Page 106 of Mastermind

“Prisoner, will you cooperate? Answer only in the affirmative,” says the guard, shining a light in my eye.

“Yes.”

“I just want to take a look at that arm. Can you uncuff him?”

One guard releases my bloody arm while another watches a few inches from my head, ready to take me down with a stun gun. All their procedures are airtight—developed over decades of containing the most dangerous elements of society.

The nurse, his face obscured by a mask, pours water over my arm, cleaning away the blood. “What is this?” he asks.

The cold metal tips of the stun gun are shoved into my neck—a warning that if I speak, I’ll experience an incredible amount of disabling pain.

Whoever planned my detention here wanted to take absolutely no chances that I would speak to anyone. Which only reinforces my certainty that I now know what has Heywood scared shitless.

Why didn’t he kill me in the penthouse? I can only guess that it would have jeopardized his attempt to come to an agreement with the government and, worse, set Jessica against him even more than she already was.

The nurse dabs my arm with gauze, wiping away the blood. The writing is clearer now and the incisions mostly clotted.

He walks over to a cabinet and takes out a camera. “Hold your arm out.”

“That’s not permitted,” says a guard.

“Actually, I have to photograph every wound,” says the nurse.

“He’s a no-contact prisoner,” the guard fires back.

“Fine. Then you take care of him.” He sits on a stool in the corner of the office. “He’s all yours.”

“All right,” says the guard. “But the photo goes to the warden only, and he can decide if it stays in the record.”

The nurse stretches out my arm and takes several snapshots of the wound with his digital camera. He then sprays my arm with disinfectant and wraps it in a bandage.

“He’s yours now. Take him to iso.”

They wheel me out of the room and down another corridor. Instead of returning me to my room, they place me in a much smaller one with my arms and legs strapped to the rails of the bed. “Twenty-four hours of isolation for self-harm,” says a guard. “Try it again and it’s seventy-two.” He shuts the metal door, and the lights go out.

This is how they treat me for going crazy . . . by driving me even more insane.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

ISO

As I lie in the dark, trying not to let the itching and the smell of my own urine get to me too much, I realize that the self-harm incident may have bought me more time. If someone wants to kill me, they will need to put me in a position where another inmate can commit the act.

The majority of correctional officers in charge of me do not want me to die under their supervision. A prisoner death leads to questions and paperwork. If one of them is found to have been culpable, then they’d face an even more serious investigation and possibly charges.

As vulnerable as I am right now, I don’t think my concern is some guard slipping in here with a pillow and suffocating me. An autopsy would reveal quite a lot and would almost certainly be performed in such an instance.

An injection of some drug that could stop my heart is another possibility. But that has its risks, too. A guard has to come here and administer it, in full view of security cameras, including the one that’s watching me right now.

The way to kill me is to make a simple mistake, like with Heywood’s prison transfer. One administrator somewhere in the prison system has to put in an order that I’m to be transferred to the general population. From there, snuffing me is merely a matter of economics.

One study found that the average price paid for a professional hit was approximately fifteen thousand dollars—which coincidentally is the average amount of money a person can withdraw on their credit card.

I don’t know what the average price is in a prison. If it’s not less, it can’t be too much more. While killing someone inside a prison increases the chances of the killer being caught—and therefore, rationally, should command a higher fee—prisons aren’t full of rational people.

Given Heywood’s resources, I suspect that more than one inmate may be prepared to kill me as soon as I’m free from isolation. Once they escort me out of here, I have to be ready for anything.

My best chance of survival is to defend myself long enough that I can get near a guard who’ll have to intervene in some way, with all the cameras watching. If they’re too slow to react, then suspicion will fall on them. That doesn’t mean that they’re required to perform a heroic intervention on my behalf, but they at least have to go through the motions of pretending to stop the assassination attempt.