Unlike most prisons, Florence did not have any communal areas for prisoners to mingle, for they all spent their days on permanent lockdown. Byron had heard that even exercise time, a single hour per day, was strictly organized so that no prisoner ever crossed paths with another. Complete and utter solitude was the facility’s answer to the incomparable brutality of its inmates — they could harm nobody if they never encountered a soul.
Byron was led through the pristine, silent block. Most normal prisons were never, ever silent, filled with complaining, cursing cons and stressed correctional officers, the stench of urine and faeces staining the air. But here it was almost peaceful, and Byron felt himself relax somewhat as he walked alongside the sergeant toward an austere interview room located on the south side of the block.
The sergeant held the door open for Byron and he walked in to see a small table, steel rings bolted into its surface and poured concrete pillars for seats on either side, more steel rings in the floor either side of the seats. The walls were likewise built from poured concrete, featureless and bare, the room utterly empty and even the table bolted into the floor.
‘There are no cameras in here due to the need for absolute security,’ the sergeant informed him. ‘In the past, patients have been known to punch out the lenses and use the glass as a weapon. I’ll have the patient brought through. He will be secured to the table by both wrist and ankle restraints and two guards will be right outside the door, which will be left partially open throughout the meeting. If you have any issues, or you fear in any way that the encounter is becoming dangerous or the patient agitated, you merely have to call the guard and they will intervene instantly. Do you have any questions?’
Byron smiled up at the guard and shook his head.
‘No, thank you. Please do bring the patient through.’
The sergeant turned with military efficiency and marched off down the corridor.
Byron waited a moment and then he slipped from the corner of his mouth a slim, silvery object that he concealed in one hand. Then, he made sure than the envelope in his pocket was open and ready. Finally, he took a deep breath and waited.
For the first time in his life, Byron Thomas prepared to commit treason.
VII
The dawn light broke through the four inch vertical window slot, a brilliant halo of light against a perfect blue sky. The light washed across the face of Aaron James Mitchell as he lay on the concrete bed in his cell and thought of the world outside.
Aaron spent twenty three hours a day locked inside his cell and was escorted by a minimum of three officers for his seven hours’ of private recreation per week. The cell had a desk, a stool and a bed, all of which were forged entirely from poured concrete, as well as a latrine that shut off if blocked. A shower ran on a timer to prevent flooding, as did a sink lacking a potentially dangerous faucet. A polished steel mirror was bolted to the wall, the cell illuminated with an electric light that could only be shut off remotely. In addition, the cell was soundproofed to prevent Aaron from communicating with other inmates via Morse code or by any other means.
It was going to be tough to escape from the facility, and something of a shame: he had enjoyed the peace, solitude and simplicity.
Aaron hauled himself off the narrow bed and padded to the window. Four feet tall and yet only four inches wide, the narrow window was designed to prevent inmates from knowing their specific location within the complex because they could see only the sky and roof through them, making it virtually impossible to plan an escape. Inmates exercised in a concrete pit resembling an empty swimming pool, also designed to prevent them from knowing their location within the facility. The pit was only large enough for a prisoner to walk ten steps in a straight line or thirty in a circle. Telecommunication with the outside world was forbidden. The prison contained a plethora of motion detectors and cameras and no less than fourteen hundred remote-controlled steel doors. Guards in the prison’s control center monitored inmates twenty four hours a day and could press a “panic button” that instantly closed every door in the facility should an escape attempt be suspected. Pressure pads and twelve-foot-tall razor wire fences surrounded the perimeter, which was patrolled by heavily armed guards with silent attack dogs. In extreme cases of inmate misbehavior, the center of the prison housed an area known as “The Black Hole”, which could hold some one hundred fifty prisoners in completely darkened and fully soundproofed cells.
Aaron looked out of the window at the thin patch of sky, his mind turning in the silence. The facility’s location in Colorado gave Mitchell the ability to estimate where his cell was located within the complex due to the light from the rising sun to the east. The lighter edges of cumulus clouds drifting right to left across the blue told Mitchell that he was looking south, as the prevailing winds in the state were from the west. Moreover, ranges of hills to the east of the facility had a tendency to cause warm updrafts of air to disperse clouds during the late morning, further informing Aaron of his location. The final evidence however was a pair of red-tailed hawks he had observed flying back and forth across the sky above the prison. Carrying prey and twigs only one way and not the other, he knew that they were nesting somewhere nearby, and by good fortune he had been able to ascertain that their swooping climbs away toward the south east were aimed at the roof of one of the six watch towers surrounding the facility. A simple mental picture of the facility, combined with all of the evidence, yielded a cell on the southernmost tip of the prison.
Aaron straightened his posture, forced himself not to slouch in defeat as he washed in the tiny sink and relieved himself in the latrine before taking a shower. There was little rush as the strictly coordinated routine of normal prisons was not a feature in a maximum security unit — he would not normally be allowed out of his cell until after lunch, and then only for an hour of strictly supervised exercise. He wouldn’t be making that appointment, as he would be long gone by then.
Mitchell had already memorized his location within the state of Colorado, and of the nearby towns he would be required to traverse in order to reach his desired refuge. From Florence he would travel to Penrose, and from there further north through Beaver Creek state park until he could reach the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, just south of Colorado Springs. It was an irony not lost upon Mitchell that the main route through the state park was named the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Highway.
Aaron dressed and waited patiently for the guards to hand-serve a breakfast of powdered eggs and sauce through a shutter on his cell’s steel door. Then, Aaron sat cross-legged on his bed and waited in absolute silence as he calmed his mind and emptied his body of the silent rage that burned within. His time would come in just a few hours, when he was due to meet with his counsellor.
The silence of minutes turned to hours, Aaron motionless on the bed and in a deep state of meditation. His heartbeat slowed gradually until his mind went into a state of deep relaxation, all sense of time vanished as he explored the deepest neural tracts of his memory, relived moments from his past both distant and recent with complete lucidity. Some haunted him, his long dead parents talking to him it seemed from beyond the grave, but their presence also comforted him and immunized against the confines of the cell surrounding his physical body. Other memories stoked the flame of anger inside him, especially those of Victor Wilms and the voices of Majestic Twelve, they who had used him for thirty years and then abandoned him to die here alone and forgotten.
His rage seemed to ring like a claxon in his mind, and then he realized that the sound was that of his cell door opening. Aaron drifted from the comforting realm of his dreams back to full consciousness and slowly got to his feet. There were no words, only the opening of a small shutter in the steel door at waist height. Aaron walked across to the shutter, turned his back to it and placed his hands behind his back.