A Ghost from Alcatraz

Chapter Three

London, January 1972

Bond had been imprisoned by the Americans before.

It was an experience neither government particularly enjoyed discussing, which is one reason it had never appeared on paper.

The other reason was that the paper had been burned.

It began, as these things do, with a request.

In the autumn of 1962 a British electronics engineer named

Halloran had walked out of a factory in Baltimore with a notebook containing the operating parameters of an air-to-air guidance package, and walked into an arrangement with the

Soviet embassy in Washington that involved a great deal of money and rather less judgement. The Americans had not yet discovered him. When they did, they would hang him, and they would also discover that three-quarters of the notebook described equipment already sold to the Royal Air Force, which would have been awkward for everyone.

So Bond was sent to Baltimore on the twentieth of

November 1962 in the character of a British businessman named

John Patrick Mason, with an interest in marine salvage and a weakness for other men’s secrets, and instructions to recover the notebook before anybody with a badge took an interest in it.

He had the notebook in his hand for four minutes.

Then two men in plain coats came through the door of the rooming-house off Eastern Avenue, and Bond, who had checked

the street and not the stairwell, did something he had not done in eleven years. He let himself be taken quietly.

That was the beginning. The rest was eleven weeks.

He remembered the processing room most clearly.

Fluorescent light that hummed at a pitch just below the threshold of pain. A sergeant with a chewing habit and kind eyes who took his fingerprints and then, twenty minutes later, took them again, because somebody had telephoned and somebody else had explained. Bond never learned the mechanics of it. He knew only that the card went into the drawer and did not come back out, and that within a day his diplomatic protection had been withdrawn with a politeness that made it worse. Nobody official had ever heard of Commander James Bond, and when he said the name aloud it sounded, even to him, like the sort of thing a man invents.

For eleven weeks John Mason existed as a prisoner inside the supposedly escape-proof Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

The Rock. There is nothing romantic about it. The buildings are concrete and old, the paint is the colour of a sickroom, and the sea around it moves fast and cold in a way that the brochures describe as bracing. The wind comes off the water and finds whatever is warm. In the cell block the noise is not the shouting you expect from films but a low continuous industrial sound, steel and stone and two hundred men trying not to be where they are.

Bond had a cell on D Block, upper tier, nine feet by five. He learned the shape of it by heart in four days: the water stain on the ceiling that looked like Ireland, the rivet in the door frame that was loose if you worked it with a coin, the faint tremor that went through the concrete at 6:40 every morning when the laundry boiler was lit.

He learned other things.

He learned that the fourth screw on the night shift had a cough like tea being poured, and that he read his newspaper for exactly seven minutes before returning to his post. He learned that nobody corrected this sort of thing, because nothing of that kind had ever gone wrong before.

Most of all he learned something about himself that he did not enjoy.

He had expected to be frightened. Instead he discovered, somewhere around the third week, that he was bored, and then, worse, that he was calm. Twenty-two days in and he understood with absolute clarity that he could kill the screw with his hands if he wanted to, and then the next one, and that he would only get seven cells down the tier before it stopped mattering. That was the thing that frightened him. Not the walls. The discovery that he was better at being a prisoner than he had ever been at anything else.

There was exactly one door in that building which nobody ever opened.

The third door on the north side of D Block stood opposite the morgue and gave onto a maintenance store that nobody used, because there was nothing in it to use. Bond had established that by the fourth day from the dust: an unbroken film of it across the threshold, and one set of footprints going in and coming straight out again, belonging to whoever had last been sent to look at something and had decided not to bother.

He opened it for the first time on the ninth night, with a stolen nail and eleven minutes’ work. That was reconnaissance and nothing more; he wanted to know whether the thing could be opened, and how long it took, and what was behind it, before he decided whether any of it was worth anything at all. He shut it

again behind him and stood in pitch dark with his hands out.

There was something in it.

Behind the shelving at the far end was a service shaft, bricked up in 1933 by men in a hurry in a room nobody could see, sweating salt for thirty years and running, so far as Bond could tell with his palms in the dark, upward and away from the cell block.

He began working on the eleventh day.

It was not a plan yet. It was simply that a man who discovers he is calm needs something to do with his hands, and now he knew where there were hands to be busy with.

He began digging on the fourteenth night and worked fifty-two nights in all, to the sixty-fifth.

It is worth saying what that actually involved, because in films men do it in eleven minutes with a grin. Bond spent fifty-two nights kneeling on a stone floor with a spoon against mortar, and the mortar came away in quantities that would fit in a matchbox, and everything he removed had to be carried out in the hems of his trousers and distributed into a dozen different corners of the exercise yard over those weeks, a pocketful a night, and the arithmetic of it was that a complete job meant four hundred and eleven pounds of brick.

