Prison Code Read online

  “Listen, you’re here for a reason, but while you’re here, I’d like your stretch to be as easy as possible. I know the code, but if you are in trouble, and I mean really in trouble, ask. If you ask, I’ll do whatever I can to help you. Understand?”

  The prisoner turned his arctic-blue gaze on Barnes.

  Barnes started as the prisoner flashed a disarmingly friendly smile. “Thank you, Officer Barnes. That’s very kind of you, and I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Barnes felt a strange, anomalous ray of hope and blushed against his will.

  Zavala spit in disgust.

  Barnes recovered himself and punched the button for the gate. “Man walking!”

  Zavala stepped through to lead the prisoner to his cell. Barnes hit the button and the bars clanged shut behind them. Hoots and catcalls erupted from the tiers. Horrific offers and suggestions rang out. Bets were laid. All eyes turned on the new prisoner as, like Barnes, the inmates all tried to determine what breed of animal had just walked in. Duivelstad was a maximum-security facility, and it was overcrowded with murderers, rapists, arsonists, drug dealers, hit men and more than a few very high ranking organized crime members. The crimes committed within its walls rivaled the ones that had sent men here.

  For the first time in Duivelstad’s history, an Executioner walked into the general population.

  The Computer Room, Stony Man Farm, Virginia

  “DUIVELSTAD?” BARBARA PRICE was the Farm’s mission controller, and she was incensed. “It’s the worst prison in the United States! Countries we’ve had extraordinary rendition treaties with have petitioned through the United Nations to have it closed!”

  “It’s pretty bad,” Kurtzman agreed.

  “And you knew that!”

  Akira Tokaido actually looked a little green. “I’ve been studying up on prison slang and prison life. I’ve learned things in the last forty-eight hours I could have spent the rest of my life not knowing.”

  “I’m sure you have.” Price had no sympathy for the young hacker. “But Mack isn’t reading about it on Wikipedia, he’s learning it the hard way.”

  “So anyway, yeah, Duivelstad is bad.”

  Price drove home the obvious, and that obvious was hanging over the entire team’s head. “And Mack is in there with no communications, no intel and no weapons.”

  Tokaido grinned. “Mack Bolan is a weapon.”

  No one laughed. Price gave Tokaido a very cold glance. “Yeah, and I’ve signed up to be his pen pal. He can start receiving personal letters a week after processing. You got anything else on your end?”

  Tokaido cringed.

  “Barbara,” Kurtzman said, “this was his idea.”

  “I know that.” Price kept her wrath focused on Tokaido. “Tell me we have intel.”

  “Oh, we have plenty.”

  “Give me all of it.”

  “Where do you want me to start?” Tokaido said.

  “The beginning would be good.”

  Kurtzman took the lead. “Duivelstad started out as a Dutch colonial town. The town had a fort, and the fort is the base of the Duivelstad prison we have today. During the Civil War, Southern prisoners were shipped there, and that’s when the English translation Devil Town really came into use. It never got the press that Andersonville did, but it was a hellhole. After the war the fort was rebuilt to function as a prison, and at the time it was considered state-of-the-art. However, the builder, who was also the first warden, believed in redemption rather than rehabilitation. The prisoners were kept in nearly perpetual states of privation and isolation in their cells, relieved only by relentless religious instruction and severe methods of discipline. The warden also believed the same curriculum would be of benefit to the mentally ill. Many well-to-do families in the state shipped off their mentally ill or embarrassing family members to Duivelstad, never to see them again.”

  Price just stared. “So the inmates went mental and the mental patients went insane?”

  “For over twenty years that was about the size of it. When the warden died it was reorganized. It went from being Bedlam to a landlocked version of Alcatraz. Religious redemption was abandoned, and except for a thin facade, rehabilitation was considered a foregone conclusion. Duivelstad became a repository for the Northeast’s worst of the worst. One newspaper at the time wrote of it, ‘Duivelstad no longer tries to save sinners, it has become a place where sinners go to get a taste of the hell that awaits them.’

  “In the last century the Duivelstad facility was expanded, but in a very ramshackle fashion and without any sort of central plan. Parts of it are 114 years old. Literally, there are parts of the prison that don’t have existing blueprints.”

  Kurtzman brought up a satellite photo on the screen. What looked like a medieval fortress with semimodern buildings attached squatted in the middle of a little valley. Two rings of twelve-foot high, razor-wire-topped fences encircled the entire facility. Several fenced-in enclosures of prefab buildings dotted the landscape. He zoomed in on the main facility. “You might notice they actually have a fence inside the walls. It’s called the ‘deadline’. Until 1962 any prisoner caught outside it was summarily shot by the tower guards.”

  Price had spent the greater portion of her life fighting evil around the world. It never failed to horrify her when she found it right here at home. “And this place is still standing because...?”

  Akira Tokaido picked up the ball. “They’ve tried to close the place five times since the seventies. Twice in the past ten years. It went from a private facility to public, to private again. They almost closed it in the 1990s, but when the War on Drugs really kicked into gear, inmate populations across the U.S. skyrocketed. Duivelstad dodged the bullet because the entire correctional system was and still is short on beds.”

