The Bastille - a Thriller

by Victor Methos

  Mickey wasn’t surprised. He’d seen people in Vietnam that had superhuman strength in the midst of battle. Hatred could do that. It was an energy as sure as love or food. It could fuel a person, driving them to do things they wouldn’t think possible in a normal state.

  Mickey had missed two doses of his medication, and he didn’t much care. He felt so tired that he could sleep right there on the bench. It had probably been a mistake to come out here. This wasn’t his game anymore. Younger agents should have handled it. But accepting your age and limitations was not easy for anyone to digest. He would just have to try.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Angela.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Hey. How’s she doing?”

  He hesitated. “She passed away.”

  “I’m sorry, Mick.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned down, placing his elbows on his thighs, and stared at the ground before him. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. They’re releasing me tomorrow.”

  Mickey only now realized that he was sitting outside the same hospital she was in as well. He hadn’t even noticed in his rush to get here.

  “There’s something I don’t get though.”

  “What?” he said.

  “How the fuck did he know where she was? I’m sure you didn’t tell anybody.”

  “No one. The only people that knew were law enforcement.” Mickey looked back to the hospital. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it before. “Only people in law enforcement knew where she was,” he said softly.

  “You thinking…”

  “Yes.”

  “Shit. Shit, fucking shit, Mick.”

  “I know,” he said, rising and rushing back inside the hospital, heading to Angela’s room.

  25

  In the morning, Angela was released. Her stitches had healed up enough that she could walk without it appearing awkward. Mickey had slept in her room on a recliner. After he woke, he visited Carrie’s room. The body had been removed and taken down to the morgue. He knew that would be the case, but still he had to see it for himself.

  Angela had to be wheeled out in a chair and she swore the entire way to the entrance. When they exited the hospital, she rose and did a spin, showing the nurse that she was fine. The nurse just smiled and pushed the wheelchair back inside.

  “Man, I hate hospitals,” she said.

  “They saved your life, you know.”

  She exhaled loudly. “Fine, they’re good for something.” She folded her arms and then grimaced from the pain. “So what’re we doing?”

  “I would say you’re going home but I think the safest place for you would be the Bureau’s offices.”

  “What’dya mean ‘for me,’ Mick? You better believe I’m coming with you. That fucker put thirty stitches in me.”

  Mickey knew her well enough to know that no amount of arguing would change her mind. It would be better to have her along anyway. Even if he dropped her off at the Bureau field office, she would just leave again and try to follow up with Tamora on her own.

  “I picked Carrie’s hotel only recently. So that means Tamora must have a phone. Unless he met them somewhere and got the location, but I think this person would want Tamora to stay as far away from them as possible. The phone’s our best bet.”

  “So what’dya wanna do? Subpoena the phone records of every cop in the city?”

  “The visitor logs for Tamora were in the reports. No one ever came to see him and they weren’t allowed phone calls. That means it’s someone at the prison. We don’t need every cop’s phone records, just the ones who work there.”

  26

  The chambers of Judge Thomas Henry were bare with the exception of stacks of law books on the half dozen shelves crammed into the small space. The judge was a portly man with glasses that drooped down over his nose. He read through the warrants and the subpoenas, and then eyed Mickey and Angela, and the U.S. Attorney—a woman named Amanda Hoskins—before re-reading it.

  “I know some of the people on this list,” he said.

  “Your Honor,” Hoskins said quickly, “we assure you we need these records for the ongoing investigation and apprehension of Zain Tamora.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I know what they’re for. I’m just saying that if you’re wrong, you might not find the Bureau of Prisons as accommodating as they have been in the past.”

  “We’re confident it’s worth it.”

  The judge shrugged and signed the documents. “Make it count.”

  The three of them left the judge’s chambers. Out in the hall, Hoskins put the paperwork in a file and said, “I’ll serve them right now and e-mail you what we get. Usually the phone companies fight a subpoena but they typically do what a U.S. Attorney asks. They know the NSA can provide them if they refuse. I put my butt on the line for this, Mickey. You better be right.”

  “I’m right. And I appreciate the favor.”

  “Hey, I owed you one.” She looked at Angela. “When I was back in D.C., Mickey saved me some serious humiliation on one of my first cases.”

  “What’re friends for?” he said.

  “I hope you catch the bastard. I’ll let you know when I have something.”

  When they were alone, Mickey sat down on a couch in the court’s hallway. Angela stood in front him.

  “You look tired, Mick. You get enough sleep last night?”

  “About three hours. I heard the television on in your room until two in the morning.”

  “Mad Men marathon. Sorry.” She sighed and glanced down the hall to Amanda Hoskins, who was walking away. “This is gonna be a shitstorm if you’re right.”

  Mickey sat across from Angela in a coffee shop by the courthouse. She ordered a stack of pancakes, an omelet, a side of bacon and a large orange juice. Watching her eat had always been an experience for Mickey. She could put it away like no one he’d ever seen, and yet she maintained a figure most women would kill for.

  “I’m glad you got your appetite back,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled with a mouthful of food. “Fucking darving in dere.”

  Mickey sipped his coffee. “Angela, have you ever considered leaving the Bureau?”

  She chewed for a moment, not breaking eye contact with him. “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just been looking back on my life a lot. You’d be surprised how much you do that when you know you don’t have much of it left… I was thinking that maybe the Bureau wasn’t the most judicious use of my time.”

  She scoffed. “What would be? Fucking barbeques and baseball games?”

  “Yeah, actually. Exactly that.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Mick. I don’t know if I’m the settling-down type.”

  “We’re all the settling-down type. But the Bureau makes it difficult. The hours, and the work— especially the work. You carry it with you everywhere. You’ll find yourself in some situation where you want to relax, but you can’t. You keep thinking about something you saw or heard. Some awful piece of humanity other people don’t even know happens. It never leaves you.” He took another sip of coffee, staring out the window. “I had a case once with a little girl who was dying of cancer. She was in a children’s hospital. That little girl went through about as much pain as a person could go through and she kept fighting. Then her parents noticed her behavior changing in a completely unpredictable way. So they got one of those teddy-bear cameras and set it on her nightstand. That first night, one of the orderlies… he’d been sneaking into her room and…”

  “Shit,” she mumbled.

  “Anyway. There was a video of it. I had to watch that video, Angela. I had to watch it several times before I grew desensitized enough to approach the orderly calmly and get a confession. There’s not an hour that goes by where some part of that video doesn’t pop into my thoughts. It’s like some darkness following me around everywhere. And no matter how sunny it is everywhere else, it’s with me. You’ll have that, too. Somet
hing will disturb you so much you’ll never be able to get rid of it. I don’t want that for you.”

  They sat quietly in the booth for several minutes. Angela had stopped eating. Finally, Mickey’s phone vibrating on the table broke the silence.

  “It’s Amanda,” he said. “She’s got the records.”

  “That quick?”

  “It’s the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI requesting them. Middle management at a phone company isn’t going to put up much of a fight.”

  She hesitated. “Mickey… I don’t know what to say about what you just told me. You’ve never mentioned that case before.”

  “I’ve never told anybody. Even my wife. Because I didn’t want that image in their heads. But I want that image in yours. Because I don’t want you to have your own.”

  She nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

  Mickey leaned back in his seat and began reading through the records. All he needed were outgoing calls from the previous night. One call, sometime before Carrie was killed but after he’d chosen the hotel. A time period of roughly 5 pm to 10 pm.

  They sat in the booth a good hour before Mickey saw what he was looking for. He looked up to Angela, who was staring out the window and sipping iced tea.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “What? What’d you find?”

  He grinned. “You’re gonna want to be there for this.”

  27

  Jacob Paul Gills liked everything in his life a certain way. As he sat at his desk in his favorite chair, reading a paper version of the Wall Street Journal—the only newspaper he actually trusted—he thought briefly about how orderly everything in his life truly was. From his wife, who had dinner prepared for him every day at 6:00 pm sharp, to his shoes, which were organized by color in his closet. Everything in its place.

  That’s how he ran his prison, too. Everyone in his place. Some wardens did not cater to the idiosyncrasies of prisoners and treated each one the same, shoving them all together and forcing them to attempt to live together. Sometimes for the rest of their lives. But he knew better.

  He knew that there were certain gangs that would rather die than eat next to other gangs. He understood that the white supremacists would bend their ideology if they could make a profit selling narcotics. He understood that people could get whatever they wanted into prison as easily as they could on the street. From prostitutes—though granted they would be male inmates, not females brought from the outside—to narcotics, to booze, to pornography and DVDs. Everything could be bought and smuggled.

  Unless you truly had everyone in their proper place.

  If the white supremacists were isolated from their peers and put with other races, they would have no one to fan the flames of their deviance. If the northern Mexican gangs were put with the gays, a group they wouldn’t have to defend their machismo in front of, they would be less likely to commit crimes to seem “manly” in front of other inmates. Bikers were placed with the religious crowds and would miraculously find Jesus.

  If you could place everyone in just the right spot, you would have harmony.

  That’s what Warden Gills had at his prison. Harmony. At least until the ACLU botched things up and an activist judge told him how to run things. He’d like to see them achieve harmony. He’d like to see them have one of the lowest incidence of violence in any prison in the country with the most violent offenders. But that wouldn’t happen. The judge and the ACLU liked to run things through the courts with papers. Not in the real world.

  The intercom on his phone beeped and the guard downstairs said, “Warden?”

  “Yes, Kelly. What is it?”

  “FBI here to see you.”

  He paused. “That’s fine. Send them up.”

  Mickey waited patiently as the guard checked with the warden. The lobby was immaculately clean, more so than any other prison he had seen. The guards’ uniforms were all pressed and free of stains, the windows so spotless you would think there was no glass in them. Warden Gills ran a tight ship.

