"Take a look at this."
Megan spread the photographs out on her desk as the men gathered around. Colby leaned forward bracing himself on a chair, David stood straight with his arms folded behind him. Don and Charlie, for their parts, were standing on opposite sides of the desk looking distinctly uncomfortable, which Megan was doing her best to ignore. "Look. Michael Scofield in 2001 at a Loyola alumni fundraiser." She pointed to the next one. "Michael Scofield in 2005 at prison intake. Notice anything?"
"Snazzy dresser," Colby said, looking at the lakeside fundraiser photo. "Still looks pissed off in both pictures, though."
"No…" she said, still tapping the mugshot. "Not his demeanor. Keep looking."
"His arms," David said suddenly.
"Bingo."
"Look at them," David continued, growing excited now. "In oh-one dude looks like a frat boy with that t-shirt. In oh-five, like a thug."
"The tattoos?" Don asked, crowding in. "So a structural engineer took up an interest in… body art?"
"But look at this," David said, reaching for another picture and reading the caption. "July, two thousand and four, and this one should show the tattoos, right? It's short enough. But clear as day, nothing on him."
"You think he got all those tattoos in the year before he went into prison?" Colby asked. "That's one hell of a lot of time underneath a needle."
"And you'd know, because.,.?" Megan asked, which Colby chose to ignore while feigning increased interest in the 2004 picture.
"Charlie?" Don prompted. Charlie had been tapping at his upper lip, but at his brother's words, he dropped his hand to his side.
Charlie shook his head. "Nothing, I just…" He trailed off into silence.
"So we have a structural engineer with a brother on death row, who in just under a year gets a full body tattoo and then robs a bank," Don said. "Now the question is, where does he go when he gets out?"
"If it were me?" Colby said, staring critically at the pictures, "I'd head for the tattoo removal parlor." Megan tried to cover her smile with a cough.
"We can't depend on them following conventional methods," Megan pointed out. "My guess is, they know where we expect them to go, so we're not going to find them in the usual places."
Don stood back up and started flipping through his packet again. "Okay, she's right, guys, Chicago has been tracking leads with family members of the escapees, business connections, even mob connections. They've got surveillance everywhere, but nobody has seen these guys since they took off. It's up to us to try to think the way…" He glanced up at Charlie. "The way Scofield thinks," he finished.
"Can… can we get a better picture of these?" Charlie asked, still leaning over the desk.
"Why?"
"Just… look at this." He tapped the enlarged photo. "On his arm, it says 'English, Fitz, Percy'. Those are the streets on that map, aren't they? Around the prison?" He pointed to the briefing document in his hand.
Don blinked and then started flipping frantically through his photocopied documents. After a moment, he settled on one and his eyebrows slowly lifted. "Yes," he said. "Yes. They are."
Everyone sat back at once, processing this. Don stared at Charlie.
"You think it's a code?" Colby asked. "In the tattoos?"
"Just like that girl we had washed up on the beach," David said. "The one with the phone number on her foot."
"What else would it be?" Megan said. "It makes… it makes so much sense. Why would a guy, master's education, working at a high-paying firm like that, get tattooed? He doesn't fit the profile at all of people who do things like this. I mean look at it. It's designed so that all he has to do is put on a button-down shirt and you'd never know it was there. He could waltz right in to a job at a high-end firm and fit right in. Charlie's right. He did this to carry information. He wasn't trying to impress anybody. He had nobody to impress."
"But what information was he carrying?" Don finished the question.
Megan's head shot up. "He didn't just plan this from the beginning. He planned it even before. This was the plan, all along." For a moment, the entire room was silent as they all considered the implications.
Don finally broke the silence. "All right. I'm going to get Chicago on the line and see what they can send us on that tattoo. Figure out what's underneath that shirt. Meantime, David, Megan, start working down that list. Get out there and talk to anybody you can. Colby, once I get off the phone, you're with me, we're gonna work the agencies and tap in to the stakeouts, find out what the deal is. We got a whole lot of teams working this and I want to make sure we're not missing out on anything."
"What do you want me to do?" Charlie asked as everyone else started to scramble.
Don placed a protective hand on his shoulder. Charlie glanced at it but didn't move. "Take a break," Don said. "It's going to take us awhile to get the data, so unless you have any equations at the moment, I need you to sit tight while I get a hold of the pictures you need." He dropped his hand to his side.
