The Bastille - a Thriller

by Victor Methos

  Mickey finished the lecture with a comparison of Bob Hare’s psychopath checklist and the early lists developed by the Swiss psychoanalysts for deviant behavior.

  By the time he was through, only fifty-two minutes had elapsed, but he felt like he’d run a marathon. His throat was dry, his arms and legs ached, and his back was throbbing.

  He stayed after the lecture and answered a few questions from the students before leaving the auditorium himself. When he was outside, the thought of going to the basement to begin screening cases didn’t feel right.

  Instead, he walked around Quantico and found a quiet spot on a bench underneath some trees. In the distance, he could hear squealing tires as drivers were put through their paces in Hogan’s Alley, Quantico’s fake city for training and examining new agents.

  He took out his cell phone and thought about calling Suzan Clay, but decided against it. Sheriff Clay, though she wasn’t a sheriff anymore, had been close to him for a long time. On his last field case, they had worked together in Kodiak Basin, Alaska. They’d grown fond of each other in the process. But as often happened with these things, after the investigation was over, the romance fizzled. Suzan, who had nearly lost her hands to the man they had been chasing, wanted nothing that would remind her of that investigation. Nothing reminded her of it more than Mickey.

  He’d stayed there a month after the investigation, but it was clear that Suzan didn’t want their relationship to progress. He’d been prepared to sell his home in Virginia and move out there with her, but the offer never came. He wasn’t surprised, and secretly he had been hoping for it. Suzan was young and deserved a young man and children. She deserved the white-picket fence and big ceremony. All Mickey could give her was a few short years before he would become bedridden. Although they had said goodbye with an understanding that the relationship was over, Mickey still called and checked up on her.

  But today just didn’t feel like one of those days. He finally decided he had to go inside and check his e-mail, and maybe do a few things so he could come in late tomorrow.

  Whenever Mickey took the elevator down to screening, which was in the basement of the Behavioral Science building, a gray dread filled his belly. The entire atmosphere of screening seemed set up to give those working there the impression that they were inferior, that the Bureau was doing its most important work on the surface and they were the dregs and bottom-feeders. It wasn’t true, of course, but that was what it felt like to Mickey. Then again, some agents couldn’t wait to be taken out of the field and chained to a desk.

  Mickey sat down in his office and opened his e-mail. He went into his inbox and found eighty-seven unread messages from yesterday. Exhaling loudly, he clicked on the first one before noticing movement on the ground. His eyes drifted to the mousetrap that the custodians had set up against the wall.

  A mouse was sniffing along the edge of the wall toward the spoonful of peanut butter used as bait. Its pink nose was up in the air and it took cautious steps toward the trap. It got up to the edge of it, a few inches from the hammer ready to crush its body, when Mickey rose.

  He scooped up the mousetrap as the little rodent scurried off and disappeared underneath a closet door. Mickey disabled the trap and set it back down. “You can have your snack.”

  Wow, he thought. In the office talking to a mouse.

  He returned to his desk, and continued reading the e-mail.

  3

  Angela Listz put on her sunglasses as the SUV came to a stop in front of the prison. The harsh Nevada sun was so bright that when she’d first transferred from Seattle, she thought she might not be able to handle it. She’d gotten so used to the dim gray of Seattle that she felt like a vampire around the piercing sunlight.

  The J. Keller Glenn Correctional Institute was one of the most frightening prisons she’d ever visited. She’d been there once before on a tour and was shocked by the amount of high-level offenders the prison housed; offenders so off-the-grid violent that normal prison was too much freedom and social interaction for them. Oddly enough, serial murderers were rarely housed there; typically they were well behaved, adjusting their personalities to their environment and winning over the staff and guards in prison. The inmates housed in J. Keller Glenn were something law enforcement didn’t have a word for yet.

  The warden, Jake Gills, and two guards waited for them to get out of their car and hike over.

  “Place gives me the creeps,” said her partner, David Chan.

  “Don’t let it show. This warden’s a real asshole.”

  As they approached, Angela put on her best smile. Shorter than the guards, the warden wore a suit with a flag tiepin larger than any Angela had seen. He didn’t smile or offer his hand. He just said, “You’re late, Agent Listz. I would expect better from the FBI.”

  “This isn’t exactly the easiest place to get to. But I appreciate your call, nonetheless.”

  The warden glared at both of them before saying, “You’re here at the request of the governor, not me. I think our state police are more than adequate to apprehend a single inmate.”

  “If you don’t mind, Warden, I’d like to get started.”

  He grinned, and somehow his pleasant gestures were more offensive than his offensive ones. “Of course. Follow me.”

  Chan and Angela followed him through the gate. The guards were bulky, their muscles bulging out of their sleeves. It was impossible to get that big without steroids, Angela guessed. She wondered if the warden encouraged their use.

  The gate rolled open, and the first thing she noticed were two guard towers on either side of the walkway. Guards armed with semi-automatic rifles stood glaring down at them through aviator glasses.

