Van Damm paused at the door, half turning to face Ryan. “Are you sure about this… this plan of yours? I mean, it’s virtually guaranteed to blow up in your face.”
“Like I said, Arnie. Sometimes the way to win the game is to rip out the steering wheel while everyone is watching.”
First, the guards had given him a haircut. Then they’d brought in five buckets of relatively larvae-free water with which to clean himself. He was given a robe, and then ushered to a regular shower, as if he’d been too dirty to enter the place until he’d washed off the outer layer of grime. The shower was tepid but unbearably pleasant, and he’d wept at the feel of so much water on his skin. By the time he stepped out of the cubicle someone had left a stack of tan hospital scrubs on the bench. The simple shower and clean clothes made it impossible to control his emotions. It was all too much to comprehend.
They moved him to a new cell with tile floors instead of rough concrete. Measuring ten by ten feet, it was palatial compared to the one that had been his home for the past month, and boasted a metal sink with running water. It had an actual bed — though the blanket was still filthy from the last prisoner to use it. A day later, they’d moved him up to the ground floor. His new place had all the amenities of his previous cell, with the most welcome addition of a small slit window. It was too high to see out of, or even reach, but it let in light and, more important, air.
Later that same day he’d been moved again, this time to a cell with a window overlooking a dirt courtyard. Best of all, there was a metal toilet attached to the base of an upright pedestal sink-and-water-fountain combination. A bucket and dipper took the place of toilet paper. Father West had uttered a silent prayer of thanks, and then cried like a baby.
Around midday, he got an actual chicken thigh on top of his rice. It was greasy, and small, as chickens tended to be in Indonesia, but the meat was identifiable — and delicious. West had eaten every grain of rice and all but the jagged center inch of the chicken bone. He was working on that when a guard came and removed his metal bowl.
He’d not seen Ajij or Jojo again after they inadvertently sent the text message from his phone.
With a little food in his sunken belly, West found himself thinking clearly for the first time in weeks. The movement to increasingly better cells was curious. It was as if the Indonesian authorities knew they were in trouble, but couldn’t quite admit it. No matter how good the accommodations became, he was still in prison.
A guard informed him he was going to get a visit from the embassy, but two uniformed men wearing berets and the owl insignia of Detachment 88, the law enforcement version of Indonesian Special Forces, had come into his cell. The men put shackles on his wrists and ankles as politely as one can shackle a person, and led him without a word of explanation to a garage, where he was stuffed into the back of an armored tanklike police vehicle called a Barracuda.
One of the most insidious things about being a prisoner was never knowing where you were going, what was coming next, what was about to happen. Sometimes this was by design, to keep the prisoner from making escape plans; sometimes it was meant to weaken the mind and induce cooperation. More often than not, though, it was simply because the guards felt a prisoner wasn’t worth the time it took to explain things.
The inside of the Barracuda had been like his first cell — hot, cloyingly humid, and dark. He could see one of the guards’ watch and noted they were on the road for just under two hours, traffic presumably clearing out of the way for the menacing armored vehicle and accompanying motorcade.
It was not until Father West was ushered out of the Barracuda and seated in a wobbly plastic chair on a small ferry that he realized where they were going.
Nusa Kambangan. Execution Island.
He’d always believed that God had a sense of humor. He had plenty of sins in his past life that should have landed him in a place like this, enough, at least, that he could never honestly say he was anything close to innocent. And yet he’d remained free and happy until he tried to do something good with his life. It was such a great cosmic joke.
As far as he knew, there had been no trial. Even in Indonesia, where the law sometimes bent to the will of the angry masses, death warrants didn’t happen quickly. Still, his was an unusual case. From his experience, sentencing, if not justice, was carried out most quickly to those who were wrongly arrested. It was embarrassing for the regime to keep such people around for very long.
Father West closed his eyes and breathed in the hot and fishy air as the ferry putted across the narrow estuary toward Execution Island. He couldn’t help but wonder if the greasy chicken thigh might have been his last meal.
