“We have what we need, Renee.” Keith gently pulled me back by my shoulder. We’d both used our real names, but it didn’t matter now.
Keith stepped up to Randell and squeezed his face with a strong hand.
“Now, I’m only going to say this once, so you listen carefully, you hear?”
We had come into Sicko’s house. It had to be the warden. We were already naked here. We had to get to Danny and get out!
“One word of this to anyone, and I’m going to make sure you end up on San Quentin’s death row for the rest of your life. Not a fun place. Keep your mouth shut and we’ll get you out early. And forget about the warden’s threats, he’s finished.”
“You don’t understand—”
“No, you don’t.” Keith released the man’s face and slapped him. “It’s over! You either go up or you go down. End of story.”
“Keith, we have to go!” I said.
He glared at Randell, then turned around, face flushed. “Put that thing away,” he said, flipping his hand at my gun.
Danny was being held somewhere off the prison’s blueprints, in a hole that made a man as strong as Randell cringe. Keith and I knew we had to find Danny now, but only I knew how. I was going to put a gun to Michael Banning’s head and force him to take us to Danny.
I shoved the gun under the strap at my calf, pulled my pant leg down over it, and hurried to catch Keith, who had just cleared the cell’s door and pulled up to wait for me.
So I’d thought, but I was wrong.
The sight that greeted me when I stepped out of Bruce Randell’s cell stopped me beside Keith. Not ten feet away stood a thick man with a blond crew cut flanked by two commanding officers in black.
Both of them had rifles hooked in the crooks of their elbows—a major breach of security protocol in any California prison, I knew. Firearms were only permitted in gun rails, towers, and control booths, out of reach of any prisoner, bar none.
The man with the crew cut looked amused. “I hear you guys need an escort,” he said.
Keith started forward. “That won’t be necessary. We were just finishing up.”
The man held up a hand. “I’m afraid the warden insists.”
I told myself to run. It had all gone wrong. Instead I pulled out my phone.
“No calls. Put the phone down. Now.”
“This isn’t your business.”
“Well now, that’s funny, because the warden told me it was. He instructed me to come find you and escort you. He said go find Renee Gilmore and Keith Hammond and bring them to me. Drop the phone.”
I glanced at Keith, who nodded. I dropped the phone on the concrete.
My heart was pounding. The warden knew our names, which meant he knew everything.
The CO flashed a grin. “Captain Bostich, here to serve. Now if you’d please follow me.”
This was all a mistake! Basal was official property of the state of California, an institution protected by checks and balances meant to ensure the humane treatment of all prisoners. I was only here because someone—the warden—was going to break through all of those layers of protection to destroy Danny.
In the end none of these thoughts got my feet moving or wiped the smirk off the captain’s face.
“Let’s go, honey. He has plans for you.”
35
THE EMOTIONS THAT raged through Danny as he lay on the table in deep meditation brought not a shred of reason with them. If not for years of training in the bloodied fields of battle he would have reacted to the warden’s words as any man might. He would have thrown himself against the restraints on his arms and screamed in a futile attempt to free himself.
But when he learned that the warden had been manipulating Renee all along and had led her to Basal to break him by abusing her, he reacted as only a man with so much training might.
He did nothing.
Rash movement would get them both killed. Nothing prudent could be done without thought. The only problem was, his mind wasn’t immediately capable of clear thought. It was fractured by a week of horror and two days of torture, and now it was frozen by a kind of rage and bitterness he didn’t know existed.
He didn’t thrash pointlessly against his restraints. He lay shaking with rage, trying to grasp at some kind of meaning.
Like demonic drones, the warden’s words whispered through his mind. She’s been put through the ringer, they said, and Danny tried to think of what Pape meant when he said ringer. And then he tried not to because the thoughts were too ugly.
She was led here, the words said, and Danny tried to think of how that could be. Led how? Under what threat? What terror had drawn her?
Maybe she can fill Peter’s shoes, he’d said.
The rage that came with those words shut his mind down again.
He tried to move, he really did, but he wasn’t thinking right.
Maybe she can fill Peter’s shoes, the warden had said.
For the first time in two days, Danny’s mind was merciful to him and shut down completely. His world faded to black and his shaking stopped.
36
MY MELTDOWN BEGAN with that phone call ten days earlier, but sitting in the corner of that dark holding cell at the back of the administration wing, I faded away to nothing.
There was nothing left. I had propped myself up with a blazing sense of purpose and hope for ten days, and just like that it had all been crushed in one final blow. It was done. Finished. I tried to think of a way out, but as Keith had first said, breaking into prison was one thing; breaking out was another. And this wasn’t just any prison, it was Basal.
I didn’t even question how it could be done, I knew that it couldn’t, not now. Not in time to save Danny, not in time to save ourselves.
The cell the captain had taken us to was a ten-by-ten concrete room with a thick metal door, nothing else except for the fluorescent light on the ceiling, which was off.
They’d marched us through back halls at gunpoint and ushered us into the cell without saying another word. With each step I tried to tell myself that something would happen to fix this. The real authorities would come busting in to free us. Keith would throw himself at the guards and give me a chance to escape. Danny would run through the door and save us.
But it was totally hopeless, and I knew that.
Keith tried to reason with the captain, promising to bring the whole prison down under a storm of controversy that would put them all behind their own bars. He was an attorney and knew the law. He had contacts in law enforcement on the outside. He knew congressmen and senators.
His threats fell on deaf ears, and with an ashen-faced glance at me, Keith gave up.
He sat on the floor beside me, slumped against the wall. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. My mind was lost.
“You realize what this means,” he said. It was a statement, not a question, and I knew the answer.
“The warden can’t let us leave this place,” I said.
“We know too much.”
“He’s going to kill us.”
“No one even knows we’re here,” he said. “The records have us as Julia Wishart and Myles Somerset. None of the inmates or guards have any idea what we really look like. There’s not a single bit of evidence that Keith Hammond and Renee Gilmore ever came to Basal.”
I hadn’t thought about that.
“They’re torturing the inmates here. The only way that happens without an OIG investigation is through a high level of planning and control. Brainwashing, even. The warden was one step ahead of us all the way. He already knows how this is going to end.”