Deadlock

Part One
1

One Month Later

450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, California

The package was sitting on Jalicia Jones’s desk when she arrived at her office in the Federal Building a little after seven in the morning. It was a large, padded manila envelope with her name written on it in big black capital letters. Beneath her name was her title. No return address. No stamps. Just her name and title. Jalicia Jones

Assistant U.S. Attorney

Organized Crime Strike Force

She took a final sip of the skinny latte she bought every workday morning across the street at Peats coffee shop and tossed the cup across the room. It went in off the rim of her wastepaper basket. She high-fived fresh air in celebration of the three-point coffee-cup shot, then sat down and stared at the new arrival.

It wasn’t internal mail, that was for sure: they used perforated envelopes for hard copies sent between departments. By rights she should speak to her legal assistant and try to work out who had delivered it. Maybe even have one of the US Marshals Service guys, who provided security for the building and its staff, check it out for her. But, almost immediately, she dismissed both those notions. Jalicia was a young woman who had conditioned herself over the years to suppress unease and confront fear. You didn’t get from the bullet-ridden streets of South Central Los Angeles to an Ivy League law school without that ability.

So, instead of following procedure, she picked the package up and shook it gently. Feeling faintly ridiculous, she held it up to her ear. What was she expecting to hear, she wondered, a ticking clock?

To hell with it.

She ripped open the top of the envelope, turned it upside down with a shake, and stifled a laugh of relief as a single DVD disc clattered out on to the wood. All that angst, and for what? It was probably surveillance footage, dumped on her desk by an over-eager intern who’d started work before she had.

She picked up the shiny silver disc — and that was when she noticed what looked like a strip of meat stuck to the inside of the bubble wrap. Pulling a letter opener from her desk drawer, she lifted the top of the envelope to get a better look.

What she’d taken to be a strip of meat extended all the way down into the envelope. Carefully, she prodded at it with the letter opener. Her stomach gave an involuntary lurch.

Grabbing for a tissue from her handbag, she extracted the paper-thin rectangle of what she could now see was human skin and laid it out on the desk. The edges of the ragged rectangle were charred black. At the centre of the slab of skin, rendered in dark ink, was a swastika.

The sound of the phone on her desk ringing made her jump.

‘Jalicia Jones,’ she said, her gaze still transfixed by the near-translucent scroll of skin with the charred swastika at its centre.

Silence at the other end of the line.

‘Hello?’

There was a click, and then a woman’s voice, human, but unmistakably automated. ‘You have a collect call from…’ There was a pause before the voice added, ‘Pelican Bay State Prison. Press one to accept this call.’

Jalicia pressed the number one key on the pad. There was another pause, then a man’s voice, deep and masculine: ‘Ms Jones?’ There was an emphasis on the Ms.

‘Yes?’

‘This is Frank Hays.’

She opened her mouth, took a deep breath, trying to compose herself.

‘You know who I am, right?’

She knew who he was all right. In fact, when she glanced over to the cork board on the opposite wall of her office, his face stared back at her. An old mugshot of a white male in his mid-twenties, with a square head, his hair down to his shoulders, a ratty mustache and a look of utter contempt for the rest of the world.

But the name underneath the photograph wasn’t Frank Hays. It referred to him by the nickname he’d earned in prison: Reaper.

Next to Reaper’s picture were six other mugshots. Together, these men on the wall of Jalicia’s office constituted the leadership of America’s most feared prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood. Violent white supremacists, they’d banded together in California’s notorious San Quentin Prison in the late 1970s; what they’d lacked in numbers they’d more than made up for in their ability to terrorize everyone who crossed their path, other violent criminals included. And within their ranks, within their leadership even, Reaper had earned a fearsome reputation based on his complete disregard for human life. It was rumored that during his first week in prison, having been threatened with rape by the leader of a long-established black prison gang, Reaper had responded by beating the gangster unconscious and nailing him to the wall of his cell with a hammer and four nails purloined from a prison workshop.

Jalicia took another deep breath. ‘I know who you are.’

‘Good,’ said Reaper. ‘You get a special delivery over the last couple of days?’

‘This morning,’ Jalicia said, her eyes drawn back to the parchment of skin. ‘Pretty neat trick. Hand-delivering something when you’re in prison.’

There was a low, throaty chuckle from Reaper. ‘I heard it was on its way, is all. You know who it belongs to?’

Jalicia knew all right. The swastika tattoo had almost certainly been carved from the mutilated body of Ken Prager, an undercover ATF agent who’d infiltrated a white supremacist group the authorities believed was carrying out an assortment of criminal activities on behalf of the incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood leadership. ‘Yeah, I know.’

‘So, you and me,’ Reaper continued. ‘I think it’s about time we had a talk.’

‘About?’

‘Just make the arrangements. And make sure it stays on the down low. I ain’t gonna be any use to you dead.’