by Des Ekin
The airline official, a middle-aged black woman with diamanté glasses, examined his tickets and punched the keys on her computer. She squinted at the screen.
‘You’ve flown in from Atlanta, sir?’
‘Yes, we’ve only just landed. We were caught in the stack over Dulles for over an hour. Fortunately, the same delay has held up my flight to Dublin. So, if you don’t mind terribly, could you just give us our boarding passes?’
The woman was not to be rushed. ‘I have a note here on screen. It says here you were warned that it might not be possible to make this connection.’
‘Yes, I understand. Now, my boarding passes?’
The woman tapped at her keyboard again. Her brow furrowed, but her head tilted in a gesture that said it just might be possible.
‘We’ll see what we can do, sir,’ she said. ‘Now, is this your own baggage?’
‘Yes.’ Mark drummed his fingers. ‘And I packed it myself, and it hasn’t been out of my sight since. Okay?’
‘All yours, sir? Including this pink cosmetics bag?’
‘Yes.’ Mark took a deep breath, then abandoned the deception. ‘I mean, no. That belongs to my travelling companion.’
‘And where is she, sir? The lady?’
Mark glanced around. ‘She’ll be here in a minute. Now, if you don’t mind …?’
The woman tapped at her keyboard again. Her face became resigned, apologetic.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid it won’t be possible to make that connection,’ she said. ‘This is an international flight, we have strict security procedures, and your companion isn’t here to answer questions about her baggage.’
‘This is ridiculous. I can vouch for –’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ The woman’s voice assumed a hard edge of warning. ‘Please don’t ask us to compromise on security.’ Her face softened. ‘But we can transfer you to JFK to catch the next scheduled flight to London Heathrow,’ she offered. ‘Allowing for the time difference, you should be in London for just after eleven tonight.’
Mark nodded, his shoulders slumped with resignation as he faced up to the stark truth that had been all too obvious since they’d begun circling above Dulles an hour ago: no matter how fast he ran between flight desks, no matter how many threats he made or how many favours he called in, it would not be humanly possible to make it back to Dublin in time for Valentia’s deadline.
‘I’ll need to make a phone call,’ he muttered.
‘No problem, sir. You have plenty of time. Next?’
Mark dialled Claire’s number. But this time, nobody answered.
EMMA peered at Charley’s yellowish complexion. ‘Have you been seeing a specialist?’ she asked. ‘You know you should be.’
‘Yes.’ Charley shrugged. ‘That’s one thing you got to hand the Danes, they’ve got excellent health care. I saw him just yesterday.’
‘And?’
‘He was pretty honest with me. He said I’d waited much too long before asking for medical help. Wanted to take me into hospital right away. But I told him I’d rather stay right here, in Christiania. So he prescribed me some medication. Warned me that if I keep refusing hospital treatment, I should hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.’
‘Hepatitis B?’
‘Yup. Chronic form. Advanced to the stage of major liver damage.’ She shrugged again. ‘I’ve always been careful to sterilise my works, but I guess I wasn’t careful enough.’
Emma nodded. She was all too familiar with Hepatitis B; the disease was rampant among intravenous drug users. Most people could carry the virus with no ill effects, provided they had reasonably healthy lifestyles. But drug addicts don’t have healthy lifestyles. All too often, they end up among the tiny minority who don’t respond to therapy.
Emma glanced around the room again. There was no sign of any other occupant. ‘Do you have any friends?’ she asked. ‘Anyone to help?’
Charley shook her head. ‘Not since William shipped out with his new girlfriend a few months ago.’
‘William?’
‘William Garville, Junior. My beloved ex. Since then I’ve been pretty much on my lonesome. Feeling pretty low, to tell you the truth. So when I got that bombshell from the specialist yesterday, I began to do a bit of serious thinking.’ She glanced at Emma. ‘I consulted the I Ching. The Chinese Book of Changes?’
‘Yes. I’m familiar with it.’ Emma noted how Charley’s genuine accent, a Dixie twang, rose in pitch towards the end of each sentence. ‘It’s an ancient Chinese oracle.’
