It was convincing enough, and when she pressed her lips together and looked as though she were about to let the gun off again, he finally cracked. “It’s the prison! Green Haven…Green Haven! Don’t …please!” Instinctively, he brought his knees to his chest to shield himself and then began to sob.
Only then did Andy lower her gun. She almost took pity on him. “Green Haven Prison,” she muttered under her breath so that she’d remember. Then, while keeping her aim on Luke, she stepped over to the table and poured another couple of ounces of Jack Daniels in his glass. She handed it to him and ordered him to drink. He obeyed and emptied the glass in seconds.
“Thank you very much for your cooperation, Luke,” Andy said calmly as she gathered up his glass as well as hers. Then, she grabbed the keys to the office from inside his left jean pocket. He didn’t bother to resist. The threat of bodily harm had passed, and the combination of whiskey and Rohypnol had sedated him to the point where sleep would soon take over.
Holstering the Ruger back onto her thigh, she hurriedly left the room and locked the door behind her while carrying the two glasses. She didn’t want to leave behind anything with her fingerprints in Luke’s “office” now that they were registered to her ID.
She left the keys dangling in the lock to make it appear as though Luke had inadvertently left them there and returned to the main floor of the club. Passing through crowds of people busy forgetting their problems, she dispersed the glasses onto two different tables sitting far apart. Finally, she left the club looking as polished as when she’d entered it. She kept her head down and stayed to the outer edge of the sidewalk. She didn’t look at anyone as dozens of people passed her on the street, including Sean Taylor.
***
Ben rubbed his eyes, then blinked several times. But neither his eyes nor his contacts were deceiving him. Who could mistake the arrogant gait or the cold stare, even from yards away? And as usual, walking with two guards behind him. Hastily ducking into the shadows, Ben retreated back to where Jim was standing. “I just saw Sean!” he whispered sharply.
“Are you serious??”
“Positive.”
But before a real panic could settle, the sound of Andy’s voice suddenly echoed off the walls of the alley. “I got it!” she cried.
She moved impressively fast in her heels, and Ben released a huge sigh of relief.
“Good because Sean just passed you.”
“You’re kidding?” Her neck craned back toward the street.
“No, and it’s lucky he didn’t notice you dressed like…like that.”
“Well, I won’t be for long.” She grabbed her backpack from the ground and quickly changed out of her dress and heels as Maria had done.
“So where is it? Where’s the virus?” Jim asked with more impatience than usual.
“Green Haven Prison,” she said proudly while kneeling down to tie her sneakers. “Any idea where that is?”
“Nope.”
“None.”
“Well, I know Luke wasn’t making it up. He was very forthcoming after I nearly shot him in the balls.”
“Wow,” Jim murmured, sounding impressed and even intimidated.
Ben turned away and looked straight up at the narrow sliver of sky between the walls. He could actually see a few stars. “Then it’s really true,” he whispered.
After gathering all their belongings, they mounted their bikes and pedaled out of the alley.
***
Sean spotted Lily sulking in the corner of the club, but he ignored her for the time being and headed to where the Directors were sitting. He wasn’t planning on staying long. Opening the club to everyone on Wednesdays was a necessary concession he knew he had to give, but the sight of all the sloppy Dregs dancing and spending all their credit getting wasted wasn’t something he enjoyed witnessing.
“Where’s Luke?” he shouted at one of the Directors over the noise of the pulsating music.
“Who knows. He left with some blond like an hour ago.”
Sean frowned and walked away. He made his way to the back of the club. The first room he came to was Luke’s, and upon seeing the keys in the door, he frowned again before opening the door and switching on the lights. Luke was lying in the fetal position on the sofa and snoring loudly.
“Perfect,” Sean grumbled. Using the bottom of his foot, he tried shoving Luke to wake up, but it was no use. His Director of the Infantry, the leader of thousands of young men, was comatose.
Disgusted, Sean left the room and slammed the door behind him. He needed Luke to redirect some troops for Chad, but now it would have to wait until morning.
Storming back to the main floor, he found Lily and told her that it was time to go.
“No way!” she yelled, yanking her arms away and nearly falling out of her seat. “I wanna stay.”
She was either drunk or high or both, and Sean had run out of patience. He grabbed her arm again but she wrestled free and staggered off into the mob on the dance floor. He didn’t go after her. She would come crawling back to him in the morning anyway, like she had done so many times before. She was entirely dependent on him, and they both knew it.
Sean found another Helen and departed the club with her in tow.
***
“So it worked?”
Andy grinned back at Charlie as she climbed in the car. “It worked. Well, that and a bullet.”
“You shot him?!”
“Nearly. He needed a little…encouragement.”
“Brilliant. So where is it?”
She repeated the name of the prison.
“Where’s that?”
“No clue.”
Once Jim put his bike in the back of the truck and got in, Charlie threw the vehicle into drive and sped off, Susan and Maria following them.
***
The hangover was unimaginably awful, far worse than any Luke had experienced, and there had been many. As he sat up, his temples pounded and nausea took hold. When he tried to stand to make a run for the bathroom, his knees buckled underneath him. He slumped back down on the sofa and vomited on the floor between his feet. Doubled over in agony, he didn’t notice the door opening.
“Man, seriously?” Covering his nose, Sean looked down at Luke and the puddle of vomit, and stood as far away as possible. “What the hell did you take last night?”
