Hell and Gone

by Duane Swierczynski

  “Yeah. Real excited.”

  The voice in his ear was real, but it still felt strange, like he was talking to himself.

  “I detect a note of sarcasm in your voice, Mr. Hardie. It’s too soon in your tenure to be jaded, don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t ask to be here. Do you have a name besides Prisonmaster? Who do you work for?”

  “We all have the same employer. As for my identity…well, you know by now that’s not how we work.”

  “Yet you know my name.”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  There was a moment of awkward silence.

  Be the bigger guy, Hardie told himself. Draw him out. Learn something about this place.

  Instead, Hardie blurted:

  “I don’t understand what the fuck you want me to do down here.”

  There was a pause on the line. Hardie thought he heard the sharp intake of breath, as if he’d offended the sensibilities of the man on the other line. He closed his eyes, tried to channel his former partner, Nate Parish. Nate was great at this stuff. He could draw a man’s deepest, darkest secrets out of him during a street-corner conversation. Hardie was never good at that. Hardie usually just hung in the background and watched, in case things got out of hand. With Nate, though, they never did.

  “Mr. Hardie, we want you to do what you do best. Guard things. Wasn’t that your previous job? Guarding the homes of the rich?”

  “This isn’t exactly a house.”

  “No, it is not. Your task is much more important than protecting the material goods of the overprivileged. You are, in effect, protecting many homes, all across the country. Because the individuals incarcerated in this facility are those worst kind of predators. They destroy without guilt. They need to be contained. And your job is to contain them.”

  “Don’t know if you’ve been down here lately, but things are a little out of hand.”

  “Which is why you’re there,” the Prisonmaster said. “We want you to bring some moral rectitude to the facility. In the time without a warden, it’s lapsed a bit. This facility can be great again. It’s why you were chosen for the job.”

  “Like I have a choice? I mean, I didn’t ask for this.”

  The Prisonmaster sighed, almost inaudibly. “Your personal circumstances really don’t matter. You were selected for this job. As I understand it, you owe a considerable debt to our employers. But that’s no affair of mine. I’m just here to help you run the best facility possible.”

  “Right. While you’re enjoying the sun up top somewhere.”

  The Prisonmaster said nothing.

  By now, Hardie thought, his dead partner Nate Parish would have deduced a hundred things from the conversation so far—if this guy went to college or not. If so, the specific college. And beyond that, which dorm complex he stayed in freshman year, and even beyond that he would probably be able to narrow that shit down to a handful of rooms. Hardie? All he knew about the Prisonmaster was that he was up there, and Hardie was stuck down here.

  “Well, do you have any requests?” the Prisonmaster asked.

  Hardie fought back the urge to request that the Prisonmaster insert his head into his own ass. But then remembered that he did have a few things to ask.

  “Yeah. The food. Everyone’s tired of the breakfast foods.”

  “Ah. This may take a while. The food service department is slow to change, but I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”

  Hardie racked his brain. There was something else…

  “The heat. We need more heat down here. It’s freezing.”

  “I will see”—there was a pause, as if to imply that the Prisonmaster was eagerly taking notes—“what I can do. Is there anything else, Mr. Hardie?”

  “Yeah. Tell me what this is all about. Why I’m down here. Why you’re keeping people in cages in this secret prison. And most importantly, who the hell you people are.”

  The Prisonmaster exhaled so forcefully it seemed like he was blowing right into Hardie’s ear.

  “You may feel slightly discouraged, but remember this—the facility is what you make it. Everything in your file indicates that you bring unorthodox solutions to difficult situations. I believe you can bring great change to the institution.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And those people—by the way, they’re not people, Mr. Hardie, let’s make that clear from the beginning, they’re monsters, and they are being kept in cages to make the world a safer place. You were chosen because you possess a certain skill set. You’re down there to help make the world a safe place.”

  Right, Hardie thought. But who’s keeping the world safe from you bastards?

