Cold Frame

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Well, whoopee-goddamn-do,” Av said. “Given that threat, from now on you can just call me Mister Miranda.”

  “You refusing to cooperate with us, Sergeant?” Tyree asked.

  “Hell, no, Mister Miller. I’m just gonna remain silent, like that man over there suggested just a few minutes ago.”

  Tyree said nothing. Then he directed one of the agents to get him a detention order. He then spun his chair to face the windows and closed his eyes.

  “Don’t be a dumbass,” said one of the other agents while they waited. “If you won’t help us, he’s going to put you into a federal prison where you can’t hurt us. Think about it, Sergeant: who knows where you went tonight? Your loving wife? Your kids? Your parents? Your tenants? Your boss? Those clowns you call your partners?”

  Av stared straight ahead. It was full dark outside now. He could see the line of federal buildings out along Pennsylvania Avenue, their granite and marble façades illuminated by spotlights. Somehow the lights made them look bigger, more formidable, like bastions of overwhelming federal power, and these days, too many of them had shooters on the roof, twenty-four seven.

  The other agent came back into the office with a form. “Petersburg?” he asked Tyree, who turned his chair back around and nodded.

  The agent sat down at the conference table and began to fill out the form. When he was done, he passed it over to Tyree Miller, who read it and signed it.

  “You sure, Detective Sergeant?” Tyree asked. “Really, really sure you want to dummy up? For the last time, what were you and Ellen Whiting meeting about?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” Av said quietly. “She does work here, doesn’t she?”

  “Call the marshals,” Tyree said. “One for Petersburg.”

  FIFTEEN

  It took three hours to get down to the federal prison complex at Petersburg, Virginia. Av was taken to something called Annex Fourteen, which appeared to be a low-security installation within the outer perimeter of the higher security complex. It was almost midnight by the time he was processed in. The guards who did the in-processing didn’t look to Av like the typical corrections officers he was used to seeing. These guys appeared to be fit, young, with buzz-cut haircuts and a military air about them. They were surprisingly polite, always referring to Av as Sergeant Smith. They had him fill out some forms, undergo a more detailed body search, swap his clothes for an orange jumpsuit that actually fit, see a medical technician to answer questions about any medications he was taking or any other medical issues they might need to know about.

  Then they escorted him to an office where he was turned over to an older but still military-looking guard, who greeted him politely and told him where to sit. He introduced himself as Master Sergeant Lawson and offered Av a cup of coffee. Av accepted, somewhat confused by the admissions process. He noticed the man had a globe and anchor tattoo on his upper right arm with the motto Semper Fi underneath, just like the one Av had.

  “This is not a jail,” the master sergeant said. “This is a holding facility. I don’t know why the Bureau wants you held and I don’t need to know. But I do need to fill you in on how things work here.”

  “I’m a homicide detective assigned to the Interagency Liaison Bureau of the Metro PD in Washington,” Av said. “And I don’t know why the Bureau wants me held, either. So I guess we’re even. And, yeah, I’d appreciate any gouge.”

  The master sergeant smiled at the term “gouge.” “Saw your ball and crow. Where’d you serve?”

  “PacFleet,” Av said. “Nothing exciting. Missed Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  “Good timing,” the master sergeant said. “You familiar with the story of Uncle Remus?” he asked.

  Av laughed. “Lemme guess: as in, tarbaby?”

  “As in tarbaby,” the master sergeant said, nodding. “You have managed to grab, and with both hands apparently, the federal counterterrorism tarbaby known as person of interest. That’s what your form says, anyway.”

  “That form signed by a guy named Tyree Miller, in the Bureau’s Professional Standards Division?”

  The master sergeant glanced down at the form. “No,” he said. “The form signed by Assistant Director William Edrington, who runs the counterterrorism division of the Effa-B-Eye. Assistant director—that’s pretty high up. Wait—yeah, Miller signed before Edrington. So who’s Tyree Miller?”

  Av blinked. He didn’t know what to say. The sergeant saw his confused expression.

  “Look, it’s late. One of the guards will take you to your room. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. But first, I need to tell you what the important rules are, what you can do, what you cannot do, where you can go, all that good shit.”

  “Room?” Av asked.

  “Yeah, room. This is the Petersburg Federal Correctional ‘campus.’ Don’t you love that—campus? Anyway, there’s everything here from a Camp Fed for white-collar crooks like Bernie Madoff, to a supermax annex for some Hannibal the Cannibal wannabes. After nine-eleven, the government, in its federal wisdom, foresaw the need for a facility where they could detain people who were not yet convicted of any crime, but who were simply ‘of interest’ to some federal LE outfit, somewhere. Like you.”

  “Without a whole lot of regard for the Constitution, either.”

