The Fall of Moscow Station

EIGHTEEN MONTHS LATER

There were fewer than five hundred men who lived in the prison proper. The al-Qaida terrorists and other extremists had their own wing, the H Unit with its own security ready to deal with their hunger strikes and refusals to cooperate with the female guards. Two men were in Range 13, the “ultramax” block where their isolation from all human contact was total and they could not even see their own guards. Thomas Silverstein of the Aryan Brotherhood had earned that home for murdering three inmates and a prison guard. He had been in isolation since 1982 and some of the guards wondered whether the old man, deprived of almost all human contact for almost four decades, hadn’t simply gone insane. That he was still alive was all they really cared to know.

Maines stared at the Rocky Mountains on the drive, knowing they would be the last view of the horizon he would ever see. Three consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole defined his future. His lawyer had argued at the sentencing that such crimes didn’t merit supermax confinement, that Aldrich Ames’s treason had killed more men and the courts hadn’t seen fit to send that old man here. The judge had been unimpressed.

The former CIA officer arrived through the underground garage, chauffeured in the rear seat of a white SUV. The armored vehicle came to a stop, ending the last car ride Maines would ever take. The garage door closed behind them and only then was he allowed to climb out of the vehicle.

“A clean version of hell,” one of the prison’s former wardens had called it, and Maines saw that the man’s observation had been accurate. The cavernous space was white, concrete walls and floor, and empty but for a fish-eye surveillance camera mounted on the wall. Maines was quite sure that he would see a camera in every room, every hallway. He would die in this place and he would never know a moment of true privacy until that day came. It was ironic that, most days here, he would be isolated, having almost no contact with another human being, but he would never be alone. Some guard controlling some camera would always be staring at him. He would finally know privacy again when they closed and locked his coffin lid.

Four prisoners had found ways to take their own lives over the years. Maines wondered whether he would want to follow their example, and whether he could find a way around the guards and the cameras and the controls to kill himself if his mind ever broke down so completely.

Three officers and an administrator were standing in the garage when the car pulled in. Maines was shackled, hands, waist, and legs, which made dismounting from the SUV a challenging task. The prison guards searched him for contraband despite the restraints. When he was pronounced clean, they led him through the halls, his chains forcing him to shuffle. They came off only when he was inside the last room that would ever be his.

The cell was twelve feet long and barely wider at seven feet than he was tall. The bed was a concrete slab extending from the wall covered by a thin mattress. The low desk and seat were also concrete slabs, unmovable, unbreakable. There was no wood in the room at all, nothing for a prisoner to shatter into splinters that could serve as weapons. The shower had no separate enclosure and a timer that turned the water off every minute, so he would have to push a button to keep it flowing. There was television on a low shelf, a twelve-inch black-and-white. He’d been forced to watch the Administration and Orientation Program on Institutional Channel 4 before they’d brought him to the room. Channel 14 was dedicated to religious and psychiatric broadcasts. A quick turn of the dial revealed that a few other channels offered him educational shows and some entertainment programs. He considered that he could smash the television and try to electrocute himself or use the glass to slash his wrists, but he dismissed the thought. Surely some other inmates had tried and the staff would be ready for that. If he failed, they would take his television and he might never get another.

The functionary who had processed him had explained his routine. Twenty-three hours a day, he would stay in the room. He would eat all three meals every day in this space. Refusal to eat would result in an involuntary feeding using restraints and a nasogastric tube they would insert through his nasal cavity. If he found a way to remove that, they would use an anal tube. He could have one hour of solitary exercise in the recreation pen each day if he behaved and submitted first to a strip search. He could read books, even order them from the outside, but only paperbacks, lest he find some malicious use for the book boards inside the covers. He would be allowed letters but only from recipients approved by the prison. He wondered who might write to him. One fifteen-minute phone call per month was permitted, monitored of course. Who to call? He would have to think about that.

Think… that was what they truly wanted him to do. Think. A man found himself here because his conscience had lost its ability to torture him, so his country had ensured that his mind would accomplish the task instead. Time, loneliness, and his thoughts would create all the pain they could ever want. It would mount slowly over the years, would never be a sharp agony, just a growing madness that would build inside him until it crushed his capacity to feel joy. One day, he would try desperately to remember what pleasure and happiness were and would find that he could not.

