time, and becoming anxious was not going to help. He considered his next move, then completely shifted gears.
“My mother and grandmother were actually born in Cuba,” Jack said.
Jack paused for the translator. He knew very little about the man in shackles before him. But he knew that he must have family. Maybe they could connect on that level. The prisoner hadn’t seen or spoken to his loved ones in years. With a deep breath, Jack pushed forward with his last chance at a breakthrough.
“My mother left the island when she was seventeen, a couple years after Fidel Castro came into power. Her name was Anna. My grandmother put her on an airplane alone and sent her to live with relatives in Tampa. I can’t even imagine how painful it must have been to watch her daughter go, but Abuela refused to let her child live under a dictator. She hoped to get off the island and reunite in a few months. It took much longer. She missed my mother’s wedding. She missed the birth of her only grandchild-that would be me. It took forty years for my grandmother to finally get out of Cuba. By then, I was in my thirties, and my mother was long gone. Doctors didn’t know much about preeclampsia back then. She died soon after I was born.”
The translation brought no reaction. Forget “I’m sorry.” Jack didn’t tell that story often, but it was the first time in his life that he’d told it without drawing so much as a blink of the eye.
“What I’m trying to say is that I know what it must be like to be separated from your family,” Jack said, and then he waited.
The prisoner looked up, impassive, his demeanor unchanged.
Time was running out. Jack could feel his heart beating faster, the prospect of failure strangling him. He struggled to maintain an even tone as he spoke.
“I also know what it’s like to be accused of something you didn’t do.”
Jack told him about his friend Theo Knight-arrested as a teenager, an innocent man who had wasted four years of his youth on death row, twice having come so close to the electric chair that he’d eaten his last meal and had his head and ankles shaved for placement of the electrodes. It was hard not to get energized when talking about Theo, and Jack’s words were coming so fast that the translator was having trouble keeping up.
“Four years,” said Jack. “That’s even longer than you’ve been here. Now Theo is a free man. My best friend. He owns two bars in Miami, plays the saxophone every Saturday night at a joint he calls Cy’s Place in honor of his great-uncle. Everybody wants to be Theo.”
Jack didn’t mention that all of his other clients from those days were either dead or still on death row. He just let the thought of Theo and his newfound freedom hang in the gulf between them. But the prisoner was unmoved.
Family. Get back to family.
Jack was about to start talking again, then stopped, deciding to steer clear of his famous father. Tales of the former cop who had signed more death warrants than any other governor in Florida’s history probably wouldn’t endear Jack to a man in shackles. Jack was running out of angles. He was down to Grandpa Swyteck-his father’s eighty-seven-year-old father.
“I visited him in the nursing home a few weeks ago,” said Jack. “He has Alzheimer’s.”
Jack stopped. The prisoner looked at him curiously, as if-perhaps-he had been listening with interest to Jack’s stories about his grandmother and Theo and was expecting Jack to say more about his grandfather. But Jack wasn’t sure what to say next. It suddenly occurred to him how little he knew about the old man. A momentary sense of sadness came over him.
“He was born in the Czech Republic,” Jack said. “Czechoslovakia, it was called then.”
Finally a reaction-though Jack wasn’t sure what had triggered it. He simply watched as the prisoner sat up, rested his forearms atop the card table, and looked Jack in the eye. There was another long stretch of silence, and then finally, in a moment that nearly blew away Jack and everyone else in the room, the man’s lips moved.
“I have been there,” he said. “In Prague.”
The JAG lawyer looked at Jack, then at the prisoner, then back again. “He speaks,” she said in disbelief.
Jack took one more long look around the room, at the cell and the steel bunk and the steel toilet and the O- ring drilled into the floor attached to the man’s ankles. Then he leaned forward in his chair, looking straight at the man in front of him.
“Yeah, how ’bout that,” said Jack. “In perfect English.”
Chapter Three
It was a ten-hour car ride from Miami to Pensacola, like going to Alabama. The flight in Chuck Mays’ new Cessna took a little over two hours. Vince practically kissed the ground upon landing, thanking God that Chuck hadn’t suffered a midair heart attack that would have left Vince at the controls. At the terminal they piled into a rental car-Chuck, Vince, and Sam. Sam was Vince’s golden retriever.
His guide dog.
Since losing his sight, Vince had heard all the amazing stories. The guy who blew his nose so violently that his eye popped out. The firefighter whose eye was left hanging by the optic nerve after a blast from a fire hose. The child who ruptured her eye on a bedpost while bouncing on the mattress. What made these cases remarkable was that in each instance the ultimate visual impairment was nonexistent or negligible, or so the tales of medical miracles went. On the other side of the coin were patients who seemed to suffer only minor ocular trauma, the globe still intact, but whose vision was lost forever. They were the unlucky ones, the Vince Paulos of the world.
“You are going to be amazed by this technology,” said Chuck as he steered into the parking lot.
Vince heard him, but he didn’t answer right away. All this talk about some kind of military gadget that could effectively restore his vision had him drifting back to the day he’d lost his sight-to that pockmarked door again, the opening to his personal and permanent tunnel of darkness.
“Vince?”
“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking for a minute.” It was a lie, of course, at least the part about “a minute.” Vince had done far better than anyone had expected over the past three years, staying on as a full-time instructor with the police force and occasionally serving active duty as a negotiator, providing for himself, leading a surprisingly normal and enjoyable life without sight. Even so, a man couldn’t help thinking and rethinking from time to time, imagining how different things might have been if he just hadn’t pushed open that door.
The car stopped, and Chuck shut off the engine. “We’re here,” said Chuck.
Here was the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a not-for-profit research institute where Chuck had some contacts. Vince had never heard of the place, but IHMC research partners included everyone from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to IBM and Boeing. They don’t just think outside the box, Chuck had told him, these guys are reinventing the box. The idea was to fit human and machine components together in ways that exploited their respective strengths and mitigated their respective weaknesses. For Vince, that meant the possibility of a whole new door to walk through.
“This way, Deacon Blues,” said Chuck.
Vince smiled as he and Sam climbed out of the car. Chuck had been playing “Deacon Blues” and other old Steely Dan songs on the car stereo ever since telling Vince that one of the board members at IMHC was Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, a self-taught specialist in terrorism, missile defense, and chemical and biological warfare who was better known as a guitarist with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. Skunk was one of those reinventing-the-box guys who worked alongside retired army generals, scientists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, philosophers, engineers, and social scientists of various stripes.
They got a name for the winners in the world… call me Vincent Paulo.
Vince was trying not to get too excited, but if this new technology for the blind did everything Chuck said it could, Vince would literally be looking at life through a new porthole.
Fuck that door.
Sam stopped, and so did Vince. They were at the entrance. Chuck pushed the intercom button and announced their arrival. The receptionist’s voice crackled over the speaker, a buzzer sounded, and Chuck opened the door. Vince stopped him before entering.
