Predator

Every aspect of life at the Polunsky Unit was calculated to degrade and dehumanize the inmates. The procedure for leaving a cell was no exception. Johnny walked to the door. He got down on his knees. Then he shuffled around so that he had his back to the door and stretched his arms backwards till his hands pushed through the bean slot and emerged into the corridor outside. A pair of handcuffs was slapped around his wrists; then he pulled his arms back through the slot and got to his feet.

‘Step away from the door!’ the voice commanded.

Obediently, Johnny walked back into the middle of the room with his hands now cuffed behind his back. Then he turned around again to face the door as it opened.

Two warders came into the sixty-square-foot cell. One of them was white and almost as big as Johnny, with crew-cut ginger hair and sunburned skin on his face and forearms. He was carrying a Mossburger shotgun and there was a tense, jumpy look on his face that suggested he was just looking for a chance to use it.

Johnny smiled at him. ‘What’s the point of pointing a gun at me today, ya dumb cracker? I’m already a dead man walking. Blow me away now, you’ll be doing me a favour.’

Johnny turned his face towards the second warden, a portly, middle-aged African-American, his hair dusted with silver. ‘Afternoon, Uncle,’ he said.

‘Good afternoon to you, too, Johnny,’ Uncle said. ‘This is a hard time for you, I know that. But the calmer we can make it, the easier it will go, y’hear?’

‘Yeah, I hear you.’

‘OK then, what I’m going to do is prepare you for transit to Huntsville. So first I want you to stand with your feet about eighteen inches apart. You were in the service, right?’

‘Damn right, was a gunny sergeant in the Corps.’

‘A Marine, huh? Well, then I guess you know how to stand at ease.’

Johnny obediently snapped into the position.

‘Thanks, man,’ Uncle said. ‘Now just stand still a minute while I fix these around your ankles.’

Johnny did as he was told and was equally compliant as a belly chain was secured around his waist. Then his hands were released from their original cuffs and resecured in cuffs that hung from the chain. He was now restricted to the short, shuffling steps that the leg irons allowed and the minimal hand movements afforded him by the links between the handcuffs and the belly chain. As massive, as powerful and as intimidating as he was, Johnny Congo was now entirely helpless. The two warders who had come to his cell were now joined by more of their colleagues as they led him through the Polunsky Unit to the loading bay where his transport awaited him.

All those years previously when Johnny had escaped from Huntsville, his associate Aleutian Brown had shot a warder called Lucas Heller in cold blood, with a bullet through the back of his skull. Johnny assumed that the warders around him now knew that. He waited for the first punch, or billy-club blow to hit him, knowing that they could do exactly what they wanted with him and he’d be completely unable to resist. But Uncle’s peaceful, civilizing presence must have been enough to inhibit any desire for violent retribution because they got to the loading bay without any disturbance. There wasn’t even any outcry from the other prisoners, giving a final send-off to a fellow inmate who was heading for the Death House. They were all alone in their silent cells, shut away behind the blank steel doors that lined the corridors. They had no idea that Johnny had ever even been in the unit, let alone that he was being taken away to die.

Johnny Congo was placed in the back of an unmarked, white minivan belonging to the Offender Transportation Office and ordered to sit on one of the two grey, upholstered benches that ran along either side of what would normally be the passenger compartment. Then his ankles were chained to the floor.

There were steel grilles on the windows and a more substantial one separating the passenger compartment from the driver’s seat. An armed guard sat opposite Johnny, dressed in tan slacks, a white shirt and a black protective vest. The guard didn’t say anything. He looked alert but at the same time relaxed, like a man who was good at his job, and trusted the other warders around him to do theirs, even in the presence of a known multiple killer. Johnny Congo didn’t say anything either, just looked at the guard, staring him down, determined to establish himself as the alpha male, even on the day he was to die.

The details of Johnny Congo’s execution had been discussed all the way to the top of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. They fully realized that he was an extremely dangerous criminal who had already proved that he could escape from a maximum-security unit. His case had received a lot of media coverage and the closer the time came to his execution, the larger that would grow. Even as he left the Polunsky Unit there were a couple of TV news crews by each gate and a chopper was buzzing overhead. Another, much bigger media pack was clustered around the back gate of the Walls Unit, through which execution convoys were always admitted.

The one thing they all wanted was a picture – any picture at all, no matter how blurred or grainy – of Congo as he looked now. The only portraits anyone had of him were the official mug shots taken when he’d got off the plane from Abu Zara, looking like someone had run a truck over his face, or old archive photographs from his first burst of notoriety, way back when. The great American public wanted and needed to see the man their legal system was killing on their behalf on his very last day on earth. But the authorities weren’t making it easy for anyone, including the media, to get anywhere near the condemned man.

