by Jeff Abbott
“You’ve been here four years. Has Kent ever sent a spy before?”
He worked his hands nervously. “Maybe he has and I don’t know.”
“I’m not a spy, but I am going to get you out of here and back to Cordelia. Would you like that?”
His face contorted. It was as though hope was trying to break free, after being buried in his heart for too long. “Leave me alone.” He staggered away from me. I let him go. It was too much at once for him.
One of the guards, an older man, came over to me. “Nanny wants to see you.”
As we walked I could feel the weight of his gaze on me. “You look familiar,” he said after a moment. “You sure you’re not a repeat offender?” His accent sounded Italian. I started to realize that the guards, the staff, weren’t local to where we were. Maybe they were loaned out by whichever dark corners took part in filling this prison.
“No. I have one of those faces you think you’ve seen before.” I glanced at the Italian, studying his features, seeing if the reverse was true. He didn’t look familiar to me.
He walked me to the office and Nanny was locking her file cabinets. They didn’t use a key but rather an electronic combination. An information farm. The secrets she must hold, from these organizations, the information she drew out…it was clearly worth a lot to whomever she worked for, pulling out tidbits of knowledge. Money kept people loyal, and so it would be hard to break that loyalty. I would have to find the weakest link among the guards.
Maybe it was this Italian who thought I looked familiar. He was young, a bit thick-looking. Maybe not the smartest guy in the room. He’d bothered to speak to me, for no good reason, when none of the other guards had. It was a breach of protocol. You have to look for the little mistakes. A dumb guard was my inroad to Nanny on a more regular basis.
Nanny gestured me to a chair. “Do you miss Miami?”
“Yes. I’ll be missed when I’m not there. Am I on the news in Miami?”
“Hardly. We have cleanup crews to make sure our guests’…absence…from everyday life is explained. No one really seems to be missing you. Your address—your neighbors don’t seem to know you.”
“I’m not neighborly.”
“Have you thought some more about telling me who you really are?” she said.
“I told you my name, which I don’t use anymore.” I pointed at my written-on face. “Now I’m number 47.”
“Mengele might get a second chance at you.” She took off her glasses, and the smile she offered was so empty, so fake. I kept thinking she would have shone at any place of intense human suffering. She liked it here. I thought it would be a shame if I didn’t kill her before I escaped. But getting out was all that mattered. This might be a way. “You have strong hands,” she continued, “and I have space on my necklace.”
I said nothing.
“So,” she said, “why not cooperate?”
“I have, Nanny. My name is who I am.” And I played my first card against her, the one designed to rattle her. “Let’s say my name is a fake. Who do you think sent me? If I worked for the police—any police organization—they’d simply pair up with the locals and raid this place.”
“Not if they don’t know about it,” she said. “You’ve vanished.”
“I found a lot in Miami,” I said. “I had a long conversation with Zhanna Pozharskaya. She told me quite a bit before she died.”
One simple lie is all you need sometimes. Nanny’s mouth worked.
“Sort of poetic justice. She forced her mother to take poison…and then someone might have forced her. I admit nothing. But she talked first.”
She stood in anger. “Stop these games. Who sent you after the Varelas?” She slapped her hand on the desk, on my file.
“I am frankly more afraid of them than you,” I said.
For a moment she was so angry I thought her English was going to desert her. The thumb bones rattled as she leaned forward. “You are not in their power. You are in mine.”
“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” I said. “And I want to tell you, but I can’t. Not yet.”
“Yet? What are you waiting for? Mengele will get you talking.”
I lowered my gaze.
“Take him back to his cell,” Nanny ordered the guard. “No food. No water. Tell Mengele to sharpen his scalpels.” She looked at me. “I give you tonight to reconsider, and I give Mengele tonight to decide what he does to you. Tomorrow, the scalpel. Think about it.”
The Italian guard pulled me to my feet and hustled me back to my cell.
“That wasn’t smart,” he said. Some people just can’t help themselves; they have to be conversationalists. “You should just give her what she asks for. It’s always easier.”
“I can’t. I have to find out what I came here to learn.” I knew he’d run straight back to Nanny and repeat this. “She cannot imagine the war she’s brought on herself with this.” This was the only way to play it, I thought.
An hour later I was marched back to her office.
Nanny shook her head at me. Marching me back before the appointed time was an admission I’d gotten under her skin, and she hated me for it. “Have you reconsidered your situation?”
“I was thinking about it until you brought me here.”
“Cordelia Varela has talked. Her family…persuaded her.”
A cold beat of my heart.
“She was told you would be tortured and killed if she did not talk, so she did. She said you own a bar in Coconut Grove. The bar has been closed for a few days. There is a woman in Miami who has been coming by the bar every day and checks on it and then she goes to a coffee shop and reads her book, and then her home.”
I scratched the number on my face.
“We know her name is Paige. She was fired from the library system because she used a computer there for hacking. Now, that sounds like someone a clever boy like you might know.”
I said nothing.
“Is this Paige your friend, 47? I think if she comes back around your bar one more time she will need a distraction from worrying about you.” And she touched the bone necklace again. “I adore imported jewelry.”
