Outside, the tropical sun beat down on the facility. On the far side of the stone wall, beyond the mangroves, the waves crashed against the shore and broke. The cries of sea birds rang across the sky. It was a beautiful, beautiful day.
Chapter Seven: The Sound of Horns and Motors
Wednesday, March 17–Monday, March 22, 1999
Forrest James sat on the cot in his cell at the USDB. Breakfast was in an hour, and then would come his first work detail of the day in the woodshop. An order for sixty-seven plaques had come in from Altus Air Force Base in Oklahoma, needed in a month for some ceremony. It was going to be Lacquer City in the woodshop for the next few weeks. The thought made him gag; he could smell that thick brown syrup just by thinking about it. Woodworking was fine. He liked the precision, the care, the chance to make something with his hands. But treating the wood with rosins and varnishes sucked rocks. It was messy work and invariably he’d get drops on his uniform, which meant laundry time. The guards kept a close eye on the prisoners’ appearance, and their clothes had to be crisp and clean. He might be in prison, but he was still in the military. Some things never changed.
James shook his head. It wasn’t the work that was pissing him off. It was Stephanie. It was the fact that she believed she was going off to die. It was the fact that he was stuck in here, on the fifth floor of the fourth wing of the Castle. It was the fact that he couldn’t do a damn thing to help her.
Even that wasn’t the whole truth. There was something he could do—maybe. He just didn’t like it very much. Since she’d visited him the night before last he’d been thinking. Thinking about a phone call he could make. About a man in New York City who just might be able to give him a Get Out Of Jail Free card.
The problem was, he’d want something in return.
“Fuck it,” James said to himself, and thought: What the hell else am I good for? He stood up and took three steps to the bars.
“Hey Anderson!” he called out.
Corrections Specialist Donna Anderson snapped her head to the left from where she was standing guard down the hall. “What is it?”
“Got a minute?”
She looked at him for a moment. Ex-Captain Forrest James, USN, had been a model prisoner. There were fewer than fifty ex-officers incarcerated in the entire Castle, and while their rank didn’t entitle them to anything special, the staff nonetheless appreciated it when they set a good example for the rest of the inmates. James had done just that. Finally she turned and walked smartly down the row until she stood before his cell.
“Well?”
“I’d really like to make a phone call.”
Anderson raised her eyebrows. “This got anything to do with that blond that was here the other day?” she asked with a faintly amused tone. Word of James’ visitor had spread among the staff and the population alike; it was the first one he’d ever had, and it was the considered opinion of the male guards and inmates alike that she was a doozy. Within twenty-four hours, you’d have thought that most of the population and a third of the staff was in the visiting room when she was there, given the eloquence—or at least, the enthusiasm—of their descriptions.
“Come on, Anderson.”
“You can do it on your own time, after breakfast.”
“It’s important. Please. When have I ever asked you for anything?”
Anderson thought for a moment before replying. “All right.” She turned towards her partner, watching from the end of the row. “Lewis! Prisoner to the phone.”
They led him down to the ground floor and into an open area frequented by prisoners during free time; at the moment, it was empty. There was a low murmur from the tiers of cells around and above them, as cons got up to greet yet another day behind bars. A bank of phones were arrayed on one wall. Lewis and Anderson stood patiently a few feet away.
James picked up a handset and dialed. He also entered his identification number. All calls from the prison had to be collect, and were placed by a prison operator to prevent inmates from lying about who they were. There were a series of clicks as the call went through Delta Green’s secure routers.
“Adam,” a voice finally said.
“This is the Fort Leavenworth prison operator. Will you accept a collect call from Forrest James?”
A pause. Then, “Yes.”
“Thank you.” Another click as the inmate phone’s receiver was enabled and the operator dropped off the line.
“What the hell do you want?” Adam barked.
“The tropical trio. They back yet?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The hell you don’t. Are they back yet?”
Another pause. “No. They’re not coming back.”
“Explain.”
“Their hosts called this morning to say they’re having a wonderful time together.”
“Thanks,” James said angrily, and hung up the phone.
Anderson stepped forward. “You done?”
He looked over his shoulder at her and dialed zero. “Not yet. Give me a minute, please.”
She stepped back and exchanged a look with her partner, who shrugged.
“Prison operator.”
“Please connect me with directory assistance,” James asked.
“Hold please.”
A recorded voice came on the line. “AT&T directory assistance. What city, please?”
“New York.”
“What state?”
“New York.”
“What listing?”
“Club Apocalypse.”
“Please hold for the number.”
James waited. He really didn’t want to make this call, but he didn’t feel that he had a choice.
“Hello, Captain,” a cultured voice said.
He jumped a little. “Hello?”
“I thought I’d cut out the middleman. Or rather, I thought I’d substitute one. Jelly has a message for you.”
The line clicked off and there was a dial tone.
James lowered the phone and stared at it. How the hell did that happen? he thought, and swallowed nervously. How’d he do that?
“All done?” Anderson asked behind him.
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “All done.” He set the phone down and turned around slowly, his face carefully blank.
The guards led him back to the cell. When they closed and locked the door, it actually made him feel a little better.