  “We have only 106 inmates,” the warden said. “But they are by far the most dangerous creations on the Lord’s green earth. You will never find a more wretched lot in the entire United States.” He stopped and looked at them, an eyebrow raised. “You don’t know who it is yet, do you?”

  Angela shook her head.

  He grinned and Angela thought he looked like a snake. The warden turned around and began walking again, his hands neatly held behind his back like a commander inspecting prisoners of war.

  “Zain Daniel Tamora.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Before your time, Agent Listz. In the late eighties, he woke up one day and killed his wife and two children. Then he walked to work, killed two people on the way in and six more at the office. During his trial, he bit his lawyer’s face, tearing away the poor man’s cheek and part of his tongue. Simply uncontrollable.”

  They rounded a corner and several guards stood around what looked like the site of a bomb detonation. Blood and body parts were strewn over the walkway, the grass, and the bushes. Angela stopped in her tracks but Chan kept walking. He had been a paramedic and was probably accustomed to the blood and gore. She swallowed and continued walking.

  “A couple vultures attacked the carcasses this morning, but other than that we’ve preserved it exactly as we found it, as per your request.”

  It was difficult to tell how many people were involved, as most of them had had their limbs severed. No, not severed—even at this distance she could see the limbs had been ripped or hacked off with something that wasn’t that sharp.

  “Used a fence post,” the warden said. “That bit there. Ripped it right out of the ground and used the sharp edge as a weapon. I lost four of my men.”

  “Sorry for your loss,” Chan said. “We weren’t expecting this, though. I think we’ll need our forensics team, correct, Agent Listz? … Agent Listz?”

  “Yeah, um, yeah, put the call in, would you, David?”

  “Sure.”

  Angela slowly paced the perimeter of the scene. She glanced up to the warden once, and he had a condescending smile on his face. He was enjoying her revulsion.

  One of the men had had his tongue ripped out. Another was nearly decapitated. Another had his head bashed in so thoroughly it resembled blood
y ground beef. She felt her stomach churn, but she didn’t look away. When you looked away was when you needed a desk job and to be removed from the field.

  “Who is this guy?” she said.

  “He’s a monster, Agent Listz. You’re chasing an honest-to-hell monster.”

  4

  The sky in Virginia was a soft hue of gold. The clouds appeared burnt red and Mickey Parsons sat on his porch and watched the heavenly glory unfolding in front of him. The day hadn’t been particularly long or stressful, but he felt every ache in every joint and muscle in his body.

  Mickey took out his phone and dialed his daughter’s number. She answered on the first ring.

  “I was wondering when you’d call,” she said.

  “Really? Why?”

  “We haven’t talked in a couple days.”

  He grinned. “I miss you. It’s not wrong for a father to miss his only daughter.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Daddy. I miss you, too.”

  “How’s school?”

  “My classes suck this semester, just like last semester. I’m out of my generals and have to focus on the upper division stuff now. How’s work?”

  “A year away from retirement.”

  “Have you thought more about what you’re gonna do?”

  He paused. “Not really. Your mother and I had a plan to buy a cabin in Lake Tahoe. I think she even had the lot picked out. When she passed… I just couldn’t do it. Maybe a condo in a busy city somewhere. I have a master’s, I could always teach to pass the time.”

  “You shouldn’t think of it as ‘just passing time.’ You get to do whatever you want. You’d be nuts not to take advantage of that.”

  “We’ll see.” He grinned. “You know, what would really enhance the experience is a grandkid.”

  “Dad, I told you, we’re not in a position to do that yet.”

  “I’m just saying. It’s better to do it young while you have the energy.”

  His line beeped and he looked at the screen on his phone. It was a number he didn’t recognize. He ignored it.

  “I’ll have to come up and visit you guys soon. Or you can come down as soon as you get a break,” he said.

  “I will. Better run. Gotta grab some groceries. Call me tomorrow, okay?”

  “You got it.”

  As he hung up, Mickey was glad he’d had a daughter. He’d often wondered what it would have been like to have a son, but the image never fit. Daughters tended to take better care of their fathers—at least, in his experience.

  The other caller had left a message, and he listened to it.

  “Mickey, hey, guess who? This is my cell. Will you please call me?”

  Mickey couldn’t help smiling. It’d been too long since he’d spoken with Angela Listz.

  Angela had been a brand-new agent fresh out of the academy when they’d met. They’d worked a case together that, in hindsight, had altered Mickey’s career. Harold Ricks had been a Vietnam veteran who’d related to Mickey so much that he’d asked Mickey to kill him. Mickey refused, but in the end he’d had no choice but to take Harold’s life.

  The case happened to coincide with the results of his HIV test. The Bureau’s official reason for removing him from the field was “a questionable agent-involved shooting,” and most people within the Bureau accepted that it was the shooting of Harold Ricks that forced the demotion. But Mickey knew that wasn’t the real reason.

