Beyond the buildings, the wall looms.
The exit comes up. The car pulls off at the ramp, the road sinks, and the Program disappears from view.
They stop at the first security barrier. Guards ask Whitman to state his business, peer at Johanssen in the back, consult a clipboard, and then wave them through. They park next to the big green block and get out.
Inside the building’s glass doors, two guards man a metal detector. As the doors slide open, they turn and stare.
Whitman says to the others, “I’ll take him from here.”
Johanssen breathes in, filling his lungs. Adrenaline kicks in his bloodstream: suddenly everything’s brighter and harder and clearer. This is it.
“Can you tell me the purpose of your visit, Mr. Jackson?” asks the clerk behind the armored-glass screen, without irony. He’s middle-aged and overweight, with a bland soft face like uncooked dough. The plastic badge on his lapel says RESIDENTS’ RECEPTION. He talks with an exaggerated slowness, as if he’s used to dealing with idiots or people whose English is weak, and he has a habit of overstressing the last word in his sentences.
On the desk in front of him sits Johanssen’s application to enter the Program.
Johanssen says, “I want to see what it’s like,” and Whitman snorts.
The man pauses, perplexed. The form obviously doesn’t have a category for people like Ryan Jackson. Eventually he murmurs to himself, “Checking inmate conditions.”
He makes a tiny mark on the form, in pen. The room they’re in is windowless and smells of nylon carpets.
It’s taken an hour to get to this point. An hour of sitting, or standing—in rooms like this one, or in corridors—while memos are consulted and calls made. Throughout it all Whitman’s maintained a weary ironic patience: he’s come here to do his job, and sooner or later they’ll let him. If he has worries about Karla’s paperwork, they don’t show. He’s given Johanssen the occasional order—“In here,” “Sit down”—but rarely looks at him. Johanssen is now Jackson, and Jackson is scum.
At last the clerk is finished. He pushes the form back under the screen for Johanssen to sign: three signatures, all in the name of Ryan Jackson. When Johanssen passes it back, the dough-faced man says, “You are advised to deposit all valuables before you enter the Program.” He smirks to himself. “Things have a tendency to go astray.” Then he says to Whitman, “What about induction? There’s usually a video presentation—”
Whitman says, “I think we can skip that. He’ll pick it up as he goes along.”
Another room. Hand- and fingerprints and a retinal scan. Photographs, face on and profile, against a height marker. A blood sample and a scrape of DNA from the inside of his cheek.
Whitman and the dough-faced man have followed Johanssen in. Whitman says softly, “You load this to your system?” and the dough-faced man says, “Not unless he’s confirmed as a permanent resident.” Whitman just nods, gravely.
Then Johanssen’s handed a lidless metal box and told to turn out his pockets; except there’s nothing in them.
A third room: tiled, with a sink and an examination table. Inside, three men in guards’ uniforms with batons on their belts are waiting, one of them snapping surgical gloves over his hands.
Gloves steps up to him. “So you’re off to the zoo,” he says conversationally. “Open your mouth.” The man peers inside, probes with a finger: the glove squeaks against enamel. Johanssen stares at the man’s right ear. The man grunts. “Close.”
After that he’s told to strip. The guards observe while Johanssen undresses and places his clothes in a plastic crate, which one of them takes outside.
Gloves says, “So where you in from, then?”
“Victorville.” Johanssen keeps his head down, avoiding eye contact. “It’s in America,” he says.
“Huh,” the man says, as if he’s heard that one before. Then, “Strip search. Turn around, you know the drill.”
Once the strip search is finished the two guards go out, leaving Johanssen shivering under the blank gaze of a security camera.
At last they bring the crate back, order him to dress, and escort him to a kiosk, where Whitman is already waiting. A bored girl with flat brown hair sits behind another screen. Above her head is a sign: NO UNAUTHORIZED WEAPONS OR DRUGS BEYOND THIS POINT.
