Pawn’s Gambit (35 page)

A woman with a very familiar face …

Quillan inhaled sharply. “And,” Winslow added quietly, “meet Susan's identical twin sister Julia. As you can see, your associate in Ghana was willing to cut himself a deal.”

“We'll want you to stay on Mars another couple of weeks,” Susan said, setting a mug of hot tea on the table in front of Rey as she slid into the seat across from him. “Just in case we need you to add to your deposition.”

“So what Mr. Quillan said was true?” Rey asked, looking down at his tea, afraid to look directly at her. Her, or her sister. “When they took him away? That you were just using me?”

“They needed to be stopped, Rey,” she said gently. “They didn't believe any of the rules applied to them anymore. Juan Estevez was just one example of the sort of thing they were getting away with every day. Quillan would have killed you, too, once you were of no more use to him. Just as he killed the telepath he had before you.”

She reached across the table and touched his hand. “But that said, no, we weren't just using you. Any more than we were just using Julia. Or me.”

“You and Julia volunteered,” Rey said bitterly. “I didn't have any choice in the matter.”

“How could we have asked you?” Susan pointed out. “Quillan had you totally isolated.”

“From everybody except Julia,” Rey countered, his voice coming out harsher than he'd expected. “You ever think of that?
She
could have asked me.”

“Winslow suggested that,” Julia's slightly slurred voice said softly from Rey's left. “But I was afraid to.”

The sheer surprise of the comment got Rey's gaze up out of his tea. She'd been
afraid
to? “Why?

To his surprise, he saw tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. “Because there was no proof I could give you,” she said softly. “I was afraid you'd think I was just trying to stir you up against Quillan. I thought you'd never want to see me or talk to me …”

She looked away. “There's no reversal, Rey. We're going to be like this for the rest of our lives. We're never going to fit in anymore, not with anyone. I was afraid if you started hating me …”

Rey looked at Susan. There were no smiles there now, on that face whose every line he'd memorized. Nothing but love and heartache and sadness as she gazed at her sister.

He looked back at Julia. Then, hesitantly, he reached over and took her hand. “It's okay,” he said. “Really. I've never hated anyone in my life. I'm sure not going to start with you.”

She looked back at him, blinking away the tears. Then, almost as if afraid to believe it, she gave him a tentative smile.

A half smile, with the left part of her lips frozen in place. A nervous, almost frightened smile.

Rey smiled back. With the enormity of the sacrifice she'd made now crashing in on her, what Julia really needed was someone who could understand her. Someone who could care for her solely for who she was. Someone who could be her friend.

He would be that friend.

Proof

“There was a little girl, she had a little curl

right in the middle of her forehead;

And when she was good, she was very, very good,

and when she was bad, she was horrid.”

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Breakfast had been oatmeal again, that god-awful freeze-dried pap that Angel Morris could never quite get to come out right, no matter how much or how little of the dispenser's hot water she used. The coffee was worse than usual, too, tingling her tongue and leaving a strange aftertaste behind. Probably someone new had made the low bid for food services, and the new contract had started.

She finished eating and put the bowl and cup down the disposal chute to be dissolved, cleaned, and reassembled in time for lunch. Then she dressed herself in the most presentable of her light gray jumpsuits, and sat on the edge of her cot, watching one of the interchangeable sitcoms playing on the tiny screen set into the wall and wondering why the hell they even bothered with the TV in the first place. They ought to be able to feed the programs directly through the tiny CURL disk that had been implanted into the center of her forehead. Skipping the TVs might even save them enough money to buy some better shows.

It seemed like forever, but finally the warning buzzer came. The door snicked open, and she stepped out into the long corridor, joining the other women with their identical gray jumpsuits and identical bland faces heading out to the yard for the day's brief taste of fresh air. Another wonderful day in the paradise-on-Earth that was Oregon's Hillcrest Prison.

The last day she planned on ever spending in here.

“You all know how it all started,” Mr. Jacobs said, his voice quiet and earnest and eminently reasonable. “The citizens wanted violent criminals locked securely away, but at the same time balked at paying the high costs involved. The state was heading for yet another fiscal crisis when Dr. Alan Cartier came up with his breakthrough Cognitive Universal Reality Linkage system.

“I'm sure you're all at least somewhat familiar with the CURL system, but let me just run through some of the highlights and perhaps dispel a few of the myths that have sprung up about it. First, the system only affects the prisoner's visual perception; that is, touch and taste and hearing are all quite normal and unaffected. Second, there are no direct psychological or mental effects involved, though I understand that researchers are working on such areas for future penal applications.

