The seven could be there all night. It was the sort of predicament the inmates all relished. Whenever a guard got injured or got locked in somewhere, they would celebrate it, hurrying to tell all the other inmates and, if possible, bringing them to see the poor guard in there waiting for rescue. That kind of event was a disruption in the ecosystem of the prison. It undermined the guards’ sense of themselves as the superiors of the inmates, and it reminded the inmates that the guards were vulnerable and could be hurt. He hoped that what had delayed the trouble squad wasn’t as dire as that.

He hoped it was nothing, even though he knew it couldn’t be nothing. Almost any problem would have been reported to his office within a minute and a plan could have been selected within two more. But there had been no report.

He thought hard for a moment. There was no sight or sound from Paul Scott either. He walked to the wall of monitors at Scott’s workstation and began to study the segments of the screens. Each monitor represented a section of the prison, and each square on a screen was the feed from a single camera in that section. A couple of them were still blacked out on the first section he checked. Three were blacked out on the next one. That meant something. Probably the electrician Humphry had posited was playing another trick.

Humphry hated to call for help, but he felt he had to. The normal procedure was to pick up the phone at this point and make three calls, in order. The first was to notify the warden, then the local police, and then the state police that something disturbing was happening inside the prison.

He went to the nearest phone, which was sitting on the desk that Scott had vacated. He lifted the receiver, but there was no dial tone.

He caught a movement in the corner of his eye. The door handle was moving. Thank God, he thought. It was undoubtedly Scott and the seven men. They were fine. The door opened.

Six men in guard uniforms burst into the room at a run, saw Humphry, and veered toward him. The first pair collided with him, knocked him to the floor, and overwhelmed him.

Minutes later the dozen uniformed prisoners who had led the break reunited and were on the move again. Now they had the watch commander’s key card, which would open any and every lock in the prison. There were only two of those keys, and the other one was at home with the warden.

They made their way toward the guards’ locker room, led by Paul Duquesne, the man with the captain’s key card. He ran ahead of the other men, stopping at each gate to open it and then run on while two of the others jammed the mechanism so the gate could not be closed again.