Gone Tomorrow

I ducked my head to my shoulder and scraped my chin across my shirt. Stubble, a little more than I remembered. Maybe eight hours’ worth. The gorilla on the National Geographic Channel had slept for ten. Score one for Reacher, except they had probably used a lighter close on mc. At least I hoped they had. That huge primate had crashed down like a tree.

I raised my head again and looked around. I was inside a cell, and the cell was inside a room. No window. Bright electric light. New construction inside old construction. A row of three simple cages made of bright new spot-welded steel, sitting in a line inside a big old room made of brick. The cells were each about eight feet square and eight feet tall. They were roofed with bars, the same as their sides. They were floored with steel tread plate.

The tread plate was folded up at the edges, to make a shallow inch-deep tray. To contain spilled liquids, I guessed. All kinds of liquids can get spilled in cells. The tray was spot-welded inside a horizontal rail that ran around the bottom of all the vertical

bars. There were no bolts through the floors. The cells were not fixed down. They were just sitting there, three freestanding structures parked in a big old room.

The big old room itself had a high, barrelled ceiling. The brick was all painted fresh white, but it looked soft and worn. There are guys who can look at the dimensions of bricks and the bricklaying patterns they make and tell you exactly where the building is and exactly when it was constructed. I am not one of them. But even so the place looked like the East Coast to me. Nineteenth century, built by hand. Immigrant labour, working fast and dirty. I was probably still in New York. And I was probably underground. The place felt like a basement. Not damp, not cool, but somehow stabilized in terms of temperature and humidity by virtue of being buried.

I was in the centre cage of the three. I had the cot I was strapped to, and a toilet. That was all. Nothing else. The toilet was enclosed by a three-sided U-shaped privacy screen about three feet high. The toilet tank had a dished top that made a sink. I could see a faucet. Just one. Cold water only. The other two cages looked the same. Cots, toilets, nothing else. Leading away from each of the cells were recent excavations in the outer room’s floor. Narrow trenches, three of them, exactly parallel, dug up and refilled and smoothed over with new concrete. Sewer lines to the toilets, I guessed, and water lines to the faucets.

The other two cages were empty. I was all alone.

In the far corner of the outer room where the walls met the ceiling there was a surveillance camera. A beady glass eye. A wide-angle lens, presumably, to see the whole room at once. To see into all three cells. I guessed there would be microphones, too. Many more than one, probably, some of them close by. Electronic eavesdropping is hard. Clarity is important. Room echo can ruin everything.

My left leg hurt a little. A puncture wound and a bruise, right where the dart had hit. The blood on my pants had dried. There wasn’t much of it. I tested the strength of the cuffs around my wrists and my ankles. Unbreakable. I bucked and jerked against them for half a minute. Not trying to get free. Just checking whether I would pass out again from the effort, and aiming to attract attention from whoever was watching through the surveillance camera and listening through the microphones.

I didn’t pass out again. My head ached a little as it cleared, and the exertion didn’t make my leg throb any less. But apart from those minor symptoms I felt pretty good. The attention I attracted was delayed well over a minute and took the form of a guy I had never seen before walking in with a hypodermic syringe. Some kind of a medical technician. He had a wet cotton ball in his other hand, ready to swab my elbow. He stopped outside my cage and looked in at me through the bars.

I asked him, ‘Is that a lethal dose?’

The guy said, ‘No.’

‘Are you authorized to give a lethal dose?’

‘No.’

‘Then you better back off. Because however many times you shoot me up, I’m always going to wake up later. And one of those times, I’m going to come and get you. Either I’ll make you eat that thing, or I’ll stick it up your ass and inject you from the inside.’

‘It’s a painkiller,’ the guy said. ‘An analgesic. For your leg.’

‘My leg is fine.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Just back off.’

So he did. He went out through a stout wooden door painted the same white as the walls. The door looked old. It was vaguely Gothic in shape. I had seen similar doors in old public buildings, City schools, and police stations.

I dropped my head back to the cot. I had no pillow. I stared up through the bars at the ceiling and prepared to settle in. But less than a minute later two of the men I knew came in through the wooden door. Two of the federal agents. The two sidekicks, the leader. One of them had a Franchi 12 with him. It looked loaded and cocked and ready. The other guy had some kind of tool in his hand and a bunch of thin chains looped over his arm. The guy with the shotgun stepped up close to my bars and poked the barrel through and jammed the muzzle into my throat and kept it there. The guy with the chains unlocked my gate. Not with a key, but by spinning a dial left and right. A combination lock. He opened the gate and came inside and stopped beside my

cot. The tool in his hand was like a pair of pliers, but with blades instead of milled grips. Some kind of a cutter. He saw me looking at it and smiled. He leaned forward, above my waist. The shotgun muzzle pressed harder into my throat. A wise precaution. Even with my hands strapped down I could have folded forward from the waist and delivered a pretty good head butt. Not my best, maybe, but with plenty of snap from the neck I could have put the guy to sleep for longer than I had been out. Longer than the silverback, perhaps. I already had a headache. Another big impact wouldn’t have made it much worse.

But the Franchi muzzle stayed firmly in place and I was reduced to the status of a spectator. The guy with the chains untangled them and laid them in place, like a trial run. One would cuff my wrists to my waist, one would chain my ankles, and the third would connect the first two together. Standard-issue prison restraints. I would be able to shuffle along a foot at a time and lift my hands as far as my hips, but that was all. The guy got the chains all locked and fastened and tested, and then he used the tool to cut off the plastic cuffs. He backed out of the cell and left the gate open and his partner pulled the Franchi away.

I guessed I was supposed to slide off the cot and stand up. So I stayed where I was. You have to ration your opponents’ victories. You have to mete them out, slowly and meanly. You have to make your opponents subliminally grateful for every little bit of compliance. That way maybe you get away with giving up ten small losses a day, rather than ten big ones.

But the two feds had had the same training I had had. That was clear. They didn’t stand there getting all beaten and frustrated. They just walked away, and the guy who had fitted the chains called back from the door and said, ‘Coffee and muffins through here, any old time you want them.’ Which put the onus right back on me, exactly like it was designed to. Not stylish to wait an hour and then hobble through and wolf stuff down like I was desperate. That would be getting beaten in public, by my own hunger and thirst. Not stylish at all. So I waited just a token interval and then I slid off the cot and shuffled out of the cage.

The wooden door led to a room about the same size and shape as the one the cages were in. Same construction, same colour paint. No window. There was a large wooden table in the centre of the floor. Three chairs on the far side, full of the three feds. One chair on my side, empty. Waiting for me. On the table, all lined up neatly, was the stuff from my pockets. My roll of cash, flattened out and trapped under a sprinkling of coins. My old passport. My ATM card. My folding toothbrush. The Metrocard I had bought for use on the subway. Theresa Lee’s NYPD business card, which she had given to me in the white-tiled room under Grand Central Terminal. The phony business card that Lila Roth’s local crew had given to me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 35th Street. The computer memory I had bought at Radio Shack, with its loud pink neoprene sleeve. Plus Leonid’s clamshell cell phone. Nine separate items, each one of them stark and lonely under the bright bulbs on the ceiling.