George Rhodes was a big man, three hundred pounds if he was an ounce. He’d come to Fort Leavenworth buff as all get out six years ago, a Marine sergeant who’d raped a woman in Italy and got fifteen years. Two years ago, another inmate stuck a shiv in his brain. George survived, but he wasn’t really George anymore. He lumbered where once he strode, and the muscle turned to flab. He sat in his cell as often as he could, staring at the wall. They’d ruled that he was still competent and didn’t need special care, which was true, but if he served out his sentence he would be one of the scant 10% of USDB inmates who returned to society worse off than they’d left it. When he came here, people called him Steel and gave him respect. Now they called him Jelly, when they noticed him at all. Rick DuBois, the inmate who’d shivved him, got twelve more years and was bucked back up to the sixth floor, shackled in maximum security like any other new fish; but he walked tall, bragging that he was the man that broke the Steel.
Forrest James didn’t know either one of them, except by sight and reputation. The tale of the day the Steel broke was a popular one around the Castle. James had heard it three times in the first six months he was here.
He didn’t share a work detail with Jelly, but he found him shuffling around the yard that afternoon. James looked around to make sure no one was giving him the eye and then ambled over to walk alongside the big man.
“Hey,” he said cautiously. “Hey man.”
Jelly kept walking. James had to move slow to match his pace.
“Rhodes, hey. What’s up, bro?”
More walking. Ja
mes stole a glance and noticed a few inmates watching them.
“Rhodes?”
“Hello again, Captain,” the cultured voice said. Jelly’s lips were moving, but it wasn’t his voice coming out.
James stopped for a second, shocked, and then caught up again.
“Hello?” he said tentatively.
“I’m pleased you called. It’s a shame we’ve never met before.”
It was chilly in the yard, but that wasn’t why James shivered.
“Yeah, well, I don’t get out to the Big Apple much.”
“That’s all right. I get around.”
“No shit.”
The voice chuckled. “They record the calls here sometimes. I thought this might be better for our little tête-a-tête.”
“Whatever floats your boat.”
“I take it you’re looking for a vacation? A week of blue sky and sunshine, wasn’t that it?”
You’ve gotta be shitting me, James thought. The voice was quoting his conversation with Stephanie from the other night.
“I’d be delighted to help. But my resources are limited. I can arrange for you to have your freedom, but you’ll have to get outside the Castle first.”
“If I could do that, I wouldn’t need you, would I?”
“Oh, I’m not suggesting you make some sort of foolhardy escape. There’s an inmate by the name of Dennis Bounds. A serial killer. Tiresome fellow. Murdered some little black girls down in Georgia, at Fort Benning. There’s three bodies still missing, one of whom the authorities don’t even know about. He’s also got a partner out there who’s still killing. John Law knows he exists, but they don’t know who he is. If you could fill in this lacunae for them, they’d be most grateful. You could be taken out of the Castle for a deposition and so on, if you ask the right people. That’s when I could give you a hand.”
“So I ask Bounds and he just spills it, right?”
“Well, you’ll need to persuade him. It shouldn’t be difficult. He’s tough in court, but he’s really the weak sister of the pair. The taxpayers provided you with a lot of skills, Captain. Use them.”
“This is bullshit,” James said.
“Huh?” said Jelly, in a slow, deep voice.
“Hello?”
“What you want, man?”
“Never mind, Jelly,” James said, as he turned and strode off across the yard.
He’d heard of Sergeant Dennis Bounds. Bounds showed up at the Castle a month after he had. The guy was a pasty little dude with bad skin, but he had a way of twitching that was unnerving. He’d been an instructor at Fort Benning’s School of the Americas before Benning’s Criminal Investigation Command caught him in his home on base with the young daughter of a black MP, sawing the hands off the corpse. Within a few weeks of his arrival at Fort Leavenworth he’d hooked up with the prison’s chapter of the Aryan Brotherhood, a loose-knit confederation of white supremacists that had spread from prison to prison and throughout the armed forces from the 1970s onward. The Castle held about twenty such people, many from a purge of the Brotherhood the military had undertaken in the last few years. They generally kept a very low profile, but they hung tight and occasionally got in scraps with black inmates. Bounds fit right in. Rick DuBois was with them, too, though it was more in spirit these days since he was still under maximum-security restrictions.
Bounds’ alliance with the Aryans made leaning on him a little difficult. Although James hoped to be out of here not long after he got Bounds to spill the beans, there was no guarantee, and the Aryans would want payback. If he was going to make a move on Bounds, he’d need help.
The day after his chat with Jelly, James took a trip to the weight room. Cons pumped iron, sweating and straining and trying to beat their last marks. To one side, the Muslims were hard at it. There were almost fifty Muslims among the Castle’s black population, righteous men who followed Allah and didn’t take shit from anybody. They tended to keep to themselves, but they weren’t spiteful; they just wanted to steer clear of the faithless.
