She argued that her client was a victim of entrapment, and insisted that Wilson’s remarks had been taken out of context. Apple called Maddox a “provocateur,” and pointed out that after Wilson was charged with solicitation of murder, the U.S. Attorney’s Office moved to dismiss Maddox’s indictment in a drug case.

The jury didn’t buy it. Wilson was convicted. And because his target was the U.S. attorney, he was sentenced to “the Alcatraz of the Rockies” in Florence, Colorado.

There he spent his first year locked down in a six-by-ten concrete cage, doing time beside the likes of the Unabomber, the Shoebomber, Terry Nichols, and Ramsay Yousef. Condemned by Amnesty International for violating the United Nations’ minimal rules for prisoners, the Supermax prison in Florence was brightly lighted twenty-four hours a day. But not by the sun. The only daylight the prisoners could see was a segment of sky, high up on the wall. Like everything else, this was a security feature. In the absence of a landscape, escape became psychologically impossible. All that was left to the prisoners was a toilet, a sink, and a slab of concrete to sleep on. That, and a TV screen embedded in the wall, tuned to insipid programming.

Burke rocked back in his chair. Supermax, he thought. Jesus!

There were only two Supermax facilities in the federal system, he read, though six others were planned. Of the two, the one in Florence was newer. And therefore crueler. More state of the art. The inmates were effectively buried alive.

Burke had been brought up on movies of convicts pumping iron, playing football, or running on a guarded track. But there was none of that for most of the prisoners in Florence. Their first year, and sometimes two, was spent in their cells with virtually no opportunity to exercise or interact with others, including the guards. If their behavior changed – if they embraced the hopelessness of their situation and surrendered to apathy – they might someday be released into the larger population of less dangerous inmates. Until then, they might just as well be frozen in amber.

It was all about isolation.

Guards slid the prisoners’ meals into revolving “food wickets,” so that the trays appeared in the cells with no apparent human intervention. Drains and drainpipes, which inmates used to communicate in other prisons, were damped. You could bang on the toilet all day long, and no one would hear you. Cells were soundproofed, and sealed off by two doors, one barred, the other solid.

Even as the inmates were denied a view of the surrounding landscape, visitors were equally clueless of the terrain. The only approach to the prison was through a long, winding tunnel. As with the meals in the cells, visitors arrived out of nowhere to find themselves in a hermetically sealed, antiseptic hell, surrounded by walls gleaming with razor wire, monitored by pressure pads, motion detectors, and dogs.

It was, Burke thought, a long way for Wilson to fall, and a hard place to land. He glanced at the notes he’d made, then worked the Internet to find telephone numbers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco; Wilson’s lawyer, Jill Apple; and Robbie Maddox.

He gave up on Maddox right away. Anywho.com didn’t have a listing for him in San Francisco, which meant that he could be anywhere. Sozio was easier to locate. He was a judge now, working out of the same federal building in San Francisco where he’d previously worked as a U.S. attorney, but there were so many layers of insulation between him and the public that getting an interview would be virtually impossible. That left Apple.

He found her number the old-fashioned way, through information. Half an hour later, he was lying to her. He told her he was a journalist who wrote for Harper’s, Counterpunch, and Salon. He mentioned some of the stories he’d covered (as a photographer), and said he was thinking of doing a piece about the Invention Secrecy Act. He was calling her because he’d become interested in one of the cases she’d handled.

“Jack Wilson,” she guessed.

“Right!”

She was a friendly woman with a warm southern voice. “Are you in touch with Jack?” she asked. And then, in a rush of realization: “He ought to be out by now!”

“Yes, he’s been released but, no, I don’t know where he is,” Burke told her. “I was hoping-”

“Well, I can’t help there,” she said. “We didn’t stay in touch.”

“No?”

“No. We appealed, but… I imagine he’s a different person, now.”

“Yeah, well, he would be.”

She sighed. “It was heartbreaking, really.”

“How’s that?” Burke asked.

“I don’t know how much you know about Jack’s life, but – he achieved so much, and then… it was just so sad. And unfair, too.”

“Unfair?”

“Bad luck.”

“How so?”

Apple sighed. “About a month before Jack went to trial, some lunatic walked into a courtroom in San Jose, and just opened fire. Shot the judge, a bailiff, and a popular young attorney on the prosecution team. Then he turned the gun on himself.”

“How’d he get into court with a gun?”

“The papers said it was a Glock. Lots of plastic parts, though I guess it’s mostly metal by weight. Anyway, you have to be trained to recognize it on a scanner if it’s disassembled. I guess he put it together in the men’s room. But the point is, if it wasn’t for San Jose, I don’t think Jack would have been prosecuted. They didn’t have a case, but they really wanted to send a message.”

“I read what Wilson said on the tape,” Burke told her. “It sounded like-”

“-bullshit. Which is what it was. He was angry. Who wouldn’t be? But murder? No way. If you’d seen that sleazeball on the stand… what’s-his-name? I’ve blocked it out.”

“Maddox?”

She made a disgusted sound. “This is the man they’re talking about when they talk about someone with ‘a record as long as your arm.’ So, of course, he was a professional snitch, and Jack, well, Jack had never been inside a jail before. So he was easy pickin’s.”

“Why was he in jail, anyway?” Burke asked. “Couldn’t he make bail?”

“He was arrested on the weekend, and I don’t think they arraigned him until Monday afternoon. He had a public defender at that point, and I think he was trying to arrange a loan, using his condo as collateral. But it took a few days and… Maddox happened. It was bad luck. Like I said.”

“You also said he was easy pickings,” Burke reminded her.

“Right. Maddox set him up. I can imagine how it went down. If you listen to the tape, there’s no context for anything. All of a sudden, Jack says, ‘Sozio,’ like it’s a revelation. And the conversation isn’t continuous. There are all these gaps. I had an expert witness examine the tape, and he suggested Maddox was manipulating the microphone. But we couldn’t prove it. And in the end, the jury didn’t buy it.”

“Did you call Wilson to the stand?”

She hesitated. “I did, and it was a mistake. Jack was… he’s very charismatic, one on one. Handsome as hell. But on the witness stand? I wanted a victim up there, but what I got instead was John Galt!”

“The Ayn Rand thing,” Burke said.

“You know about that!”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it wasn’t helpful,” Apple told him.

“I’m surprised you let him talk about that-”

“I didn’t! I cut him off as soon as he got started. But the prosecutor picked up on it, and jump-started the whole thing all over again on cross. And he just hung himself. He actually told the jury that it didn’t have a right to judge him because they weren’t his peers.” She paused. “This did not go over well.”

Burke laughed. “Meanwhile-”

“Meanwhile, I’m trying to keep the jury focused on the throwaway Indian boy who was left on a doorstep in a cardboard box. You know, he didn’t even know who he was named for until he was ten years old. I mean, he looked Indian, but he had no idea what tribe he was or anything like that. That’s when he got a foster mother who finally did some mothering. She helped him find out who he was, and where he’d come from.”