One of the escorts twitched with what may have been a smile. I sat back on the bed and let Herr Kommandant read me some more rules. The basic premise was as Creeps had described it: Be good, don’t give the guard force any shit, and this would be like any other motel, only with one-way doorknobs and perpetual room service.
“Isolation is the rule here, Mr. Doe. Hood’s on when outside the rooms. You don’t talk to guards, other detainees, the housekeeping people, and especially anyone outside the fence. When you use that card to access the bathroom, the other person’s card won’t work until you’ve used yours to exit. If you tarry overlong in the bathroom, your card will stop working. You want to live in there instead of in here, be our guest.”
“Do I get my one phone call?”
He shook his head. “Isolation means just that, within and without. Octopus rules.”
“And for how long does this go on?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s up to the Octopus, Mr. Doe. Did you perchance ignore a warning from someone in authority to stay away from something or someone?”
I nodded. “It’s possible.”
“Well, that’s it, then. Whoever that authority is, they’ll make the decision, and then the Octopus will wave one of its many arms and you’ll return to main pop out there in civvie-land. Or not.”
I stood up, and the escorts made subtle adjustments in their stance. They weren’t armed, but they both looked like men who didn’t need a gun to get things done.
“The government can’t hold me forever, Major,” I said. “Even military prisoners have rights.”
“The housekeeping people will deliver a menu each morning through this slot in the door, Mr. Doe,” he said, ignoring my declaration of human rights. “You can indicate the items you don’t want each day. Your tray will be delivered through that drawer. When you’re finished, put the tray and all utensils back in the drawer.”
“Okay.”
“Your mommy doesn’t work here, Mr. Doe. You will be responsible for keeping your room clean. Housekeeping will clean the bathroom daily, and sanitize the room once a week while you’re out in the exercise yard. Lights go out at 2200, and the door card readers lock down at the same time. See that red button?”
He pointed at a red button next to the hallway door. I nodded.
“That’s the panic button. If you have a genuine emergency, you push that button. If we feel it’s not a genuine emergency after we’ve responded, you’ll get yelled at. If you get yelled at twice, the panic button is disabled, and then when you do have a genuine emergency, you’ll just have to die. Clear?”
“Crystal,” I said. “Don’t fuck with the panic button. How about television? Books?”
“Let’s see how the first few days go, Mr. Doe,” the major said. He looked me up and down. “You look like a guy who works out. Maybe even a tough guy? There’s a weight set in the yard; not many of our detainees use it. Feel free. If you get the urge to rumble, we can set up a smoker with some of my Marines. Do a little boxing instruction, maybe some hand to gland. Fun stuff like that.”
His Marines looked mildly interested. There’s a brand of soap products called Arm and Hammer. Their logo is a muscular arm raising a small maul. These guys looked like the maul. “What time is it now?” I asked.
He almost looked at his watch, but checked himself. “It’s late, and it’s dark, Mr. John Doe Fifty-Seven. From now on, please just play by my rules, and pray that the Octopus doesn’t forget you’re here. They do that, you know.”
I lay back on the bed when they were gone, wondering what the fuck I’d gotten myself into this time. I heard the card reader on my side of the bathroom door click and saw the little light go red. A noisy bathroom fan went on. Someone, my neighbor, I supposed, had come into the bathroom. Thirty minutes or so later, the fan went off and my bathroom door LED went green. I fell asleep, wondering how long before Tony and the guys came looking. Soon, I fervently hoped.
Two days later, I was moved to another room on the same floor. No change in amenities, and I figured it was a housekeeping issue. Life in the detention center went pretty much as briefed. The food was mess-hall chow. Mass-produced, acceptable, if not exactly cholesterol conscious. I began drawing lines through some menu items on the second day, concerned about my girlish figure and the fact that I had nothing to do but sit or sleep. The two-hour exercise window was precisely measured, with one surprise: There were fenced lanes in the grounds, running from the building to the perimeter fence, beyond which I assumed was the river. The lanes were fifty feet wide and nearly five hundred feet long. I know. I paced mine.
Other detainees were out in their own lanes, and no one seemed interested in making eye contact, which, admittedly, would have been difficult as we were all wearing hoods. With eyeholes, we could see straight ahead. If anyone was curious about his lane neighbor, he would have to turn his head, and my guess was that this movement would be visible to the guards or on whatever surveillance system was covering the grounds.
If there was a weight set out there, I didn’t find it. I concentrated on doing stretching exercises, a brisk walk, a jog, and then a real run, up and back, for about forty minutes. It got hot under the damned hood. After that, I reversed the order to cool off. I saw only one other detainee doing something similar; the rest just walked, back and forth, inside their fences. It was surreal, this procession of baggy orange jumpsuits, humping dutifully back and forth between the perimeter and the hulking, concrete building. I’d expected guard towers and spotlights, but there was just a fence, and not a new one at that. Beyond the fence was a field of dormant grass, and then some dense woods. I’d caught a glimpse of the river from my fifth-floor window, but it wasn’t visible from the yard.
