The Passage: A Novel Read online

  “Let me guess. The one with the pants?”

  Doyle grinned, giving his eyebrows a playful wag. “They all had pants, boss.” He tipped his head at Wolgast. “What happened to you? You look like you got dragged from a car.”

  Wolgast looked down at himself to discover he’d slept the night in his clothes. This was becoming something of a habit; ever since he’d gotten the email from Lila, he’d spent most nights on the sofa of his apartment, watching television until he fell asleep, as if going to bed like a normal person was something he was no longer qualified to do.

  “Forget about it,” he said. “Must have been a boring game.” He rose and stretched. “We heard from Sykes. Let’s get this over with.”

  They ate breakfast at a Denny’s and drove back to Polunsky. The warden was waiting for them in his office. Was it just the mood of the morning, Wolgast thought, or did he look like he hadn’t slept very well, either?

  “Don’t bother to sit,” the warden said, and handed them an envelope.

  Wolgast examined the contents. It was all pretty much as he expected: a writ of commutation from the governor’s office and a court order transferring Carter to their custody as a federal prisoner. Assuming Carter signed, they could have him in transit to the federal lockup at El Reno by dinner. From there, he’d be moved to three other federal facilities, his trail growing fainter each time, until somewhere around two weeks or three or a month at most, a black van would pull into the compound, and a man now known simply as Number Twelve would step out, blinking at the Colorado sunshine.

  The last items in the envelope were Carter’s death certificate and a medical examiner’s report, both dated March 23. On the morning of the twenty-third, three days hence, Anthony Lloyd Carter would die in his cell from a cerebral aneurysm.

  Wolgast returned the documents to the envelope and put it in his pocket, a chill snaking through him. How easy it was to make a human being disappear, just like that. “Thank you, Warden. We appreciate your cooperation.”

  The warden looked at each of them in turn, his jaw set. “I’m also instructed to say I never heard of you guys.”

  Wolgast did his best to smile. “Is there a problem with that?”

  “I’m supposing if there were, one of those ME reports would show up with my name on it. I’ve got kids, Agent.” He picked up his phone and punched a number. “Have two COs bring Anthony Carter to the cages, then come to my office.” He hung up and looked at Wolgast. “If you don’t mind, I’d like you to wait outside. I look at you any longer, I’m going to have a hard time forgetting about all this. Good day, gentlemen.”

  Ten minutes later, a pair of guards stepped into the outer office. The older one had the benevolent, overfed look of a shopping mall Santa, but the other guard, who couldn’t have been more than twenty, was wearing a snarl on his face that Wolgast didn’t like. There was always one guard who liked the job for the wrong reasons, and this was the one.

  “You the guys looking for Carter?”

  Wolgast nodded and showed his credentials. “That’s right. Special Agents Wolgast and Doyle.”

  “Don’t matter who you are,” the heavy one said. “The warden says to take you, we’ll take you.”

  They led Wolgast and Doyle down to the visiting area. Carter was sitting on the other side of the glass, the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder. He was small, just as Doyle had said, and his jumpsuit fit him loosely, like the clothing on a Ken doll. There were many ways to look condemned, Wolgast had learned, and Carter’s look wasn’t scared or angry but simply resigned, like the world had been taking slow bites of him his whole life.

  Wolgast gestured at the shackles, turning toward the two COs. “Take those off, please.”

  The older one shook his head. “That’s standard.”

  “I don’t care what it is. Take them off.” Wolgast lifted the phone from its cradle on the wall. “Anthony Carter? I’m Special Agent Wolgast. This is Special Agent Doyle. We’re from the FBI. These men are going to come around and remove those shackles. I asked them to do that. You’ll cooperate with them, won’t you?”

  Carter gave a tight nod. His voice on the other end of the phone was quiet. “Yessir.”

  “Anything else you need to make you comfortable?”

  Carter looked at him quizzically. How long since anybody had asked him a question like that?

  “I’s all right,” he said.

  Wolgast turned to face the guards. “Well? How about it? Am I talking to myself here, or am I going to have to call the warden?”

  A moment passed as the guards looked at each other, deciding what to do. Then the one named Dennis stepped from the room and reappeared a moment later on the far side of the glass. Wolgast stood and watched, keeping his eyes fixed on the guard while he removed the shackles.

  “That it?” said the heavy guard.

  “That’s it. We’ll want to be left alone for a while. We’ll tell the OD when we’re done.”