Luke groaned and slowly sat up. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You look worse than shit,” Sean spat out, even more disgusted than he’d been hours earlier. “Seriously, you’re a Director! If you can’t handle your booze or coke or whatever else you’ve been chugging, then I’m done with you.”
Half-listening, Luke struggled to voice a defense. “Man, I think someone slipped me something.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything.”
“Jesse said you were with a blond last night. You remember that?”
Eyes shut, Luke rubbed his head. “There were lots of blonds,” he muttered dully.
“This is the last time,” Sean warned menacingly. “You know too much, Luke. You can’t be acting like everyone else, and you absolutely can
not
blackout. You understand?”
He didn’t dare open his eyes as he nodded. This small action alone hurt his head.
“Learn to pace yourself,” Sean ordered as he stepped to the door. “Now get cleaned up. We got work to do.”
Chapter XXIV
October 2023
A
small forest butted up against the northwest corner of the prison, and the autumn foliage provided plenty of cover to conduct a safe stakeout. Everything was almost ready. The final step was preparing the escape route.
The previous two months had passed in a flurry of unending preparations. Learning where Sean was hiding the virus turned out to be the easy part. Infiltrating the prison would be much harder.
“I count three guards in the towers again,” Jim whispered to Ben while staring through his binoculars.
“The same guys?”
“Yeah, and they all look bored to death.”
It was their seventh consecutive day surveilling the prison compound, not including the five nights spent staring through the same pair of night vision binoculars they’d used the year before at Fort Detrick. But watching the building was just one part of the plan.
It had taken three days back in August just to find out where the prison was located after learning the name. Without the Internet, such information was now elusive, and Ben had almost made a trip to see Danny to access his
Wikipedia
files when Charlie found a reference to the prison in an old newspaper article at the university library. Then the real work began.
“Bored is good,” Ben replied absently as he scanned the area with his naked eyes.
“It’s too bad they’re all using night vision goggles. Otherwise we could go in at night,” said Jim.
“Yeah, well, nothing’s perfect. If it was, one of us would know how to fly a plane.” Ben was referring to the small airport just west of the small forest. “A plane would’ve been a perfect getaway.”
Grabbing their belongings, they left their observation point and began the grueling task of clearing a path almost a quarter-mile in length through the forest using machetes found at a specialty knife store near Princeton. Sweat soaked despite the grey, fifty-degree weather, the two young men reached the western edge of the woods an hour later. An overgrown field separated the woods from the small airport. Tired and cold, they hopped into their truck parked on the runway and headed back to Princeton over a hundred miles away.
“I wish Brian would come back,” Jim said once they were safely away from the prison. “It’s too bad we can’t just put a sign on our door telling him where we are. Then we could finally relocate up here and stop making this trip every day.”
“Yeah, true,” Ben muttered. He leaned his head sideways on the headrest. He stared out his window until the vibration of the tires against the road lulled his eyes closed.
Jim smiled to himself. “Well, it’s almost over.”
Still awake, Ben let out a grunt and mumbled, “God, I hope so.”
***
Luke had experienced drunken blackouts before—two in the last month, in fact, both of which he’d managed to conceal from Sean, who had been in Philadelphia. Yet that night in early August—his birthday—had been nagging him relentlessly for weeks now. He remembered the blond…Kathy? Kendra? Something like that. But he couldn’t remember her face, but she must’ve been beautiful. He only talked to the beautiful ones.
He was in his room at
Papillon
as he thought through the events of that day. He went over to the table to pour himself a drink, but then he noticed something lying on the floor. “What…why’s there a plastic bag here?” he said to himself.
Then suddenly a thought popped into his head.
The virus…the virus…
He looked over to the sofa that had a bullet hole in it, but until now he had no memory of how it got there. “She drugged me,” he said out loud. All at once, snippets of the words that had passed between them surfaced from some dark corner of his mind. He began to sweat. His body shook with fear, like a violent shiver that he couldn’t control. Days of agonizing over his recollected memories made him physically ill. The only thing that terrified Luke more than the virus itself was if Sean ever found out he had revealed its location.
I have tell him…I have to tell him…he’s going kill me,
he thought as he walked from
Papillon
to his apartment.
He’ll understand…I was drugged…it wasn’t my fault…she nearly shot me…
Luke dragged himself into the bathroom to throw water on his face. After shutting off the faucet, he stared at the tap. It was early, only nine o’clock, but he was exhausted. There was no way he’d be going out anywhere tonight.
He needed to sleep. Tomorrow he would tell Sean. Or maybe the next day. Nothing strange had happened at the prison in over two months. Another day wouldn’t make any difference.
***
The weeks of planning were complete.
Maria and Carmen made a hearty meal for Andy and the boys before their departure. It was a cold and grey afternoon, no more than a few degrees above freezing, and they would need their strength. There was tension in the air as everyone ate, more so than the night Andy and Maria had gone to
Papillon
.
Andy said goodbye to Morgan and the other girls, and gave Katie a kiss on her plump cheek. Then she climbed into the passenger’s seat of the car and immediately cupped her hands to her mouth. Her fingers were like ice.
“Here, I’ll get the engine running,” said Ben as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
“Thanks,” she muttered over a shiver.
It felt like winter, and Andy hated winter. Without heat and only a meager amount of body fat to protect her, the months of short days and long nights had become an eternal effort to stay warm. Even in Bermuda the winters had been windy and damp.