It began calmly, in the wee hours of the morning. At 2:00 AM, two armed guards headed down the cellblock to Professor Creed's cell. They stood calmly in front of the door. One held a man's suit on a hanger; the other a pair of handcuffs, leg irons, and a belly chain. Professor Creed came calmly to his door and looked at them.
"OK, Creed," one of the guards said. "I want you to get changed into your civvies here. Then we're gonna cuff you and take you down to the van. You know the drill. Don't give us no trouble and you'll be just fine."
"Of course," Professor Creed answered, watching the guards easily with his pinpoint pupils.
The guard put the suit through the food slot of the cell. Professor Creed changed clothes with an easy speed. He did not dawdle but he did not rush either. Once he had dressed, the guard handed a set of black wing tips through the food slot. Professor Creed put them on and then looked expectantly at the officer. It was quite pleasant to wear civilian clothes. He had asked to be allowed to testify in civilian clothes, and they had given him this request. The jacket and pants were inexpensive, as they had come from the jail's used-clothing room. Still, it was much better than the usual prison jumpsuit.
"Hands in front or behind, Officer?" he asked in a friendly fashion.
"Front," grunted the officer.
Professor Creed stuck his hands obligingly through the food slot. The guard locked the cuffs onto Creed's wrists. Once he was secured, Professor Creed stepped back from his cell door and waited for them to open it. He did not intend to be a problem for his guards. This was something he was quite looking forward to.
The guards were swift as they moved to shackle his feet and attach his cuffs to a chain circling his waist. He was quite cooperative, standing submissively still as they worked. Soon enough, Professor Creed was restrained. Each guard took one of his arms and escorted him from the cell. Metal gates crashed behind them as they walked out of the prison.
They led the professor out to the van outside. There were two equally large and burly federal marshals there to take charge and custody of the prisoner. After signing the documents, Professor Thomas Creed was legally transferred from the custody of the New York Department of Corrections to the custody of the US Marshals Service. The van was already parked in a secure area of the prison; there was nowhere he could go even if he did manage to overcome his restraints. They helped him into the van and he sat down in the back. A steel gate separated him from them in the van. Professor Creed sat down and closed his eyes. He thought about Plato's The Cave as the van started and drove off. It was still very early in the morning. Perhaps 2:30, the professor thought.
The plan was quite simple. It would take five hours to ferry the professor from the prison in Dannemora to Boston, where the grand jury was waiting to hear his testimony. It was much preferable to transport the professor in the middle of the night. By seven-thirty or so, he would be safely ensconced in South Bay Jail.
The van trundled along through upstate New York, heading up a stretch of Interstate 87. The professor was quiet and did not make any trouble for his guards. He did not need to. He knew what came next.
The van exited on Route 11 and proceeded into a bucolic stretch of Vermont. There was no other traffic on the road. Lake Champlaign was nearby, and the professor commented that it was pretty.
"Yeah, it is," one of the guards agreed desultorily. He consulted his clipboard. "Okay," he said to the guard behind the wheel. "Looks like Route Eleven runs inna 89. Then it's 89 all the way down."
Unfortunately for the guard, the van in question would never reach the Interstate. As it drove along through the quiet night towards the goal it would never reach, it also drove closer to Susana Alvarez Lecter.
Susana was hidden back in the tree line. She was too far back from the road to be seen. She could see them, however. She owed this ability not to any sort of superhuman ability, even though there were those who believed Susana to have some sort of superhuman powers. Instead, there were two things that allowed her to see the van without being seen by the people inside. One was a large set of Zeiss binoculars, which she currently had held up to her eyes. The other was a large, fat telescopic sight mounted atop the rifle in her gloved right hand.
Susana Alvarez Lecter was her father's daughter. Had anyone suggested that to her she would have wholeheartedly agreed. But she was not only Hannibal Lecter's daughter. She was also Clarice Starling's daughter, and her knowledge of firearms stemmed from her mother. Clarice Starling had bequeathed her shooter's eye to her daughter and encouraged her to practice in her youth. Mostly, Susana knew pistols, but rifles were hardly alien to her, as they had been reasonably familiar to Clarice in her FBI years.