He did not remove four hundred and eleven pounds. He removed sixty-one, which is the difference between engineering and burglary; and after sixty-one pounds the wall was no longer a wall but a pane of glass pretending, and he knew exactly how much pressure would break it and exactly how much noise it would make.

What he did not know, for the first twenty-six of those nights, was where the shaft came out. That did not trouble him much. A man who is digging is at least doing something.

Then, on the fortieth day, somebody gave him a library book.

Somebody had donated a dozen or so paperbacks in 1961 and they had been circulating ever since, and one of them was a history of the island written by a former guard in 1934 — before it was a federal penitentiary, when it was still a military prison with a garrison in it. Bond read it twice in four days and four more times over the following three weeks, not for the stories but for the floor plan printed inside the front cover, drawn when the buildings were new, which showed eleven things that no longer existed.

One of them was a bakery.

One of them was a cistern.

One of them was a corridor of twenty-two feet marked simply STORE, running behind the morgue on the north-east side, built in 1910 to move supplies up from the dock without going through the prison proper, and bricked up in 1933 when the military handed the island over and somebody decided that a morgue ought to have a proper wall behind it.

Which meant that the wall he had spent twenty-six nights eating his way through came out somewhere a man could walk to the sea from.

So the plan arrived on the fortieth day, by which time he was twenty-six nights into the digging. That is the correct order of these things, and it is the only reason he ever got off that island at all. Most men plan and then dig. Bond dug until the brickwork told him what was permitted, and then he planned.

After that there remained only the ordinary facts.

The second double shift change happened at 21:40 and 22:20 on Tuesdays, which meant that the fourth screw — Nightingale, who coughed like tea being poured — was relieved eleven

minutes early and had to walk forty feet of corridor past a maintenance door nobody looked at twice.

He had a spoon, a stolen nail, and a length of wire he took from the grille of a loudspeaker in the exercise yard in his seventh week while everyone else watched the softball. He had no rope, and twelve days to make one out of mattress ticking, and nothing whatsoever to test it on.

Then, one night, he disappeared.

No witnesses. No recovered body. No explanation.

The official report stated that Mason had escaped through an unknown maintenance passage and was presumed drowned, which allowed the Bureau to say deceased and allowed the Navy to say not our island any more, and allowed everyone else to go home. In reality Bond had gone down through a disused service shaft behind the morgue that had been sealed in 1933 with a brick wall nobody had checked since, across a maintenance catwalk running the length of the island’s north shore, out through a storm drain that had been half-blocked for thirty years, and down to the water on a rope made of mattress ticking and loudspeaker wire.

The crossing went badly, and Bond had known it would.

The drain came out on the island’s north shore eighteen feet above the tideline, through a mouth of concrete no bigger than a coal chute and half-blocked for thirty years. Bond had opened it far enough to get one shoulder through. He went out head first on his belly, the rope knotted round his instep and his shoes knotted to him by their laces, which is the only way to carry anything down a rope made of mattress ticking and loudspeaker wire with nobody below to catch you.

The descent took fourteen seconds and most of the skin on both palms.

It was twenty minutes to midnight, with no rain on the island for eleven days and a moon three nights short of full, which cuts both ways: it put a black shadow along the foot of the wall, and it put the water itself in plain sight for any man who thought to look down. Below him the water went past the foot of the concrete at something near four knots without hurrying.

Bond got into the lee of the mouth, sat down in six inches of it, and took out the raincoat: prison oilcloth, the colour of a dirty bandage, and the only thing in his possession worth anything at all. He had thought of little else for eleven days and had never been able to test it, because there is nowhere on Alcatraz to test a thing like that.

He buttoned the neck first and buttoned it wrong, because his hands were wet. Then he knotted the cuffs, one overhand knot at each wrist, and — because knotted wrists still leak — took off his belt, threaded it through both knots and drew them together under the coat, so that what he had was not a bag with a hole at each end but a closed tube. He lay flat, swept it backwards through the air and shut the front under his chest, trapping what he could catch, worked it down his body under the water, and did that nine times more, until the sleeves stood out to either side of him like the wings of a very ugly bird.

It was not a raft. It was a bladder with sleeves. It would keep a man’s chin above water if he held it, and it would do nothing else whatsoever.

He went in backwards off the shelf, holding it against his chest with his forearms.

Eleven degrees, somebody had told him once, in a briefing he could no longer place; perhaps fifty-two on the other scale, though he had never been a man to care much about either.

