He took another very slow step.
Earlier that evening Sister Dionne had sat them all down. There’d been Joy, the crazy, one-eyed bald woman, who’d sort of rescued him from the Razorbacks. “Rescued” seemed like the wrong word. Stolen? Hijacked? Anyway, there was her. There was also a tall, striking woman called Tatiana, who didn’t speak throughout. Then there was a video link with someone called Zoya, who watched from a laptop screen positioned on the coffee table by Sister Teresa. Teresa asking the screen, “Is that OK?” were the first words he’d heard her speak in over a day. He’d assumed she was a mute.
He and Teresa had spent the whole day together, looking at schematics of the prison buildings, reading personnel files of COs, and watching live feeds from the penitentiary. They’d sat there and watched as the Bunny guy had been “attacked”. Arthur had said that there was something off about the whole thing. He took small comfort when Dionne confirmed his suspicions. Bunny had faked it.
Arthur had been asked to give them his initial assessment of the prison and he had done so. It hadn’t been encouraging, but he’d made it clear – nothing was impenetrable. Given enough time, they could find a flaw. He was sure of it. Deep down, Arthur was an optimistic sort of guy.
Then, Dionne had dropped the bomb.
He took another slow step.
Five days! They had five days to get McGarry and this Carlos Breida guy out of prison. It was utterly impossible. Prison breaks took months – years – to figure out. You had to find that flaw – the little tiny gap in the system – and then you had to test it ever so subtly. None of that could be achieved in five days, especially when, apparently, during the course of those five days, the two prisoners in question were going to be the most heavily surveilled in the prison. You would have more chance of success walking up to the gates of Fort Knox, politely rapping on the door, and explaining you’d left a few gold bars inside by mistake and did anyone mind if you quickly grabbed them?
He slowed his breath and took another slow step.
It wasn’t just the gates, the walls and the guards. Every prison had them. Sure, Longhurst being almost new and having all those cameras did make getting out a much harder task, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. Not by a long shot.
The monumental issue wasn’t the prison at all. It was what was around it. At least twenty miles of inhospitable desert in every direction. No vehicles of any kind coming in and out of the compound except for that damned train. It left three options:
One – try to take over the train. It had four armed guards onboard, CCTV monitoring and all manner of alarms. You would need a special forces unit to hold it and defend it.
Two – forget the train, but somehow get a vehicle to the prison. All kinds of detection devices were in use. First sign of anyone trying to get near the place and it would be locked down tighter than a nunnery during Spring Break. Arthur remembered seeing a Bond movie where there had been an invisible car. It was remarkable, even in a movie with a protagonist who had about a thousand bullets shot at him and never got hit, who managed to sleep with the world’s most beautiful women two minutes after meeting them, and whose enemies inexplicably invented new and elaborate ways not to kill him. Even amid all that, the invisible car had caused a movie theatre full of people to groan and throw popcorn. You can’t drive a car right up to a building without people noticing.
And helicopters? Airplanes? Forget it. The prison had anti-aircraft guns on the roof. It seemed ludicrous for a civilian prison, so much so that Arthur had asked to see if they could confirm the reports. That mysterious Zoya lady had sent Teresa an email containing images, and even a purchase order confirming that there really were two anti-aircraft guns on the roof. They’d got them from the US military, second-hand – surprisingly cheap, too. Apparently, they also had personnel who were certified to use them. An ex-army engineer was on the payroll and handled the training. The place was literally a fortress.
Option three – walk out. Assuming you could survive the cold nights and blistering-hot days without dying from being somewhere humanity had no right to be, that would be one hell of a walk. Twenty miles in the desert? Arthur didn’t even know how long that would take. All he knew was that it would take considerably more time than it would for the prison authorities to realise you were gone, get a chopper in the air, track down your infra-red heat signature and riddle your absconding ass so full of bullets that your body came back see-through.
It was in light of all of the above that Arthur had made his decision. Sure, the dream Dionne had floated of the clean passport and a whole new life had been incredible, but while he might be optimistic, Arthur Faser was no fool. In five days, McGarry and his buddy would still be in prison, all kinds of shit would hit the fan, and Arthur would find himself dropped off at the nearest police station. No, he was getting out while the going was good, and he’d make it on his own from thereon in.
He took another slow, slow step.
He’d managed to short the sensor on the door to his room so that he could open it without being detected. After an awful lot of effort, he’d filed down the plastic pen cap to jimmy the lock on the ankle bracelet they’d put on him, and he was almost past the
