Off to Be the Wizard - 2 - Spell or High Water (21 page)

21.

For practical reasons, prisons are often built in areas that will
naturally
discourage escape. Some prisons are too far from
civilization
for inmates to realistically ever return from, like
Devil’s
Island. Some are close to civilization, but located in a place that makes attempts at escape a form of suicide, like
Alcatraz
. Some of the most feared prisons are located both far from civilization and in a life-threatening environment.

After a long conversation followed by a long flight
followed
by a long drive, Agent Murphy parked his rental car in the
parking
lot of the most secret prison on U.S. soil, near the
southern
tip of Florida.

To many it would seem counterintuitive to place an ultra-high-security secret prison in Florida. After all, the two
impressions
most people share of Florida is that it is a palm
tree
-infested family vacation destination and that it is the criminal’s natural habitat. Murphy himself had expressed surprise when he was told where he was going and why.

After Jimmy’s attempts to direct Agents Miller and Murphy into the mysterious file that was now mysteriously password
protected
, Jimmy had scoured his notes trying to recall
everything
he knew about how every other person who had accessed the file had done it. It seems that a popular pastime amongst those who found the file was sharing stories about how they found the file. Jimmy said that during his time in exile he had written down what he remembered, and using his notes and his increasingly hazy memories, they had managed to find twelve more copies of the file, all of which were password protected.

After they had followed every lead in his notes, Jimmy lapsed into a deep funk, sullenly pacing around the warehouse for two days, muttering to himself. Miller and Murphy had decided that Jimmy had been a costly and embarrassing dead end, and were about to pull the plug when Jimmy ran into the camper
shouting
like a crazy person. He said that someone they’d never heard of, named Phillip, had clearly put up the passwords on every copy of the file he knew about to keep him out. At first,
Murphy thou
ght this was just more reason to give up, but then Jimmy said that there was one person who had never told anyone where he found the file, another person they’d never heard of named Todd
Douglas
. Jimmy said Todd should be easy to find, as he was fairly certain that Todd would be in prison.

They searched for a prisoner named Todd Douglas and hit a brick wall. They learned that Douglas existed, and was “in the system,” so to speak, but they didn’t have high enough security clearance for any information beyond that. Murphy had to kiss a lot of backsides and Miller had to yell a lot of threats. On a few occasions, they had to do both at the same time, to the same
person
, but after three days of sustained phone action they finally got clearance for one of them to come to this secret federal facility and meet with the infamous Todd Douglas.

The phone call came in the middle of the night. It was
Murphy’s
turn to sleep at home in his own bed while Miller guarded Jimmy, so it was Murphy whose phone worked. The voice on the other end of the line said that he was a high-ranking official in the
federal
corrections system, and would give Murphy the clearance to meet with Todd at a top-secret federal prison in Florida.

Murphy expressed surprise that there was a secret prison in such a popular and populous state, but the mysterious voice explained that Florida was the perfect location for a secret prison. “You might think that out in the desert in Nevada or New Mexico would be better, but the problem with putting a prison in the middle of nowhere is that you then have to ship the prisoners, the guards, and their supplies out to the middle of nowhere. That costs money. The beauty of Florida is that it’s a thoroughly hostile environment with well-established supply routes and a surplus of people for whom
prison guard
sounds like an attractive career opportunity.”

“But Florida’s not very wide,” Murphy said. “You’re never that far from an interstate. An escapee could be two states away by nightfall.”

The voice on the phone said, “If a prisoner did manage to escape, they’d have a choice. Face the swamp, or travel through towns.

“If they choose the swamp,” he continued, “they get to deal with alligators that are dangerous enough to kill and eat a man, and snakes dangerous enough to kill him without eating him, which if you think about it is kind of a bigger insult. It’s bad enough to die, but it would be worse to also go to waste.”

Murphy said that he agreed, although he wasn’t sure that
he did.

The voice on the phone continued. “If the escapee stuck to well-traveled roadways and towns, they’d face an even greater danger. Floridians. Law-abiding Floridians suspect that any stranger they meet might be a violent criminal. They trust nobody, and they call the police at the drop of a hat. To a
Floridian
, 911 is like an electronic lottery ticket. If they report you and you turn out to be a wanted felon, they might get a reward. If they report you and you’re not wanted, they still get to watch you get questioned by the police. The only way to lose is to not be the first person to call the cops. It’s a race to see who can dial 911 the fastest, and the prize for second place is a ride in a squad car.”

Murphy wasn’t buying it. “I’m not sure—”

“Don’t interrupt,” the disembodied voice on the phone said, interrupting him. Just because Murphy wasn’t buying it didn’t mean the voice had to stop selling it. “And
furthermore
, if that’s how dangerous the law-abiding citizens are, you can imagine how treacherous the criminals would be. There’s no honor among thieves, and even less among Floridians. If a criminal finds an escaped convict, they see the perfect
victim
. They can rob him of whatever he’s managed to steal with
impunity
, because what’s he going to do, call the police? And if he hasn’t managed to steal any money, clothes, or a car yet, you can just befriend him, help him steal all of those things, then take them yourself later. Agent Murphy, if I escaped from a prison in south Florida, I’d try to swim to Cuba. At least sharks play fair and the communists are up front about taking
everything
you own.”

This was a lot to absorb at 3:00 A.M., and Agent Murphy had almost forgotten what they were talking about in the first place. The voice reminded him, telling him that he was to report alone to the front gate of the prison at 3:00 P.M. eastern time in two days, and that he’d be allowed to meet with the prisoner, Todd Douglas, for exactly twenty minutes.

