Chapter 22: The Escape

The micro-SD card was an illegal sun, burning a hole through Sabe's palm. Rico's arrival had changed all this. He was no longer a passive captive waiting for his fate; he was a fighter in a cell, and the boundary of the enemy had just been marked. Section Seven. The title was an ice in his blood, reminding him walls were not just concrete, but living, breathing entities that could warp reality as they pleased. He was waiting for Anton's lawyers for a trial. By then he'd be buried under a mountain of pristine evidence, and Anton would be… whatever Marcus and his ghostly benefactors intended.

He had to leave. Now.

The strategy wasn't formulated in an epiphanic moment, but in the hard, calculating awakening of a part of himself he'd tried to entomb: the operative. The ghost. He spent the infinite, empty hours watching. The shift change of the guard at 22:00 was a time for the rush of hellos and utilitarian tedium. The delivery of the plain dinner at 18:00 was by a different, heavier guard who mouth-breathed constantly. The beat of the place was a dull, unvarying melody.

The breaking point was the medical inspection. There was a doctor round every third day. Sabe's turn was tomorrow.

Before the doctor, a harried but kindly-eyed fellow in an off-the-rack suit, arrived, Sabe was ready. He groaned of dizziness, of constricted chest. He hyperventilated furtively, and his skin underneath the eyes became white. He was the epitome of controlled, convincing misery.

"Perhaps stress, perhaps a cardiac arrhythmia from the smoke inhalation," the doctor thought, checking Sabe's blood pressure. "We have to do an EKG in the infirmary. Can't do it here."

This was the crack. A tiny, administrative glitch from procedure.

An hour went by, and two guards appeared to escort him to the clinic. They cuffed his wrists in front this time, a small measure of sympathy for an ill patient. The ride was down a series of locked corridors, the noise echoing off of the clinical stillness. Sabe kept his head down and played the weak, ailing man.

He had something they could never train for: they were guarding Sabatine Stalker, the PI. They had no idea what to expect of the man he used to be.

They were passing a janitor's closet. The lock was an old pin-tumbler, smoothed out from years of wear. Passing by it, Sabe tripped, a realistic, clumsy stagger that sent him shoulder-first into the guard on his left.

"Apologies," he growled, his cuffed hands coming up as if to break his fall.

In the half-second of chaos, his fingers, used to far more delicate work than this, fell into the guard's belt and pulled out the keycard from its holder. A gamble that had nearly cost him his life, but the guard, annoyed, simply shoved him back up on his feet. The card was now hidden in the palm of Sabe, covered by the cuffs.

He was plugged into the EKG machine in the infirmary. The guards waited outside the curtained-off cubicle. The nurse hurried by, her thoughts elsewhere. As the machine whined, spewing its serrated readout onto paper, Sabe's eyes scoured the room. A window, barred and closed. A storage cabinet. An alarm box on the wall by the door.

The nurse finished, peeling the electrodes off of his chest. "Wait here for the doctor to read," she told him, and withdrew, closing the curtain behind her. 

This was his window. Maybe sixty seconds. 

He moved stealthily, more than the absence of sound; it was a denial of being there. He was at the fire alarm in two steps. He did not pull it. That would be a crazy, well-guarded way out. To that end, he used the tip of the stolen keycard to activate the silent alarm to the hospital's security system—a pinpoint, area-specific alert for a containment breach of the infirmary wing. It would send guards to the incorrect sector, making it a diversion.

Then he made his way to the supply closet for medical supplies. It was locked. He knelt down and, using the ridged plastic of the keycard, opened the basic lock. It clicked open. Inside, amidst syringes and bandages, was what he needed: heavy-duty scissors.

The initial wails of disorientation began to emerge from the hallway. His distraction was working.

Sliding back behind the curtain, he peered out. One guard was sprinting in the direction of the security alert, shouting into his radio wildly. The other was turning, his hand going to his sidearm, his eyes divided.

Sabe crashed out of the curtain. He was no longer human, but a missile. He shoved the shears, not at the guard, but at the radio on his belt, shoving down hard. The machine crackled and died. Before the guard could even respond to the attack, Sabe spun away from him, utilizing the man's momentum to slam him forcefully into the wall. His head bounced against the concrete with a revolting thud, and he fell to the floor, unconscious.

