Cam - 03 - The Moonpool

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Fuck me,” I said, without thinking.

  “Right now?” she asked, and then she laughed again. It was an appealing laugh, but those eyes still had that penumbra of lunacy around the edges. I figured her for about thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight or so. It was hard to tell in the gloom, and I wasn’t about to turn on a light.

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “I mean—aw, shit . . .”

  She waved a hand. “No offense taken. In fact, I kind of like the direct approach. Especially after being locked up in here. The last guy in this room was a Muslim of some stripe, and he was scared to death of women. He threatened to report me when I visited. I told him I’d throw menstrual fluids on him in his sleep if he opened his yap. That seemed to do it.”

  “Ri-i-ght,” I said. Mad Moira indeed.

  “Yeah, well, I tend toward direct action. They don’t call me Mad Moira for nothing. You have anyone on the outside who’s going to be wondering where you went?”

  “Actually, I think so. Or maybe it’s more like hope so. And you?”

  “The Arts and Sciences faculty was probably relieved all to hell when I went ‘on sabbatical,’ as I suspect they’ve been told. If anyone has inquired, they’ve probably been damned tentative about it.”

  A legend in her own mind, I thought. “You one of those feminazis I keep reading about?” I asked.

  “You bet,” she said proudly. “Although I’m not anti-male. I am definitely anti-government, especially this government, which I believe to be illegal, unconstitutionally elected, and guilty of all sorts of perversions of the Bill of Rights. You going to escape?”

  Oh, great, I thought. Another fanatic. She ought to meet Carl Trask. They could rant together. As to escape, the thought had occurred to me, but so had the nature of the guard force. These guys weren’t your typical paunchy, chain-smoking, union-card-carrying, fifty-year-old penitentiary screws. That little group jogging around the perimeter fence in eighty pounds of full battle regalia hadn’t been out there for a picnic, and none of them, not one, had been even breathing hard. If I did try to escape, I’d better succeed on the first try. Plus, I didn’t exactly know my newest best friend all that well.

  “Thought about it,” I said finally. “But it looks really hard. Besides, I don’t fancy living in a real cell. I’m hoping my friends get some really nasty lawyers to start looking.” Even as I said that, I wondered if it was likely, at least in the near term, especially if Quartermain was part of the cover. I realized that he was increasingly the unknown element here.

  “I’ve thought about nothing else,” she said, shifting on the bed. In profile her face was quite pretty, and, yes, that was red hair. “If I could get my hands on the computers that run this place, we could walk out of here in five minutes.”

  “Then what?” I asked. The same government agency that rounded her up in the first place would more than likely round her up again, and this time she might have to learn Spanish or some other foreign tongue. “Are you familiar with the term ‘rendition’?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. In fact, that’s what attracted their attention. I was getting a pretty good handle on the size and scope of that program. Of course, I had to break through some federal firewalls to do it.”

  “Yeah, they hate that,” I said. “Frankly, I used to hate it when hackers went after our sheriff’s office computers. If they were local assholes, we’d drop by and do something physical about it.”

  “Oh, so I’m an asshole now?”

  “Look, Moira, I don’t know you. I do know that I have not been fucking around with the federal government’s war on terrorism. I ignored a warning from an FBI agent to stay out of a case that got one of my people killed, so here I am. If you went hacking into the feds’ computer networks, they have to assume you’re part of the problem, just like the president said.”

  “So it’s okay for the government to kidnap citizens in the night and lock them up for the duration?”

  I shrugged. “Personally, I favor prosecution in open court. I’d certainly be willing to take my chances in that venue. But: Did you do the crime?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “You know the saying. And I have to tell you, as an ex-cop, this is pretty cushy time.”

  “Yet here you are,” she said. “You don’t think what you did was a crime, but you’re doing the time, just like me.”