‘I use Richard Wilhelm’s translation. The same one Jung always consulted.’ Charley lifted a hefty hardback volume. ‘After I got my bad news, I thought I’d ask the I Ching for guidance. I made a pact with myself. If the Book gave me a good reading, I’d act on it.’
‘And if it didn’t give you a good reading?’
Charley reached over to a small cupboard and silently opened a drawer. It contained an old-fashioned handgun of some sort – a revolver, Emma thought, rather than an automatic pistol.
‘I’d blow my brains out,’ she said.
Emma stiffened, but she kept her voice even. ‘I thought guns were against the rules here,’ she said.
‘They are, strictly speaking. But we had a bit of a scary incident here once. Some crazy psychotic had overdosed on acid and thought he was the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse. After that, William bought this gun from a seaman down on the docks. Just to be safe.’
‘I see.’
Charley seemed preoccupied as she leafed through the pages of the Book of Changes. ‘Anyway, I tossed the three coins to get the I Ching reading, and look what it came up with.’
She passed the book to Emma, who squinted at it in the poor light. It showed a hexagram, a pattern of six parallel lines. Some of the lines were solid; others were broken in the centre.
‘There are sixty-four possible hexagrams,’ Charley said earnestly, ‘but the one that came up for me was this one, number eighteen, Ku. Look at its title: Work on What Has Been Spoiled. Now, read the judgement.’
Emma held the book at an angle to catch the light. ‘Work on what has been spoiled will bring supreme success,’ she read. ‘It furthers one to cross the Great Water.’
‘See?’ exclaimed Charley triumphantly. ‘But there’s more. See, there were two changing lines in the hexagram, lines four and five. This will really blow your socks off, Doctor. Line four: Tolerating what has been spoiled by the father: in continuing one sees humiliation. And line five: Setting right what has been spoiled by the father: one meets with praise. It just couldn’t be clearer than that, could it?’
‘You think that refers to you and your father?’
‘Sure it does.’ Charley slammed the heavy book shut with satisfaction. ‘A lot of things have been spoiled by my father, Dr Macaulay. I think it’s time I stopped tolerating it and started putting it right, before …’
Her voice trailed off, her initial enthusiasm dissipated.
‘You mean, before it’s too late.’
‘Yes. It’s just that I’m not sure how to go about it.’
For the first time, Emma allowed herself to look at her watch. Oh, my God, she thought. Less than four hours to go.
She squeezed Charley’s hand. ‘There is one way you can help put right what’s been spoiled,’ she said.
Charley looked back at her, puzzled. ‘And what’s that, Doc?’
‘Fly back to Dublin with me tonight. And tell the truth to the world.’
‘You mean now?’
‘It has to be now.’
A haunted, frightened expression flickered across Charley’s face, and for a second Emma thought she’d blown it. But with a quick glance at the I Ching, Charley appeared to make up her mind.
‘Okay, Doc,’ she said. ‘Let’s cross that great water.’
CHATO Cook’s head didn’t slump forward, the way heads do when they’re shot in the Hollywood movies. It just came right off, blown into fragments by the
concentrated fire of six automatic rifles. Hunter had caught only a brief glimpse of the carnage in his driving-mirror as he dived sideways in a bid to throw his body across Claire’s and protect her from the blast of bullets. But what he’d seen in that millisecond would haunt him for the rest of his days. A human head had exploded in front of his eyes, like a bloody balloon. A human head. A human head, just like the one that was hovering fuzzily in front of his eyes right now …
‘Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,’ said the head. ‘This is your early-morning call.’
A woman’s voice.
Hunter tried to move, but his body wouldn’t let him. Every muscle felt stiff and sore. His brain seemed to contract and swell, contract and swell, inside his head, as though it were about to explode out of his skull at any moment. Explode just like Chato Cook’s head …
He managed to open his eyes. Immediately he wished he hadn’t. The dim light struck his retinas like a lightning bolt, bringing with it a slow thunder-roll of pain.
