Prison Code

by Don Pendleton

  Warden Linder had given Officers Johnson and Stewart long, hard and separate grillings about that. The problem was he knew both men well, knew their methods, had seen their results and had no reason to believe they had somehow shirked their dirty duty. The fact was the two men were confirmed sadists who enjoyed their work immensely. How Cooper had managed to go poison foot on Love was one more in a mounting series of enigmas that were all named Cooper. “I’m growing tired of Prisoner Cooper.”

  Schoenaur straightened in his seat with eagerness. “And it’s about goddamn time.”

  Scott sighed. Always being the smartest man in the room was harder than most people knew. Since Rollin had been put in the hospital, Scott had been reading Machiavelli as well as the samurai Miyamoto Mushahi’s The Book of Five Rings and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He had pored over them morning and night like other men might pore over the Holy Bible, attempting to find hidden meaning spring up between the lines. Scott had done this inserting the name Cooper for the enemy as he had read the ancient Italian, Japanese and Chinese masters’ stratagems for overcoming their foes. These studies had resulted in an unexpected epiphany, and one that brought a whole host of problems with it.

  “Has it occurred to anyone that Cooper is not what he appears to be?”

  Zavala frowned. “He’s a cop?”

  Scott snorted. “No, cops going undercover in prison is TV bullshit. We all know it’s easier to just pay a snitch or make one your bitch, and no cop would ever enter the Hunger Games.”

  “So he’s some merc hired by the FBI? CIA? DEA?” Schoenaur suggested.

  “If he was, the Hunger Games would have brought D-Town down after the first match. He’s not here to investigate that, prison abuse or corruption.”

  Warden Linder steepled his fingers. “He’s here to investigate us.”

  “He may not be totally sure of that yet, and even then he’s still not certain what he’s trying to uncover. But something brought him here.”

  Schoenaur wasn’t seeing it. “Like what?”

  “The farm in Lancaster County was attacked by forces unknown, and burned to the ground. Maybe the data wasn’t erased or completely destroyed, like we thought. Maybe someone left some clues. What I know is this—our operation suffered an anomalous setback in the Lancaster clubhouse, and then this Cooper appears at D-Town’s door almost like magic and now almost owns the place.”

  “You’re saying Cooper is some kind of nongovernment organization fixer, and he’s here trying to figure out what we’re up to?”

  Scott relaxed his mass back into his chair. “It’s a theory.”

  “So we kill him,” Schoenaur asserted.

  Linder weighed the possibilities. “Then that blond bitch shows up Wednesday and asks where lover boy is.”

  “But if Force is right, then she’s part of the scam.”

  “Yes, and if we can’t produce Cooper, she hits us with the Hunger Games.”

  Zavala frowned. “And she knows about that how?”

  “We have to assume that wasn’t his wife he spent the day with in Jungle Park. We have to assume they know about the Hunger Games and were probably watching. They can shut us down anytime they want, but they still don’t know what exactly is going on.”

  “So what the hell do we do?” Schoenaur asked.

  Scott answered. “We move up the timetable. Once we blow the horn and the walls come down, neither Cooper nor any of his undercover bullshit will mean anything, and it will be an awfully convenient time for him and every other loose end to die tragically.”

  Chapter 14

  BOLAN RAN HIS eye across the tiers. Men smoked and talked, argued and socialized. Down below at the tables some played checkers, cards or chess. Others lazed about listening to their portable music players, or read. Some ground out endless push-ups in their cells. Work details in the laundry or the kitchen were privileges that had to be earned. Time in the shop was reserved for exemplary prisoners or those the warden favored. For most of the population now was another of the endless hours between meals where there was nothing to do but mark time and vainly try to fill it.

  This was a new battlefield for Bolan. Prison was what it was, and it was a waiting game. Bolan was a trained sniper. He could outwait a rock if need be, but his every instinct was screaming that he had to make his move and soon.

  “We’re running out of time, and running out of options,” he remarked.

  Rudy leaned on the rail and took a long breath. “So you’re going to force the issue?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About goddamn time, if you ask me!” Patrick opined. “I say we kick this pig!” Patrick’s elders and betters gave him matching looks. The young man cringed. “Sorry.”

  A part of Bolan did admire Rudolpho the Younger’s enthusiasm. “It’s going to happen soon enough.”

  Rudy gave Bolan a bold grin. “Cheer up, I bought you a present.”

  “Presents are good.”

  Rudy checked his watch and grinned again in satisfaction as Officer Barnes entered C Block carrying a laptop. The guard came up to the tier and gave Rudy a sheepish look. Rudy gazed skyward for strength. “What did you do this time?”

  “I didn’t do anything!” Barnes protested.

  “No patches or software without telling me?”

  “No!”

  Rudy looked off to one side leerily. “Did you download something you wouldn’t want me to see?”

  Barnes blushed beet-red. “Oh, for the love of— No! Of course not!”

  Rudy shook his head. “This is becoming a habit, Officer.”

  Barnes regained his composure. “You have something better to do, Rudolpho?”

  “Well, I was watching Cooper stare grimly into the middle distance, and listening to my son give me a load of shit, but I can get that any day all day.”

