“Actually,” Gregor said, “I was thinking about wardens. About the one at the federal facility that has Timothy McVeigh.”
“We’re very happy not to have him here,” Ed Nagelman said. “We’ve got enough trouble with the SGN.”
“What’s the SGN?”
“The Seamless Garment Network,” Gregor said. “That’s very odd. Sister Harriet Garrity was a member of the Seamless Garment Network.”
Ed Nagelman looked momentarily blank. “Oh,” he said finally, “you mean that woman who died, the murder you’re looking into. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. Most of the members of SGN seem to be nuns. You may have seen some of them out in front of the gate. They’re already gearing up to protest this one.”
Ed Nagelman nodded at the guards, and then led the way through them and across the parking lot to the path that led around the front of the large building.
“Everybody has to come through the front,” he told Gregor, “even me. And anybody who comes in or goes out of the secure area has to have an armed escort.”
“Even on visitor’s day?” Gregor had this vision of dozens of wives and small children, waiting for men with machine guns to follow them everywhere.
“Visitors of that kind aren’t admitted into the secure area. We have a visitor’s room where people can sit at booths and talk to each other through bulletproof glass. But for somebody like you, who will be meeting with a prisoner face-to-face, within the prison’s secure compound itself, we’ve got armed escorts.”
Gregor cleared his throat. He did not repeat his line about hoping that the idiots had their safeties on. He just thought it.
They got to the front door, which oddly enough—at least oddly to Gregor’s mind—did not seem to have anything in the way of security on it. It just opened, like a door. Inside, in the lobby, there was plenty of security, including four more uniformed men armed with machine guns.
“It makes you wonder how anybody ever escapes from places like this,” Gregor said.
“If it makes a difference to you, nobody has ever escaped from this one,” Ed Nagelman said. “It’s our job to make sure they don’t. And it’s in their best interests, although they think it isn’t. I don’t know of a single escape attempt from a maximum-security facility anywhere in the last ten years that has resulted in somebody successfully getting out and staying out alive. They die of cold. They die of exposure. They get shot dead on the main street of some godforsaken small town somewhere when a concerned citizen who watches too much television recognizes them and panics. Do you know how many people in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania carry handguns?”
“I don’t think I want to,” Gregor said.
Ed Nagelman led them to an inner door. One of the armed men came forward to open it up for them. They stepped into a small space with another door on the far side of it. Then the door they had come through closed and snapped locked behind them. Only then did a uniformed man from the other side of the far door open that one, so that they could go on through into yet another room full of men.
“The whole place is set up like this,” Ed Nagelman said. “They’ve got scientists who work out the possibilities and devise ways to protect us from them. I would expect that this system would be much the same in federal prisons.”
“Not so many guns,” Gregor said politely.
They went through another door, into another secure lock, and out the other side through yet another door. Gregor had the odd feeling that they were caught in a journey to the center of the earth, or—what was that movie, with Gregory Peck, or maybe with Cary Grant, where the man had amnesia and kept remembering himself going down to subbasements that didn’t exist? Beyond this set of doors there was another room with another set of doors. Beyond that, there was yet another room and yet another set of doors. Gregor had not seen a single prisoner yet, as far as he knew. It was as if this place had been so thoroughly occupied by an invading army, all its inhabitants had left.
After this next set of doors, they found themselves in a long corridor with rooms on either side. They were still not actually in a cellblock, but they at least seemed to be in a functional part of the building.
“These are conference rooms,” Ed Nagelman said. “They’re here so that prisoners can talk to their lawyers—death-row prisoners, by the way, and only death-row prisoners. Contrary to the people who picket us at the gate, we do not indulge in summary executions here. Most prisoners stay on death row for over ten years, and, if anything, they have the best accommodations in the place. Their own individual cells, without roommates. Their own exercise yard, very uncrowded and very carefully policed. Their own communications facilities, including telephones and Internet access. I’d be a fool to think that prison rapes never happened here, but I can guarantee they don’t happen to condemned prisoners. Here we go. A smallish room, but adequate for the purpose.”