It was fitting, Pine thought, that a female was depicted on the badge of the preeminent law enforcement agency in the world. The gold shield was topped by an open-winged eagle, and below that was Justitia, holding her scales and sword. She was thirty-five, and the last twelve years of her life had been spent with a shiny badge riding on her hip. After that she was escorted to the front entrance and showed the guards stationed there her FBI special agent credentials. The supermax was not designed for prisoners to make new friends.Ītlee Pine’s truck had been scoped and searched, and her name and ID checked against the visitors list. Solitary confinement was the rule rather than the exception here. Its cells were kept completely dark, and restraints were built into each concrete bed. For unruly prisoners, or in the case of a crisis, there was the Z-Unit, also known as the Black Hole. Outside communication was forbidden except in the visiting room. The showers automatically cut off, the toilets could not be stopped up, the walls were insulated so no inmate could communicate with another, the double steel doors slid open and closed on powered hydraulics, and meals came through a slot in the metal. The cells were seven-by-twelve and virtually everything in them, other than each inmate, was made from poured concrete. Florence had been designed so that no prisoner could even tell where in the structure he was located. Inside, the cell windows were four inches wide and four feet long, cut in thick concrete, through which only the sky and roof of the facility could be seen. And few would care about a serial murderer, terrorist, or spy face-planting in the Colorado soil for the final time. Any prisoner reaching this spot would almost certainly be killed by either fangs or bullets. These spaces were patrolled 24/7 by armed guards and attack dogs. The prison was encircled by twelve-foot-high perimeter walls topped with razor wire and interlaced with pressure pads. Not a blade of grass, or a single tree or bush, grew around the complex. The topography around the prison was flat and open. No one had ever escaped, but if anyone did, there would be no place to hide. Many of the inmates here would die in federal prison under the official weight of multiple life sentences. The supermax currently held, among others, the Unabomber, the Boston Marathon bomber, 9/11 terrorists, serial killers, an Oklahoma City bombing conspirator, spies, white supremacist leaders, and assorted cartel and mafia bosses. It was not a place for the faint-hearted, or the easily intimidated, though the deeply demented were obviously welcome. The men here, guards and inmates, were as hardened as precious stone. In total, more than nine hundred inmates were incarcerated on this parcel of dirt.įrom the sky, with the prison lights on, Florence might resemble a set of diamonds on black felt. The supermax component was one of four separate encampments that made up the Federal Correctional Complex located here. But just as Pine begins to put together clues pointing to a terrifying plot, she’s abruptly called off the case.įBI Special Agent Atlee Pine stared up at the grim facade of the prison complex that housed some of the most dangerous human predators on earth.ĪDX Florence, about a hundred miles south of Denver, was the only supermax prison in the federal system. It soon seems clear the lost tourist had something more clandestine than sightseeing in mind. So when one of the Grand Canyon’s mules is found stabbed to death at the bottom of the canyon-and its rider missing-Pine is called in to investigate. She’s the lone agent assigned to the Shattered Rock, Arizona resident agency, which is responsible for protecting the Grand Canyon. Three decades after that terrifying night, Atlee Pine works for the FBI. It’s seared into Atlee Pine’s memory: the kidnapper’s chilling rhyme as he chose between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. and an old nightmare.Įeny, meeny, miny, moe. Introducing a remarkable new character from #1 New York Times bestselling writer David Baldacci: Atlee Pine, an FBI agent with special skills assigned to the remote wilds of the southwestern United States who must confront a new threat.
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