After putting me in green stab armor, which covered my torso and groin, she led me through a door and along a windowless hallway as she described the cartel leader’s life since being sent to the Florence supermax.
For most of the past year, Marco Alejandro had been kept on a strict schedule. He was awakened at six a.m. by a bell and fed at seven, noon, and six in the evening. Guards passed him his meals through a slot in the door, and the guards were rotated weekly and forbidden to talk to him.
“Has he tried to talk to them?”
“He tried repeatedly at first,” Perrin said. “Less after six months. Almost no attempts the past eight weeks other than discussions with the prison doctor and nurse during two recent trips to the prison clinic when he had kidney stones. He’s evidently prone to them and has high uric acid in his blood, which means he’s probably going to suffer from gout at some point. That’s the difficulty of facilities like mine these days, Dr. Cross.”
“What’s that?”
“Florence is the end of the line for these prisoners, whether they understand it or not. The worst of the worst are sent here for life or to await execution. They will never leave.”
She stopped by the sort of steel, hatch-shaped door with a wheel you might expect on a submarine and said, “This is a problem, because the worst criminals tend to mistreat themselves and age poorly. As a result, we have a growing geriatric prison population with increasing medical challenges that we, as a system, have an extremely difficult time addressing.”
“I imagine so,” I said.
Warden Perrin put her hand on the wheel. “Are you ready to face the devil himself, Dr. Cross? I guarantee you, he’s not what you’d expect.”
“I have no expectations. And there’s no time like the present.”
“One hour,” the warden said. She threw the wheel and pushed open the hatch door for me.
Chapter
34
I ducked through the doorway and stood up in a five-by-five-foot space. A wooden chair bolted into the concrete floor faced a counter and a three-inch-thick pane of bulletproof glass two feet wide and three feet high midway up the far wall.
LED lights poking from the concrete ceiling lit the room. A small, remote-controlled camera glowed in the upper left corner.
The identically furnished room on the opposite side of the bulletproof glass was empty. The warden shut the hatch door behind me. The wheel spun the lock shut. I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
From everything I’d read about Marco Alejandro, I knew I was dealing with a ruthless drug lord who was also a brilliant, multilingual, self-educated man who presented himself as a philosopher-king to his cartel members.
Alejandro was an alpha–alpha male who’d read, thought, connived, and murdered his way out of poverty in rural Mexico and eventually came to hold immense power as the leader of an ultra-violent, ultra-successful cartel.
Instead of sitting down to wait, I stood behind the chair and pulled myself up to my full six foot two inches to try to get a psychological edge over Alejandro, who was barely five six and, according to rumors, had had a chip on his shoulder about his height his entire life.
I didn’t have to wait long to see if it was true. The big hatch door in the other room opened and three guards in helmets, visors, and full stab gear escorted Marco Alejandro inside.
Alejandro, dressed in a blue prison jumpsuit and rubber slippers, wore a restraint system the warden had shown me as I’d donned the stab suit. Keyless, digitally controlled, electromagnetic handcuffs kept Alejandro’s wrists pinned to an electromagnetic belt at his waist, and around his ankles were electromagnetic cuffs connected by a length of twelve-thousand-pound-test airline cable that could be shortened with the touch of a button.
With close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, forty-nine-year-old Alejandro was built like a gymnast—big chest, shoulders thrown back like a matador, head up, present and alert as he moved to the chair. He studied me with interest even when the guards forced him into the chair, which had an electromagnetic plate that pinned the belt to the back. The cables retracted, giving him two inches of play between his feet.
Only then did the guards leave us alone. Only then did I come around, sit in the chair opposite him, and flip the single switch on the counter.
“Can you hear me, Se?or Alejandro?”
He smiled, revealing a gold upper-left incisor and an otherwise perfect set of bright white teeth. When he spoke, it was with the barest of accents in near-perfect English. “You’re only the third voice I have heard in almost a year. Who are you?”