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were about three times as harsh as civilian ones. Tracy supposed there was logic in not opening to dispute every call the corrections officers made.
    Too many write-ups, or too severe an infraction, and a prisoner earned himself a stay in the hole-the prisoners’ pseudonym for solitary confinement. There, the rules were harder to live with. The prisoner was allowed out of his six-by-ten-foot cell only an hour each day, and he had to stay awake from 0330 until 2130-three-thirty in the morning until nine-thirty at night. He couldn’t sit on his cot, only on the chair inside his cell. And he could read only the Laurel Correctional Facility Rule Book or the Bible.
    Tracy signed in and then followed her armed escort down the two-story row of cells. The bays housing the men reminded her of those in basic training-except for the bars. Cramped space and the prisoners’ penchant for making weapons from the most unlikely objects kept furnishings sparse-a cot, a chair, a toilet, and a footlocker-but the place was spotless: unmarked white walls and gray tile floors that gleamed and smelled of fresh wax. Yet the air felt stale and recycled; old and used, like many.of the prisoners’ expressions. Dressed alike in issue gray jumpsuits, officers were segregated from enlisted prisoners, as is custom military-wide, though none wore any rank. Those sentenced for longer than five years would eventually be transferred to Leavenworth. With a stint at “the castle” hanging over their heads, she didn’t suppose they had much incentive to feel enthusiastic.
    She walked swiftly through the center of the cell block. Early on at Laurel, she’d learned not to linger between the entrance and the attorney/client conference room, or to so much as glance at any of the men. Once a female attorney did that in Cell Block D, she was verbally tormented more every time she walked through the steel doors.
    The attorney/client conference room was down near the far end of the long corridor. She often wondered if it had been placed there deliberately to diminish the number of visits attorneys made to clients. It didn’t take much imagination to walk in and feel oppressed.
    The feeling hit her every time she came here, as soon as the heavy steel doors slammed shut behind her and locked. But before today, she had never suffered such strong claustrophobic symptoms. Hot, clammy, and sweat-sheened, she felt dizzy and her throat threatened to squeeze closed. Why did the oxygen in the air feel like lead in her lungs?
    A shade shy of panic, she issued herself a stern lecture. Calm down, Tracy. You know why this visit is the worst yet. You know why … She did know. This visit, she had come to meet with Captain Adam Burke, a traitor and coward who had killed four of Janet’s Intel friends. And from all reports, Burke was about as excited at the prospect of meeting her as she was at the prospect of defending him.
    God help them both. And please-please!-Let her find a legal hook.
    She stepped into the postage stamp generously referred to as a conference room. It was empty of everything except bare white walls, a marred wooden card-size table that had seen ‘better days, and three scratched and dented metal folding chairs that attested to some of the less-than pleasant conversations which had taken place here. But the ceiling fan’s paddles, thumping overhead, made the Lysol-scented room semicoot.
    Tracy slid her chair over so that when Burke arrived and sat down he wouldn’t be between her and the door. No sense in taking unnecessary risks with a man who had little to lose. She checked her watch. Ten o’clock on the nose. Burke should arrive any A guard around thirty, sporting sergeant’s stripes, a blond crew cut, and arms the size of steamship rounds preceded Burke into the room, blocking her view of her client. When he stepped aside and Tracy got her first look at Adam Burke, it took everything she had in her not to gasp.
    His legs were shackled. His arms