Ruthless (7 page)

Almost.

“On approach to Flying Cloud airport,” the pilot announced, “fifteen minutes to touchdown.”

I thanked my lucky stars as I felt the plane bank into a turn. I didn’t really love flying on these military C-130’s. Not only was the bathroom a curtained-off area at the back of the plane that almost always smelled like it had been used exclusively by men with poor aim, but the pilots also didn’t truck with any of that sissy crap that the airlines insisted on for the comfort of their passengers, like gentle turns. Military pilots were authorized to go from point A to point B in a hurry, and they did that. Worries about airsickness were secondary.

On the whole, I’d rather have flown myself, but unfortunately I had to stay on the plane with Simmons to make sure he didn’t get up to any trouble. Unlikely, I know, but better safe than allowing a quake-causing dipshit to go free-range again.

Reed looked over at me as we went into a steep turn to the left. “Almost home.”

“Yeah,” I said, probably a little sourly on account of the not-so-smooth ride. “Maybe you can have a little Italian for dinner tonight,” I sniped.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Gah, you’re banging on that drum again.” I caught the flinch as he realized what he said a moment too late. “Go on,” he said resignedly, “hit me.”

“I’d have to bang on it a lot more to catch up with how many times you’ve …” I gave it up halfway through, catching the pitying look from him, and changed tacks, “… gone on about surveillance states and indefinite detention.” Then I flinched, because I’d set myself up much worse than he’d just done, and just as unintentionally.

He leaned over to me and lowered his voice to a whisper so low that only a metahuman sitting a foot away could have heard it over the engine noise. “Does it not bother you at least a little that we’ve basically become the judge, jury and executioner for metas?”

We
should
execute more of them
, Bjorn said.

I ignored the voice in my head, pondered a smug and snarky answer, which he would promptly batter aside, and tried for something a little more truthful. “I think it would bother me more,” I said, “if we didn’t presently have in our prison some of the foulest a-holes known to man. I mean, seriously,” I said, throwing in a little of the snark that I’d previously withheld, “our little prison is well-named if we call it a penal system, because they are all of them dicks.”

He gave me a slightly pained look, and I recognized it as disappointment in my pat answer. “They get no trials to speak of. They have zero recourse. We put them in the ground and don’t allow them to see the light of day. What if we have an innocent person in there?”

“We don’t,” I said, dead certain. “And you know we don’t. You’re speaking in hypotheticals of what might happen in the future.” This much was true; we’d caught every one of our current prisoners in some sort of act of criminality, greater or lesser. There was no doubt in my mind as to any of their guilt, not with as low a population as we were dealing with.

“What about your buddy?” he asked, and he withheld the judgmental satisfaction that I knew was coming. “What about Logan?”

I felt a pained expression work its way onto my face. Timothy Logan was a bit of sore point for me, because he’d been involved in some low-ranging crimes in a rural jurisdiction. He was guilty, no doubt, but he hadn’t been violent and he’d expressed a lot of remorse. He was, bar none, our easiest prisoner, and I was of a mind to parole him soon-ish. “I don’t have absolute power over these people, okay?” I said. “You know that the DoJ and Homeland Security are just as much in charge of this as I am.”

“And that doesn’t worry you?” His penetrating gaze was annoying. Really annoying. His accurate points in regards to Timothy Logan were even more so. “They haven’t ever interfered with your judgment.”

“That’s because so far,” I said as we started to descend, a lot sharper than a commercial airliner would, “I haven’t let anyone go.” Passengers? Nah. We were cargo to our pilots. I glanced back at Simmons, up to his neck in gel, and the parallel was not lost on me.

Reed sat back, looking hideously uncomfortable. “It’s just not right. It’s like those Russians they dug out of that Siberian prison a few months ago.” He stared at me. “You know what I’m talking about?”

“It would have been hard to miss,” I said. They’d been on pretty much every news broadcast, and I’d gotten email forwards from what seemed like everyone in the government from the White House on down. It was turning into a real human interest story, the tale of four metas locked up by the Soviet Union for mysterious and unremembered crimes, left to rot for thirty years and through multiple regime changes. I had enough requests for comment from reporters that printing them all out would have deforested ten planet Earths.