He was in a large room made of bare grey concrete. No windows, just open pillarbox ventilation slats high on the walls. Grey steel lockers, spartan wooden benches. Strangely patterned jerseys hung from some of the hooks. It reminded him of the sports changing-room at his old school.
‘At last,’ said the woman. She didn’t sound sympathetic, just impatient.
Hunter struggled to get her face into focus. Finally he recognised her as the woman who’d driven the British camper van. She’d changed into a T-shirt and jeans, and her wig had been discarded to reveal tightly cropped blond hair.
He looked down at his own body. He was lying on one of the wooden benches, wrapped in a large towel.
Hunter winced as his brain began erupting again. He lifted his hand to the back of his head and understood why. His hair had been shaven around a large wound that had been sewn up with about a dozen stitches.
‘What hit me?’ he groaned.
‘We won’t be sure until the inquest,’ said the woman, ‘but we think it was Chato Cook’s temporal bone. Either that or a five-centimetre section of his lower jaw. What do you care?’
‘Where’s Claire? What’s happened to her?’
‘She’s okay. She took a few fragments from a ricochet. She’s in hospital, under observation. She asked us to give you a message. That she had to do something to get her twenty-minute meditation session in. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes. Can I see her?’
‘No.’
Hunter struggled to a sitting position, suddenly suspicious and more than a little annoyed at the woman’s belligerent tone.
‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’ he demanded. ‘And where am I?’
‘I’m Mary Smith.’
‘A cop?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You said you were with the ERU. The Emergency Response Unit.’
‘I can be, if you want me to be.’
Hunter placed his palms over his eyes to cut out the agonising light. In the background, there had been a constant swell of noise, like distant surf. Now it was growing louder – the sound, he realised, of a large crowd cheering. It was accompanied by a distant drumming that was also increasing in volume by the second. It reached its peak, almost right outside the room, before rapidly fading away again. It was the sound of a dozen horses’ hooves thundering across turf.
‘As for your other question,’ Mary Smith continued, ‘you’re in the jockeys’ changing-room at Forthill Races. Just north of Dublin.’
‘I know where the damn Forthill Racetrack is,’ said Hunter sourly. ‘I just don’t understand what I’m doing here.’
Mary Smith ignored that point. She walked to the corner of the changing-room and turned on a shower. Steam began to drift out. It immediately condensed in the cold air.
‘Okay,’ she said briskly. ‘Into the shower with you.’
Hunter glanced down at the reddish grime that covered his body and silently agreed that a shower was badly needed. But when he tried to stand up, his aching limbs mutinied.
‘I can’t get up,’ he muttered.
‘Yes, you can.’ It wasn’t encouragement. It was an order. ‘Don’t be such a wimp. You’ve got a cut in your head and a few bruises. If you’d walked away from a plane crash in this state, you’d be skipping like a spring lamb and thanking your lucky stars that you’d got off so lightly.’
She helped him to his feet and held out two white tablets. ‘Here, take these. They’re dynamite painkillers. Over the next few hours, you’re going to need them.’
By the time Hunter had showered, towelled himself dry and dressed in a change of clothes – brand-new Pepe jeans, Ralph Lauren sweatshirt and Timberland boots, all supplied in his precise size – the painkillers had kicked in and, for the first time, he felt almost human again.
Mary Smith surveyed him critically. ‘Okay,’ she said, satisfied. ‘You’ll do.’
‘Do for what?’
She ignored him. Producing a tiny mobile phone, she dialled a number and introduced herself. ‘Hunter’s ready to see you,’ she said respectfully. She listened for a moment. ‘Yes, of course we can wait ten minutes. After the end of the next race, then, ma’am.’
‘WE’RE never going to make it,’ Emma muttered.
‘Say what?’ asked Charley as she emerged from Emma’s hotel bathroom, liberally spraying herself with complimentary cologne.
Emma zipped up her suitcase, then tried to unzip it again as a fragment of nylon became jammed between the fasteners. The zip wouldn’t budge either way. She gave up on it and helplessly flung it to the floor.
‘It’s nearly six o’clock,’ she pointed out. ‘The flight home would take two hours, and the deadline is nine. Here, pass me that house phone.’