Eleven degrees does not feel like cold water. It feels first like

being struck; then like a band of iron drawn tight about the chest; and then — third — like something that has made a mistake and will presently correct itself, which is the most dangerous of the three, because it is the one that persuades a man he can swim.

Bond took the shock through his teeth with his eyes shut and did not move. He made no movement at all for perhaps ninety seconds beyond what the water chose to do to him, and that was the entire purpose of the coat.

A man who strikes out from Alcatraz is dead. A man who floats is a piece of flotsam with a pulse.

The ebb took him west along the island’s own north wall.

He went feet first, which he had decided in the second week: a man moving backwards through water he cannot see takes whatever he hits on his heels and his spine rather than on his face. The wall went past at walking pace: the concrete skirt of the power house, its bolted shutters, forty years of lime bleeding out of the joint between two pours. Bond watched it go by with the cold pleasure of a man who has been right about something expensive: he could never have walked that wall. He had reached that conclusion by eye in his first week in the exercise yard.

Somewhere above him a man coughed three times:

Nightingale, walking back to his post along the same catwalk

Bond had crossed eleven minutes earlier, having read his newspaper for exactly seven minutes. Bond let himself be carried and did not wave.

Past the last of the buildings the rock stops being a prison and becomes simply a rock, and the bay opens out in front of a man in a manner that is not encouraging.

The current freshened. He felt it on the top of his head, the only part of a floating man of any use as an instrument. This was not water in the way a lake is water, but the Pacific going in and

out of a gap in a range of hills: four times a day forgetting which way it is going, and out through the Gate at a speed everybody had an opinion about and nobody agreed on, taking everything foolish enough to be floating. Then the lights opened wide, three-quarters of the horizon, none of it belonging to him, and directly ahead, across something between two and three miles of black moving water, the dark.

The Marin Headlands.

Every man who has thought about leaving the Rock has thought about them, because they are the nearest ground from which nobody is likely to come and knock on a door, and because they are full of drowned men who got there under their own steam. Bond intended to be neither of those things, and he understood better than most why men became the second: a current does not put you ashore. A current takes you where it is going. To go somewhere else you require something to push with, and a man’s arms are not free when they are holding the thing that keeps his mouth clear.

The bridge came up beside him — two towers, a cat’s cradle of cable, lit like a liner. Then the land beyond it resolved slowly into two shoulders of hill with a saddle between them, and eight or nine yellow lights scattered up the slope above the water, belonging to an army post whose name he did not yet know.

He had perhaps fifty minutes. That was the whole of it, and he had done this so often in the dark that it had stopped being arithmetic: a little over two miles of water at three knots or thereabouts, and then he would be somewhere he could not get off, and then he would be dead either way, and the only question that remained was which piece of ground the sea finally put him on.

Then he began to lose his hands.

Cold water does not kill a man first by drowning him; it kills him first by taking his hands away, and it takes them quickly, and a man who has spent eleven weeks imagining cold water without ever being in it will imagine that he will swim and will not imagine that he will simply be unable to hold on to the thing keeping him alive. The coat was no longer something he gripped.

It was something happening to him. His fingers had gone into the sleeves of their own accord and could not be argued with, and there was still a quarter of a mile of the strongest water on the

American west coast between him and anywhere at all.

So he used it.

He got the two fragments of brick out of the coat pocket — carried off the wall for nine weeks, one for each fist — pushed one into each cuff and hauled the knots down over them, which took four attempts and most of what remained in his forearms.

Then he let go. The coat went away from him, riding low, two sleeves of brick hanging under it, looking like nothing very much at all. He never learned what became of it. Some days afterwards the authorities dragged something shapeless and grey out of the bay and entered it in a ledger as clothing, possibly from the island, and boats went out looking where the entry suggested they should look, and whether any of it was his coat nobody could afterwards say.

Then he got his trousers off, which took a long time and cost him most of what was left. He knotted the legs at the ankles, buttoned the waistband shut, swung the whole thing over his head and filled it the way he had filled the coat. Canvas holds air badly and loses it quickly, and he had to do it again twice. But canvas does hold it, and after the third attempt he had something under his armpits that would keep the top of him out of the water while he used his legs.

He could not swim. He could kick, badly, in the direction of eight or nine yellow lights, at perhaps a three-quarters of a knot, for as long as his legs would answer him.

It took him twenty minutes to cover a quarter of a mile.

What he remembered afterwards was not the water but the noise, which got louder for a very long time and then stopped being a noise and became a beach. Shingle. An idle, meaningless shuffling of shingle, the sound it makes when there is nobody on it, and by then he was not so much steering towards it as being conducted to it. He came in on a rising swell he had done nothing whatsoever to catch, felt his right knee strike rock, and did the only thing left to him, which was to let the next one take him and not fight it.

