“Your name, ma’am?”
She found the source of the voice in the observation deck over her right shoulder. The guard stood impassive in a white shirt, black tie, and wide amber-lensed sunglasses of the type usually available through a special TV offer. A rifle leaned against the sliding glass window.
He found her on his list — it could only have been one name long — and with a slow rolling rumble the steel grille opened to admit her. She walked the twenty paces to the second grille, feigning poise as the first grille rolled shut, effectively trapping her inside the enormous sally-port cage. She heard a low ambient humming she realized was the electrified fence. When the second grille did not immediately open, something interesting happened. Rebecca began to panic. The electric fence, the tower, the glimmering wire, all roused a basic fear, one of humanity denied, of freedom revoked. She trembled, and yet even in the grip of this unreasonable distress, the writer in Rebecca thought, Remember this. Use this. When the grille clicked and rolled open finally, she squeezed through to the other side and did not look back.
The boxy, austere building ahead did not intimidate her as she imagined a super maximum security prison would. The facade was white limestone and square windows, cold and uninviting but not fearsome, with no outward symbols of deterrence. Certain embassies in New York City inspired more dread.
Warden Barton James met her at the administration building’s door. He was tall, no older than sixty, stooped at the shoulders like a career butler, although his hand, when she took it, was warm. Baldness articulated the shape of his skull, tipped forward deferentially on his long neck, and at times his sentences began with a mild stutter. Capillaries of red and blue showed maplike beneath the thin flesh of his face, giving him a sense of frailty that interested Rebecca. Oddly, she noticed his fingernails were trimmed to various lengths, as though he observed some obsessive grooming routine that allowed time for only two fingers each morning.
She had him pegged as a bachelor, a man with nothing but order waiting for him at home, so when he mentioned that Mrs. James was a loyal fan of hers, Rebecca was, in a writerly way, intrigued by her error. Keep surprising me, she thought. Another man and a woman met them inside, Special Agents Gimms and Coté, two FBI agents assigned full-time to the federal penitentiary, and both admirers of Last Words. They shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, then Rebecca continued with Warden James to another imposing grille, this one a grid of two-inch-square steel bars rising from the floor.
“We don’t get many visitors,” he said, excusing the agents’ attention.
“But the inmates must,” said Rebecca, uncertain she had used the right term. Convicts? Prisoners? Criminals?
“They’re allowed one per month, but we find ourselves in a rather remote location here, and these men aren’t that well-loved. We’ve actually cleared very few outsiders since Gilchrist went online five and a half years ago. Which, frankly, is just how we like it.”
“I appreciate you bending the rules for me.”
“No, not me,” he said, pleasantly. “I just do what I’m told.” He led her under the raised grille to another guard wearing a white shirt, black pants, and black tie, standing at an inner checkpoint. Rebecca clipped a laminated ID card to the smooth wool of her sweater. “You’ll have to bear with us now, there are certain things, regulations, we must insist upon. A pat search, to begin with. You received the appropriate clothing list?”
“I did.”
The only restriction that had affected her, aside from the prohibited colors black, blue, and orange, was the one banning brassieres containing wire supports. She wore a sports bra beneath her boyish sweater, a prudent, if somewhat defensive, choice of apparel.
She followed a secretary named Donna into a secure room and surrendered her car keys, coat, and belt, and stood for her very first frisking. Donna’s technique was efficient and businesslike — she had the busy, no-nonsense demeanor of a well-caffeinated young mother — and Rebecca smiled and never squirmed. After more scrutiny from a metal detector wand, Donna asked her to raise her sweater up to her shoulders. “Body alarm,” Donna said, attaching an adhesive patch to Rebecca’s chest, just above her heart, connected by wire to a red, pager-sized device, which clipped to the waistband of Rebecca’s khaki trousers.
“We call them ‘triple deuces,’ ” said the warden, back outside at the lobby checkpoint. “That was the prison system’s old method of sounding an emergency alert, dialing two-two-two on any facility phone. Pressing that black button on the transmitter sends an electronic signal directly to the Command Center, which controls everything inside the prison. The device also tracks your location anywhere within the perimeter at all times. Every officer here at Gilchrist wears a body alarm, and every one of them will answer a triple deuce running. The pulse rate monitor is a backup device: A read over one hundred and sixty will trigger the alarm if, for instance, a gun to your head is preventing you from signaling. If the electrode wire disconnects, same thing. But don’t let that scare you. We haven’t had a triple deuce here in...”
“Twenty-seven weeks,” answered the lobby watchman, one eye on his closed-circuit monitor.
“Twenty-seven weeks. Thank you, William.” The warden passed her a clipboard. “And of course, that was a false alarm.”
She signed the liability waiver, as well as an autograph for Donna, who was markedly more personable now that her official duties were complete. “I can’t wait for your next book.”
Rebecca asked her full name and, inscribing the autograph, asked her what it was like to work at ADX Gilchrist, leaving the part about “being a woman” unsaid.
“Super,” Donna said, brightly. “Pay’s good. Job security, real safe.”
“I notice you don’t wear a weapon.”
“No one does inside, except the extraction teams. There’s really no need. We have rifles at our desks in the event of an emergency. We’re retrained each year.”
“Really,” said Rebecca.
“I like the M-14,” said Donna, eager to impress.
Other than shooting skeet over the rail of a cruise ship on her honeymoon, Rebecca had never held a firearm in her life. A retired police captain from the Bronx edited her fictional gunplay for accuracy. Here was a young mother six inches shorter than she who could handle an M-14.
“My kind of reader,” Rebecca said.
She continued with Warden James down a long corridor of granite terrazzo polished to a high sheen. “Up Front,” as the warden referred to the administrative area, had the antiseptic charm of a hospital morgue at night. Their footfalls echoed. Warden James offered her a tour and was surprised and a little disappointed when she declined.
“I hope you didn’t go to any trouble on my behalf,” she apologized. “But I’m really just here to see Trait.”
He gestured graciously with his hand. “My office, then.”
The interior was routine upper-management, which disappointed her. The office of the warden of ADX Gilchrist could have been that of the president of a smalltown savings and loan. Her eye was drawn to the commendations on the wall and a crystal vase full of butterscotch candies on his desk. He picked up his telephone and said without dialing, “Please make Mr. Trait available.”
Rebecca sat in a firmly padded vinyl chair, mindful of the body alarm wire squirming against her belly. The warden hung up and faced her, standing against the sill of a barred window, fences and cushions of razor wire visible behind him.