  “Ah, the Constitution. Not much in vogue these days, is it. Anyway, they had one of the motel chains come down here and build one of their motels right here on the ‘campus.’ Your room is a typical nonsmoking motel room. No sexually deprived roommates, a private bath, television, small refrigerator, windows, curtains, air-conditioning, and heat—the standard-issue cheap motel room. There’s a dining room, which is open from 0630 to 1930 daily. It’s catered by one of those geezer-heaven cafeterias downtown. You can go to meals or not as you please. They only ask that you tell them in the morning whether or not you’re coming for lunch and dinner. There’s no reveille. You can sleep in every day except Saturday, which is field day. You remember field day, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Field day here means everyone’s up at 0730 and ready to clean their rooms. Otherwise, there’s a library room, a weight room, even a small indoor lap pool. You can use what you want, when you want. If you’re a smoker, there’s a smoking area out behind the building. You a runner?”

  “I’m not sure,” Av said.

  The master sergeant laughed. “Yeah, I guess that can be taken two ways. No, I mean a regular runner, because if you are, you can run with the guard force. They go out every day except Sundays at 0630, rain or shine. Otherwise, like I said, your day is your own. You have to be in your room by 1930 every evening, but you will not be locked in. All exterior doors except mine open to an electrified fence, so, really, there’s nowhere to go, thus no need for you to be locked in.

  “Now,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “There’s one hard-and-fast rule, and it’s kinda the price of all this easy living while you’re in federal custody: you may not speak to any of the other detainees. You can speak to the guards all you want, and they may or may not reply. You can speak to the service staff. But. You. May. Not. Speak. To. Any. Detainee. Is that clear?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “No, no, I need to know that I’ve made myself clear. Because if you do speak to any other detainee, your living accommodations will change in a heartbeat and not for the better. Trust me on that, okay? Think of yourself as a Benedictine. You will observe the Rule of Silence, and that includes signing, wall-tapping after hours, eyelid-blinking, note-passing—you name it, we know about it. You will be under audio and video surveillance at all times in this facility, even in your own room, even in the head—there are no women here, so that’s not a problem. It’s kinda like the Garden of Eden, Sergeant: God only gave ’em one rule: don’t touch the fucking apple tree. Look what happened. So: do not communicate with any other detainee. Not good morning, good night, or go to hell. Nothing, got it?”

  “Got it,” Av said. “How about calls o
r visitors?”

  “No calls out; no calls in,” the master sergeant said. “No Internet access, either. The only visitors you can expect will be LE.”

  “How long will I be here?”

  “Beats me, Sergeant Smith. Your detention order says indefinite. The record is three years and two months, but that was an unusual case, I’m told. Some detainees are retrieved and taken somewhere else for questioning. They either come back or they don’t. Some have gone overseas, for reasons I don’t want to know about. The population right now is forty-two. You’ll make forty-three. Okay—that’s enough for tonight. We’ll see you at breakfast.”

  Once in his assigned room Av took a quick tour and then a shower. There was a laundry basket on the bed with clean towels, military-issue underwear, socks, and a second jumpsuit. He’d been wearing sneakers when they picked him up. At the initial in-briefing, he’d been fitted with a pair of desert boots and given a military-style baseball cap. His name had been stenciled on all the linens and both his jumpsuits. They were efficient, he thought.

  Or, he realized, they’d known he was coming. How was that possible?

  WTF.

  He began to wonder if Tyree Miller had been right: Was he being used? And, if so, for what? And the overarching question of the day: by whom?

  His marine training took over. When in doubt, get some sleep. He decided to turn in.

  SIXTEEN

  Ellen Whiting was nothing if not timely. Thomas brought her to the library the next morning at five minutes after nine. Hiram greeted her pleasantly, looking much better than he had the night before. He was wearing wool trousers and a tweed jacket over a plain white shirt, a burgundy ascot, and sporting a small white flower in his lapel. After a quick coffee, he took her out to the gardens. The day was cool and bright, and many of the plants were showing signs that their season was ending. She was wearing a businesslike pantsuit and low-heeled shoes. The air was filled with the scent of vegetation and some of the plants were still bravely trying to bloom. She realized she couldn’t identify a single one of them.

  Hiram explained that the gardens were laid out concentrically, with the house at the center of all of them.

  “It’s a bit like what they do at Disney World,” he said. “The tourists walk all over the place, unaware that most of the engineering is beneath their feet, like some kind of iceberg. Down there are miles of tunnels big enough for electric golf cars, pumping stations, utility lines, filtration systems, and feeding matrices beneath all the gardens.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said. “But I do remember that all the gardens there were perfect.”

  “Right,” he said. “These don’t look perfect, of course, except behind the house, because these are technically weed gardens. They don’t know they’re weeds, of course, but we do, and between here and the lab is where we do our most interesting business.”

  “Why weeds?” she asked.

  “As I said before, they’re the ultimate survivors in the plant kingdom. You’re walking in the realm of pure Darwinism out here, Special Agent.”

  “You said ‘we’?”

  “I have a gardening staff of twenty-five people, which Thomas oversees for the most part. My research involves three lines of effort: the first is to see what the plants do on their own, the second is to steer their development out here in the gardens through chemistry, basically, and the third is the mutation program, which is restricted to my lab.”

  “And this is all about toxins and poisons?”

  “Not directly,” he said. “More like proteins, carbohydrates, sugars, pollen, and some substances which rather defy classification. Lots of biochemistry, but then anything living is all about chemistry, isn’t it.”

