by Jeff Abbott
I whispered, “Find the Hungarian and wait for me in the cafeteria. I may not be in these clothes when you see me next, so be prepared.”
I left the library, and in the courtyard I found the Italian guard watching two middle-aged men listlessly shooting baskets.
“I’ve considered Nanny’s offer and I’ve decided to take your good advice, as I don’t want Mengele cutting on me. Will you please tell her that I’d like to make an appointment to see her?”
He smiled. “Yes.”
“But,” I said, “I’ll only tell her and you what I’ve learned. Because it affects the staff here. I know something about who is being sent here to staff the place. Something Nanny doesn’t know. There’s a spy here.”
His face paled. He frowned. He grabbed my arm and he took me straight to her office. I was still carrying the big, heavy history of England.
It was a strange feeling to know I’d either be free or dead in a matter of minutes.
61
I NEED TO speak to the two of you alone,” I said to Nanny.
She glanced at the other guard. The Italian nodded.
“Why?” she asked.
I gestured at the big book. Now, when you do something that seems completely illogical, people either start to question you endlessly or they let you talk. “You don’t need to bother František Lada about me. I work for the CIA. For a special division inside the CIA. Sam Chevalier is an identity from that division—if you have a CIA contact, they may be able to confirm that. I couldn’t say until I could prove what I came here to prove. Which I can only say to you and my friend here.”
She digested this news over ten seconds of silence. “Leave us,” she said to the other guard, who was still standing in her office. In the reflection of the thick glass overlooking the jungle I could see the guard step out, muttering to the Italian, who patted him on the shoulder. And I saw the Italian put his hand close to his gun’s holster. Not a complete fool. Then he closed the door, and it was only the three of us in the office.
“You like the dramatic,” Nanny said.
“I’m here because someone has been passing sensitive information from the prison to outside interests. It’s not coming from you, Nanny. Someone on your staff is conducting unauthorized interviews with the…guests. They’re passing information they should be giving to you to another source.”
“Impossible,” she said. “I’d know if someone were interrogating the guests.”
“The guests are passing information through marking in a code in this book. The staff member is then gathering the information and passing it out of the prison. Selling it. Information that frankly belongs to us,” and I made my voice imperial, “and that we, and you, are being cheated out of.”
Her gaze narrowed at me, suspicion clouding her face. “Why didn’t you just come to me, then?”
“Because I needed to make sure you yourself weren’t the problem. That you weren’t circumventing your own system. For your own profit.”
Her lips thinned. “Show me what you mean,” she said. “Prove what you’re saying.”
I tossed the heavy book on her desk. It made a big, satisfying thud. “The most recent message is on page 456. The pages with consecutive numbers, such as that one, seem to be favored: you know, 123, 234, 345.”
She stared at me and the Italian took a step forward, curious. Nanny flipped open the old, heavy book, with its small print and lavish illustrations, and bent over the pages.
“You’ll note,” I said, using the voice I’d used when standing in front of a PowerPoint presentation to CIA bigwigs on how we were infiltrating the worst criminal and terrorist groups, “that certain letters are underlined. When you put them together, it makes an encoded message.”
She looked up at me, then put her finger on the first underlined letter and began to search for the second one. I waited until, with her other hand, she pulled a pad of paper and that sharpened pencil she always liked to tap on her desk.
She held the pencil upright.
You have to be fast and ruthless. It was me or them, and no negotiation.
With all my strength, I slammed my hand into the back of her head and her face smashed into the heavy weight of the book. Before she slid off the desk I had her pencil in my hand and I spun. With the same hand I’d hit her with I slammed a palm over the Italian guard’s mouth and I drove the pencil into his eye.
He was dead before he hit the floor. I checked Nanny. Broken nasal bone driven backward toward her brain but she was gurgling, not dead yet. I tightened the necklace of thumbs around her throat and the bones of her victims pressed deep into the flesh. She stopped gurgling.
I dropped her, dead, to the floor.
