Judd Holt awoke in his cell as he had every morning for the past 1,779 days. Physically, he was located inside a prison, but the issue of his legal whereabouts was more convoluted.
On a quiet winter day in 2006, Indiana’s Federal Correctional Complex at Terre Haute inaugurated a euphemistically named Communications Management Unit, which floated inside the larger prison. The unit’s nickname, Little Guantanamo, was more apt.
Like its cousin in Marion, Illinois, the Indiana CMU was created without any formal review process required by law. Mind-fuckingly, the unit was located on U.S. soil while somehow not existing on sovereign land—a clever Schrö dinger’s-cat contortion designed to suspend prisoners’ inalienable rights once they entered the sealed, windowless box.
CMU detainees—mostly terrorists or suspected terrorists—were deprived due process. Once ensconced inside the complex, they had radical restrictions placed on their phone calls, visits, and written correspondence.
For Judd Holt this was perfect.
He needed to stay hidden as much as President Jonathan Bennett preferred him to be hidden.
Of course, Holt could have done without the incarceration bit, but he’d fucked up, stepping into an FBI sting operation that was too high-profile to cover up. Almost five years ago in the East Ward of Trenton, New Jersey, he’d illegally acquired an FN M249 SAW.
If he was going to kill Orphan X, he knew he’d require a serious platform.
He’d also acquired a Predator backpack that could hold eight hundred linked rounds to feed the rifle. Then he procured that amount of firepower four times over, in case it took more than a minute-long sustained burst to put down Orphan X. He’d driven to an isolated patch of woods outside Langhorne, Pennsylvania, to test the weapon. When the task force closed in, he’d been wearing the bulging rucksack on his back, unleashing on a stand of yellow birch like Santa Claus with a rage-control issue.
He could’ve obliterated his pursuers with a twitch of his trigger finger, but as accustomed as he was to bloodletting, he didn’t need deaths of federal agents on his conscience.
So he’d allowed himself to be taken.
They couldn’t believe that he was planning to use so much firepower for anything but a public massacre. They didn’t understand the man he was hunting.
Needless to say, they had no idea who he really was. He lived under a false identity buttressed by authentic government-issued papers that were backstopped at the highest level.
Gun laws came with sentencing guidelines as draconian as those for drug laws, so he’d been slapped with two sixty-month sentences, one for the hog and the ammo, one for transporting across state lines.
He didn’t expect to survive his first night in jail. He figured he’d be neutralized as soon as the sun dropped. Those were the rules of the game. He’d been caught—in the act of executing a personal mission, no less—and being caught risked exposure for those above him. The people who really mattered.
But that night a proxy had arrived who’d given him a choice. A deal could be cut to take him off the boards. Holt would be buried in a CMU, out of sight and out of mind, where he’d finish his sentence. He wasn’t to make any noise or file any appeals. He’d get out once his time had been served or when he was required—whichever came first.
He never went to trial. He zippered his mouth and got on the bus and had lived inside this box ever since. It was so cramped that when he lay on the cardboard-thin mattress of his cot, his outstretched arms could touch the opposing walls.
Of the three thousand prisoners housed in the entire complex, Holt was the most lethal, despite the fact that he’d already breached his fifties. He was a “balancer,” one of the few non-Muslims scattered throughout the population to inoculate the unit against lawsuits. He’d been told more times than he could count that he looked like he had Scottish blood, but he didn’t know where his people hailed from any more than he knew where he did.
He was built like an anvil, a whisper over five-nine, broadened with veiny, bulging muscle. His short-cropped hair, dull brown tinged with copper, receded into a severe widow’s peak, a monk’s tonsure beginning to crown in the back. A beard crowded his face, bristle so dense it looked like wiry fur. Under armed guard he was allowed to shave in his cell twice a week, and he required a fresh razor each time.
He was given fifteen minutes of yard time in a pen every Sunday—when it wasn’t raining, when there were no threats of riots, when no irregularities had occurred during the week. During that time he had kept to himself, as was his habit, but he’d observed the others closely and forged a few alliances, not for protection but because he never knew when savage men might come in handy.
Today was not Sunday, which meant that he had sixteen hours to fill inside this six-by-eight-foot cell before he could go to sleep again.
