Behind the desk was a window with a clear view outside.There were skyscrapers, the central one of which was familiar: the Empire State Building. He was looking at the top half from a similar height which meant he was in another Manhattan skyscraper. The mission was over. He had failed. After surviving the ferry he’d been transported to a surface hospital in New York. But then who was this woman and why was he not with his own people? The feeling that he should stay on his guard intensified.
‘Where am I?’ Stratton asked.
‘You were going to tell me your name,’ the woman said. The chill in her voice did not alter.
He wondered why she was asking for his name. Surely she knew who he was. If she didn’t then who the hell was she? He decided to give her something. Until he was sure that the op was at an end he would continue to play the game.‘Nathan . . . Nathan Charon.’
He caught her expression just before she turned away and he had the feeling that she was disappointed. Or perhaps it was irritation. He looked out of the window as a bird flew close to the ledge before veering away. ‘How long have I been here?’ he asked.
‘Two days,’ she said, walking out of the cage without closing the door and leaning against the steel work surface of the counter from where she could study him.
He did the same, noting her sneakers, her strong, shapely legs, her square shoulders.This girl was in shape and was also very pleasing to the eye.
‘Do you remember what happened?’ she asked.
‘I remember the ferry flooding,’ he said, looking at a row of bottles containing different-coloured liquids on top of the medical cabinets behind her. It was certainly an odd-looking hospital room.
‘Where are you from, Nathan?’
The question highlighted an aspect of this charade that Stratton had been most uncomfortable with. Charon was from Vermont but a cover story of years in the UK was intended to explain Stratton’s English accent. The background details had been placed in Charon’s file but Stratton’s problem was not so much the alleged period during which he’d lived in the UK, it was the rest of his life, supposedly spent in Vermont. He’d read a brief prepared by the analysts but it would never be enough to get him off the hook if he was questioned. If the woman pushed the issue he would go to the emergency plan for that eventuality which was to go on the offensive and demand to see his lawyer if they were going to interrogate him. ‘Vermont, originally. But I moved around a lot.’
‘England, I suppose.’
‘I spent a lot of years there.’
She took her time with her questions as if weighing each answer carefully.
‘What happened on the ferry?’
She was cutting right to the chase. ‘It began to flood. One of the guards released our chains.’
‘Go on.’
The girl was acting more like an investigator or interrogator. He wondered about revealing Gann’s part in the incident but decided it was in his best interests to appear to remember nothing. Once he became an integral part of the investigation it would detract from his purpose - if he had any purpose left, that was. ‘I can remember hardly anything. I don’t seem to remember getting on board, even. Certainly nothing after we climbed out of the escape hatch.’
‘We?’
‘I was with one other prisoner.’
She looked down at her feet. Stratton decided she was not a professional interrogator. She gave too much away with her eyes and body language. Something wasn’t right about her. Whatever her job was it was privileged or she would not be here. She had rank. He would have expected the first person to question him to be highly qualified. She looked as if she was in her late twenties or early thirties. Subtract the years spent in college getting the degrees a person in her position would need and she could not have been in her job very long. She was acting professional but it was just that: an act. She had little real experience of what she was doing. That was obvious to someone like him, at least. It made his circumstances even more curious.
‘Where is he?’ Stratton asked.
‘You and one of the guards were the only survivors.’
Stratton saw an image of Dan leaving the hatch just before him. He felt sorry for the man.
The bird returned to the window ledge before veering away again. Stratton realised there were no bars on the window. That didn’t make sense. He was in a detention centre of sorts but one without bars on the windows. There would have to be some kind of exit control no matter how high up from the street the room was.The door into the room was made of frosted glass. The bird returned to the window but this time he realised there was something odd about it. The bird was performing exactly the same action every time.
‘What am I doing in New York?’ he asked.
The girl looked at the window and rolled her eyes, walked behind the desk, reached for the side of the frame and flicked a switch. The image disappeared. ‘Doctor Mani thinks it’s healthy to at least maintain a sense of natural surroundings down here.’
‘I’m in Styx?’ Stratton asked.
‘Sorry if it confused you,’ she said, without sounding sorry at all.
Stratton felt a sudden partial relief. But a residual fear remained. He was still on the mission, as far as he could tell, but it was all going wrong. Six men were dead, the cause of their deaths was sinister and he had only barely survived.The need to proceed with extreme caution was paramount. ‘You a doctor?’ he asked.
‘No. I’m a prison inspector. I work for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the programme-review division.’
She spoke as if it was a declaration, a statement of fact, defining her position clearly to him. Her attitude towards him was still hard to pin down. She was cold and authoritative, confident and aggressive. But she was not talking down to him.
She looked as if she was struggling with a thought. ‘You have a problem,’ she decided to reveal.
He couldn’t begin even to guess what she meant.
The girl leaned on the desk and tapped the keypad on a laptop. The screen came to life and she turned it to face him. It was a copy of Nathan Charon’s prison file.
‘You’ve put me in a difficult position.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’re not Nathan Charon.’
Stratton forced a smirk while at the same time trying to deal with this most dangerous development. Everything seemed to be unravelling before he could even get his foot in the bloody door of the place. ‘Do I have brain damage?’
It was a pathetic effort which she was not even going to waste a second on. ‘Who do you work for?’ she insisted.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Prior to your arrival at Styx your personal file was wired here from the Vermont Department of Corrections. The files of the other inmates were likewise wired from their respective state corrections departments. You also arrived with hard copies, which were recovered from the ferry. The files from the Vermont Department of Corrections and your hard copies match. The problem is that neither of your files match the one I have. I received mine from the Federal Bureau of Prisons Atlantic regional office. Whoever set you up as Nathan Charon was powerful enough to change your state file but not influential enough to alter your federal records - either that or they overlooked them. Your photograph is close, but it’s not you. Most damning are your fingerprints. I did a comparison and they don’t match. More interesting is that they don’t match anyone’s records. Not even the FBI’s. I checked. Either you never had a US driving licence or you’re a foreigner who skipped Immigration on his way into the US.You don’t work for the CIA because there are enough of them down here already. But you do work for someone in the US government otherwise you couldn’t have got in here.’