The Henchmen's Book Club

by Danny King

  “Mark Paul Jones,” they said, “you have pleaded guilty to the following charges.”

  A military clerk stood up and read out what I’d won.

  “One count of conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity. One count of conspiracy to destroy US government property. One count of murder in the second degree.”

  That bloody Nguni! My prosecutors dropped all the other murder charges and accepted that I couldn’t be held responsible for killing so many whilst technically only responsible for guarding the Coke machine but Dunbar wouldn’t have it. He simply wouldn’t let them sully the memory of his matchstick mate with a grubby plea bargain so for the second time in as many lives I was convicted of killing a man who’d knocked on my door looking for a fight.

  If only I could’ve killed him again.

  “These are some of the gravest charges on record,” the head-judge glowered. “Each a capital crime in its own right and in normal circumstances I should have no hesitation but to pass the appropriate sentence with immediate effect. However,” he hammed, milking the moment for all it was worth, “in light of your recent co-operation with our investigators we have decided to treat you with leniency and it is therefore our judgement that you be sentenced to a term of ninety-nine years incarceration for each offence. Sentences to run concurrent.”

  “That’ll help,” I said.

  “You will serve out the entirety of your sentence here at Fort McCarthy in the maximum security wing of the special prisoners unit. As you are a British subject your government will be informed of your presence here, though you will not be permitted to communicate with any persons beyond these penitentiary walls. That includes diplomatic staff, lawyers, journalists, friends or family.”

  “Can I at least call Raj’s News and cancel my papers?” I asked. “I must be running up one hell of a bill.”

  The judge continued, unfazed. “Furthermore, any and all assets held by the convicted are hereby confiscated and turned over to become the legal property of the United States government,” he said, his country suddenly one slightly run-down if heavily mortgaged farm in West Sussex the richer, before looking me straight in the eye to hammer the final nail into my coffin.

  “Lastly, because of the nature of your plea and because of your full and unconditional acceptance of guilt, it is our judgement that you be denied the right of appeal for the entirety of your sentence. Mark Paul Jones, have you anything to say for the record?”

  What was the point? It was over. I might as well have been buried under all that snow in Greenland for all the weight my words would ever carry again.

  I looked over my shoulder at a blazing Rip Dunbar, who’d made a special effort and actually put on a shirt for the occasion, before turning back to address the bench.

  “Yes, I have,” I told them. “I’ve been in US custody for four months now so will that go down as time served?”

  28.

  IN THE LAND OF THE FREE

  Believe it or not there were some actual benefits to being convicted and sentenced, the main one being that I was transferred from the detainees’ unit to the special prisoners’ block with immediate effect.

  And wouldn’t you know it, I was already acquainted with some of my fellow special prisoners.

  “Mr Jones.”

  “By God, Mr Smith!”

  We shook hands like old friends but stopped short of embracing and rolling around on the floor together. I guess that would come with time.

  “I can’t say I’m pleased to see you here,” Mr Smith shrugged.

  “Me neither,” I agreed. “Still, it could be worse. I thought you were dead.”

  “Me? No,” he shrugged. “We got the chopper moving after we saw your flare and got picked up in Tasiilaq before the extraction team could get us out.”

  “Who flew?” I asked as we were ushered through a huge set of doors and into a plain white tiled room with showers in the middle of the room.

  “An Omega guy called Crow. Black hair, funny eyebrows; do you remember him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well anyway, he came up looking to bug out so we hitched a ride. He should be in here as well somewhere,” he said, looking around at the other faces in our association batch as they began stripping us of our duds.

  “So what did you get?” I asked. “What sentence did they give you?”

  “Ninety-nine years, same as everyone else,” Mr Smith confirmed. “It’s what everyone gets, didn’t you know?”

  “No,” I said, feeling suckered and somewhat less than special all at once. “Motherfuckers!”

  “Ain’t that a fact.”

  Of course, the authorities didn’t just let us mingle at will. We were locked up two to a cell for twenty-two hours a day and allowed only one hour of association time a day. And even then, our association hours were staggered in such a way that barely twenty guys were ever allowed out at once. I guess the authorities didn’t feel like taking the lid off a pot of snakes by giving four hundred professional mercenaries with nothing to lose the run of the place.

  So we were shepherded out of our cells in batches, through the showers, through the dinner hall and finally up to the surface for a precious hour of daylight, before once again being led back to our cells. It wasn’t much but that hour of daylight came to mean everything to us and the one and only bright spot in an endless succession of otherwise grim days. It also turned out to be the authorities’ chief stranglehold over the prisoners and could be – and frequently was – withdrawn for any infraction of the rules. I guess that’s why they gave it to us in the first place.

  I’d find out all of this in the fullness of time but for the moment I was an old hand at settling into inhospitable climes and kept my head down until I’d learned the lie of the land.

