Hostage Zero

Evan brought his arm down quickly and whipped his head to the side, expecting to see Father Dom standing there. His voice had been that clear in his head.

When He wants me to know, He’ll tell me.

A sense of utter clarity washed over him, flooding away the darkness.

He didn’t have time for a pity party. Evan needed to grow a pair and embrace the reality of today. That meant he had to wrap his arms and his mind around the fact that he’d been taken from a place he liked and shoved into a place that smelled like mold and was hot as hell. He had no friends, so that meant he was on his own.

How do you run away if you don’t know where you are to begin with? You’ve got to start from someplace, and Evan didn’t even have a compass point to shoot for-as if he had a compass in the first place, or would know how to use it if he did.

His first decision, then, was easy: He’d wait things out for a while. So far, he saw no reason to tempt people to kill him. If the time came to risk death, Evan figured he would know it, and he would make the big decisions then. For the time being he’d just hold tight and-

His door slammed open, revealing Shack Man silhouetted against the harsh light of the day. “Come,” he said, beckoning with his whole hand. “Time to go.”

“Go where?” Evan asked.

“ Appurate,” the man said. Evan knew “hurry” when he heard it. He left the jeans where they lay, folded on the plank, and he walked cautiously to the door. As he approached, he saw that a beat-up four-wheel-drive vehicle was waiting for him.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Sussex 1 State Prison on Musselwhite Road in Waverly, Virginia, sprawled like a concrete cancer in the former tobacco fields south of Richmond. First opened in 1998, the place featured the overly sterile look of the modern supermax prisons that are so popular these days.

This was home for the worst of the worst, and they were treated accordingly, closed into their soundproofed concrete cells for twenty-three hours a day, the twenty-fourth hour dedicated to indoor recreation. In its own way, the stifling nature of the new cell design had to be even more oppressive than the barred cages of days gone by.

After a lifetime in law enforcement-first as an FBI agent and later as sheriff of a small community in Indiana-Gail Bonneville still could not abide the oppressive tightness of the air inside a prison. The filtered body odor seemed harder to breathe than air on the outside. She wondered if it was possible to lock the doors so tightly that the oxygen levels actually dropped. Add to the general misery of the place the meter-pegging humidity of the otherwise stifling July day, and you begin to realize just how little the penal system in the United States has evolved from the torture chambers of medieval Europe. Where, she wondered, were the protesters who forced the closing of Guantanamo when places like this-new construction, no less-continued to thrive?

At least the noise levels that were so common of older prisons were kept in check here.

The deal that Gail had made with Marie Brady, Frank Schuler’s attorney, had left no room for variation: She would allow her client to appear in the same room with Gail, but all questions would be addressed to the attorney. She would then make the decision as to whether or not he could answer. At this stage, with Schuler’s execution date less than two weeks away, they could afford for nothing to go wrong. In a perfect world, Schuler would speak to no one even distantly related to law enforcement. This exception was being made only because his son had been kidnapped.

Per Jonathan’s instructions, Gail had mentioned nothing about the boy having been recovered safely.

In deference to the hopelessness of Frank Schuler’s situation, she’d dressed plainly and unprovocatively. That meant gray slacks with a black blouse, chosen in part to help conceal any filth she picked up from the furniture.

Marie Brady had arrived first and was waiting in the reception area for Gail when she arrived. Neither tall nor short, the lawyer was likewise dressed plainly, but less formally than Gail had come to expect from attorneys. Her black slacks and top were clearly off-the-rack, and her shoes hadn’t seen polish in a long, long time. They were the clothes of the working poor, and it occurred to Gail that such was the lot of a lawyer who specialized in saving the condemned from their court-ordered fates.

The women greeted each other cordially, and then Marie walked Gail through the process of gaining entry into the death row interview room. Throughout the process, Gail noted with interest the respect shown to the attorney by all of the correctional officers. It bordered on deference, in fact. As they ran through the perfunctory checklist of dos and don’ts, she got the feeling that they wanted to apologize for the inconvenience.

“You seem comfortable here,” Gail said as they cleared the security air locks and followed their escort down the brightly lit concrete hallway.