question anyway. He knew his real name but he also remembered that he had a cover. The false identity was just beyond his reach. He thought he saw it flit across his mind but he couldn’t get hold of it. He found the image of the man sitting in the back of the prison truck. He saw Paul and Todd. And then the name was suddenly there in front of him. Nathan Charon. Then it was as if the effort had triggered the bursting of a bubble of information inside his head as other elements of his assignment fell into place.
Stratton decided to ignore the woman’s question until he had gathered more information on who she was and on his own situation. One of the most important questions he needed an answer to was whether or not he still had a mission. Where on Earth he was would be a good start.
He tried to bend his arm to bring it under his shoulder but what should have been a simple effort proved difficult. He felt eighty years old.
‘You want to sit up?’ she asked.
Stratton nodded. The woman made a poor effort to help him, unsure where to hold him. This suggested she was not accustomed to helping someone sit up in a bed. That seemed to rule out nurse or doctor as her job. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, both clean but not the usual attire of a professional. As she gripped his shoulder he could feel her strength. She was slender but strong and athletic. Nothing about her was adding up yet.
She pulled the bedclothes away to allow him to slide his feet off the mattress and onto the floor. He was wearing a tracksuit that he did not recognise. His body ached all over. The discomfort reminded him of the time when he’d fallen halfway down the side of a snow-covered mountain in Norway after narrowly avoiding a small avalanche.
Stratton looked around, his ability to focus gradually improving. He realised he was actually inside a steel cage in a corner of a room. The bars went from floor to ceiling on two sides and the door was open. The room beyond looked like a cross between an office and a laboratory. There was a desk with a lamp, pens, paper and a computer. A long workbench was against one wall, next to a row of glass cabinets filled with medical paraphernalia. Another counter was bedecked with technical apparatus and on the wall there was a flat-screen monitor that was switched off. The aspect of the situation that struck him most was that his was the only bed.
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.