  “Now it’s all political,” Kurtzman said. “The prison guard unions in the state have a lot of pull, and they don’t want it closed. They want it to go public again and they want to control it, so it’s been tied up in litigation for years. And let’s face it. U.S. prisons today are all overcrowded, Duivelstad is a straight-up animal factory, and no sane warden wants the D-Town boys transferred into their general population. Duivelstad is the inoperable cancer in United States corrections. There’s nothing wrong with it that money and political infighting can’t prolong.”

  “And we contact Mack how?”

  “Until he is allowed to receive letters or conjugal visits, we can’t. He’s going to have to contact us.”

  Price was startled. “And just how is he supposed to do that?”

  Kurtzman nodded at Tokaido. “Akira has already broken into Duivelstad’s mainframe. As you might imagine it’s not exactly state of the art. The facility has a computer area in the library with six desktops for inmate use. Internet access is strictly controlled, and computer time is a privilege that has to be earned. But if Mack can manage to log on, we can communicate directly with him and they’ll never know, unless a guard is standing directly behind him looking over his shoulder. On top of that, we can fake an order from the governor or the Board of Corrections giving the warden instructions. But that’s a last atomic option. If we do that and the warden figures it out, Mack’s cover is blown and he’s probably dead.”

  “Is there any good news?”

  Kurtzman heaved a small sigh. “Like Akira mentioned. There’s Mack himself. We agreed on several codes and passwords to be used in alternative media.”

  “What’s an alte
rnative media?”

  “As in Mack figures out his own way to communicate with us that we haven’t foreseen yet.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. For now all we can do is keep crunching on the code Mack found, and make something out of it.”

  “And in the meantime Mack just sits in a cell and rots until he earns internet privileges?”

  The computer wizard gave Price a leery look. “Actually, I think he’s going to be really busy.”

  “Doing what?”

  “We think something bad is going down. We don’t have time for Mack to be a model prisoner and become a trustee.”

  “And?”

  “You ever read Will by G. Gordon Liddy?”

  “The Nixon operative during Watergate. No, why?”

  “He went to jail for his part in the break-in. He was a middle-aged white man with no connections, and the U.S. government wanted his hard time to be hard. So he did what no one expected. He went on the offensive inside. A charm offensive, a fighting offensive and an intelligence offensive. Neither the prison administration, the guards nor the cons were ready.”

  Price didn’t look convinced.

  “Barbara? Try to think of it this way. Mack’s not stuck in there with them. They’re trapped in there with him. From the lowest sex-offending rent-boy to the warden himself, no one in Duivelstad is ready for Mack Bolan.”

  Duivelstad, Cell Block C

  “HOME SWEET HOME, hard-ass.” Officer Zavala lifted his chin at Bolan’s new roommate and smiled. “Good luck.”

  Bolan walked into his cell. According to psychologists and feng shui experts, shades of blue and green were soothing colors. In a completely misguided effort in the 1980s all the steel in Cell Bock C had been painted an electric, Miami Vice blue. It wasn’t soothing. It was a pastel house of horror. The first thing a man noticed when walking inside was the pervasive smell of human excretions and every orifice they had come from. The pervasive odor was nothing compared to what was coming out of Unit 2. Within the cell a man who could have been Officer Barnes’s albino big brother in overalls, suffering from a dual case of acromegaly and morbid obesity, lolled on the bottom bunk and gazed at Bolan like a sumo wrestler Frankenstein in pin-eyed cupidity. His teeth were yellow turning to green. The man smelled like a dead wildebeest rotting under the African sun. He spoke in a thick, childlike Southern drawl. “The Todd says you’re on the top bunk.”

  Bolan and his colleagues at Stony Man had done their homework. Duivelstad was a unique situation by United States correctional facility standards even on the best of days. Nonetheless, according to the regs, as a high-interest inmate transferred from military custody, Bolan should have been put in isolation for at least a week. Any facility, public or private, that had a prisoner with Bolan’s cover story would have done so just to give themselves time to figure out what to do with him. The fact that he had been dumped immediately into the general population with a rape-walrus for a cellmate told Bolan the plan had already gone FUBAR.

  It seemed the powers that be had decided that trial by fire was their best investigative venue on the new fish.

  Bolan nodded and tossed his belongings on the top of the steel dissection tables Duivelstad called bunks. When a night attack came from whomever, he would prefer to be fighting down rather than trying to rise up, especially if it was three-hundred-plus pounds of corpulent hillbilly. “Cool.”

  Bolan could sense the prisoners in the adjoining cells and out in the immediate tier hanging on every word. Todd spent uncomfortable moments processing the soldier’s response. “The Todd doesn’t like your attitude,” he finally declared.

  Bolan had vainly hoped “the Todd” was someone not in the cell at the moment, rather than the hillbilly referring to himself in third person. But hope had run out in Unit 2, Cell Block C. The soldier’s arctic-blue eyes stared implacably into the black holes in paper that were the windows to his cellmate’s soul. “The Todd can go fuck himself.”

