Undersea Prison (19 page)

The vessel shunted again and this time there was a perceptible feeling of movement that gradually increased as the craft gracefully pulled out of its holding bay. As it left the guide tray it dropped, taking up the slack in the cables. Everyone experienced that lost-stomach feeling, to the point where several of the prisoners groaned.

Gann tapped Ramos on the side of his head, still unsure if he had done any serious damage - not that he cared much. He gave up and shrugged. ‘You got the picture, guys,’ he said, walking back along the row. ‘No fuckin’ around or you’ll get the same.’

Stratton focused on a map board at the other end of the bench row. The ferry’s position was indicated on an angled line marked at regular intervals like a metro map, except the lit beads were depth markers between the surface platform and the prison’s arrivals dock. A bright green LED light indicating the surface platform extinguished and a blue one blinked on further down the line.

Gann stopped in front of a bank of valves and gauges that displayed the internal and external ferry pressures, air-storage volume, air quality, and the carbon dioxide, nitrogen and oxygen percentages of the air. He tapped a couple of the gauges, noting with satisfaction that the internal pressure was several pounds per square inch lower than outside. As he turned around to check on the prisoners his eyes drifted to the line of relief valves in the ceiling, three in total. A drop of water fell from one onto a prisoner’s head, causing the man to look up curiously.

‘Lemme know if that turns into a fire hose,’ Gann said, with a wink.

The prisoner wasn’t amused and looked up as another drip fell onto his face.

Gann walked to the front of the cabin to Palanski. ‘Did you check the escape suits?’

Palanski was looking at Ramos who, although still in a daze, appeared to be recovering. He raised an eyebrow at the request. ‘That’s the senior man’s job.’

‘I only asked in case.’

‘I can do it if you want.’

‘Nah. I’ll check ’em.’

Palanski moved aside. Like most of the prison guards, Gann intimidated him.

Gann unlocked the six dog hasps around the emergency escape-room door. Stratton watched as he tugged at the handle, unable to shift it. Both men looked up at a gauge on the wall above the door. ‘Fuckin’ room ain’t equalised,’ Gann mumbled as he turned a valve beside the gauge that allowed air into the escape room. Seconds later the door popped slightly towards him and he turned off the valve and pulled the door fully open.

He stepped inside and as he turned to close the door he caught Stratton staring at him. Stratton looked away and Gann watched him a little longer before closing the door. Stratton looked back to see a couple of the dog hasps turn to secure it.

Gann went to a rack containing more than a dozen bright yellow packs with ESCAPE SUIT written on them in large letters. He took one of the packs, pulled open the seal, removed the bright yellow suit and draped it over the side of the rack. He opened a red box on the wall. Inside were a couple of small air cylinders. He removed one, checked that the contents gauge was green and that the full-face mask was secured to the end of its high-pressure tube. He turned the bottle valve, put the mouthpiece in his mouth, took a quick guff to ensure that it was working and placed it on the shelf beside the escape suit.

He faced the emergency escape tube which was basically a large pipe welded vertically to the ceiling and big enough for a man to crawl up inside. The bottom end, covered with a hatch, was just below his waist. He checked a gauge to ensure that the pressure inside the tube was the same as the ferry’s and squatted to take hold of the hatch wheel. He turned it a couple of times and the heavy hatch dropped open on its hinge and returned almost all the way back up on a pair of robust springs designed to counter its weight.

Gann got onto his knees, pushed the hatch fully open against its springs and poked his head up inside to take a look at the narrow space that was illuminated by an internal lamp. A hatch covered the other end of the six-foot-long tube, the brass wheel at its centre wet with condensation. A breathing umbilical was secured halfway up and he crawled sufficiently inside to reach up and press the spring valve inside the teat. An instant gush of air revealed that it was working and he inspected the small collection of valves and gauges that operated the flooding system. Satisfied that everything was in working order, Gann manoeuvred his large frame out of the awkward space and got to his feet.

He looked around to make sure there was nothing else he needed to prepare for his murderous plan and took a deep breath to steel himself. This was by far the biggest job he had ever taken on.