  She had me there. “I guess I think someone’s eventually gonna try to get me out,” I said. “Maybe not right away, but soon enough. My people are going to see through the smoke screen and, being all ex-cops themselves, they’ll push it. Someone ‘in authority’ will come in here one day and ask me if I’ve gotten the message, I’ll play nice, and then I’ll be out.”

  “I used to think that, too,” she said. “See how you feel a year from now. Or two.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re not thinking it through,” she said. “Why would they let you out? To have you on the outside, running your mouth about what happened to you just because you pissed off the FBI? They’ve done the hard part—they’ve swept you off the streets and covered their tracks. Your people can push as hard as they want, but the United States Government, and that’s spelled with a capital G these days, doesn’t have to say one fucking word. They have zero motivation to let you out. And you know what else?”

  “I give up.”

  “I’ve talked to six other people in this place. And given the rules, that’s been harder than you might think. No one knows of anyone who’s ever been let go. Moved, yes, but not just let go. I’m not saying it hasn’t ever happened, what with the lovely headgear and all, but, best I can tell, we’re all in here for life.”

  “Don’t you have family? A husband? Or at least one good friend?”

  “Nope,” she said. I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. When I thought about it, though, neither did I. If the guys at H&S bounced off the Octopus shield and then gave up, I had nobody who would keep trying, except maybe my shepherds. She was watching my face.

  “That’s why I asked if you’ll try to escape, because if you do, I want to go with you. And I can help.”

  It was my turn to study her. “How do I know you’re not from the Octopus, as the major calls it. That you’re not in my room because they’re letting you into my room, to find out if I’m going to be a good boy or if I’ve been sitting up here, lo, these few nights, plotting and scheming.”

  “You don’t,” she said immediately. “I’m able to fiddle these doors because one of the nice señoras dropped her hall pass card. It only works on the bathroom doors, not the room doors. But I can get us out into that hallway, and there are fire stairs at each end of that hallway. The elevators are computer controlled. The fire stairs are not.”

  “How do you know this?”

  She stood up and shucked her jumpsuit. Underneath she was wearing a long white football shirt that reached down to just below her knees. She put her hands behind her head, stretched, and turned around slowly to show off. Even in the dim light, I could see her body. She was lovely in all respects. “This is what I work out in when it’s warm outside,” she said. “The Marines are all horny young American males. The major does not go down into the basement, ever, no matter what he says.”

  She picked up the jumpsuit and wiggled back into it, all the time watching me watching her doing it. “Girls and boys have their needs, and Marines are nothing if not direct. I’m telling you, I can get us out of this building. What I can’t do is get over that final fence.”

  “Or what’s probably on the other side of it,” I said. “And there’s still the problem of afterward.”

  “I’ll take my chances. And if I can get to my computers, they’ll wish they’d never ever tangled with likes of me.”

  Her computers had probably been reduced to burned blobs of plastic in a landfill, but I didn’t tell her that. I was busy rearranging my covers to hide my reaction to her little tease. “Where does the ‘Mad Moira’ business come from?”
I asked.

  “Because I’ll do absolutely anything once,” she said with that sly, half-crazy look. “Even you, big guy.”

  Then she was gone, and the light on my bathroom door was green again. I got up to look out the window, just to make sure I hadn’t been dreaming. On my way back to the bed my bare feet discovered a filmy little unmentionable.

  Okay, I thought. I hadn’t been dreaming.

  Time to think. A redhead with a radical left political agenda who admitted to being part crazy wanted to light off an escape attempt from a prison run by Marines. What could possibly be wrong with that proposition?

  The next morning, I heard the familiar sounds of guards in the hallway escorting prisoners, excuse me, detainees, to exercise. My turn came two hours later, and I shuffled down to the elevator with six other people, all indistinguishable in their jumpsuits and hoods. If my newfound ally was among the group, I had no way of telling, but it seemed as if they didn’t let adjacent rooms out together.

