Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

“Hold on, man,” said Borges, gesturing with his palm out as Ochoa stepped forward. “I want to hear this.”

“Hear what?”

“You know you’re being set up,” Albino was saying. “They want you to kill me. And you know it-every single one of you. Do you know why?”

He stared in turn at the group that now encircled him.

“Who the fuck cares?” said Juggy, taking a step forward and readying the shank.

“Why?” said Borges, holding his arm out toward Juggy again.

“Because I know how to escape from here.”

An electric silence.

“Bullshit,” said Juggy, darting forward with the shank. But the Albino was ready and shot the ball at him, taking him by surprise, and in dodging it Juggy lost his stride. The ball bounced off and rolled away.

“Are you going to kill me and then spend the rest of your lives in here, never knowing if I was telling the truth?”

“He’s full of shit,” said Juggy. “He did Pocho, remember?” He lunged forward again, but the Albino skipped sideways and turned, like a matador. Borges grabbed Juggy’s arm with a grip of steel.

“He fucking did Pocho!”

“Let the man talk.”

“Freedom,” Albino continued, his drawling accent making the word sound delicious. “Have you been caged up so long you’ve forgotten what the word means?”

“Borges, nobody gets out of here,” Juggy said. “Let’s finish this.”

“Jug, don’t fucking do anything.”

Juggy looked around and saw that the others were staring at him. He felt incredulous: the Albino was sweet-talking his way out of a shank.

“Hear the man out,” said another gang member, Roany. The others nodded.

“This is the guy that waxed Pocho,” Juggy said again, feeling the conviction begin to drain out of his voice.

“So?” said Borges. “Maybe Pocho needed a little waxing.”

The Albino continued, speaking in a low voice. “Borges is going out first,” he said. “He believed me first. Jug, if you’re ready, you’re next.”

“Going out? When?” Borges asked.

“Right now, while the guards are gone.”

“The hell with this,” Juggy snarled.

“Okay, instead of Jug, I’ll take you.” And the Albino pointed to Roany. “Are you ready?”

“You know I am.”

“Wait a goddamn minute.” Ochoa took another lunge with the shank, but there was a sudden flashing movement that took him utterly by surprise, and when it was over, Albino held the shank.

Ochoa backed up. “You son of a bitch-”

“He’s just wasting our time,” said Albino. “Another word out of him and I’ll cut out his tongue. Any objections?” He looked around the group.

Nobody responded.

Ochoa stood there, breathing hard, saying nothing. The bastard had killed Pocho and taken over, just like that. How could it have happened so fast?

“Anyone who doubts me, look at this.” Albino reached over to the fence and grasped the links at a welded seam at a post, giving a sharp tug. The links parted effortlessly. He drew them back a bit more, stretching out an opening just large enough to admit a human being.

They stared in disbelief.

“Follow my instructions and you’ll all get out of here-even you, Mr. Jug. To prove my sincerity, I’ll go last. I’ve worked it out to the final detail. On the far side of the fence, you will scatter, each going out by a different route. Here’s the plan…”

Pendergast waited until the last one, Jug, had climbed through the slit in the fence and disappeared, all of them tumbling through the gap so quickly they hardly cared whether he followed or not-which was precisely what Pendergast had hoped. They would each be following separate escape routes, exquisitely choreographed by Eli Glinn to create a maximal uproar and response.

After Jug had disappeared, Pendergast grasped the cut fence, which had sprung back into place, and pulled it as wide as he could, stretching and bending the metal to leave the gap obvious for the guards who would soon be coming. He stepped back and examined the digital watch on his wrist, which in Pendergast’s case had far more sophisticated guts inside than its cheap plastic casing suggested. Those guts included a receiver unit that downloaded ACTS satellite time signals, which would be of the utmost importance for the impending operation. He waited until the precise appointed time, then pressed a button on the watch, activating a timer. The display began counting down from 900 seconds.

Pendergast stepped back and waited.

At 846 seconds, the sudden howl of emergency sirens filled the air. Pendergast turned and walked swiftly across the yard into the angle of the building closest to the door, where two shabby cement walls came together at a right angle. There, he reached down into a drainpipe and retrieved a long, thin tube: the same tube D’Agosta had placed inside it a few days earlier. He released the catches at both ends, unrolled it like a flag, and gave it a sharp shake. Immediately, it popped out into its intended shape: two equal squares of fabric about three feet per side, joined along one edge by plastic stays to create a V shape. The squares were coated in very thin sheets of brilliantly reflective Mylar. The entire construction, in fact, had been modified by Glinn from a standard portable light reflector such as those used in outdoor advertising shoots.

Now Pendergast moved into the corner, putting his back against the bricks and crouching low to the ground. He positioned the device in front, snugging it up close to him and making sure the outer two edges of the V-shaped reflector were tight against the walls on each side, forming a ninety-degree angle.

It was a simple but highly refined application of one of the oldest stage illusions of magic: using carefully angled mirrors to make someone vanish. It had been used as early as the 1860s, when Professor John Pepper’s “Proteus Cabinet” and Colonel Stodare’s “Sphinx” act-in which a woman was placed in a box that was subsequently shown to be empty-were the rage of Broadway. Pressed into the corner of the prison yard, the reflector accomplished the same effect: creating in essence a mirrored box that Pendergast could hide behind. Its mirrored surfaces reflected the cement walls on either side, creating the illusion of a vacant corner where the two walls came together. Only someone actually walking over to examine the corner would discover the deception-and the current panic was calculated to prevent that.

At 821, Pendergast heard the electronic bolts disengage; the doors were flung open, and four “first responder” guards from nearby guard station 7 charged into yard 4, Tasers at the ready.

“Fence is cut!” one cried, pointing to the gaping hole at the far end.

As the four sprinted across the asphalt toward the gap, Pendergast stood, snapped the two sides of the Mylar reflector together, rolled it back into a compact tube, and returned it to the drainpipe. Then he slipped through the doors into the prison, sprinting around a corner and into the nearby bathroom. Quickly, he entered the second-to-last stall, stood on the toilet, and lifted the acoustic ceiling tile overhead. There, taped to the upper side, he found a plastic bag containing a slim four-gigabyte flash-memory chip, a credit card, a small hypodermic needle and syringe, some duct tape, and a tiny capsule of brown liquid. Pocketing the items, he exited the bathroom and darted down the hall to guard station 7. Just as Glinn had predicted: of the five guards on duty, four had responded to the escape call, leaving the lone commanding guard at the console, surrounded by a wall of live video feeds. The man was shouting orders into a microphone and punching up feed after feed, frantically searching for the loose inmates. An overwhelming response had been mobilized to deal with the mass escape attempt. Based on the guard’s excited chatter, already one of the inmates had been run down and recaptured.