Once she had arrived in Plattsburgh the day before, Susana had perused the local want ads for a rifle for sale. Conveniently, private sales of rifles or shotguns in New York State required no permits at all, and it had been easy to play a fumbling housewife intending to buy it for her husband. The rifle was a plain Winchester chambered for 30.06, a hard-hitting round. Susana knew that it would have the power to do what she wanted it to. She'd sighted it in yesterday, and she was confident it would shoot.
Susana was wearing the uniform of a Vermont state trooper. Parked back in the woods was a matching state trooper cruiser. Just beyond the cruiser was the trooper himself, lying in a ditch. She'd found him poaching for speeders at the border. The uniform was a bit too big for her, but that was OK. It wouldn't be used for long. Just long enough to free and then spirit away the professor. She looked forward to meeting him. They'd been corresponding for a long time.
She was lying on a mat she had bought in a Wal-Mart some sixty miles away. As the van drew closer Susana put down the binoculars and lifted the rifle to her eye. She'd picked a nice, deserted stretch of road convenient for her to pull off with the cruiser. Their switch car was parked further down the road; the guards had probably seen it and assumed it was either broken down or an early-morning fisherman.
There was something in this she found amusing. She'd known from the moment she seriously began considering Professor Creed as a potential partner that she could not break him out of a maximum-security prison. It would have been well nigh impossible even for someone who wasn't a wanted killer in her own right. But in a van driving through a nice rural area in the middle of the night – well, that would be easy. Two guards to take out and he was free.
She could have tried to get him in that van herself. She had enough money and could have doubtlessly gotten a judge somewhere, somehow, to pull Professor Creed out for a deposition or something. But there was something so fitting in having Lisa be the one to do her dirty work for her. The fact that the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit had become her unwitting accomplices pleased her to no end. She found herself wondering if Lisa would be the one to realize that she had masterminded this whole thing. But then again, she reminded herself, she had to spring him and get away before she could call herself a mastermind.
The van looked to be the size of an aircraft carrier through the bright scope. Susana raised the rifle and tracked along the van. She could see the two guards driving and flitted back and forth with the sight. Between and behind them, she could see a pale face separated by bars, and a smile crossed her lips.
The guard behind the wheel was a pretty big guy, and his head took up a lot of the sight. Susana settled the crosshairs just below his nose, where a patchy moustache was valiantly struggling. She took a deep breath and held it. Then she squeezed the trigger. A flat report echoed across the field.
Susana grabbed the bolt and worked it, catching the shell expertly in her free hand. She slipped it into her pocket. Then she pointed the rifle at the chrome grill of the van and fired a second shot. The van had already begun to slew across the country road, its driver being newly dead. When the second bullet struck the engine block, it cracked. The van swerved across the road. Susana thought it was heading for the ditch. Just to be sure, she pumped a third bullet into the tire. Sure enough, the van completed its turn into the ditch, driven by a last few firing neurons in the brains of the driver – well, those brains that weren't splattered across the headrest, anyway.
Susana Alvarez Lecter arose and checked her pockets. There were the three spent shells. Good. She grabbed up the mat and the rifle and jogged back to the cruiser. It took only a moment to stow the rifle and mat in the passenger seat of the car. The powerful engine of the cruiser revved and she dropped it into gear.
It took only a moment or two to reach the road, and then to the fallen prison van. Susana put on the cruiser's lights and got out of the car quickly. She took the pistol out of the holster on her belt and adopted a frightened expression. The guard in the passenger seat gave her a panicky look.
"What the hell happened?" Susana hissed.
"I dunno…he just…we're transporting a prisoner to Boston…federal court…then bang, somebody just shot us," the guard blubbered.
"Get him out," Susana demanded. She reached for the chrome handle of the guard's door and tried to open it.
