Klay stared at his computer screen. Eady had spelled it out in an email. Encrypted or not, Eady would never include such sensitive details in his correspondence. Something was wrong. Flukes happened in raw seafood. They did not happen with Vance Eady.

YOU WERE THE GUN

Kgosi Mampuru II Management Area

Pretoria, South Africa

The woman with short auburn hair and deeply lined skin tore the cellophane off another pack of Camel cigarettes, unwrapped the foil, and dumped the contents onto a pile she had created on the wooden bench beside her. Between her feet was a large woven polypropylene bag filled with bulk packages, including toilet paper and Dial soap.

“They get nothing here,” she explained, not looking up.

“It’s unbelievable,” Klay agreed.

He was sitting opposite her in the waiting room at the notorious Kgosi Mampuru II prison, formerly Pretoria Central Prison, renamed for the nineteenth-century king (kgosi) who fought colonial domination and was hanged on the prison site—twice. The benches had welded rebar for legs, screws in the wood soldered tight, everything smoothed to a gloss by generations of visitors.

The woman got out a box of plastic baggies and began filling them with loose cigarettes. She worked steadily, taking each baggie to its limit, two rows wide, stretching the plastic to near breaking before sealing it. She set each filled bag aside and started on another.

“You’re getting faster,” Klay said.

She looked up. “What’re you, some kind of packing engineer, timing me?”

“I’m looking to enter you in the cigarette Olympics, if you’re interested,” Klay replied.

“Yeah, right.”

She kept at it. The hard part, he saw, was sealing a full baggie without crushing its contents.

“You want some help?”

“Wouldn’t say no.”

They worked together. Camels. Peter Stuyvesants. Marlboros. More visitors arrived, taking seats on benches around them. The newcomers each with their own items they’d brought, their own rituals. The smell of home cooking filled the room. A man tapped his foot. A woman began to knit.

“They get nothing,” the woman said again. “The noise is awful. There’s no sleeping at night. He can only sleep in the daytime when the doors are open. But they’re always looking in at you, you don’t know what they want, so you can’t sleep then, either.”

Klay thought of his father. Jack Klay was currently at USP Coleman in Sumterville, Florida. He wondered how he slept at night.

After an hour they called everyone up to a window and handed each of them a large blue card sheathed in plastic bearing a prisoner’s name, date of birth, and two fingerprints. At the bottom of each card was a list of charges and court dates.