Maines looked out through the four-inch-wide window. He could see sky, but a wall of red concrete bricks blocked his view of the earth. Some days he might see clouds, maybe rain, or a bird, others there would be snow or lightning. The stars would be there, rarely the moon. Earth itself would always be denied him, but he would always see the heavens. But they would be denied him in the end too, wouldn’t they? Maines didn’t believe in God, and hoped that he was right on that score now more than he ever had. If there was some Deity out there, surely He despised a traitor. Then Maines’s eventual death wouldn’t be an end to his punishment but the start of a new kind that would go for an eternity that would make his stay here feel like a small moment.

He turned back to the cell door, now closed and locked behind him. His imagination had been telling him for months now that Stryker or Barron would be there, to mock him or curse him when they finally locked him up. But there was no one.

Maines sat down on the cement bed and closed his eyes. The room already felt smaller than it had five minutes ago.

Kyra hadn’t asked the Federal Bureau of Prisons to let her accompany Maines into supermax and she suspected they would have refused the request outright had she made it. Such dramatic gestures were the fantasies of fiction and the U.S. Department of Justice cared more about efficiency than drama. ADX Florence was a hole in the ground where men were sent to be forgotten by the society they had done so much to harm, and the actual forgetting would begin before they arrived.

But Kyra had wanted to see where the man would end his life. She was searching for something here, though she didn’t know what… closure or understanding, maybe even sympathy. Alden Maines had decided that his country deserved to be hurt. She wasn’t sure she wanted to understand his line of reasoning, but something inside whispered that it was necessary. Kyra Stryker was in a position to do what he had done. Every CIA officer was. Kyra had read about other such traitors, sat through the lectures and heard the dire warnings. Every CIA officer had. And still, some turned anyway. Someday the temptation might reach her and she wanted to be sure she would make the right choice.

Kyra had never seen the Rockies before this morning and she could hardly digest their raw size. Virginia had its mountains, but most were covered by trees that hid their true size from view. Even so, she could see that the Blue Ridge Mountains were just a line of hills compared to these.

Such beauty was the last thing Maines or any other resident of supermax would have seen before they were locked inside for life, and she wondered if the Department of Justice hadn’t chosen this site for that reason, just to add a final bit of punishment onto their sentences.

Kyra pulled the smartphone from her pocket, called up the number she needed from the contacts list, and dialed. “It’s me,” she said. “He’s inside.”

“Ah, supermax… our landfill for human garbage. You didn’t go in with him?” Clark Barron asked. The CIA director did not sound surprised.

“I’m done with him.”

“I wish we could forget about our traitors. They’ll be teaching classes about him for the next fifty years. Speaking of which, the Kent School wants you to give a lecture on Maines in the Bubble.”

“Any chance we can get Jon and Kathy to come back in? Guest speakers?” Kyra asked.

“We have to unveil Kathy’s portrait in the Directors Gallery soon. I’m sure the Burkes wouldn’t mind spending a few minutes onstage talking. Well, Kathy will be happy to do it. Jon, not so much,” Barron offered. “Do you want an extra day out there? You’ve got the leave hours.”

“Depends,” she replied without thought. “You don’t need me for anything?”

“We do have a report that some advanced body armor showed up in Libya,” Barron admitted. “Nothing that’s going to change the big picture over there, but not something we like to see. But I think we can handle it without you.”

“I was thinking about driving back. I’ve never seen the battlefields at Shiloh or Chickamauga. I thought I might take the opportunity.”

“Avoid Kansas,” Barron advised. “Swing south through Texas and Louisiana. Barbecue and gumbo country.”

“Noted. I’ll call you from the road.”

“Take your time.” Barron hung up and Kyra replaced her smartphone in her pocket.

She stared at the Rockies again. The winter snows hadn’t melted off the peaks yet. They were tall enough that she wondered if the powder ever melted, even in the summertime. It was a sight fit for a painting, grays and blues everywhere she looked. But it wasn’t home. The greens hills of Virginia were more beautiful still, to her eyes anyway.

The chief of the Red Cell turned away from the prison and walked back toward her rental car. She could be home in three days if she wanted to drive hard. Virginia was two thousand miles east, but she was in no hurry. The world was quiet, for once.