The attendant opened the gate and beckoned for Vidor to follow. His wrist monitor must have been deactivated. Otherwise, wouldn’t it set off an alarm? They walked single file to the funicular, only to find no one about. Smoke curled through a blackened stovepipe poking through the little hut at the railhead. The driver must be inside, huddled by the woodstove for warmth. The attendant knocked and waited until a gnarled old man appeared in the doorway. He stared at them with rheumy eyes, a plug of tobacco stuck inside his cheek.

After examining the letter Vidor showed him with a suspicious squint he grunted for them to follow. Vidor and his minder climbed into the funicular and waited for the man to start up the engine.

‘Good thing you got yerself a pass,’ he said, ‘or they’d come after you.’ He snorted and tapped his nose. A veritable Charon to guide them across the Styx, the alcohol on the man’s breath would knock over a mountain goat. Though it wasn’t the underworld they were headed for, Vidor thought, with a flicker of excitement, but the real world. A kingdom without restrictions and rules. A marvellous land of clocks and calendars, with the regular arrangement of time, and normal people going about their business.

The funicular rattled and lurched as the cogwheel mechanism shunted them down the mountain. Vidor toyed briefly with the idea of doing a runner. Why go back to that nonsense when he could taste freedom in every breath of the pine-scented air? It might unleash a frantic chase down the mountain by the Swiss version of a SWAT team. But better to take a stand than wait for Gessen to let him go. With the tendrils of lassitude infiltrating his brain, any day now he would sink into a torpor, unable to summon the energy to speak or move. Gessen’s insistent prodding and probing was herding Vidor down a dark passage he had no wish to explore. If he didn’t get away soon, inertia and rigor mortis might keep him here, a fly trapped in amber.

As the funicular ground through a gap in the trees, the branches of the pines smacked against the windows. Strange that he had no memory of coming up the mountain. Had he been unconscious at the time, or sedated? Dark thoughts scuttled through his head, as he questioned whether he had, in fact, agreed to be transferred here as Gessen claimed. And the business about attacking that man in Copenhagen. Most certainly staged, and the video a fake. Even the clinic might be nothing more than an elaborate stage set, and the other patients, actors. All in a ruse to extract information only he possessed. But what did they want? State secrets, or his special knowledge of the brain?