I pulled an electronic passkey free from her stylish belt. I took the Italian’s gun out of its holster, checked the clip, clicked off the safety. Nanny’s computer was open and I could see camera feeds from around the prison on her screen. The yard, an empty interrogation room, the main desk at the library, hallways. And the cafeteria, where Edwin and the Hungarian stood, waiting for me. There was an icon marked “Security Status” and I clicked on it and it gave me a map of the complex, with green lights indicating all was well. The prison was ringed with four towers and there were guards in those towers. Ready to shoot anyone who tried to scale the wall.
We would not be going that route.
I took Nanny’s phone. It had cell coverage, out here in the vast nowhere, so it had to be a satellite phone. The Italian had one as well, and I stuck one phone in each of my pockets.
I went back to studying the map of the facility. The bottom-most level had power lines and plumbing, presumably carrying waste away to a river or a treatment facility. I searched for wastewater on the computer and found a document, in English and Portuguese, that outlined the system the prison used. It fed into a remote treatment tank and then into a river. The lines were tagged for repair people to be able to find them.
And that was my plan, in short: Follow the pipes to the broad stripe of a river. A river will eventually lead you to civilization.
But how to get out? There were outside access doors on the bottom floor, double-locked and reinforced, forbidden to prisoners, where the repair people could go. The map showed a security station down the hall from Nanny’s office. Nine guards, but who knew how many were sleeping elsewhere in the facility? There wasn’t a camera in the staff quarters; they had privacy.
But first I had to get past the guards.
I put on the Italian’s uniform. Sometimes a second’s delay or indecision is all you need. Plus, he had better shoes than I did and I faced a jungle trek. I put on his cap, pulled it snug on my head.
Deep breath. Thinking in terms of space, movement, and aim, I made my heart cold.
I opened the door.
The guard Nanny told to wait outside turned toward me and I shot him in the eye. The gun was loud in the concrete confines of the hallway and as he fell another guard raced around the corner from the security office and I shot him, catching him in the throat. He fell and lay gurgling and I couldn’t listen or think about that as I ran past him toward the security office.
Behind bars and a thick green layer of bulletproof glass were two guards. Both stared at me in surprise as I used Nanny’s passkey to open the door’s electronic lock. I raised the gun and shot the first one, and the second one dove behind the desks. Two seconds later he hit a button, I presumed, because an alarm sounded—a deafening, shrill clarion. He aimed a shotgun at me from behind his desk and I ducked as he fired. Then I vaulted over the desk, feet first, my feet slamming into his rifle as he raised it again, and I shot him in the head.
I could see the facility on his map, but along with the alarm the phones were ringing and I knew other guards would be racing here. Four guards dead on this floor; I might have a minute or two. On his computer screen there was a block of text reading LOCKED on each of the main doors and I pointed and clicked with the mouse and the word changed to UNLOCKED.
&nbs
p; I clicked them all to UNLOCKED. All of them.
On another computer monitor, a screen showed the tracking devices that violated our bodies. All of them, each prisoner’s position a tiny green number. It showed who you got close enough to talk to, how long you spoke to them, where you were at any given second. It was in a window titled “Dermascan”; that must be the software’s name. I found the Dermascan icon in the server’s applications folder and dragged it to the screen’s trash icon and emptied it. The numbers on the scanners all vanished—and presumably vanished from every computer in the network.
I fired into the computer’s hard drive. I couldn’t think of what else to do, and that twenty seconds might buy us several minutes.
I scooped up the shotgun along with the headset the security guard was wearing, slipped the headset into my ear. I saw a sign on a back-room door: ARMORY. I ducked inside and found another gun, which I stuck in my holster, and grabbed two concussive charges. There was a satchel, and I dumped four more guns and shotgun ammo into it. I moved quickly but I was careful. On the dead guard’s earpiece I heard a babble of men reporting in, asking for Nanny to report, for the security desk to report. At the desk there was an intercom control and I spoke into it, in English, because that seemed the lingua franca of the prison. My voice boomed over the loudspeakers.
