The Henchmen's Book Club (24 page)

“Mark Paul Jones,” they said, “you have pleaded guilty to
the following charges.”

A military clerk stood up and read out what I’d won.

“One count of conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.
One count of conspiracy to destroy US government property. One count of murder
in the second degree.”

That bloody Nguni! My prosecutors dropped all the other
murder charges and accepted that I couldn’t be held responsible for killing so
many whilst technically only responsible for guarding the Coke machine but
Dunbar wouldn’t have it. He simply wouldn’t let them sully the memory of his
matchstick mate with a grubby plea bargain so for the second time in as many
lives I was convicted of killing a man who’d knocked on my door looking for a
fight.

If only I could’ve killed him again.

“These are some of the gravest charges on record,” the
head-judge glowered. “Each a capital crime in its own right and in normal
circumstances I should have no hesitation but to pass the appropriate sentence
with immediate effect. However,” he hammed, milking the moment for all it was
worth, “in light of your recent co-operation with our investigators we have
decided to treat you with leniency and it is therefore our judgement that you
be sentenced to a term of ninety-nine years incarceration for each offence.
Sentences to run concurrent.”

“That’ll help,” I said.

“You will serve out the entirety of your sentence here at
Fort McCarthy in the maximum security wing of the special prisoners unit. As
you are a British subject your government will be informed of your presence here,
though you will not be permitted to communicate with any persons beyond these
penitentiary walls. That includes diplomatic staff, lawyers, journalists,
friends or family.”

“Can I at least call Raj’s News and cancel my papers?” I
asked. “I must be running up one hell of a bill.”

The judge continued, unfazed. “Furthermore, any and all
assets held by the convicted are hereby confiscated and turned over to become
the legal property of the United States government,” he said, his country
suddenly one slightly run-down if heavily mortgaged farm in West Sussex the
richer, before looking me straight in the eye to hammer the final nail into my
coffin.

“Lastly, because of the nature of your plea and because of
your full and unconditional acceptance of guilt, it is our judgement that you
be denied the right of appeal for the entirety of your sentence. Mark Paul
Jones, have you anything to say for the record?”

What was the point? It was over. I might as well have been
buried under all that snow in Greenland for all the weight my words would ever
carry again.

I looked over my shoulder at a blazing Rip Dunbar, who’d
made a special effort and actually put on a shirt for the occasion, before
turning back to address the bench.

“Yes, I have,” I told them. “I’ve been in US custody for
four months now so will that go down as time served?”

28.
IN THE LAND OF THE FREE

Believe it or not there were some actual benefits to being convicted and
sentenced, the main one being that I was transferred from the detainees’ unit
to the special prisoners’ block with immediate effect.

And wouldn’t you know it, I was already acquainted with
some of my fellow special prisoners.

“Mr Jones.”

“By God, Mr Smith!”

We shook hands like old friends but stopped short of
embracing and rolling around on the floor together. I guess that would come
with time.

“I can’t say I’m pleased to see you here,” Mr Smith
shrugged.

“Me neither,” I agreed. “Still, it could be worse. I
thought you were dead.”

“Me? No,” he shrugged. “We got the chopper moving after we
saw your flare and got picked up in Tasiilaq before the extraction team could
get us out.”

“Who flew?” I asked as we were ushered through a huge set
of doors and into a plain white tiled room with showers in the middle of the
room.

“An Omega guy called Crow. Black hair, funny eyebrows; do
you remember him?”

“Nope.”

“Well anyway, he came up looking to bug out so we hitched a
ride. He should be in here as well somewhere,” he said, looking around at the
other faces in our association batch as they began stripping us of our duds.

“So what did you get?” I asked. “What sentence did they
give you?”

“Ninety-nine years, same as everyone else,” Mr Smith
confirmed. “It’s what everyone gets, didn’t you know?”

“No,” I said, feeling suckered and somewhat less than
special all at once. “Motherfuckers!”

“Ain’t that a fact.”