At the end of two hours, a police whistle would sound, and the Orangemen all trudged back to the steel double doors. We were required to sound off and identify our numbers, and then we were admitted to the interior and walked in groups of five detainees with a Marine at each end of the line to the freight elevators. The elevator was as close as we got to another human being, but there was no contact. We were marched to our respective rooms and told to stand in front of our doors. The doors all clicked at once, up and down the hallway, and we went through. My neighbor apparently was let out for a different exercise period, and the yard was busy all day with orange jumpsuits walking the line.
On the fifth day it rained, and a voice came by my closed door and asked if I wanted to stay inside or go out. I chose to go out; many others did not. The Marines issued me a full-length plastic slicker that had a rain hood. I spent the whole two hours outside, getting damp in the process but determined not to miss a chance for fresh air and exercise. During the time I was out there, a group of Marines humping full battle packs came jogging around the perimeter fence on the outside, soaking wet but keeping perfect time to the subdued chanting of their sergeant, who ran, similarly encumbered, right alongside. I noticed the major was also running, with two packs on, one rank in front of the rest of the group. Gotta hand it to Marine officers-they know how to lead from the front.
When I got back to my room, I found a stack of books and my watch on the desk. It was all nonfiction and not very recent, but I was delighted to have books at last. The television remained dark, but I didn’t care very much. I’m not much of a vidiot under the best of circumstances. I worried about my mutts, and wondered for the umpteenth time if my guys were looking for me. I couldn’t see Tony believing anything the G-men told him, but, on the other hand, he’d had doubts from the git-go about what I was doing down there at Helios. If Quartermain happened to back up what the agents told him, he’d probably go into the watch-and-wait mode.
My secret surprise came late that night, when I was awakened by a sound I couldn’t place. The rain was still coming down outside, so the room was dark except for the light coming in under the door from the hallway. Instinctively I reached for my trusty. 45 and then remembered I was fresh out of heat.
I hear
d it again: The hinges on the bathroom door made a faint squeaking noise. I tensed in the bed, not knowing what to expect, and then a human figure loomed out of the darkness and sat down on my bed.
“Hi, there,” a female voice said. “I’m Mad Moira Maxwell, and I’m your neighbor. What’s your name?”
Coming from a relatively sound sleep, it took me a few seconds to gather my wits, sparse as they were.
“Cam Richter,” I said. I could just make out her face, but the rest of her was wrapped up in a lumpy bathrobe. Her eyes were wide and, I realized, just a little crazy-looking. Had she said Mad Moira?
“So what’d you do?” she asked, making herself more comfortable on the edge of my bed. She didn’t weigh much, and her hair was disheveled. Red hair, I realized. There might be something to that Mad business after all.
“Failed to heed a nose-out warning from appropriate authority. Twice, I think. And you?”
“Sedition with a computer or three,” she said brightly.
“I haven’t heard that word since high school civics. Sedition?”
“It’s come back into vogue these days,” she said. “The government is taking itself a lot more seriously than it used to, and here we are.”
“How’d you fiddle the bathroom door locks?” I asked, mindful of the major’s warnings about being good and not talking to other detainees. I sat up in the bed to give her more room. That didn’t work. She slid closer. She smelled of soap and healthy young female.
“When you can do sedition with a massively parallel computer system, door locks are a piece of cake,” she said. “I am-I was, I suppose-a professor of computer science at the U in Wilmington. How about you?”
“I was a lieutenant in the Manceford County Sheriff’s Office, back in Triboro, for far too long. Now I’m a freelance investigator. Or maybe just lance, now that I think about it. Free I am not.”
“Know that feeling,” she said.
“How long have you been in here?” I asked.
“One year, one month, ten days, and a wake-up, as the Marines like to say.”
She laughed when she saw the surprise registering on my face. “Oh, yes, lieutenant, this can go on for a long, long time. Especially for sedition in time of war, even if it is an undeclared war.”
“Fuck me,” I said, without thinking.
“Right now?” she asked, and then she laughed again. It was an appealing laugh, but those eyes still had that penumbra of lunacy around the edges. I figured her for about thirty-five, maybe thirty-eight or so. It was hard to tell in the gloom, and I wasn’t about to turn on a light.
“I’m sorry,” I sputtered. “I mean-aw, shit…”
She waved a hand. “No offense taken. In fact, I kind of like the direct approach. Especially after being locked up in here. The last guy in this room was a Muslim of some stripe, and he was scared to death of women. He threatened to report me when I visited. I told him I’d throw menstrual fluids on him in his sleep if he opened his yap. That seemed to do it.”
“Ri-i-ght,” I said. Mad Moira indeed.
“Yeah, well, I tend toward direct action. They don’t call me Mad Moira for nothing. You have anyone on the outside who’s going to be wondering where you went?”
“Actually, I think so. Or maybe it’s more like hope so. And you?”
“The Arts and Sciences faculty was probably relieved all to hell when I went ‘on sabbatical,’ as I suspect they’ve been told. If anyone has inquired, they’ve probably been damned tentative about it.”
A legend in her own mind, I thought. “You one of those feminazis I keep reading about?” I asked.
“You bet,” she said proudly. “Although I’m not anti-male. I am definitely anti-government, especially this government, which I believe to be illegal, unconstitutionally elected, and guilty of all sorts of perversions of the Bill of Rights. You going to escape?”
