Yacine figured the one who’d nodded was in his late thirties or early forties and sensed something curious; the stranger’s still face and dark, distant eyes gave him the aura of a haunted man befitting of a new name.

Dark Eyes.

Yacine tucked his observations away, like a skilled craftsmen taking care of his tools.

After processing Yacine and signing him out, he was escorted from the Maximum Security Unit to the rear of the prison where a CSC van and two marked Chevy Impalas from the RCMP’s Prince Albert Detachment waited within the high stone walls of the institution.

The men put Yacine in the van and helped him with his seatbelt. The gum snapper sat facing Yacine and never removed his eyes from him.

“You know, no matter how big and tough you are in prison, there’s always someone bigger and tougher, isn’t there?” The gum-snapper leaned forward, invading Yacine’s space. “Tell me, that time you shared a cell with Zookoff, that massive Russian, were you his bitch?”

One of the others turned away, smiling covertly.

Yacine stared at the gum-snapper, his chains tinkling softly as over and over he rotated Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in his hands without speaking.

Without blinking.

-Chapter 34-

Prince Albert, Saskatchewan

The Mountie, Will Fortin, the one Yacine had named Dark Eyes, was not part of the taunt.

Fortin didn’t go for that kind of crap.

He looked out of the van’s window as the small convoy left through the gate. Work had taken Fortin to this prison and many others many times over the years since he got this job.

Ironic, he thought, while he was free to leave each prison, he’d never escape the one he’d built for himself.

“Billy, wake up! Daisy, wake up!”

Saskatchewan Penitentiary was a century old and sat on a twenty-eight-acre expanse of land at the western edge of Prince Albert, a city of some fifty thousand people, in the near middle of Saskatchewan, a province big enough to swallow several Midwestern states. The geographical region marked the passage between the vast prairie and the northern boreal forest leading to the Northwest Territories and the Arctic. Or, Fortin thought, what some called, “the end of the world.”

Twenty minutes after exiting the prison, the convoy came to Glass Field, the small airport that borders the North Saskatchewan River northeast of town. The three vehicles activated their emergency lights and moved toward a far hangar and a waiting plane.

Yacine’s escorts had radioed ahead, so by the time the cars and van came to a halt, the two-man crew, pilot, RCMP Corporal Eric Banner, and co-pilot, RCMP Corporal Ken Leclair, had completed most of their pre-flight checks.

But one of the passengers, the Mountie, Terry Cox, was not happy with the Star-Hawk[PI3] Nomad, a small, twin-engine aircraft.