One of the Muslims in the weight room that day was Ex-Major Frank Holmes, a reformed alcoholic who’d killed his wife ten years ago during the last in a long string of booze-fueled slapfests in their little house at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. James knew him from anger-management classes. Frank was doing eighty years at the Castle, which meant he’d die here. In class, he’d come across as genuinely reformed, a man who accepted responsibility for the way he’d lived his life and was now committed to a higher path. They hadn’t really spoken outside of class before, but if there was anyone in the Muslims James felt he might could turn to, it was him. He strolled over as Frank toweled off his massive chest and watched some of his pumped-up brothers going through their routines.
“Major,” James said respectfully, nodding his head as he stepped up.
Frank looked at him, stone-faced. “The Army doesn’t call me that anymore, and I don’t either. I’m just a man now, a man on the road.”
James shifted uneasily. “What can I call you?”
“That depends on what you want.”
“I’m looking for some help. I thought you and your brothers might be the ones to talk to.”
“If you’re looking for spirits or drugs or tobacco, you have come to the wrong man.”
James shook his head. “I know better than that, and I wouldn’t be interested anyway. It’s the Aryan Brotherhood. They’re sheltering someone, someone who did some terrible things. He’s not done. He’s got a partner on the outside still at work, a guy the cops never found. I’d like to see that justice is done.”
Frank nodded. “I know the devil you mean. What do you care?”
James paused, thinking hard of the right words. “On the outside, I fought for a righteous world. But I was weak, and I succumbed. I’m strong again. I’m not willing to stop fighting just because I’m doing my time. This man killed children. He didn’t give up all the bodies. There are families out there who have never found their dead. And there’s his partner. He’s still killing. I want this man to give up his secrets and end this suffering. But to do it, I need your help.”
Frank looked at him for a long moment. James felt like his soul was being laid bare before this man’s blazing sight. Finally Frank laughed.
“You’re a righteous man, Forrest James. I know that. But don’t think your newfound hubris excuses your crime.”
“I don’t.”
“So what do you propose?”
“I need to get Bounds alone and make him see the error of his ways. I need you and your brothers to run interference, keep the Aryans at bay, and watch my back for a few weeks afterwards. If Bounds dies, I’ll take the fall.”
Frank nodded. “An interesting plan. My brothers and I will pray on this matter. Bounds is a devil who slew my little sisters, and Allah is not fond of devils.”
“So what do I call you?”
“What?”
“You said what I called you depended on what I wanted. So what do I call you?”
The man laughed. “You can call me Frank.”
It went down two days later. Bounds and two of his Aryan buddies were on laundry detail, pushing carts full of linens down the narrow halls. Their route took them past a locked storeroom.
At least, normally it was locked. Jesse Smith, a grizzled little old Muslim who’d been in the Castle for forty years, helped out the cleaning staff and could get the keys when he needed them for work. As the three Aryans pushed the heavy cart, the storeroom door swung open behind them. They turned to look.
Four burly black men poured out the door. Two grabbed Bounds and picked him up like a doll, a powerful hand clamped over his mouth, while the other two faced off with the Aryans.
“We need Mr. Bounds for just a minute,” one said, as Bounds was dragged into the storeroom squirming and moaning.
The Aryans gawked for a second. Then one sprinted off down the hall, quick as a rabbit. The other one glanced at his fleeing partner and then looked back at
the Muslims, his chin trembling.
“Uh—”
The fists came down like righteous hammers.
Inside the storeroom, the two Muslims held Bounds while Frank Barnes gagged him with a cleaning rag, fastened his wrists behind his back, and tied his ankles together. Little Jesse stood in the corner, grinning and nodding. “Look at that devil kick!” he exclaimed merrily. Forrest James cracked his knuckles and stared into Bounds’ eyes with an executioner’s cold gaze.
When Frank was done, he shoved Bounds to the floor. “He’s all yours.” Then the Muslims pulled the laundry cart inside—it now contained a badly battered and thoroughly unconscious Aryan—and went to wait in the hall, closing the storeroom door behind them.
Bounds looked up at James from the floor. He’d pissed himself, and the smell rose off him mixed with sweaty fear.
James hunched down next to Bounds, keeping his gaze fixed. “I’m going to ask you a few questions in a little while. But not right now.”
Bounds whimpered.
“Right now, I’m just going to hurt you.”
It didn’t take long for the Aryans to respond. Within a few minutes, the one who’d rabbited came back with six of his friends. The gang caught sight of the Muslims standing outside the storeroom, arms folded, a formidable wall of black power. One of the Aryans, his sleeves rolled up and his powerful arms covered with blue jailhouse tats, pushed to the front as his buddies slowed. He walked right up to Frank and got in his face.
“What the fuck is going on here, Sambo?”
“We’re taking out the trash. Why don’t you just run along?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you care for a child molester?”
“Bounds ain’t no fuckin’ kiddy-raper! Those nigger bitches got what they deserved. Stand aside or get the same.” His allies gathered around him, eyeing the Muslims and nodding with determination.
Frank grinned huge. His smile made him look even bigger than he really was.
“You know,” he said, “in class I learned how to keep my temper. And I do. I keep it inside, like butane in a blowtorch. I’ve been saving up.”
“Oh yeah?”
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 29