  “Suit yourself,” the guard said and walked out, closing the door behind him.

  There was only one chair in the room, a folding metal seat, like something from a high school auditorium. Wolgast took it and positioned himself squarely to the glass, while Doyle remained standing behind him. The talking was Wolgast’s to do. He picked up the phone again.

  “Better?”

  Carter hesitated a moment, appraising him, then nodded. “Yessir. Thank you. Pincher always does ’em too tight.”

  Pincher. Wolgast made a mental note of this. “You hungry? They give you breakfast in there?”

  “Pancakes.” Carter shrugged. “That was five hours ago, though.”

  Wolgast swiveled to look at Doyle, raising his eyebrows. Doyle nodded and left the room. For a few minutes, Wolgast just waited. Despite the large No Smoking sign, the edge of the counter was rutted with brown burn marks.

  “You said you from the FBI?”

  “That’s right, Anthony.”

  A trace of a smile flicked across Carter’s face. “Like on that show?”

  Wolgast didn’t know what Carter was talking about, but that was fine; it would give Carter something to explain.

  “What show’s that, Anthony?”

  “The one with the woman. The one with the aliens.”

  Wolgast thought a moment, then remembered. Of course: The X-Files. It had been off the air for what, twenty years? Carter had probably seen it as a kid, in reruns. Wolgast couldn’t remember very much about it, just the idea of it—alien abductions, some kind of conspiracy to hush the thing up. That was Carter’s impression of the FBI.

  “I liked that show too. You getting on in here all right?”

  Carter squared his shoulders. “You came here to ask me that?”

  “You’re a smart guy, Anthony. No, that’s not the reason.”

  “What the reason then?”

  Wolgast leaned closer to the glass; he found Carter’s eyes and held them with his own.

  “I know about this place, Anthony. Terrell Unit. I know what goes on in here. I’m just making sure you’re being treated properly.”

  Carter eyed him skeptically. “Does tolerable, I guess.”

  “The guards okay with you?”

  “Pincher’s tight with the cuffs, but he’s all right most of the time.” Carter lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Dennis ain’t no friend of mine. Some of the others, too.”

  The door opened behind Carter and Doyle entered, bearing a yellow tray from the commissary. He placed the tray on the counter in front of Carter: a cheeseburger and fries, gleaming with grease, resting on waxed paper in a little plastic basket. Beside it sat a carton of chocolate milk.

  “Go on, Anthony,” Wolgast said, and gestured toward the tray. “We can talk when you’re done.”

  Carter placed the receiver on the counter and lifted the cheeseburger to his mouth. Three bites and the thing was half gone. Carter wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and got to work on the fries while Wolgast watched. Cart
er’s concentration was total. It was like watching a dog eat, Wolgast thought.

  Doyle had returned to Wolgast’s side of the glass. “Damn,” he said quietly, “that guy sure was hungry.”

  “They got anything for dessert down there?”

  “Bunch of dried-up looking pies. Some éclairs looked like dog turds.”

  Wolgast thought a moment. “On second thought, skip dessert. Get him a glass of iced tea. Make it nice, too, if you can. Dress it up a little.”

  Doyle frowned. “He’s got the milk. I don’t know if they even have iced tea down there. It’s like a barnyard.”

  “This is Texas, Phil.” Wolgast suppressed the impatience in his voice. “Trust me, they have tea. Just go find it.”

  Doyle shrugged and left again. When Carter had finished his meal, he licked the salt off his fingers, one by one, and sighed deeply. When he picked up the receiver, Wolgast did the same.

  “How’s that, Anthony? Feeling better?”

  Through the receiver, Wolgast could hear the watery heaviness of Carter’s breathing; his eyes were slack and glazed with pleasure. All those calories, all those protein molecules, all those complex carbohydrates hitting his system like a hammer. Wolgast might just as well have given him a fifth of whiskey.

  “Yessir. Thank you.”

  “A man’s got to eat. A man can’t live on pancakes.”

  A silent moment passed. Carter licked his lips with a slow tongue. His voice, when he spoke, was almost a whisper. “What you want from me?”

  “You’ve got it backward, Anthony,” Wolgast said, nodding. “It’s me who’s here to find out what I can do for you.”

  Carter dropped his eyes to the counter, the grease-stained wreckage of his meal. “He sent you, didn’t he.”

  “Who’s that, Anthony?”

