Menckley looked surprised. “How am I supposed to discourage them?”
“Just do it. See that they stay happy and occupied until tomorrow morning.”
Trait left him and started down the hallway. He had been inside a few police stations in his time, he knew the general layout. He paused at the doorway to the radio room. Every line on the Enhanced 911 switchboard was flashing. An ex-con named DeYoung was working the console, and Trait motioned to him to put a call on speaker.
“Gilchrist Police,” said DeYoung. “What’s your emergency?”
“Oh, thank God, I’ve been calling.” An elderly woman, whispering. “There’re men snooping around my backyard.”
Enhanced 911 displayed the name and street address of the caller. DeYoung said, “Is this forty-three Abenaki Way?”
“Yes.” Relief, her voice growing louder. “Yes, that’s me.”
“Those are plainclothes police officers, ma’am. We’re checking residents door to door. You can let them right in.”
“Oh — thank heavens.”
Trait moved on. He wore the police chief’s key ring on his belt — having changed out of his hack clothes and back into regular prison issue — and found the lockup around the corner to the right. There were only two cells: Gilchrist was a safe community, once you factored out 312 reluctant residents. Trait found the key that fit the lock, and the steel-barred door swung open.
Warden Barton James sat turned toward the wall on one end of the thick plastic bench inside. He was hunched over, head hanging, hands tucked protectively between his legs. His bald skull was florid with yellow and purple bruises and blood from his face soaked the front of his white cotton shirt. He was beltless and shoeless and still.
Luther Trait entered and stood before him. Trait stooped for a good look at his face. The warden’s right eye was a swollen, raspberry egg. Within the bruised orbit of his left, a pale green iris drifted toward Trait, a dilated pupil attempting to focus.
Trait sat down next to the warden. He relaxed and took in the clean, wide cell. Then, for a moment, he was sitting in his foster father’s study, in an oversized, smoothly polished wooden college chair. Trait waited and the image cleared.
“There are things I want you to know,” Trait said, “because no one else will truly appreciate what I have achieved here. I can tell you now, the break started with your guards. Brotherhood of Rebellion parolees got the home addresses of the E-Unit hacks and maintenance personnel. You all live in a neat little hack neighborhood, so it was easy to do surveillance on the hacks and their hack wives and little hack children enjoying their freedom. My men concentrated on dietary habits — specifically, breakfast foods. Getting into the houses was no big deal, and the sedatives were carefully measured with body size in mind, timed to release well into the hacks’ work shifts. Yesterday was shakedown and sterilization in E-Unit. It was smooth, the hacks going down without any biological surges triggering their body alarms. We used the sight lines along the corridor to duck the cameras and swap clothes with the sleeping hacks. Then we played guard, signaling the cameras to open the rest of the pod doors. This same trick worked for the grate openings at the end of the hall, and the range upstairs, your hacks opening doors for us all the way to the Command Center. The battle there was bloody but quick, and then we owned the entire complex by remote control. Pod doors were opened in every security unit and the animals set free.”
Warden James did not move, facing away from Trait, crumpled in pain. His only response was a tuneful wheeze.
“You’re wondering how a man in solitary confinement in the highest security prison in the world could coordinate such an ambitious plan. I got a little help from my friends. The only times I was allowed out of the prison was to provide testimony for one of the members of my ‘disruptive group.’ A few minutes of face time, that was all I needed. You can thank my lawyers for that. I left most of the details to a trusted associate who has been lying low here in town a few days now, your average good citizen, preparing for my release. Other devoted Brotherhood parolees have been drifting steadily into town, getting the lay of the land and jacking tractors and heavy machinery to barricade the main roads and blitz you at the staging area. We took you from behind. You can see, I considered everything.”
Trait was only now starting to appreciate the victory himself.
“You understand now why I had to see the writer? Her requesting a visit one day before the riot, after eighteen months of planning? I was worried the riot was off, but it wasn’t. Tonight I have unleashed the wrath of ADX Gilchrist on its little host town. One night of rampage won’t make up for years of torture, but it is a start. I’m putting their pent-up hostility to good use. The cons are rounding up every citizen in town and bringing them back to the prison. Tomorrow morning I will outline for them my great design.”
The warden’s voice was hushed and pained. “You’ll never control them all.”
Trait was pleased with the warden’s impaired speech. “No more than you could. The difference between you and me is, I don’t intend to try. Tonight I have their enthusiasm and that is enough.”
The satisfaction of the past few hours drained as Trait looked ahead to the strength required to see this thing through to the end. He turned the warden toward him, eliciting a pitiful groan.
“I am not going to kill you, Warden. On the contrary, I am going to do everything within my power to keep you alive. You are my prisoner now. I am going to study you as you studied me.”
Barton James’s slanted jaw garbled his words. “The army will come in here and blow you all to hell.”
Trait smiled. “I give your government two hours before it realizes what has happened here, and another six to eight to mass troops outside the town. By then I will have addressed the country, and that should put things into proper perspective. You think we got lucky breaking out of Gilchrist? I’m working on a fifty-year plan. This is only the beginning.”
It was midnight and Callie Coldwell was sitting in the dark with a loaded .38 in her lap. She never slept well when Ted was gone, but when Channel Seven’s prison remote went to static, she really got scared. She couldn’t see any lights on in the windows down Duggan Way, the main road of the cookie-cutter village of correctional officers known as Gilchrist Falls. She wondered how many other wives had already left.
Ted’s last words to her on the phone that morning were Just sit tight. And she had done that, making an afternoon of it with Becky and C. C. after their early release from school, building a family of snowmen in the front yard and baking sugar cookies to welcome them to the neighborhood. Later, they went tramping over to Dinah’s to go sledding with her two girls. From the hill out back they watched the minivans pulling away, she and Dinah dishing cruelly on the younger wives. Callie was home in plenty of time for Ted’s next call, due six hours ago now. Maybe mixing two highballs after the girls went to bed wasn’t such a good idea. She was getting really paranoid now that something had gone wrong.
That was why Ted’s old gun lay across her thighs. So when the blue-lighted police cruiser turned onto her street, she said aloud, “Thank you, God,” going to the window, leaving the gun behind. Just knowing that the Gilchrist cops were out there — even though Ted called them Mayberry RFD — put her mind at ease. All it took was that one little sign of authority.
Then the cruiser stopped outside her house. All gratitude melted away, and she felt her worst fears were about to be confirmed: Something terrible had happened to Ted at the prison. She stood behind the window sheers, hiding from bad news, praying the cruiser would shine a light in their yard and roll along.