Sabe didn't wait. He picked up the guard's gun, checked the clip, and concealed it inside the waistband of his prison-issue pants. He snipped through the plastic restraint on the other guard's belt with the shears, extracting a set of handcuff keys. A few seconds of fiddling, and the cuffs off his own wrists fell away.

Liberty had a metallic, bitter flavor. in his mouth.

He moved into the corridor. Alarms were sounding now, aside from the one he'd triggered—the usual prison alarm. The pursuit had begun. He had to get past the outer barrier. The service door he'd plotted through a window crack days ago was where he was going.

He was made invisible in the machine of the prison. He did not flee; he slipped, holding to dark places, relying on the chaos he had made as camouflage. He slipped past two more guards running in the other direction. They didn't notice him. He wasn't there to be noticed.

The entrance to the service area was a steel door with keypad and magnetic lock. He used the stolen keycard. A red light flashed. Denied. Of course, its clearance was revoked the instant the alarm sounded.

He looked up. Above the door was a ventilation grille, large enough for a person. The screws were rusty, old. He thrust the point of the medical shears into one and turned. The metal groaned in protest. His shoulders cried out at the strain, the newly healed wounds on his back aching. One screw gave, and another. He heard the sound of bootsteps approaching.

With a last, stomach-lurching heave, he yanked the grate free. He hauled himself up and into the black, narrow duct, hauling the grate partly closed behind him. He did not look around.

The air duct was a narrow, metal bowel, filled with grime and dust. He crawled, the gun a hard, reassuring pressure against his back. He moved by the faint scent of cold air, the promise of the outside.

After what seemed like an eternity of scraping his knees and elbows bloody, he saw a sliver of night sky through another grate. This one opened out onto an alley at the rear of the prison compound. He kicked it open, the banging lost in the cacophony of sirens, and descended into the cold Geneva night.

He was finally free.

But now he was a fugitive. A bull's-eye painted on him. Every camera, every cop, every cell phone-toting citizen was a potential informant. He had to vanish.

He swiped a bike off a wall, a ridiculous but sneaky mode of transport, and cycled out of the city centre, into suburbia. He strolled through a deserted industrial estate, and there he found what he was looking for: a freight yard. He watched the schedules, the comings and goings of the massive container lorries. He selected one with UK number plates, its trailer sealed for cross-channel transit.

As the driver remained behind in the office to finish his paperwork, Sabe cut through the thin plastic seal on the container doors with the medical shears. He crept inside, into a vast dark warehouse with the smell of new cardboard and plastic—pallets of consumer electronics. He taped the doors shut from the inside with a roll of heavy-duty tape he discovered, surrounding himself with total darkness.

The truck began to roll. He was a stowaway, a piece of contraband being returned to the center of the storm.

The journey was a bumping purgatory. He had no food, no water, only the rumble of the engine and the gnawing realization of his new life. He was a specter. He had no identity, no assets, no friends aside from a billionaire who may now view him as the ultimate turncoat.

When the lorry finally came to a halt and the doors were opened at a depot on the outskirts of London, he crept out into the half-light, just another figure in a city of figures.

He made his way to the one place he knew he would not be seen: the London Tube. He descended the stairs to the subway at a distant station, using cash pilfered from the cup holder of the truck driver. He blended into the crowd, eyes downcast, body changed, soul hidden close.

He moved through the maze-like corridors, a rat in the city's veins. In the grimy mirror of a speeding train window, he caught sight of himself. A gaunt, hollow-eyed man with grime still ground into the folds of his face. A saboteur's face. A terrorist. A ghost's.

He stepped down at a random platform, climbing the stairs to the level of the street rain and indifferent hum of a London morning. Between banks of CCTV cameras on departure, he did not look up. He kept his face concealed, city landscape.

Later, in a security room, a scan of the tapes would reveal nothing interesting. Just a blur of travelers. If one rewound the tape, frame by frame, he or she might glimpse a distorted, passing reflection in a wet tile or a shiny handrail. A man-shaped smudge, a watery ghost. No recognizable features. No face.

Sabatine Stalker had slipped away from custody. He had vanished into the city's bloodstream. The cameras caught nothing but his reflection, a specter that had already dissolved back into the shadows from whence it had come. He was on the loose. And he was more trapped than ever in his life. But he was on his way to the truth, and to Anton. No matter what.

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