IT WAS EVENING when the FBI Gulfstream V bounced down hard onto the tarmac of the Fremont County Airport in Colorado.
Two young male agents were standing beside a black Ford Explorer outside the aircraft’s dropped door. They speedily helped move us and our files and bags into the backseat before spinning the roof lights as they floored it out of the rural airport and onto the service road.
As we got onto a highway, outside my window in the distance, I could see the blood-orange glow of the sun that must have just settled behind the dark, serrated peaks of the Rocky Mountains.
“Well, what do you know?” I said to Emily through a yawn as we looked over the piles of Unabomber case files. “Those mountains actually do look like the ones on the beer cans, huh? Speaking of which, where is the Coors brewery? Close by? Do they give tours? With tastings?”
“Unfortunately, that’ll have to be the next trip, Mike. The warden is waiting on us,” Emily said as she opened a laptop. “But believe me, when this is over, the first six-pack of Silver Bullets will be on me.”
Known sometimes as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, ADX Florence is a 490-bed concrete-and-steel hotel that the feds reserve for its system’s most notorious and most extremely violent prisoners. In addition to Kaczynski, it houses convicted foreign and domestic terrorists, spies like the ex–FBI agent scum Robert Hanssen, and leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood and the Gangster Disciples.
“So, Mike, what do you think? You’ve read the files. You ready to talk to Ted?” said Emily as our SUV went up the long driveway and was buzzed in at the gate, flanked by towers manned with armed guards.
“I don’t know,” I said as we rolled in past the twelve-foot-high fencing, topped with razor wire. “The guy isn’t your regular perp, is he? I never interviewed a killer who went to Harvard at sixteen or was a Berkeley math professor at twenty-five. Why do you think he wants to talk to us now? He’s never offered his help before.”
Emily shrugged.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
The assistant warden was a tough, matronly Native American woman named Marjorie Greene. She met us at the administration building’s sally port and helped us get through processing, where we handed over our service weapons.
The inside of the prison was like no facility I’d ever been to. Everything was made of smooth poured concrete—the floors, the walls, the ceiling. There wasn’t a window in sight. Prisons are usually loud, with slamming gates and people yelling, but here it was quiet and almost bizarrely serene.
“Like walking into a spaceship or something, isn’t it?” Marjorie Greene said as she led us with four guards down a meandering corridor to the interview room. “They designed it that way on purpose, so the prisoners don’t know where they are in relation to the outside. I don’t even know myself half the time, and I’ve been here seven years.”
“Seems like overkill, no?” said Emily. “Aren’t they locked down in their cells twenty-three hours a day at a supermax?”
“Well, it’s not so much that the inmates will escape from in here per se,” Marjorie explained as we walked. “It’s that some of these guys are heads of the kinds of organizations that actually might try to break them out from the outside.”
“What’s Kaczynski like as a prisoner?” I said.
“Tidy cell. Nice rapport with staff. Reads a lot. Figures, his being a genius and all. Never caused any kind of trouble. Quiet as a church mouse, really. He’s…different. You’ll see.”
We came down some steps into another concrete corridor with a lower ceiling and a frosted, probably bulletproof, Plexiglas door at the far end. One of the four guards slipped a long tubelike key into a metal box beside the door as Marjorie Greene spoke into her radio. A moment later, there was an electric buzz and the crack of a lock snapping open.
I took a deep breath as the guard opened the door.
And then I was standing there looking at the Unabomber in the flesh.
He didn’t look like the famous crazy-mountain-man picture of him taken when he was arrested. He was clean-shaven and just looked sort of oldish, with age spots on his forehead and skin drooping off the sharp bones of his face. You wouldn’t know who he was—just some sickly-looking man in a baggy orange jumpsuit.
It was actually bordering on ridiculous that this scarecrow of a man, who looked as threatening as a kitten, was cuffed to a concrete desk behind a set of thick steel bars that divided the room.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, smiling weakly, as one of the guards slammed the door closed and locked us in. “I didn’t think you’d take me up on my offer. I’m surprised, not to mention hopeful.”
CHAPTER 66