Gone Tomorrow

He went quiet.

I asked him, ‘Do you know the combinations for the cells?’

He said, ‘No.’

‘So how do you give painkiller injections?’

‘Through the bars.’

‘What happens if someone has a seizure and you can’t get in the cell?’

‘I have to call.’

‘Where is your equipment?’

‘In my locker.’

‘Show me,’ I said. ‘Open it.’

We went back to the anteroom and he led me to a locker and spun the combination dial. The door swung open. I asked him, ‘Can you open any of the other cabinets?’

He said, ‘No, just this one.’

His locker had a bunch of shelves inside, piled high with all kinds of medical stuff. Wrapped syringes, a stethoscope, small phials of colourless liquids, packs of cotton balls, pills, bandages, gauze, tape.

Plus a shallow box of tiny nitrogen capsules.

And a box of wrapped darts.

Which made some kind of bureaucratic sense. I imagined the management conference back when they were writing the operations manual. The Pentagon. Staff officers in charge. Some junior ranks present. An agenda. Some DoD counsel insisting that the dart gun’s ammunition be held by a qualified medical officer. Because anaesthetic was a drug. And so on and so forth. Then some other active-duty type saying that compressed nitrogen wasn’t medical. A third guy pointing out it made no sense at all to keep the propellant separate from the load. Around and around. I imagined exasperated agents eventually giving up and giving in. OK, whatever, let’s move on.

I asked, ‘What exactly is in the darts?’

The guy said, ‘Local anaesthetic to help the wound site, plus a lot of barbiturate.’

‘How much barbiturate?’

‘Enough.’

‘For a gorilla?’

The guy shook his head. ‘Reduced dose. Calculated for a normal human.’

‘Who did the calculation?’

‘The manufacturer.’

‘Knowing what it was for?’

‘Of course.’

‘With specifications and purchase orders and everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘And tests?’

‘Down at Guantanamo.’

‘Is this a great country, or what?’ The guy said nothing.

I asked him, ‘Are there side effects?’‘None.’

‘You sure? You know why I’m asking, right?’

The guy nodded. He knew why I was asking. I was fresh out of computer cords, so I had to keep half an eye on him while I found the gun and loaded it. Loading it was a jigsaw puzzle. I wasn’t familiar with the technology. I had to proceed on common sense and logic alone. Clearly the trigger mechanism tripped the gas release. Clearly the gas propelled the dart. And guns are basically simple machines. They have fronts and backs. Cause and effect happens in a rational sequence. I got the thing charged up inside forty seconds.

I said, ‘You want to lie down on the floor?’

The guy didn’t answer.

I said, ‘You know, to save bumping your head.’

The guy got down on the floor.

I asked him, ‘Any preference as to where? Arm? Leg?’

He said, ‘It works best into muscle mass.’

‘So roll over.’

He rolled over and I shot him in the ass.

I reloaded the thing twice more and put darts into the two agents that were liable to wake up. Which gave me at least an eight-hour margin, unless there were other unanticipated arrivals on the horizon. Or unless the agents were supposed to call in with status checks every hour. Or unless there was a car already on its way to take us back to D.C. Which conflicting thoughts made me feel half relaxed and half urgent. I carried the pry bar through to the cell block. Jacob Mark looked at me and said nothing. Theresa Lee looked at me and said, ‘They sell shoes like that on Eighth Street now?’

I didn’t answer. Just stepped around to the back of her cell and jammed the flat end of the pry bar under the bottom of the structure. Then I leaned my weight on the bar and felt the whole thing move, just a little. Just a fraction of an inch. Not much more than the natural flex of the metal.

‘That’s stupid,’ Lee said. ‘This thing is a self-contained freestanding cube. You might be able to tip it over, but I’ll still be inside.’

I said, ‘Actually it’s not freestanding.’

‘It’s not bolted to the floor.’

‘But it’s clamped down by the sewer co

‘Will that help?’

‘I hope so. If I tip it up and the sewer co

‘Will it hold?’

‘It’s a gamble. It’s a kind of competition.’

‘Between what?’

‘Nineteenth-century legislation and a sleazy twenty-first-century welding shop with a government contract. See how the floor isn’t welded all the way around? Just in some places?’

‘That’s the nature of spot welding.’

‘How strong is it?’

‘Plenty strong. Stronger than the toilet pipe, probably.’

‘Maybe not. There was cholera in New York in the nineteenth century. A big epidemic. It killed lots of people. Eventually the city fathers figured out what was causing it, which was cesspools mixing with the drinking water. So they built proper sewers. And they specified all kinds of standards for the pipes and the co

Lee paused a beat. Then she smiled, briefly. ‘So either I get illegally busted out of a government jail cell, or the sewer pipe gets torn out of the floor. Either way I’m in the shit.’

‘You got it.’

‘Great choice.’

‘Your call,’ I said.

‘Go for it.’

Two rooms away I heard a telephone start to ring.

I knelt down and eased the tip of the pry bar into the position it needed to be in, which was under the bottom horizontal rail of the cell, but not so far under that it also caught the edge of the floor tray. Then I kicked it sideways a little until ii was directly below one of the upside-down T-welds, where the force would be carried upwards through one of the vertical bars.

Two rooms away the telephone stopped ringing.

I looked at Lee and said, ‘Stand on the toilet seat. Let’s give it all the help we can.’

She climbed up and balanced. I took up all the slack in the pry bar and then leaned down hard and bounced, once, twice, three times. Two hundred and fifty pounds of moving mass, multiplied by sixty inches of leverage. Three things happened. First, the pry bar dug itself a shallow cha

‘That was a spot,’ Lee called. ‘As in spot-weld.’

I moved the pry bar and found a similar position twelve inches lo the left. Wedged the bar tight, took up the slack, and bounced. Same three results. The grind of powdered concrete, the screech of bending bars, and the ping of another metal bead torn loose.

Two rooms away a second phone started to ring. A different lone. More urgent.

I stood back and caught my breath. Moved the pry bar again, this time two feet to the right. Repeated the procedure, and was rewarded with another broken weld. Three down, many more to go. But now I had approximate hand-holds in the bottom rail, where the pry bar had forced shallow U-shaped bends into the metal. I put the pry bar down and squatted facing the cell and shoved my hands palms-up into the holds. Grasped hard and breathed hard and prepared to lift. When I quit watching the Olympics the weightlifters were moving more than five hundred pounds. I figured I was capable of much less than that. But I figured much less than that might do the trick.