Undersea Prison

Mandrick didn’t bother to try and guess. He was busy assessing Hank’s sincerity and to his alarm he found him convincing.

‘Getting even with him before he screws you,’ Hank said. ‘That’s the smart play. Open the door.’

Mandrick did not react to the threat although more than a tingle of discomfort rippled through him. He opened the door and watched Hank walk out of the room.

There was always going to be an endgame to this whole scenario and Mandrick often felt concern at his apparent powerlessness to influence it one way or another. But perhaps that was not the case any more. It would appear that the ticking clock was going faster than he’d thought a few hours earlier. Hank had shone a narrow beam of light onto the pitfalls that faced all the players in this complicated game. The Agency controlled almost everything, but not quite. Every player had a destructive force that they could unleash and in such a game the advantage went to him who struck first. Mandrick and the Felix Corp were in it for the money but receiving it wasn’t enough. The real issue was holding on to the freedom to spend it when the top eventually did blow off.

‘He thinks he’s in charge around here but he ain’t,’ chirped Gann.

Mandrick glanced at Gann, wondering why Forbes had inflicted such an uncontrollable beast on him.

‘Mr Forbes is in charge of this place. And until he tells me to lay off Charon I’ll do what I think is best for this place.The CI friggin’A can go screw themselves.’

Gann headed for the door. Mandrick considered trying to convince him not to go against Hank but decided not to bother.The seams were cracking all over the place and Mandrick felt it was now beyond his ability to hold them together. Gann was, understandably, concerned about being accused of sabotaging the ferry and therefore had every right to protect himself. There was no way that Gann was going to let Charon get out of the prison alive and so he might as well get on with it.

Gann left the room and Mandrick went back to his desk and slumped into his chair. He suddenly felt more vulnerable than he had ever been and there was only one solution. He needed more control of his destiny. To get that he needed to act first. In short, he needed to escape. But it wasn’t getting free of Styx that was a problem. He could leave that afternoon. He was the warden. The problem was staying free. Hank had underlined that fact most clearly. The only way Mandrick could keep the CIA off his back was to have a value to them. It was that lack of value that was frustrating him.

The phone on his desk chirped, taking him out of the depths of his thoughts, and he plucked the receiver out of its cradle. ‘Mandrick.’

‘Hi,’ a woman’s voice said.

It was Christine and the image of her body immediately acted like a tonic. ‘Hi yourself.’

‘I’d like to see you.’

He never believed her when she was so forward. If she wanted to see him it was nothing to do with romance. ‘See me or interrogate me about the mess hall incident?’

‘What mess hall incident?’

‘That’s very good, Christine. You’ll become more memorable with comments like that.’

She laughed. ‘I was told one of the guards got his timings mixed up.’

‘It’s inexcusable. We’re taking it very seriously, of course.’

‘I wanted to tell you I’m pretty much finished.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. You’re the only breath of fresh air in this place. You’ll be at dinner tonight?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll see you then . . . Perhaps we can talk afterwards.’

‘That would be nice . . . Can I book a ferry for later this evening?’

‘You want to leave straight after dinner?’

‘After our little talk,’ she said coquettishly.

‘I see,’ Mandrick said, the excitement rising in him despite his better judgement. The thought then struck him that he might leave with her. Perhaps they could both depart after dinner and enjoy the following day together in Houston, relaxing at his apartment after the decompression. It was worth considering. ‘I’ll make the arrangements.’

‘See you later.’

‘Bye,’ he said, replacing the phone.

That was pleasantly unexpected, he thought. Christine was suddenly within his grasp and it made him feel far more excited and attracted to her, a very welcome distraction from everything else. Mandrick’s natural suspicion brought up the question of why she had changed from challenging to amenable so suddenly. He decided that perhaps it was not so sudden. He had been working his charm on her from the moment they’d first met. And time was running out for them to get it together which could have helped to encourage her. Or perhaps it was simply one of the mysterious complexities of the female gender.

On the other hand, this was probably a bad time to be leaving the prison. Things could get ugly over the next few days and being topside would lose him any control he might have. Perhaps it was time to put together his endgame plan. It was based on the premise that, when this house of cards toppled, if he could not be of value to the CIA alive he would have to let them think he was dead. Its magnitude was unnerving and challenging, not the most perfect solution but a good one and, more important, the only one he had.

Christine was highly desirable but he couldn’t allow the craving for a beautiful woman to cloud his common sense. That would be fatal.

Christine put down the receiver and stared thoughtfully at the colourful eiderdown covering her small bed that took up almost half of the otherwise drab white-painted concrete room. She sat down at a simple dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room, and brought up an internet mailing page on her laptop screen. The vent in the ceiling clicked on to adjust the air. She paused to clear her ears before typing a short message that explained to the recipient that she was preparing to finalise her plans for departure.

She had set her own clock ticking. She could quit there and then, throw in the towel, tell Mandrick that she needed to get out of Styx immediately and turn her back on the rest of her plans. But that was not about to happen. Not without reasons better than those she had. She had waited her entire life for this moment, not that she ever knew what it would entail. But it had all the ingredients she had dreamed of as far back as her teens: an operation concerning national security; dangerous and, most significant, operating alone and under cover. She was a woman doing a man’s job in a man’s world and in the highly competitive arena she had chosen to work in that was no small achievement.

It had been a relatively short and hazard-free journey to the rare, enviable and highly classified position of Secret Service Special Operative to the Oval Office. The post achieved the highest level of secrecy by circumventing the channels used by all other mainstream and military intelligence-agency recruitment procedures. But Christine was nobody’s fool and was aware that getting the important job had been due more to luck than to ability. On the other hand, as her grandmother had always told her,‘The harder you work, the luckier you’ll be.’The words were true enough. Her appointment had had a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. But she had certainly worked tirelessly towards the job throughout her life.

Right from childhood Christine had refused to conform to the generally accepted standards of her gender - by refusing to wear dresses, for instance. She would only ever agree to put on traditional female trappings after heavy negotiations with her parents, always bartering an occasional act of conformity for things considered too masculine for a young lady. At ten she wanted boxing lessons, at eleven she accepted brides-maid duties only if she could join a boys’ soccer club since there was no local girls’ team. Other demands over the years included baseball, fencing, rock climbing, karate and clay-pigeon shooting, not all of which she persisted with. But her hunger to pursue such energetic pastimes never seemed to diminish.

Christine’s parents regarded her macho aspirations as delusional, superficial and immature until the day she returned home for dinner after a game of ‘Smear the Queen’, a full-contact American football game without pads or helmet. She was clearly in pain as she sat down for the meal but stoically refused any attention. It later transpired that her collarbone had been broken in two places and she had several cracked ribs, a fractured wrist and a broken thumb. What was more, Christine had received the injuries at various points throughout the game but had refused to leave the field until the end.

By the time Christine attended college she had not only grown into a very beautiful girl but her femininity had