  He had cleared more serial homicides than any other FBI employee. He worked high-profile cases and was frequently featured in the media. The Bureau was always twenty-five years behind the times—the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover—and a special agent who was HIV positive wasn’t the seasoned tough-guy image they wanted in the media. He had given them a good twenty years of his life, and in return they’d stuck him in a basement because of PR.

  He dialed the number.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d call,” Angela said.

  “I’ll always call you back. You’re one of the few people I can say that about.”

  “How you been?”

  “Good. Busy with screening.”

  She chuckled. “I bet. Crazy yokels ask for any help finding Bigfoot lately?”

  It was lore in Behavioral Science that a sheriff from somewhere in the southern United States had once contacted the Bureau for help investigating Bigfoot. The Bureau, allegedly, was so amused that they actually had one of the local field office agents go down on a hunt and pretend to be the FBI’s Bigfoot expert.

  Mickey didn’t know whether it was true or not, but it wouldn’t surprise him. He’d seen sheriffs elected in some counties for nothing more than promising to buy drinks for anyone who voted for them. Illegal election manipulation went practically unnoticed.

  “No Bigfoot yet. Though he’d be a relief after some of the requests. A lotta bank robberies. Whenever the economy sours, we get bank robberies.”

  “Well, I know a lotta agents are still pissed that you got taken outta the field. My SAC swears up and down you were the best he’d ever seen and that the Bureau shot themselves in the foot by doing it.”

  “Best thing that coulda happened to me, Angela. I’m not a young man anymore. Running around the country chasing psychopaths isn’t for old men.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” A short silence, then, “I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Sure.”

  “I have a case I’ve been working for about forty-eight hours. It looks like… I don’t know what the hell it looks like. Escaped inmate. You ever heard of the J. Keller Glenn Correctional Institute?”

  “In Nevada?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone I collared a long time ago is actually serving time there.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t remember exactly. His last name was Reynolds.”

  “You ever heard of a Zain Tamora?”

  “I have.”

  “How is it everyone’s heard about him but me?”

  Mickey’s knees were starting to ache and he stretched them out in front of him. “I think you might’ve been around one or two years old when he was in the news. Was a big story back then, but we didn’t have the internet. It was in all the papers for a few weeks and then disappeared when they latched on to the next thing.” He hesitated. “Don’t tell me your escapee is—”

  “Yup.”

  Mickey didn’t say anything for a moment. “Who do you have down there?”

  “A shitload of people that can’t do a damn thing. We got four marshals, at least half a dozen agents, sheriff’s people, state police… everyone’s on this thing. But we’re not turning anything up.”

  He knew he could’ve told her it’d only been forty-eight hours and that wasn’t long enough, but he had taught her long ago that forty-eight hours was all you really had. It was the most important time in any investigation because it was the time when the perpetrator was the most vulnerable, the most confused and frightened. The most likely to make mistakes. After that, they learned and adapted exponentially quicker.

  “I’m sure something will turn up. He’ll get pulled over somewhere for speeding or something.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Angela said. “Mickey, you should have seen what he did to these guards. It’s like a fucking bear attack or something.”

  As much as Mickey enjoyed speaking with her, he wanted to get off the line. Because he knew what was coming. He’d received at least half a dozen requests for help in the last year, and he’d turned all of them down. Even though he and Angela had a history, he would be turning this one down as well.

  “I’ll talk to Kyle,” he said. “See if we can send some resources your way.”

  “I was actually hoping you could take a look.”

  “I don’t do that anymore, Angela. I wouldn’t be any help anyway. I’m just an old man in a basement reading e-mails.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

  “I’ll talk to Kyle about getting some more resources. That’s the best
I can do.”

  She paused. “I can’t even figure out how he got out of his cuffs, though. Sometimes evil’s not explainable, Mickey. I think this fucker is one of those times.”

  “I don’t think that’s true. The brain, in a lot of ways, is like a machine. Input, conversion, output. Tamora is no different than any other perp you’ve ever chased.”

  She sighed. “At least ask Kyle to get me some decent agents. It’s me and my partner and six new graduates. I think the SAC thought this would be good training or something.”

  “I’ll talk to him. I promise.”

  “Okay… it was good talking with you, Mick.”

  “You, too. Stay in touch and let me know how this turns out.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  Mickey hung up and rose. It would be dark soon and time for his medication. He went inside his condo, and shut the door behind him.

  5

  The photographs hung on the smartboard near the cubicles: monstrous displays of what men could do to each other if they were really determined. And from everything Angela could see, no one had been more determined to break out of the Bastille than Zain Tamora.

  The Bastille. Weird name for it.

  She wondered how it’d gotten that nickname. She had only run across it because in the incident report from the prison, the guard had referred to it that way. Weirder still for a guard to call the institution something that the inmates had probably named it.

  She stood in the center of the room with her arms folded, staring at the photos as if they’d give her something if she just looked long enough. Four guards. The first three were killed in a group, and the fourth was killed after he had called to the destination building and asked where the prisoner was. He’d gone out to check on them and was stabbed through the spine with a jagged bit of fencepost.