The Boys from Santa Cruz

leather armchair that was not made for rocking. Two more inmates, one man, one woman, were sitting together on an overstuffed sofa, watching soap operas on the antique TV, while in the far corner, a female lunatic was braiding a lanyard out of those shiny, linguine-shaped, vomity-smelling plastic strands they give you in occupational therapy.

As my eyes traveled around the big room, my glance inadvertently met that of the whitecoat sitting by the door, who had just looked up from his magazine. I let my eyes glaze over, then formed a spit bubble in my mouth and pushed it out onto my lower lip. The whitecoat’s interest faded instantly, and he broke off eye contact.

A few minutes later, when the lanyard braider, a middle-aged woman wearing a pleated skirt, drab blouse, and fingerless gloves, put down her basket and left the room, I glanced over at the whitecoat, who hadn’t seemed to notice. Nor did he look up from his magazine when she returned, which suggested to me that keeping track of comings and goings in the lounge might not be part of the man’s job description.

To test my theory, I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering in and out of the lounge at random intervals. Each time I left, I stayed away a few minutes longer, and each time I returned I sat in a different part of the room. When I was as sure as I could be that my absence would not be noted by the whitecoat, I returned to the chess table in the corner of the room, which was close enough to the curtains that I could smell the dust and see the faint, slightly lighter stripes where the old purple velvet had faded lengthwise along the pleats.

And there I waited, still as a mime, poised on the edge of my chair, until the lanyard lady broke into tears. When the whitecoat got up to see to her, I slipped behind the curtain and flattened myself against the wall.

There were scarcely eighteen inches of clearance between the wall and the back of the curtains. I sidled along until I reached a wide steel door with a safety-yellow sign above the breaker bar, barely readable in the dusty gloom: EMERGENCY EXIT!!! TO BE LEFT UNLOCKED AT ALL HOURS!!!

I gave the bar a gentle shove. It opened with a click that sounded deafening to my ears, but apparently went unnoticed on the other side of the curtain.

Closing the door quietly behind me, I found myself at the top of an enclosed, dimly lighted stairwell with concrete walls and iron steps. Moving noiselessly in my paper slippers, I descended three flights to the basement, then followed a trail of Day-Glo orange chevrons and illuminated exit signs down a long corridor with cinder-block walls, passing storage rooms, file rooms, branching corridors, and a boiler room with a yellow hazard triangle marked DANGER!!! NATURAL GAS!!! NO OPEN FLAMES!!! on the door. Either the sign painter at Meadows Road was paid by the exclamation mark, I decided, or else they had some manic-phase bipolar making signs in occupational therapy.

The trail of chevrons and exit signs continued on for thirty or forty feet, ending at another steel-plated, breaker-barred door marked EMERGENCY EXIT!!! TO BE LEFT UNLOCKED AT ALL HOURS!!! But on this door there was a second sign that read: TO BE OPENED ONLY IN EVENT OF EMERGENCY!!! ALARM WILL SOUND!!!

Shit. I must have been crazy to let that old nutcase get my hopes up, I told myself as I began retracing my steps, following the yellow chevrons backward through the basement maze. There was no easy way out of here. The second that alarm went off, the whitecoats would be all over me.

But when I passed the boiler room on my way back, the warning signs stopped me dead in my tracks. Danger, natural gas, no open flames!!!! What if there were some way to create a diversion, to set off some kind of explosion before I opened the exit door? I asked myself. The whitecoats would be so busy dealing with that, they might not even notice the alarm, or maybe they’d decide that it was the explosion that had blown it open, or maybe the alarm wouldn’t even work. Whatever happened, at the very worst I’d have a running start on them.

It’s a long shot, I know. And I may very well blow myself up in the process. But compared to the prospect of spending the rest of my life in this shithole, that doesn’t sound all that bad. So wish me luck, Pocket Pal: by this time tomorrow, I’ll either be free or I’ll be dead.

PART TWO CHAPTER ONE 1

Pandemonium in the wake of a bank robbery interrupted. Alarm bells clamoring, sirens shrieking. On one side of the plywood and veneer tellers’ cages, hostages wept and prayed. On the other side, bodies lay motionless on the carpeted floor of the bank lobby, while a baby-faced young man in a blue FBI windbreaker shouted himself hoarse from the doorway. “You’re surrounded, give yourself up, come out with your hands on your heads,” and so on.

“Here we go again,” Special Agent E. L. Pender whispered to the man crouched next to him.

The man clapped Pender on the shoulder. “Courage, mon ami, nobody lives forever.”

They stood up. Pender crooked his arm around the smaller man’s neck from behind, and together, in lockstep, they shuffled out from behind the counter and through the waist-high swinging gate into the lobby, where the other man ducked out of Pender’s grasp.

“Freeze,” shouted the kid in the blue windbreaker as Pender’s right hand moved toward the inside pocket of his rumpled plaid sport jacket; the other man, wearing respectable banker’s pinstripes, backed away obediently, his hands half-raised. Without hesitating, the baby-faced Bureau trainee dropped to a bent-kneed crouch and fired two rounds at Pender, who grabbed his chest with his free hand (the other was still inside his jacket), lowered himself carefully to the floor, and flopped over onto his side.

The trainee crossed the room holding his nine-millimeter automatic at the ready. “Are you all right, sir?” he asked the man in the suit, without taking his eyes off the recumbent Pender.

“Just fine. You, on the other hand, are in deep, deep shit.”

The trainee looked up from Pender and saw the man in pinstripes pointing a Glock.40 at his chest. “What- what’s going on?”

“Bang,” the man replied, rather than fire off a blank cartridge-everybody’s ears were still ringing from the earlier shots.

“Congratulations, son.” Pender hauled himself to his feet and flipped his leather badge case open to show the kid his DOJ shield. “You shot your inside man, then got yourself killed.”

He returned the badge case to the inside pocket of his sport coat, then reached down to offer a helping hand to a healthy-looking brunette corpse lying on the floor with her skirt rucked up high on her shapely thigh. All over the lobby, dead bodies were springing up and brushing themselves off, while freed hostages strolled out from behind the counter, discussing their performances in low, excited tones. (All the participants, save Pender, were professional or semiprofessional actors from a D.C. casting agency under contract to the FBI; having a real, if unlikely looking, special agent playing the undercover inside man, it was believed, helped drive home the point of the exercise more forcefully.)

“Ed.” Mick Lawler, an instructor at the FBI Academy, bustled into the bank with his hand outstretched. “Thanks so much, I really appreciate your help.” He pumped Pender’s hand a few times, then turned to the crestfallen trainee, standing alone by the tellers’ cages, gun in hand. “Remember what we said about making assumptions, Mr. Kincheloe?”

After shaking hands all around, Pender exited the phony bank through the plywood front door and stepped out into the sunshine of Hogan’s Alley, the simulated small town constructed for training purposes on the grounds of the FBI Academy, which was located within the borders of the U.S. Marine base in Quantico, Virginia. He fired up a Marlboro as he strolled down the center of a deserted street lined with false-front stores, a street that ended disconcertingly as always, morphing into what might have been a rolling, landscaped college campus.

A meandering walkway bordered with flower beds climbed a grassy knoll to a recently completed minimalist office building with photographs of President William Jefferson Clinton and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh gracing the lobby wall. Pender stubbed out his cigarette in an urn filled with white sand and rode a silent elevator to the fourth floor, where the suite of offices housing the Liaison Support Unit was guarded by the fiercely protective Miss