Free The Shield of Darius by Allen Kent

take a chance. He had to find a way to quiet Katherine Sager.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     

SIX
     
    Ben stood on one of the stools, looking down through the unpainted upper half of his cell window into the walled enclosure across the alley.  A woman dressed in a long black sweater and headscarf squatted flat-footed beside the back door of the house, rhythmically sloshing clothes up and down in a galvanized tub.  He had watched her for nearly ten minutes and she still hadn’t looked up.  She washed three or four garments, wrung them out by hand and pressed them against a flat stone that sat beside the step.  When satisfied the material was as dry as she could get it, she rose stiffly and waddled on bowed legs to the back of the yard to Ben’s right where she hung the clothes loosely over a line stretched diagonally across the corner of the high compound walls.
    “We need to get out of here,” Ben said partly to himself and partly to Jim, who sat silently thumbing through a magazine on the bed behind him.  “I’ve been here over three weeks now and nothing’s happening.”
    “There’s no way out,” Jim said, still looking down at his magazine.  They had held some version of this conversation almost daily since Ben arrived and now recited it without thought.
    “There’s always a way out.  Like I told you yesterday, it wouldn’t be that hard to get out of here.”
    “You seem to be forgetting my little episode with the man in the suit.  He gave you the same speech I got, but had improved on the visual aids.  I thought I was a goner.  So did you.  Next time, they’ll kill us.”
    “They’re lying about that,” Ben said, continuing the dialogue.  “They’re keeping us here for something and whatever it is, it must be important.  Look at how they feed us.  I don’t think they can afford to kill us.”
    “We can’t take that risk,” Jim said, still leafing through his magazine.  “You didn’t have that barrel down your throat.”
    Ben turned on his stool to face him, his hands clasped behind his back.  “I don’t think they’ll kill anybody, Jim.  Whatever we’re here for, they need us alive and in good shape.  This is something big.  Look at how careful they are about the guards not knowing anything.  We get a whole new set every four days, just like clockwork.  We don’t even change clothes that often.”
    “We don’t change clothes at all,” Jim muttered. “And that still strikes me as kind of odd. If they’re trying to keep security tight, I’d think they’d keep the number who knows about us as small as they can.”
    “Probably think there’s greater security in making sure we don’t get to know any of them.  The guards see us only eight times and aren’t allowed to speak. The two outside guys don’t even look in, and the man who brings in the tray doesn’t ever look at us. That’d still keep things pretty secure.”
    “Could be,” Jim said, completing the obligatory dialogue.  Ben turned again to the window.  The woman had moved from the tub to the corner of the walled yard and was hanging three large semi-circular chadors across the line, the full-length wrap that traditional Muslim women wear to cover themselves.
    “I think one of us can get out without them knowing we’re gone,” he said.  Behind him he heard Jim close his magazine and stand up.  This was a new twist to the conversation.
    “How?  You mean not know for a few hours?”
    “Not know at all.”  Ben continued to look down at the old woman.  “You remember I asked yesterday if the guards who brought dinner the first night I was here had been into the room before?  You said they had, but not since I was brought in.  The thing that struck me about them, though I wasn’t really tuned in to it at the time, was that none of them seemed surprised to see me.  Didn’t you find that odd?”
    “I wasn’t paying much attention.  And I imagine the guy that gave us the