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Ped had spent the morning of voting day in the shopping centers and strip malls of Wilmington, Delaware, then split the afternoon between Rhode Island and Connecticut before flying to Philly for the five-state victory party being set up in the Terrace Ballroom of the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
Several muck slingers, including the great Barry Cosgrove, had ridiculed him for not spending a minute of the previous three days in either Pennsylvania or Maryland, which between them had almost twice as many delegates as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Under the heading Opportunity lost to bury Hunter in home state, Cosgrove described Garland’s decision to bypass Maryland as his ‘biggest blunder’.
Ped’s public line, that Congresswoman Hunter was doing a fine job for the people of Maryland, and it didn’t feel right to campaign against her in her home patch, had been widely reported.
Privately, Jin and the Ciph had been carpet-bombing swinging voters and their reinforcers with under-the-radar third-party posts and texts in Hunter’s home patch for weeks. Carl had also been active in the dark recesses of Baltimore. Ped didn’t want to know the details.
Exit polls throughout the morning pointed to wins for Garland in Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island, a respectable loss in Maryland, a pounding in Pennsylvania. Little had changed by the time Ped boarded the plane in Hartford for the flight to Philly, and the results were confirmed minutes before he stepped onto the stage at the convention center. His lead had been trimmed to 32.
The bulk of his speech to the faithful concentrated on the plus side – that he’d done better than expected in a region Hunter was predicted to dominate, he needed just 201 more delegates to secure the nomination, positive speculation about his chances against the two clear candidates emerging on the Democrat side. Ped had instructed Carl to shift resources from the team shadowing Hunter’s campaign to focus on the two Dems.
But as he faced the balloons, banners and saluting hard-core, he sensed a flatness, lack of vigor compared to previous victory rallies. A large contingent of delirious Delaware supporters – many of them three sheets to the wind – had made the trip up the interstate from Wilmington, along with smatterings from Bridgeport and New Haven. Most of the faces, though, were roll-your-sleeves-up Pennsylvania vols who knocked on the doors, made the calls, talked the talk. He’d taken them for granted. Let them down.
He tried to apologize but was shouted down and eventually left the stage to saluting chants of Ped, Ped, Ped that reminded him of black and white newsreels from Berlin.
What had he unleashed? Was he starting to believe his own bullshit? And could he actually pull it off? He’d misread the mood. A kid with steel rods through her nose was more in touch with folk than he was. And he couldn’t see the Ciph getting security clearance to enter, let alone work, at the White House.
*****
It took Jay three days. Every vehicle passing through the gray doors – trucks delivering food, utility and tradesmen’s vans, prisoner transports with fresh meat, a pizza delivery truck, even a busload of suits from the Indonesian Ministry of Law and Human Rights – was searched thoroughly inside and out, including a sweep underneath with bomb-detection mirror.
Every vehicle except this one. A matte black Hummer.
From his vantage point in the guesthouse, Jay watched it arrive each morning between 5.50 and 5.55. The gates swung open, and the driver reversed the vehicle into a covered bay. Then each evening between 6.35pm and 6.40pm, the gates opened and out it came. Like clockwork.
Jay spent the morning with Mike at a cafe near the Taman Sari market, trawling through images and video and posts on social media from Facebook to YouTube, and sites Jay had never heard of. It was alarming what you could glean from public sources if you knew what you were looking for. Jay wasn’t fooled by the occasional PR whitewash when prison authorities let selected journalists inside to interview ass-lickers and film choreographed routines.
He convinced Mike to loan him his smartphone, show him how to connect it wirelessly to a tiny camera the journalist had brought back from the States.
After Mike left to check up on Bec in hospital, Jay visited hardware stores to get the equipment he’d need. Screwdrivers, hex keys, pliers, small hinges, a slender piece of metal, can of spray paint, hand drill, nuts, bolts, small mirror. He was sitting on his motorbike down the road from the gray doors by 6.30pm.
He slipped into the traffic behind the Hummer and followed it along the busy Teuku Umar Barat towards Denpasar. It crossed a canal with blue utility pipes along the side, then turned into a small lane beside a footwear store. Jay watched from the corner as the Hummer went up the narrow lane and stopped outside a two-story house. A man in the blue uniform of the prison service got out of the passenger side and entered the house. Jay guessed he was the prison’s governor.
