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.
