“Madame St. Lucie?” a man called after she’d gone through a metal detector.
It was the same big, muscular guy from Le Canard, the one who enjoyed sopping up garlic butter with the fresh bread, only now he was wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit and moving toward her with total confidence.
“We never had the pleasure of meeting properly,” he said, making a half bow. “I am Luc L’Argent, personal security director to Monsieur Abelmar.”
Bree smiled. “Enchanté. It’s nice to meet properly.”
“Very much so,” he said and gestured toward the elevator. “I understand you are from Saint Martin and here talking with clients.”
“Potential clients,” she said.
They boarded the elevator. He pushed the button for the forty-ninth floor. “Monsieur Abelmar says you are in the shell-company business.”
“We help people organize them and put them together with local banks,” she said as they began to rise. “The Caribbean is an attractive place for people with money. Not far from the U.S. and, of course, beautiful.”
“It is that.”
The elevator doors opened, and they emerged into the lobby of the French offices of the Pegasus Group. He led her inside and showed her the layout of the facility, including the currency and futures trading desks.
Then he offered her coffee, which she accepted and drank in a lounge area. Afterward, L’Argent took her to meet with three people who questioned her about her service and its merits and weaknesses.
Bree did her best to answer questions about the shell-company operation and how it might benefit Pegasus France in general and Philippe Abelmar in particular. She also did her best to walk the line between earnest and coy, legal and illegal, focusing mostly on the regions’ shared language and therefore ease of doing business in Saint Martin.
After the third talk, she was taken back to the lounge area, where she sat for almost an hour before Valentina, Abelmar’s young personal assistant, appeared.
“Congratulations,” she said and shook Bree’s hand. “Everyone is very impressed. Philippe wanted to take you to lunch but he has been called away at the last minute. Can you meet us for dinner tonight at Le Canard? Eight thirty? He has a proposal that he thinks you will find intriguing.”
Bree tilted her head and gave Valentina her sincerest smile. “How could I say no to an invitation like that?”
Chapter 33
Fremont County, Colorado
The Alcatraz of the Rockies squats in desolate high-desert country well outside the dusty town of Florence. Were it not for the pale, bulbous water tower, seen from a distance, the parapets and the upper floors of the supermax penitentiary could easily be mistaken for the low rocky bluffs and wind-carved spires that naturally jut up out of the dry, barren landscape in the area.
But the closer you get, the more you appreciate the scale and strength of the penitentiary, which features a series of massive bunkers half buried in the ground. A wall stout enough to take a tank round or two surrounds the bunkers and is topped by giant, tight-rolled spools of razor and concertina wire.
Above the wire, at the corners of the penitentiary wall, are towers with turrets and narrow, horizontal bulletproof windows that give the guards a 360-degree view of their world.
I looked all around, taking it in, as I passed through the main gate and then several hydraulic doors of steel and bulletproof glass. I showed my identification again and again as I went through one security system after another. But the entire time, most of my thoughts and prayers were with the best friend I’ve ever known.
Jannie had called me hysterical the previous night as I waited for a flight from LAX to Denver. Across the street from John’s house, a man had stabbed Sampson twice before John was able to kill him with his bare hands.
Sampson had passed out and was rushed to GWU Hospital, where they did emergency surgery on his abdomen. The last I heard before entering the supermax was that he was in stable but serious condition in the ICU. Willow was at our home under the care of Nana Mama, Jannie, and Ali.
Please keep that good man alive, I prayed as I went through another series of steel and bulletproof-glass hydraulic gates.
On the other side, I was met in a small octagonal room by the warden. Ainsley Perrin was a small, thin woman in her fifties with faded freckles and lank red hair that kept falling in her eyes. At first, she reminded me of Pippi Longstocking, one of Jannie’s favorite characters, but once Warden Perrin opened her mouth, she was all command and business.
“Dr. Cross,” she said, shaking my hand. “Your reputation precedes you, but I must let you know, I disagree with Judge Sands’s decision to alter part of Alejandro’s sentencing guidelines. I think he should have done the full year of silence.”
“He’s done almost fifty weeks,” I said. “And he may have information vital to us as we investigate his cartel’s role in the murders of two federal law enforcement agents and the murder of an innocent family the day before yesterday.”
“Is interviewing Marco now rather than two weeks from now really going to change things?” Warden Perrin asked.
“I’m hoping it will prevent more bloodshed and more innocent lives lost,” I said. “Judge Sands agrees.”
“His decree is my command.” She sighed. “How long do you need?”
“An hour?”
“I can give you that,” she said. “But you will be separated by three inches of bulletproof glass and you will wear full stab armor. Oh, and I cannot make him talk to you if he doesn’t want to.”
“All we can do is try.”
After putting me in green stab armor, which covered my torso and groin, she led me through a door and along a windowless hallway as she described the cartel leader’s life since being sent to the Florence supermax.
For most of the past year, Marco Alejandro had been kept on a strict schedule. He was awakened at six a.m. by a bell and fed at seven, noon, and six in the evening. Guards passed him his meals through a slot in the door, and the guards were rotated weekly and forbidden to talk to him.
“Has he tried to talk to them?”
“He tried repeatedly at first,” Perrin said. “Less after six months. Almost no attempts the past eight weeks other than discussions with the prison doctor and nurse during two recent trips to the prison clinic when he had kidney stones. He’s evidently prone to them and has high uric acid in his blood, which means he’s probably going to suffer from gout at some point. That’s the difficulty of facilities like mine these days, Dr. Cross.”
“What’s that?”
“Florence is the end of the line for these prisoners, whether they understand it or not. The worst of the worst are sent here for life or to await execution. They will never leave.”
She stopped by the sort of steel, hatch-shaped door with a wheel you might expect on a submarine and said, “This is a problem, because the worst criminals tend to mistreat themselves and age poorly. As a result, we have a growing geriatric prison population with increasing medical challenges that we, as a system, have an extremely difficult time addressing.”
“I imagine so,” I said.
Warden Perrin put her hand on the wheel. “Are you ready to face the devil himself, Dr. Cross? I guarantee you, he’s not what you’d expect.”
“I have no expectations. And there’s no time like the present.”
“One hour,” the warden said. She threw the wheel and pushed open the hatch door for me.