John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

When He wants me to know, He’ll tell me.

A sense of utter clarity washed over him, flooding away the darkness.

He didn’t have time for a pity party. Evan needed to grow a pair and embrace the reality of today. That meant he had to wrap his arms and his mind around the fact that he’d been taken from a place he liked and shoved into a place that smelled like mold and was hot as hell. He had no friends, so that meant he was on his own.

How do you run away if you don’t know where you are to begin with? You’ve got to start from someplace, and Evan didn’t even have a compass point to shoot for-as if he had a compass in the first place, or would know how to use it if he did.

His first decision, then, was easy: He’d wait things out for a while. So far, he saw no reason to tempt people to kill him. If the time came to risk death, Evan figured he would know it, and he would make the big decisions then. For the time being he’d just hold tight and-

His door slammed open, revealing Shack Man silhouetted against the harsh light of the day. “Come,” he said, beckoning with his whole hand. “Time to go.”

“Go where?” Evan asked.

“ Appurate,” the man said. Evan knew “hurry” when he heard it. He left the jeans where they lay, folded on the plank, and he walked cautiously to the door. As he approached, he saw that a beat-up four-wheel-drive vehicle was waiting for him.

The Sussex 1 State Prison on Musselwhite Road in Waverly, Virginia, sprawled like a concrete cancer in the former tobacco fields south of Richmond. First opened in 1998, the place featured the overly sterile look of the modern supermax prisons that are so popular these days.

This was home for the worst of the worst, and they were treated accordingly, closed into their soundproofed concrete cells for twenty-three hours a day, the twenty-fourth hour dedicated to indoor recreation. In its own way, the stifling nature of the new cell design had to be even more oppressive than the barred cages of days gone by.

After a lifetime in law enforcement-first as an FBI agent and later as sheriff of a small community in Indiana-Gail Bonneville still could not abide the oppressive tightness of the air inside a prison. The filtered body odor seemed harder to breathe than air on the outside. She wondered if it was possible to lock the doors so tightly that the oxygen levels actually dropped. Add to the general misery of the place the meter-pegging humidity of the otherwise stifling July day, and you begin to realize just how little the penal system in the United States has evolved from the torture chambers of medieval Europe. Where, she wondered, were the protesters who forced the closing of Guantanamo when places like this-new construction, no less-continued to thrive?

At least the noise levels that were so common of older prisons were kept in check here.

The deal that Gail had made with Marie Brady, Frank Schuler’s attorney, had left no room for variation: She would allow her client to appear in the same room with Gail, but all questions would be addressed to the attorney. She would then make the decision as to whether or not he could answer. At this stage, with Schuler’s execution date less than two weeks away, they could afford for nothing to go wrong. In a perfect world, Schuler would speak to no one even distantly related to law enforcement. This exception was being made only because his son had been kidnapped.

Per Jonathan’s instructions, Gail had mentioned nothing about the boy having been recovered safely.

In deference to the hopelessness of Frank Schuler’s situation, she’d dressed plainly and unprovocatively. That meant gray slacks with a black blouse, chosen in part to help conceal any filth she picked up from the furniture.

Marie Brady had arrived first and was waiting in the reception area for Gail when she arrived. Neither tall nor short, the lawyer was likewise dressed plainly, but less formally than Gail had come to expect from attorneys. Her black slacks and top were clearly off-the-rack, and her shoes hadn’t seen polish in a long, long time. They were the clothes of the working poor, and it occurred to Gail that such was the lot of a lawyer who specialized in saving the condemned from their court-ordered fates.

The women greeted each other cordially, and then Marie walked Gail through the process of gaining entry into the death row interview room. Throughout the process, Gail noted with interest the respect shown to the attorney by all of the correctional officers. It bordered on deference, in fact. As they ran through the perfunctory checklist of dos and don’ts, she got the feeling that they wanted to apologize for the inconvenience.

“You seem comfortable here,” Gail said as they cleared the security air locks and followed their escort down the brightly lit concrete hallway.

“Comfortable is not the word,” Brady said. “Not when you factor in the mission. But I am certainly a regular. Secretly, I think they all want me to prevail in the cases I represent.”

“Murderers?” Gail’s voice demonstrated more shock than she wanted it to.

“Human beings,” Brady corrected. “Over the years, the corrections staff develops relationships with these men. It’s hard to watch them walk off to their deaths for crimes that were committed so long ago.” As they approached yet another door, the attorney added, almost to herself, “If politicians were half as human as the worst of these guys, we’d be done with sanctioned murder.”

Under the circumstances, those were the politics that Gail had expected.

“Sometime soon,” Brady continued as they walked, “probably in the next three or four days, they’ll transfer Frank to the death house at Greensville. That’s about thirty-five miles from here. I’ve even seen a few tears among these COs when inmates depart for the final trip. This is an emotional business.”

For reasons that no doubt made sense to someone, the Commonwealth of Virginia had decided to separate death row from the execution chamber. In fact, the death house was located in a medium-security prison. You had to love bureaucrats.

After another door, Gail and Brady arrived at the tiny glass-walled interview room. To Gail’s utter shock, the furniture was spotless-shiny, even, carrying forward that oppressive, astringent sterility.

“You know I’ve got to have the recorder on, right, Marie?” the guard asked, his first words since they started their long walk.

“I do,” Brady replied with a smile. To Gail, she explained, “Normally, my talks with Frank are privileged. But since you’re not an attorney, and you’ll be hearing what he says, the state gets to listen in, too.”

Gail found this alarming, though she could not say why.

“That explains the importance of all questions being directed at me,” Brady went on. “If anything you ask even knocks on the door of something Frank shouldn’t be saying, I’ll cut you both off. I’ll ask you not to question that decision until after we are out of the prison.”

Gail agreed. The lawyer was impressive, she thought. It wasn’t everybody who could rattle off instructions like that and not seem patronizing or haughty.

Within a minute or two, a door opened on the opposite side of the room from where they’d entered, and a different guard escorted Frank Schuler into the room in a full shackle rig. He looked twenty years older than his eight-year-old induction photo. Thin to the point of appearing frail, he sported a pate of sparse gray hair. He moved with the institutional shuffle of a lifer. He needed no instruction as he turned to make his wrists more accessible to the correctional officer’s key.

With his hands free, and clearly resigned to his ankles remaining restrained, he shuffled to the table and accepted Brady’s warm embrace. “They said something about Jeremy,” he said in a rush. “Do you know something? Tell me it’s good news.”