“Can we see the prisoner now?” asked Circe.
“Sure,” Wilson said with bad grace. He led the way and we followed him through cold, damp halls that felt more like the corridors of an ancient dungeon rather than part of a modern prison. We passed through two heavily occupied cell blocks, and as we passed we saw hundreds of prisoners standing on the other side of the bars. Their eyes followed us, reading us. They watched Circe O’Tree, who wore a tailored suit that hid none of her curves.
The prisoners were absolutely silent.
And that was creepy as hell. I had never heard a quiet cell block before. Not once as a Baltimore cop or during my time with the DMS. There were always catcalls and laughter, the low murmur of conversation, smart-ass remarks. There should have been some whistles at Circe, some off-color remarks.
All we heard was the hollow sounds of our own heels on the concrete floor. Even the warden felt it. He stopped in the middle of one of the rows of cells and looked around. When he made eye contact with the convicts, they returned his stare, but they said nothing.
Wilson cut a look at me and continued leading the way.
Several turns took us through a series of locked doors until we reached the secure area used for solitary confinement. The cells on either side of Nicodemus’s cell had been left vacant. The video cameras on the wall were pointed toward his cell. I could see a small figure on the cot, curled asleep under a thin brown blanket.
A guard-supervisor stood at the far end of the row, and he came to meet us.
Wilson said, “Bill, these people are with Homeland. They want to interview Nicodemus.”
“Sure, but if you’d called down I could have—”
“Just open the cell,” I said.
It was against all protocol, and the guard studied the warden for a moment before complying. He waved to two other guards and they came to join us, bringing waist chains and riot sticks. All three of the guards cut worried looks at the cell. It was the fearful reaction Rudy had described. He was right: these guys were scared as hell by the little prisoner.
“Nicodemus,” called the supervisor, Bill. “Rise and shine.”
Nicodemus ignored him.
“Come on,” Bill said, his tone almost pleading. “Let’s not make this harder than it needs to be.”
When Nicodemus still didn’t stir, the supervisor turned and yelled down the hall, “Open Six!”
There was a metallic clang inside the wall and the door twitched open. The two guards braced the doorway. One opened it, the other drew his riot stick and tapped on the door frame.
“Come on—let’s not be screwing around here.”
When there was still no compliance, they looked to the warden, who gave a nod, and they entered the cell.
“What the hell? Oh—
We crowded the doorway, watching as one of the guards grabbed the blanket and whipped it away. Circe and Rudy gasped as black and brown roaches scuttled in all directions. Hundreds of them.
There was a pillow and a rolled-up bundle of clothes.
Nothing else.
“Dios mio,” breathed Rudy.
“Where is he?” demanded Circe. “Where’s the prisoner?”
The warden ordered the supervisor to send the alert: escaped prisoner. Horns blared and sirens wailed. The whole place went into hard lockdown. Teams of men and dogs ran through the halls and out into the yards. Teams on ATVs tore through the countryside.
They found nothing.
In the warden’s office, Circe asked to see the video surveillance tapes from Nicodemus’s cell. When they were played back we watched the little man crawl under his blanket and appear to go to sleep. That was at 4:16 P.M. I knew from when we’d signed in that we had passed through security at 4:18.
At 4:19 the video feed in Nicodemus’s cell dissolved into white static. The guards had unlocked the cell at 4:41.
That left a twenty-two-minute gap during which Nicodemus vanished.
The video feed trained on the outside of his cell door, however, showed a continuous picture, and the door did not open. The FBI and investigators from the Department of Corrections spent days going through the stored video files of all of the cameras at Graterford. Nicodemus was not seen on any of them.
Manhunts in three states could not find him. TV alerts and posted rewards resulted in no useful responses. No trace of him was ever found.
But as Rudy, Circe, and I stood in that cold hallway outside Nicodemus’s cell, I think we all had the same feeling. It was absurd, impossible, and foolish. But it’s what I felt, and when I looked in their eyes I saw the same shadows. The same ghosts.
We did not voice those thoughts. In our profession you don’t. Just as you do with pain, you learn to eat your fear. Even fear of something that may not have an explanation.
Rudy crossed himself, though. And that said it all.
(3)
Vox’s betrayal hit a lot of people hard. It shook the foundations of our government. So many key people in government, so many people in crucial jobs in labs and nuclear power plants and defense factories, so many of our most highly trained special operators, had been screened and vetted by Vox. Over seventy people in the DMS had been screened by him. Did it make them all guilty or complicit? No. Circe O’Tree had been approved by Vox, and so had Grace Courtland, Top Sims, DeeDee Whitman, and Khalid Shaheed.
What it meant was the start of a witch hunt and a wave of paranoia that would make the McCarthy years seem like an era of tolerance and understanding. Church did not want that to happen and over the next months he would spend more time in front of Congress than he would overseeing the hunt for the Kings.
Vox vanished off the radar. So did Toys and the rest of the Seven Kings. All of the think-tank records had been stolen. That was a sleeping dragon, and we all knew it.
T-Town was shut down pending a review, but absolutely no one wanted to do that review. No one wanted to be known as “the next Hugo Vox.”
Rudy, Circe, and Bug spent thousands of hours going over the psychological profiles of people in key industries, looking for those personality types that jibed with Plympton, Grey, Scofield, Snow, and Taylor. They identified 103 possibles. Amber Taylor became part of the debriefing team that conducted the interviews. Aunt Sallie coordinated with Federal Marshals for an unprecedented number of new identities in Witness Protection. With Santoro locked away wherever Church has him it might mean that no one would ever come after the families of the people he had coerced and psychologically tortured—but was that a risk we could ever take?
It was an enormously expensive venture, but somehow the funding always materialized. I wondered if some of the Inner Circle were helping. They were still a pack of evil bastards the DMS would have to take down, but if they wanted to avenge their children, so be it.
As far as I know, the Inner Circle are still on the “to-do” list of Aunt Sallie and Mr. Church. Not a nice place to be.
(4)
The hunt for the Seven Kings wasn’t over. We all knew that. It would go on until we found out where they were, and tore them down.
Sounds so easy. Like the War on Terror would be over when we found and killed Osama. But do any of us believe that? Is this a winnable war? It’s a fair question, and a hard one, and the answer is probably “no” for both sides.
And yet we have to fight it. If we don’t, the bad guys get bigger, bolder, more dangerous, and more destructive. Right now they’re jackals nipping at the weak and the unwary. We can’t allow them to become the dominant predator.
All of which sounds like a lot of flag-waving, but it’s not that simple. We have to be careful not to become what we hunt. We almost did that with the Patriot Act, taking away civil rights in the name of protecting them. That can’t happen.
