Four Blind Mice

second catch.
Kyle Craig was imprisoned there, my old nemesis. Kyle was also on death row.
    The Florence ADX was one of the so-called supermax prison facilities. Thirty-six states now had them. Death row was located in the Security Housing Unit, a kind of prison within a prison. It turned out to be a bland, sand-colored building with extraordinarily heavy security inside and out. That was comforting, since Kyle Craig was being held inside — and Kyle had nothing but disdain for prison security.
    Two heavily armed guards accompanied me to death row. As we walked down the otherwise empty, fluorescent-lit hallways, I heard none of the usual chaotic noise of a prison. My mind was somewhere else anyway.
    I had arrived in Colorado about noon. Everything was running smoothly on the home front, and hopefully I’d be back in D.C. that night. Nana wasn’t missing any opportunities, though. Before I left the house, she sat me down and told me one of her story-parables. She called it The Story of the Thousand Marbles. “I heard this on NPR, Alex. It’s a true story, and I’m passing it along to you for what it’s worth. Seems there was this man who lived in southern California, around San Diego, I believe it was. He had a family, nice family; and he worked very hard, long hours, lots of weekends. Sound familiar?”
    “Probably familiar to a lot of people,” I said. “Men and women. Go ahead, though, Nana. This hardworking man with the extraordinarily nice family living outside San Diego. What happened to him?”
    “Well, anyway, this man had a kindly grandfather who adored both him and his family. He’d noticed that his grandson was working too hard, and he was the one who told him about the marbles. He told it this way. He said that the average life span for men was around seventy-five years. That meant thirty-nine hundred Saturdays — to play when you were a kid and to be with your family when you got older and wiser.”
    “I see,” I said. “Or to play once you got older. Or even to give lectures to anyone who’ll listen.”
    “Shush, Alex. Now, listen. So the grandfather figured out that his grandson, who was forty-three, had about sixteen hundred and sixty Saturdays left in his life. Statistically speaking. So what he did was he bought two large jars and filled them with beautiful cat’s-eye marbles. He gave them to his grandson. And he told him that every Saturday, he should take
one
marble out of the jar. Just one, and just as a reminder that he had only so many Saturdays left, and that they were precious beyond belief. Think about that, Alex. If you have the time,” said Nana.
    So here I was at a supermax prison — on a Saturday. I didn’t think I was wasting the day, not at all. But Nana’s message had sunk in anyway.
    This was my last murder case. It had to be. This was the end of the road for Detective Alex Cross.
    I focused my mind on the baffling case as I walked toward the cell of Tran Van Luu. He would make my trip worth at least one marble.
    Or so I had to hope.

Chapter 72
    TRAN VAN LUU was fifty-four years old, and he informed me that he spoke Vietnamese, French, and English fluently. His English was excellent, and I couldn’t help thinking that he looked more like a college professor than a prison inmate convicted of several murders. Luu wore gold wire-rimmed glasses and had a long gray goatee. He was philosophical — about everything, apparently. But was he Foot Soldier?
    “Nominally, I am a Buddhist,” he said as he sat in a cell that was only seven by twelve feet. A bed, a stool, and a fixed writing shelf filled more than half of the space. The fixtures were all made of poured concrete so they couldn’t be moved or disassembled by the inmates.
    “I will give you some history,” he said. “The back-story.”
    I nodded. “That would be a good place to start.”
    “My birthplace is Son Trach village in the Quang Binh province, just north of what was the DMZ. This is one of the country’s poorest provinces, but they are all relatively poor. I started work in my family’s rice fields at five. Everyone was always hungry, even though we grew food. We had one real meal a day, usually yams or cassava. Ironically, our rice was handed over to the landlord. All loyalty was to the family, including ancestors, a plot of land, and the village. Nationalism was nonexistent, a Western notion imported by Ho Chi Minh.
    “My family moved south in 1963 and I enlisted in the army. The