  “Woman’s husband.” Carter frowned at the memory. “Mr. Wood. He come here once. Told me he found Jesus.”

  Wolgast remembered what Doyle had told him in the car. Two years ago, and it was still on Carter’s mind.

  “No, he didn’t send me, Anthony. You have my word.”

  “Told him I was sorry,” Carter insisted, his voice cracking. “Told everybody. Ain’t gonna say it no more.”

  “No one’s saying you have to, Anthony. I know you’re sorry. That’s why I came all this way to see you.”

  “All what way?”

  “A long way, Anthony.” Wolgast nodded slowly. “A very, very long way.”

  Wolgast paused, searching Carter’s face. There was something about him, different from the others. He felt the moment opening, like a door.

  “Anthony, what would you say if I told you I could get you out of this place?”

  Behind the glass, Carter eyed him cautiously. “How you mean?”

  “Just like I said. Right now. Today. You could leave Terrell and never come back.”

  Carter’s eyes floated with incomprehension; the idea was too much to process. “I’d say now I know you’s fooling with me.”

  “No lie, Anthony. That’s why we came all this way. You may not know it, but you’re a special man. You could say you’re one of a kind.”

  “You talk about me leaving here?” Carter frowned bitterly. “Ain’t make no sense. Not after all this time. Ain’t got no appeal. Lawyer said so in a letter.”

  “Not an appeal, Anthony. Better than that. Just you, getting out of here. How does that sound to you?”

  “It sound great.” Carter sat back and crossed his arms over his chest with a defiant laugh. “It sound too good to be true. This Terrell.”

  It always amazed Wolgast how much accepting the idea of commutation resembled the five stages of grief. Right now, Carter was in denial. The idea was just too much to take in.

  “I know where you are. I know this place. It’s the death house, Anthony. It’s not the place where you belong. That’s why I’m here. And not for just anyone. Not these other men. For you, Anthony.”

  Carter’s posture relaxed. “I ain’t nobody special. I knows that.”

  “But you are. You may not know it, but you are. You see, I need a favor from you, Anthony. This deal’s a two-way street. I can get you out of here, but there’s something I need for you to do for me in return.”

  “A favor?”

  “The people I work for, Anthony, they saw what was going to happen to you in here. They know what’s going to happen in June, and they don’t think it’s right. They don’t think it’s right the way you’ve been treated, that your lawyer has up and left you here like this. And they realized they could do something about it, and that they had a job they needed you to do instead.”

  Carter frowned in confusion. “Cuttin’, you mean? Like that lady’s lawn?”

  Jesus, Wolgast thought. He actually thought he wanted him to cut the grass. “No, Anthony. Nothing like that. Something much more important.” Wolgast lowered his voice again. “You see, that’s the thing. What I need you to do is so important, I can’t tell you what it is. Because I don’t even know myself.”

  “How you know it’s so important you don’t know what it is?”

  “You’re a smart man, Anthony, and you’re right to ask that. But you’re going to have to trust me. I can get you out of here, right now. All you have to do is say you want to.”

  That was when Wolgast pulled the warden’s envelope from his pocket and opened it. He always felt like a magician at this moment, lifting his hat to show a rabbit. With his free hand, he flattened the document against the glass for Carter to see.

  “Do you know what this is? This is a writ of commutation, Anthony, signed by Governor Jenna Bush. It’s dated today, right there at the bottom. You know what that means, a commutation?”

  Carter was squinting at the paper. “I don’t go to the needle?”

  “That’s right, Anthony. Not in June, not ever.”

  Wolgast returned the paper to his jacket pocket. Now it was bait, something to want. The other document, the one Carter would have to sign—which he would sign, Wolgast felt certain, when all the hemming and hawing was over; the one in which Anthony Lloyd Carter, Texas inmate 999642, handed one hundred percent of his earthly person, past, present, and future, to Project NOAH—was tucked against it. By the time this second piece of paper saw daylight, the whole point was not to read it.

  Carter gave a slow nod. “Always liked her. Liked her when she was first lady.”

  Wolgast let the error pass. “She’s just one of the people I work for, Anthony. There are others. You might recognize some of the names if I told you, but I can’t. And they asked me to come and see you, and tell you how much they need you.”

  “So I do this thing for you, and you get me out? But you can’t tell me what it is?”

  “That’s pretty much the deal, Anthony. Say no, and I’ll move on. Say yes, and you can leave Terrell tonight. It’s that simple.”