"No, wait…he's a death row prisoner…we gotta….," the guard continued, his eyes wide.
"Listen," Susana said. "There is someone out there with a rifle and right now I feel like I've got a bullseye painted on the back of my head. Now listen to me. I want you to get your prisoner out of there now and put him in the back of my cruiser. Once he's secure we're getting the hell out of here."
The guard nodded dumbly, panicking and eyes wide. He fumbled around for a bit in the van. It was more difficult than he expected, seeing that the van was on its side and what was up was now to the right. But he fumbled with his keys and unlocked Professor Creed's leg irons and belly chain.
"N-now, listen up, Creed," he said in a semblance of his normal gruff bully-boy tone. "That state trooper's gonna have her gun out. You mind your manners and let me cuff you once we're out."
"Of course," Professor Creed said blithely from where he was lying on the window.
The van rumbled open. Susana drew her pistol and aimed it at the top of the van. Professor Creed emerged, blinking at the light. His eyes touched Susana's. They both smiled. There was a metal thunk as the professor pulled his body out onto the side of the van. He slid down with a brief sound, holding his handcuffed hands in front of him.
The guard's head appeared above the open sliding door of the overturned van.
"You got him?" he asked Susana.
"I sure do," Susana Alvarez Lecter agreed.
The guard pulled himself out of the van and approached Professor Creed, holding the belly chain and leg irons.
"Now you behave," he admonished the other man. He squatted to chain the professor's ankles again. He had barely enough time to feel the trooper's pistol pressed into his ear, but he did not hear the sharp report of the pistol. Instead, he simply died on his knees, preparing to chain a killer.
Susana bent down and took the guard's gun, extra loads, pepper spray, and handcuff key. She handed the key to him and stuffed the rest in the pockets of his jacket. He simply grinned at her in the early Vermont morning.
"You're even more beautiful than you described yourself," he said gently.
Susana smiled, letting the compliment warm her. But then the stern voice of her mother spoke up in her. Never screw around on an op. Get the job done.
"Thank you," she said. "Now let's get out of here." She grabbed his arm as the guards had and led him to the
She led him to the car and put him in the back, as if she actually was a police officer. Professor Creed gave her a quizzical look as she threw herself behind the wheel. The cruiser's rear wheels spun, spitting gravel as they raced down the road.
It took the professor only a minute or so to unlock his handcuffs. Once he did, he noticed that there was a heavy hunting jacket and a pair of jeans folded neatly on the seat next to him. Not needing to be told, Professor Creed shucked out of his jacket and pants in favor of the clothing Susana had provided him.
Susana pulled onto the grass and drove a few hundred feet down to the shores of the lake. There, she told Professor Creed to leave the sports jacket, slacks, and handcuffs. She also threw a piece of paper into the air on which she had scribbled the phone number of a hotel in Montreal. Once he'd left them there, she headed back to the road and drove down to the switch car.
It wasn't much – a fifteen-year-old sedan. It was well maintained, but the small pockets of rust on the body made it seem somehow dilapidated. Susana let him out of the back seat and gestured for him to take the wheel. From beside her on the cruiser's seat, she picked up a long denim jumper and a cardigan sweater. She put on the jumper over the police uniform and sat down in the passenger seat. It took only a moment or two to stow the rifle and the mat in the trunk. The professor took the wheel. It had been years since he last drove a car, but he was able to get the car started and moving in short order.
"Go back the way we came," she told him. "Don't speed."
"We're going back?" Professor Creed asked with some surprise.
"Exactly where they won't expect us to be looking. They'll think you're heading for Quebec."
"That would be a sensible option for those in our situation," the professor observed.
"It would, but there are two problems with it," Susana said, shucking the pants of her uniform. Under it she wore dark blue tights. The pants went in a duffle bag at her feet. She exchanged the clodhopper cop shoes for simple slip-ons. "First , I'm already wanted in Canada. Old boyfriend thing, you know. Second, that's what they'll think you're going to do. I have a motel room all ready in Plattsburgh for the morning."