On his side of the screen there’s a handprint reader and a retinal scanner.
Without looking at him the girl says, “Place your hand on the panel and look into the screen.”
When she’s satisfied, she issues him with an entry pass: a credit-card-sized oblong of green plastic with an embedded chip and a copy of his digital photo.
“Currency?” she asks.
Johanssen glances sideways at Whitman. Whitman asks, “How much can he take?”
“One hundred,” she says.
“Then give him a hundred.”
The girl stares at her monitor, punches a couple of keys, and a flood of little plastic disks, red and blue and yellow, rattle down a chute into a metal tray in front of him. He scoops them out: they’re like counters from a kids’ game.
Last of all she takes a printed map that shows the perimeter wall and the tracery of streets, and with a fat blue marker puts a cross against a building. Next to it she writes Grisham 24 in rounded, childish writing. She pushes it through to him, along with a pair of keys on a ring.
He’s still staring at the map when Whitman says, “You got what you wanted. You go in there, you think about it, then we’ll talk. Two days.” He nods, turns, and walks away, without another look.
Johanssen’s taken outside.
Across a stretch of tarmac the Program’s perimeter wall rears up: forty feet high, topped with wire. Dead ahead is a metal gate; above the gate, in sheeny black lettering against a white board, are the words RESIDENTS’ ENTRY POINT WEST.
To one side of the gate is a sentry booth: a guard is watching electronic screens. As Johanssen draws close, he glimpses images: the wall, the exterior of the sentry booth, an empty corridor.
Johanssen’s escort halts him in front of the gate. “Name?”
“Ryan Jackson.”
The man in the booth consults a clipboard.
The same bored instruction: “Place your hand on the panel and look into the screen.”
He does as he’s told.
Outside the sentry booth a green light comes on and the guard says, “Clear.”
The metal gate slides open. Johanssen steps through it.
He is in a whitewashed corridor of cement-block walls, concrete floor, lit high up by caged wall lights. Above his head two cameras peer down at him. Gas nozzles stud the ceiling. Only two meters ahead of him the corridor turns at a right angle.
Behind him the gate slides shut, and bolts clunk home.
He follows the corridor. Turns left, right, left again. No sounds but the sounds of his own footsteps, his own breath.
He turns another corner, and a second metal door comes into sight. Same cameras above. Same gas jets. He waits.
Nothing.
Ten seconds pass. Fifteen, and he’s counting now. Still nothing.
Then a metallic click, and the door slides open.
A big, empty room. A couple of CCTV cameras, no furniture. He’s alone. A sign in six languages says WAIT HERE. On the other side of the room is a door marked EXIT.
When he tries the handle it opens.
He steps outside, blinking.
A forty-meter no-man’s-land of cleared ground. Then the buildings start and, beside them, a command post with a tower bristling with aerials, like something out of Troubles-era South Armagh. Left and right, the inner perimeter wall curves away, the wire on its upper edge winking in the pale winter light.
No guards, that he can see.
He checks his watch. Ten thirty-nine.
Then he crosses the no-man’s-land and walks toward the command post and the buildings. He’s barely halfway across when he knows he’s been marked.
&nbs
p; A glance and it could be a street in any rundown London suburb. It could be, if you can forget what you’ve just come from: the strip search, the wall, the razed ground, the command post.
Houses line the road—kicked-about houses, with junk and refuse in the front gardens, but inhabited. Then he walks on, and the houses morph into a row of shops ending in a small seventies shopping center. Some of the shops are boarded up, but some look like they’re doing business, though what they’re selling he’s not sure. There are things he’ll need to get, but they can wait. On the other side of the road, there’s a pub, only it can’t be a pub now. The sound of hammering comes from inside. Outside, three men stand in a tight group, talking without looking at one another, eyes on the street. In charge. Johanssen switches his gaze away. Already he’s read the rule book for this place. Don’t attract attention. Don’t look weak. Don’t get in anyone’s space. Don’t meet their eyes.
