The Enemy Inside (40 page)

On first blush I would say that housing Betz at Supermax is itself an act of cruel and unusual punishment. You would think it is also highly dangerous, given the informational powder keg he is sitting on.

According to what I’m reading, inmates at Florence generally serve solitary time, one man to a cell. They spend twenty-three hours a day locked up. They are allowed out for five hours every week for private recreational activity.

Each cell boasts poured concrete amenities: a fixed bed, a fixed concrete stool in front of a fixed concrete desk. The commode includes a basin and drinking fountain all built into one, and there is a built-in concrete shower. All of the water to the cells is on a timer so that inmates can’t flood the cubicles. A tiny opening the size of an arrow slit is the only window.

For entertainment they have a small black-and-white television that shows only educational and religious programs. According to one article, inmates do not know the location of their cell with reference to other parts of the institution. I can only assume this means that perhaps they are hooded and disoriented when they are being moved. They are also ankle and waist chained when on the move.

For the hard-core inmates, those who haven’t earned other privileges, all recreation occurs in a subterranean concrete-sided pit similar to a swimming pool to maintain the sense of disorientation to prevent escape attempts.

The minimum term for a stay at Supermax is generally twenty-five years, though there are exceptions. For those who have earned benefits, there is limited interaction with other inmates.

In Betz’s case, I’m assuming, except for a few guards and other prison staff, he is alone twenty-four hours a day. They wouldn’t dare expose him to any of the other inmates, not in this place. They may as well shoot him.

I have been in contact with Proffit’s office, which is acting as the intermediary between Grimes and me. For some reason the senator wants no direct contact. You would think I had the plague.

At one point they offered to transport Betz to California, to MCC, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, as a “convenience” to me. This tells me precisely what kind of a threat he is. MCC is a twenty-three-story tower downtown where they house defendants pending trial. At one time inmates were punching holes in the concrete walls and letting themselves down on bedsheets to the sidewalks outside.

I told them no. If I was going to represent Betz I wanted to see him in his surroundings, where he’s incarcerated. They haggled over this, as if perhaps they weren’t anxious to have me view this. I can’t imagine why. I told them it was that or nothing. I figured I might as well test them early and see what their reactions were. They caved.

Then, to my surprise, they offered a government jet to fly me there. I had been joking when I quipped about this with Harry. They are not. I’m only hoping it’s round trip.

It goes without saying that I will not be allowed to take any of the usual electronics inside—no computer or cell phone, camera, or recording devices.

But there are certain things I will insist on which are nonnegotiable. I have no intention of telling them what these are in advance or asking permission. Otherwise they will deploy countermeasures to defeat them. Either these will be accepted or the entire exercise ends there. Unless they use force, I will leave.

I’m sure I will get the usual search, and probably more, along with the requirement that I sign a waiver of liability in the event that I’m taken hostage, wounded, or killed while inside.

Even thinking about this under the circumstances sends a chill up my spine.

The phone on my desk rings. I look at the clock. It’s nearly midnight. It must be Harry. I pick it up.

“Hello.”

“Hey! Finally caught you at home.” It’s Herman. “Where the hell have you guys been?”

“Long story. Where are you? No, on second thought, don’t tell me. Are you guys OK?”

“For now,” he says.

“How are you making this call?”

“SIM card,” he says. “Not to worry. Got an endless supply. Soon as we’re done, I’ll toss this one, open another.”

“Still, there’s the tower.” I’m concerned that perhaps they can track his location.

“Not to worry,” says Herman. “Got it covered, but let’s keep it short.”

“Things look as if they may be coming to a head. You’re gonna want to keep in touch. Can you check in, maybe every other day?”

“Can do,” says Herman.

“Good. How’s your charge?” I’m talking about Alex.

“He’s OK, but like me, he wants to get home.”

“Anything you need?”

“What’s the sense of telling you?” he says. “You wouldn’t be able to get it to us if I did.”

He’s right. “The messenger service was a problem, I take it?”

“Big-time. Very messy. You might check the local news there, couple of online sites. They reported it, but were a little wide of the mark on the details. You wanna read between the lines.”

“Listen, we want to get you guys out of there.”

“Couldn’t be soon enough for me,” says Herman. “Where and when?”

“Remember the place you used before?”

Herman thinks for a second, then realizes I’m talking about the place where they dropped in. The dirt strip thirty miles east of Ixtapa. “Oh, that one?” he says.

“That’s the one. Can you get there?”

“No problem.”

“How much lead time you need?”

“Minimal,” says Herman.

I’m not sure what this means, but one thing’s for certain, unless they have a rocket ship they’re nowhere near Tampico, over on the Gulf Coast. “We’ll make the arrangements at this end, let you know when,” I tell him.

“How you gonna do that?”

“You call me?” I say.

“Better idea,” says Herman. “There’s an online message board.” He gives me the name. It’s in Tampico. I’m assuming Herman is doing this to throw anybody listening in off his track. He could collect the message from anywhere in the world. “Should have thought of this earlier,” he says. “You know my handle. One I used to use for Telex.”

“I do.”

He uses the name Diggsme along with a traveling e-mail address.

“One message,” he says. “Keep it cryptic and don’t use it again. Just give us the time and the day.”

“You’re sure the location is OK?”

“It’s good,” he says.

“Give us a few days. Watch the board.”

“I’ll do it. Gotta go now.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“You too,” he says, and he hangs up.

FORTY-NINE

T
hree days later, early morning, they pick me up outside my house, a military staff car from Miramar, the Marine Air Station in San Diego. Harry is there to see me off.

“You know what to do if for some reason I don’t come back?”

Harry nods. We have made contingency plans. I have called Sarah, my daughter, and Joselyn, my lover, who is still in Europe on a project, and told them both in general terms what is happening. I take my bag from Harry and step into the backseat of the blue sedan, and we’re off.