As the professor drove, Susana managed to slip out of the uniform shirt as well. She kept the pistol close enough where she could get it. This was the chancy part; once they were back in Plattsburgh it would be easy.
Professor Creed drove close to the limit, so as to avoid the attention of traffic police. Susana was tense as they drove, her fingers never far from the butt of the pistol. From the glove compartment she produced a Bearcat scanner and turned it on, listening for news of the escape. She'd meant for this to go as quietly as possible. Pyrotechnics were fun occasionally, but she wanted to get away more than she wanted to teach the law enforcement community a lesson.
It took forty-five minutes to make it back to Plattsburgh. Professor Creed glanced nervously west as he drove. He was well aware that he was only fourteen miles from the prison in which he had been held for the past six years. Susana directed him to pull off the Interstate and into the parking lot of a motel conveniently close to the highway. From the inexpensive purse next to her she produced a motel room key.
Once they were safely ensconced in the motel room, Susana relaxed. Provided no one had seen them – and Susana didn't think they had – their odds of getting away would be much better. The motel room itself was quite anonymous – a bed, a table and chairs, and a rather ugly and anonymous print on the wall. A laptop computer on the table lorded over its subjects: a color printer and a small laminator. There were several plastic bags on the bed. Some were medical supplies, and Professor Creed looked at those curiously. Another had a drugstore logo on it, and it was this one that Susana chose. She handed it to him. He plucked a cardboard box from inside and stared at it.
"Maxi Blonde Hair Lightener Kit," he read aloud dubiously.
Susana grinned. "Ladies prefer blondes, you know. Now go on in the bathroom. Make sure to do your eyebrows too, so they match. It'll wash out after a few shampoos, but it'll work."
While Professor Creed set about dying his hair blonde, Susana changed her own clothing. In lieu of the country-girl denim jumper, she donned an expensive blue suit with a knee-length skirt. An expensive blonde wig made of real human hair changed her hair color and style. It would be fine for the car. She swapped the blue tights for proper businesslike nylons and the slip-ons for proper businesslike pumps. The pistol went into a Prada purse that she left on the table. She sat down to wait. She plugged an earphone into the Bearcat and listened with one ear while she waited.
There was nothing yet. The stretch Susana had chosen in which to kill the guards and set him free was quite deserted. Someone would find it eventually. Susana checked her watch and discovered that it was almost five in the morning. With a bit of luck, they'd be able to get on the road shortly. Police would notice traffic at five, but at six there would be more traffic.
It took the professor rather longer than it would have taken Susana, as he was not familiar with cosmetics or hair coloring. He came out with his hair an attractive shade of blonde, however, and his eyebrows were correctly colored as well. Susana smiled and handed him a pair of black-tinted contact lenses. They hid his tiny pupils quite easily, blending everything into a shade of black. A pair of wire-framed spectacles gave him an intellectual air.
After that, Susana gave him a suit bag containing a shirt, tie, and a fine blue suit. He smiled at the sight of it and took it into the bathroom to change. Professor Creed did not dress up as often as Hannibal Lecter had, but he did enjoy it now and then. And the suit was quite beautifully cut, although it was not tailored to fit him, as Susana had only been able to provide approximate measurements. A pair of shiny wing tips, redolent of new leather, finished off the ensemble. When he returned, you might have mistaken him for a highly placed executive, or an attorney, but certainly not an escaped convict.
Susana looked him up and down and smiled. He cleaned up nicely. She took a digital camera from her bag and told him to stand against the wall. It took only a few moments to take his picture. Once his picture had been taken, it was quite easy to print it out to the proper size and slip it into the identity document she had ready for him. Susana had turned on the laminator, an item available in any Target or Wal-Mart for thirty dollars, before she left, and it was already warm. In a few minutes Professor Creed had identity documents. The Massachusetts driver's license would pass any check that a police officer might want to run. The passport was an excellent Brazilian forgery, but any immigration official in the world would have been fooled. He took that and dropped it into the inner jacket pocket of the suit, enjoying the slick feel of the smooth lining. The ID went into a fine black leather wallet she had picked up for him in Italy before she left. He noticed she had already put ten twenty-dollar bills into it, so that he would have cash for the trip.