Murphy, Miller, and Jimmy scrambled to make a plan, then they scrambled to execute it. By the time they were done,
Murphy
barely had time to make it to his flight. The Treasury had approved the expenditure to pay for his travel, but, as always, they made the arrangements with an eye toward saving their money, not his time. There are direct flights from Los Angeles to Miami, but Agent Murphy’s itinerary had three legs and layovers in
Minneapolis
and Seattle (because fate has a sense of humor), before landing in Jacksonville, at the far end of the state from where he needed to be. Agent Murphy told his supervisor that this was a massive waste of his time. His supervisor replied that Agent Murphy was paid a salary, so his time was the agency’s to waste.

The flights were awful, and the drive had been worse.
Several
times he had driven through swarms of black insects that died in such large numbers, and in such a gruesome fashion, that it made it impossible to see through the windshield. Every rest area and gas station had lines of bug-splattered cars waiting to use a hose. The first time he stopped to clean the car had been
seriously
unpleasant. The nose of his silver rental car looked like it had been scorched during reentry, but the black streaks weren’t burn marks, they were bug corpses. The car reeked of death. He used the dirtiest squeegee he’d ever seen to clean as much of the windshield as he could without throwing up. He got back in the car, got back on the freeway, and within fifteen minutes drove through another swarm that obscured his vision all over again.

By the time he reached his destination, Agent Murphy longed for his days in the boxcar full of squeaky toys, but he made it. Murphy thought he was going to see a prison, but when he arrived he found a perfectly mundane, if over-sized
industrial
park. The front of the closest building was a long row of office entrances. He saw an unbroken line of tinted
windows
, tinted glass doors, and uninspiring signs with names like
Fan-rific Industrial
Venting
Solutions
, and logos that were capital
letters
tilted to the side to look like they were moving quickly, or
leaning
over, partially melted in the Florida heat, which seemed more likely. The
building
had probably been beige at first, but
prolonged
exposure
to the Florida sun had left it a dirty
eggshell
color. Behind the one-story office fronts there were larger two-story structures that looked like the standard industrial park storage/workshop/loading dock, multi-use business space. The whole property was surrounded by a cyclone fence topped with vicious-looking razor wire.

Murphy drove up to the security booth, where a dull-eyed old man in a faded uniform slouched on a stool,
watching
a small TV. Murphy sat in his idling car, trying to ignore the
oppressive
heat and the smell of baked bug guts rising off of his car in almost
visible
waves. The guard glanced at Agent Murphy
without
turning
his head. He sighed, then slid the window open so he could talk to this man who had the audacity to interrupt his
stories
.

The security guard said, “Wadja want?”

Murphy held up his badge and said, “I’m Agent Duane
Murphy
from the U.S. Department of the Treasury. I have an appointment.”

The guard nodded, then looked down at a clipboard on the shelf next to his TV. His finger trailed down the document, then stopped sharply. The guard sat straight up, turned crisply to Agent Murphy, and smiled. He instantly seemed ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter.

The guard said, “We’re expecting you, Agent Murphy. Come right in. Warden Brookes is waiting at the visitors’ entrance. It’s the fourth door down, labeled
My Shirt-List Novelty Tees
.” He slid the window closed and raised the orange and white striped arm so Murphy could enter.

Murphy found the door. The logo was a drawing of a T-shirt with a capital T in an overly decorative font. He parked, got out of the car, and pushed the car door closed with one finger,
pressing
on one of the few surfaces of the car that wasn’t streaked with sticky dried bug juice.

Murphy walked into the nondescript office entrance and was shocked at what he found inside: exactly what you’d expect.

A dropped-tile ceiling and fluorescent lights hung above off-white stucco walls and low-pile, high-traffic carpet. A metal faux wood grain desk and a black plastic desk chair were the only furnishings. The desk was covered with paperwork, a red stapler, and a black multiline phone. The only other door was behind the desk. It looked to be hollow core, and probably weighed about eight ounces. It had a cheap, shiny brass doorknob. The room reeked of dust and failure, which was better than humidity and dead bugs, but only a little.

Murphy had been inside less than five seconds when the door swung open. A man in a beautifully tailored black pinstriped suit entered. He was average height with thinning black hair. He looked like the kind of man who would play the president in a 1950s movie about giant wasps. He stepped forward, thrust out his hand, and said, “Agent Murphy, I’m Warden Brooks.
Welcome
to The Facility.”

Murphy shook his hand, and asked, “It certainly is quite a . . . facility. I just realized that nobody’s ever told me what this place is called.”

Warden Brooks said, “I just told you, Agent Murphy. It’s called
The Facility
.”

“Yes, I understand that that’s what you call it, but what’s its official name?”

Warden Brooks smiled, but clearly had been through this conversation many times before, and derived no pleasure from it. “This facility’s name, Agent Murphy, is The Facility. Any time anybody refers to The Facility in any capacity, official or
unofficial
, they refer to it as The Facility.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“The kind that confuses people and makes them sound either stupid or crazy. It is, in short, the perfect name for this kind of . . . facility. Please follow me.” With that, Warden Brooks walked out through the flimsy door he had used to enter.
Murphy
followed.

The cheap door led from the shabby office to a crummy hall. One side of the hall held two more faux-veneer hollow-core doors and too-shiny doorknobs. One had a drab brown plastic sign that said
Men
; the other had a similar sign that said
Ladies
.

Warden Brooks walked to the unmarked door at the end of the hall, but paused before opening it. “You need to use the
restroom
?”

Murphy said, “No.”

“Good. We deliberately keep those bathrooms dirty and short of toilet paper. We must keep up appearances.” The warden led Murphy onward through the door. Every characteristic changed. The hard carpeting was replaced with slightly softer-looking concrete floors. The stucco was displaced with painted cinderblock. The suspended acoustic ceiling was now exposed metal trusses and ductwork. The design aesthetic had changed from the kind of cheap that falls apart immediately to the kind of cheap that lasts forever.