  INTERLUDE WITH A PARANOID FEDERAL AGENT (RETIRED)

  DEKE CLARK HAD a knife in hand and raw chicken on the counter when he saw something moving in the bushes out back.

  He did a double take, wondering if it was just an optical illusion in the early summer twilight. A shadow falling in an unexpected way. A crosswind. Or maybe that third beer goofing around with his mind, making him see things that weren’t really out there, in the backyard, where his teenaged girls were tossing a baseball around, waiting for their father to get dinner going already.

  It was nothing, Deke told himself. Had to be nothing. But a little voice inside Deke’s head—the same voice that had been nagging at him for a long time now—told him maybe it could be something. After all, Deke had done something very naughty today.

  He’d made a phone call.

  Deke put the knife down and walked to the window, holding his hands in the air. He should wash them. But he needed to look first just to make sure. Deke squinted, trying to block out the sun and zero in on those bushes.

  “DAAAAAAD,” his youngest cried. “I’m STARRRVING.”

  “It’s coming, baby,” Deke said, still peering into the spaces between the branches and leaves, looking for movement, the gleam of metal, anything.

  “Come on, DAAAAD,” his elder daughter yelled, joining her sister in the faux anguish.

  Nothing…

  Of course, if you were an assassin hiding in the bushes out behind a suburban home, you’d go perfectly still, too, knowing that your target was now sticking his stupid head in the perfect frame of a kitchen window. Deke imagined a blast of cold black—his brains splattered on the raw chicken behind him—and the look on his kids’ faces as their father’s already dead body dropped to the floor, out of view. Then the assassin expertly turning his gun on them, no matter how fast or where they ran…

  Because he made a phone call.

  Why did he make that damned call?

  Deke stepped away from the window, nudged the kitchen tap with his wrists, stuck his hands under the hot water.

  For the longest time he’d played everything cool. Served his time and had done what they wanted. He didn’t mention Hardie or the Hunters ever again. Not even to Ellie. He’d put the brakes on several investigations connected to activities in Eastern Europe. He’d received no resistance from Sarkissian, so it wasn’t difficult. If Deke or his boss wasn’t leading the charge into something, nothing got done. Their office was too scattered, the case load too great. Eventually Deke couldn’t take it anymore and he pulled the plug. Said he wanted to teach, spend more time with his family. Sarkissian didn’t say a word. He was probably thinking the same thing.

  Still, the image of Hardie ate away at him. Deke had only seen it once—they felt no need to show it to him again—but once was enough. The pain on that man’s face. Goddamn it. You couldn’t see what kind of torture they were putting him through and that somehow made it worse. Deke tried to console himself with the thought that Hardie was dead; they wouldn’t keep him alive. They’d kept him alive just long enough to show his image to Deke so Deke would eagerly slip that dog collar around his own neck. He cursed his own cowardice.

  What else could he do, though?

  Play the tough guy and wait until they grabbed one of his kids and…

  Deke couldn’t even thin
k about it.

  As time passed, though, he had this troubling gut feeling that Hardie was alive. Kept in some hellhole like a POW, brought out for beatings every so often. Meanwhile Deke drank his Yards Pale Ale and cut up chicken breast for the grill, watching his kids play in his backyard…

  Finally Deke decided to do something about it.

  He was careful. God, was he careful. Deke, a longtime FBI agent, knew how the bad guys could communicate in secret. He duplicated those techniques—laundering his own money, using disposable cell phones and dead drops, none of it (he prayed to God) traceable in any way back to himself.

  What Deke did with that money was hire a professional investigator. Not just anyone—the best of the best. Someone he’d never met but had heard great things about. Whose track record spoke for itself. The contact was brief; the investigator seemed to understand Deke’s situation perfectly, which was a little unnerving. “The next time you hear from me, I’ll have found your man.” Which Deke would have considered bluster, if not for the investigator’s 98 percent success rate. (Confirmable, too, after a peek at FBI case files.)

  But all this time later…and no word from the investigator.

