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those gorillas I will find a gun and shoot you.”
    “But if I did ask they’d be mad at me, not you,” she said with a smile.
    “No. They always beat up the guy. The girl never gets the speeding ticket. And thanks.”
    “For what?”
    “Now
I
have butterflies.”
    The perimeter wall was locally quarried stone, twelve feet tall with a six-foot-high stainless steel cylinder riding on top. It would be impossible to get a grip on, much less climb over.
    “Seen that equipment on some supermax prisons,” noted Sean. “Latest whiz-bang technology in keeping the bad guys inside.”
    “What about suction cups?” asked Michelle, as they both stared at the metal wall topper.
    “It rotates like a hamster wheel. Suction cups won’t help you there. Still fall on your ass. And it’s probably loaded with motion sensors.”
    Their car was analyzed by an AVIAN, or Advanced Vehicle Interrogation and Notification System, which used seismic sensors placed on their car to capture shock waves produced by a beatingheart. An advanced signal-processing algorithm concluded in just under three seconds that there was no living person concealed in their Ford. The car was then subjected to a mobile trace handheld unit that screened for explosives and drugs. The portable unit was then run over them, and Sean and Michelle were personally searched the old-fashioned way, questioned by the guards, and had their names checked against a list. Michelle had instinctively started to explain to them about her weapon before realizing the police still had it. Then they were turned loose on a rigidly narrow path bracketed by high fences to continue their ride. Michelle let her gaze wander over the perimeter.
    “Watchtowers every hundred feet,” she noted. “Each manned by a pair of guards.” She squinted into the sun. “One looks to be carrying an AK with an extended clip and the other a long-range sniper rifle with a mounted FLIR,” she added, referring to a Forward-Looking Infrared scope bolted to the rifle. “Bet they have a CCTV subsystem, digital recording, and terabytes of data storage. And multizone intrusion and escape detection systems, microwave and infrared technology, biometric readers, high-security IT network grafted onto a fiber optics backbone, multistage uninterrupted circuits, and big-time backup power in case the lights go out.”
    Sean frowned. “Will you stop sounding like you’re casing the place? With all the bells and whistles they obviously have here, we have to assume people are watching
and
listening.”
    She pulled her gaze back and saw that there were three rings of interior fencing around the two-story rebar-reinforced concrete building housing America’s most wildly psychotic predators. Each fence was an eighteen-foot-high chain-link with concertina wire on top. The top six feet of each fence was angled inward at forty-five degrees, making it nearly impossible to clear. The middle fence carried a lethal electrical charge, as a big sign next to it made crystal clear. The open ground in between each fence was a minefield of razor wire and sharp spikes pointing up from the ground, and the glint of the sun told her that there were myriad trip wires strung everywhere. At night, the only time anyone would dare attempt to escape from this place, the wires would be invisible. You’d bleed to death before you ran into the middle fence, and then only toget charred for your troubles. But by then the watchtower guards would have finished you off anyway with
bang-bang
taps to the head and heart.
    “That electric fence has five thousand volts and low amperage, plenty lethal enough,” said Michelle in a low voice. “I’m betting there’s a concrete-grade beam under it so no one can dig out.” She paused. “But something is weird.”
    “What?”
    “You put in an electric fence to save labor costs. And in the world of prison perimeter security labor costs are basically tower guards. But every single tower is still manned