"Do you mind if I-" Charlie held up the copy of his report from Chicago.
Megan locked eyes with Don for a long moment.
Don took a deep breath and nodded. "No, no," he said. "Go ahead. Knock yourself out. If you come up with anything..." He made a phone with his hand and held it to his face. Charlie nodded his agreement and leaned back on the desk, studying the report as the agents made their way out of the office.
------------------------
"You're not still grading those papers?" Alan shot Charlie a tired look as he hung his jacket beside the door.
"No, I gave that to the T.A.s," Charlie said. "Just some stuff. For Don." He wondered briefly how often he'd used that answer to his father's inquiries. It did seem like most of his work these days was for Don. He was getting quite the mileage out of his T.A.s this year.
"Ah, right. What is it this time? Terrorism? Arson? Murder?"
"Prison break."
"Wha?" Alan nearly tripped over the rug in excitement as he made his way over to the table. "Not that thing up in Illinois?"
"Yeah. FBI thinks they might be headed here, I'm going over the convicts and analyzing their risk factors. Not so typical a bunch. Dad, did you see that the guy who they think masterminded the whole thing majored in civil engineering, just like you?"
Alan was already nodding. "Yeah, my buddy Tony heard that on the news."
Charlie turned to him with a slight twinkle in his eye. "So, tell me. Did they teach you in school how to break out of a maximum security prison?"
"That wasn't covered, no," Alan said, sitting carefully across from Charlie. "But it depends. Did he engineer prisons?"
"Not according to this," Charlie said. He set the paper down. "He did it for his brother, you know. Megan thinks he planned it from the beginning. Got himself in to save his brother's life."
"Rather unconventional," Alan remarked. "They must have been close."
"I wonder how 'close' you really have to be to react when the state is going to kill your family," Charlie said.
Alan shrugged. "Family is family."
Charlie paused, struggling for a moment. "I don't know what I'd do. If you or Don were in that situation."
Alan tilted his head, considering this. "Well, the guy did kill the vice president's brother, after all, Charlie. It's not exactly something that would happen with me, or with Donnie."
"So you believe he's guilty."
"He was convicted."
"Convictions have been overturned. Heck, I've overturned them. And this execution – the speed of it, only three years from the crime to the date of execution – how do we know he got a fair shot?" Charlie's voice rose as his excitement grew.
"He got the same trial process as anybody else. Probably more of an advantage, what with being a white man in the system. Maybe it's a shoddy system, but what he did was still illegal, no matter what you think of the death penalty."
Charlie sighed. He leaned back in his chair, two legs rising dangerously off the floor. "I mean, yeah, I don't agree with the death penalty, even though my work has led to that sentence before. But each and every one of those people is still alive, still going through the system, and I've been working these cases for a while now. This? It just… something isn't right, that's all." He scratched at his hair for a moment before bringing the chair back down to rest.
"You're right. Something's not right. Half a dozen convicted felons hogtied a warden, got out of a maximum-security prison and went missing. That's not right," Alan said.
Charlie leaned over the papers. "I'm missing something," he said. "It's not equations. Not yet. It's just a connection in there somewhere, it's logic, it's the pattern. It doesn't fit. The risk factors." He shook his head. "I give up. I'll take it in to work tomorrow, see what Larry makes of it." He closed the packet and stood up.
"Good night, then," Alan said, reaching for his glasses and opening a book.
Charlie took a step and then stopped. He watched his father for a moment, studying him beneath the light of the lamp, before speaking. "You know, I don't think I could do it."
"Do what?" Alan looked up at him.
"Prison. Even if it was Don. Even if it was you. I wouldn't make it two seconds."
Alan opened his mouth, closed it, and then took a moment to collect his thoughts. "Like I said, Charlie. We're not that kind of family."
"Hmmm." Charlie stood up, closing the case file on the table. "Just make sure you pay your parking tickets on time, Dad?"
Alan waved him off with a hand. "I said good night, son."
-------------------------------
"Charlie, I brought – uh, what are we studying now, the mathematics of body art?" Amita took in the blown up photos on the chalkboard and stepped backward through the doorway, positioning herself back out in the hallway.
