lifting her tongue. She looked like she was on the verge of success, but then she closed her mouth and turned away. She raised her right hand and pointed at one of the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. At first Joe thought she wanted him to turn it off, but then he realized she was asking a question.

“That's a light,” Joe answered. “Try to say it, Annabelle.
Light.
”

But instead of trying to speak, she pointed at the floor. Then at her pillow and the bedsheets. Then at all the pieces of medical equipment surrounding her bed. She wanted Joe to name every object in the room. She needed him to say the words so she could relearn them.

So Joe did it. Slowly and patiently, while he drifted in and out of consciousness, he taught her all the words she'd forgotten.

*   *   *

When he finally awoke he found himself lying on a different kind of bed, a narrow cot with a thin mattress and a discolored pillow. On his left was a cinder-block wall, painted dull yellow. The opposite wall was just a few feet to his right, and jutting from it were a small sink and a stainless-steel toilet without a lid. On the floor was a crosshatched rectangle of sunlight, slanting down from a high window with a metal grille over it. Then Joe saw the bars of his jail cell's door, which stood wide open, and he remembered where he was: on cellblock D of the Otis Bantum Correctional Center on Rikers Island.

He had a headache, a bad one. He raised a hand to his forehead and touched the bandage wrapped around it. The cops on Dyckman Street had given him a concussion when they'd tackled him last night. He'd regained consciousness in the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital, where he lay handcuffed to a gurney for five hours before the doctors there said he was okay. Then he spent the next eight hours at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where the prosecutors charged him with resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. He couldn't make bail, of course, so the next stop was Rikers.

Joe twisted on the cot, trying to find a more comfortable position. The guards had taken away his old clothes and given him a pair of gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt. His new clothes smelled better than the old ones, but he still didn't feel clean. The jail had its own stench, a mix of sweat and mildew.

He guessed it was evening now, maybe seven o'clock. He'd been lying on the cot for the past three hours. His withdrawal symptoms had kicked in again—he hadn't had a drink since one thirty in the morning—and the tremors and nausea would soon get much worse. There was no malt liquor for sale on cellblock D, and even if he could somehow get his hands on a smuggled bottle of booze, he doubted he'd be able to drink it. The poison from the satellite was still in his bloodstream. He knew it was inside him because his vision was still phenomenally sharp, and because thinking about alcohol still made him want to puke.

This was the biggest of his problems, even worse than the fact that he was locked up in Rikers. The poison was changing him. It's what made him grab the nightstick from Officer Patton and jab him in the stomach. He'd lost control of himself for only a moment, but it had scared the shit out of him. He should be in the hospital right now, in the toxicology department at St. Luke's, working with the specialists there to get the poison out of his blood. But he couldn't get help, couldn't even ask for it. If he told the guards about his problem, they'd send him straight to the jail's psychiatric ward, and Joe had a feeling that place would be even scarier than cellblock D.

He rolled onto his side. He needed to piss but was afraid to get out of his cot. Some of the other inmates paced up and down the corridor outside his cell. When he'd arrived at the jail earlier that afternoon the guards had informed him that the cells would stay open until dinner and in the meantime he could visit the exercise yard or the TV room. But he'd noticed that most of the inmates remained in their cells, either napping or reading or zoning out, so he'd concluded that this was the safest option. There seemed to be a shortage of correction officers in the cellblock, and they mostly stayed behind the protective glass of the guard station.

As he lay on the cot he kept one eye open and watched the inmates in the corridor. Some stared straight ahead as they passed by, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Others—the biggest, most intimidating prisoners—took a moment to peer into each cell. Most of the inmates were either black or Latino, and very few were over the age of forty. Joe, as a middle-aged white man, was a novelty at Rikers, and the other inmates were curious about him. Every couple of minutes someone would stop outside his cell and linger in the corridor. Whenever this happened Joe closed his eyes tight, pretending to be asleep and praying that the inmate would go away.

This strategy worked well for the first fifteen minutes. Then a hulking white inmate walked right into his cell to get a better look at him. Joe closed his eyes a little too late. The guy stepped further into the cell and poked Joe in the shoulder.

“Stop faking it.” His voice was slow and deep. “I know you're awake.”

