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“You know what I am,” I said eventually.

“I know what your file says.”

“My file says nothing. That is the entire point of it.” I settled back in the chair, and it groaned under the weight.

“Let me save you a few weeks. I am not going to hurt you. I am not going to hurt your daughter, and neither is any man of mine. And if any man in this world ever did, I would find him, and I would take a great deal of time making him wish he hadn’t.”

He blinked once at me, as that knocked him further off balance than a threat would have.

“Then what do you want?”

“Very little, and you will barely notice giving it to me.” I laid it out for him plainly, the way you do with a man in shock.

“Your job continues. Your numbers stay clean. Your reports read exactly as they always have, and in eighteen months you retire to that house with your family in that photograph and you never hear of me again. In return, this wing runs the way I say it runs. Movements. Rosters. Who works medical and when. And when I ask for a door, that door is open.”

“I can’t…”

“You can and you will. In fact, you’ve already done it twice this week, you just didn’t know it.” I let that land, telling him in so many words that I had already bought some of his men.

“The chain lengths on the infirmary cots were changed on Tuesday. Nobody signed for it. Officer Reyes was moved off the medical post on Thursday morning and put on the yard, and the man who replaced him left his position for forty minutes and wrote nothing down.”

He stared at me. And I watched the last few days rearrange themselves behind his eyes, one after another, every small wrong thing he had noticed and most likely explained away.

“That wasn’t me,” he stated, as if I needed to hear it.

I didn’t.

“I am aware, because that was all me.” I let him sit with that knowledge before continuing.

“I am telling you so that you understand where we are, and how long I have been here, and how little I actually require from you.”

The silence went on for a while after that.

He was not a stupid man, and I had dealt with my fair share of them in my time. He was simply a man who had built a life out of paperwork, had worked for a pension, paid for a daughter to go to college. Then someone had shown him, over a telephone, in his own kitchen, exactly how thin the walls of that life were.

There was never going to be any decision other than giving me what I wanted. The only question was how long he needed to sit there before he stopped pretending there had ever been another choice.

“There’ll be a review,” he said quietly. “After the yard. There has to be.”

“Then hold one. Write it up as a fall.” I shrugged, and the chains moved with me. “You will find that nobody saw anything, and I would be surprised if that changed,” I said with confidence, as everyone knew by now not to fuck with me, and if they forgot it, then they wouldn’t be breathing for long.

He closed his eyes for a second.

“And if I do this, how much blood will end up on my hands?”

I sat back and assessed him further.

Well now… There it was.

Not what happens to me? Not what about my pension, my daughter, my house on the hill? He had every one of those available to him and he had spent the last ten minutes learning exactly how easily I could take them.

Yet what came out of him was a question about other people… criminals at that.

Not only was he not stupid, but clearly, he had a conscience as well.

Now, I have sat across from a great many men in his position. Bankers. Customs officers. A judge, once, in a car outside a restaurant with his wife still inside eating dessert. Every last one of them asked me the very same thing, and all within the first few sentences at that. And the thing they always asked about was themselves.

Not one has ever asked me what it would cost anybody else.