  Which was why Deke made that phone call this morning, just to check on progress, and had spent the rest of the day with a growing sense of unease, half convincing himself that trained killers were hiding in his backyard, ready to punish him for the transgression. Deke hadn’t even made contact with the investigator; just the answering service. Which made him worry even more that…

  Oh, God.

  He definitely saw something now, in the bushes. An arm. Had to be. What else could it be? Deke almost screamed the names of his girls before forcing his mouth shut. Don’t be an idiot and tip him off. Instead Deke took the knife and ran out the back door, putting himself between his children and the bushes and screaming at them to go inside the house, NOW, don’t ask questions, just GO GO GO and stabbing at the bushes with the knife and…

  Whatever had been there—if anything had been there—was gone.

  Back inside, Deke told the girls that he thought he saw a rabid dog out in the bushes and there wasn’t time to explain. His elder girl rolled her eyes, thinking her dad was kidding, but then she saw his ashen face and decided not to press it. Deke also announced that the chicken had spoiled, they won’t be grilling tonight, they should put some shoes on and pile into the car pronto and go out for something to eat.

  Deke drove Ellie and the kids to their favorite pizza parlor, a few minutes away, his mind a jumble of contradictory emotions. Relief that nothing had happened. Regret at making that phone call. Cowardice for feeling that regret.

  The entire drive, Deke couldn’t keep his eyes off the rearview and side-view mirrors.

  16

  These walls are funny. First you hate ’em, then you get used to ’em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.

  —Morgan Freeman, The Shawshank Redemption

  OVER THE NEXT dozen shifts Hardie waited, learning the patterns. There were four shifts to cover the twenty-four-hour day. Not that they truly measured days—they had timers strapped to their wrists, not watches. Six hours a shift, one guard per shift, with another serving as backup. Each “day,” the prisoners removed their masks and were photographed with a handheld plastic digital camera. The guards took those cameras to the uploading room, and the images were sent to somebody in the outside world. A proof of life. Meant for whom? Who knows.

  Hardie himself was on Prisoner Zero detail, checking pee tubes and IV lines twice a day and listening to the creepy son of a bitch grunt and wheeze and laugh to himself. Or to no one in particular.

  Guh-huh. Huh-huh. Huh-huh-huhhhhhhhhhhh.

  No one asked for Zero’s proof of life. Which was a relief. Hardie wasn’t in any great rush to see what was under that mask.

  Otherwise, prisoners were confined to their cells for twenty-three and a half hours a day. Some form of disgusting breakfast food, barely heated in a battered, rusty toaster oven, was served during two of the three shifts that were considered “day.”

  Hardie again thought about those food deliveries. If there was a way in for food and medical supplies, there had to be a way out, no matter what Victor said. And what about trash? Trash had to go somewhere.

  “Whatever isn’t used, we burn,” Victor said. “But we tend to reuse whatever we can.”

  “Doing your part for the environment.”

  “All these questions,” Victor said, a curious smile on his face. “You do realize this is a prison, Warden? Maximum security and all that? Do you think the designers of this place would leave anything to chance, and let some prisoner shimmy up a vent or something? Do you think the designers of this place haven’t seen Star Wars?”

  And Victor was the friendliest guard, in his own passive-​aggressive way. The other three eyed him with suspicion. Worry. Hostility. Uncertainty. Maybe they knew what he was up to. Maybe they could sense he wasn’t taking this seriously. They’d be right, of course.

  Hardie needed to gain their trust somehow, put them at ease. He couldn’t escape if his own staff was keeping a closer eye on him than the actual prisoners.

  God help him…

  He needed to hold a staff meeting.

  After the fourteenth (fifteenth?) shift, Hardie asked Victor to gather everyone in the break room.

  “Why? What’s going on?” Victor asked.

  “Just get everyone together.”

  “No sneak preview, Warden?”

  Hardie shook his head no. Victor actually seemed hurt, then shuffled off to gather the other three guards.