"Okay," Susana said, and stood up. Her tone was still businesslike and disciplined. "You look good. Now let's have some coffee."
Professor Creed dropped his arms to her shoulders and smiled at her. He dropped his lips to hers, realizing what he owed this woman. A scant two hours ago he'd been a helpless, shackled prisoner. Now, he was wearing a fine suit and had everything he might need to escape. She was, truly, a capable woman. A suitable mate for him.
Susana Alvarez Lecter stiffened at first when his face dropped to meet hers. She was still thinking in the rules of operational security, as her mother had once taught her. Just as Clarice Starling would have probably shot Hannibal Lecter had he tried to kiss her in the middle of the Feliciana Fish Market raid, Susana did not expect her professor to kiss her and she tried to pull away.
But once she realized what he was doing, and that they were almost away, she relaxed a bit and allowed herself to respond. Her body became more pliant in Professor Creed's arms and she leaned up towards him. Even despite her heels, the professor was still significantly taller than she. But the discipline Clarice Starling had taught her was not completely overcome. She broke the kiss and stepped back.
"Susana, thank you," Professor Thomas Creed said calmly. "For all of this. Everything."
"You're quite welcome. Now let's have some coffee and we'll hit the road around six." She indicated a coffee machine sitting on the nightstand next to the television set. He turned on the TV and lowered the volume so it could barely be heard. It took Professor Creed a few moments to figure out how to work the coffee machine, as the maximum-security unit he had lived on until today did not allow its inmates such niceties. The smell of the coffee filled the room. It was a gourmet blend Susana had purchased in Philadelphia before driving up to Plattsburgh, and he thought it would be a welcome experience. He was quite hungry to take in the charms and pleasures that the world might have to offer, even the charms and pleasures that the anonymous, dull little motel room possessed.
Once it was ready, Professor Creed poured the coffee, mindful not to spill on the snowy-white shirt, the red slickness of his silk tie, or the blue wool of his suit jacket. Susana smelled the brew and closed her eyes in pleasure. For Professor Creed, the coffee was wonderfully strong, wonderfully hot, a paroxysm of pleasure. A thousand leagues beyond the weak and lukewarm brew he had been given in prison. He wondered about sugar and saw it nearby. For a moment he was torn. With sugar or without? He did not want to miss the taste of the coffee either way. He would have two cups, he decided. The first would be without sugar and the next with it. There was no creamer to be had, as Susana preferred her coffee black with sugar.
"What do you have planned now?" Professor Creed asked easily. It was a simple question, and one that would go unnoticed in the event someone in the next room overheard it.
Susana took another sip of coffee. "We get out of here," she said calmly and quietly. "Boston, actually."
Professor Creed's eyes widened. "Boston? Why Boston? It's teeming with FBI, with the whole Bludgeon Man investigation."
"Because," Susana said, "that's exactly where they won't expect us to be. They'll be poking around Montreal looking for us there. That and they may shut down I-89, if they think you went that route."
"We could have gone there," Professor Creed observed. "I speak some French, although I read it better. And you obviously speak French."
"Parisian French. They'd understand me but I'd stick out like an Englishman in New York City." Susana grinned and took another pull at the coffee. "No, we're going to Boston and we're going to hide out there. I want to do some work on your face. We're not going to go out and paint the town red, you know. I have a nice suite at the Park Plaza reserved, we'll simply lie low in the suite until we get out of here."
Professor Creed's eyes were much less spooky but no less powerful for being hidden behind the contact lenses. They met Susana's. Susana did not look away, but simply tilted her head, looked interested, and locked her eyes back on his own. For a moment it seemed there was an invisible token between the two, pushed back and forth by the forces of their wills, neither willing to yield. But there was an air of amusement between these two highly dangerous people, rather than real rivalry.