He keeps walking.
A middle-aged black guy shuffles past in slippers like an eighty-year-old. A younger woman with a pale face and dark Slavic eyes pauses to light a cigarette. A tired-looking white man clutches a plastic bag … Ordinary faces, from an ordinary town on a tough day: you wouldn’t mark them as special—
Another man standing in a doorway, watching the passersby with a predatory alertness—his gaze settles on Johanssen, and it’s like a current moving through him; instinctively he tenses until the man’s attention moves on.
There are no cars, no buses, no kids.
And still he’s being followed. No surprise there. Walk into a place like this, alone, out of the blue, and someone will want to know why.
At a corner he comes across a sign of hopeful private enterprise, two stalls set up under plastic sheeting. One sells old clothing, the other small electricals: a radio crackles out tinny music. A young Asian walks past carrying a length of electrical cord and a bag of potatoes—head up, moving quickly, with business to attend to. A patrol in a snatch Land Rover trundles by.
He reaches a crossroads. Another command post on the junction, bigger this time, with a high razor-wired wall around a yard. Another snatch is pulled up outside. Up ahead are aging council-built residential blocks, three-story, with mean tight windows, their façades punctured by stairwells behind wired glass, but he turns right and south, homing in on that blue cross on the map.
A block beyond the junction he reaches it. The sign outside calls it the Grisham Hotel. A few trees have been planted out front but most of them are dead, broken trunks spiking out of the earth at intervals. The main structure has been built on so many times that it’s been lost in a jumble of add-on boxes. A first-floor window’s patched with tape, another has torn sheets for blinds.
The front door’s open. Inside a middle-aged woman’s chain-smoking listlessly on the other side of a small barred hatch knocked through the wall. Johanssen shows her the map and the keys, but when he starts to explain, she cuts across him—“Stairs”—and points.
The staircase walls are utility green, darkened by patches of damp. Signs on the second floor direct him along a corridor grayly lit by low-voltage lights. Room 24 has a single bed and a chair. There are stains on the pillow, greasy smells rising from the bedding. He crosses to the window, tries the catch—it opens. That’s something. Two and a half meters below, the roof of a ground-floor annex juts out from the side of the building. An exit, if he needs it. Though the chances are whoever’s watching will have thought of that.
Through another door there’s a tiny, squalid bathroom: shower, dirty toilet, cracked sink. The bolt on the door is cheap and pathetic: one swift kick is all you’d need.
He sits on the bed. Somewhere close by: music, and a low moaning from another room.
He waits fifteen minutes, but nothing happens. At last he goes back down the stairs, past the woman and out into the street again. And there’s the tail, slotting into place.
He walks north, back to the central command post, then right and east, past the council blocks, checking off the landmarks against the map in his head. A light-industrial unit with a sign outside that says SKILLS DEVELOPMENT CENTER, a handful of men loitering by its doors and three more kicking a ball idly around an empty car park—
Program residents are offered a choice between participation in employment schemes, vocational training, and study.
More shops, and a side road with a pair of snatches parked at the junction; on Karla’s map the housing beyond it was marked WOMEN’S AREA. He doesn’t try that way, instead turning north to skirt the edge of the council flats again, then leaving them behind. A mosque is doing brisk business, but up the road a small chapel has been boarded up. Beyond the chapel, queues stretch down the street, dozens of people shuffling forward in a line that ends at the door to a square white building: the central admin block. A command post overlooks the street, and another snatch is parked nearby. When a scuffle breaks out, its crew watches but doesn’t intervene. Other men—residents, civilians, prisoners, take your pick—step forward and separate the fighters.
Beyond that the buildings end: he’s back to the waste ground and the wall again. This time he turns left, following its curve. There are more high-level cameras on posts along its length, and one of them swivels to track his progress. He keeps his head down.
He’s still being followed.
