Deadlock rl-2

  Deadlock

  ( Ryan Lock - 2 )

  Sean Black

  Sean Black

  Deadlock

  Prologue

  The California/Oregon Border

  Ken Prager woke to blood at the back of his throat and the barrel of a shotgun pressing hard into his right eye. He opened his left: a burning wooden cross was embedded in the centre of a muddy clearing ringed by giant redwood trees.

  Then, as firefly embers from the blazing cross were sucked heavenwards by a swirling wind, came the question he’d been dreading for the past six months. A question that, depending on his answer, might be the last words he ever heard. Worse still, the question came from the blonde-haired woman on the other end of the shotgun.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ she asked him.

  Prager cleared his throat to speak and she withdrew the gun just enough to allow him a glimpse of a lone figure flanking the burning cross. Arms folded, face obscured by a ski mask, the figure stood in silence, waiting for an answer.

  ‘You know who I am,’ Prager said. His voice sounded cracked and tentative to him — the voice of a liar.

  He put a hand down on the muddy ground and tried to lever himself up and on to his feet.

  ‘What’s all this about?’

  ‘You tell us,’ the woman said, ratcheting a round into the chamber of the shotgun and re-sighting it in the middle of his forehead. ‘Now, why don’t you try again? And this time we’d appreciate the truth.’

  Prager choked back a laugh. ‘The truth?’

  The truth was, Ken Prager wasn’t sure who he was any more. Six months ago he’d been Special Agent Kenneth Prager, devoted family man, and a six-year veteran of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Then he’d been asked by his bosses at the Bureau to go undercover, to become Kenny Edwards, a marine fallen on hard times who’d found a new purpose in life: ridding the United States of America of anyone who wasn’t in possession of white skin.

  But he’d quickly found there was a snag. In order to convince the others of his new identity, he’d first had to convince himself. Then, to complicate matters further, and despite the fact that Ken Prager had a wife at home, he’d fallen in love. Those six months had blurred the edges of his identity to a point where he was no longer sure he could answer the question of who he was with any certainty. Not even to himself.

  He felt the woman leaning her shoulder into the stock of the shotgun, the tip of the barrel pressing painfully into his skull.

  ‘We need an answer, Kenny,’ she said.

  Prager blinked the rain from his eyes.

  Stick to your story. Wasn’t that the mantra? They wouldn’t ask you if they already knew. If they knew, you’d already be dead.

  ‘You know who I am,’ Prager repeated, taking his time over each syllable, trying to inject a tone of certainty into his words.

  ‘OK then,’ the woman said, with the slightest of nods to someone standing behind him. ‘Maybe this’ll refresh your memory.’

  There was the low rumble of a diesel engine and a black van squelched its way to the centre of the clearing and stopped. A masked driver clambered out of the front cab and walked round to the side.

  Prager caught the flash of a tiny shamrock tattooed on the knuckle of the man’s right hand as he clasped the handle and threw open the van’s side panel with a game-show flourish.

  A dome light illuminated the van’s cargo space. Two people crouched on the floor. One a woman in her early forties, the other a boy in his mid-teens. Bar the ropes securing their hands and feet and a single strip of silver gaffer tape covering their mouths, they were both naked.

  Turning his head, Prager vomited on to the muddy ground beneath him.

  ‘Jesus, no,’ he muttered, staring into the terrified eyes of his wife and son.

  Part One

  1

  One Month Later

  450 Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco, California

  The package was sitting on Jalicia Jones’s desk when she arrived at her office in the Federal Building a little after seven in the morning. It was a large, padded manila envelope with her name written on it in big black capital letters. Beneath her name was her title. No return address. No stamps. Just her name and title. Jalicia Jones

  Assistant U.S. Attorney

  Organized Crime Strike Force

  She took a final sip of the skinny latte she bought every workday morning across the street at Peats coffee shop and tossed the cup across the room. It went in off the rim of her wastepaper basket. She high-fived fresh air in celebration of the three-point coffee-cup shot, then sat down and stared at the new arrival.

  It wasn’t internal mail, that was for sure: they used perforated envelopes for hard copies sent between departments. By rights she should speak to her legal assistant and try to work out who had delivered it. Maybe even have one of the US Marshals Service guys, who provided security for the building and its staff, check it out for her. But, almost immediately, she dismissed both those notions. Jalicia was a young woman who had conditioned herself over the years to suppress unease and confront fear. You didn’t get from the bullet-ridden streets of South Central Los Angeles to an Ivy League law school without that ability.

  So, instead of following procedure, she picked the package up and shook it gently. Feeling faintly ridiculous, she held it up to her ear. What was she expecting to hear, she wondered, a ticking clock?

  To hell with it.

  She ripped open the top of the envelope, turned it upside down with a shake, and stifled a laugh of relief as a single DVD disc clattered out on to the wood. All that angst, and for what? It was probably surveillance footage, dumped on her desk by an over-eager intern who’d started work before she had.

  She picked up the shiny silver disc — and that was when she noticed what looked like a strip of meat stuck to the inside of the bubble wrap. Pulling a letter opener from her desk drawer, she lifted the top of the envelope to get a better look.

