The Final Hour h-4 Read online

  I took a breath. December 30. One day before New Year’s Eve. How would I ever find Prince in time? How would I ever stop him?

  Blade went on, “Yard time on the thirtieth, you are going to start some trouble in the yard. You are going to get into a fight, with me in fact. It is a sure thing what will follow that.”

  I nodded. “Dunbar’ll have his goons drag me into the

  Outbuilding so he can beat the daylights out of me.”

  Blade gave a laugh and the cold wind blew, and to tell you the truth I wasn’t sure which chilled me more, his laughter or the wind. “That’s right. That’s exactly what he’ll do. And as we learned in our last journey to the Outbuilding, when he takes you inside, the other guards disappear.”

  “That’s right. He doesn’t want any witnesses.”

  “And because he doesn’t want any witnesses, you will be in there all alone with Yard King Dunbar at the very moment when our friends are ready to break through into the Outbuilding and give us a passage out of here.”

  I looked into Blade’s dreamy eyes to see if I could find any humanity in there. I shouldn’t have wasted my time. I said, “That’s your master plan? What do you think? You think Dunbar won’t set off the alarm because he’ll be too busy beating me to a pulp?”

  Blade gave that chilling laugh again. “Oh, no, no, no, my young disciple. No, no, no. My master plan is to supply you with a shiv. A knife.” His toothy grin flashed and the toothy grins of the men around him flashed. Blade laid his hand on my shoulder.

  “Dunbar is not going to set off the alarm,” he said, “because you’re going to kill him.”

  PART II

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Mike

  On Christmas Eve, Sensei Mike came. I was counting on that. He was the best hope I had.

  I was sitting on my stool in the visiting room. There was a prisoner on either side of me and a guard walking back and forth behind. I was looking out through my pane of glass when Mike came down the hall. Just the sight of him seemed to put strength into me. For one second I found myself thinking, This is going to work. This is going to be all right.

  Mike was wearing jeans and a kind of flowery shirt and a sports jacket. He never looked right to me out of his karate gi. He was a tall man, lean but with broad shoulders. He had a lot of black hair, which he was very proud of, and a thick black mustache, behind which his mouth always seemed to be sort of bent in a mocking smile. There was always a smile in his eyes too-even now. Mike had seen some pretty awful things in the wars in the Middle East, I guess. He’d learned there was not too much stuff in life that needed to be taken seriously. Just the right stuff. Just enough.

  Mike had taught me karate in his studio at the mall in my hometown, Spring Hill. But that’s not all he’d taught me. In fact, it doesn’t even begin to tell the story. Mike had taught me a whole way of thinking, a way of being, really. I was one kind of person when I started to study the martial arts as a little kid, and I was another kind of person when I finally got my black belt. A lot of the difference was because of Mike.

  It wasn’t just that I could fight now and protect myself-although, man, that sure had come in handy, hadn’t it? But it was more the way Mike taught me to think. It was sort of like Mike told me the stuff in words and lessons that my father just showed me by the way he was. Mike taught me that, whatever the situation, whether I was outnumbered, outsmarted, or even beaten and at the end of my rope, I could always ask myself a simple question: How can I come out of this stronger? Better? Mike didn’t talk about God or religion a lot. I saw him sometimes in his office paging through the cool camo-covered Bible they gave him in the Army, but he rarely talked about it. He just talked about karate. He talked about how, in karate, whether you did well or badly, whether you won or lost, whether you got good breaks or suffered bad luck, there was always a path forward-forward and upward: a path to a better, stronger life. He taught me that if you look for that path hard enough, you will always find it. And when you find it, he said, even if you lose the fight, even if you lose everything, you can never lose, not really.

  He taught me all that through the competitions I entered and in the backbreaking practices and tests I had to go through to earn my belts. And just knowing that, just knowing there was always a path, made me different inside. I guess you could say it taught me how to be a man. I was grateful to Mike for that.

  My point is: There was no one on the planet I trusted more. When Sensei Mike came down the hallway and sat on the stool across from mine and looked in through the window and picked up the phone, I felt better right away, that’s all.

  I picked up my phone and nodded at him. For a second or two, neither of us said anything.

  Then Mike said, “Well, chucklehead, here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into. I can’t leave you alone for ten minutes.”

  I laughed. It felt like the first time I’d laughed in about a century. Hearing his voice just seemed to put steel in my backbone.

  “So how’s the worst prison in the country treating you?” he asked. He kept his eyes on mine and I knew he could already see the answer.

  So I just said, “Hey, no sweat. It’s just like high school-only with murderers.”

  His mouth curled under his mustache. “You could almost consider that an improvement.”

  “Right.”

  We were silent again. There were a million things I wanted to say to him. I wanted to tell him the truth about this awful place. I wanted to tell him every evil thing I’d seen here. I wanted him to help me make sense of it and explain to me how you could do right in a place that was so wrong. But there wasn’t time for anything like that. I had to talk fast-and I had to make sure no one around me heard. If what I was about to say got back to Blade and his friends, I’d be dead within the hour.

  “Mike, listen, there’s not a lot of time,” I said. “I have to talk fast and you have to listen really well.”