Joe opened his eyes a fraction, just to see how much trouble he was in. The inmate was well over six feet tall and weighed at least three hundred pounds. His T-shirt was too short to cover his belly, which hung over the cot like a hot-air balloon. His head was bald and bullet-shaped and slick with sweat, and there was a crude tattoo of a skull over his right ear. He bent over Joe and grinned. “Hey there, Doc. My name's Daryl. Welcome to Rikers.” Then, without waiting for a reply, Daryl looked over his shoulder at another inmate standing outside the cell.

“Check it out, Curtis!” he shouted. “The doc woke up from his nap.”

Giving up, Joe opened his eyes all the way and saw a second white guy come into his cell. Curtis was also bald and even taller than Daryl but didn't have an ounce of fat on him. His chest muscles bulged under his T-shirt and his forearms rippled under shirtsleeve tattoos. He leaned over and slapped the foot of Joe's mattress, making it jump. “You're a noisy motherfucker when you're napping, Doc. You were saying all kinds of crazy shit.”

Joe had no idea how to respond. He wanted to tell them to get the hell out of his cell, but he was too sick to even raise his voice. Shivering, he lifted his head off his pillow and stared at the two men. “Why … are you calling me ‘Doc'?”

Daryl shrugged. “We heard you're a doctor. That's the word going round.”

“Yeah, a drunk doctor who hit a cop.” Curtis laughed. “How the hell did a stupid fucker like you get into medical school?”

Again, Joe didn't know what to say. He couldn't tell how serious his visitors were. He studied their faces, trying to figure it out. Were they kidding around or getting ready to hurt him? The uncertainty was making him squirm. He didn't know anything about the inmates here, so he was afraid of everything.

“I'm not a doctor anymore,” he finally said. “I'm just a drunk now.”

“Hey, I like your honesty.” Curtis nodded in approval. “You're an honest white guy, which definitely puts you in the minority in this place.” He jerked his thumb at the corridor outside the cell. “If you haven't noticed already, most of the assholes here are lying, dick-eating niggers and spics.”

Joe winced. It was an involuntary reaction, like gagging. He'd been raised by a family of ignorant racists. That was one of the reasons why he'd left home and broken off all contact with them.

Daryl noticed his reaction. He opened his mouth in mock surprise and looked at Curtis. “Uh-oh. I don't think Doc liked that.”

“Really?” Curtis narrowed his eyes and trained them on Joe. “You didn't like what I said? About the niggers and spics here?”

Joe tried to sit up, his head swimming. He raised his hands, palms out, as if to stop the men from coming closer. “Look, I don't want any trouble.”

Curtis stepped toward the head of the cot, nudging Daryl aside. “Come on, Doc, be honest with me again. You've never called one of them a nigger? Never in your life?”

This was one of the few things, maybe the only thing, on which Joe still held a strong opinion. He'd hated his family for their prejudice, and these men were acting just like his uncles and cousins. He shook his head. “No, never in my life.”

“Whoa, we got a saint here!” Daryl pointed at him. “Saint Doc the drunk.”

Curtis wasn't amused, though. He furrowed his brow and looked down at Joe, examining him carefully. Then he turned to his friend. “Step outside, Daryl. I need to have a talk with this asshole.”

Daryl nodded and stepped away from the cot, but he didn't go far. He took up position just outside the cell, with his back turned toward them, his body blocking the view of anyone trying to look into the cell from the corridor. Joe's stomach clenched as he stared at the back of Daryl's T-shirt.
Well, at least there's no more uncertainty,
he thought.
Now I know something bad is coming.

Meanwhile, Curtis stepped closer. He bent over the cot and grimaced, flaring his nostrils. The man's eyes were bloodshot and he had a scar that ran diagonally across his forehead. “Let's get something straight, all right? In this place it doesn't matter who you were outside or what you did for a living. Not one fucking bit. We're all the same here.” He curled his lip, baring a row of crooked teeth. “You hear me?”

Joe nodded, but it looked like Curtis was going to hit him anyway. Bracing himself, Joe raised his arms to protect his head. But then Curtis turned away from him and looked down at the floor. He reached under the cot and picked up a plastic bin that Joe hadn't even known was there. “We have a rule here in D block: share and share alike. So I'm gonna take a look at your stuff now.”

He opened the bin, which was about the size of a hatbox. The only contents were the personal hygiene items issued to every inmate: a plastic cup, a stubby rubber toothbrush, and a small tube of toothpaste. Curtis stared into the bin for several seconds, then turned back to Joe. “Where's the rest of it?”