CHERUB: Maximum Security (19 page)

When James had finished, he put the lengths of rope in his locker and noticed that sunlight was flickering behind the blades of the ventilation fans in the cell wall. He was dreading another sweat-soaked day inside Arizona Max. But if things went to plan, this would be the last one.

*

James asked Curtis to hang back when the rest of the skinheads went on to the yard. The cell never emptied out entirely, but no one was paying attention as James pulled a strip of cardboard out of his shorts.

‘It’s my visit today,’ James explained. ‘If I can get Lauren on her own for a few seconds, without my uncle, I’ll tell her to pack a bag and expect us at the house at three tomorrow morning.’

Curtis nodded. ‘What’s with the cardboard?’

‘That’s how we’re getting out of here.’

‘
Cardboard
,’ Curtis said, looking at James like he was insane.

James stepped across to the emergency door in the middle of the cell. There were two of these sliding doors along the cell wall in between beds. They were designed to allow the PERT team to enter if the prisoners rioted and barricaded the main door, or as emergency exits in a fire.

‘How
exactly
do you plan to get a solid steel door open with a piece from a Kleenex box?’

James grinned confidently. ‘Watch and learn.’

He checked the gantry to make sure there wasn’t a hack around, then walked to the door and went up on tiptoes. He slotted the card through the gap between the top of the door and its frame and jiggled it in and out, before tucking it back into his pocket.

‘Now we wait,’ James said, as he moved away and sat on the end of a bed.

‘This is your great plan?’ Curtis asked indignantly.

Thirty seconds later, a hack walked purposefully on to the rail. He disappeared down a flight of spiral stairs behind the door. The door slid open thirty centimetres and the hack pushed his head through the gap. He inspected the inside for signs of tampering before shutting it again.

‘
What
…
?
’ Curtis gasped, as the guard walked back up the steps. ‘What happened?’

‘Remember I told you about that big-mouthed hack in Omaha?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He always moaned about the faulty doors. Every door inside Omaha State had an anti-tamper device. If someone starts fiddling, an alarm goes off on the console in the cellblock control room. They have to send a hack out to check both sides of the door and reset the alarm, but they’re very sensitive. All it takes is a gust of wind, or someone hitting the door to set it off. The hack said he spent half his life wandering around cancelling false alarms.’

‘And the doors here are the same?’

James nodded. ‘
Exactly
the same. And the thing is, the guards get so sick of the alarms, they assume every one is false.’

Curtis nodded. ‘That hack didn’t even look over the rail to see if someone was waiting on the other side.’

‘Within a minute of taking out the guard, we can be up on the rail and tooled up with stun grenades and pepper spray.’

‘And from there?’

‘You’ve seen how few staff there are on duty at night,’ James said. ‘If we rip off the hacks’ security passes and put on their uniform, I reckon we can bluff our way out of the front gate before the alarm goes off.’

‘Definitely tonight?’

James nodded. ‘As long as I get a chance to speak with my sister. Let’s hit the yard.’

There’d been a knife fight between two rival gangs the previous morning. Everyone had been sent back to their cells and locked down for the rest of the day. As James and Curtis lined up to pass through the metal detector, all the other inmates seemed tense, like something bad could flare up at any second.

As they closed on their regular spot by the chin-up bars, James spotted a kid balled up on the ground sniffling. Elwood had just slapped him around in front of a dozen laughing skinheads.

‘James,’ Elwood said, pointing down at the ball. ‘Wanna finish him off?’

‘I’m good,’ James said, waving his hand in front of his face.

The victim was Mark, the friendly kid with the black eye who’d slept next to James on the first night. Mark had no relatives on the outside to pay in commissary money. This ruled out extortion, but didn’t stop Elwood beating him up for fun.

‘Boot him,’ Elwood snarled. ‘You’re such a pussy, James.’

James spun quickly and kicked Mark up the arse. He knew this would amuse the crowd, without hurting his victim too badly. The skinheads roared as Mark rolled over in the dirt. James pulled down the front of his shorts.

‘Now get out of here before I piss over you,’ he snarled.

Mark scowled back at James, as he scrambled to his feet and limped off.

‘Why’d you let him go?’ Elwood asked angrily.

James shrugged. He kept trying to find ways to minimise the daily violence without appearing soft, but he knew that the more time he spent with psychos like Elwood, the more chance there was he’d end up involved in an incident where someone got badly beaten, or stabbed.

‘So,’ James said, desperate to change the subject. ‘Is there a riot going down, or not?’

The prospect had been hotly debated in the cell overnight. Whenever there was serious violence, the hacks closed the yard and locked everyone in the cells. But locking inmates down for long stretches only fermented the anger.

‘I
love
riots,’ Kirch said, making a rare excursion into the world of speech.

‘Yeah,’ Elwood said. ‘You should have seen the last one, James. There were baton rounds whizzing across this yard from every direction.
Poom, poom, poom
. I was one of the last to make it back to the cell and dudes were laid up everywhere: either stabbed, or shot up.’

Kirch looked at the sky with a smile across his face. ‘Happy days,’ he nodded. ‘Easily worth a month of lockdown.’

James sat down in the dirt. After a week of Kirch and Elwood’s bullying and bragging, he could happily have laid them out in return for five minutes’ peace.

‘The riot was the scariest hour of my life,’ Curtis whispered, leaning into James’ ear. ‘I thought I was gonna die. Elwood hid under one of the shelters. He was as scared as I was.’

James smiled. ‘What about Kirch?’

‘Kirch really
is
a psycho. I think he loved every minute.’

‘We’ve gotta get out of here,’ James said, shaking his head. ‘This place is doing my brain in.’

