The plan was like a piece of machinery designed so that each step happened in order. It had been formulated and then spread to every one of the inmates needed to execute the steps. Over the past two years Leah had watched hundreds of hours of prison surveillance recordings, some of them dated as much as six months before July, in early January. There were recordings of inmates rehearsing their roles in the prison break as they went about their daily routines. Three men would simultaneously converge on a spot from three different directions and recite what they were going to do to subdue a guard in approximately that spot and hold him still for the fourth man, the strangler. Sometimes there were gestures, slight arm motions and half turns to practice the movements. Then they would part without looking back.

She had seen a few sequences of men in the exercise yard demonstrating for others the tricks of leverage and momentum to bring down a guard. There were other segments when an inmate would stand before several others and appear to be reciting a list of things to be done in a particular order. Now and then another inmate might correct him or add a step and he would begin again.

If anyone in the command center noticed the oddness of these interactions, none of them interpreted what the motions meant, any more than they interpreted the steady increase in the endless weightlifting in the yard or the growth in the number of inmates running along the walls together, or the pull-ups and push-ups inmates were doing in their cells during the lockdown hours.

During the night of July 19, most of the surveillance cameras were blacked out for periods of time and then restored, but Leah had noticed that the key to understanding the phenomenon was simple. When a camera was blinded, something bad was happening in that location for those minutes. This gave her an unassailable record of the timing for each step in the plan. After watching the footage dozens of times, she could stop the flow of time in her mind and say what was going on in each part of the prison for each minute of the night. For each crucial event, she could name which of the twelve men were in that spot at that time.

And after all this time, she could also remember exactly what she was doing. At no moment had it been what people assumed. Leah knew that the mayor and council, her police colleagues, neighbors, and parents had all held roughly the same view of her. They had all formed that opinion based on years of observation and the free-flowing gossipy exchange of information that went on in places like Weldonville. They all had missed something.