  “Warden says to go up,” the guard said. “I’ll walk you there.”

  He followed the guard, but not before looking back through the double doors of the entrance to Angela, who was standing outside with three federal agents.

  The guard led him up to the office he’d been to before and Mickey saw the warden sitting behind the desk, reading a paper. He lowered it and took off his glasses before speaking.

  “Agent Parsons. Such a pleasure to see you again.”

  Mickey sat down across from him. “Likewise.”

  “So to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “We caught a break in the Tamora case.”

  The warden leaned back in the chair, a grin on his face. “Really? Well, that is exciting. Mind sharing? Ah, if it’s not breaking any confidentiality, of course.”

  “No, not at all.” Mickey took the printout from his pocket and placed it on the warden’s desk. “You can read it yourself.”

  The warden put his glasses back on and picked up the document. “What exactly am I looking at?”

  “The records for the last forty-eight hours for your wife’s cell phone. The U.S. Attorney didn’t think we needed to ask for hers but I insisted.”

  The warden placed the paper down. “And what exactly would you get my wife’s phone records for?” he asked sternly.

  Mickey grinned, but said nothing. A few moments passed in silence. The more time elapsed, the more the warden sweated. His hands were trembling and he kept them under the desk. What Mickey wasn’t going to tell him was that disposable phones were more heavily monitored than the average cell or home phone. The warden had bought a disposable phone and set it up on his wife’s credit card, thinking it couldn’t be traced. But terrorist organizations like the Taliban had adopted that trick years ago. The National Security Agency now immediately picked up conversations on disposable phones as soon as they were activated. They moved so quickly because the organizations thought they would avoid NSA surveillance by tossing their phones after a few calls.

  Mickey had called in a favor to the liaison between the NSA and the Bureau. What they’d given him was a conversation between the warden and Zain Tamora, consisting primarily of Carrie Fetcher’s address and place of employment.

  “I can’t imagine why you thought this would be a good idea,” Mickey said. “You had to have known he was going to kill your guards. Those men trusted you. They were loyal to you. And you led them to the slaughterhouse.”

  The warden placed one hand over his eyes. He said nothing for a moment, but then: “I think I need to speak to a lawyer.”

  “That’s fine. You can request one at the Bureau.” Mickey waited until the warden looked up at him. “Why would you do this? What possible reason would be worth sacrificing four of your men?”

  “I didn’t… I didn’t sacrifice them. They were to be unhurt. I didn’t understand what he was. He was just supposed to get out and find her and scare her. We were going to arrest him before he got to her.”

  “You told him Carrie’s new identity?”

  He nodded. “He was to scare her. I never intended for anyone to get hurt. I promised that if he did this for me, I would give him certain privileges. Taking him out of administrative segregation for one.”

  “But he didn’t play along.”

  “He’s not human, Agent Parsons. I don’t know what he is.” The warden placed his elbows on the desk and put his face in his hands. “What the hell have I done?”

  “Was it just the lawsuit?”

  “Just the lawsuit? That wasn’t just a lawsuit. They set precedent. They took control of this prison, my prison, away from me. The next day, ten new petitions were filed by other inmates. I was losing control of the entire thing. I was losing the harmony it’d taken me a decade to build. I wanted to show them that… I wanted to show them what the consequences were.”

  “You wanted to show them you were right, that things had to be run your way. I think you knew people wou
ld get hurt. Those four guards, those three people at the gas station, Special Agent Chan… and Carrie are on your head. You are the one responsible for their deaths, Warden. And it’s time to pay the piper now.” Mickey rose. He stopped the digital recorder in his pocket. “You know, we may not have actually had enough to convict you until this little conversation. So I have to thank you for that.”

  The warden’s jaw dropped open. Mickey wasn’t surprised he’d garnered a confession with a little prodding. When they were faced with what they had done, few people could think clearly enough to keep their mouths shut.

  Mickey texted Angela. A few moments later, federal agents had the warden in handcuffs.

  “He asked for a lawyer,” Mickey said to Angela. “Make sure you call his. But he wasn’t under arrest yet when he asked for one, so the confession I got is good.” He handed her the recorder. “I’ll come back out and testify if you need me to.” He turned and headed out of the room.

  “Where you going?”

  “Following a hunch. I’ll call you.”

  28

  Mickey drove down the residential street and parked next to a fire hydrant. The neighborhood was upscale and he saw several children playing outside. He wondered if Carrie had watched those children as well. Her house was up the block and Mickey could see it from where he was parked.

  Tamora had to go somewhere during the day and hide out. He wouldn’t be out driving around; his face was on every newspaper and broadcast in the state. But where could he go? If he picked a random house, someone might surprise him by coming home. Empty buildings had people going through them as well and someone might turn him in. Bus stations, parking lots and motels all had the same problem. The safest place for him would be somewhere he knew no one would show up. The house of a victim he’d already taken. The house of his wife.