Bearing in mind both the wickedness of Johnny Congo and the very public embarrassment that the entire Texas criminal justice establishment would suffer if he should get away from them a second time, there had been a change in the standard convoy format. There were, as always, three vehicles. But on this occasion the third in line was not another patrol car, as it would normally be, but a Lenco BearCat armoured personnel carrier, loaded with a heavily armed, ten-man SWAT team. The BearCat was a big, black, menacing war-machine and the men inside it were the police equivalent of Special Forces. Against their firepower nothing short of a full-scale military assault would stand a chance of succeeding.

On the day of Johnny Congo’s execution, everyone who saw D’Shonn Brown reported that he seemed withdrawn, subdued and, in a quiet, understated way, very obviously distressed. The execution was set for six o’clock in the evening. Huntsville is only about seventy miles north of Houston, right up Highway 45, and doesn’t take much above an hour if the traffic is light. But D’Shonn wanted to be sure of missing the rush hour, and so, at the same time as the convoy taking Johnny Congo to his execution left the Polunsky Unit, D’Shonn’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Phantom purred out of the underground garage beneath his downtown Houston HQ. D’Shonn was sitting in the back. Clint Harding was up front next to the driver. A black Suburban followed the Rolls out of the garage. In it were another four of Harding’s men, whose job would be to get D’Shonn through the mob outside the prison gates on his way to the viewing room that looked on to the execution chamber.

D’Shonn was watching the TV on his iPad. ‘They got Johnny live on TV, following him from the sky like he’s another OJ.’

‘I hate the way they are making this into a circus,’ said Harding, tilting his head back towards D’Shonn. ‘Look, I know he was your brother’s buddy, or whatever, but Johnny Congo was a dangerous man. Now he’s getting the most dire punishment our society can deliver. It shouldn’t be turned into a TV reality show.’

D’Shonn’s phone rang. He took the call, listened for a moment and then said, ‘Yo, Rashad, my man … Yeah, I’m watching it too. I guess I knew this might happen, but still … Crazy to think, the next time I’m due to see Johnny is when they wheel him into the chamber. I’m not looking forward to that, don’t mind admitting.’

Harding had turned his head back to the front and was staring right out the windscreen, down Interstate 45, so as to respect his boss’s privacy. He didn’t see D’Shonn pick up a second phone and flash a Snapchat message: ‘Perfect. Go ahead. Get the chopper and the jet ready to roll.’

Ten seconds after it was received, the message vanished into thin air, leaving no trace that it had ever existed.

For two weeks Rashad Trevain had been trying to figure out ways of tracking Johnny Congo’s prison convoy without attracting any attention from the cops. The obvious answer was just to tail it on the road, but if one car stayed right behind the convoy all the way, it was bound to be spotted and forced to stop. They could have a relay system, handing over from one car to another, but with three routes of up to fifty-five miles to cover, that would mean three long chains of drivers, waiting to take up the surveillance if the convoy happened to come their way, which was more manpower than he wanted to use. The more guys there were on the job, the less likely he was to know them all well and, it followed, the less he could trust them to keep their mouths shut.

Rashad’s next idea was to buy a spotter drone of the kind police forces use for crowd control: a couple of feet across, with three miniature helicopter-style horizontal rotors and a camera that can send back images in real time to a base-station. But that would require skilled technicians to operate, plus there were range limitations for both the drone itself and the signal it was sending. So then Rashad went back to basics. He decided to scatter half-a-dozen spotters at key turning points along the first few miles of road: places where the convoy would be forced to make a choice that would determine its route.

But when he put the problem to D’Shonn Brown as they were looking across the water to the eighth green at the Golf Club of Houston’s Member Course, D’Shonn Brown had straightened up from the chip he was about to play, looked at Rashad and asked, ‘You reckon they’ll have a helicopter following that convoy?’

‘You mean a police chopper, like an eye in the sky?’ Rashad replied.

‘That or a TV station, taking a break from following traffic to check out the badass nigger murderer taking his final ride. Give it the OJ treatment.’

‘Guess so. It’s possible. Why?’

‘Well, if someone was tracking the motorcade that would sure make our lives easier …’

D’Shonn interrupted himself for a few seconds to hit the ball about ten yards beyond the hole, only for it to halve the distance as the backspin kicked in and rolled it back towards the pin.

‘Whoa, lucky bounce, bro!’ Rashad laughed.

‘Luck didn’t come into it, I played for the spin,’ said D’Shonn coldly. He turned to replace his club in his bag, which was mounted on a trolley since they’d decided to play without caddies: no need for anyone else to hear what they were discussing. ‘But anyway, about that chopper, it would sure be handy if there was one up there,’ he went on. ‘Only problem is, we’d have to get rid of it afterwards. Some things we don’t want getting caught on camera.’

‘Yeah, I follow you, man.’