  Prisoners outside whistled and made approving noises. Bolan heard new bets pass down the tier. It appeared his bravado was appreciated, but not favored in the wagering. The Todd didn’t seem to care at all for this new development in cellmate congeniality. He rolled up into a sitting position from his supine, Roman splendor with surprising alacrity for his bulk, and started to rise. “The Todd is angry.” He didn’t sound angry. Indeed, he licked his blubbery lips and smiled to reveal his rotting teeth.

  A voice in the immediate cell to the right spoke in sympathy. “Aw shit! New fish gonna get laid and filleted!”

  Catcalls rang out. Bolan didn’t hear any guards calling for order or in inquiry. The new fish had been thrown to Moby Dick and a lot of people on both sides of the bars seemed to have some skin in the game.

  The sexecution was on.

  Bolan frowned. Todd’s huge, sagging belly didn’t hide his tumescence. Despite the vast avalanches of muscle and fat cascading down Todd’s rib cage, they went in two different directions under his bib overalls like breasts. To a discerning eye, like Bolan’s, between the chest waterfalls Todd’s xiphoid process was covered only by skin and a millimeter of denim.

  Bolan stepped forward to meet the rising Todd and thrust-kicked his heel into bone and cartilage. The lower tip of Todd’s sternum snapped with a wet click. The man had already been fish belly pale when Bolan had entered the cell. Now his face went as white as chalk as his diaphragm perforated. Bolan snapped up his leg again and chopped his heel in a short ax kick to the solar plexus as Todd fell back.

  Every bone in the man’s body seemed to dissolve, and he toppled from the bottom bunk to the floor in a gelatinous cascade. Bolan estimated Todd had about five minutes to live without medical attention. Bolan raised his voice. “Guard!”

  The Executioner stepped out of the cell. The cons in the tiers cheered wildly. Bolan rounded left into the adjoining cell. A black man with short, cinnamon-brown dreads looked up from a book he was reading. His surprise seemed split between the fact that Bolan was still alive, much less rectally intact, and that Bolan had the gall to walk in without an invitation.

  The convict put down his book, rose, lowered his chin and turned slightly sideways. Bolan read the man before him. He was powerful, and if Bolan had to bet, the man’s sentence was all-day. He was old-school, a longtime man, and he wasn’t going to back down no matter what Bolan had done to the great white whale next door. The fact that the man before him lived next to the Todd and didn’t take shit from anyone spoke volumes. Bolan smiled and shoved out his hand. “Cooper. Nice to meet you, neighbor.”

  The man stared at Bolan’s hand as if it were dead vermin on the end of an arm. “You are one dead white devil.”

  “Yeah.” Bolan shrugged. “But hopefully not by your hand.”

  “You have to earn that. You want to earn that?”

  “No way. I want to be a good neighbor, like State Farm.”

  “Then you have five seconds to turn your white ass around and get out of my cell.”

  “Give me twenty.”

  Bolan’s neighbor stared at him long and hard. People had been sizing up the soldier since he had walked through the gate. This man stared at Bolan with the wisdom of decades of being institutionalized. He came to a weighted decision. “This is the first time I have ever asked this of another man in this place, much less a white man I don’t know, but why are you here?”

  Bolan gave an incomplete answer, but an honest one. “I’m in trouble.”

&
nbsp; Boots rang on the catwalk as the guards hit the tier. “That you are,” the convict agreed.

  “I’m Cooper. I’ll probably be dead soon.” Bolan shoved his hand out again. “Nice to meet you...?”

  The con eyed Bolan’s hand with mild disinterest. “Kal. Nice knowing you.”

  Both Bolan and Kal recognized the sound of collapsible batons snapping open next door. Kal gave Bolan a sympathetic look. Profanity, and shock and awe spewed forth from the guards at the sight of the Todd’s quivering, blood bubbling body.

  “Cooper! Don’t make me come and find your narrow ass!” Zavala roared.

  Bolan shrugged. “Gotta go.”

  Kal sighed in mock resignation at Bolan’s fate. “As salaam alaikum.”

  Bolan smiled in sincere gratitude. “Wa alaikum as-salaam.”

  Kal rolled his eyes. “I don’t know you, but I think I’m going to miss you.”

  Bolan nodded. “I miss me already.”

  Zavala bawled out in rage. “Last chance, Cooper!”

  Bolan strode out of Kal’s cell onto the catwalk. “Yo!”

  Chapter 3

  The Warden’s Office

  “NOT AN AUSPICIOUS first day, Mr. Cooper,” the warden remarked. Warden Ulysses S. Linder was known as “The Big U” in Duivelstad. He looked like the NFL noseguard from the 1970s that he was. He had a big square head, big square hands, and looked as if powerful machinery had forced his body into the gray suit that only his red suspenders held together. “Mr. Solomon is in critical condition.”

  “Who?” Bolan asked.

  Linder gave him a very weary look. “Your cellmate, Mr. Cooper. Todworth Elias Solomon.”

  “Oh, you mean the Todd.”

  “Yes,” Warden Linder conceded. “The Todd.”

  “That guy was bug fucking nuts, Warden. The first time he threw himself tits first against the shitter, I took a walk and struck up an acquaintance with the neighbor.”