  I wasn’t put in a cell with Mr Smith but someone else I knew, or at least knew of, Mr Rousseau, otherwise known as Cyber Guy to all at book club. He’d been picked up in Tajikistan by French Foreign Legion commandos following a visit from that tedious hair-transplantee, Jean Cabon. I was surprised to find him in American custody but like Mr Rousseau said of the French authorities; why build your own top-secret maximum-security prison when you can just pay the Americans to take your trash? Either way he was a nice guy and I’m pleased to say we got on.

  What’s more, with Mr Rousseau, Mr Smith, Mr Woo, Mr Deveroux and half a dozen other guys in here already we were able to get book club up and running again within a matter of weeks.

  Of course, we had to disguise it from the authorities as they came down hard on any sort of collusion but we’d been well versed at hiding it from The Agency so this didn’t prove too problematic. Besides, there’d been a few reading collectives before we arrived so all it took was a little structuring and a mutual acceptance of the rules to put the basic infrastructure in place.

  We didn’t have access to computers, of course, so we logged our scores on the next best thing – the prison grapevine. This was a living computer in its own right and with consensus and accord and we were able to hold a record of everything we’d read and even update the scores as we went along. It’s quite a testament to the human mind if you think about it, but at any given moment in time, any one of some eighty prisoners could’ve told you how Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow was getting on.

  Not too well as it turned out.

  “It’s just backwards, I don’t see the point,” Mr Deveraux said, as we walked around in closely monitored circles under the falling snows of early winter.

  “That’s exactly the point,” I replied. “It’s a whole life backwards, from death all the way through to birth.”

  “Yeah I know that, I read it – in one evening I might add – but it just seemed like an exercise in seeing if he could write a book backwards. Big deal, he did it. Woo fucking hoo!”

  “You don’t think it was clever?”

  “No because I could see the end coming from page one, that he was going to disappear up his mum’s chuff and then up his dad’s d
ick at the end of the book.”

  I stopped to look out across the white plains, flat and as crisp as a new tablecloth under low hanging grey skies. Mr Deveraux stopped with me while I stooped to pick up a handful of fresh snow.

  “I don’t think it was meant to be a whodunit, Mr Deveraux. I think the message behind the book was that there’s no set truth; everything takes on a different interpretation when you look at it from a different perspective.” I opened my hand again to let a few dribbles of melted water drop to the ground.

  “How profound!” he mugged.

  “Well, you don’t have to like everything on the list, just give it a shitty score if you didn’t rate it.”

  “I did, I gave it a five.”

  “A five?”

  “Oh sorry, I mean a one. Catching isn’t it, this backwards business?”

  “Hilarious. So that brings it down to…” I did a quick bit of mental arithmetic as we kicked our boots and got moving again. “Two point one? I’ll double-check that with a pen and paper later but I think that’s right.”

  “No, it’s less than that now. Mr Hughes read it and he gave it a one, an’ all,” Mr Deveraux told me.

  “When did he read it?”

  “Last night, in the cell right after me. I told you, it only took me an evening to get through. It’s really short.”

  “So all right then, hang on, that’s now twelve scores logged; four ones, five twos, two threes and a four (mine),” I recalled, jotting them all up on my frozen fingers.

  “It comes to exactly two,” Mr Deveraux told me. “The average I mean. It’s good when that happens, when we get an exact score like that, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly makes all this reading worth while,” I agreed.

  Of course, the real reason book club flourished in McCarthy was because it brought with it a sense of freedom to men who knew none. Our books were like windows out onto the world. Of course they had been before we’d started book club, when they’d been read individually, but when you read books as a group, the worlds and stories that are held within their pages come to life even more because they become part of a collective consciousness. The experiences become richer and that window out onto the world opens just a little wider.

  And in prison, the difference between hope and hopelessness is more often than not barely the width of a page.

  So this was how we passed the time. We read. We shared our thoughts on what we read. And book by book we gradually rated the prison’s somewhat limited library.

  It’s vital to have some sort of endeavour to throw yourself into because the enormity of a ninety-nine year sentence is almost enough to crush you. Naturally it’s easier for Affiliates to bear because we’ve been sentenced to life before but it’s still a challenge to make it out of bed most mornings. The secret of survival is forgetting your former life, that’s gone, you can’t get it back, and mourning for it will do nothing but put knots in your bed sheets before the year’s out.

  It’s hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s meant to be hard. But when you sign on as an Affiliate, you’re aware of the risks and prepared for the consequences. If not, then you’ve no business signing on as an Affiliate.

  But the authorities didn’t want us going off our chumps either, as that would do no one any favours, least of all them, so they did what they could to prevent the spread of despair. We liked reading? So they provided us with a few extra books. In addition, all the Affiliates that shared association hours were at similar stages of their sentences. Meaning, the first four hours of the day were given to Affiliates who’d served less that ten years. Once you got into the afternoons, the Affiliates who were let out then had been here for anything up to twenty years. And then, in the evenings, when the last lights were fading and the shadows stretched long across the prairie, the old timers were given their hour of daylight. Most prisoners didn’t make it to see their thirtieth year in truth but according to the grapevine there were one or two in here that came out at night, that had long white beards and no idea Kennedy was dead.