  Once outside, I went through my regular routine. There were guards here and there, but they seemed almost uninterested in what the detainees were doing, or not doing—some just sat on the benches against the side fence and smoked. There was no smoking permitted in the building, but cigarettes were provided to the real addicts when they came out for their fresh air.

  I covertly watched the other people, trying to see if I could make out Mad Moira in the group, but it was impossible. The jumpsuits were identically baggy, and the hoods revealed nothing that would indicate the gender of any detainee. I did glance up at the top floor to see if I could see a face at her window, but the glass appeared reflective. No luck there, either.

  Then a detainee tried to escape.

  It was almost ordinary. I was doing some stretching to relieve incipient cramps in my legs from the sprints when I saw a detainee who was three lanes away walk calmly over the end chalk line to the final fence and begin to climb. He didn’t bolt or yell or do anything dramatic. He simply crossed the line, grabbed a handful of chain-link, and began to clamber up the wire. I looked around to see what the guards would do, and was surprised to see them do absolutely nothing. One guard who had stopped to watch when the man started up the fence lit a cigarette and then sat back down on a bench. That gave me a bad feeling: If the guards weren’t concerned, the escapee had better be. They were expecting a show.

  The orange figure climbed steadily until he reached the top. He looked back as if expecting machine-gun fire from within the exercise yard, but the guards were all just watching and still acting unconcerned. There were no guard towers or other weapons stations around the building—just that fence. There were three strands of barbed wire at the top of the fence, tilted inward, but the detainee pulled a couple of bath towels out of his jumpsuit, doubled them over the barbed wire, wobbled for a moment at the top of the fence, and then tumbled over.

  The other detainees had all stopped doing whatever they’d been doing and stood there, watching, just like I was. I expected sirens, a prison escape alarm—some kind of institutional reaction to the escape attempt, but there was only silence and the watching guards. Who had to know what was about to happen.

  As the orange-clad figure began climbing down the other side of the fence, I heard a bang from over my left shoulder. I first thought it was a gunshot, but then realized it was a large wooden trapdoor opening and closing in the building’s wall. I saw something come through that door, something black and moving fast. It was a large rottweiler. Full grown, ugly as a stump, and rounding the far corner of the fence at the speed of heat in that bearlike gait they have. It made not a sound, but ran as hard as it could to the point just below the detainee, who’d by now seen the dog coming. He stopped his descent about halfway down the fence and stared. I could see the dog’s spittle flying as he came, head down, ugly pig eyes locked on to his prey, and those massive black haunches driving him forward. The escapee was still a good eight feet in the air, and he’d frozen in midclimb, his arms stretched one over the other, and his feet in a similar disposition, one up, one down.

  He started back up as the thick black dog arrived, but he might as well not have bothered. The rottie screeched to a stop, took one measuring look, barked once, a nasty, wet sound, and then jumped up onto the fence, all four legs driving. To my amazement, the damned dog began scrambling up the fence, using his enormous teeth to help him climb. He overtook the man’s lower leg at probably ten feet off the ground and clamped down on his ankle. Then he let go of the fence. The man screamed in pain as the dog’s clamped-on, dead weight took effect. I almost thought I could hear the bones crunching, and I could absolutely see bright red blood spurting out of those clenched jaws. The man screamed again, and clung to the chain-link with white knuckles, his free leg swinging in the air now while the dog just hung from the other leg, growling and biting down harder, the froth in his mouth running red from the terrible damage he was doing to the man’s lower leg and ankle.

  It was no contest. The dog must have weighed over a hundred pounds, and between the dead weight, the horrible slaughterhouse noises, and the dog’s own squirming, the man simply could not hold on. They both fell to the ground, and I held my breath. I thought surely the rottie would let go and then go for the man’s throat, but he didn’t let go. He began pulling the screaming man along the fence, back toward the corner from which he had appeared, matching each scream with a growl of his own and a sharklike shake of his massive head, as if determined to drown out the human’s piteous cries and simultaneously rip off his prize. He dragged that poor bastard all the way down the fence line, jerking backward around the corner, and then backed into the trapdoor, where they both disappeared into sudden silence.

