“He isn’t. As you know, he is now at a camp in Alabama.”
“Some camp. Crystal, there never has been a John Fletcher Faoni in any federal or state prison in the United States. We checked.”
“Yes and no. No and yes. He was in the federal prison in Tomaston, Kentucky, five weeks. As a plant.”
“A plant.”
“As soon as he escaped from the prison, all records of his having been there were to be expunged immediately.”
“He never shot a cop, or shot at a cop?”
“Of course not. Cop killing is one of the crimes that most impresses The Tribe.”
Fletch snorted. “Pink Cadillac convertible. I knew the little bastard didn’t know how to load a .32. Who arranged for him to enter the prison, and why?”
“I did.”
“Goddamn it! You helped arrange for a handsome kid like that to spend time in a maximum-security federal prison? Have you no idea what could have happened? What probably did happen to him?”
“Nothing happened to him.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“Jack is expert in a very esoteric form of the martial arts.”
“Big deal! Some of those guys—”
“Besides,” Crystal said, “he plays the guitar nicely.”
“So goddamned what?” Fletch also wanted to shout at Crystal,
“Lots of people helped in the arrangements, Fletch.”
“Like who?”
“Jack Saunders,”
“Saunders? He’s retired.”
“He’s still meddlesome. The Attorney General of the United States. I’ve made a lot of friends since you last knew me.”
“Friends?”
“Jack is, and always has been, determined to follow in your footsteps.”
“I tried to get into prison once, do a story. No one would let me.”
“This is a special case. There’s a real need for what he is doing.”
“Like what?”
“Jack went to Boston University’s School of Journalism. He spent a lot of time with Jack Saunders and his wife. Jack, that is Jack Fletcher—”
“Jack Fletcher Faoni.”
“So his name is backwards. Jack wanted to do his master’s thesis on The Tribe. Secret organization though it is, he had come across it in the universities, in the streets. In fact, they tried to recruit him. Your dear old editor, Jack Saunders, suggested he treat it as a story, do it right, as something that could be published, something useful.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“We discussed it.”
“You and Jack Saunders?”
“Jack Saunders and I.”
“You didn’t discuss it with me. For whom is he supposedly doing this story?” Maybe Fletch could find a steak somewhere, on the way back to the airport, a rare steak….
“Do you think it is anything that might interest Global Cable News?”
“I see. I was conned.”
“Oh, I think anyone would be happy to have this story. Looks like you’ll have to negotiate for it.” Crystal laughed. “Then I happened to be having a conversation with the Attorney General.”
“Of the United States.”
“He got back to me, and asked to see Jack. The idea of using Jack appealed to him. There had been a plan to send a young FBI agent into the prison. Inmates in a maximum-security prison would spot a trained agent in a blink of an eye. After meeting with Jack, the AG was certain Jack could carry this off. Jack gets the story rights.”
“Uh-huh!”
“There is this man, Kris Kriegel—”
“We’ve met.”
“He’s very intelligent, apparently.”
“He’s a jerk.” Fletch looked around the room. There wasn’t even water to drink, to fill up his stomach.
“In jail for murder.”
“Yes. Was.”
“Using his civil rights as a federal prisoner, he organized and took control of the white supremacist movement, established what is called The Tribe, in every federal and state prison in this country. Race riots were happening in the prisons with increasing frequency. They were becoming more vicious. Kriegel had contacts, more than that, position and authority not only in the supremacist movement outside the prisons, in this large country, but also in similar movements in Europe, Africa, and around the world. He was organizing a worldwide movement from his jail cell! They couldn’t take his civil rights away from him without giving him publicity. They moved him from prison to prison, but that only made things worse, increased his contacts with the prison population, made him more powerful. They knew if they put him in solitary under some pretext, the whole prison system would explode. He was becoming impossibly dangerous. Jack was really on to something.”
“So?”
“So it was arranged for Jack to go to prison to win Kriegel’s confidence, arrange his escape, and to stay with him, and to find out everything he could about his contacts, the organization, the Tribe, his plans….”
Fletch shook his head. “Strooth, it’s a hell of a story, if I do say so myself. Hell of a master’s thesis. But couldn’t the kid just have written about the First Amendment like everybody else?”
“Jack’s not like everybody else. He’s like you.”
“I didn’t have a mother as willing and weird as you are! You arranged for the kid to go to prison!”
“We all did. It was what Jack wanted. He had an ulterior motive of his own, you see. Stop clucking!”
“I’m not clucking.” It was getting dark outside and Fletch’s mind was settling on pizza. “I’m expostulating.”
“Listen to me! It was arranged that if he did not succeed immediately in attracting Kriegel, Jack would be out of there in six hours.”
“Out of prison?”
“You’re forgetting something. In prison, once he had Kriegel’s attention and support, no one would dare touch him. Not in any way. Jack was as safe as if he were at home in bed.”
“Horseshit.”
“Nothing happened to him.”
“You know that?”
“I do.”
“So what was his ‘ulterior motive’?”
“You can’t figure that out?”
“Maybe. Tell me.”
“To meet you. On your own turf. To do as you used to do. Still do, I guess, if I view my GCN correctly. And to do it to you.”
“Do it to me.”
“He didn’t want to approach you as a slavering kid. He didn’t want to meet you as a pedestrian while you were on horseback. He wanted to meet you while he was working on his own big story, see if he could suck you into it, see if he could make you go along with him, if he could interest you in what he was doing, in him. Apparently he did, at least to some extent. He wants your respect, too. Surely you can see that.”
“You’re a weird mother.”