Very carefully, very calmly, as if speaking to a student he had caught toilet-papering school property (as indeed he once had), Professor Thomas Creed said, "You mean to have some fun with your cousin, don't you?"
Susana grinned. "I intend…to help my cousin, actually."
"After tormenting her," Professor Creed observed judiciously.
"I'm entitled to some fun on this trip, aren't I?" Susana asked archly. "And don't tell me you didn't enjoy watching her bounce around once she realized you actually knew who the Bludgeon Man was. She gets so very agitated at the idea of the bad guy getting away. Excitable little blonde thing, isn't she?"
"Why do you care about the Bludgeon Man, anyway?" Professor Creed asked.
Susana chuckled. "I finish what I start," she said cryptically.
When their coffee had been finished, they rose. With two of them, it took very little time to break down and pack what equipment was in the hotel room. The computer setup Susana had fit easily into a nice attaché case. The rifle took a few minutes to disassemble, and after that it too fit nicely into a duffle bag. Professor Creed was able to get most of the bags, as they were plastic and it was easy to carry them all.
Outside, Susana walked past the down-at-the-heels sedan as if she had never seen it before. Like the rifle, she had bought it used in Plattsburgh. She'd promised the original owner to mail the plates back in a week. That did bother her a bit, but she didn't have much choice. The sedan would rot here until such time as the police found it.
Instead, she walked across the parking lot to a sporty BMW bearing New York plates. From her purse she took a remote control and unlocked the doors. After Professor Creed put the equipment in the trunk, she gave him the keys and told him where to go.
In her ear, the earphone buzzed with police.
"10-Alpha, I'm on the scene with the MVA. It's a federal marshal's van. Two bodies inside. Looks like someone shot up the van. Looks like they were transporting a prisoner to Boston. No sign of the prisoner. We need the state down here with a homicide unit, now."
Susana Alvarez Lecter tensed, forcing herself to remember she was forty miles away.
"Go code," the dispatcher replied tersely. Susana knew what that meant; any further transmissions would be encoded, so that people with scanners could not eavesdrop. It also meant it was time to get out of town as quickly as possible.
The Vermont authorities would probably be prowling Interstate 89, since it was only a few miles from the scene of the escape. They would probably be bright enough to call in the New York authorities too, since the border was so close. Probably the Surete du Quebec, too, since Professor Creed's clothing and handcuffs had been dumped by the lake. The image of Professor Creed running through the hinterlands of Quebec in his skivvies, stealing clothes from a clothesline and greeting shocked housewives with a clumsy bonjour made her grin.
But they wouldn't shut down the entire state of New York, and the sooner they were moving and the farther away they got, the better. Professor Creed stalled the BMW out once backing it out of the parking space. It had been years since he last drove a manual shift, but it came back to him quite quickly and Susana decided not to tease him about it.
The gleaming black BMW was luxuriant inside and had plenty of performance. It wasn't quite what she usually drove, but it would certainly do, and Susana valued inconspicuousness this time around. Susana adjusted the Bearcat scanner and tried to pick up some transmissions that hadn't gone to code.
The authorities were competent, despite their late start. What had begun when a sheriff's deputy located an overturned van in a ditch in rural Vermont swiftly grew larger and larger. The US Marshals, Vermont state authorities, New York state authorities, and Quebec provincial authorities were all notified. Like a beacon, the scene of the escape summoned more and more police officers. Where Susana Alvarez Lecter had shot two federal marshals and then taken their prisoner for her own was now bathed in flickering red lights and surrounded by the metallic babble of police radios. They assembled photographs of Professor Creed and swiftly realized he had an unknown accomplice.
Meanwhile, forty miles away, a black BMW picked up Interstate 87 and blended into traffic. It did not speed nor did it stop. It headed down the highway calmly at sixty-five for two and a half hours, where it met the large east-west artery of the Thruway. By now, there was a great deal more traffic on the highway and the BMW went completely unnoticed. It headed east.