Of course, the authorities didn’t just let us mingle at
will. We were locked up two to a cell for twenty-two hours a day and allowed
only one hour of association time a day. And even then, our association hours
were staggered in such a way that barely twenty guys were ever allowed out at
once. I guess the authorities didn’t feel like taking the lid off a pot of
snakes by giving four hundred professional mercenaries with nothing to lose the
run of the place.

So we were shepherded out of our cells in batches, through
the showers, through the dinner hall and finally up to the surface for a
precious hour of daylight, before once again being led back to our cells. It
wasn’t much but that hour of daylight came to mean everything to us and the one
and only bright spot in an endless succession of otherwise grim days. It also
turned out to be the authorities’ chief stranglehold over the prisoners and
could be – and frequently was – withdrawn for any infraction of the
rules. I guess that’s why they gave it to us in the first place.

I’d find out all of this in the fullness of time but for
the moment I was an old hand at settling into inhospitable climes and kept my
head down until I’d learned the lie of the land.

I wasn’t put in a cell with Mr Smith but someone else I
knew, or at least knew of, Mr Rousseau, otherwise known as Cyber Guy to all at
book club. He’d been picked up in
Tajikistan by French
Foreign Legion commandos following a visit from that tedious hair-transplantee,
Jean
Cabon. I was surprised to find him in American custody but like Mr Rousseau
said of the French authorities; why build your own top-secret maximum-security
prison when you can just pay the Americans to take your trash? Either way he was
a nice guy and I’m pleased to say we got on.

What’s more, with Mr Rousseau, Mr Smith, Mr Woo, Mr
Deveroux
and half a dozen other guys in here already we
were able to get book club up and running again within a matter of weeks.

Of course, we had to disguise it from the authorities as
they came down hard on any sort of collusion but we’d been well versed at
hiding it from The Agency so this didn’t prove too problematic. Besides,
there’d been a few reading collectives before we arrived so all it took was a
little structuring and a mutual acceptance of the rules to put the basic
infrastructure in place.

We didn’t have access to computers, of course, so we logged
our scores on the next best thing – the prison grapevine. This was a
living computer in its own right and with consensus and accord and we were able
to hold a record of everything we’d read and even update the scores as we went
along. It’s quite a testament to the human mind if you think about it, but at
any given moment in time, any one of some eighty prisoners could’ve told you
how Martin Amis’s
Time’s Arrow
was
getting on.

Not too well as it turned out.

“It’s just backwards, I don’t see the point,” Mr Deveraux
said, as we walked around in closely monitored circles under the falling snows
of early winter.

“That’s exactly the point,” I replied. “It’s a whole life
backwards, from death all the way through to birth.”

“Yeah I know that, I read it – in one evening I might
add – but it just seemed like an exercise in seeing if he could write a
book backwards. Big deal, he did it. Woo fucking hoo!”

“You don’t think it was clever?”

“No because I could see the end coming from page one, that
he was going to disappear up his mum’s chuff and then up his dad’s dick at the
end of the book.”

I stopped to look out across the white plains, flat and as
crisp as a new tablecloth under low hanging grey skies. Mr Deveraux stopped
with me while I stooped to pick up a handful of fresh snow.

“I don’t think it was meant to be a whodunit, Mr Deveraux.
I think the message behind the book was that there’s no set truth; everything
takes on a different interpretation when you look at it from a different
perspective.” I opened my hand again to let a few dribbles of melted water drop
to the ground.

“How profound!” he mugged.

“Well, you don’t have to like everything on the list, just
give it a shitty score if you didn’t rate it.”

“I did, I gave it a five.”

“A five?”

“Oh sorry, I mean a one. Catching isn’t it, this backwards
business?”

“Hilarious. So that brings it down to…” I did a quick bit
of mental arithmetic as we kicked our boots and got moving again. “Two point
one? I’ll double-check that with a pen and paper later but I think that’s
right.”

“No, it’s less than that now. Mr Hughes read it and he gave
it a one, an’ all,” Mr Deveraux told me.

“When did he read it?”

