“Oil.”
“Right now, it’s convenient for a lot of people in the government to pretend that the Homelanders were just a random bunch of crackpots. And that you were just a troublemaker who got involved with them. That way, there’s no pressure from the people, from the media, to go too high up the ladder, to embarrass the people we need to deal with . . .”
Suddenly I found myself on my feet. The plastic chair toppled over in back of me, rattling against the floor.
“Embarrass them?” I shouted. “Embarrass them? They’re just going to leave me to rot in here so they won’t embarrass people in the countries where these killers came from?”
“It’s a sensitive moment, Charlie. A very powerful faction in our government is determined to believe the Homelanders didn’t really exist at all . . .”
But I silenced him with a raised hand. I turned away from him. Paced to the wall. Braced my hands against it, my head hung down. I could barely believe what I was hearing—and at the same time, I believed it too well.
Behind me, Rose said, “There’s something else you oughta know . . .”
I just stood there, head hanging, waiting for it.
“We didn’t get them all.”
Now I swung around, looked at him, eyes glaring.
“Prince escaped,” he said.
“Prince . . .”
“And some of his top operatives—some portion of his operation—we don’t know how many . . .”
“But Prince was the head guy. He was the brains behind the whole deal.”
“I know that.”
“Well, do you have any idea where he is?”
Rose looked down at his hands clasped together on the surface of the desk. He was silent for a long moment. Then he raised his expressionless face and stared at me with eyes that said more than he could say aloud. “The government is convinced he’s left the country.”
“Because they want to be convinced. Because it’s convenient.”
He nodded.
“But what if he hasn’t?” I said. “What if he hasn’t left?”
“Well,” said Rose. “If he hasn’t left . . . you may not be safe.”
I let out a laugh—if you can call it a laugh. “Oh, really? I’m not safe? What a surprise. I thought I was snug as a bug in a rug in here! I mean, it’s not as if someone just tried to slice me to pieces. It’s not like some guard just used me as a punching bag for half an hour.”
“Look, I’m working on this,” said Rose. “I am, it’s just . . . They’ve closed Waterman’s operation down. I have no official power base anymore. I’m doing my best to go through channels, through friends . . .”
Angrily, I reached down, snapped up my chair. “Channels!” I said. “Friends!” I plunked the chair down across the table from him. I plunked myself down into it. I was so mad I hardly felt the aches in my body anymore. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. Most of the Homelanders are in custody, but the government doesn’t want to admit they were a highly funded organization taken down by an unofficial undercover organization. Because of their negotiations in the Middle East, it’s more convenient to pretend the whole thing is over—and to keep me in here, with everybody thinking I’m a murderer. Meanwhile, Prince has escaped and wants me dead, but you have no way to find him because the government prefers to believe he’s gone and you have no power base. So not only am I stuck in this hellhole, I’m a sitting duck for anyone who wants to earn Prince’s favor by bumping me off. Have I got all that right?”
For the first time, Rose showed some sign of strain. He rubbed one eye wearily. It was a quick gesture, over in a moment, but it revealed to me how tired he was, how hard he’d been working on all this.
“You need to try to be patient . . .”
“Patient?” I slammed my fist down on the table. “You don’t know what it’s like in here.”
“I understand, but . . .”
“What if I call the newspapers?” I said. “What if I tell them about Waterman? About the Homelanders. About what went down? How it all happened?”
“Who do you think people will believe?” Rose asked quietly. “A convicted murderer telling people he’s secretly a hero who busted up a terrorist organization—or a lot of serious-looking officials in suits saying he’s just one of a bunch of troublemakers?”
I didn’t answer. I knew he was right. No one would believe me if I told the truth. Even I could hardly believe it. I buried my face in my hands. I don’t think I’d ever felt so low, so helpless in all my life.
“Listen,” Rose went on. “I’m working on something, okay?”
It was another moment before I could look up. “On what?”
“An appeal. Through your lawyer. In the courts. We’ve got friends there, people who know the truth. If they can arrange for the evidence against you to be declared tainted, your conviction could be overturned.”
“Overturned,” I said roughly. The word would hardly come out.
“I know. It’s not a complete vindication, but . . . at least it’d get you out of here.”
I looked at Rose—and again, his eyes flitted away. He couldn’t meet my gaze. He was ashamed of the position he was in, ashamed of what the government was doing to me. I didn’t blame him. On the other hand, when Waterman first recruited me for this job, he didn’t lie about it. He told me I was risking everything. Not just my life, but my reputation. He told me he was operating outside the usual channels. He told me I might not have the support of the fancy suits in government. He told me they might pretend I didn’t exist and that the people I loved might go to their graves believing I was a traitor and even a killer.
I’d signed on knowing all that. And I’d won too. Me and Waterman and Rose and the others. We’d done what we set out to do. We’d broken up the Homelanders, stopped them, most of them, anyway, before they could carry out their plans. All except Prince and a few of his friends.
So I had nothing to complain about. I’d known what I was getting into from the start.
I just hadn’t known about Abingdon. How hard it would be. How lonely and terrifying and suffocating. That’s just not something you can know before you get there, before you experience it for yourself.