  “For those of you who don’t speak English,” Hardie said, “my apologies. Maybe someone can translate for you.”

  Everyone just…stared, as if they had all lost the ability to speak or understand English.

  Christ, Hardie hated this shit. Because you know what? He was used to being the one in the back of the room, giving the ice-cold stare. He was never the leader of anything. Not for more than a decade, anyway, and back then it was different. Nate Parish had often goaded him, asking him why he didn’t go legit, join the force, wear the badge and all that. One good word from me, Nate said, and you’d be in. But Hardie demurred. He wasn’t a team kind of guy. He preferred to be freelance. A consultant. Whatever you want to call it. He’d often tell Nate: “Problem is, there’s no ‘fuck off’ in ‘team.’” And Nate would just shake his head and smile in that sly, knowing way of his.

  Somewhere up in heaven, Nate’s sides were probably killing him from laughing so hard. Look at Charlie Hardie, trying to lead a meeting.

  So, Nate, what would you do?

  Give ’em something. Something little. A peace offering. Let ’em know you’re working for them behind the scenes.

  “I finally spoke with the Prisonmaster.”

  Some eyes perked up a little.

  “And he’s working on the heat.”

  Yankee sighed. “Yeah, he always says that. And then it takes weeks, or more, to change it. You can push him a little harder, you know. You’re the new guy. You’ve got a grace period. He’s just testing you, see how far you’ll go.”

  Hardie ignored him. “Food’s changing, too.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Victor asked. “When will that little miracle happen, exactly?”

  Hardie felt a little sucker-punched there. Victor was turning on him now?

  “He’s working on it,” Hardie said.

  “Same old shit,” Yankee muttered.

  So much for giving ’em something, Nate. Maybe he should just get to the point.

  “I want to talk about the breakout from a few days ago. What you people did to Horsehead. I don’t know what’s gone on in the past. And I really don’t give a shit. But that’s not going to happen anymore. Not without my authority. You understand me?”

  No one spoke at first. The four of them seemed to be waiting him out, the same way you wait for some crazy crackhead with a gun to run out of bullets b
efore you calmly step out from the shadows and put him down with two to the chest.

  Yankee coughed and raised his hand briefly. “Warden.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Respectfully, how do you suggest we control the prisoners? When they escape, do we pat their hand, tell them that’s okay, everything will be all right?”

  “No,” Hardie said. “But you don’t beat the living shit out of them, then nearly electrocute them to death.”

  “The batons are designed to be nonlethal,” Yankee said quietly. “It’s impossible to kill someone with them.”

  “Bullshit. I saw what you guys did. And like I said, I don’t care how it was around here before, I don’t care what the previous wardens did, I want it to stop.”

  “So,” Yankee said, drawing the word out until it almost purred. “The next escape attempt we’re supposed to just hang back until you tell us what to do? That will be interesting. What if you’re asleep? Or taking a shit? You expect us to just wait until you’re done?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  The moment the words left Hardie’s mouth he realized it was a tactical error. Because what he said was stupid. See, Nate, this is why you can’t put me in front of a room. I’m not a leader. I’m not a policy maker. I’m a doer. You know that better than anybody.

  “Bool-sheet,” X-Ray said. The German guard may not have been able to speak English, but he could understand enough of it.

  “No, that’s actually brilliant,” Victor said. “While we wait, maybe the loose prisoner can help free his friends. And then they can come after us and kill us all, and the Prisonmaster can send down another group of guards with yet another lame-ass warden for them to torment.”

  “Enough!” said Yankee. “We’re ignoring the real problem here, and that’s the obvious plant among the staff. Horsehead didn’t just walk through solid bars. He had help.”

  “Uh-huh,” Whiskey said.

  “Listen to me: those cells cannot be opened from the inside. It’s impossible. I’ve checked them. They can only be opened by a guard. So you’re telling me these cell doors just pop open all by themselves? Presto, bingo? Like magic?