Chapter 4 - The Warden's Dilemma
Three floors above the cafeteria, inside the sterile, glass-walled office of the warden, the atmosphere was considerably more desperate.
Warden Thomas Vance—no relation to the inmate downstairs, though the coincidence had given him a migraine since the day Elias arrived—pacing furiously across the expensive Persian rug. His fists were clenched, and his face was flushed a deep, unhealthy crimson. Standing rigidly by the door was Captain Miller, the head of prison security, whose left arm was wrapped in a tight elastic bandage from a "fall" during the previous night's lockdown.
"An inmate is dead, Captain!" Warden Vance roared, slamming his palm down onto his mahogany desk so hard the brass nameplate rattled. "Not just any inmate—Damon Cole! The one man keeping this entire facility from descending into a full-scale race war! And you're telling me the security cameras in Block C just happened to experience a complete, simultaneous hardware failure for exactly twelve minutes last night?"
Captain Miller stared straight ahead, his jaw set, refusing to meet the warden's furious gaze. "That's what the technical logs indicate, sir. A localized power surge fried the digital storage arrays on Tier 3."
"Don't give me that bureaucratic garbage!" the warden shouted, grabbing a manila folder from his desk and hurling it across the room. The papers scattered across the floor like wounded birds. "I got a call from a federal magistrate in Washington thirty minutes ago asking if inmate 88342—Elias W.—was comfortable. Do you understand what that means? Federal magistrates don't call prisons to check on drug dealers or white-collar embezzlers! That man is a ghost from an era of black-ops intelligence that the government pretends never existed!"
Miller finally lowered his eyes, his voice flat and steady. "Then what do you want us to do, Warden? Put him in solitary? Transfer him to a supermax?"
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Warden Vance stopped pacing. He stood frozen by the floor-to-ceiling window, looking down at the desolate expanse of the prison yard where the morning sun glinted off the endless rows of razor wire. A cold sweat broke out across the back of his neck.
"Transfer him?" the warden whispered, his voice trembling slightly. "If we try to move him, we acknowledge we're vulnerable. If we put him in solitary, we give him a fortress of his own. We don't touch him, Captain. We don't look at him. We pray to God that whatever debt brought him to Lockrich gets paid off quickly, and that he decides to leave us breathing when he's done."
