“And in the third scenario?”
“The third scenario is to deliver the PCs to Wolverine’s FBI, the one that really does care if good wins out over bad.”
“Isn’t Wolfie part of the problem? At least maybe?”
“For now, no,” Jonathan said. “I think she’s in the dark. But you know Wolfie. Presented with the evidence, she’ll come around to our side.”
Being processed into jail was every bit as humiliating as Jolaine imagined it would be, right down to the oft-rumored cavity search. To their credit, the staff of the jail remained courteous and professional through the whole thing.
Taking her own advice, she said nothing. She answered questions regarding her identity and her physical state — she had no known diseases or allergies, she was in excellent physical health, had not had any recent surgeries, blah, blah, blah — but otherwise offered nothing. She didn’t even ask where they had taken Graham.
She’d never seen such a look of terror as she saw on Graham’s face, and that included young grunts who found themselves in a war zone for the first time. At least in combat, there was an element of empowerment, a way to affect the outcome of your own life. There on the street, on his belly, with his hands ratcheted into handcuffs, there was only misery. She had no idea what the next chapter in his life was going to be, and she didn’t ask because she was confident that no one would tell her.
She sat alone in a holding cell that looked more like the pictures she’d seen of supermax prisons than what she’d envisioned a county jail to look like. Assuming the tiles on the floor were one foot square, her rectangular corner of the world measured roughly five by seven. A heavy steel door occupied the narrow dimension at the front of the cell, with a tiny wire-reinforced glass window that looked out into the hallway — or would look out into the hallway if the sliding panel on the far side were open. She imagined that the other panel in the door, this one about waist high and made of metal, was a hinged flap that would allow the guard staff to pass food to her without opening the door. It looked just big enough to accommodate a cafeteria tray.
Her cot was actually a concrete half wall that ran the length of the long dimension of the cell, and it was topped with a thin mattress that had been rolled up around her pillow and nudged up against the back wall. Hospital-green sheets and a blanket sat folded in front of the bedroll. The most prominent feature in the left-center of the space was a squatty, mushroom-shaped stainless-steel bar stool that served as the chair for the stainless-steel desk that folded up to reveal the stainless-steel toilet. Efficiency at its most hideous.
Aware of the fisheye camera in the corner of the ceiling nearest the door — enclosed, of course, by what appeared to be bulletproof glass — she wondered what bizarre pleasure some of the guards must have gotten from watching prisoners take care of bodily functions. It wouldn’t surprise her to learn that there was a porn channel devoted to just that.
As she placed the sheets onto the desk and began to unroll the mattress, she took inventory of where she was and how she’d gotten here. As far as she could recall, the arresting officers had never told her what she she’d been arrested for, and she hadn’t asked because (a) it would violate her rule of saying nothing, and (b) it would all be revealed sooner or later.
Imprisonment was a first for her. There’d been a close call back in her teen years where a kindhearted magistrate had overridden the desires of a county cop following a DUI charge, but to date, she’d never spent a moment in jail. She surprised herself with her own calm. Sure, it was scary, but she’d scored a single room where she didn’t have to deal with the politics and violence of other prisoners, and the entire ordeal was only a few hours old.
Give it a few more, she thought. Once nighttime came, and the boredom of her own company began to crush her, she imagined that there’d be plenty of panic to deal with.
For the time being, she committed herself to treating this mess as an adventure. If nothing else, she was experiencing an adrenaline rush of a magnitude she hadn’t felt since the Sandbox.
Jolaine’s sole experience with the rigors and processes of the criminal justice system was limited to what she’d seen on television. As she spread the nearly see-through thin green sheet across the mattress, she thought through the events of the past couple of hours, and she tried to reconcile the facts of her situation to the fiction that she’d seen so often.
They never read me my rights, she thought. The realization startled her. Wasn’t that a requirement whenever someone was arrested? Yes, she was certain of it.
Come to think of it, they’d never actually said that she was under arrest. That thought brought her bed-making to a halt. She stood there, with the top of the sheet tucked in and the bottom of the sheet suspended like a flag as she tried to figure out what that might mean.
I’m in jail, but I haven’t been arrested.
The thought paralyzed her. She dropped the sheet and sat heavily on the bed. She felt the blood draining from her head, but she forced herself to sit upright anyway so as not to give whoever was watching her camera feed any indication of fear. She didn’t know why that was important, but it was.
Jolaine told herself to calm down and to think through exactly what she did and didn’t know. What she thought and what she feared were irrelevant. It was too easy to shoot out to the worst-case scenario, and to extrapolate from there that all roads and all options led to tragedy. Panic was the only result of bad assumptions, and panic always resulted in tragedy. She needed to think it all through.
Fact: Her arrest violated all of the rules she was aware of regarding arrest procedures.
Counterfact: She wasn’t a lawyer, and not everything you saw on television was true. Hell, depending on what channel you watched, only half of what you saw on the news was true.
Fact: Graham was the sole possessor of some kind of code that a lot of people thought was worth killing for.
Fact: If her observations about her nonarrest were true, then someone was asleep at the switch because — again, if television lawyers knew what they were doing — any case against her would be fatally flawed and the government would be guaranteed to lose.
Unless they don’t care about losing.
But why would that be? This couldn’t all be some scare tactic, could it? Could that possibly be legal? Wouldn’t there be consequences to pointing guns and pulling people out of their cars just to make a point?
No, she thought, it was more than that. Just as she had seen the terror in Graham’s eyes, she had also seen genuine fear in the eyes of those cops who took them down. They’d been expecting bad things from Jolaine, and that expectation had driven all of the rough handling that had followed. Even down to manhandling a fourteen-year-old boy.
Where did such fear come from?
Clearly, the police had been alerted to be on the lookout for them. That in turn meant that someone had told them what and who to look for. But who? Who would even know what car she was driving?
Fact: No one had asked her any questions. They hadn’t even fingerprinted her.
After all of the drama and all of the violence and near-violence, why would there be such silence? It was almost as though they’d been instructed not to say anything.