13.
An hour earlier Clara Hsu had just been taken prisoner. They walked for quite a while through narrow corridors, passing through a number of doors that had to be opened electronically, and a few gates where COs in glassed-in booths buzzed them through. The prison was a big place, and Clara doubted she could find her way back alone if she had to, much less figure out a way through all those locked gates. Eventually they emerged from an underground tunnel into a building that felt more like office space than jail cells. The ceiling was made of acoustic tile that supported fluorescent light tubes, and the walls were normal plaster instead of cinder block or brick. Clara decided this had to be the administrative center of the prison, a place prisoners would rarely ever see. It made her feel a little more comfortable, anyway, to be away from the echoing cell blocks and the brutal architecture of restraint and control. Not that she thought that she was free, or that she would be unsupervised for even a second.
At the end of a long corridor lined with normal hollow-core doors they came to a reception lobby and then an oak door labeled WARDEN in chipped gold lettering. The CO with the stun gun indicated that Clara should open the door herself. She stared at the scratch on his cheek. The skin was starting to peel away at the edges. She was very afraid she knew what that meant.
She knocked gently on the door—her arms had gone weak—and then turned the knob. Inside the office her eyes were dazzled by orange and pink light. There was a massive picture window at the far end of the room, and the sun was just setting beyond it, a bar of red light on the horizon. The window looked out over a courtyard ringed with watchtowers and a twenty-five-foot-high curtain wall.
“Miss Hsu,” someone said.
Clara shielded her eyes to try to see who was talking to her. “It’s Special Deputy Hsu, please,” she said. There were at least three people in the room, not counting the CO who had come in behind her and had his stun gun leveled at her back. She blinked rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. There was a desk there, and a long rectangular coffee table running through the middle of the room, and two people in orange sitting on a sofa along one wall—
“I suppose there’s no need to pretend this is a routine interview,” said a woman standing next to the window. She was wearing a stab-proof vest over a conservative business suit. She had something in her hand that Clara thought at first must be another stun gun, but a moment later she saw it was a Black-Berry handheld.
Outside the window the sun winked out, done with the day.
In a few seconds it would be night. The timing wasn’t lost on Clara. “Maybe so, but I should point out that detaining a federal agent without an arrest warrant is a pretty serious crime,” Clara said. “If you let me go now, we can both save a lot of really annoying paperwork.”
“I would advise you not to move, or flinch,” the woman said. She had to be the warden of the prison, Clara decided, though she hadn’t bothered to introduce herself.
The coffee table stirred, and Clara nearly did jump back. She hadn’t been expecting that. She stared at the piece of furniture and saw that her sun-dazzled eyes had mistaken it for something it was not. It was a wooden box, six feet long, with a long, tapered, hexagonal shape.
“Oh, Christ,” Clara sighed, as its lid started to slide back.
Someone whimpered to her left. Clara looked over and saw the two people sitting on the sofa there. Now that the sun’s glare was less dazzling, she could see that they were both prisoners dressed in identical orange jumpsuits. Their hands were tied behind their backs and they were gagged. One of them, a blond girl who looked like she couldn’t be more than nineteen, stared at Clara with imploring eyes.