I said nothing.
“Now. This bar, it is the place where the Colombians who work for us killed a man who was asking questions.”
“Yes,” I said, “he was my entrée to Cori Varela.”
“I don’t understand. Are you here because of your friend or because you were sent here by someone?”
If the answer was Steve, then I was worthless to them, just an interfering jerk avenging his friend, and a bullet in my head was the obvious solution. So I had to be more. “I was sent here. I was sent first to Miami to make friends with a Varela. I did so through Steve Robles’s connection to Cordelia Varela.”
“By whom?”
“I can’t tell you yet. Soon. But not yet.”
Rage trembled her mouth. “I can have both your thumbs.”
“You hire all the guards, all the support staff, right?” I said. She blinked at the sudden change in subject. “So if someone wanted to check on you…on your work…they’d send a prisoner.”
Her eyes blazed. “Are you saying you were sent here to spy on me?”
“I’m not saying anything more.”
“Take him back to his cell,” she said to the guard. “Tomorrow afternoon, Mengele gets to play with you. I urge you to change your mind.”
That night I listened and chartered the rhythms of the night. We were in our rooms by nine. The lights all went out at ten. I went to the doors and I listened. I could hear the guards making their rounds. It was a small prison—a walk-through each hour. At seven the doors unlocked, as if at once, and we stepped out. The Hungarian was four cells down from me. Edwin was not on our hallway. That was going to be a problem.
I didn’t sleep well; I wondered if Nanny did. I thought not.
58
THE NEXT MORNING I heard the door to my cell unlock. I opened my door and stood in the doorway until the
guard gestured to the guests. I followed the thin throng to the commons. I didn’t look up at the four skulls watching over our breakfast. I got a tray of food and I sat alone at a table. I saw Edwin get his tray of oatmeal and an apple and he hesitated. He didn’t go to his regular spot with the Hungarian and the older men.
“You understand there is no way out,” he said, by way of greeting, as he sat across from me.
“Hasn’t anyone ever tried?”
“Yes. Two before I got here. Two more, about a year after I got here. You see the daily reminder up on the wall.”
I glanced at the skulls.
“They brought them back,” Edwin said.
“And?”
“They made us watch. Nanny cut off their thumbs, with a hatchet. And then the guards put ropes around their necks and hung them in the exercise yard, by the basketball court. I guess whoever sent them here decided they didn’t want to keep them here, given the attempt.”
“And that broke everyone.”
“Most of them were kind of broken already if you ask me. The two guys who ran, they were ex-soldiers. Most of us have no training in fighting.”
“No chance of a rebellion? There are more of us than them.”
“Most wouldn’t try.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “They think they’ll get to go home at some point if they cooperate.” Amazing, the human capacity for self-delusion and misplaced hope, I thought.
“Home has a strong pull.”
Edwin went silent, jabbing his oatmeal with his spoon as a guard wandered by us.
“What?” I asked.
“Did my father send me here?”
“I don’t think so. Everyone seems to believe you’re dead. Cori misses you terribly. Kent must know. Would Zhanna have cared?”
“Zhanna is—was—a monster. She and Kent both.” Edwin put down his spoon. “My father knows he’s involved with this prison and I go missing and he doesn’t ask if I’m here? That makes no sense.”
“I know. Maybe they assured Rey you weren’t. He seems to believe you were kidnapped strictly for ransom. He paid it twice. Ten million total.”
Edwin breathed the words “ten million” back to me. “But…who would he have paid that to? He works for whoever runs this prison. Why would they have extorted money from him, why?…” His mutilated hand moved to his mutilated ear. “You mean maybe just to convince him normal kidnappers took me?”
“It’s possible,” I said. “This place. Who do you think runs it?”
“You mean, other than Nanny?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s a very weird mix of guests.”
“Ties with terrorism and crime,” I said. “Who would dare to own a prison like this?” I considered my own question. “The guards. One is Italian, at least one is Spanish, two speak Portuguese with Brazilian accents.”
“In the past we’ve had Russians. Brits. American guards,” he whispered.
“Why import guards? Maybe they’re not hired. Maybe they’re sent here. On a duty rotation.”
Edwin bit his lip in thought.
“She collects information. If this is a private business, she sells it. But I don’t think she sells it. I think she gives it.” I looked hard at Edwin. “Your father moved a lot of weapons. He broke the law a lot, but the US government, and some other governments, protected him. Because, sometimes, war is in their interests. And they gave him legitimate work, a lot of it.”
“You think the government runs this place? Like another Guantánamo?” He shifted in his seat. “When I found the security holes at FastFlex, Kent said it was secret government work we were doing…since we’d shipped so much equipment and cargo to Iraq and Afghanistan, I believed him. And then he shot me—with a tranquilizer dart. Who expects Kent to shoot them?”
“I encountered that same problem,” I said.