  Mike’s smile disappeared. His face went very still very fast. “Go,” he said.

  “I don’t know how much you know about why I’m here…”

  He nodded once. “All of it.”

  Startled, I blinked, stared. “How…?”

  “You remember the night you came to the dojo? The night you and I fought it out?”

  “It wasn’t much of a fight,” I said. “As I recall, you kicked me around the room like a soccer ball.”

  “And you told me you’d lost a year of memory. That you went to bed one night and woke up captured by terrorists, wanted by the police.. . I couldn’t make any sense out of it, at first, but when your friend Mr. Sherman turned up dead…”

  “Yeah, my friend,” I said sarcastically.

  “I started to put things together. I still got a lot of friends in the military, a lot of contacts in intelligence, special forces, all the secret places. I started asking around. I didn’t get the whole story, but I got enough of it to get to Rose.”

  My jaw literally dropped. My mouth hung open as I stared at him.

  “Close your mouth, chucklehead. You look like an idiot,” he said.

  My teeth clopped together. “You talked to Rose?” I said. “How did you know he was part of it?”

  Mike shrugged. “I just figured it out, you know. The way you escaped from his custody, the fact that he kept showing up out of his jurisdiction to hunt you down, taking charge of other police departments and things like that. That’s not the way things work. Also, the fact that you were supposed to be this mad killer, but he somehow managed to hunt you down without you getting hurt. Like I said, I just figured it out.”

  “Wow. That’s amazing. I mean, I never even figured it out.”

  “Well, you’re a chucklehead, that’s why.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

  “Anyway,” Mike went on. “I thought maybe if I went to Rose and played the whole military card, showed him my medals, bled on his floor, whatever, I could get him to let me in on what was happening.”

 
“And did he?”

  “Nah, you kidding? Guy stonewalled me into the ground. It was like talking to Mount Rushmore. But…” He wagged his big head of black hair back and forth. “Let’s just say there was a lot of information in some of those silences of his.”

  The wave of surprise started to draw back inside me. I took stock of what he was telling me. Mike had a pretty good idea of what it was all about. And he knew Detective Rose was in on it. “That’s great,” I said, excited. “That’s great. Is there any way you could get in touch with him? With Rose, I mean?”

  Mike stroked his mustache as he thought about it. “Maybe. It wouldn’t be easy. He told me he’s gonna go invisible, but like I say: I still got a lot of contacts in secret places. I might be able to get word to him somehow.”

  My heart started pounding harder. A chance, a hope. I couldn’t ask for more than that. I leaned in close to the glass, dropping my voice. I knew the prison authorities could listen in if they wanted. But as long as I didn’t talk about Blade’s escape plans, I didn’t see where it made much difference. I’d already gone to the warden, after all, so it was no secret I was worried about the Homelanders.

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s the deal. Most of the Homelanders have been rounded up now, but not all of them. The leader, Prince, is still on the loose.”

  Now it was Mike’s turn to look surprised. “Really? Rose gave me the impression it was all over…”

  “I know. That’s what the government thinks and what they want everyone to think. They figure Prince has left the country so there’s no reason to start a panic. But they’re wrong. He’s still here.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do. Prince swore he wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t give up until he’d carried out a plan called the Great Death…”

  “The Great Death, huh. I’m guessing that’s not good.”

  “That’s my guess too. It involves something called a C.O. device that they’re acquiring from the Russians. Any idea what that is?”

  “No. But it must be a weapon of some kind.”

  “Right,” I said. “And whatever it is, they’re going to set it off on the devil’s New Year’s Eve.”

  “And the devil…”

  “Is us, America, right?”

  Mike sighed. “Of course. Who else? Okay. Where is this supposed to happen?” Mike was leaning into the glass on his side now too. His eyes were flat and serious. He knew there was no time to waste.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “I don’t know if I ever knew. If I did, I don’t remember. Right now, that’s all I got.”

  “Okay.”

  “You have to get the word out to Rose. You have to. If not to Rose, then to some of your other friends.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s as good as done.”

  I leaned in even closer. Our faces were inches apart now, with the glass between us. “And Mike,” I said. “You gotta get the word to Samuel.”

  I saw his black eyebrows draw down. “Samuel?”

  “He’s coming to town after Christmas. He’ll be the first at number 1912 on the thirtieth of December. Samuel, I mean.”

  The next moment seemed to last forever. I didn’t really think there was much of a chance that Mike would understand me then and there. Like I said, he did read that camo-covered Bible, but I doubted he knew it chapter and verse. I was never much good at memorizing stuff myself. I had my copy in my cell so I’d looked it up before coming. I just hoped Mike would figure out what I was trying to say and look it up himself when he got home.

  “Samuel, the first at number 1912,” I heard him repeat softly. I saw his eyes move away from me and shift up to the right as if he were looking for something inside his own head. And then-yes!-I could see it on his face. He found it:

  First Samuel 19:12: So Michal let David down through a window, and he fled and escaped.

  Mike’s lips parted. He understood. He stared at me, dumbfounded.

  “December 30,” I said again. “He’ll be there with all his friends.”

