Free The Book of the Dead by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child

enormous concrete building blocks, set in a U shape, surrounded by asphalt yards, lookout towers, fenced service areas, and guardhouses. D’Agosta knew the first building was the Federal Maximum Security Unit, filled with the very worst violent offenders contemporary America could produce—and that, D’Agosta thought grimly, was saying quite a bit. The second, much smaller area bore the official title of Federal Capital Sentence Holding and Transfer Facility. While New York State had no death penalty, there was a federal death penalty, and this is where those few who had been sentenced to death by the federal courts were held.
    The third unit also had a name that could only have been invented by a prison bureaucrat: the Federal High-Risk Violent Offender Pretrial Detention Facility. It contained those awaiting trial for a small list of heinous federal crimes: men who had been denied bail and who were considered at especially high risk of escape or flight. This facility held drug kingpins, domestic terrorists, serial killers who had exercised their trade across state boundaries, and those accused of killing federal agents. In the lingo of Herkmoor, this was the Black Hole.
    It was this unit that currently housed Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast.
    While some of the storied state prisons, such as Sing Sing and Alcatraz, were famed for never having had an escape, Herkmoor was the only federal facility that could boast a similar record.
    D’Agosta’s binoculars continued to roam the facility, taking in even the minute details he had already spent three weeks studying on paper. Slowly, he worked his way from the central buildings to the outbuildings and, finally, to the perimeter.
    At first glance, the perimeter of Herkmoor looked unremarkable. Security consisted of the standard triple barrier. The first was a twenty-four-foot chain-link fence, topped by concertina wire, illuminated by the multimillion-candlepower brilliance of xenon stadium lights. A series of twenty-yard spaces spread with gravel led to the second barrier: a forty-foot cinder-block wall topped with spikes and wire. Along this wall, every hundred yards, was a tower kiosk with an armed guard; D’Agosta could see them moving about, wakeful and alert. A hundred-foot gap roamed by Dobermans led to the final perimeter, a chain-link fence identical to the first. From there, a three-hundred-yard expanse of lawn extended to the edge of the woods.
    What made Herkmoor unique was what you couldn’t see: a state-of-the-art electronic surveillance and security system, said to be the finest in the country. D’Agosta had seen the specs to this system—he had, in fact, been poring over them for days—but he still barely understood it. He did not see that as a problem: Eli Glinn, his strange and silent partner—holed up in a high-tech surveillance van a mile down the road—understood it, and that’s what counted.
    It was more than a security system: it was a state of mind. Although Herkmoor had suffered many escape attempts, some extraordinarily clever, none had succeeded—and every guard at Herkmoor, every employee, was acutely aware of that fact and proud of it. There would be no bureaucratic turpitude or self-satisfaction here, no sleeping guards or malfunctioning security cameras.
    That troubled D’Agosta most of all.
    He finished his scrutiny and glanced over at Proctor. The chauffeur was lying prone on the ground beside him, taking pictures with a digital Nikon equipped with a miniature tripod, a 2600mm lens, and specially made CCD chips, so sensitive to light they were able to record the arrival of single photons.
    D’Agosta ran over the list of questions Glinn wanted answered. Some were obviously important: how many dogs there were, how many guards occupied each tower, how many guards manned the gates. Glinn had also requested a description of the arrival and departure of all vehicles, with as much information as possible on them. He wanted detailed