Mandrick replaced the phone, pushed his fingers through his short tan hair and walked over to a detailed model of the prison facility.
A buzzer sounded and Mandrick glanced at one of the monitors showing two angled images of a large man wearing a lime-green tailored uniform and standing outside a door. The man looked up into one of the camera lenses, his expression blank, his eyes cold.
Mandrick took a hand-held remote from his pocket and pushed one of several coloured buttons on it. The sound of escaping gas lasted a couple of seconds as a thick rubber seal around a steel oval-shaped door shrank and, after a heavy clunking sound, the door moved back into the room like a filing cabinet drawer before pivoting open.
Gann walked into the room, a big heavy-boned man of distant Scandinavian origins. He was almost a head taller than Mandrick and remained standing by the opening like a barely obedient hound, staring at his master with an arrogant indifference that those who did not know him might have mistaken for insolence.
Mandrick pushed a button on his remote and the door closed with another clunk and a further escape of air as the seal puffed back up to fill the space around it. ‘You’ll be picking up the next in-transfer,’ Mandrick said without a trace of drama.
Gann waited for an explanation. He was not particularly interested but was curious nevertheless about why the schedule was being changed.
‘Didn’t we have a problem with one of the ferries a couple weeks ago?’ Mandrick asked, suddenly remembering.
‘Number four,’ Gann said.
‘What was the problem?’
‘The number-three relief valve in the main cabin. The seal needs changing. It leaks.’ Gann’s accent was soft: many thought he was from Chicago or Philly but no one knew for sure.
‘Why hasn’t it been changed?’
‘It has a scheduled service next week. I guess they’re waiting till then.’
Mandrick looked at Gann, gauging him as he often did. The man was a gift from Felix Corp, a special assistant. A thug, in other words. He hadn’t gone through the normal vetting procedures and his personnel file was clearly a fairy tale. Gann was supposedly a former US Marine sergeant, an ideal pedigree for the prison service in which he had to look after the most desperate individuals in the world. Mandrick knew soldiers and Gann did not even begin to fit the profile. What Gann did for the company required a pedigree far more ominous than any that the Marines could provide. When they’d first met at the corporate offices in Houston, the day Mandrick was promoted to warden, Gann had been introduced as his key security officer. Forbes went even further, seeming to boast of some secret information when he said to Mandrick, sotto voce, that Gann would take care of any ‘delicate situations’.
At the time Mandrick could not accurately imagine what that might entail but he got a taste within the first few days Gann was on the job when an inmate was caught stealing gems from the mine. The prisoner, an armed robber and escape artist from Leavenworth penitentiary who was serving three life sentences, had a partner in the guard force who was smuggling the ‘merchandise’ ashore. The inmate suffered a paralysing injury when a piece of machinery fell on his back and in that same week the guard was involved in a fatal alcohol-related traffic accident. When Mandrick had mentioned that the inmate could have died Gann must have thought he’d said ‘should have’ because his reply was that a dead man attracted attention whereas one who’d had an accident and was recovering from his injuries did not.
It was a wise theory. Only one inmate had died in Styx since it had opened, an impressive record which helped protect it from outside scrutiny. But it did have an unusually high rate of injuries, the level of whose seriousness was often concealed. But as Gann so accurately pointed out, as in a war, the ‘merely’ wounded were hardly taken into account, no matter how serious the damage they’d sustained.
Mandrick had never personally ordered Gann to do anything unsavoury, nothing beyond the bounds of what a normal prison guard looking after category one-plus prisoners might be expected to do. That was indication enough that the man received his orders from someone else. Mandrick had no problem with that. They were all steering in the same direction. And this particular request was going to require a team effort. It was not only serious but technically complicated. Gann could not achieve success without Mandrick’s assistance.
The order was also proof that Forbes received his orders from someone. It wasn’t easy to get a congressman to become a willing party to a murder - and of an FBI agent, at that. Forbes wasn’t a tough guy. Mandrick personally found him weak and pathetic. He was typical of the type: born to wealth and influence, carried through school, did his time in the army in an administrative role, thus avoiding Vietnam, and was handed his political career on a plate. Someone must have dangled him by his testicles over a pool of sharks to get him to do this.
‘We have a problem,’ Mandrick said in his usual calm, controlled manner. ‘One of the prisoners on the next intake cannot be allowed to enter the prison.’
The printer on Mandrick’s desk came to life and spat out a sheet of paper. Mandrick picked it out of the tray and glanced over it.‘Six prisoners . . . but we don’t know which one is our unwanted guest.’ Mandrick glanced up at Gann who was staring at him without a shred of emotion in his expression. ‘Would the valve be enough, do you think?’ Mandrick asked, knowing the answer but wanting Gann to get involved in the conversation.
‘Everyone?’ Gann asked, impressed. This was by far the biggest deal he had been presented with since taking on the job. Come to think of it, it was the biggest hit numbers-wise that he had ever been asked to carry out.
‘It looks that way. We don’t have the time to figure out who it is.’
Gann took a moment to absorb the request. ‘I guess the valve would do it . . . with some added insurance.’
‘Like what?’
‘It would have to happen deep . . . close to the dock would be best but not too close. They’d have to be denied access to the escape suits, for one thing.’
Mandrick was satisfied that Gann was on the right track and would come up with a plan. He looked at the six names again, none of whom he had heard of before. Five would be collateral victims. Once again he was surprised at how easy it was for him to ignore the evil of the decision. Perhaps it was because they were all scum anyway. The list did not include their crimes - he would have to look at the files for that - but he didn’t need to. No one got a ticket to Styx who wasn’t a special-category prisoner. As for the FBI agent, the risk came with the job.
‘We can’t afford to screw this up,’ Mandrick said, sounding like an officer even to himself. He did not particularly care what Gann thought about him. The man was an ape and needed to be reminded as often as possible of his place in the pecking order, even if his strings were usually pulled from somewhere way above Mandrick’s own position.‘What about the other guard?’ Mandrick asked.A minimum of two guards was required to ferry an intake of prisoners from the surface. Escape was considered impossible but this minimum was a procedural requirement in case there was a medical incident - like a guard becoming incapacitated due to a bad compression or something similar.
The prison’s seventy-five guards were divided into three shifts. When the dark side of the system was designed it had been regarded as dangerous if not impossible to try and recruit only corrupt employees. However, applying principles learned from the infiltration of entire police forces by organised-crime syndicates, the compromising of key positions of responsibility could be coordinated. Once the necessary personnel were in place it was easy to recruit and then manipulate the lower ranks by using the basic motivating principle of greed.