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Michelle pressed the gas pedal harder, hurtling them faster at their destination. Sean looked over at her. “Having fun?”
“Just working off some butterflies.”
“Butterflies? What butterflies can you—” He caught himself, realizing that not that long ago Michelle had checked herself into a psych facility to work out some personal issues.
“Okay,” he said, and returned his gaze ahead.
A man-made causeway consisting of asphalt bracketed by built-up and graded-solid Maine stone led them out to the federal facility. The entry gate was steel and motorized and looked strong enough to withstand a charge by a herd of Abrams tanks. The guard hut held four armed men who looked like they had never smiled in their lives. Their utility belts each contained a Glock sidearm, cuffs, telescopic head-crushing baton, Taser, pepper spray, stun grenades.
And a whistle.
Michelle looked at Sean as two guards approached them. “Bet me ten bucks that I won’t ask the bigger one if he’s ever blown his whistle to stop a rampaging psycho from escaping.”
“If you make even one joke to those gorillas I will find a gun and shoot you.”
“But if I did ask they’d be mad at me, not you,” she said with a smile.
“No. They always beat up the guy. The girl never gets the speeding ticket. And thanks.”
“For what?”
“Now I have butterflies.”
The perimeter wall was locally quarried stone, twelve feet tall with a six-foot-high stainless steel cylinder riding on top. It would be impossible to get a grip on, much less climb over.
“Seen that equipment on some supermax prisons,” noted Sean. “Latest whiz-bang technology in keeping the bad guys inside.”
“What about suction cups?” asked Michelle, as they both stared at the metal wall topper.
“It rotates like a hamster wheel. Suction cups won’t help you there. Still fall on your ass. And it’s probably loaded with motion sensors.”
Their car was analyzed by an AVIAN, or Advanced Vehicle Interrogation and Notification System, which used seismic sensors placed on their car
to capture shock waves produced by a beating heart. An advanced signal-processing algorithm concluded in just under three seconds that there was no living person concealed in their Ford. The car was then subjected to a mobile trace handheld unit that screened for explosives and drugs. The portable unit was then run over them, and Sean and Michelle were personally searched the old-fashioned way, questioned by the guards, and had their names checked against a list. Michelle had instinctively started to explain to them about her weapon before realizing the police still had it. Then they were turned loose on a rigidly narrow path bracketed by high fences to continue their ride. Michelle let her gaze wander over the perimeter.
“Watchtowers every hundred feet,” she noted. “Each manned by a pair of guards.” She squinted into the sun. “One looks to be carrying an AK with an extended clip and the other a long-range sniper rifle with a mounted FLIR,” she added, referring to a Forward-Looking Infrared scope bolted to the rifle. “Bet they have a CCTV subsystem, digital recording, and terabytes of data storage. And multizone intrusion and escape detection systems, microwave and infrared technology, biometric readers, high-security IT network grafted onto a fiber optics backbone, multistage uninterrupted circuits, and big-time backup power in case the lights go out.”
Sean frowned. “Will you stop sounding like you’re casing the place? With all the bells and whistles they obviously have here, we have to assume people are watching and listening.”
She pulled her gaze back and saw that there were three rings of interior fencing around the two-story rebar-reinforced concrete building housing America’s most wildly psychotic predators. Each fence was an eighteen-foot-high chain-link with concertina wire on top. The top six feet of each fence was angled inward at forty-five degrees, making it nearly impossible to clear. The middle fence carried a lethal electrical charge, as a big sign next to it made crystal clear. The open ground in between each fence was a minefield of razor wire and sharp spikes pointing up from the ground, and the glint of the sun told her that there were myriad trip wires strung everywhere. At night, the only time anyone would dare attempt to escape from this place, the wires would be invisible. You’d bleed to death before you ran into the middle fence, and then only to get charred for your troubles. But by then the watchtower guards would have finished you off anyway with bang-bang taps to the head and heart.
“That electric fence has five thousand volts and low amperage, plenty lethal enough,” said Michelle in a low voice. “I’m betting there’s a concrete-grade beam under it so no one can dig out.” She paused. “But something is weird.”
“What?”
“You put in an electric fence to save labor costs. And in the world of prison perimeter security labor costs are basically tower guards. But every single tower is still manned by two shooters.”
“I guess they really don’t want to take any chances.”
“It’s overkill, at least to my mind.”
“What’d you expect? Our federal tax dollars at work.”
She noted a large array of solar panels off to one side, angled just right to take in the maximum amount of sunlight.
“Well, at least they’re going green,” she said, pointing them out to Sean.
They passed three more gates and three more checkpoints, and endured three more electronic scans and body searches, until Michelle assumed the guards collectively knew every contour of her person better than she did. At the entrance to the building massive portals resembling blast doors on a nukeproof bunker swung back on air-powered hydraulics. Michelle said in an impressed voice, “Okay, I’m thinking this place is escape-proof.”
