Chapter 10
The woman's ill-fitting, sky blue suit hung from her sharp, narrow shoulders. Her gaunt eyes searching the library for her target. Her gaze roving over the heads of the other women who wore prison-issue suits identical to hers. She was looking for the prison library's Non Fiction section, as instructed.
Non Fiction, second row, 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu, translated by RL Wing. Leave the note at the start of Chapter 6.
She followed the instructions to the letter. This had been her task. He brother gave her the coded message over the course of a week of phone calls. She could hear his nervousness over the line. It was a matter of life and death- he'd conveyed that message as well. She didn't know who, how or why but she had to fulfil her part…or else.
She found the book and surreptitiously slipped the note between the thin pages; pressing the folded note against the title of Chapter 6- 'Illusion and Reality'; looked around casually and pushed the book back onto its place on the shelf. She was to put the book back and disappear from the library but curiosity made her hang back hoping to catch a glimpse of whoever had gone through all this trouble to pass a note. She had to wait for 20 minutes and was just beginning to feel that straying from her strict instructions might be a dangerous move before she saw an unlikely recipient collect the book from the shelf and hurry to check out.
'Betty the bully?!' the message bearer thought incredulously, '…I didn't even know she could read.'
The hulking Betty turned in time to see the messenger's eyes following her out of the library and the larger woman's returned stare chilled the frail woman to her core. She ducked behind the stacks she'd been peeking from and clutched her chest to calm her racing heart.
'Not smart, Kerry,' she chastised herself as she hid further in the stacks in case Betty returned.
But Betty's presence was required elsewhere and she was on a deadline.
She passed the opened cells and the guards station, the cafeteria, and showers and headed straight for the lockers of the gym. Where she promptly inserted the book in the middle of a stack of five other books and left it on the bench between the lockers so they'd appear forgotten. And then Betty turned and left.
Like clockwork seven minutes later, the inmate who cleaned the lockers arrived for her daily sweep. She collected the discarded, dirty towels and random, inexplicably forgotten socks and shirts and placed them into the laundry bin. She wandered over to the books and dumped them unceremoniously into the laundry basket and proceeded to the laundry room to fulfil her assigned task for that day.
A guard approached the inmate, walking purposefully in her direction. The inmate's grip on the laundry bin's tightened as she regarded the man with a stiff smile.
"Moreau," the guard addressed the inmate reflexively as he passed her, not losing a step in his even gait.
The inmate angled her head in deference and smiled her response, the saccharin sweet leer, not quite meeting her eyes, "Please sir, my name is Sonia."
Hardison's stomach churned and tightened.
"Wow," Sophie chimed from somewhere directly over Hardison's left ear, "This is Operation Pegasus?!"
Hardison's lip thinned as he stared at the tiny nugget of information he was able to uncover. It was buried so deep he never would have unearthed it without the marginal bits of information Eliot gave him. What he found was something he'd never wanted to see.
"Does Eliot truly know what this is?" Sophie whispered reverently, feeling suddenly even more anxious for Nate and Joshua to arrive. "This is horrible..."
Hardison stared at the words over and over: Eradication, Extermination, Removal. There was no sugarcoating it, "This is genocide."
As the laundry turned and tumbled around the six heavy duty machines that filled the laundry room in the basement of the prison, the steam rose and filled the ceiling of the room. It was the perfect cover.
Sonia reached into her laundry basket to retrieve the prison's copy of the Art of War. She found the page easily as it was obstructed from closing neatly because of the note. She looked toward the door of the room once more before she opened and read the note. A simple sentence. Unintelligible to anyone else but for her it held the world of meaning: THE VEIL IS LIFTING. PEGASUS.
Sonia smiled.
"Very good," she breathed as she folded the note and opened the bottle of bleach, "That is very good, indeed." She slipped the note into the bleach and closed the bottle.