He looked at Hamlin who now represented the last vestige of hope he had to cling on to. His survival depended now on the plans of an old lunatic. Things could not get any worse. ‘Where’re you going if we get through that door?’
‘Let me explain somethin’ to you. I’ve spent two years, ever since the first day I walked into this joint, figuring out how to get out of here. One thing I hadn’t been able to figure were the doors and you walked into my life with the answer.That’s providence and I’m grabbing it with both hands. But I don’t owe you anything.’
‘Nothing for showing you how to open the door?’
‘You need that as much as I do. Maybe more. At least I have time on my hands. Yours is running out.’
‘You don’t even know it’ll work.’
‘It’ll work. You gave me the missing piece of the puzzle.’
‘Why can’t you take me with you to the ferry? That’s the only way out.’
‘Why don’t you just concentrate on your own problems? ’
‘Getting out that door doesn’t get me to Gann.’
‘Oh, I dunno. A resourceful guy might stack things in his favour.’
‘You’re full of shit, Hamlin. You’re just a crazy old man. I don’t see why I should help you if you can’t help me.’
Hamlin started to grin widely, displaying his stained and cracked teeth. ‘Maybe I can.’
‘I’m beginning to think you’re just an old windbag.’
Hamlin was still smiling. ‘I don’t know why I like you, ferryman. But I do . . . I know this place better’n anyone, even the people who built it, because I know the changes that were made when the corporation moved in. The original experiment needed independence from a surface barge. A life-support system floating on the surface defeated the whole idea. Failure in that department was probably why it got cancelled. The current surface barge was put in for the prison. They depend on it. It’s the key to helping the both of us. We need confusion. The barge provides air, water, power. We screw the barge up and we got ourselves a pretty neat diversion, just like a military operation.’
‘How can you do that from down here?’
Hamlin gave him a knowing smile once again. ‘This room houses all the distribution conduits for the prison since it was intended to be the main life-support factory. When they brought the barge in it made sense to utilise the distribution system that was already in place. That’s what I figured, at least. So I searched around. I discovered I was wrong to a certain extent. They rebuilt the water- and air-distribution system, added water pumps to level three, shut down the sterilisers and desalinators, reduced the workload for the air scrubbers. But what they did end up utilising was some eighty per cent of the power-distribution conduits.’
Hamlin walked over to a metal staircase and climbed to the top. ‘Come take a look,’ he said.
Stratton followed.
Hamlin led him along a gantry, around a corner, behind the line of scrubbers to an ordinary door. He reached for a small rock in the stone wall, removed it, put his hand inside the hole and withdrew a key. ‘One of the service engineers always used to leave the key in the door while he was working in here. I made a mould out of putty, took the key out of the lock one day and made an impression. Took me a while to make a copy of the key,’ he said as he put the key into the lock.‘It ain’t a perfect copy,’ he said, concentrating while manipulating it, massaging it back and forth. The key finally raised the tumblers and turned. ‘But it works in the end,’ he said as he opened the door.
Inside were several large dust-covered electrical cabinets. ‘These are just two of the transformers. But they’re an important pair - if you wanna screw up the others, that is.’
Hamlin opened the cupboards and Stratton looked at the complex array of high-powered cables, switches and junctions. ‘How do you know what feeds what?’ he asked.
Hamlin was still wearing that know-it-all grin. He reached behind one of the cabinets and retrieved a long tube of paper, placed it on a table and unrolled it. It was an electrical blueprint, a complex diagram that was practically meaningless to Stratton. ‘I took this off one of the engineers about a year ago. I know every damn circuit on here.’
‘You can control the prison’s circuitry from here?’
‘No. Can’t do that. But I can sure as hell screw it up. I can trip circuit-breakers all over that damned barge. The barge isn’t manned twenty-four seven. Even if there was an engineer on board it’d take him a while to figure it out.And no engineer would reconnect a circuit before they knew why it broke in the first place.’
‘You can cut the power to the prison?’
‘Some of it.’
‘But there’s an auxiliary power system.’
‘Sure. But it only runs essentials. In this place that’s mostly life support. Security always comes second to safety. I’d say you’d have as much as eight hours before the system was back on line.That long enough for you?’
‘Internal doors?’
‘Level access will become emergency access, not security. They’ll all go green.’
‘The ferry dock?’
‘Uh-uh. External access is safety so they’ll stay secure. I don’t know about cell doors and internal security such as that one,’ Hamlin said, indicating the door to the scrubber room. ‘That’s why we have to open it manually before we blow the fuses, otherwise we’d have no power to do it after. You see what I’m tellin’ you?’
Stratton did. His mind raced at the possibilities. He could get back up to the other levels. But he still wouldn’t be able to get to Durrani unless he knew precisely where the Afghan was. His only chance was to get to Gann first. If he could then he might be able to resume his original plan, having neutralised the main threat to his life. It looked like that plan still amounted to nothing more than lying in wait. But if the entire facility was in turmoil there was a good chance Gann would turn up and an equally good chance Stratton could find a dark, unobserved place from which to jump out at him. The overall plan was sketchy at best but it opened up possibilities. Suddenly he reckoned that once he was through the door he didn’t need Hamlin after all. That was a relief in itself. ‘OK,’ he said.
‘You go right. I turn left,’ Hamlin said, wanting assurance.
Stratton could not imagine why Hamlin would want to head deeper into the complex. Left was essentially down. As far as he could remember there was nothing in that direction but the mine and some more caverns. ‘You go where you want. I’m heading up.’
‘Good.’ Hamlin grinned. ‘To make the most of it we should open the door at the same time the circuit-breakers snap. That way, when the alarm triggers in OCR they’ll think it’s part of the electrical fault.They’ll have too much else to worry about than a door opening down at this level anyway.’
Stratton began to prepare himself mentally for the push. Like a runner approaching the starting line, he was thinking ahead to the first curve in the track. Charging up the corridor would be no different from crashing into a house and not knowing where the enemy was.
‘Let’s do it,’ Hamlin said as he left the room and headed along the gantry and down the steps. ‘A drill saw and something to isolate the sensor,’ he called out as he hurried down the steps.
Doctor Mani stood over Durrani who was lying on the operating table in a near-unconscious state. As usual, the medic was not expecting to find much in the way of outward signs of injury after an over-zealous pressure interrogation but he did a cursory check as always. Durrani moaned as Mani pushed open his eyelids to inspect his pupils with a light, looking for any sign of brain damage.