  “I was a liberal arts major,” she said. “Bio-anything is over my head, I’m afraid. But if these are all weeds, they’re the biggest weeds I’ve ever seen.”

  “Tall, perhaps, but then we have the ability to present perfect growing conditions if we choose to. You can make roses grow out through snow if you control the environment underground. The rings out closer to the walls have the really big plants, most of which are mutations. I don’t let them out of the lab until I’ve done two things: sterilize them so they can’t reproduce, and establish a continuous sampling system to each plant so I know what they’re up to, chemically speaking.”

  He went on to explain about the Phaedo Botanical Society, and how they collaborated from time to time, primarily to find ways to channel some of their more interesting discoveries into the worlds of medicine and environmental science. “In our view,” he said, “plants are the answer to some of the world’s biggest problems, such as clean energy, food production, of course, and pure water. For example, take a Himalayan tree called Moringa oleifera. One seed from that tree can purify a liter of muddy water. It’s a weed, really, which is just another word for a wild plant.”

  “What’s your ultimate fascination with weeds?” she asked.

  “I think that plants have brains,” he said. “Not like ours of course, but in the sense that some aggregation of their cells acts like brains. At least that’s my theory, and I think weeds are probably the best example of that.”

  “I can see that,” she said. “Our brains could be called just an aggregation of specialized cells, I suppose.”

  “Each of us in our little botanical society has a pet theory like that,” he said. “We collaborate on projects when two or more of those pet theories intersect.”

  “Would curare be an example of how plants can help us?”

  “Yes, it would. A potent poison in some applications, and yet it’s used in tiny amounts to supplement general anesthesia. It’s a profound muscle relaxant whose effects can be easily reversed. The technical name is tubocurarine chloride, which is isolated from the bark and stems of a South American vine, Chondodendron tomentosum, and is the purified form used in medicine. In toxic concentrations, the way the Indians there make it, it brings on respiratory paralysis in wild game, or anything else hit by a curare-tipped arrow.”

  “Yikes,” she said. “Would that grow here, say, in northern Virginia?”

  He shrugged. “In an appropriate environment, say inside an environmentally capable greenhouse? Yes. But at the risk of sounding smug, what I’m working with these days has gone a long way beyond curare. Let’s go see some of the other gardens.”

  They spent the next two hours walking through the various plantings, which ranged from what looked like totally natural patches of fairly ugly vegetation to manicured rose gardens lining the large, stepped reflecting pool that led down toward the Potomac River. Then he took her down to the basement laboratory, which looked like every other lab she’d been in. After a brief tour of the lab, they took an elevator up to the back side of the mansion’s roof, where a narrow greenhouse extended the full length of the house. From the driveway this had looked like the ridgeline of the roof.

  Toward the end, she noticed that he was moving slower, and suggested they go back into the house. He gratefully accepted her suggestion and they took the elevator back to the ground floor. When the elevator door opened, Thomas was standing there, as if he’d been about to set out on a rescue mission. Hiram excused himself for a few minutes, asking Thomas to take her to the sunroom for lunch. As they walked back through the house, she asked Thomas if Mister Walker needed a lot of medications.

  “Do you know what Marfan syndrome does?” he asked in reply. “Besides the elongated body and the face-in-a-vise look?”

  “Mister Walker mentioned something about the aorta?”

  “Got it in one,” Thomas said. “Main blood supply right down the middle of the body. If that lets go he’ll go down like a felled tree. They’ve got better drugs now, and he has a cardiologist and a vascular surgeon who come once a month. We have a medical treatment room here in the mansion with whatever machines they need. But basically, he must pace himself and I must pay careful attention to medications. Here we are, miss. You sit there, if you will, please
, and he’ll be right along.”

  The sunroom was like an ornate greenhouse at one end of the expansive, column-lined porch along the back of the mansion. Everything was white—the circular table, the wrought-iron chairs, even the framework supporting the eight ornate panels of glass which arched up to a point some sixteen feet above the table. The table was set for two, and the chair she’d been shown to was, to her great relief, normal-sized. The one across from hers was throne-sized, just like the one she’d seen in the library.

  She took in the view, the beautiful avenue of trees and flowers laid out alongside the reflecting pool, which descended through a series of small waterfalls almost a thousand feet to the tall trees that lined the riverbank. There was a patch of golf-green-quality grass on the exterior side of the gardens, and then a dense forest beyond that. She wondered if that huge brick wall went all the way around the estate.

  “Special Agent,” Hiram’s voice boomed from behind her. She blinked as he slipped past her to his side of the table. Her head had been level with just above his knees, he was that tall.

  “This is really beautiful,” she said as he sat down, carefully, she noted.

  “That is the blessing of the plant world,” he said. “Nurture them, and they produce beauty to the eye and solace for the soul. They produce the air we breathe and the food we eat.”

  As if on cue, Thomas came through with lunch, two salad plates with more ingredients than Ellen could count. He returned with a bottle of white burgundy, poured out, and then left them alone. Outside, the noonday sky was displaying that special hazy blue that signaled the end of summer.

  “To your good health,” Hiram toasted, and she lifted her glass. The wine was wonderful. She glanced at the label, which listed Montrachet, among other things.