"Tattoos," Larry said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. "A message."
"Good morning, Amita," Charlie added.
"Tattoos make me nervous," Amita said, still lingering in the door. "Just the thought of a needle with permanent ink near my skin is enough to give me a heart attack. Oh, and Charlie, I was just bringing you one of those bottles of Sattui I told you about."
"It's some sort of communication," Charlie said, distracted. "Used by the prisoners in the Illinois prison breakout."
"Whoa," she said, finally entering the room all the way, but still clutching her book bag for protection. "That's how they did it?"
Charlie had to smile briefly at the thought of Amita being without words for even a moment. "Our suspected kingpin had all of this work done in the year prior to his incarceration. And yet nobody can figure out exactly what it all means. And it's hard to even run any kind of statistical analysis on it because we don't have a two-dimensional image of it."
"Well, I have a friend over in the biology department who can probably extract some biometric data from that photo," Amita said, digging in her bag for a moment before producing the bottle of wine. Charlie examined it with a grin and stashed it in his bag. "We can just factor in gradients for the geometry of his body shape, can't we? And plug that into my modeling program to create a two-dimensional layout? It shouldn't be too hard."
"That'd work," Larry agreed, rubbing at his ear now.
"I just hate to factor out the third dimension," Charlie said, peering closely at one of the images. "I hate to factor out any dimensions, really. Agent Reeves says Scofield is a structure whiz – he understands how the pieces fit together, and once we take them apart? We lose our ability to see them the way that he does."
"What could this stuff possibly mean?" Amita asked. "Angels and devils and swords. Ripe chance woods. English Fitz Percy. Bolshoi booze. Cute poison. It doesn't sound like any code I've ever come across. Or maybe they're anagrams. But for what…?" She glanced at Charlie, who was licking his lips now as he circled the images. "Charlie?"
He blinked. "What?"
"The words. Do they strike you as any code you've come across?"
"Oh, it's not code," Larry said with confidence.
Amita stared at him. "Ripe chance woods? Isn't code?"
"Not a formal one, anyway. It's not a communication, it's one man's notes to himself. Which is an important distinction. They're hints. It's not designed to convey information, but to trigger memory. The hypothesis is that everything in that design is meant to remind one person – the designer – of something he needed to remember."
"Like tying a string around your finger, or writing a phone number on your hand," Amita said.
"Or foot," Larry pointed out.
"With a very, very long string," Charlie added.
"Or very permanent ink for the phone number," Larry agreed. "There's, there's no rules to it, it's just – reminders. Different game entirely."
"It's brilliant, really," Amita said, lighting up. "You can't take notes with you into prison, and if you've got a lot of information to remember – disguising it in a tattoo? This guy isn't stupid."
"Definitely not. He graduated magna cum laude in civil engineering," Charlie said.
"Like your father the city planner?" Amita asked. She moved beside Charlie to peer at the tattoo, her mouth hanging open as she studied the picture.
"Something like that. Why?"
Her finger ran along the picture, delicately tracing the lines of the tattoo. "The patterns – well, don't you think these look like, paths? Streets, or something?"
Charlie moved closer so that his nose was nearly touching the paper, his eyes scanning back and forth rapidly. "Yes," he said slowly. "Yes. But we already covered the streets. Unless it's a map to… something else."
"Maybe we should try the analysis, then. I'll get the calculations we need from my friend over in biology, and we can run the two dimensional image against maps of the area to see if it matches at any level."
"Streets don't act like this," Charlie said, rocking slightly back and forth. "This isn't designed to carry people from place to place. These paths… they're only designed to go in one direction."
"Wh-what are you saying?" Larry stammered, wrinkling his nose and looking closer at the photograph.
"They're pipes," Charlie said with sudden realization. The pieces seemed to swirl in front of him, as he could almost imagine them taking on the shapes that Michael Scofield must see. One flowing to the next, with markers, with notations. "Schematics. It's not streets. It's the diagram. It's his escape route, but not on roads. This… this is the prison itself."
Amita stopped in her tracks. "So… no go on the biology analysis?"
"Go ahead and get it, just so we can be sure," Charlie said, reaching for his cell phone. "But in the meantime, I'm going to get Don's guys to take a closer look at what exactly Michael Scofield was engineering in the days before he became a felon."