The Hummer reversed out of the lane, and Jay followed it to an executive parking yard behind the Ibis Styles Hotel.
*****
‘He’s done it before, apparently.’
‘Fricken hell Mike. This is insane. I can’t believe you went along with it. Encouraged him.’
‘He didn’t need any encouraging.’
Bec signed her discharge papers at the front desk and followed Mike to a cab waiting outside law offices next to the hospital. The sun hadn’t been up long, but the heat was already sapping after the air-conditioned ward.
She’d been buoyant at the thought of seeing the blue of the sky after three days in a windowless room waiting for a scan. But news Jay was planning to break in to Kerobokan Prison had Aristotle smothering in the amber cloths bundled round roadside shrines.
‘What do you mean, he’s done it before?’
‘Told me he sprung a friend out of a prison in a country called Timor-Leste, which I’d never heard of. It’s a former Portuguese colony north of Australia. Jay and his friend, who lives somewhere here in Bali by the way, were trying to stop a Portuguese company chopping down a forest of sandalwood when the friend got busted. Jay was a bit vague on the details, but it seems he got into the jail dressed as a Catholic priest. The guy’s like a cross between Jack Reacher and Greta Thunberg.’
‘That doesn’t make this right, Mike.’
Before leaving the hospital room, Bec had gone through her morning routine of breathing and squeezing – her version of the TIPP distress tolerance technique recommended for people with borderline personality. TIPP was short for lowering Temperature, Intense exercise, Paced breathing, Paired muscle relaxation. Bec shortened it even further to breathe and squeeze, adding in splash and dash when Aristotle played up, like he was now by drawing her attention to the yellow in the Hypermart sign in the median strip.
‘What else did Jay say? You know, about his past?’
‘Not much, I thought you knew.’
‘He keeps a lot to himself. From what I’ve been able to piece together, he’s worked all over the world as a kind of elite environmental activist. I’m pretty sure most of what he’s done is outside the law, which is why he doesn’t broadcast it. I know he’s sabotaged a gold mine in Egypt and a copper mine in Myanmar, as well as blowing something up in India. Something happened in Zimbabwe he refuses to talk about. And he was involved in protests against toxic waste being dumped in Alabama. Stopping sandalwood deforestation would be right in his wheelhouse.’
Mike was smiling. ‘Breaking into a prison sounds a breeze.’
Bec looked out the cab window at the passing commuter chaos. Thought about what she’d learnt online about Kerokoban Prison during her research into Seth Crichton – the unchecked violence, murder, rape. Prisoners catching rats, breaking their necks, eating them raw. Death row inmates setting themselves on fire.
‘It’s the most irresponsible, hair-brained idea I’ve ever heard, and I need to talk him out of it. When’s he planning to attempt this suicide mission?’
Mike palmed his phone. ‘About now.’
*****
Fuel economy was the last thing on the minds of executives at the Indiana heavy vehicle manufacturer AM General when they decided back in the 1990s to convert military Humvees into civilian SUVs called Hummers.
During his online research with Mike, Jay had laughed out loud at a review describing the Hummer as the perfect example of an SUV done right when your scoring is just based on badassery.
The spec of most interest to Jay was the dimensions of a lock box he’d spotted in the cargo area of the Hummer when the hardtop was opened by guards as the vehicle entered the prison each day. They’d poked around the box, never opened it.
Breaking into the parking lot behind the Ibis, and into the Hummer, had been straightforward. Loud gamelan music from a nearby temple had drowned out the sounds as Jay got to work on the lockbox.
After tracing the edges of the panel with his fingers, probing for vulnerability, he’d carefully inserted the tip of a small screwdriver into a seam. The panel resisted initially, so he’d adjusted the angle of the screwdriver, applying pressure until the first screw yielded.
Once he’d detached the panel, Jay removed the expensive-looking kites stored inside and turned his attention to the latch. Using the piece of metal, which he’d painted matte black, he’d crafted a latch that could be opened from inside the box.
Satisfied the surface of the panel would appear untouched to a casual observer, he’d attached the tiny camera under the chassis and tested the connection with the phone.
Jay got an undercarriage view of the black and white curbing popular in Bali on the drive to the governor’s house and back to Kerokoban. There was a moment of anxiety when the Hummer passed through the prison gates and was surrounded by several pairs of boots and raised voices in Indonesian, before Jay felt the passenger door open and watched the governor’s shiny black shoes walk away.