“But I can hardly see Kent as a government agent. He’s always worked for us…”
“There are skulls up on the walls, Edwin. This isn’t a normal government prison. Think of who your dad’s clients were, back when he was starting out. I think maybe this is a back dark corner of a government,” I said. “After all, your father worked for anyone who would pay him. Back corners of governments and warlords and smugglers. Maybe the dark corners all got together. Pooled resources. Built this to be shared.” I stared at him. “Your father said something to me about the CIA and south Florida. All the money the agency poured into the area, funding companies that could be used in operations against Castro. I had a bunch of guys who wanted to sound like Russians grab me and take me to a restaurant off Calle Ocho. One Ricky went to.”
“His grandfather owns a restaurant there,” Edwin said. “He’s owned it for years.”
“They grabbed me and one spoke Russian to me, but with a bad accent,” I said. “Who does that? Who pretends to be Russian in Miami?”
Edwin shrugged.
“Who has a non-native Russian speaker at hand? The CIA. Maybe the FBI.” I knew that well enough. “But why bother? Why try to trick me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because this…isn’t run by a Russian gang. But they wanted me to think it. There’s a reason.”
Edwin fell silent.
“Surely the prisoners here have theories,” I said.
“Everyone just thinks their enemy has paid to keep them here. And it doesn’t matter if their enemy is a politician or official or gangster.” Steel came back into his gaze. Maybe for the first time in a long while, having to talk about Kent and his father and Ricky and what had been done to him. “So. How do we get out?”
“You’ve been here four years, I was hoping you would know.” I ate some of my own oatmeal. “Nanny’s patience with me is wearing thin. Is there a way out?”
“Supposedly this was a prison built by the Brazilian government, deep in the Amazon,” he said. “The drug rings started killing whoever was in charge of finishing it as an act of defiance. So the government stopped building it, and a private investor bought it.”
Brazil. It was oddly reassuring to know at least which country I was in.
“How do you know?”
“One of the guards told me.”
“The baby-faced one with the Italian accent?”
“Yes. He likes to talk. He’s easily bored.”
“He’s our key.”
Edwin shook his head. “You can’t bribe your way out. You can’t burrow out. You can’t climb your way out. Or swim your way out, we’re in the middle of a jungle.”
Swim. Water’s the key to life, in more ways than one. An idea hovered at the edge of my mind. But I didn’t want to share my thoughts with him on how to get out quite yet.
“I saw when I tried to get out that one side is solid jungle. What’s the other side?”
“It’s all solid jungle. But we have to get out first. And there’s no way to get blueprints of this place,” he added.
“They have to exist. Probably in Nanny’s office. They would need it for repair work. You have to know where wiring, junctures, plumbing are to fix them.”
“Getting into her office is about as easy as breaking out of here.”
“Let me think,” I said. “Let me think.” I only had a couple of hours before Nanny put me under Mengele’s scalpel.
And then I saw the answer.
59
I DID THE math.
Forty-seven prisoners, minus the four heads on the wall.
Nine guards among the prisoners. Double and round up to ten more outside on the perimeter. I’d counted a kitchen staff of four to prepare the simple meals we ate. Mengele. Nanny.
Sixty-eight souls, assuming Nanny had a soul. I remained unconvinced.
And sixty-eight souls needed water. A lot of it.
Where did the water come from and where did it go?
No one watched you. I mean, there were cameras, and the doors were locked. But we were free to wander. I went to the library. I browsed. I figured as the newest guest I would
be watched. But the guards did not seem that interested in me.
Edwin followed me to the library and sat alone at a table while I walked among the shelves. I got the sense reading was his lifeline. He was reading his Shakespeare again. I had to agree that here Shakespeare might be a comfort, a way of knowing there was still beauty and thoughtfulness in the world.
“I have a way out,” I said, very quietly.
He stared at me as though I were crazy.
“Will the Hungarian help us? Can we trust him?”
Edwin nodded, surprised that I sounded so confident. “He’s tough and he’ll fight. Those are his only virtues.”
“What about yours?”
“I don’t get rattled and I was a Boy Scout.”
“We could end up mounted on the cafeteria wall,” I said.
“They’ll probably put my four-fingered hand above my skull,” he said, and I decided right then that I was going to save Edwin Varela. Not just for Cori. But because I couldn’t help but like and respect him. And I wanted him to have his life back.
“Tell him I have a way out.”
Edwin laughed for the first time I’d seen. “He won’t believe you.”
“Convince him. But we have to go, now, Edwin. I think your sister is in extreme danger from these people. Stay close to the cafeteria. Be ready to run.”
“How can you…”
“I’m CIA, Edwin.” I forgot to mention former. But I needed to have him believe in me. “And I am going to get you out of here.”
He gave me a look of disbelief. “In the prison escape movies, they plan for weeks.”
“We don’t have weeks. We have now.”
60
I FOUND THE biggest, heaviest book in the library. It was a history of England. I picked it up and I told Edwin to get me a pencil from the desk. I stood at the end of a row of books. I’d studied the surveillance cameras earlier, and this was my best guess for a blind spot in the camera coverage. Pencils weren’t allowed, apparently, but there was a felt-tipped pen. Edwin handed me the pen and I told him to get a book and sit and read at his usual spot.
I turned to the middle of the book and I began to underline random letters. Edwin watched, confused. I marked the pages for a couple of minutes and then I gestured him over.