“Finally, civil libertarian hysteria and accusations to the contrary, there is absolutely nothing cruel or unusual about the system. The prisoners are not fed frightening or malicious images in order to keep them in line, nor are they shown alluring mirages to taunt or torture them. They're merely shown a few things that aren't there, and kept from seeing a few other things that are. With the prisoners preparing their own freeze-dried meals in their cells, and with automated fiber-reformable dishware and uniforms eliminating the need for food-service and laundry facilities, this has brought prison staffing costs down to a bare minimum, while still protecting both the citizens and the handful of actual guards on the site.”

The midday sun was shining brightly as the prisoners filed out into the exercise yard that encircled the prison building like a wide, grassy moat. Of course, with the CURL in place, all that sunlight could be just an illusion. Still, Angel could feel the warmth on her face, so it probably was real.

She took a deep breath, then another, savoring the clean, crisp scent of the outdoor air. It wasn't until she was outside that she ever realized how genuinely bad the air inside really smelled, that sickening mixture of sweat and smoke and toilets and, occasionally, vomit. It always made going back inside that much harder.

That, at least, she wouldn't have to worry about today.

She gazed out at the barriers standing between her and freedom as she and the other women began dispersing across the yard, heading to the various pieces of exercise equipment or to just walk around and savor the sunshine. The first of those barriers was the waist-high wire-mesh warning fence that ringed the edge of the yard. Beyond that was a twenty-yard open area patrolled by dozens of guards with tasers, fighting batons, and compact shoulder-slung Uzi machine guns at the ready. Beyond that, should a prisoner somehow make it that far, was the outer wall itself, thirty feet of forbidding stone topped by coils of razor wire, with guard towers rising from each corner.

Only it wasn't real. None of it was. Or at least, very little.

One of the other prisoners bumped into her, and she spun around. “Watch it, skank,” she growled.

“Sorry,” the other woman said, her bland, featureless face not changing in the slightest as she moved hastily away. Angel watched her go, her skin crawling as she silently cursed the vicious bastard who'd thought this one up. Every single face, every single body in this place looked exactly the same. It was like being locked up with a bunch of faceless robot zombie clones, making the view inside the wall as bland and tasteless as the morning oatmeal.

“The CURL also provides what's known as ‘shrouding,' overwriting all the inmates' features and body type with a single uniform pattern as seen by all the other prisoners,” Mr. Jacobs continued. “The purpose, of course, is not to eliminate potential friendships, but to defuse potential arguments and fights. After all, it's impossible to instigate a feud with someone if you can't pick that person out of a crowd. And you'd have to be a fool or completely psychotic to start a random fight when you can't tell whether the other person is smaller and weaker or bigger and nastier than you yourself are.”

A wide walking path had been worn into the ground just inside the warning fence, the grass there beaten down by a thousand restless feet with nothing else to do. A dozen other prisoners were already striding along it as Angel arrived and worked herself into the pattern.

She gazed out at the guards as she walked. There were at least fifty of them out there today, looking back at her with expressionless faces, and she noted once again with a deep and vicious anger that
they
had been allowed to keep real faces and bodies.

But then, they had to … because the deep dark secret of Hillcrest Prison was that most of them weren't there at all.

Most of the prisoners didn't know that, of course. Most of them were gullible enough, or stupid enough, to take all this at face value.

But then, most of them hadn't made a point of sleeping with anyone who actually worked in the prison system the way she had while she was still on the outside. His name had been Carl, one of the few men she'd ever slept with whose name she'd bothered to learn.

“Angel Morris is a perfect case in point,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Though convicted for only two murders, she's the probable perpetrator of at least seven more over a fifteen-year period. And unlike most of those incarcerated at Hillcrest, she
has
shown herself willing to pick fights with her fellow inmates, even with the shrouding in place. Guards have had to taser her twice in the past week just to calm her down. Apparently, she's not only violent and vicious, but stupid as well.”

With one final grunt Carl rolled off her onto his side of the bed. “Whew!” he breathed. “You sure are something, Angelface. You know that?”

“I've been told,” Angel said, forcing herself to snuggle up against his side. He'd gotten what he wanted. Now it was her turn. “So. It must be fun to work at Hillcrest, huh?”

“Naw,” he said, fumbling at the bedside table and coming up with a cigarette. “It
is
pretty funny, though.”

“Funny?”

“To see all those stupid sheep wandering around inside a wall that's not there,” he said. “Mostly not there, anyway—the bottom seven feet are real enough. But the rest of it, plus the guard towers and razor wire—” He shook his head as he lit the cigarette, the light from the match throwing strange shadows across his face. It was one of those Turkish cigarettes she absolutely hated, and she crinkled her nose in disgust at the smell. “Sometimes you just want to tell them how stupid they are, just so you could see the looks on their faces.”