  The door into the cage opened once more; Doyle stepped through, holding the tea. He’d done as Wolgast had asked, balancing the glass on a saucer with a long spoon beside it and a wedge of lemon and packets of sugar. He placed it all on the counter in front of Carter. Carter looked at the glass, his face gone slack. That was when Wolgast thought it. Anthony Carter wasn’t guilty, at least not in the way the court had spun it. With the others, it was always clear right off what Wolgast was dealing with, that the story was the story. But not in this case. Something had happened that day in the yard; the woman had died. But there was more to it, maybe a lot more. Looking at Carter, this was the space into which Wolgast felt his mind moving, like a dark room with no windows and one locked door. This, he knew, was the place where he would find Anthony Carter—he’d find him in the dark—and when he did, Carter would show him the key that would open the door.

  He spoke with his eyes locked on the glass. “I jes’ want …” he began.

  Wolgast waited for him to finish. When he didn’t, Wolgast spoke again. “What do you want, Anthony? Tell me.”

  Carter lifted his free
hand to the side of the glass and brushed the tips of his fingers against it. The glass was cool, and sweating with moisture; Carter drew his hand away and rubbed the beads of water between his thumb and fingers, slowly, his eyes focused on this gesture with complete attention. So intense was his concentration that Wolgast could feel the man’s whole mind opening up to it, taking it in. It was as if the sensation of cool water on his fingertips was the key to every mystery of his life. He raised his eyes to Wolgast’s.

  “I need the time … to figure it,” he said softly. “The thing that happened. With the lady.”

  And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years …

  “I can give you that time, Anthony,” Wolgast said. “All the time in the world. An ocean of time.”

  Another moment passed. Then Carter nodded.

  “What I got to do?”

  Wolgast and Doyle got to George Bush Intercontinental a little after seven; the traffic was murderous, but they still arrived with ninety minutes to spare. They dumped the rental and rode the shuttle to the Continental terminal, showed their credentials to bypass security, and made their way through the crowds to the gate at the far end of the concourse.

  Doyle excused himself to find something to eat; Wolgast wasn’t hungry, though he knew he’d probably regret this decision later on, especially if their flight got hung up. He checked his handheld. Still nothing from Sykes. He was glad. All he wanted to do was get the hell out of Texas. Just a few other passengers were waiting at the gate; a couple of families, some students plugged into Blu-rays or iPods, a handful of men in suits talking on cell phones or tapping on laptops. Wolgast checked his watch: seven twenty-five. By now, he thought, Anthony Carter would be in the back of a van well on his way to El Reno, leaving in his wake a flurry of shredded records and a fading memory that he had ever existed at all. By the end of the day, even his federal ID number would be purged; the man named Anthony Carter would be nothing but a rumor, a vague disturbance no bigger than a ripple on the surface of the world.

  Wolgast leaned back in his chair and realized how exhausted he was. It always came upon him like this, like the sudden unclenching of a fist. These trips left him physically and emotionally hollowed out, and with a nagging conscience he always had to apply some effort to squash. He was just too damn good at this, too good at finding the one gesture, the one right thing to say. A man sat in a concrete box long enough, thinking about his own death, and he boiled down to milky dust like water in a teapot forgotten on a stove; to understand him, you had to figure out what that dust was made of, what was left of him after the rest of his life, past and future, had turned to vapor. Usually it was something simple—anger or sadness or shame, or simply the need for forgiveness. A few wanted nothing at all; all that remained was a dumb animal rage at the world and all its systems. Anthony was different: it had taken Wolgast a while to figure this out. Anthony was like a human question mark, a living, breathing expression of pure puzzlement. He actually didn’t know why he was in Terrell. Not that he didn’t understand his sentence; that was clear, and he had accepted it—as nearly all of them did, because they had to. All you had to do was read the last words of condemned men to know that. “Tell everyone I love them. I’m sorry. Okay, Warden, let’s do this.” Always words to that effect, and chilling to read, as Wolgast had done by the pageful. But some piece of the puzzle was still missing for Anthony Carter. Wolgast had seen it when Carter touched the side of the glass—before then, even, when he’d asked about Rachel Wood’s husband and said he was sorry without saying it. Whether Carter couldn’t remember what had happened that day in the Woods’ yard or couldn’t make his actions add up to the man he thought he was, Wolgast couldn’t be certain. Either way, Anthony Carter needed to find this piece of himself before he died.