And now that I did know, I wasn’t sure I had the courage to stick it out.
“How long?” I asked Rose hoarsely. “How long would an appeal take?”
“With our friends working on it,” he said, “a couple of months maybe. If all goes well, you’ll be out of here early in the New Year.”
I let out a long breath. “Christmas in Abingdon,” I murmured. “Just what I always dreamed of.”
“I’m sorry,” Rose said. He still wouldn’t look at me.
Finally, after what seemed a long silence, his chair scraped against the floor as he pushed it back. He stood up. He hesitated, standing over me.
“I’ll tell you something, Charlie,” he said then. “When you started this, you were a boy. But you’re not a boy anymore. You’re a man. A man and an American. And I don’t say either of those things lightly. You’re getting a raw deal from some people who aren’t fit to tie your sneakers. Government can be like that. That’s one of the reasons we try not to have too much of it.”
He moved away from me. He went to the white door in the white wall. He rapped against it. Then he looked back at me over his shoulder.
“You won’t be seeing me after this, Charlie. I won’t be able to get in touch with you directly. But believe me, I won’t forget you. I’ll be working on getting you out of here any way I can. And if there’s any news, I’ll find some way to let you know.”
The door opened. I could see the guard standing in the hall outside.
“How can I reach you?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “You can’t.”
“But . . .” I stared after him desperately. “Who do I call if I need help?”
Another very slight trace of a smile touched the corners of his lips. “You know how to pray, don’t you?”
he said.
And he walked out.
CHAPTER SIX
Advent
Even in Abingdon, you could feel Christmas coming. There was something in the air—something, I mean, besides the usual tension, terror, and rage. Each day, there were fewer fights in the yard. More cons started talking about visitors. Even people who never got visitors the rest of the year got visitors now. And there were Christmas cards in the mail. The prisoners taped them up on the walls of their cells as decorations.
The Salvation Army had a program called the Angel Tree. Cons were allowed to ask for presents for their kids. Then the Salvation Army would hang the requests like ornaments on trees in malls around the country. People could pick off the ornaments and then buy the presents that were listed there. Then the Salvation Army would deliver the presents to the convicts’ kids as a way of showing them God loved them. The prisoners liked that program. I could hear them talking to one another about what they’d asked for, what their kids would get. It gave them something to think about besides the endless days locked away in this hole.
For me, though, Christmas just made things harder. I couldn’t stop thinking about my home, my mom and dad, my friends. I couldn’t stop remembering the stuff we’d do at Christmastime. Nothing special really, just the usual stuff, but when it’s gone, when there’s a wall and bars and barbed-wire fence and gun turrets between you and a glass of eggnog and A Christmas Carol on TV and your sister getting so excited Christmas Eve she has to go to her room with a headache and your mom worrying the tree will catch fire and the radio playing songs that you can’t help liking even though they seem to have been recorded when dinosaurs walked the earth . . . When you’re locked away, all those stupid, ordinary things seem pretty exceptional, pretty sweet, and you miss them like crazy.
But I guess I thought about stuff like that only about every other minute or so. In all my spare minutes, I still kept watch, knowing it was only a matter of time before someone else tried to kill me, knowing there was still no place for me to run or hide.
Saturday came. It was my first visiting day. My mom and dad were coming. Beth too. I was excited. Really excited. I paced up and down in my cell, a step and a half from the rear wall to the bars, then back again. The morning went by even more slowly than usual.
Finally, the guard came to fetch me. He took me to a room with a long row of windows set in the cinder-block wall. There was a low wooden stool in front of each window. The windows were separated from one another by small metal dividers. Black telephones hung on the dividers. Words painted on the wall above the windows said, “Keep your hands visible at all times.”
The guard led me to a stool in front of a window in the middle of the row. There was a convict to the left and another to the right of me. Both were talking through their phones to people on the other side of their windows. They leaned in close to the glass for privacy, but there wasn’t much privacy to be had.
I sat and waited, looking out through the window at the room on the other side. I could see the entrance to a hallway out there. I thought about how someone could walk down that hallway and leave the prison. Free. Just like that. Someone, but not me.
A minute passed, then another. Then my mom and dad came into sight, walking toward me down the hall.
I expected to be happy to see them. And I was, I guess. But it made my heart hurt too. It made me hurt to see the way my mom looked, all tired, and red-eyed like she’d been crying. Crying and crying without stopping for more than a year, ever since this nightmare began. My dad looked better, better than he’d looked before I was arrested, anyway, when I saw him talking on TV. Back then he didn’t know the truth. But now, Beth and my friends had explained to them about the Homelanders and even though they didn’t know the whole story, they’d probably guessed a lot of it. I think as long as my father thought I was just on the run, wanted for murder—well, that was kind of tough for him to take. But now that there was a reason behind it all, now that he understood I was fighting for the good guys—I think that was easier for him. My mom didn’t care why I was here. She just wanted me safe at home. But Dad understood that sometimes the right thing to do is dangerous and you just have to do it anyway. I know he understood because he was the first one who taught it to me.
