Page 1 of The Hero
Chapter One
Marlowe Kennedy jerked in surprise when one of the trustees yelled her name loud enough to be heard over the noise of the hundreds of sewing machines in the room.
Turning, she saw Yanisa scowling at her from just inside the door. She didn’t immediately move because the last thing Marlowe wanted was to get into trouble. Trustees were prisoners who’d been given a bit of power over their fellow inmates. One word from a trustee to the guards and a prisoner could find herself in solitary. Most of the women here were scared of the trustees, and Marlowe couldn’t blame them.
The ratio of guards to prisoners in this awful penitentiary in Thailand was something like twenty to one thousand. It was fear, or simply a lack of will, on the prisoners’ parts that kept them from uprising. Most of the women had been sentenced to life, Marlowe included.
It was unbelievable that barely a month ago, Marlowe had been an esteemed archaeologist working on a dig not too far from Bangkok. She’d been respected and considered an expert in her field. But now look at her. She was a convicted drug dealer, according to the Thai government, thrown away as if she was a piece of trash.
Her days were spent hunched over a sewing machine, stitching cheap blouses, and her nights sleeping in a room crammed with at least a hundred other women, lying shoulder to shoulder on a thin mattress that didn’t do a damn thing to cushion her from the hard concrete floor.
“Marlowe!” Yanisa yelled again, more impatiently this time. She gestured with her hand for her to come.
Standing, Marlowe made her way through the other women, who seemed not curious in the least why she’d been called out by the trustee. Or maybe they just knew better than to draw any attention to themselves by stopping what they were doing.
When Marlowe got close to Yanisa, the woman reached out and grabbed the front of her light-blue prisoner’s shirt and shook her. Marlowe’s first instinct was to smack the woman’s hand off her, to shove her backward, but if she did that, she’d go right back to solitary. It was forbidden for any of the other prisoners to touch a trustee. But of course that didn’t go both ways. The trustees could do whatever they wanted to the women in their charge. They frequently kicked, punched, and sometimes sexually assaulted others in the dark of night.
Such was life in this overcrowded and underfunded prison.
Yanisa turned, with a fistful of Marlowe’s shirt still in her hand, and started walking toward the administrative building.
Dread rolled through Marlowe. She didn’t like anything about the main building on the prison grounds. It was where the guards hung out. And where interrogations took place. Marlowe had spent more than enough time in one of the small rooms in the large brick building.
When she’d first been brought to the women’s prison from the archaeological dig site, she thought she’d be able to explain that the yaba pills found in her belongings weren’t hers. She thought she’d get a chance to explain her side, how she suspected her coworker, Ian West, of being the one to plant them.
But that hadn’t happened. Secured in a room in that admin building, she’d been yelled at for hours in Thai. She didn’t understand a word of what they were saying. She begged for an interpreter. For something to eat and drink. To use the bathroom. But no one seemed to care what she wanted.
She had no idea how long she’d been in the room, but finally a woman came in who spoke English. Marlowe had never been so relievedin her life to see someone she could understand, and who could understand her.
The woman explained that she was being charged with drug trafficking, and that she needed to sign an affidavit of some sort. Of course it was in Thai, and Marlowe couldn’t read it. She’d refused at first, and the woman insisted that if she didn’t sign it, she’d be found guilty on the spot and sentenced to death.
It had been a nightmare Marlowe had no idea how to get out of. She knew it wasn’t smart to sign anything without reading it first, but the woman had been so calm and reassuring. And by that point, Marlowe was hungry, exhausted, and terrified. She’d seen the way the male guards had looked at her during the long interrogation. She’d heard the horror stories of women being assaulted.
In the end, she’d signed the papers.
Then she’d been brought into a room, her clothes were taken away, and she’d been forced to change into the light-blue shirt and dark-blue skirt all the prisoners wore, and taken to solitary confinement.
So yeah, needless to say, she didn’t have good memories of the administrative building Yanisa was currently dragging her toward. At five feet, four inches, Marlowe wasn’t a large woman, and with the amount of weight she’d lost while she’d been incarcerated, she was even more slight. Generally, Thai women weren’t all that much taller than her, but Yanisa was an exception, which was probably part of the reason she was a trustee. She easily yanked Marlowe behind her as she walked, and it was all Marlowe could do to stay on her feet.
To Marlowe’s surprise, instead of taking her to one of the small interrogation rooms, Yanisa dragged her toward the visitors’ area.
For a brief moment, hope bloomed in Marlowe’s chest. Was Tony here? Had her brother finally been able to get through all the red tape to come see her?
She felt almost dizzy with relief. Tony would get her out of this. Her big brother had always been her protector. He had connectionsthanks to his work for a US senator. If anyone could figure this mess out, it was him.
Yanisa jerked to a stop and practically threw Marlowe into a chair placed in front of a chain-link fence. The setup for the prisoners to talk to visitors wasn’t ideal. She sat in front of the fence, and there was a second fence about eight feet away, behind which sat the visitors. There was absolutely no chance of them being able to touch, and in a room so large, with a dozen other women talking to those who’d come to see them, it was almost impossible to hear what anyone was saying.
“Five minutes,” Yanisa told her gruffly, then turned and stomped away.
No one was sitting in the opposite chair on the other side of the large gap, and Marlowe frowned in confusion. She looked eagerly toward the door at the side of the room when it opened, expecting to see Tony.
But the man who entered wasn’t anyone Marlowe had ever seen before. He stood out like a sore thumb from everyone else. He was tall. Had dark hair and a frightening scowl on his face, and was dressed impeccably in a white dress shirt, blue tie, and pair of khaki pants. He carried a briefcase, which he set on the ground as soon as he got to the space designated for her visitor.
He didn’t lower himself to the chair, though. He frowned at her through the fence.
After a beat, his lips moved, but Marlowe couldn’t hear what he was saying.
“I’m sorry, what?” she practically yelled.