The trip is comfortable and swift. The sleek blue and white military jet streaks northeast over the California desert, nips the northern edge of Arizona, and flies almost directly over Four Corners, where the borders of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado meet. On a straight shot it heads over the shoulder of the southern Rockies and down their eastern flank. In just under two hours we land at the small airfield just outside Florence.

As I had requested, a gentleman from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, one of their executives from Washington, is waiting for me at the airport with a government car. He is personable, highly professional, and best of all, somebody I already know. I met Daniel Wells on a case years earlier when he was working for the Bureau of Prisons in San Diego.

From time to time we’ve kept in touch. We had children the same age and Dan was like me, single. He was divorced. I was widowed. But we haven’t seen each other in almost fifteen years, so that when I step off the plane he has to look twice to be sure it’s me.

“Dan, how are you?”

“Long time,” he says. “But you’re looking good.”

“More wrinkles and gray than I would like.”

“Yeah, but at least you still have some.”

Dan has gone completely bald. I suspect he shaves what little he has left.

“It’s good of you to meet me here. I appreciate it.”

“Not at all. I’m happy to get out of Washington. I’ve got the car over here. Want me to take the bag?”

“No, I’ve got it. Traveling light.” We head for the car.

On the way to Supermax we talk about the kids. He asks me if I’ve ever been out here before. I tell him no. If Dan has done any background on Betz, and I suspect he has, he doesn’t say so. I fill him in on the reason for my request that he accompany me, the fact that I am carrying a single electronic device that I want to take with me inside the prison.

He listens politely and then says, “I don’t know. They don’t generally allow it.”

“It’s not a camera. It’s not a recorder or a communication device. And,” I tell him, “unless I can take it inside and use it, we can’t go forward. We may as well not even go inside.”

He turns his eyes from the road for a second and looks at me. “You’re sure about this? You mean that?”

“I do. Betz does not know me. Unless I can give him absolute assurance that what he’s telling me is confidential, that it can’t be overheard or recorded by anyone else, I cannot in good conscience even talk to the man. I can’t share the details, but I can tell you that his life hangs in the balance. And he may not be the only one.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It is.”

“Well, we’ll see what we can do.”

More than twenty years ago when I was a young man, married with a daughter about eighteen months of age, I had my first experience with white noise. Sarah was going through one of those brief periods when babies seem to cry incessantly. She was miserable and slowly driving us crazy. One day as I was getting ready to clean my study, she was screaming in the other room with her mother. I turned on the vacuum and suddenly she stopped. When I turned it off she started crying again. I turned it on and she quit.

Her mother, with Sarah in her arms, came into the room. We looked at each other and suddenly realized that we had discovered magic. There was something about the sound of the vacuum. We made a tape recording, played it in the car on trips, and sang its praises. It was white noise.

It is a range of audible wavelengths, constant in their tone, the most effective being low frequency, which tend to swallow up and mask other sounds, in our case the disturbing and uneven sounds that tend to make a baby irritable.

Today the same technique is used in manufactured devices called “white noise generators” as a sleep aid. Better than a pill, they work like the wheels of a train to send you to sand land.

They also have other purposes. One of them is as a countermeasure, to defeat listening devices such as parabolic and laser microphones that can tune in on a conversation some distance away. In the case of parabolic mics, this can include distances of up to fifty yards, depending on the size of the dish used to capture the sound waves. Laser mics, which are far more expensive but are known to be used by government agencies, have a range of about half a mile and are exceedingly sensitive.

It is what I’m carrying in my pocket, a small noise generator about the size of a cell phone. It is part of the reason I want Dan with me when I get to the prison. Without him, everything would come to a halt. Security would stop me at the door, take all of the electronics including the noise generator, and I would be playing on their turf.

They would, of course, give me the privacy of a clinical cement visiting cubical, Betz on one side of the glass, me on the other. They would no doubt promise to honor the attorney-client privilege. And then they would listen to everything we had to say. The stakes are too high in this case not to.

At reception, at Supermax, everything happens as expected. The guards just in front of the gated magnetometer ask for all of our electronics. Dan and I empty our pockets, take off our watches, and surrender our cell phones. He shows them his Bureau credentials and I show them the small white noise generator. They tell me it has to go in the basket and be held at the front desk to be reclaimed when I leave. It cannot go inside.

Dan explains to them and a few moments later one of the supervisors comes out. It seems he already has my name on a list. He shakes my hand. He and Dan exchange pleasantries. He looks at the device and asks me if I mind their examining it. I tell him no, as long as they do it in my presence. My concern is that if they take it in another room to look at it, when it comes back it may not work anymore. Harry and I tested it thoroughly with one of the technicians at the shop where we purchased it. It worked perfectly.

They do it at the counter while I watch. They turn it on, turn it off, take out the batteries. One of them unscrews the back of the case with a mini screwdriver, looks inside and then seals it back up. When I turn it on, the red light comes up. It’s still working.

The supervisor tells me there is no need for it. They have a private conference area already set up. I tell him that we’ll have to talk about that when I get inside.

He looks at the two guards, nods, and Dan and I go through the metal detector. The guard isn’t happy about it, but he hands me the noise generator on the other side and we head to the sealed door beyond.

FIFTY

H
er name is Hannah Parish. She’s an assistant US attorney. She introduces herself along with her boss, a senior supervising deputy attorney general, Fenton Yasuda, with the Criminal Division. It seems we all have our own surprises today. Parish and Yasuda are from the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington. No one told me they would be here.

“Why don’t we go ahead and sit down,” she says.

We are in a small conference room at the end of a long hall. We start to take chairs around the table. She looks at Dan and says, “I don’t think there’s any need for Mr. Wells to stay, do you?”