“Last night, in the cell right after me. I told you, it
only took me an evening to get through. It’s really short.”

“So all right then, hang on, that’s now twelve scores
logged; four
ones
, five
twos
, two
threes
and a
four
(mine),” I recalled, jotting them all up on my frozen fingers.

“It comes to exactly two,” Mr Deveraux told me. “The
average I mean. It’s good when that happens, when we get an exact score like
that, isn’t it?”

“It certainly makes all this reading worth while,” I
agreed.

Of course, the real reason book club flourished in McCarthy
was because it brought with it a sense of freedom to men who knew none. Our
books were like windows out onto the world. Of course they had been before we’d
started book club, when they’d been read individually, but when you read books
as a group, the worlds and stories that are held within their pages come to
life even more because they become part of a collective consciousness. The
experiences become richer and that window out onto the world opens just a
little wider.

And in prison, the difference between hope and hopelessness
is more often than not barely the width of a page.

So this was how we passed the time. We read. We shared our
thoughts on what we read. And book by book we gradually rated the prison’s
somewhat limited library.

It’s vital to have some sort of endeavour to throw yourself
into because the enormity of a ninety-nine year sentence is almost enough to
crush you. Naturally it’s easier for Affiliates to bear because we’ve been
sentenced to life before but it’s still a challenge to make it out of bed most
mornings. The secret of survival is forgetting your former life, that’s gone,
you can’t get it back, and mourning for it will do nothing but put knots in your
bed sheets before the year’s out.

It’s hard. Of course it’s hard. It’s meant to be hard. But
when you sign on as an Affiliate, you’re aware of the risks and prepared for
the consequences. If not, then you’ve no business signing on as an Affiliate.

But the authorities didn’t want us going off our chumps
either, as that would do no one any favours, least of all them, so they did
what they could to prevent the spread of despair. We liked reading? So they
provided us with a few extra books. In addition, all the Affiliates that shared
association hours were at similar stages of their sentences. Meaning, the first
four hours of the day were given to Affiliates who’d served less that ten
years. Once you got into the afternoons, the Affiliates who were let out then
had been here for anything up to twenty years. And then, in the evenings, when
the last lights were fading and the shadows stretched long across the prairie,
the old timers were given their hour of daylight. Most prisoners didn’t make it
to see their thirtieth year in truth but according to the grapevine there were
one or two in here that came out at night, that had long white beards and no
idea Kennedy was dead.

Or even, that his son had become President.

This was our fate. This was what we were all heading for.
Nothing could stop that and nobody could reprieve us, so why unsettle us by
showing us our futures in the faces of our elders?

“Escape?”

“Well that’s the real reason, isn’t it?” Mr Smith said.

“What?”

“If anyone knows how to get out of here or at least where
the cracks are, it’ll be the old timers so they’re not gonna let them anywhere
near us, are they? Not with our fresh legs and unsullied spirits. Not that it
would make much difference.”

“Why not?”

“Well…”

Blinding spotlights suddenly cranked on all around us and
loud hailers ordered to freeze.
 

Commotion and angry yelling followed as Delta specialists
poured in through the wire from all sides and ordered us onto our faces at
gunpoint. Boots pressed into the backs of mine and Mr Smith’s necks as plastic
draw-straps were tightened around our wrists, then we were yanked to our feet
and run across the exercise ground to the main prisoner elevators as our
colleagues behind were subjected to ID and bar code scanning.

“Prisoners 2248 and 2251, you were recorded having a
restricted conversation therefore you are both sentenced to a month in the hole
with loss of privileges,” Watch Commander Crockett told us. “Effective
immediate. Take them down.”

The Deltas bundled us in the elevators and we dropped like
stones back into the underground facility, bi-passing our own level and
carrying on straight down to the punishment block. When the doors opened two
more Deltas took over from our escorts and we were run in different directions
towards opposite ends of the wing. Before I was out of earshot I just managed
to shout one last thing over my shoulder to Mr Smith.

“Well what?”

“Well…” Mr Smith shouted back, “
this!
”