“The doors are open. Nanny and several guards are already dead. If you want to risk a run, run for it. Fight and run. The doors are open, but the guards are armed. But there are fewer of them now.”
Later I would think this was unfair, but you can’t prepare everyone. Those who wanted to run and hide under their beds and not take the risk, they could. Those who wanted to take the risk and fight, even though it might mean death, they could. And I wasn’t sure who I was unleashing on the world. Good, innocent guys like Edwin, or maybe bad guys. But this secret prison, with no charges filed and no trials, with too many innocent people kept as leverage, mangled with tracking implants, and funded with hidden money, was not and never could be a good place. I could sleep at night, assuming I survived.
A guard hesitated as I hurried down the stairs, coming out of the medical lab, seeing my uniform more than my face. I blasted him with the shotgun and he flew back into the infirmary. Mengele looked stunned, holding up his hands. He held a scalpel, presumably for self-defense.
“Drop it,” I said. “Grab a medical kit, and come with me.”
He stared at the dead guard, splayed out in his own blood.
“You have three seconds to start moving or I will kill you.”
He obeyed me, the scalpel clattering to the floor, and grabbed a white kit. I hurried him to the cafeteria, and there we ran into chaos.
What happens when people are wrongly kept for weeks, months, years? Either their spirit wilts and they cannot fight when the chance comes, or the tiniest spark of soul remains and the human spirit’s longing for freedom roars from ember to flame. And I wondered if there was a resentment about seeing daily the skulls of those who had dared defiance, of Nanny wearing human remains as her obscene jewelry. Inside the hallway two of the older women were fighting a guard, their hands pulling at his revolver, clawing at his eyes, him fending them off. The women looked up at me and saw me, a “guard” walking with Mengele, and screamed and raised their hands in surrender. The guard they’d been attacking glanced up at us and I shot him.
“Run,” I told the women. They stripped the guard of his gun and baton and fled. I reloaded.
In the cafeteria there was chaos. Guards and staff fighting, two prisoners dead on the floor, and I opened fire with the shotgun, ripping off the cap so the prisoners could see it was the new guy, the bandage from my tracker still on the back of my neck, the 47 mark still blackly written on my face. Four more guards went down, their weapons looted from them, their batons turned against them. I unlocked the kitchen using Nanny’s passkey. Prisoners swarmed into the kitchen, arming themselves with the forbidden knives and skillets and whatever they could get to hand.
“Run,” I yelled. “Run!”
I hurried Mengele toward Edwin and the Hungarian. They had taken a baton from a guard and whipped him unconscious. I gave them each a gun from the satchel. The Hungarian handled his with ease, Edwin with determination.
“All right,” I said. “Lowest level. Where’s the passageway?”
“There’s not one,” Mengele interrupted. “You’re an idiot; you’ll get us all killed.”
“This way,” the Hungarian said. I hurried them down to the lower-level doorway, and it was still unlocked from my computer command. A few other prisoners followed us, others ran amok, others hid. To each their own.
In the dark of the basement I hunted and finally found the plumbing array that would lead out of the facility. It’d taken longer than I thought, and panic rose in my chest. I could hear gunfire on the floor above.
We found the service door I’d seen on Nanny’s computer display, but it was now locked. I slid in the passkey. Red light. Someone must have locked out the codes in the past few minutes.
I fired the shotgun into the lock. It shattered. We pried open the door. There was another barred door over the exit. I shot out that lock too, but it didn’t give. I moved everyone back toward a far wall, near a second door marked ARCHIVES. I wondered how many secrets were there. It didn’t matter.
I activated the concussive charge and ran back toward the Hungarian, Edwin, and the others. The charge rolled against the door and it exploded. My ears rang with the echo of the blast. The bars held, but the hinges were damaged enough for the Hungarian to push the door open.
Sunlight. We stumbled onto a grassy area kept free of jungle growth. I remembered the map. The trail of the pipes was marked with little bright-orange flags. I could see patches of orange wavering in the distance at the edge of the jungle. That was our path.