That was fine. His training had prepared him for this. Time was money, and he had plenty to spend in here, 1,779 days with nothing to do but hammer his body into shape, hone his mind, and stoke his personal obsession to a high blaze. The instant he walked free from these four walls, he’d be ready to resume his mission.
Murder Orphan X.
Holt lay on the cot now, eyes still closed, feeling the warmth of sleep depart his face. The air was cool and smelled strongly of industrial cleaner. He let his lids part.
Directly over his head, a grapefruit-size orb bulged from the low ceiling, sufficiently tinted to hide the surveillance lenses inside.
The air felt different. He sensed it before he even sat up.
When he did, his cell door was standing open.
He stayed perfectly still, focused on the door, waiting. Ten minutes passed, maybe twenty.
He rose and knuckled the door gently. The rarely used hinges creaked.
He stepped into the hall.
The gate at the end was rolled back.
He moved toward it, drifting past other cells. Through the tiny glass squares, pairs of eyes watched him glide by.
Silence prevailed.
He reached the gate.
The guard chair just beyond was empty, a folded-back Sports Illustrated left on the padded seat.
Holt stepped through.
Now he was in a wider corridor that led to a solid steel door and a guard station. He kept on.
The guard on duty was watching the morning news.
Holt approached slowly and stood in full view of the tempered glass. The guard didn’t remove his eyes from the small TV screen. His hand dipped beneath the counter, a buzz electrified the air, and the steel door clicked open.
Holt grasped the cool handle and pulled it wide. He stepped through into the gen-pop unit, two stories high. The range floor was spotless, broken only by floating staircases to the second-level catwalks. The animals were all in their precast-concrete houses, still behind locked doors, a face darkening every tiny glass window.
Holt ambled across the empty plain of concrete, sensing myriad heads swiveling to note his progress. Breath huffed across the tempered panes, fogging them sporadically.
So enormous was the hall of warehoused humans that it took Holt a full ninety seconds to traverse its length. Total silence accompanied him at every step. Given the height of the ceiling and the number of lives housed under it, the quiet felt thunderous, weighty, religious—as if he were moving through some netherworld, passing beneath the gaze of eternally trapped souls.
He reached the controlled entry point at the far side. He stopped and faced the security camera above.
The locking mechanism disengaged. He opened the door.
He was in the reception center now, where he’d been screened and processed nearly five years ago. An obese guard sat at the counter, working her gum like a cud. In the pass-through tray, a neatly folded stack of clothes waited.
It took Holt a moment to recognize them as his own.
As he approached, the guard swiveled on her chair, turning her back with evident disgust.
He stripped off the gray prison jumpsuit and stepped clear of it, leaving it puddled on the tile floor. For security reasons he’d been issued no undergarments, so he stood naked now, the air cold against his flesh.
He crossed to the counter, retrieved the clothes he’d last seen 1,779 days ago, and dressed. Olive drab vintage fatigue pants, worn T-shirt, steel-toed boots. A hundred bucks in gate money rested in the tray next to the wallet holding his authentic if illegitimate driver’s license. He folded the five crisp twenties into his pocket and headed out.
A guard stood by the concrete faç ade of the entrance, twelve-gauge shotgun in hand.
The men stared at each other, and for a moment Holt wondered if he’d misread the situation, that he’d been led to his execution.
But the guard spit in the dirt and turned away.
Holt started across the dusty yard. In the tower the sniper kept up his watch, his wraparound shades winking back the sunlight. Holt watched the sunglasses scan right past him as if he didn’t exist.
Which, he supposed, he didn’t.
He came to the front gates, two layers deep topped with coils of concertina.
They parted like the Red Sea.
He walked through one and then the other.
The instant he stepped free, a bizarre chime sounded, accompanied by a vibration against his thigh.
He reached down to one of his cargo pockets and lifted free an old-fashioned flip cell phone. He had never seen it before.
He snapped it open.
A voice he didn’t know said, “There’s a Nissan Maxima across the parking lot to your right. No, farther right.” He adjusted his gaze. The voice continued, “The keys are in the ignition. The destination is in the GPS.”
The call severed with a click.
Orphan A closed the phone and ambled to the waiting car.