Chapter 259

The warden’s residence sat inside the outer wall of Somora Prison, separated from the correctional complex by a tall barrier. To enter the actual facility, they had to pass through a separate security zone.

2:37 a.m., the hour when Sunday turned into Monday. They climbed into a patrol vehicle—high-bodied, with massive off-road tires.

Malcolm had Baekgyeong and the still-unnamed pretty youth put on correctional officer uniforms, batons, and ID badges. It was precautionary: if the security system slipped out of test mode and returned to normal operations, the disguises would help dispel any suspicion of outside intruders.

“We’re leaving now. We have to reach the checkpoint by 2:50, so mind yourselves,” Malcolm said.

Baekgyeong’s reply came the instant the words left his mouth. “Please. Why would we go out of our way to invite danger?”

Malcolm started the engine. From the residence to the only road into the facility—the mandatory security gate—was four kilometers. At the speed limit, a little over ten minutes. There were twenty CCTV cameras along the route; an ally on the security team would wipe whatever traces they left.

Searchlights atop the watchtowers turned like clock hands through a full three hundred sixty degrees, but so long as nothing suspicious happened as they moved, they would reach the gate without incident.

It started smoothly—until they rounded a gentle curve into the northwest blind spot of a tower and a ghostly shape stepped into their path.

Malcolm stomped the brakes just short of hitting the specter and yelped, panic-stricken. “W-what the—!”

From the back seat, the pretty youth breathed a whisper like a sigh. “Isaac.”

Malcolm turned toward the youth, his face still bleached as if he’d seen a ghost. The young man stared wide-eyed, stunned, like someone in shock.

“Someone you know?”

“U—unlock the door.”

“The door?”

“The searchlight! Open the door, now!”

Ten meters ahead, a round cone of the searchlight was cutting toward them through the dark. The boundary of light and shadow was razor-sharp. Malcolm, flustered, thumbed the door locks. The passenger door flew open and a man like some great beast climbed in without hesitation, tipping the vehicle to one side before it settled.

“Step on it,” the man ordered, voice low and unnerving.

Malcolm wasn’t a man used to taking orders, but the force rolling off the stranger made him press the accelerator on reflex. The searchlight washed over their car and slid away, indifferent.

Blinded white, then plunged back into black—Malcolm blinked hard, steering by the pale haze of the headlights. Only after several seconds did it hit him: the man who had just climbed in might be Gezar Bazelli’s adopted son.

The air felt like damp cold sweat choking his throat. In nearly sixty years he had met countless criminals, but never someone who left this kind of inexplicable wrongness in their wake.

“So you’re alive.” Baekgyeong, silent since the stranger’s appearance, broke the night with a taunt.

“Unfortunately, my life is hard to kill,” the man in the passenger seat said, without a trace of humor.

He didn’t look back. He just heaved rough breaths, like he’d sprinted flat-out to intercept Malcolm’s car. Malcolm seized the brief return of silence to ask what he needed to know.

“You’re Isaac Bazelli?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get inside the prison?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Let me guess—you approached the designated coordinates on the seabed and dismantled a high-pressure underwater lock.”

The man gave a dry chuckle at Baekgyeong’s jab—as if it were a private joke between them.

Only then did the warden dimly grasp Baekgyeong’s meaning. He had no idea how, but this Isaac had entered a specific underwater zone, dismantled something carrying a high-voltage current, and come in through a passage connected to the sea. The reek of salt rolling off his soaked clothes said as much.

While he drove, Malcolm stayed on alert, tracking Isaac and the presence in the back seat. In the taut quiet, Baekgyeong kept probing, emotions clamped down. Isaac, unreadable, stared straight ahead like an eagle locked on a target.

The pretty youth who had so urgently demanded the door be opened reacted in a way Malcolm hadn’t expected—his face tangled with emotions Malcolm couldn’t parse: relief at seeing Isaac again, or discomfort.

“Are you here to see Gezar too?”

“Yes. Which means you’re going to help me.”

“Impossible. The simultaneous entry authorization is capped at three.”

“Aren’t you the man in charge here? Fix it. Now.”

Isaac casually produced a jackknife. The coating seemed to drink in light; unless you looked closely, you wouldn’t even realize it was a blade. The warden glared at him—and then, having no choice, called Security. Fortunately, just before they reached the first gate, the access authorization was temporarily adjusted to four.

At exactly 2:50, Malcolm stopped at the security gate and tapped his card to the reader. He pressed his eye to the iris scanner; the infrared swept his iris in a flash. With beeps and the grinding of massive steel, the first gate opened. The guard in the booth didn’t even step outside—just held his newspaper higher and kept reading. No ID check, no X-ray vehicle scan.

Malcolm got back in and headed for the high-risk inmate block. At 3:00 a.m. on the dot, they stepped inside the building. As arranged, the assigned officer was absent. Malcolm led the three of them straight down to the basement.

The block was built of reinforced walls with more than twenty centimeters of steel rebar within. There were three hundred solitary cells, called “unit blocks.”

There were currently two hundred ten high-risk inmates, most on death row, some terrorists and spies who had leaked state secrets. They lived twenty-three hours a day alone in coffin-like concrete cells, then spent the remaining hour exercising in a windowless room barely three pyeong in size, with no contact with the outside. Night and day bled into meaninglessness; the only rhythm was the regular alternation of meals and surveillance.

Limping, Malcolm took the stairs down into the corridor below. Unlike aboveground, there was only one prisoner kept down here. He stopped at Unit 300, checked the men behind him, and said:

“This is the cell where Gezar lives.”

Without meaning to, Malcolm watched Isaac’s face. In the dark he hadn’t noticed, but in the light the man was corpse-pale, as if bled dry. Eyes shadowed and bloodless, he stared at the closed steel door.

“Is Gezar in there now?”

Malcolm shook his head. “He’s in the isolation ward. Don’t you want to see the cell he’s been in? He’s family.”

He jerked his chin toward the observation hatch you could use to look in. Isaac shook his head without hesitation.

“If you don’t want to, we’ll go straight to isolation.”

But the youth following at the rear couldn’t hide his rising curiosity; he pressed his face to the little square of metal-framed glass. One glance inside and he recoiled, shaking his head. “No one could live here,” he muttered to himself.

After the final security check, Malcolm led them into the isolation passage on the right—a special zone of complete separation from the outside, off-limits even to officers without authorization. Passing under CCTV cameras layered at every corner, they finally reached the isolation room.

Gezar Bazelli.

Three winters ago, Malcolm Knox’s mandatory retirement request had been denied. Instead, the BOP director who trusted him appointed him warden of Somora Prison. Before transferring in, he was given a file on a man long confined in the high-risk block.

A man named Colby James, it said, had undergone genetic procedures to cure a hereditary disease and mutated into an entirely new biological class, one marked by extreme sexual drive and a defect of extreme violence.

He had murdered his adopted son and partner, been captured by police, and in despair attempted self-immolation—but failed. He was sentenced to death and confined in Somora Prison. Because this new human type went into heat periodically like an animal, he had to be sealed in the isolation ward at specific times.

Malcolm hadn’t believed the condensed report on Colby James. But it was true—except for the lies, and the parts deliberately left out.

To Isaac Bazelli, the man who lived like a lifelong thorn inside that story of Colby James—no, of Gezar Bazelli—Malcolm said:

“I’ll wait here. You have thirty minutes. Plenty of time to catch up.”