After ten minutes he reaches a railed area of muddy grass with two benches bolted onto concrete rafts. Beyond the grass, a big modern windowless building juts out from the wall. He goes in.
Inside it’s one enormous room, like a warehouse, with seating for a few hundred and a barracks smell, cabbage and sweat and disinfectant. The canteen. Above the heads of the diners, on a big screen, a girl singer in a scrap of dress mouths words at the camera. Her lips are soft and glossy, her skin’s coffee colored, taut, perfect. At the tables and in the queues men watch, heads up, jaws slack, the food cooling in their mouths. There are only a handful of women in the room.
Johanssen joins the back of a queue. Following the next man’s lead, he picks up a plastic bowl and a plastic spoon and shuffles forward in the line until he comes to a bank of nozzles. He slides the bowl under a nozzle: a gray-brown stew with the consistency of vomit discharges automatically into the bowl.
He finds an empty table. Both the chairs and the table are bolted to the floor. The food is lukewarm and tastes mainly of salt.
In Johanssen’s head the woman in the gray suit smiles her armored smile.
She’s out there somewhere. But she’s a different woman—the fitted suit, the closed-off look, all that’s history. Since that picture was taken, things will have happened to her that have changed her forever … He thinks of her: thinner, ragged, older—hardened by this place or broken by it.
Then for the first time since he entered the Program, he thinks about the job.
There is a process to these things. You locate your target. You follow them or you have them followed. You learn their habits. You survey their environment and you find the one place where you can do the job cleanly, then you do it and you leave.
There is a process and it assumes you aren’t yourself constantly watched, constantly followed. It assumes you can find a way to disappear—among shoppers or commuters or casual workers loitering on a corner. It assumes you can pass for a street drinker or an addict or a workman or a man in a reflective vest emptying waste bins. But someone invisible.
How long before he becomes invisible in this place? A month? Two? Six?
He has three weeks.
Someone says, “All right, mate?” in a high, breathless voice, and he looks up into a narrow face framed by stringy hair. A man is standing by his table, holding a tray. He gives a scared placatory smile—“All right if I sit here?” His eyes are darting everywhere. Inside his shirt, his pulse must be racing like a snared rabbit’s.
Johanssen doesn’t move.
“All right then,” the man says brightly, and he sits, and straightaway bows his head over his food and starts to
eat. His fingernails are bitten down to the quick.
After a minute the man glances up. Another nervous smile. “So where you from then?”
This is not the man who followed him. A good tail needs nerve, and he hasn’t got it. But he knows Johanssen’s just arrived. Whoever sent him in here told him so.
Refuse to answer? No point.
“Victorville,” Johanssen says. “Penitentiary. California.”
The man’s face twitches into a desperate grin. “California, eh? You don’t sound—”
“No, I don’t, do I.”
“So why you here?” the man asks.
Who wants to know? But he’ll find out soon enough.
“Transferring,” Johanssen says. “Maybe.”
“Nicer here, eh?” the man says.
“Yeah.”
“So what you doing today?” the man asks.
Johanssen says, “Taking a look around,” and the man brightens.
“Yeah,” he says, “like sightseeing.”
It takes him all of two minutes to gulp down the rest of his food and then he rises with another fleeting, frightened smile and leaves, sliding his tray onto a rack and heading for the door. Going to make his report.
The next man is waiting outside, on one of the benches, watching the canteen’s door: a man with fair hair and the delicate face of a damaged angel. When he sees Johanssen he smiles, dazzlingly—deep and warm and genuine—and gets to his feet, angling his head. Then he turns toward a gap between two buildings. He glances back once over his shoulder, to check Johanssen’s following, and he smiles again, encouragingly.
Johanssen hesitates.
He has a choice now: follow, or wait. Or even run, though running only does you any good if you have somewhere to run to.
Johanssen follows, because whatever comes next is probably going to happen anyway.
Two in the afternoon now, and already the January light’s beginning to fade. The gap between the buildings is in shadow.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 6