Ted Dekker - Sanctuary

The light behind him cast a glow down a corridor that ended in twenty feet before turning to the right. From there he knew he would climb one set of stairs to the segregation wing. And another to the administrative wing.

Why?

Why had the warden gone to this trouble? Why hadn’t he just come for Danny and led him to Renee?

But then Danny knew. Pape wanted him to come of his own will, even knowing it was a trap. He wanted to lead him as he’d led Renee. The act of going to save someone invested a person in the rescue and intensified the pain of any failure.

The crushing of hope, however thin that hope, was more miserable than having no hope at all.

Even knowing that his disposition now was to overthrow his vows, knowing he was throwing himself on the mercy of his own emotions, Danny retreated, picked up two large splinters of wood, each roughly a hand’s span, and slipped them under the waistband of his shorts. One of the table legs had split off at an angle so that it formed a sharp wedge at one end. He grabbed it and strode for the door.

So, then, it came down to this. There was no more room for ideology or thinking. It was Renee up there now, not him. He would crush them all to save his bride.

And if they hurt Renee, he would hurt them.

Danny stepped out of the cell and headed down the corridor.

38

I KEPT TELLINGmyself the same thing as two guards handcuffed Keith and me and led us through the prison: this was all a misunderstanding. It was a mistake. This was the United States of America. This was California. There were laws, as the warden himself so aptly pointed out, and those laws prohibited the abuse of its citizens, both in and out of prison. As soon as the warden understood that we really hadn’t hurt anyone, his thinking would change. As soon as he reflected on how absurd his intentions were, he would come to his mind and return us to a conference room, where we could sit down like civilized people and discuss each of our mistakes—no foul, no harm.

But I knew that I was wrong. This really was my Jonestown, and there really was a new Jim Jones in town, living out his own twisted vision of good and evil right under America’s nose.

The world had been shocked by the deaths of the nine hundred people who’d died at Jonestown, because no one believed the rumors of abuse leading up to the massacre. It wasn’t possible. It was too much. It was preposterous. Maybe it could happen in the dark ages or in Nazi Germany, but not today. Not in California. Not in the United States of America.

But there I was, like a lamb being led to my own slaughter, and the worst thing about it all was that Keith was right. No one even knew that we were at Basal, not as Renee Gilmore and Keith Hammond. The pieces had fallen almost perfectly into a puzzle of Marshall Pape’s design. But I’d given up trying to figure out exactly how and just faced the fact that they had.

The prison was a ghost town. They’d cleared it before we were led through the domed hub. The inmates were probably locked down in their own cells, a common enough occurrence in most prisons. It was usually a form of restriction following an incident that required investigation, or a preventive measure against exacerbation of the incident.

Today, Keith and I were that incident. Danny was that incident. The warden had cleared the prison so that he could deal with us as he wished.

The captain jabbed his chin at the far side of the room. “This way.”

Keith hesitated. “Where is everyone?”

The captain gave him a little shove without bothering to answer.

Keith’s tie was gone and his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, was smudged along the arms and back where he’d leaned against the wall. He still wore his leather shoes and dark blue slacks.

There were no other guards on duty that I could see. The doors out to the main yard were closed, as were the doors to the housing wings.

Danny, where are you?

We were herded toward the section of Basal that held the infirmary and the cafeteria, but we passed them both and turned into a small hall. It ended at a door under a sign that said Recreation Room.

The captain reached for the door and offered me a twisted grin. “Welcome to the hard yard.” He pulled the door open and stepped aside with the handle still in his hand.

From my vantage, I could see only a gray concrete room—no people. But my mind’s eye saw images of black-and-white pictures from old documentaries. Gas chambers from Auschwitz. Slaughterhouses and abandoned basements.

I glanced up at Keith, who was staring in, face masked in stone. His words from the holding cell returned to me. This isn’t over.

I’d been consumed with Danny and myself, but looking at his stark hazel eyes, I saw a man who’d been pulled into a nightmare because I convinced him to help a damaged woman save the man she loved. Keith was connected through Randell, yes, but as it turned out, Randell had much less to do with the threat against Danny than either of us had thought. Like me, Keith had done what he thought was right. Conscience had only brought him here, to a place called the hard yard, inside of the prison called Basal, which meant core. Hard core.

The captain wagged his head through the open doorway. “Let’s go.”

It was my Jonestown, but it was also the place where I might see Danny, and so it was with a conflicted mind that I stepped inside their hard yard.

The room was concrete on all sides except the ceiling, which was made of a mesh wire supported by several metal beams. The towering concrete walls sent a chill down my back.

It was as if I had just stepped into my own graveyard. This was my tomb. My crypt, my slaughterhouse, the place where I would finally rest at the end of my life’s search for peace.

My eyes flitted over the rest of the room. A sea of faces stared at me, but none of them belonged to Danny. My heart crumbled.

Marshall Pape stood to my left, hands tucked into his blazer pockets, watching me without expression. Ten inmates were seated along the wall, legs cocked up or extended on the floor in front of them. Some were dressed in the common blue-and-tan uniforms of the general population. Some wore street clothes.

Besides the captain and the guard who’d brought us, there were four other COs in the room, one in each corner, all armed with illicit rifles.

Bruce Randell stared at me from the center of the line. I was going to die.

That was how I was thinking of it, but in the most trying times I had a way of letting all of my neurotic tendencies sink into the floor and becoming stronger. I was going to die here—Keith knew that, I knew that, Danny would soon know that—but maybe I was going to take Pape with me.

A low wolf whistle from one of the inmates broke the silence.

“Quiet,” the warden said. “This isn’t a whorehouse.” He returned his stare to me, face still flat.

The captain removed my handcuffs and shoved me from behind. I stumbled forward to the center of the room and was joined by Keith.

For long seconds no one spoke. I scanned the faces of the inmates, trying to guess their intentions or, worse, the warden’s intentions for them. Look at me, my eyes told them. I’m only a skinny woman who needs your sympathy. The real ogre’s over there. He’s the one who we should all fear.

Some were in their twenties, but most were in their thirties or forties, covered in prison tattoos. Just men, like Danny, who’d been sucked into Marshall Pape’s monster factory.

But they didn’t look like monsters. One had whistled, yes, and two or three eyed me with interest, but their eyes weren’t dripping with lust. In fact, most of them looked at me with uncertainty, even sympathy.