  Mike’s face changed as I watched through the window. For a minute, I seriously thought he was going to come crashing through that Plexiglas and grab me by the shirtfront. His voice became a harsh whisper. “Are you out of your mind? I said I’d get the word out and I will.”

  “There’s no time, Mike. You’re gonna need whatever information is in my head. It might be our only chance.”

  “Forget it,” Mike said, his eyes burning into me. “We’ll handle it from here.”

  “You’re going to need friends too. Rose is going to need them. He’s on the outs with his bosses. He’s an embarrassment to them and they don’t believe him. Even if he finds the answers he needs, he may be on his own.”

  “No,” Mike told me, speaking full force. “It’s nuts. Nuts. Do not do it. You read me?”

  “Mike…”

  “Do you read me, chucklehead?”

  I sat back. What could I say? Mike was smart. Not just smart. He was wise. He was a soldier, a hero, and if he said he was going to get to Rose, he would get to him, if anyone could.

  But the truth was: I was breaking out of here anyway. I didn’t know what the Great Death meant-not exactly- but I knew Prince would not be satisfied with anything less than mass murder and destruction. I could not sit inside my cell and just hope he was stopped. If I could help, I had to try.

  “Do you read me?” Mike said once again.

  “ Time’s up! ”

  I started as the guard made the announcement over the loudspeaker. Mike kept leaning in toward me, waiting for my answer. But now the two guards who stood on watch behind the visitors came forward off the wall.

  “Wrap it up,” one of them said.

  Mike stared in at me through the glass. “I will get the word out,” he told me. “There is no need to do anything stupid.”

  “Mike,” I said, “if anything happens, if New Year’s Eve comes and Prince isn’t stopped and I thought I could’ve done something-”

  “No,” he said again.

  “Listen to me-”

  A hand came down on my shoulder. It was the guard in back of me. “Say ‘Merry Christmas,’ kid, and wrap it up,” he said. “You’re done.”

  “Merry Christmas, Mike,” I said. Slowly, my hand lifted to set the telephone back in its cradle. Mike was still talking through his handset. I could see him shaking his head. I could see his lips forming the word no over and over again.

  The guard came up behind him and said something I couldn’t hear. Mike hung up the phone-hard. He stood up. We stared at each other through the glass.

  Mike shook his head one more time. No.

  Then the guard led me away.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Merry Christmas

  I got the knife on Christmas Day-the shiv I was supposed to kill Dunbar with. Blade slipped it into my hand during the service in the chapel.

  The chapel was just another faceless, windowless cinder-block room in the prison. The cinder blocks were painted yellow here instead of green. And during Christian services, there was a cross hung on the wall. Today, for Christmas, there was also a wreath and a small wooden creche set up on the table that the chaplain used for his lectern. For Abingdon, the place was almost cheery.

  The chaplain-Chaplain Adams-was an old black guy. I don’t know how old, but old. He had long, sad features that looked like he was mourning for the world. I’d only had a chance to talk to him once, but I got the impression he was the only semidecent human being in the whole prison. Maybe that’s why he always looked so sad.

  He had his big leather Bible open on the table next to the creche. He was reading the Christmas passages in Luke. His voice was as sad as his face. Even the joyful words of the Scripture sounded mournful when he said them:

  “And the Angel said to them, ‘Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people…’”

  Hard to make that sound mournful, but somehow Chaplain Adams ma
naged to do it.

  There were a lot of folding chairs packed into the room. They were full, a prisoner in each, guys of every color who’d committed all kinds of crimes. Praying. Most of them sincere, I’d guess. Looking for a way out of a bad past, and a path to a better life.

  I know I was sincere. I was sitting in a chair about halfway to the back of the room, off to the right of center. I had my head bowed, my eyes closed. And I was praying just about as hard as I could. I was praying for help, praying that Mike would get word to Rose, and that Rose would get word to his bosses in Washington, and that his bosses in Washington would turn out full force to find Prince-and that everything would be taken care of by somebody else so that I wouldn’t have to break out of here with a bunch of Nazi maniacs.

  Your will be done, I added at the end of my prayer- but I’ve got to admit, I didn’t really mean it. I really wanted my will to be done: Namely, I wanted God to get me out of this mess, and fast!

  Anyway, I was hard at it, my head bowed, my eyes closed, so I didn’t really notice when the prisoner next to me got up and moved away. The first time I did notice was when I felt the smooth plastic tube slip into my hand.

  My head came up fast; my eyes opened fast. There was Blade, suddenly sitting next to me. His dreamy, murderous eyes were fixed on mine.

  I looked down and saw what he had given me. A homemade knife. I don’t know what it had been originally. Part of a bed or a chair maybe. I don’t know. It was a tubular piece of thick plastic with string wound tight around one end to make a handle grip. The other end was sharpened to a long, deadly point.

  When I looked up at Blade again, he smiled his toothy smile. He slowly pressed his index finger under his chin to show me how to drive the knife into Dunbar’s throat. But of course, I had already pretty much figured that’s what he wanted me to do.

  Then, with a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching us, Blade reached over and gently pushed the shiv up into my sleeve.