The second wave put him down on gravel and then tried to take him back, and he got the fingers of one hand into the stones and held on while it went over him, and then clawed himself three feet further up the beach and held on again.

He lay there for a while with the water still trying to get hold of him, and after a time he understood that it had stopped trying.

Ten minutes later he got his trousers on, because a man walking into California at one o’clock in the morning with no trousers on is a man a policeman will want to talk to. Then he got to his knees, and then he stood up, which took three attempts, and walked unsteadily up the beach away from the water with his shoes still knotted round his neck, forgotten.

He was in the lee of a concrete breakwater, on a curve of gravel inside a small bay full of the slow breathing of boats at their moorings. Up a slope of dead yellow grass there was a scatter of buildings with lights in some of the windows. Fifty yards away a wharf ran out into the water, and on the wharf there was a long low shed with its doors shut, and a marine railway

running down into the bay with a cradle standing on it, and three or four vessels tied up in Army grey.

Bond looked at all of this for a moment. Then he sat down, because there was nothing else he could do.

He had perhaps four hours of darkness left and no capacity whatever to use them. He got himself into the lee of the shed, into a corner where two walls met, took his trousers off again and wrung them out as well as he could manage with hands that would not properly close, put them back on wet, put his shoes on at last because he had remembered them, and folded himself into the smallest shape available to him. Slowly, over what felt like a very long time, the shaking stopped.

He did not sleep. He considered, in a detached way, that this was the farthest he had got in the world in eleven weeks, that he was wearing a prison shirt, that he could not feel his feet, and that this was a considerably better position than he had any right to expect. Then he stopped considering things and waited for it to get light.

It got light.

Dawn happens slowly and then all at once. First there is a difference in the colour of nothing, and then quite suddenly there is the other side of the bay, and Bond watched Alcatraz come up out of the dark two miles away, small and grey and entirely ordinary, and was surprised to find that the sight annoyed him.

Movement on the wharf. A man walked down to the nearest vessel with a thermos under his arm, unlocked the wheelhouse, went in and shut the door, and after a moment the engines started and settled into the sort of knocking idle that means a boat is going nowhere for some while. Bond watched him. He was not young. He was alone. He read something for eleven minutes, put it down, got out and walked up towards the buildings, and did

not lock anything, because the boats belonged to the Army, and there is nobody on a military wharf at seven in the morning of a

Wednesday who is expected to steal one.

Bond gave him eleven minutes to get wherever he was going. Then he walked down the wharf.

Inside the shed there were oilskins hanging on a nail, and

Bond took one, because a man in a prison shirt crossing San

Francisco Bay in broad daylight is a man who will be remembered. He chose the least objectionable thing he could find that would float well enough to get him out of the country: about forty feet, a harbour launch, grey, with a wheelhouse and a running light that did not work and no name on the bow that he could read and nothing worth locking. He cast off with his fingers in a manner that would have been comic to watch, got the engine turning on the third attempt, and gave her the width of the bay, because he did not think he was going to be capable of steering for very long.

He crossed to a naval yard on the far shore and left her in shallow water against a pier wall at Hunters Point, with no attempt at concealment, because a boat that is obviously stolen and obviously abandoned is worth more than one that is missing: it gets found, it gets receipted, and it gets dated. Then he went ashore on his own feet, took public transport across the Bay

Bridge with his hands in the pockets of somebody else’s oilskin, and made contact with an MI6 extraction team in a hotel room in

Oakland that smelled of furniture polish, where a man Bond had known for six years looked at him for a long moment and said, "Good God, you’re thin."

He had been on the island seventy-seven days, and he had been inside that wall since the ninth night, and he had left his cell on the night of the seventy-seventh, which was the fifth of

February 1963.

Forty-four days later, on the twenty-first of March, the

Bureau of Prisons closed Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary for good and shipped the last twenty-seven inmates to other institutions.

Every scrap of paper the island held went with them, into three separate warehouses, in a hurry, in the wrong order.

Which is why there are two versions of when John Patrick

Mason escaped from the Rock, and why they have never been reconciled.

The summary card — the one-page abstract that sits at the front of the file and is all ninety-nine men in a hundred ever read

— was typed in 1974 by somebody working from the Shipping and Receiving docket rather than the incident report, and it says

because 1962 was the year in which the joint arrangement with the British had begun, and a record that agreed with the arrangement was considerably easier to file than one that did not.