  What she’d taken to be a strip of meat extended all the way down into the envelope. Carefully, she prodded at it with the letter opener. Her stomach gave an involuntary lurch.

  Grabbing for a tissue from her handbag, she extracted the paper-thin rectangle of what she could now see was human skin and laid it out on the desk. The edges of the ragged rectangle were charred black. At the centre of the slab of skin, rendered in dark ink, was a swastika.

  The sound of the phone on her desk ringing made her jump.

  ‘Jalicia Jones,’ she said, her gaze still transfixed by the near-translucent scroll of skin with the charred swastika at its centre.

  Silence at the other end of the line.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was a click, and then a woman’s voice, human, but unmistakably automated. ‘You have a collect call from…’ There was a pause before the voice added, ‘Pelican Bay State Prison. Press one to accept this call.’

  Jalicia pressed the number one key on the pad. There was another pause, then a man’s voice, deep and masculine: ‘Ms Jones?’ There was an emphasis on the Ms.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘This is Frank Hays.’

  She opened her mouth, took a deep breath, trying to compose herself.

  ‘You know who I am, right?’

  She knew who he was all right. In fact, when she glanced over to the cork board on the opposite wall of her office, his face stared back at her. An old mugshot of a white male in his mid-twenties, with a square head, his hair down to his shoulders, a ratty mustache and a look of utter contempt for the rest of the world.

  But the name underneath the photograph wasn’t Frank Hays. It referred to him by the nickname he’d earned in prison: Reaper.

  Next to Reaper’s picture were six other mugshots.
Together, these men on the wall of Jalicia’s office constituted the leadership of America’s most feared prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood. Violent white supremacists, they’d banded together in California’s notorious San Quentin Prison in the late 1970s; what they’d lacked in numbers they’d more than made up for in their ability to terrorize everyone who crossed their path, other violent criminals included. And within their ranks, within their leadership even, Reaper had earned a fearsome reputation based on his complete disregard for human life. It was rumored that during his first week in prison, having been threatened with rape by the leader of a long-established black prison gang, Reaper had responded by beating the gangster unconscious and nailing him to the wall of his cell with a hammer and four nails purloined from a prison workshop.

  Jalicia took another deep breath. ‘I know who you are.’

  ‘Good,’ said Reaper. ‘You get a special delivery over the last couple of days?’

  ‘This morning,’ Jalicia said, her eyes drawn back to the parchment of skin. ‘Pretty neat trick. Hand-delivering something when you’re in prison.’

  There was a low, throaty chuckle from Reaper. ‘I heard it was on its way, is all. You know who it belongs to?’

  Jalicia knew all right. The swastika tattoo had almost certainly been carved from the mutilated body of Ken Prager, an undercover ATF agent who’d infiltrated a white supremacist group the authorities believed was carrying out an assortment of criminal activities on behalf of the incarcerated Aryan Brotherhood leadership. ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘So, you and me,’ Reaper continued. ‘I think it’s about time we had a talk.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Just make the arrangements. And make sure it stays on the down low. I ain’t gonna be any use to you dead.’

  2

  Twenty-four Hours Later

  Pelican Bay Supermax Prison, Crescent City, California

  The seven-hour drive from San Francisco to California’s highest-security prison had given Jalicia plenty of time to chew over Reaper’s request for a meeting, and what it might mean for her case against the Aryan Brotherhood.

  In the administration building she was greeted by Warden Louis Marquez, a dapper Hispanic with a prosthetic left eye, his eyeball having been gouged out of its socket by a disgruntled female inmate early in his career as a correctional officer. Marquez got Jalicia to sign the prison’s standard release form, certifying that she understood that the prison operated a strict ‘No Hostages’ policy, then passed her on to a barrel-chested lieutenant by the name of Williams, who explained that he was in charge of monitoring gang activity among the prison’s three and a half thousand inmates. Williams had facilitated Reaper’s phone call to Jalicia, but beyond that he was equally in the dark as to what Reaper was so eager to discuss with her.

  Williams led her into a white-walled meeting room tucked away from the prying eyes of other inmates. Jalicia took a seat, while Williams keyed his radio.

  ‘OK, you can bring him in now,’ he said.

  A minute later the door opened, and Reaper was led into the room by two guards. A double set of handcuffs and leg restraints were linked by a heavy belly chain which looped around his midriff. A white spit shield covered his nose and mouth.

  Reaper shuffled forward and was dumped into a chair opposite Jalicia by the two guards, who took up positions either side of him, hands poised, gun-slinger style, on their tasers. He sat there in silence for a moment.

  Jalicia turned to Williams, who was standing behind her, arms folded. ‘Could we lose the mask?’ she asked, hoping that the request would go some way towards establishing trust between her and Reaper.

  ‘Hope you got all your vaccinations,’ Williams said to her, before nodding to one of the guards flanking Reaper to remove the spit shield.

  Reaper smirked at Williams’s jibe.

  When the shield was off he leaned back in his chair and scratched lazily at a set of SS lightning bolts tattooed across a bicep that was thicker than most men’s thighs. ‘You know, me just being here, talking to you, could get me killed.’