‘So you’d better see to that. If we want to get this job done, we’d best think of every eventuality.’

All Johnny Congo’s roads led to Huntsville. So that was where the ambush crew were waiting. The three heavily laden dumper trucks and the five stolen SUVs were all parked up on the cracked and dusty ribbon of road that led from Martin Luther King Drive up to the Northside Cemetery. There were no funerals planned for that day, no passers-by to look at the line of vehicles. The Maalik Angel in charge of the crew was a scrawny, light-skinned brother with a goatee beard called Janoris Hall. Like all the men who would be working under him today, Janoris was wearing a hooded white Tyvek disposable boiler suit, with fine latex gloves and flimsy polypropylene overshoes covering his Nike sneakers. Plenty of crime scene investigators dress in virtually identical work-gear. They don’t want to contaminate a crime scene they’re investigating. The Angels didn’t want to contaminate a crime scene they were about to create. They also didn’t want to be identified, which was why each of the Angels had already been issued with a hockey goalkeeper’s face mask.

Janoris didn’t have his mask on right now. He was watching the TV news on his iPad and the moment the prison convoy turned left off Farm to Market Road 350, on to Route 190, he turned to his second-in-command Donny Razak and said, ‘They headed north.’

Razak had a shaven head, a thick, bushy beard and deep, gravelly voice that came from somewhere down in his barrel chest. ‘You want us to get going, meet ’em on the one-ninety?’

Janoris thought for a moment. It was tempting to head right out there now and get in position early. The less they were rushed, the smaller the chance of making a dumbass mistake somewhere along the line. But what if the convoy took the scenic route, up around the top of the lake and on into Huntsville on Texas 19? He didn’t want to be waiting in the wrong place with his dick in his hand while Johnny Congo was being taken to the Death House on another route.

‘No, man, we are going to wait a while. See what happens when they get to the bridge. Soon as we know if they’s gonna cross it or not, that’s when we make our move.’

At the Walls Unit, one of the administrative offices had been taken over for use as a command post for the Congo operation. Now the only question was, who was in command? There were three possible candidates for the job: Hiram B. Johnson III, the prison governor, who was responsible for everything that would happen from the moment Johnny Congo entered the Walls Unit alive, to the time his body was taken from it, stone dead; Tad Bridgeman, the head of the Offender Transportation Office, whose own HQ was at the James ‘Jay’ H. Byrd Jr Unit, a mile north of Downtown Huntsville and who was himself responsible for getting Johnny Congo from one prison unit to the other; and finally, this being Texas, there was a man in a white Stetson hat.

This last man also wore a pair of plain tan cowboy boots, stone-coloured denim jeans, a crisply laundered white shirt and a dark tie. His gun was holstered high on his hip, making it easy to draw if he were on horseback, and there was a Star of Texas badge on his chest, stamped from fifty-peso Mexican coins. Officially, in recognition of their roughneck, cowboy origins, the officers of the Texas Rangers Division have no uniform other than their badge and their hat. Unofficially, however, jeans and a white shirt are expected, and the man wearing these was Major Robert ‘Bobby’ Malinga, commander of the Rangers’ Company A.

He was the one who had co-ordinated the security precautions for the transport with the other two officials and would be responsible for reapprehending Johnny Congo if, by some terrible misfortune, he happened to escape captivity somewhere between West Livingston and Huntsville. The situation was further complicated by the addition of a fourth person, Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy. An immaculately groomed, impeccably mannered but laser-eyed redhead, Chantelle was Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor of Texas. Her role was to observe and advise on the various political and public relations aspects of the execution and all the events and tasks surrounding it. She had no right to give direct orders to any of the various representatives of the state’s criminal justice system. But she was the eyes, ears and voice of the Governor. And he certainly could give orders.

Right now, as the Congo convoy headed north up the 190 towards the lakeside developments at Cedar Point, the four key players in the command post were all doing the same as everyone else … watching the convoy’s progress on TV.

‘I don’t like those pictures,’ Bobby Malinga growled. ‘If we can see ’em so can every gangbanger in Texas. I don’t want anyone thinking they can pull some crazy stunt, make a name for themselves as the guy who freed Johnny Congo. Or the guy who killed Johnny Congo before the state could do the job. It’s just as bad either way. I want that bird grounded.’

‘That’s not going to happen, Major,’ Chantelle Dixon Pomeroy said softly. ‘This isn’t Russia. We have a First Amendment here. We can’t just go around telling TV stations they can’t film an event of genuine significance to the people of Texas.’

‘You ever heard of homeland security? Johnny Congo is a notorious killer. He spent years as a fugitive in Africa, led a personal militia there from what I understand, may still do for all I know. He represents a clear and present danger to national security. You want to help our enemies, Ms Pomeroy?’