“The guards in the tower may shoot, or they may be busy containing the riot,” I said, talking in what I hoped wasn’t a yell, my ears ringing from the blast. “We run for the jungle. They may shoot at us from the towers. Don’t stop. If they shoot me, follow the orange tags at the beginning of the jungle; they mark the water pipe, so follow them to the river.”
We ran. Halfway across, a Chinese woman who had bolted toward the front disintegrated in a blast, an explosion erupting from the soft green lawn, consuming her.
The field was mined.
Smoke and dirt and blood clouded the air. The others screamed. A couple stopped, frozen. The rest kept running.
What else can you do? “Keep running!” Edwin yelled at the others. A shot rang out and I saw an older man go down, but the cloud from the blast seemed to obscure the air, making it harder for the guards in the towers to shoot.
We ran, the Hungarian manhandling Mengele along. To my right there was another explosion, anguished screams. I saw part of an arm land in front of us.
“This is insane!” Mengele yelled.
Before we reached the wall of jungle the Hungarian and Mengele had pulled ahead of me and then they stopped, caught. Strings of barbed wire, colored green, nearly impossible to see. Then I spotted the thin posts holding them in place, fifteen feet away.
Mengele screamed.
“Wire, wire!” the Hungarian yelled, trying to warn the others, trying to pull himself free. I skidded to a stop, went on the ground, crawling. Shots rang out. I found the thin post and I put the last concussive charge against it, set it, and ran back toward the Hungarian.
“What are you doing?” Mengele screamed. “Wait!”
The post shattered. The wire sagged and its barbs tore at both Edwin’s hands and mine as we freed our friend and the doctor. Fragments and dust filled the air, giving us a few moments’ cover. Mengele was bleeding; the Hungarian was hurt, lacerated by a bit of the post. But the fence was down and we ordered the others to come this way, follow our voices through the cloud of heaved dirt and smoke.
We reached the wall of jungle. We’d lost four. Ten of us left.
“You�
��ll never make it,” Mengele said, panting. “Snakes, quicksand, predators, disease-carrying insects. We have no food or water. And maybe they’ve mined the jungle for the next kilometer or so. You’re days from civilization. There’s no road. They helicopter everything in and there’s not a copter here today.” He pointed at an empty landing spot, close to the wall of the jungle. “There’s a reason they built it here, idiots.”
“What happens to us happens to you. Unless I shoot you first,” I said.
“Which way?” Edwin said.
“We follow the subterranean pipe to the river. Then downstream to a village. It may take us a few days. But we’re free.”
“They’ll come after us,” the Hungarian said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Where do they get backup in time? They’ll try to hold the fort, so to speak, and call for reinforcements.” I touched my bandage. “These locators, if they’re GPS chips, they won’t penetrate the triple canopy of the jungle. It’ll hide us until we reach a village.”
“And then what, then they’ll know where we’re at,” Edwin said.
“I have an idea.”
“How will we get home?” a woman asked.
“First things first. River, village.”
From behind us we heard gunfire, and I didn’t know who was shooting. I told the Hungarian to get everyone moving forward.
“What are you doing?”
“The same jungle canopy that blocks the GPS in the trackers will keep the satellite phone from working. Get everyone under cover and wait for me; I’ll catch up with you. Follow the orange flags. Don’t go too far. I’m going to make a phone call.” He moved the group forward and the green closed around them. And then I opened up Nanny’s satellite phone, before anyone back at the prison thought to cancel or track it, and I made a phone call to Mila.
62
MY NEW SUIT felt good, with a crisp, fresh white shirt. Good clothes can make all the difference in your attitude. I felt ready, despite the cuts and the sunburn flush across my nose; the nearly scrubbed-clean ghost of the number 47 on my cheek; the stick of the fresh bandage and stitching on the back of my neck. It had been ten days since our escape from Nanny’s prison in the wild.