  ‘Then I guess you must have a pretty good reason for contacting me,’ Jalicia said.

  Reaper’s mouth, partially obscured by the kind of walrus mustache usually reserved for the bad guy in an old Western, broke into a smile, but his eyes remained unblinking. In fact, ever since Reaper had walked into the visiting room with his two-guard escort, she’d felt him studying her, taking in every detail, scrutinizing her every reaction. It wasn’t so much the feeling of a man mentally undressing her, which she might have expected under the circumstances. No, this went deeper. Reaper’s gaze suggested a man staring into her soul.

  ‘This case you’re building against the Aryan Brotherhood,’ he said. ‘And these conspiracy charges you’re going to be bringing against them for that ATF agent and his family being snuffed.’

  Jalicia took a breath, her mind flitting back to the contents of the envelope. ‘What about them?’

  ‘You’re gonna be seeking the death penalty for the suspects, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  Jalicia settled for a nod of the head and a ‘That’s correct.’

  Reaper stretched his arms up as far as his restraints would allow, and yawned. ‘But, hypothetically speaking, if someone who was, shall we say, associated with the Brotherhood were to cooperate with your office, this person wouldn’t be looking at Death Row. In fact, he might even be offered some kind of a deal.’

  The truth was that, so far, Jalicia had enough evidence to bring the leadership of the gang to trial for ordering the murder of Ken Prager and his family. An intercepted, and subsequently decoded, note found in a prison cell right here in Pelican Bay proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the Aryan Brotherhood had voted on and directly commissioned Prager’s death after he’d infiltrated a group which helped run the gang’s operations on the outside. But, whether she could persuade a judge and jury to sentence to death men who were already serving life without possibility of parole was another matter entirely. The one thing that would do that would be a star witness, someone on the inside of the organisation. Reaper more than fitted the bill.

  ‘If such a person were to come forward, we could certainly look at making some kind of an arrangement,’ Jalicia said. ‘You know, you might want to think about seeking an attorney to represent you.’

  At this Reaper stiffened. His fingers interlocked, then steepled under his chin. ‘No. This stays between me and you.’

  ‘So you would testify against the other men being indicted?’

  ‘If you keep me off The Row, then yes, I would.’

  ‘What else would you want?’ Jalicia asked.

  Reaper’s eyes swept the floor. Here it comes, thought Jalicia. She knew that cheating death wouldn’t be motivation enough for a man like Reaper.

  ‘Time off for good behaviour?’ Reaper suggested with a wry smile.

  Jalicia matched his smile. Reaper was already serving three sentences of life without possibility of parole for a triple homicide, which included two young black girls, so any kind of early release wasn’t an option. ‘What is it that you want that I can actually deliver?’ she prompted.

  Reaper leaned forward. ‘I’ve been in solitary confinement for the past five years. In my cell twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. Out only to shower on my own, or exercise in a tiny concrete box not much bigger than this room.’

  ‘We could arrange for you to be transferred to the THU,’ Jalicia suggested.

  Lieutenant Williams nodded in agreement. ‘We could definitely do that.’

  The Transitional Housing Unit was where former gang members lived together inside the prison. It lay, like purgatory, somewhere between the hell of solitary confinement (also known as the Secure Housing Unit, or SHU) and the relative freedom of the general housing units, where the majority of prisoners could move much more freely.

  Reaper shook his head. ‘I want to be back on the mainline.’

  Jalicia laughed. The m
ainline was the other name for the general housing units. ‘A federal witness on the mainline? You wouldn’t last two seconds.’

  ‘That all depends,’ Reaper said with another wry smile.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Let’s just say I have some new friends now, friends who think the leadership of the Aryan Brotherhood might have had its day.’

  So that was what this was all about, thought Jalicia: a power play, with Reaper testifying against his old comrades and being rewarded by the new regime.

  ‘Which “friends” are we talking about here?’ she asked. ‘The Nazi Low Riders? The Texas Circle?’

  The Nazi Low Riders and the Texas Circle were both up-and-coming white supremacist prison groups who had long envied the Aryan Brotherhood’s stranglehold on the prison system’s drug and protection trade. If Jalicia and the Federal Prosecutor’s office took the Aryan Brotherhood down, it would create enough space for one of the other prison gangs to step in and take over a trade inside and outside the country’s prisons worth tens of millions of dollars.

  Reaper looked up at the ceiling. ‘I can’t name names, but you know as well as I do that nature abhors a vacuum.’

  ‘So, you take the stand, testify against the Aryan Brotherhood, and in return I convince the prison authorities to let you back into general population.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Reaper.

  ‘But the Aryan Brotherhood would come after you.’

  ‘I’m prepared to take that risk. Plus, like I said, I have new friends looking out for me.’

  Jalicia knew that, in the normal course of things, a snitch was an automatic target on the mainline, fair game for everyone. But Reaper was different. Most prisoners would see his treachery as existing on a plane high enough that it wouldn’t be their job to intervene. In some ways it was akin to the kind of deals governments cut all the time with other nations when it served their purposes. It was realpolitik at its most base.