Now, on the same day Ren Carter worried about her son, Lee’s condition, while preparing her pies in Ice Lake, Washington, miles away in another country, chains clinked in the Maximum Security Unit of Saskatchewan Penitentiary.

Eight men, four of them prison staff, approached the cell at the end of the corridor, the one segregated from the rest of the population.

Inside on his cot, inmate Robert Lazarus Yacine turned his attention from his worn paperback copy of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, to consider the traces of cologne and cheap motel shampoo that had arrived outside his door.

“Time to go,” Powers, the deputy warden, said.

Yacine stood and slid his hands through the portal of his cell door. Cold steel tightened around his wrists and snapped.

“Step back, please,” Farrell, the youngest guard, said.

Keys jangled, metal clicked against metal, and Yacine’s heavy cell door opened. He cooperated as a waist chain and leg irons were applied. Taking stock of the men, he knew Powers, he knew Farrell, and the two other prison guards, but not the four strangers. One of them passed him a pen and held a clipboard, thick with forms before him.

“Yacine, your signature is required by the Xs on each record,” the stranger flipped crisp pages of official documents for Yacine to see.

Letterheads flashed by: the U.S. Attorney General, the U.S State Department, the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, Immigration, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, U.S. Homeland Security, Correctional Service Canada, the U.S. Justice Department, and several other agencies.

It was awkward for him to sign, his cuffs and chains knocked against the clipboard. Chewing gum snapped as one of the new men eyeballed Yacine; six feet two inches, two hundred rock-hard bench-pressed pounds, laced with tattoos, all packaged in prison-issued green coveralls and sneakers.

The strangers wore jeans, khakis, button-down oxfords, polo shirts, and windbreakers. The men were cold, grim, and all business as they assessed him amid the distant clang of steel doors and shouting inmates.

From Yacine’s quick read of names on some of the documents, he figured that two of the strangers were members of the RCMP, Will Fortin and Terry Cox; and the other two were Deputy U.S. Marshals, Arlo Phife and Moss Johnston.

But Yacine didn’t know who was who.

“Washington DOC will provide you with personal toilet items, underwear and the like, when they process you at intake,” Powers said, after witnessing Yacine’s signature.

“May I bring my book to read on the trip?” Yacine asked.

“Personal or library property?” Powers asked.

“Personal.”

One of the strangers fanned the book’s pages, examined its spine and binding before concluding that it was a harmless paperback. Nothing concealed.

“Can I bring it?”

Powers threw Yacine’s request to the four strangers. It bounced among them until one of them nodded, an indication of who was in charge.