Oh, great, I thought. Another fanatic. She ought to meet Carl Trask. They could rant together. As to escape, the thought had occurred to me, but so had the nature of the guard force. These guys weren’t your typical paunchy, chain-smoking, union-card-carrying, fifty-year-old penitentiary screws. That little group jogging around the perimeter fence in eighty pounds of full battle regalia hadn’t been out there for a picnic, and none of them, not one, had been even breathing hard. If I did try to escape, I’d better succeed on the first try. Plus, I didn’t exactly know my newest best friend all that well.
“Thought about it,” I said finally. “But it looks really hard. Besides, I don’t fancy living in a real cell. I’m hoping my friends get some really nasty lawyers to start looking.” Even as I said that, I wondered if it was likely, at least in the near term, especially if Quartermain was part of the cover. I realized that he was increasingly the unknown element here.
“I’ve thought about nothing else,” she said, shifting on the bed. In profile her face was quite pretty, and, yes, that was red hair. “If I could get my hands on the computers that run this place, we could walk out of here in five minutes.”
“Then what?” I asked. The same government agency that rounded her up in the first place would more than likely round her up again, and this time she might have to learn Spanish or some other foreign tongue. “Are you familiar with the term ‘rendition’?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. In fact, that’s what attracted their attention. I was getting a pretty good handle on the size and scope of that program. Of course, I had to break through some federal firewalls to do it.”
“Yeah, they hate that,” I said. “Frankly, I used to hate it when hackers went after our sheriff’s office computers. If they were local assholes, we’d drop by and do something physical about it.”
“Oh, so I’m an asshole now?”
“Look, Moira, I don’t know you. I do know that I have not been fucking around with the federal government’s war on terrorism. I ignored a warning from an FBI agent to stay out of a case that got one of my people killed, so here I am. If you went hacking into the feds’ computer networks, they have to assume you’re part of the problem, just like the president said.”
“So it’s okay for the government to kidnap citizens in the night and lock them up for the duration?”
I shrugged. “Personally, I favor prosecution in open court. I’d certainly be willing to take my chances in that venue. But: Did you do the crime?”
She didn’t answer.
“You know the saying. And I have to tell you, as an ex-cop, this is pretty cushy time.”
“Yet here you are,” she said. “You don’t think what you did was a crime, but you’re doing the time, just like me.”
She had me there. “I guess I think someone’s eventually gonna try to get me out,” I said. “Maybe not right away, but soon enough. My people are going to see through the smoke screen and, being all ex-cops themselves, they’ll push it. Someone ‘in authority’ will come in here one day and ask me if I’ve gotten the message, I’ll play nice, and then I’ll be out.”
“I used to think that, too,” she said. “See how you feel a year from now. Or two.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You’re not thinking it through,” she said. “Why would they let you out? To have you on the outside, running your mouth about what happened to you just because you pissed off the FBI? They’ve done the hard part-they’ve swept you off the streets and covered their tracks. Your people can push as hard as they want, but the United States Government, and that’s spelled with a capital G these days, doesn’t have to say one fucking word. They have zero motivation to let you out. And you know what else?”
“I give up.”
“I’ve talked to six other people in this place. And given the rules, that’s been harder than you might think. No one knows of anyone who’s ever been let go. Moved, yes, but not just let go. I’m not saying it hasn’t ever happened, what with the lovely headgear and all, but, best I can tell, we’re all in here for life.”
“Don’t you have family? A husban
d? Or at least one good friend?”
“Nope,” she said. I waited, but she didn’t elaborate. When I thought about it, though, neither did I. If the guys at H amp;S bounced off the Octopus shield and then gave up, I had nobody who would keep trying, except maybe my shepherds. She was watching my face.
“That’s why I asked if you’ll try to escape, because if you do, I want to go with you. And I can help.”
It was my turn to study her. “How do I know you’re not from the Octopus, as the major calls it. That you’re not in my room because they’re letting you into my room, to find out if I’m going to be a good boy or if I’ve been sitting up here, lo, these few nights, plotting and scheming.”
“You don’t,” she said immediately. “I’m able to fiddle these doors because one of the nice senoras dropped her hall pass card. It only works on the bathroom doors, not the room doors. But I can get us out into that hallway, and there are fire stairs at each end of that hallway. The elevators are computer controlled. The fire stairs are not.”
“How do you know this?”
She stood up and shucked her jumpsuit. Underneath she was wearing a long white football shirt that reached down to just below her knees. She put her hands behind her head, stretched, and turned around slowly to show off. Even in the dim light, I could see her body. She was lovely in all respects. “This is what I work out in when it’s warm outside,” she said. “The Marines are all horny young American males. The major does not go down into the basement, ever, no matter what he says.”
She picked up the jumpsuit and wiggled back into it, all the time watching me watching her doing it. “Girls and boys have their needs, and Marines are nothing if not direct. I’m telling you, I can get us out of this building. What I can’t do is get over that final fence.”
“Or what’s probably on the other side of it,” I said. “And there’s still the problem of afterward.”
The Moonpool cr-3 Page 13