“Justice systems that take place in the darkness are not typically—” he began.

“Oh, enough already,” I snapped at him. “God save me from hapless idealists. What would you prefer we do with him?” I tilted my head to indicate Simmons. “Let him go?”

“No,” Reed said, looking like he was about to deliver a punchline of his own, “that’s the kind of thinking that causes the death of Uncle Ben.” He paused and looked suddenly uncomfortable. “Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben, not the rice guy.”

“I got it.”

“I’m not saying these people aren’t guilty as hell,” Reed said gently, “and I’m not saying they don’t deserve what we’re giving them right now and worse.”

“Then what are you saying?” I asked, feeling the plane shift directions again. The shawarma was not settling well. Or was it the conversation?

“We have a justice system for a reason,” he said. “With penalties civil and criminal—”

“That these guys wouldn’t fit into at all,” I said. I laughed, but there was zero joy in it. “Try and imagine sticking them in—I dunno, the Stillwater prison. Human guards, meta prisoners. Give them their hour of exercise or whatever every day, under the supervision of normal people, and see how long it takes for Simmons or—” A particularly malicious thought occurred to me, “or your boy Anselmo,” I watched him blanch almost imperceptibly, “to break out.” I folded my arms in front of me. “The guards don’t even carry guns in human prisons, Reed. They’d be completely defenseless against what these guys could unleash. It’d be like taking a prison population and giving them all guns and telling the guards they had to go in with nothing.”

“I don’t have a solution, okay?” Reed said, and it was not a question. “I’m just suggesting that we’re making trade-offs that should be examined. In this case, we’re putting people in a black box without—”

“I know what we’re doing,” I said, in a tone that suggested I was so far done with this conversation that I didn’t even want to look back at it.

“Do you?” he asked. “Do you really?”

I tilted my head to look at him. “Unless you’ve got a better idea?”

He looked like he was going to argue more, but his voice fell. “The guy who got those Russians out? He was part of an organization called ‘Limited People.’”

I wanted to roll my eyes, but didn’t. “Great name for a human group.”

Reed held his silence for a second. “It’s from a quote. ‘Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.’” This time I did roll my eyes. “You don’t think it’s true?” he asked.

“I think it’s a really great piece of fortune-cookie wisdom from someone who’s never had to deal with running a prison for people who fall outside the realms of ordinary law and power,” I said with a slight growl. “I mean, really, has there ever been a system devised to take into account these extraordinary circumstances?” I shot him a look of fire, feeling like I was burning as I looked at him. “Has there ever been this great a threat to basic security?”

“There’s always a threat, Sienna,” he said quietly. “So long as there have been people, there have always been others who intend them harm.”

“Yeah, well, my job is to stop that harm,” I said, looking straight ahead. “Full stop, end of sentence.”

I could see him out of the corner of my eye as the plane rattled on final descent. I knew he wanted to argue more, but whether it was because of the roughness of the landing or because he knew my patience was gone, he held his tongue. I sat in silence as we made our way to the ground, thankful for the peace that hung in the air—even if it did not come close to settling inside me.

I led Simmons out of the back of the van, a half dozen guys with submachine guns arrayed around me. We stepped out into the cold, and I felt Simmons gasp as Minnesota kissed him hello. It was January and he was wearing a fairly thin coat. Do the math on that one.

Thanks to long practice dealing with the Minnesota chill, I managed to brace myself. I held tight on his forearm and pushed him forward. “Come on, let’s get inside,” I said with as much encouragement as I could.

The snow covered the ground in all directions as we stepped out under the portico and walked the half dozen steps toward headquarters front door. Simmons was dripping from the gel still, and I felt it freeze on him as we walked. I’ve read books where authors talk about the glorious, frigid majesty of winter. Every time I step outside on a day like today I feel the urge to track them down and give them a swift kick to the groin. Or the head. Maybe both. Simmons’s steps faltered, and I dragged him along, flanked by our armed guard squad as they opened the glass doors to the agency’s headquarters for me.

