barely glanced at him. “Likewise.” He was preoccupied with his men, and the trucks. The next part of their journey had already begun. Getting two mobile nuclear missile launch platforms with missiles included to the Middle East was probably not an easy proposition.
Brown raised a finger. “Hey, Jamal!”
The thin man turned back to him. He made an impatient hand gesture, as if to say, “What?”
“If you get caught with those things…”
Now Jamal did smile. “I know. You and I never met.” He backed away toward the nearest of the two trucks.
Brown turned to Mr. Jones and Mr. Clean. Jones was on one knee, stuffing the money back into the heavy bag. Clean was still testing diamonds from the velvet bag, handling them one at a time, the needle device still in his hand.
They had made one whale of a score. Things were looking up finally, after the fiasco that had run Brown out of his own country. He smiled.
All in a day’s work.
And yet, something about the scene here disturbed Brown. His guys were not paying attention to their environment – they were distracted by all the money. They had let their guard down, badly. And so had he. On a different operation, that could come back to bite them. Not everyone was as trustworthy as Jamal.
He turned to look at the Arabs again.
Jamal was there, near the truck, holding one of the Uzis. Two of his guys were with him. They stood in a line, pointing their guns at Brown and his men.
Jamal smiled.
“Clean!” Brown shouted.
Jamal fired, and his men did the same. There came the ugly blat of automatic gunfire. To Brown, it seemed like they were almost spraying him with a fire hose. He felt the bullets piercing him, biting into him like stinging bees. His body did an involuntary dance, and he struggled against it, to no avail. It was almost as if the bullets were holding him up, pinning him in an upright position, making him jitter and jive.
For a moment, he lost consciousness. Everything went black. Then he was lying on his back, on the concrete floor of the warehouse. He could feel the blood flowing from him. He could feel that the floor was wet where he lay. A puddle was spreading around him. He was in a lot of pain.
He glanced over at Mr. Clean and Mr. Jones. They were both dead, their bodies riddled, their heads half gone. Only Brown was still alive.
It occurred to him that he had always been a survivor. Hell, he had always been a winner. There was no way, after more than two decades of combat, madcap adventures, and narrow escapes, that he was going to die now, like this. It was impossible. He was too good at his job. So many men had tried to kill him before now, and failed. His life wouldn’t end like this. It couldn’t.
He tried to reach inside his jacket for his gun, but his arm didn’t seem work right. Then he noticed something else. Despite all the pain, he couldn’t feel his legs.
He could feel the burning in his gut where he had been shot. He could feel the ringing pain in his head where he had smacked it on the stone floor when he fell down. He swallowed, then lifted his head and stared down at his feet. Everything was still down there and still attached – he just couldn’t feel any of it.
The bullets severed my spine.
No thought had ever caused him such horror. Valuable seconds passed as he saw his future – rolling in a wheelchair, trying to climb from the chair to the driver’s seat of his handicapped accessible car, emptying the colostomy bag that drained the shit from his useless digestive system.
No. He shook his head. There was no time for that. There was only time for action. Clean’s gun was above his head and behind him somewhere. He reached back there – it hurt just to raise his arms like that – but he couldn’t find it. He started crawling backwards, dragging his legs after him.
Something caught his eye. He looked up and here came Jamal, swaggering toward him. The bastard was grinning.
As he approached he raised his gun. He pointed it at Brown. Now Brown noticed Jamal’s two men were with him.
“Don’t try to do anything, Brown. Just lay still.”
Jamal’s men took the big heavy bag with the money, and the small purse with the diamonds. Then they turned and headed back to the trucks. They climbed into the cab of the lead truck. The headlights came on. The engine farted and belched, black smoke pouring from a stack on the driver’s side.
“I like you,” Jamal said. “But business is business, you know? We’re not leaving any loose ends on this one. Sorry about that. I really am.”
Brown tried to say something, but he didn’t seem to have his voice. All he could do was gurgle in response.
Jamal raised the gun again.
“Do you want a moment to pray?”
Brown nearly laughed. He shook his head. “You know something, Jamal? You crack me up. You and your religion are a joke. Do I want to pray? Pray to what? There is no God, and you’ll find that out as soon as you – ”
Brown saw fire lick the end of the gun’s barrel. Then he was flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling of the warehouse high above his head.
CHAPTER FIVE
9:45 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time (11:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Florence ADX Federal Penitentiary (Supermax) – Florence, Colorado
“This is it,” the guard said. “Home sweet home.”
Luke walked the white cinderblock hallways of the most secure prison in the United States. The two tall, heavyset guards in brown uniforms flanked him. They were nearly identical, these guards, with military recruit-style crew cuts, big shoulders and arms, and even bigger midsections. They moved along, their bodies stiff and top-heavy, like offensive linemen from a football team who had been out of the sport for a while.
They were not fit in any traditional sense of that word, but Luke mused that they were the perfect size and shape for their jobs. In close quarters, they could put a lot of weight on a resistant prisoner.
Footfalls echoed on the stone floor as the three men passed the closed, windowless steel doors of dozens of cells. Each cell door had a narrow opening near the bottom, like a mail slot, through which the guards could shove meals to the prisoners. Each also had two small windows with steel-reinforced glass facing the walkway. Luke didn’t glance into any of the windows they passed.
Somewhere on this hallway, a man was screaming. It sounded like agony. It went on and on, no sign of ending. It was night, soon it would be lights out, and a man was shrieking. Luke thought he could almost make out words embedded in the sound.
He glanced at one of the guards.
“He’s okay,” the guard said. “Really. He’s not in any pain. He just howls like that.”
The other guard chimed in. “The solitude drives some of them insane.”
“Solitude?” Luke said. “You mean isolation?”
The guard shrugged.