He walked back to the door and unclipped the two dog hasps. When he pulled open the door his gaze met Stratton’s again.

Gann stepped through the door, left it open a little and crossed over to Stratton. ‘You got somethin’ you wanna say to me?’

Stratton looked down, playing the passive-submissive card.

‘Then stop lookin’ at me. You ain’t my type.’

Gann brushed past him and Stratton watched as he stopped in front of the route-marker board where a blue light put the ferry a quarter of the way to the arrival dock.

Stratton sat back in his seat, beginning to wonder if this operation had any chance of success. It was always easier to see where the cracks were from the outside. On the other hand, the inside was where the reality was. He had no experience of penitentiaries and, frankly, the level of security so far was significant enough to suggest the job was going to have to rely much more on chance than the briefing had allowed for.There were things about the ferry that had not been reflected in the diagrams he had seen. They were small but significant enough.The control panel was in a different location for one thing, and there were three relief valves in the ceiling when he was sure there had only been one on the blueprints. Stratton’s knowledge of the layout of the prison was based entirely on plans that had not been updated in several years.

Then there was the total lack of information about the everyday routine life of the prisoners as well as the guard system. Procedures could change overnight, anyway.There were also the various unquantifiable characters who ran the place - such as Gann. Asinine prison officers were only to be expected but Gann was more like some kind of classic medieval dungeon guard more comfortable running the torture chamber than looking after the everyday welfare of an inmate. He could screw up the operation all on his own.

‘Hey, leave that open,’ Gann called out.

Stratton looked over to see he was addressing Palanski who was about to lock the door to the emergency escape room.

‘But it’s supposed—’ Palanski began but was cut off.

‘I said leave it open.’

Palanski walked over to Gann at the console. ‘We’re supposed to keep it closed while we’re in transit,’ he said in a low voice, as if he didn’t want the children to see their parents arguing.

Gann couldn’t have cared less what the prisoners thought. ‘And I want it open, OK,’ he said, glaring at his colleague. And then, as if regretting his anger, he calmed down, mimicking Palanski’s lowered voice. ‘I wanna go back in there and check on somethin’, OK? Between you and me I think one of the relief valves is sticky.’

Palanski looked up at the valve. ‘This whole friggin’ ferry needs a service if you ask me.’

‘Go check on Ramos,’ Gann said.

Palanski stepped back, glad that Gann had calmed down. He leaned over the Mexican whose eyes were heavily red-rimmed and looked as if he had taken a drug overdose. Palanski had no idea what he could do for the guy and so he made a meal out of checking him over.

Gann went back to the route indicator. The timing of the next phase was crucial. The ferry needed to be close to the prison dock but not too close. The dock was designed on a moon-pool concept.The ferry arrived from beneath, the cables rolling under a series of wheels before heading up inside at an angle. Once the ferry moved below the wheels it followed the cables and emerged as if from a pool inside an air-filled cavern. Gann’s plan was to sabotage the ferry and leave the prisoners for dead before it arrived at the dock. But the prison maintained a rescue team on standby whenever a ferry was operating in case there was a serious incident.

Gann estimated he would soon have to commence the operation and as he checked his watch he experienced a touch of nerves such as he had not felt since his earliest days in the business of skulduggery. He glanced up at the leaking relief valve, a pivotal element to his plan, and then at the prisoners sitting in a row, wondering which of them was the reason they all had to die. It was obvious that things were not well with the prison but perhaps his mission would solve the problem. The man was not just a threat to the future of the facility but also to Gann’s employment.This was a great gig for him, the best he’d had. It was more money than he had ever earned and he didn’t want it to end.

It was typical of Gann that never once did he question if all the men had to die. It made perfect sense. He was used to following orders that would result in the injury or death of people whom he did not know. He was more interested in how he was going to succeed. Gann knew his place in the great scheme of things. He always did. He was not the kind of man who could set up a company or a criminal organisation by himself. But he made a good lieutenant. Working at Styx had given him levels of responsibility he had never before been entrusted with and tasks such as this made it all so much more satisfying. If there was anything he could do to safeguard his job he would.