  “You’ll take a look at it?” Barnes asked hopefully. “The screen keeps freezing.”

  “Better to be busy than bored. Full disclosure, you got nothing private on here since the last time I looked at it?”

  “Nope, but I do want to get online and play tonight after work.”

  Rudy nodded. “You will.”

  “Thanks, Rudy!” Barnes walked off happily, solid in the knowledge his world would be Warcrafting this evening.

  “You set up his laptop to malfunction,” Bolan surmised.

  Rudy looked at his watch. “Johnny on the spot.” He looked at his son. “Let’s talk.” They went into the cell, where the Rudolphos began a lengthy discussion of intimate computer programming details. Bolan sat on the bunk with the laptop and connected. He punched in the password he had given Rudy, and hit Send + Silent.

  Kurtzman’s chat window popped up instantly.

  I have news, he typed.

  And? Bolan typed in return.

  Kurtzman gave Bolan a rapid rundown on what he had unearthed on the Force. Clelland Wilberforce Scott was a genuinely spooky dude. Most white supremacists in Bolan’s experience had long ago jumped their charter, and besides sporting Nazi tattoos and shouting a few slogans, their main concern in life was running guns and drugs and controlling territory like any other criminal gang. Still, there had always been a shadowy upper echelon that still believed in the main mission. Bolan scanned Scott’s jacket and the notes Kurtzman had compiled. He was serving life for first-degree murder, conspiracy for the killing of a federal judge, and being found in midplan to kill a second. Scott was a legend in the New England criminal circles, and since his incarceration was referred to in hushed tones as the “Fuehrer behind the Walls.” He was widely known to reach out from behind the walls of Duivelstad as a king-maker, an adviser, and by proxy, an executioner. In New England’s underworld Scott was what went bump in the night, and if something horrible was about to happen in D-Town, he had to b
e the man behind it.

  Bolan scanned the file on Lincoln Whitmore and saw the perfect storm forming on the horizon.

  The more the soldier read the more his suspicions were confirmed. Old-school CIA agents all had a mantra: Die Someplace Warm. Bolan was starting to get a very strong feeling that Lincoln Whitmore had no intention of dying behind the walls of Duivelstad.

  Kurtzman typed, I went through as much Air America data as I could get my hands on. A lot is missing, even more is redacted. But I began trying to link data streams, and given where Whitmore is, and your current Jericho theory, these are the most concerning.

  Bolan began to get a very cold feeling as he watched the data slowly scroll. The possibility that the United States had deployed “backpack” nuclear weapons in the Southeast Asian theater during the Vietnam War was still choice fodder for conspiracy theorists to this day. It was generally known that the Pentagon had considered the idea; what the exact targets might have been was again fodder for endless speculation, as was whether specific low-yield, low-signature weapons had actually been designed for the theater, or whether the powers that be had been contemplating already-in-production, standard, military nuclear demolition charges.

  Some of the code words for the “in-theater” small nuke projects were known. Kurtzman had also managed to come up with several of Whitmore’s code names used during his stint in Air America, and as an analyst for the CIA, where Whitmore’s department had naturally been Southeast Asia. The code words designating the project and Whitmore’s code names appeared together in several data streams.

  Kurtzman had applied the words to Whitmore’s library files and the disk from the Lancaster farm, and he was starting to get more hits.

  Storing nukes in a prison. Hard to believe, Kurtzman typed.

  Hard to think of a safer place, Bolan typed back. No prison gets raided unless there’s a riot going on. It’s an artificial, strictly controlled environment, almost no possibilities of leaks. Except for human rights groups, hardly anyone is monitoring the day-to-day activities of any specific prison. No government agency is, and if they are they’re mostly just running surveys or monitoring political activity.

  Which implies the warden and at least some of the staff are in on it.

  Bolan considered his experiences with the Big U. That’s a safe bet.

  So how do we go in?

  We can’t. We have no proof. Duivelstad is a private prison. The warden is friends with the governor. We’ve got nothing and we’re going to need a lot to get this place shut down and searched.

  We could send in Able or Phoenix.

  It was tempting to think of the Farm’s two extraordinary action teams hitting Duivelstad in a combined raid. We’re not authorized, and most of the guard and staff aren’t in on this. They would resist, and then there’s the possibility of it sparking a riot. We need more.

  There was a pause on Kurtzman’s side of the chat. So what are you going to do?

  Both men knew it was a rhetorical question. Bolan gave the answer Kurtzman was expecting. I’m going to have to bust this thing wide open, force them to show their hand, or both. The good news is we’ve established the target list and the objective. I’ve got a lot to work with. Good work, Bear.

  Thanks, but the objective has to be something more than just blowing down one of D-Town’s walls and engineering the biggest jailbreak in history.

  Well, that would be memorable, but I think Scott wants more bang for his buck. Literally.

  Like how big?

  Warden Linder wants money. Whitmore wants to die on some spit of sand in Southeast Asia, lying in a hammock with China white on tap in his arm.

  And Scott?

  He wants to irrevocably alter the American political landscape. I’m pretty sure he wants to do it by assassinating the President of the United States, and he wants to use a nuclear weapon to do it.

