Officially called the High Risk Management Correctional Centre, the Supermax was a jail within a jail. Seventy-five cells. All one-out. All no way out. This was where the country’s worst prisoners were held: the mass murderers, the serial killers and the terrorists. With the unit sitting on a third-of-a-square-kilometre plot in the northwestern corner of the Goulburn jail complex, the inmates might have had a nice view of the historic town – had it not been for the impenetrable and windowless white masonry walls lined with five-metre-high fences lashed with razor-wire.

The facility had more cameras then the rest of the prison combined, Jax knew. They looked in and out. They looked down. They even looked up, a camera in the yard watching the sky for any approaches from the air – a helicopter arriving to scoop up an inmate, for example.

Jax thought about the Serpent as he pushed his empty serving trolley along the corridor. This was where he lived, his lair a three-metre-by-two-metre cell with a completely see-through glass front. Jax hoped he wasn’t home. He hoped he had been dragged off to court to have his 338-year sentence extended to 358 years. Or, even better, that he was back in Sydney, in the Long Bay hospital, dying – no, already dead.

JAX looked on as a kitchen hand, a prisoner he didn’t know, loaded the meals onto the trolley: foil trays with white cardboard lids that had all been numbered with a thick red texta. Earlier that week, he’d been surprised, even slightly suspicious, when Turner, the guard from Long Bay, had suddenly arrived in Goulburn and informed Jax that he was being given a new job, the long-time Supermax server, Benny, having suddenly fallen ill. Jax hoped the virus ASIO had given Benny wasn’t serious.

‘They’re all in order,’ the kitchen hand said. ‘No. 1 goes to Cell No. 1, No. 2 to Cell No. 2 and so she goes. Nothing to it . . . But whatever you do, don’t fuck it up. We’ll never hear the end of it if one of the Leb cunts ends up with a tray full of bacon.’

The kitchen hand pointed towards the now fully packed trolley. Jax had fifty-eight meals to deliver. Jax wondered if the kitchen hand was in on the plan.

‘Got it?’

‘Don’t give the Leb cunts bacon, right?’ Jax said. ‘Got it.’

No. Surely not. Not unless ASIO hired racist scumbags.

Jax stopped his trolley and applied the footbrake in front of Cell No. 1. With both the wall and the door made of an unbreakable glass-like, ballistic-grade polycarbonate, the inmate could not hide. Neither could Jax.

A man stood on the other side of the door, bald on top but with the horseshoe of long hair around the sides of his skull gathered into a ponytail.

‘Where’s Benny?’ he demanded. Who are you? I don’t know you.’