  Or even, that his son had become President.

  This was our fate. This was what we were all heading for. Nothing could stop that and nobody could reprieve us, so why unsettle us by showing us our futures in the faces of our elders?

  “Escape?”

  “Well that’s the real reason, isn’t it?” Mr Smith said.

  “What?”

  “If anyone knows how to get out of here or at least where the cracks are, it’ll be the old timers so they’re not gonna let them anywhere near us, are they? Not with our fresh legs and unsullied spirits. Not that it would make much difference.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well…”

  Blinding spotlights suddenly cranked on all around us and loud hailers ordered to freeze.

  Commotion and angry yelling followed as Delta specialists poured in through the wire from all sides and ordered us onto our faces at gunpoint. Boots pressed into the backs of mine and Mr Smith’s necks as plastic draw-straps were tightened around our wrists, then we were yanked to our feet and run across the exercise ground to the main prisoner elevators as our colleagues behind were subjected to ID and bar code scanning.

  “Prisoners 2248 and 2251, you were recorded having a restricted conversation therefore you are both sentenced to a month in the hole with loss of privileges,” Watch Commander Crockett told us. “Effective immediate. Take them down.”

  The Deltas bundled us in the elevators and we dropped like stones back into the underground facility, bi-passing our own level and carrying on straight down to the punishment block. When the doors opened two more Deltas took over from our escorts and we were run in different directions towards opposite ends of the wing. Before I was out of earshot I just managed to shout one last thing over my shoulder to Mr Smith.

  “Well what?”

  “Well…” Mr Smith shouted back, “this!”

  29.

  TIME’S DRIFTWOOD OF FORTUNE

  The odd trip to the cell block asides my first three years in McCarthy were pretty uneventful – as you’d expect. I didn’t get gang-raped. I didn’t challenge Mr Big for supremacy. I didn’t make it over the wall or even try. And I didn’t earn the wrath of Lieutenant-General Major despite continually referring to him as Lieutenant-Major General whenever I knew the long range microphones were on me. I just survived. This was the minimum, maximum and only requirement at McCarthy.

  I don’t know why I chose to survive. There didn’t seem much point. Some of the guys I’d come in with, Mr Deveraux for instance, opted for early release and went out in a wooden overcoat, but I didn’t. Not because I was scared or still hankered after a life outside the perimeter wire but because I was in no rush to go anywhere just yet. That’s the best way I can think to describe where my head was. Death would eventually find me. And when it did it would last for a million billion trillion years, until the end of time in fact, if such an event even occurred, so what difference did my measly lifespan make? I wasn’t suffering, I wasn’t living in fear and I wasn’t in pain. I didn’t need my misery to end (it would’ve been nice but it wasn’t a deal breaker) and I didn’t need to get back to any loved ones so I was perfectly resigned to my confined circumstances.

  I think it also helped that I’d died under that avalanche in Greenland, or at least, thought I had, because as hopeless and as bleak as my situation now was it was still preferable to that. Being alive counted for something. Not much, but it counted for something all the same. And as long as I could feel the wind on my face for an hour a day, see the clouds in the sky or hold a thought in my head, it always would.

  “Prisoner 2248. On your feet.”

  I swung my legs over the bunk and dropped to the floor, leaving Elizabeth Graver spread open on the bunk behind me – not literally, but I had been in prison a few years so I wouldn’t have said no (maybe).

  Mr Rousseau started getting to his feet as well but they told him, “Stand fast 2212 and stay on your bunk,�
�� flicking my trouble antenna in ways that got me grumbling.

  “Against the wall,” I was ordered, so I did as I was told and listened to sounds of my belongings being tossed, before being slapped into cuffs. Steel cuffs at that. Not plastic draw-straps.

  Something was definitely up.

  “Turn around!”

  I turned to find Major-General Lieutenant, or whatever the fuck his name was, standing tall and regarding me with deep mistrust.

  “2248?” he asked.

  “That’s my number, don’t wear it out,” I replied, figuring we could both stand a little levity right about now.

  “Otherwise known as Mr Jones? Mr Mark Paul Jones, formerly of Petworth, West Sussex, Enger-lund?”

  “What’s all this about? I haven’t done anything,” I said, before amending that statement. “Well nothing I haven’t already been sentenced to ninety-nine years for.”

  “Read a lot of books do you Mr Jones?” the General hinted, his eyes flickering towards Ms Graver on the bed then back to me.

  “That’s right,” I told him. “I’ve gone right off snow-boarding just lately.”

  Despite the giggles I was genuinely worried for myself. Like I said, the authorities in here came down hard on any sort of organising activities, even over something as innocent as reading. They liked to deal with four hundred individually broken spirits, not a single working resolve. That was dangerous. That was a challenge. That was absolutely positively not tolerated. It had taken them three years to find me but it seemed they’d finally located the mouldy old apple that was daring to corrupt the rest of their carefully harvested barrel. It didn’t matter that our book club hadn’t caused them any problems since its inception – all that mattered was it could.