I picked up the phone on my side. My mom held the phone on their side. Dad pulled up an extra chair and sat beside Mom with his arm around her shoulders. They peered through the window at me. I felt like one of the animals in the zoo.
Mom tried to be brave, but it was hard for her to get the words out, especially when she got a look at the bruises on my face, all purple and yellow now.
“Oh my God,” she said, the tears starting. “What happened to you?”
“I’m all right,” I told her. “Don’t worry about it.” I didn’t want to lie, but I knew she didn’t want to hear the truth either. And I only had to glance over at my father to see he understood what had happened.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Mom said. “Did they let you see a doctor at least?”
I almost laughed. Doctor Fist, I wanted to tell her. They let me see Doctor Fist. Instead, I changed the subject. “Listen, I have some good news. My lawyer says there’s a chance my case is going to be overturned on appeal. He says I could be out of here in a couple of months.” I tried to make it sound like a sure thing, even though I knew it wasn’t.
“That’s wonderful,” Mom said through her tears— but I could tell she didn’t believe me. She was just trying to sound hopeful for my sake.
“Mom,” I said. “Really. It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.”
“That’s great,” she said bravely, but she was just pretending still, I could tell.
When my mom couldn’t talk anymore, my dad lifted his hand up and pressed the palm flat on the divider. I put my hand up and pressed it to his. He looked at me through the Plexiglas. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t say he was proud of me or that I was like a part of him and he was suffering right along with me. He didn’t say that he threw a father’s heart on the altar of heaven every night in the hope God would protect me, or that he sent a father’s blessings into the bowels of this hell every day in the hope it would sustain me. He didn’t say any of that, but somehow he said all of it—the way he’d always said it, without speaking a word—just by being there.
After a while, he lowered his hand and I lowered mine. My dad helped my mom stand and they went out together, slowly.
A couple of moments passed. Then Beth came down the hall.
I read a poem in school once. I can’t remember the name of it, but the guy in the poem said that he was afraid he was going to die “like a sick eagle looking at the sky.” I remembered that poem now because that’s how I felt looking through the thick square of Plexiglas at Beth. Like a sick eagle looking at the sky. She looked good. Beth always looked good. Pretty, with her hair curling around her smooth cheeks, and her blue eyes bright. She was wearing a yellow blouse and new jeans and they looked good on her too. But the thing about Beth that was hard to describe was just how nice she was, how kind she was, and how it showed in her face and in her eyes.
In here, in Abingdon, you came to understand that kindness is like freedom—you don’t know how sweet it is until it’s gone.
When she sat down, when she looked through the window, when she saw how banged up I was, her mouth got all tight and her eyes got watery, but she didn’t cry. I could see her forcing herself not to cry. She didn’t ask what happened to me either. She knew.
It was a moment before she could speak. She just sat there, looking at me through the glass, holding the phone to her ear. Then she just said, “Are you all right, Charlie?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s fine, Beth. It’s nothing. I miss you. That’s the hard part. I miss everyone. That’s the only thing that really hurts.”
Her eyes lingered doubtfully on my purple bruises. But she said, “You’re going to get out of here soon. I know it.”
“Good,” I said. “Hold on to that. Don’t lose hope. Talk to my mom. Don’t let my mom lose hope. There’s an appeal in the works. It’s going to take a month or two, but it could get me out.”
“Do you really think so?” she said. Her voice cracked. When I heard it, my heart cracked too.
“We’ll see,” I said. “They’re working on it. We’ll see.”
Her eyes went over my face again. “A month or two. You’ll miss Christmas.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s gonna be all right, Beth. Don’t worry.”
“Okay.”
“That was really unconvincing.”
“I’m so scared for you, Charlie. Look at you. Why don’t they keep you safe?”
I tried to smile. “Think of it as a chance for me to practice my karate.”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but she tried to smile back all the same. “That reminds me,” she said. “Sensei Mike says hello. You weren’t allowed any more visitors this week so he said he’d wait till there was an opening, then he’d come see you. Josh, too, and Miler and Rick. They want to come too.” Her voice caught a little again and again I could feel it inside me. But she swallowed her tears. “Sorry,” she said. “It just seems kind of awful, you know. When I think about it. It seems kind of awful that they can keep you in here when you haven’t done anything. It seems awful they can tell you who you can see or who can visit you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “They can tell you just about everything. Where to go, what to do, when to eat . . .”
I had to stop talking then. I bit my lip. I just sat there, looking out at her through the window. Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
When the guard came to tell us visiting hours were over, I felt something plummet inside me, going down, down, down very fast. It would be another week before I saw anyone I loved again. A week in here, surrounded by walls and guns and angry men.
I watched Beth go down the hall with the other visitors. Just before she went out the door, she turned back and waved. It’s hard to describe what it was like to see her go, to see my parents go. There was that plummeting feeling, but also—well, in some ways, I was almost glad they were gone. I hated to have them see me here. In this gray uniform with a number on it. With guards pushing me around and telling me what I could and couldn’t do. An animal in a cage.