Henry stared at the rain out the side window of the gray government car all the way into the city.
They told him nothing. They barely tolerated his existence. When he had had to use the toilet facility on the airplane, he thought one of the marshals would hit him for the crime of having a bladder.
Henry McGee wore a prisoner’s look. His black eyes seemed to focus on some middle distance. He stared into tomorrow, which was fifty yards away. Five days before his sure-thing escape, and they were moving him. He wondered if it was Don Anthony’s doing.
The car delivered him to a high-rise triangular building on Van Buren Street. The building had narrow slits of windows and resembled three old-fashioned computer cards leaning against each other. The Loop elevated tracks permanently shaded the entrance of the building. Henry was disoriented by the noise of the El train passing overhead and by the silence of the federal marshals.
They passed him through security and turned his papers over to a man behind a gunmetal gray desk.
Henry didn’t ask any questions. They weren’t going to tell him.
They put him in a single room on the ninth floor of the high-rise prison called the Metropolitan Correctional Center. It was very collegelike, much softer than Lewistown. Henry looked around the room. The guard said that since he had eaten on the airplane, there would be no further food until breakfast.
He looked out the window. It was a window, and the glass, while thick, was merely glass. He looked down at the glittering city. The Loop shone with light in the soft rain. The streets were full of cars. He could see trains. He saw the lights stretching out to the horizon, grids of light on lights. It saddened him inexplicably to be imprisoned so close to so many people.
“Hello, Henry.”
The interview room had no windows. It was in the federal court building one block north of the prison. Henry McGee had been escorted to the building by two somber federal marshals who handcuffed him, pushed him into another gray government car, and drove him one block.
“I could a walked,” Henry said.
“Streets are for free people,” one of the marshals had said.
Henry McGee wore handcuffs and stared at Devereaux. The Devereaux of his dreams faded into the real dimensions of this man. God, Henry hated him.
Henry rested his manacled hands on the table.
“Can you take these off?” he said.
Devereaux got up, went to the door, and summoned the marshal. The marshal removed the handcuffs and looked hard at Henry, as though he regretted doing this. He closed the door on the two of them.
Henry tried to keep down his excitement. Devereaux. There was going to be a trade after all. The Soviets had come through. The Soviets kept their promise, and Devereaux was going to have to eat crow about it. That’s the only thing this could mean. And to think he paid Don Anthony all that money to escape from Lewistown. Now he would go back to Moscow. He would still have fifty grand left. In Moscow, money could buy anything, the same as it could anywhere else in the world.
Henry McGee’s eyes were shining again, and he felt good for the first time since they took him out of Lewistown.
“The trade,” Henry McGee said.
“There’s no trade.”
“You’re shitting me. What am I doing here?”
“How’s life inside?”
“You couldn’t hack it.”
“Penitentiary.”
“What?”
“They call them penitentiaries. It’s a place for penitents. For bad people to regret their bad deeds. Do you regret yet sufficiently, Henry?”
“Come off this shit.”
Devereaux said, “We want to know something.”
He dealt the words like cards.
Henry stared.
“Skarda,” Devereaux said.
The name lay between them. Henry picked it up and examined it. “Skarda,” he repeated. It burned right back into the darkest part of his memory.
Devereaux waited.
Henry put the name back on the table. He stared at the man across from him. The walls were white, the room was a perfect box. If other humans existed, they were not aware of it. The room was the world and nothing was beyond.
“What’s in it for me?”
“Your cooperation is appreciated,” Devereaux said. “It shows a degree of penitence. The Lord loves a sinner who repents his sin.”
Henry waited.
“On March twelfth last year, you attacked and mutilated a prisoner. Henry Lewis Jackson. You cut off one of his balls.”
Henry McGee didn’t blink.
“We suspect you murdered Luis Maria Miranda. He was your buddy in Lewistown, Henry. A hit was put on him, and it was probably you. You were his pal, Henry, how could you kill a pal? But then you stuffed that Eskimo girl in the trunk of a car in Anchorage—”
“Shit, Devereaux, I was probably the lead pilot in the attack on Pearl Harbor, too,” Henry McGee said. “Let’s clean up the blotter.”
Devereaux went on as though Henry had not spoken. “We’re afraid we might lose you, Henry. We’re considering sending you to a maximum-security institution.” The words were flat cards again, laid out like solitaire, all the words strung out across the table with no kings or aces showing. Henry stared at them and he didn’t have a play. Time to shuffle the deck.
“Marion. It’s our maximum prison. It’s in southern Illinois, Henry. You’ve heard of it.”
Everyone had. Everyone knew about the bad places. Marion was the worst. They had the kid spy — the one called Falcon — locked up down there, and it made him so crazy he was fighting in the courts to get out. The other spy, the guy who gave the secrets to the Israelis, he was there, too. The only way you got out of Marion was to die. Everyone was hard-core, everyone was doing maximum time. Marion was the waiting room of hell.
Henry McGee had seen the inside of Lubyanka once. He had gone into the basement rooms where the Cheka had beaten Reilley, the British spy, to death. He had smelled the hopelessness of the basement rooms, the smell of blood spilled and death torn out of living bodies. Marion would be like that, only he would not be tortured in a brutal manner. The torture would consist of days dropping, one by one, drops of rain on rock, wearing it down through the endless days of the endless millennium. Christ! Henry thought. He was scaring himself. He had to get control, grab the cards.
“What do you want?”
“Skarda. Tell us about Skarda.”
“Honestly don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” Skarda. What if he played Skarda now, just a card in a friendly game, and it turned out once they got Skarda, they screwed old Henry? Play a cool hand and don’t give nothing away. “Honestly don’t know.” Just to show he was lying.
“Honest Injun?” Devereaux said.
“Skarda. You want me to make something up?”
“Go ahead.”
“Skarda. Skarda was this old fella in Alaska, used to trap on the slope, was part Inipu’it. Ran into him in Fairbanks one winter—”
“That’s not good enough,” Devereaux said.
Henry blinked. “Skarda is a plan. Skarda is an operation to populate the north coast of Siberia with—”
“Henry, stop fucking around with me.”
“I ain’t fucking around. You wanna know something. I’m trying to tell you—”
“You’re hopeless. You couldn’t tell the truth if your life depended on it. It does, Henry, by the way. Depend on it. Marion is not a threat. It’s the reality of things. You think about it, Henry, and you get in touch with me when you’ve got something to say.”