The supporting papers tell a different story if anybody troubles to read to page nine: the Alcatraz inmate ledger with the intake date of 20 November 1962, the Bureau of Prisons transfer forms, and the receipt for a stolen forty-foot supply launch recovered at Hunters Point on 6 February 1963. Everything down at that depth says February. Nobody has ever bothered to amend the front page, because amending a front page requires a man to sign something.

Bond found this out in 1982. By then he was back inside, and Vale was dead, and the Americans had come to lean on him with whatever happened to be nearest to hand, which on that occasion was the Bureau’s file on Mason. They read the date off the summary card with a certain satisfaction, believing they had caught him out on his own history; Bond, who had contradicted

nobody about anything in nine years, let them enjoy it. It was only later, alone, that he understood what he had actually been shown — not that the front page was wrong, but that somebody had once needed it to be, and that needing it had been enough.

Within a year he was operating again.

Auric Goldfinger had been rather less trouble than the Rock.

Now, almost nine years later, sitting in a small grey office with the rain beginning again outside, Bond considered the fact that the Americans wanted the same man who had embarrassed them at Alcatraz to penetrate their most closely guarded secrets.

He found the irony irresistible.

He found the timing less amusing.

M opened a locked drawer.

Bond watched him do it, because M’s drawers were not usually locked, and because whatever came out of a locked drawer in a room where nobody had offered you a chair was going to be either a weapon or an identity.

It was a British passport, navy blue, the older issue, its cover softened by handling.

Bond took it and opened it.

His own face stared back at him. Not a forgery in the usual sense, not a substitute pasted over a real document — his photograph, his biographical details, his signature, the whole thing issued with whatever issuing meant when it was done in a room with no windows. The date of issue was November 1962.

The name beneath it read:

JOHN PATRICK MASON.

"Again?" Bond asked. "Your original cover remains intact." "Rather unfortunate, considering its history."

"It has certain advantages. The Americans have no official record connecting Mason to the Service."

Bond closed the passport, held it a moment, and opened it again, because he wanted to see whether the photograph would change. It did not. He had never much liked pictures of himself and here was another, looking younger and considerably more certain. "And Bond?"

M paused. Out in the corridor a door closed and somebody laughed at something, and the sound was so ordinary that Bond felt the hair rise on his forearms. "James Bond will be taking an extended leave of absence."

Bond looked up. "For how long?" "As long as necessary." "You’re asking me to go into Washington as a man with an outstanding escape warrant and no diplomatic protection, to steal documents from a government that has already decided once that it doesn’t want me to exist." "I’m asking you to do a job." "No," Bond said, mildly. "You were asked to ask me, and you are asking me. Those are two different things, and by now I suspect you know exactly who did the first one."

M’s eyes came up. For an instant — no longer — Bond saw something in them he had never seen before and would not see again for the rest of his life: not anger, not the old impatience, but something very like a man trying to warn somebody without being overheard. "That will do," M said.

Bond waited, but M was finished.

He stood, put the passport in his pocket, and walked to the door. There he turned, because he wanted one ordinary thing out of this meeting and he was not going to leave without asking. "Sir. Is Moneypenny to be told anything?" "No." "Q?" "Especially not Q."

Bond nodded.

He had expected that. What he had not expected was the way

M said it: not for security, not need to know, but with a small, weary emphasis, as though Q were the sort of problem that occurred to him last and worst. Bond thought about that for the next two days, and then for the next twenty years he had time to think about it more.

He went down the corridor, signed out, and walked out into the rain.

There was a pub on the corner where he sometimes went, and he went there and drank a whisky and soda standing up, which he disliked doing. He considered telephoning Felix Leiter.

He considered not considering it. He considered a great many things.

What he kept returning to, as he had been returning to it since the radio room of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, was not the danger. He knew danger. He had slept beside it most of his adult life, and in time he had even learned to be flippant about it, which is a kind of love letter written by a man who does not know how to write one.

No. What he kept returning to was simpler.

He had spent his whole life assuming that somewhere behind him there was a chain of men — M, and the people above M, and the people above them who answered to people who had been

elected — and that the chain, however much it creaked, held.

That somebody was ultimately responsible. That a thing could not simply be done to you by a country, because a country was not a person and therefore could not want anything.

He had never doubted that before.

He finished his drink and found it hadn’t helped at all.

Rather than order another, he decided to go home and pack. He had a train to catch in the morning, and a woman to meet in

Paris, and a name he was going to have to learn to answer to.

The rain had settled in properly by the time he reached his flat. He let himself in, locked the door, and stood in the hall with the light off, listening to the building the way he always did, without thinking about it.

Then he took out the passport again and looked at it under the lamp.

JOHN PATRICK MASON.

Eleven weeks of his life had already been spent inside that name. Now it was going to take the rest.

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