  The Warden’s Office

  “HELLO, LINK!” WARDEN Linder smiled sunnily. It was a travesty on his face. He waved at a chair. “Have a seat.”

  Whitmore flinched. Zavala pushed him forward. Whitmore moved to the offered chair and tried not to squirm under Linder’s overly intimate gaze. The warden was the one man on earth Whitmore feared. The warden had established their relationship early. He had learned of Whitmore’s addiction, let him satisfy it for a few months uninterrupted, and then thrown him in the hole cold turkey. Whitmore had begged, screamed, soiled himself and climbed the walls for seventy-two hours with nothing to break up the hellish torment save a single serving of nutraloaf and a once-a-day hosing down of his cell and himself with the fire hose. At the end of it Whitmore had genuinely beaten his addiction.

  Then Linder had let him out and shoved his arm full of heroin purer than Whitmore had experienced in decades, and started the addiction cycle all over again. The warden had mentioned once conversationally that Whitmore was too old to catch anyone’s eye save for some of the oldest sissies looking for a husband to settle down with, but he was sure if he passed out the Viagra and gave them the proper motivation he knew some sickos in B Block that would take the case, and a man as advanced in age as Whitmore, and addicted to heroin, probably had enough bowel problems without that sort of attention.

  Whitmore was a prisoner, a drug addict and a slave.

  He was well liked in the prison. He enjoyed running the library and teaching inmates how to read, or helping them earn their high school equivalency diplomas. Several times a year Warden Linder liked to let him get a little rocky, but Whitmore enjoyed a mostly steady supply of junk of varying quality.

  The man behind the desk could take all that from him in the blink of an eye.

  “You like movies, Link?”

  Whitmore thought furiously. This was one of those weeks when the warden had left him in need a little too long. It was often a harbinger of the warden wanting something of him. “I do. Thank you for showing Casablanca last week. It’s one of my favorites.”

  “Mine, too.” Linder took a small plastic bag and a cooking kit out of his desk drawer. “Want to watch a movie with me?”

  Whitmore trembled and sweat burst across his brow despite himself. He dragged his eyes off the junk and the kit with difficulty. “Of course, Warden.”

  Linder took a small penknife out of his pocket and pushed it and the plastic bag across the desk. “You can snort one line now to calm your nerves. I want you at your movie critic best for this.”

  Whitmore pierced the bag with the knife and poured and arranged a careful line. His need overcame his shame as he snorted the line off the ancient wood. Zavala grunted in disgust. Linder gazed on benevolently. “All better?”

  Whitmore leaned back, craving more but calmed. “A bit.”

  “Well, watch this.” Linder opened his laptop and clicked on a film file. It opened showing Linder’s office. Cooper sat in a chair and a woman who could only be the lawyer known as “Cooper’s blonde” began to read him the riot act. A goon in a suit stood by, looking imposing.

  “I didn’t know you had your office wired.”

  “Pay attention. Look at it like a CIA analyst. Is there anything going on here I’m missing?”

  Whitmore had been an excellent pilot and soldier until he had been wounded and a little too much dependence on morphine had led him to heroin. He had always been an excellent analyst. He observed Cooper’s meeting with the DOJ lawyer and then the second one. “Run them again.”

  Linder hit the first film file once more.

  Whitmore threw back his head and laughed. Linder wasn’t exactly pleased at the sound. “What?”

  “It’s the oldest trick in the book!”

  Linder placed his hand over the little bag of heroin. His voice went dead. “What?”

  “They’re blinking at each other in Morse code! Our captured pilots used to do this when the Cong
tried to use them in propaganda films. I’ve seen the original film strips!”

  “What are they saying?”

  Whitmore went into genuine analyst mode. “They’re good. You see how she keep running one hand through her hair and then the other? Turning her head? And look, Cooper is rubbing his temples again. They’re trying to hide it without being obvious. I doubt there’s much in the way of doublespeak in their conversations. The grilling is all distraction for the Morse code with the eyes.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “Cooper just blinked ‘hurt.’ The woman just blinked ‘out.’ This was between the fights, so it must have been after the Wrecking Crew laid into Cooper, and she’s asking if he wants extraction.”

  Whitmore took his hand off the heroin. “Very good, Link. What else?”

  “He blinked ‘no’ and—” Whitmore laughed again. “You see how he keeps his head lowered? He isn’t sure whether he’s on film or not, but nearly all surveillance cameras are placed high to take in the whole scene, and he is acting appropriately. Cooper is a total pro. The woman is a talented amateur, at least when it comes to fieldwork.”

  “So we’ve been compromised.”

  Whitmore never took his eyes off the interview footage. “You have been penetrated, but Cooper still hasn’t found the prize. That’s why he’s still here and the National Guard hasn’t surrounded the perimeter.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “Give me both files on a flash drive. They’ve managed to hide a lot of the conversation, but I bet I can extrapolate most of it.”

  Linder pushed a prepared flash drive across the desk and nodded at the heroin. “You go ahead and get yourself nice and high today. Tonight I want you working on it, and tomorrow I want a full report.”