We passed through the doors into the lobby and a blast of warm air thawed me slightly. Ice had already formed on Simmons’s arms and legs, and he walked with a limp, jaw chattering. His lips were slightly blue. “Come on, let’s get you locked up, it’ll be warmer down there.”

I steered him through the security checkpoint with a nod from the guards and we made our way out of the sweeping lobby with its high ceilings into a metal door that led to a staircase.

“Where are you … taking me?” Simmons asked, shivering.

“The meta equivalent of prison,” I said, leading him down the stark staircase. The smell of fresh paint lingered in the air. “Which is also, not coincidentally, called prison.”

“I thought that was in Arizona,” he said, looking around wildly, taking it all in.

“Used to be,” I said. This was a pretty closely guarded secret, since the last prison had been destroyed twice. When we rebuilt it, they—the government—wanted to make sure that it was given every possible security precaution.

Apparently, I was the best security precaution they could come up with, so they stuck it here under the agency headquarters. It was still a secret to the rest of the world—including most of our employees—but since Eric Simmons was about to become a resident, I didn’t feel a need to lie to him about it.

I hustled him through the special security checkpoint and into the staircase to the prison entry. There were twelve armed men waiting here with their weapons at the ready, and another dozen waited behind a concrete and metal wall. I put one hand on a biometric sensor while leaving the other on Simmons’s arm. “I don’t have to tell you what the penalty will be for starting shit right now, do I?”

“I won’t get a nice, fluffy cell?” Simmons smarted off.

“I’ll kill you instantly by breaking your neck,” I said without emotion. “This is a high security area; the guards will shoot to kill, and if they fail, I won’t.” I pulled a scanner from the wall unit close to one of my eyes, leaving the other free to watch him. I saw him look back, trying to get a read on me. “You escaping custody out in the world is one thing; you causing an earthquake in the middle of my meta prison is a death sentence.”

I heard him gulp. I think he believed me. He should have.

The door opened without any fanfare. A firing line of armed guards stood to our right. We left our other escort behind and walked down a long, narrow corridor that looked like it had been shaped out of steel. It wasn’t; it was some metal harder than steel, some alloy whose proper name I’d never caught. They made meta handcuffs out of it, and it stretched a hundred yards straight ahead and slightly down, a grim warning that we were entering a place of darkness and seriousness.

Simmons took it all in with an air of uncertainty. His cockiness was all evaporated now, and so was his limp. He was dripping a little on the floor, but I saw his eyes take in the steady succession of men staring out at us from portholes with rifles to our side. The guards called them murder holes, and that was an accurate description. There was one way into the prison and one way only, and anyone unauthorized was to be riddled with bullets until such time as their body was nothing but splatters of tissue and bone.

I didn’t take any chances with safety.

We reached the other end of the hallway of death and were buzzed in thanks to the camera above our heads. I pushed open a heavy door and there we were, in the Cube.

I heard Simmons make a gasping noise as he took it in. It was metal all around, too, with inlaid lighting behind bulletproof panels. There was room for eighty modular cells, with an option for another unit further down as maximum security if we ever needed to expand. For now it was just the Cube, though, so named because it was four floors up and down. Only the top floor was presently occupied, though, and not even fully. The rest were reserved for future inmates.

I pulled Simmons along the first row. We passed one of my favorite prisoners, Anselmo Serafini. Reed had run afoul of this particular pig in Italy a couple years earlier. I’d had his cell speaker muted so that he couldn’t be heard, and had personally supervised a reconstruction of his cell that allowed only a small window for him to look out of because—I’m not even kidding—every time I or another female guard came past his cell, the bastard would expose himself to us. While I considered neutering a valid option, cooler heads than mine prevailed, and I settled for giving him a two-inch by three-inch mail slot to look out on his limited world.

Speaking from experience, it’s a shitty way to go through imprisoned life. When I put him in the new cell, I’d threatened him with covering that last slit up as well. Happily, I’d now gone a year and a half without having to see his genitals. It had been a good year and a half.