He seemed like such a little man, hunched over between two guards and hobbling in his shackles, his hair and face drained of almost all color. Even through the filter of the newsman's camera, you could see it, feel it. There, in the center of the picture, was a void, a hole where Stephen Roye used to be. You didn't have to know Roye to see that years in that fetid prison had almost erased him. Long gone was that seemingly boundless self-confidence, that piercing intensity that helped make Roye a forceful and successful television news producer years earlier. Now he was a shadow. A ghost. If he felt any joy, any relief, if he felt anything at all, you couldn't see it in his face.

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There should have been something in his eyes. After all, this was the moment he had spent more than eight years dreaming of, the moment when, at long last, he would be escorted out of Bangkok's Bangkwang Central Prison, placed on a plane and flown home, back to the United States. Yes, there was still prison ahead. He would have to spend time in a U.S. prison, but he wouldn't be there for long, certainly. As bad as life in American prisons can be, there are, for crimes such as the one Stephen Roye committed, limits to how long a man can be punished. That wasn't true in Thailand. There, a court had weighed the years of Roye's life and found that they tilted the scales at 10 kilograms, the exact same weight as the heroin he had sewn into the lining of his suitcase.

He might have died in that sweltering prison. He almost certainly would have, had it not been for an arcane clause in an international treaty between Thailand and the U.S. that allows American prisoners convicted of narcotics charges to be returned to their native country after serving a portion of their sentences in Thailand.

At least now, Roye was a step closer to freedom. There should have been something in his eyes that reflected that. But there wasn't. Maybe he understood that he was returning to the same world where, after climbing so high, he had fallen so far, the place where all his successes had only served to throw his collapse into such stark relief.

Maybe Roye realized that a little bit of him had been in prison long before he ever boarded that plane to Thailand in the first place, and even back here in America, he would never really be free. Maybe. Or maybe he really was just a shadow. A ghost.