one

The room was a box within a box. It was cramped, gloomy, short of air, and heavy on heat, especially in daytime. It held two metal folding beds, an old wooden chair, and a bucket in one corner that was already attracting flies.

The walls were bare and of simple stud construction, scarred with the signs of transportation and handling. Gaps showed in the corners where the fit had focussed more on urgency than care. A small slit window on one side was the only natural light source, with a battery-powered storm lantern on the chair for emergency use. The window itself offered a limited view of a patch of coarse grass leading to a weed-dotted concrete surface running arrow-straight into the distance. Farther over was a huge wood-and-concrete slab building that had seen its best days half a century ago. A door in the opposite side of the room had a small peephole showing the concrete strip going the other way. Beyond that was a long view of nothing; flat, dun-coloured ground interrupted by acres of scrub and a bunch of large rocks lying scattered to the horizon like toys on the floor of a child’s playroom.

A driver travelling along the little-used road a quarter of a mile away would, if he were curious, see an abandoned airfield from the 1940s with an ancient hangar and a tired, clapboarded workshop with a sagging roof and an air of decaying desolation. No planes, no people, no engineers or smart terminal buildings; nothing to draw anyone in closer save for idle curiosity and maybe the urgent call for a rest stop.

If he had any degree of instinct, the driver wouldn’t bother; he’d keep this foot hard on the gas until he hit the next township thirty miles away.

Uncomfortable, perhaps, but at least that way he might get to live longer.

What he wouldn’t see was the newly constructed room inside the workshop, put together two weeks ago under cover of night by an imported construction crew. Nor would he have cause to wonder at the recent confusion of tire tracks and foot prints left behind during the construction, which had been impossible to eradicate altogether—although the crew’s final task had been to try as best they could, even if they hadn’t fully understood the reasons why.

Most importantly of all, the passing driver wouldn’t notice that, in a supposedly abandoned structure like this, there were supplies of canned food, fruit, and a pallet of shrink-wrapped bottles of water. Or that one of the beds had been fitted with two sets of steel handcuffs; one at the head, another at the foot. Of law-enforcement grade, they were impossible to pick, break, or cut through, and snug to the bone to avoid a desperate man attempting to slip them off.

Like the prisoner currently lying there, being watched over by a second man.