  I remembered to breathe. I looked over at the guards, who had gone back to their routine of walking back and forth along the interior walkway, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The rest of the detainees in the exercise area were still frozen in their tracks, as was I. I’m sure we were all wondering what would happen next, inside that door, but the show was definitely over and that was that. It had taken all of maybe ninety seconds. I glanced back up at the top floor, and this time I thought I saw a blurred white face in Moira’s window.

  Okay, neighbor, I thought. Still want to make a run for it? I looked back out at the fields and woods beyond the perimeter fence. The trees were perhaps two hundred yards across the open field from the fence. I assumed the river was just beyond that tangle of willows, scrub oaks, and haphazardly piled flood debris.

  But then I saw a welcome sight.

  Frick and Frack were looking back at me. They were sitting just inside the tree line, clear as day, if you were looking.

  When I recovered from my surprise, I began walking casually toward the perimeter fence, conscious of the fact that absolutely no one else was getting anywhere near it. I was sure the guards were watching and wondering if the madness was contagious, but then I turned around at the chalk line and did a light jog back to the other end of my pen. I did this twice more, and each time confirmed that I could see my shepherds’ heads sticking up through the weeds just inside the tree line, watching me.

  Okay, I thought, if they’re watching me, then there’s a human out there, too, hopefully with binocs. On the third trip back to the perimeter, the whistle blew. I scoped the guards out of the corner of my eye. They were gathering to assemble the detainees to go back into the building. I got to the white line, stopped, stretched, got down on one knee with my hands on the ground, and pushed the other leg out behind me. Then, keeping my body between the guards and my hands, I made an imaginary pair of scissors out of my two hands and mimed cutting through the fence. I got back up and walked casually to the other end, where a guard was waiting for me. I heard another Marine bark out a command, reminding the small line of prisoners that there was no talking allowed.

  “Nice pet you-all got there, Marine,” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Kibble and Bits,” he said. “Step out. Fal
l in. No talking. Clear?”

  Clear as a bell, I thought. I stepped out, fell into line on the sidewalk, and shut my yap. If the dog hadn’t already done it, they were going to have to amputate that poor bastard’s foot.

  That evening after supper I went in to use the bathroom. There was a message soaped on the mirror: Well? It was signed MM and followed by the words erase this. I erased the message with a wet cloth, picked up my soap bar to reply, but then put it back down and went about my business. On balance, I still didn’t know if I could trust Moira to be who and what she said she was. First of all, what were the chances they’d put a man and an attractive woman in conjoined rooms? Even with all the elaborate key card security, she’d still managed to get into my room. And how had she done that? With a conveniently dropped key card, which was never reported missing? Third, she was a wild-eyed redheaded female. I’d tangled with one of those in my younger days, and tangled was the operative word. In my view, red in the head meant Celt in the blood, and that tribe had always and only been about mortal combat.

  I wedged my door open with a towel, retrieved her skivvies, and put them on the edge of the sink. Then I retreated to the relative safety of my room. Whatever I was going to do about escaping, I wasn’t going to complicate it with Mad Moira.

  Unless, of course, I wanted use of that magic key card.

  I sat down at the little desk and thought about it some more. Obviously, there was no going over the fence in broad daylight with that thing on ready-alert. So: first things first. See if my guys out there got the message about cutting the fence. I got up and looked out the window. It was raining again, and now there were tendrils of fog creeping up from the river through that band of trees where I’d seen Frick and Frack. Maybe tonight, they’d make their move.

  The next day was gray and overcast, but without the rain. I took my usual exercise period, this time around midafter-noon. Which exercise pen you got depended on the whim of the guard, but I’d noticed that the first guy in the lineup after coming out of the building went to the first pen to our left, and so on. I set myself up so that I was shut into the same pen as yesterday.