“But you'd get fired if you did that, wouldn't you?”

He snorted. “Fired, hell. We'd probably get stampeded. There are only five of us out there on any shift, you know. Five guards, for a hundred prisoners or more outside at a time! You believe that?”

“It's the CURL that makes it work, right?” she asked, probing delicately. “It makes them see what isn't there?”

“That, and makes them
not
see some of the stuff that
is
there,” he said smugly. “Gotta admit it's kind of cool.”

“And there's nothing that can stop it, huh?”

“Oh, sure, lots of things,” he said, tapping the cigarette off into an ashtray. “The computer feeding the images could crash. Not going to happen, though. A good shock nearby might scramble it, too, at least for a second or two. Or someone could get some long needle-nose pliers and pull it out of her forehead. 'Course, that would hurt. A lot.”

“A shock, you say,” she said, latching onto the interesting part. “You mean an electrical shock, like a taser or something?”

“Yeah.” He stretched, the movement sending a few ashes drifting into the air. “Hey, be a good girl and go get me a beer, would you, Babe?”

She stiffened, her breath catching in her throat, a blood-red haze dropping like a curtain across her vision.
Babe
… “What did you mean, the CURL makes them not see things that are there?” she asked, forcing her voice to stay calm.

“Enough shop talk, huh?” he said tiredly. “Damn, but you've got a weird idea of what to chat about afterward. Just go get that beer, huh?”

“Don't you mean, go get that beer,
Babe
?” she countered.

“Whatever,” he said off-handedly.

Her right hand groped for the sheets, got a good grip on them and squeezed, fighting against the terrible ache to do him right here and now.
Not yet
, she warned herself urgently.
Not yet. Not until he tells you everything.
“Okay,” she said, prying her fingers loose from the sheets and slipping out from under them. “Then will you tell me what's there the prisoners can't see?”

He grunted. “Sure,” he said tiredly. “Whatever.”

She padded barefoot to the kitchen and got two beers out of the refrigerator. Then, crossing to the butcher block, she pulled out the biggest knife there.

Later, after it was all over, she made sure to carefully wash the blood off her hands as she finished off the last of her beer.

She was approaching one of the guards now, standing a half dozen feet inside the mesh fence, his eyes flitting alertly back and forth across the yard. “Nice day,” she called, smiling at him as she passed.

There was just the barest of pauses before his eyes shifted to focus on her. But it was enough. “Yeah,” he grunted back.

Angel continued walking, still smiling as she marked the man's face in her mind. She'd never managed to get Carl to tell her how to tell the real guards from the phantom ones, but since being put in here she'd figured it out for herself. The real ones could respond to her questions and comments right away, but the computer running the CURL system had to take a moment to process the input and come up with an answer for the fake ones.

She glanced back over her shoulder at the phantom guard. There was something odd about their shadows, too, she'd noted, something that didn't look quite real against the genuine grass beneath their feet.

But she didn't just have Carl's word and her own speculation to go on. She'd seen the reality for herself, twice, just before those taser shots had knocked her out. She'd seen the shortened wall, and the faces of her fellow prisoners, and the empty spaces that up to that moment had been filled by threatening guards.

Unless that had all been yet another trick, this one a trick of the taser and her looming unconsciousness and her own desire to believe there was indeed a way out of here. Certainly as she gazed out now across the prison yard it was hard to believe that her eyes could lie to her so effectively and persistently.

But whether those taser images had been the proof she craved or not, today was the day she had to make her move. There'd been some technical glitch with her sentencing hearing, she knew, but it was back on track now. And if it went badly and they transferred her to death row, she might never get another chance at this.

Facing forward again, being careful not to bump into any of the slower walkers on the track, she continued around the track.

“The system has been up and running for five years,” Mr. Jacobs said. “And in that time, it's shown itself to provide better prison security at a fraction of traditional costs.

“But despite all these precautions—despite all our technology and planning and preparation—things can and do sometimes go terribly wrong.”

She had to make six circuits of the track, but when she was finished she had all five of the real guards pinpointed.

Not surprisingly, all these months of herding human cattle had made them sloppy. Instead of spacing themselves more or less evenly around the yard, they'd clumped themselves together on one side, probably so that they could relieve the boredom by chatting together. Being a prison guard, after all, was probably nearly as bad as being one of the prisoners.

The problem—for them—was that the prison buildings rose a good two stories up from the center of the ground. That meant that, from where they all stood, there was a whole chunk of the exercise yard they couldn't see.

There would be cameras, of course, watching those blind spots. But Hillcrest's touted budget savings had cut into that aspect of prison life, too, and she doubted there would be more than a single man on duty in the monitor room. He certainly wouldn't be expecting anyone to make a run for it.