She dialled reception and asked for the time of the next scheduled flight from Copenhagen to Dublin.
‘Nice crib you’ve got here,’ Charley said, ignoring Emma’s conversation. ‘You always stay in places as cool as this?’
She was stealing a bath-towel, rolling it into a tight cylinder and wedging it into her own battered holdall.
‘What?’ Emma asked absently. ‘Oh, yes, hello … And you’re sure that’s the earliest flight there is? … Right. Thank you. Goodbye.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘Damn. Now we’re in big trouble.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘The next flight is at eight-thirty. We’d easily make it. But even if it took off dead on time, we wouldn’t get into Dublin Airport until ten-thirty. At least twenty minutes to clear the airport, twenty minutes to get to the conference … We’re talking well after eleven o’clock. It would be all over.’
She sat down heavily on the bed, defeated.
‘You could always phone Hunter and tell him what you’ve found out,’ suggested Charley helpfully. She was packing her pockets with soaps and shampoos.
‘He hasn’t got a phone.’ Emma shook her head. ‘And anyway, who’d believe him without the evidence? We need you to be there, Charley. It’s the only way it’s going to work.’
Charley shrugged.
‘What the hell,’ said Emma. ‘No point hanging around. Let’s go for it, anyway.’
She locked up her room and led the other woman towards the lift. The lights flickered as they descended smoothly, to a muzak version of Phil Collins’s ‘Another Day in Paradise’. At lobby level, the doors sighed open again.
‘Dr Macaulay?’
Emma recoiled as a large figure blocked her exit. She didn’t recognise him, but his accent betrayed his nationality – Irish – and he had an air of authority about him. Police. Or Government.
She dived forwards and hit the lift button. But it was too late. His giant grizzly mitt was already inside, pressing on the button that held the door open.
‘Don’t make a fuss,’ he grunted. ‘I’m here to help you.’
‘Oh, yes?’ She stared at him defiantly.
‘Emma, who is this?’ Charley’s eyes were wide with panic.
‘I
don’t know. But I’m going to call Security and find out.’ She turned back to the figure in the doorway. ‘This isn’t Ireland. You’re on Danish soil. The Danes won’t take kindly to the sort of dirty-tricks operations you’ve been pulling back home.’
‘Excuse me … sir? Ma’am?’ An American businessman was trying to get through.
‘Emma, listen to me. Please.’ The Irishman’s eyes were earnest, honest. ‘I’m offering you the only chance you’ve got to make it home on time.’
The American’s eyes scanned him suspiciously and then returned to Emma. ‘Is there anything wrong, ma’am? You want I should call Security?’
‘No, thank you. It’s all right.’ Emma shepherded Charley out of the lift, and the three of them moved into the lobby. The American businessman kept his eyes locked on the Irishman until the doors eased closed between them and the lift ascended again.
‘Okay,’ said Emma, setting down her suitcase. ‘First I want your ID. Then I want to know what you’re suggesting.’
The big man nodded, relieved. ‘No problem. My name is Bernard Sauvage and I’m a police Inspector. On special assignment.’ He showed her his ID. ‘And I’m liaising with that gentleman from the Irish Embassy in Copenhagen’ – he gestured to the street, where a grey-haired man was waiting at the wheel of a Jaguar limousine – ‘in order to escort you back to Ireland – if you wish to accompany me.’
‘And why should I wish to do that?’
Sauvage’s voice remained calm and patient. ‘Because waiting on the tarmac at Copenhagen Airport, refuelled and ready for immediate take-off, is our Government jet.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘If we can leave by seven, we’ll be back in Dublin in time for you to make Valentia’s conference.’
Emma stared at him, dumbstruck. The Irish Government had only one jet, and its use was carefully monitored by jealous opposition politicians alert for the slightest hint of wastefulness by those in power. The idea that it could be laid on for her personal use was so far-fetched it was hardly worth thinking about. Only one person could make a decision like that …
Sauvage smiled, as though reading her mind.
‘And I have a message from Taoiseach Orla Byrne,’ he said. ‘She hopes you have a very pleasant flight.’