*

If the cellblock was put back in lockdown, visitation would be cancelled. James wouldn’t get to see Lauren and the escape would be off. As the morning wore on, James got increasingly nervous. There was a fight inside the canteen when the first batch of lunches was being served. It was shut down while the mess was cleared up inside and a rumour flashed around the yard that it wouldn’t reopen. A sullen crowd, most of whom had missed their main meal because of the lockdown the day before, gathered around the prefabricated building looking for trouble.

Superintendent Frey prowled on the roof, watching the commotion through binoculars. James anxiously studied his body language for any sign that the cellblock was going back into lockdown, but the canteen re-opened and the backlog of prisoners gradually got served.

When it was time, James enthusiastically walked to the reception room at the front of the cellblock. Before entering the visitors’ area, he had to strip naked and put his clothes in a cardboard box. After a body search, he buttoned on a pocketless yellow overall that nobody had ever thought to wash.

The visiting room had tables for six inmates, but Lauren and a wiry FBI agent James had never seen before were the only ones in the room. James walked barefoot across the tacky floor and sat opposite them. Lauren leaned forward and gave her brother a hug.

‘What happened to your head?’ Lauren gasped, looking at the five-day growth of stubble.

‘You hang with skinheads, you gotta look like one,’ James grinned. ‘If I don’t get out of here soon, I might end up with a tattoo.’

‘Prison tattoos are very dangerous,’ the FBI man said stiffly, in the poshest American accent James had ever heard. ‘The needle penetrating the skin is unlikely to be sterile. You’d risk being contaminated with any number of infectious diseases including hepatitis and AIDS.’

‘I read my briefings,’ James whispered. ‘I take it you’re my new uncle John.’

‘Theodore Monroe,’ the stick man nodded as he shook James’ hand, ‘but everyone calls me Theo. I’m afraid John Jones was compromised when Curtis saw him in the education block. Scott Warren already works here and Marvin … Well, it would obviously be inappropriate to send an African American undercover pretending to be your uncle.’

James smiled. ‘So are we expecting company in here?’

‘Scott organised the visiting roster so that it only contained inmates who never get visitors,’ Theo explained.

‘Are we being bugged?’

Theo shook his head. ‘There is recording equipment in this room, but they need permission from a judge to switch it on. We have to get it every time Curtis’ supposed uncles turn up.’

‘You know that note you passed to Scott Warren about the psychiatrist in Philadelphia?’ Lauren asked excitedly. ‘The FBI followed up your lead and found a picture of Jane Oxford.’

‘At least we think it’s her,’ Theo interrupted, reaching inside his impeccably tailored suit and pulling out a blurry colour photo.

James stared at the face of an ordinary looking middle-aged woman, wearing large rectangular glasses. The boy standing at her side was clearly Curtis.

‘It’s a video surveillance picture from the first class check-in counter at Philadelphia International Airport, a couple of weeks before Curtis was sent to the military school. Interestingly enough, the psychiatrist Curtis visited turned out to be on the board of directors at the military school.’

James laughed. ‘Curtis
said
psychiatrists are a bunch of crooks. I bet he earned a nice bonus for every poor kid he sent there.’

‘The FBI have also traced multiple transactions on the credit cards Jane Oxford used to book the flights. All in all, it’s a commendable piece of intelligence work. John Jones and Marvin Teller told me to pass on their heartiest congratulations.’

James couldn’t imagine the phrase
heartiest congratulations
ever passing the lips of John Jones or Marvin Teller, but he got the point.

‘So, does any of this actually get us anywhere?’ James asked.

‘Perhaps,’ the FBI man said, as he swept invisible crumbs from his jacket with his spindly fingers. ‘Even if your escape attempt fails, this photograph represents a significant breakthrough.’

‘What about the escape?’ James asked. ‘We’d better still be on for tonight. I can’t handle it here much longer. I was scared about what might happen to me at first. Now I’m more worried about what I might be forced into doing to someone else. Things are on a short fuse out on the yard right now.’

‘There’s no hold-up at our end,’ Theo nodded. ‘There will be three staff on duty in your cellblock tonight. Scott Warren, of course, the female guard Amanda Voss and lastly a man named Golding, who will be working at the cellblock control console. You have to be exceedingly cautious around the control room. Golding will be within reach of an emergency alarm that can instantly deactivate every door in the prison, even for those with swipe cards.

‘When you get out of the cellblock and reach the staff lounge, you’re unlikely to bump into a member of staff. I’m led to believe that the conditions are rather insalubrious. It’s not the kind of place where you’d want to spend time hanging around after your shift.

‘Apart from Warren, the only other person who will be on duty inside the prison and who knows about the escape attempt is a man named Shorter. He works inside the central prison control room and operates the staff exit door. As you know, Dave has certain physical similarities to Scott Warren and the original plan was for him to show his face to the security camera when you passed through the main gate. Unfortunately, neither yourself nor Curtis are big enough to easily pass as an adult male, so we’ve brought in Shorter as an insurance policy. He’s been an employee of the Arizona Prison Department for nearly forty years, and we expect the inquiry into your escape to make him the scapegoat. Shorter understands this, but the FBI has agreed to offer to pay for his early retirement, in return for cooperation.’

‘So that should get us out of the front door,’ James said. ‘What next?’

‘You meet up with Lauren, as per the plan. It is of considerable importance that you move quickly. Arizona is sparsely populated and there are not many roads in and out of the state. You can expect police roadblocks to be set up on all the major roads near to the prison within half an hour of the escape being detected.’

‘I’ve already tuned the car radio to a local news station,’ Lauren said. ‘So we’ll know as soon as the alert goes out.’

‘Assuming you make it away from the prison, we’re then relying on Curtis to find the way back to his mother,’ Theo explained. ‘We recorded the conversation during Curtis’ visit on Saturday and he made no mention of the escape. Do you have any idea where you’ll be going?’