Jim O’Haire raised his left arm and looked at his watch. It was a few minutes before midnight. Something had awakened him; a noise, a metallic click. He didn’t know what it was. He sat up in his cot, shoved the covers back and swinging his legs over the edge. He was a husky man with graying hair and violently blue eyes. His roommate was sound asleep in the upper bunk. The lights from the main tier hall cast shadows in the narrow cell. From somewhere he could hear music. He ‘figured one of the guards was listening to a radio.
A large black figure, dressed in prison dungarees, appeared at the cell door. “O’Haire,” the man called softly.
Jim O’Haire recognized him as George Hanks, one of the trustees from downstairs. He got up, but remained uncertainly by his bunk. Something was wrong here, drastically wrong. All the inmates were supposed to be locked down at this hour.
“let’s go,” Hanks said. He glanced over his shoulder, then eased the cell door open, taking care to make as little noise as possible.
“What is it?” O’Haire asked. “What do you want?”
“You’re getting’ out of here, that’s what it is,” Hanks said. “Now move your honky ass and fix up your bunk, we’re runnin’ out of time.“The sound he had heard was the electronic door lock. Somehow Hanks had gotten to the control board, or one of the guards was in on this. O’Haire didn’t want to get his hopes up, not this soon after talking with the two Agency pricks who had come out here the other day. Besides, this simply didn’t feel right to him. Hanks and the other prisoners had given him a lot of shit over the past week.
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“Shit, I’m not going to stand here all fuckin’ night waitin’ on you. We got word from the man that you’re getting’ out of here. Tonight.”
Christ, was it possible? “What about my brother?”
“He’s on his way. Now move your ass!” Hanks whispered urgently. O’Haire hesitated only a moment longer before he turned and stuffed his pillow beneath his blanket so that from the cell door a passing guard might be fooled at first glance into believing that someone was in the bunk. There was no way he was going to sit rotting in this place when there was a chance of immediate escape. No way in hell.
At the barred door, O’Haire slipped out onto the walkway three tiers up from the main floor. Hanks, his powerful muscles rippling beneath his thin prison shirt, eased the door shut, the lock snapping home, then turned and nodded silently for O’Haire to follow him.
At the end of the walkway they took the stairs down to the main floor where Hanks produced a key and opened the steel door, admitting them to a holding vestibule. On the far side was another steel door, a small square window at eye level. Hanks unlocked this door, and O’Haire followed him out into the access corridor which ran the length of the main building. A guard should have been stationed here, but his desk was empty, the corridor completely deserted. Hanks had a plan, and the organization and contacts to carry it out. They were attributes that O’Haire admired, and he allowed a faint smile as he followed the big man down the corridor and outside into the bitter-cold night.
They held up in the shadows as a light-gray station wagon crossed the prison yard from the laundry plant.
“What’s the plan?” O’Haire whispered.
Hanks looked back at him, the expression on his face unreadable. “You and your brother are getting out in the morning garbage run.”
“What about outside?”
“Somebody will be waitin’ on you. It’s all set up.”
“How about clothes?”
“Man, quit raggin’ my ass. You’ll be taken care of.”
“I want to know,” O’Haire demanded, grabbing the man’s arm and pulling him around.
Hanks shoved him up against the brick wall, his eyes suddenly wild, his muscles bunched up. “Don’t mess with me, motherfucker! I said you were going to be taken care of, and I meant it!” O’Haire spread his hands. “Sorry. My ass is hanging out here.”
“Yeah, so is mine,” Hanks said, backing off. The car was gone, and they hurried to the far end of the building, passed through a tunnel, crossed a broad courtyard and driveway, then entered the garbage-collection facility through a side door, the sudden odor of rotting food and an open grease trap assailing their nostrils.
The prison garbage was separated here into recyclable items such as cans and glass bottles which were crushed and shipped out, and paper and plastic products that were dried, shredded, and sent over to the electrical generating plant for burning. Everything else was loaded aboard trucks each morning and taken out to the country dump off prison grounds. Four big garbage trucks were parked in the main garage. Hanks led the way behind the trucks and through another steel door into the big separation room adjacent to the prison kitchen.
Jim O’Haire’s younger brother, Liam, stood leaning up against a table, his arms folded over his chest. He straightened up when he spotted his brother.
“We’re getting out of here,” he said.
“Right…” Jim O’Haire started to reply when Hanks suddenly swiveled on him, grabbed a handful of his shirt and bodily threw him up against the table. “Motherfucker,” Hanks swore.
“What the hell,” Jim O’Haire shouted, regaining his balance and spinning around.
Six black men had appeared out of the shadows, each of them armed with a knife. Hanks pulled out a switchblade and thumbed it open with a soft click.“Mother of God, what’s going on here?” Jim O’Haire shouted. “Go ahead and scream, boy, nobody’s going to hear you,” Hanks said, he and the others advancing.
“We did our part,” Jim O’Haire shouted. “Goddamnit, we did as we were told.”
Chapter 17
The number at her father’s house in Baltimore rang ten times before Stephanie finally hung up. She’d used the pay phone in the corridor between the cocktail lounge and the lobby.
Calls from their room could be too easily monitored by the hotel operator. Mac had told her that. She believed in him. God in heaven, she’d done everything he’d told her.
She glanced down the darkly paneled corridor toward the cocktail lounge. A couple of men sat at the bar talking with the woman bartender. Other than that the hotel was quiet at this hour.
Where is my father? she asked herself. It was a Monday night. He should have been home asleep in his bed unless there had been an emergency call to the practice. But he never got emergency calls.
And where was Mac? He had been gone nearly seven hours now. Where was he? What was happening? She had a vision of his bulletriddled body lying beside a dark road somewhere in the country.
She didn’t think she could take much more of this. Sitting alone, waiting. She’d never been very good at that. Highnote was somehow at the center of this business. In at least that much she and Mac were now in total agreement. But where he was blinded by past friendships, previous loyalties, she was able to see with an unprejudiced eye. Mac had been set up from the moment he’d been arrested in Moscow. Highnote was the logical man behind it all. He was Zebra One. He was the man in Washington who had controlled the O’Haire network… and probably still controlled whatever was left of the organization. Mac, by going to see him, had been walking into a trap.
So write him off. Turn around and get out. Run. But to where? Mac had not returned and her father did not answer her call. She was alone, and she was frightened. She walked back to the elevator and took it up to their third-floor room where she went to the window. It was snowing quite hard now.
I can’t stand by and watch you commit suicide…. It’s been Highnote all along. It has to be!