It was midafternoon already. The file had appeared on the second server by noon, as promised, and I’d been staring at its ugly sheets since then, scowling at them, drinking water from the cheap hotel-room tumbler, puzzling over the nine pages of closely typed text and illustrations, and thinking the same thing: What a goddamn mess.
The first three pages of the file concerned Father Barton and his cell of the Underground Airlines, and this section was short on details and long on conjecture, pure search-engine bullshit. Some intern in Bridge’s office had strung it together from old arrest warrants and radical abolition chat rooms: Barton’s birth date, town of origin, known and suspected associates. His close ties to the International Canaan Organization (ICO) and Les Bénévoles Blackburn, his loose ties to the Black Panthers and two other “domestic terror organizations.” His name in connection with a nasty incident twenty-two months ago: a body found in a crate in a Cincinnati FedEx routing center, never delivered, substantially decayed. This corpse was eventually ID’d with a PIN and a service name—a runner from Boone County, Carolina, who’d gotten himself crated and sent to “Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, Indiana.” The FedEx employee who’d facilitated this Hail Mary maneuver, an abbo sympathizer working freelance, was in federal prison but could not be persuaded to admit he’d been acting on Barton’s behest—at least, that is, not according to this useless, messy, bullshit file.
All these first few pages did was tell me what I already knew—that despite his claims of innocence, the parish priest was a prolific smuggler of runaways, directly or indirectly responsible for dozens of illegal manumissions over the last several years. Bridge or Bridge’s intern had “a high degree of certainty” (whatever the fuck that meant) that it was Barton and his group who’d pulled Jackdaw off the plantation and/or gotten him across the Fence. They were equally certain it was Barton’s people shielding the boy till he could be moved across the 49th parallel to permanent freedom.
I scowled. I shifted my weight. My eyes flickered past the hole in my grid, a gap like a vacant lot in a row of homes. That was page 7, and I hadn’t printed it. I wasn’t ready to look at it. Not yet.
The section about Garments of the Greater South, Incorporated, wasn’t much more useful. Nothing that any mope couldn’t have pulled from public records. Total acreage; acreage devoted to production; total annual yield; yield of upland, yield of American pima. Gross annual revenue, gross annual profit, projected future revenue. Every time I read about one of these places, they’d gotten bigger, more modern, larger in scope, and more sophisticated in their operations. This one, this GGSI, boasted of having customers in seventy-two countries around the world for its “durable, high-fineness fibers” and its “premium-rated seeds and seed oils.” GGSI housed the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, with support from the state of Alabama and the American Cotton Council, performing “cutting-edge research on new technologies in the production of pest-and drought-resistant cotton strains.” GGSI had 4,232 Persons Bound to Labor on its sprawling campus—in its fields, in its factories, in its offices.
Four thousand, two hundred and thirty-one, I thought. As of Sunday night, 4,231.
There was an aerial photograph of the facility in there, too, a smudged satellite image with every blurry rectangle numbered and labeled. Thirty-two separate structures. I let my finger move from rectangle to rectangle. I traced the lines between the buildings, along the service roads and gravel paths connecting them, fighting off a burst of dread imagination, me down in there, running in slave grays from building to building, from shipping and receiving to facilities maintenance, bare feet slapping the paths.
The population center was five buildings arranged in a semicircle around a courtyard labeled RECREATION, five grim rectangles of identical dimensions, arrayed like soldiers. Past the pop center was building 20, labeled DETENTION/RECONDITIONING, which would have been known in the land of my own youth as the shed.
I paused, just a second, just a half second, my forefinger pressed into building 20 until the blood had left it and it was white as the fingernail.
Some things on the map I could not understand, and I noted them all, put them aside to discuss with Mr. Bridge later on. One building, just behind the Institute for Agricultural Innovation, was unlabeled and blacked out, a redacted rectangle, hidden from the eye of God. And there was a whole set of lines on the map I could not explain, a broken black line making a loop around the periphery of the campus, just inside the line of the fence. Was it an extra line of fencing? A kind of shock collar around the whole place? I didn’t like it, that line. I felt sure it was connected to the PB population. Some new innovation in the control of men.
I wondered. I clenched my jaw. I memorized the map and moved on.