Gann’s introduction to inflicting violence on others as a means of gainful employment came at an early age, shortly after he’d left school in Toronto, the city of his birth. He became an ‘enforcer’, a glamorous title bestowed upon him by his first boss, a ruthless housing developer who specialised in turning low-class neighbourhoods into upper-middle-class luxury homes. Gann’s job was to put pressure on owners who did not want to sell. This he managed in a number of occasionally imaginative and usually violent ways. Once the houses had been bought the tenants were evicted. Normally the sight of Gann stepping in through the door and telling them that they had to get out was enough. If not, creativity was called for.

The turning point in Gann’s life came when a particularly tough tenant organised a group of friends to beat him up on the day he arrived to press his demand to vacate the premises. It was a serious case of misjudgement: several days later Gann followed the man to his place of work, approached him in an underground car park as he was getting out of his vehicle and beat him to death with an iron bar. At first Gann was worried, never having gone that far before. But instead of panicking he kept his nerve and rigged the murder to look like a mugging that had gone wrong.

A few months later Gann’s boss was slain as the result of a private business disagreement and Gann was hired by a powerful loan shark in whose employ opportunities to improve his particular skills were plentiful. Gann’s reputation grew and he became a freelancer on the books of several major collecting agencies, becoming involved in bounty hunting abroad in places like South and Central America. The next honing of his developing skills was his introduction to assassination, a trade he took to effortlessly with his first task: the strangling of an accountant who had embezzled money from a New York crime family.

Gann carried out a number of similar ‘jobs’ for the same people until one day things took a turn for the worse. He was picked up by the FBI just before a job and, convinced he was looking at several decades in jail, he agreed to turn state’s evidence. As luck would have it, Gann managed to avoid imprisonment altogether due to shockingly poor management of the evidence against him. The feds, however, stuck with their witness-protection agreement and, armed with a new identity, Gann was free to start life over again.

Gann’s big concern now, however, was how he was going make a living. The feds had been quite clear in their threats about what would happen if he went back to his old ways. But depression and desperation soon set in when he failed to find satisfactory employment and just as he was contemplating his first armed robbery he received a call from a man who knew not just his real identity but every detail about his past. This man had called to offer Gann a job utilising his particular type of skill but this time for a legitimate company. Gann was curious, to say the least, and agreed to take a meeting in Houston at the headquarters of an outfit called the Felix Corporation.

After a brief interview he was hired as a special-duties prison supervisor, a position that, although he had zero experience of such work, filled him with excitement at the thought of its possibilities. His responsibilities were left vague for the time being and he was placed on a handsome retainer for six months. During that time he attended courses on the duties of a corrections officer, followed by training in sub-sea environments. Gann arrived at the prison several months before the first inmate and spent his time familiarising himself with the jail’s layout and procedures, its life-support systems and the ferry procedures. At the end of it he received his special-duties brief, which included giving every assistance to Mandrick, the new warden, as well as to the government agents who would be conducting prisoner ‘questioning’.

Gann had matured greatly since his early days and, anxious to keep his position in a company that, in his eyes, showed great potential for his personal enrichment, he made sure he did precisely what he was ordered to and did it as efficiently as possible. In the exclusive world of murderous lackeys, Gann was at the top of his game.

Therefore, when Gann was told it would be convenient if everyone in the ferry that day should die it was as good as done. He could also expect a handsome bonus at the end of the month.

Gann went to the communications set, surreptitiously unplugged the handset and put it in his pocket. He went to the control panel and pretended to study the various gauges while taking hold of an adjustable wrench attached to a chain fixed to the panel. The tool was used for turning tight valves. A screwdriver was similarly attached and he used it to prise open one of the wrench’s chain links and disconnect it. He reached for the interior main air valve and turned it until it was fully closed. The needle of the interior pressure gauge moved very slightly to indicate a drop in cabin pressure. With the screwdriver he undid the screw that secured the interior valve handle, removed the handle completely and, using the wrench, bent the valve stem enough to ensure that it could not be turned by hand. He placed the wrench in his pocket.