Free HL 04-The Final Hour by Andrew Klavan Page B

had the power to stand in the way of the Homelanders’ plan.
    The Great Death . . . will ring in the devil’s New Year .
    New Year’s. It was right around the corner, a little more than a week away. Whatever Prince was planning, there wasn’t a lot of time to stop him. I had to think of something.
    I raised my head slowly. I looked up at Dunbar. “I need to talk to the warden,” I said again. “You gotta tell him, Dunbar. You gotta let him know. There’s going to be a terrorist attack.”
    “What?” said the Yard King, his rattling voice cracking with disbelief.
    I stared up at him, hoping he could read the seriousness in my eyes, praying he’d believe me. “People are going to die, Dunbar. A lot of people. You have to get me to the warden. I have to tell him. I have to tell someone.”
    Dunbar let out a harsh laugh. “Man, you are one crazy—”
    The next moment I was on him. I didn’t think about it, I just leapt off the bed. One hand grabbed Dunbar’s shirt, the other was on his throat, curved into a claw around his Adam’s apple. I knocked him back against the wall and held him there, my eyes inches from his.
    “Do it, Dunbar!”
    He stared at me, his mouth open. “Are you out of your—”
    “Do it,” I said. “Or so help me, I will turn you in for the things you do. Even if you kill me for it, Dunbar, I will turn you in and they will put you away. How do you think that’ll be, huh? How do think you’ll do in prison? How do you think the cons’ll treat you once you’re here on the inside?”
    His eyes turned into deep pools of fear.
    I clutched his throat tighter until he gagged.
    “Get me to the warden!” I said. “Do it!”

CHAPTER TEN
The Warden
     
    The warden’s name was Wilson Tanker. He was a large, square-built man with a shaven head and a sharp silver mustache. He wore a black suit and a black shirt and a string tie with a turquoise clasp. He had such narrow eyes they were almost buried in the windburned ridges and wrinkles of his cheeks. He seemed constantly to be squinting at you, like he was trying to make you out in the dark.
    He was sitting in a swivel chair behind a gunmetal-gray desk. It was daylight now—it had taken me more than twelve hours to get in to see him. The window behind him looked out on a section of the prison I’d never seen, a wall of grated windows across a narrow courtyard two stories down. Trucks occasionally rumbled through the court on their way from somewhere to somewhere else—somewhere I couldn’t go.
    Two flagpoles stood against the paneled wall, an American flag and a state flag, one on either side of the window, on either side of Tanker as he leaned back and swiveled this way and that.
    He had me standing in front of the desk. There was a guard standing beside my left shoulder and another standing beside my right. Chuck Dunbar was standing in back of me. I guess you could say I was well guarded.
    For a long time, Warden Tanker just went on swiveling back and forth, back and forth, squinting narrowly up at me.
    Then after a while he asked, “And just how would you know there’s going to be a terrorist attack on New Year’s Eve?”
    My frustration felt like a creature trapped in my chest trying to get out, a great big gorilla or something pounding on the cage bars of my insides. I let out a slow breath, hoping to calm the gorilla down. It didn’t help much. “I was with them,” I said. “The terrorists. I overheard them talking.”
    Warden Tanker looked at the guard to the left of me. Then he looked at the guard to the right of me. Then he looked over my shoulder at Dunbar. “Uh-huh,” he said finally. He had a thin, high reedy voice that came out of him in a slow drawl. “So why did you wait until now to tell me?”
    I stammered stupidly as I tried to put the words together. Finally, I managed to say, “I didn’t remember.”
    Warden Tanker sort of rolled that around in his mouth for a moment, then drawled it slowly back at me: