LACKING VIRTUES

by Thomas Kirkwood

  The news droned on in French. Warner hated not being able to understand it. But there were a few words that rang loud and clear through the sonorous cascade of meaningless sounds, words such as Marx, LeConte and Nicole Michelet.

  The Belgian border was just five miles ahead. Five miles, he thought, could be a long way.

  The news report ended, replaced by irritating European rock. Warner checked the rear view mirror. No one coming. He eased the Peugeot down the steep embankment and bumped onto the service road. He came to an intersection and opted for an unmarked two-lane.

  “Steven, what did they say?”

  “Everything we don’t need to hear. The police are looking for me. They think I stabbed Sophie and kidnapped Nicole. Can you believe it? They also say I might be in a rental Peugeot, the model and color of this one. They gave a license number. I assume it’s ours. How the hell could they know that, Frank?”

  “I don’t know. Claussen must have recognized the CVR as a part from one of the Boeing crashes and taken if from there.”

  “But how?”

  “Steven, it’s pointless to speculate. It doesn’t change our situation. All that matters is that we’re in serious trouble. I think you should know that, Nicole. I’m not just talking about me and Steven. These are desperate men, your father included. If we are taken into custody, they’ll find a way to justify getting rid of all three of us. As I said, we’re in serious trouble.”

  “I know,” Nicole answered. “I don’t want to think about it, Mr. Warner, but I know what you say is true.”

  She was, Warner thought, showing a lot of composure after what she had been just been through.

  “It gets worse,” Steven said. “They described me and Nicole. The police apologized for delays at airports, toll booths, ferries and border crossings. And they’re involving Interpol in the manhunt. Getting out of France isn’t salvation. They’ll be looking for us all over Europe.”

  “Shit.”

  “Amen. Listen, Frank, here’s another question for you. If they announced Nicole’s name, why aren’t they mentioning you?”

  “Because they don’t want to alert our government. I will simply fall into the Sophie category if we’re caught.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You killed me for the car.”

  “Terrific. Let’s not get caught.”

  “Good idea.”

  Headlights were coming toward them, bouncing eerily through the early morning mist. The tree-lined road was narrow and the approaching vehicle large. Warner turned off on a dirt tractor path to let the aging fertilizer truck clatter past. He was about to continue his aimless drive when he spotted something that jolted his mind into high gear. He pointed into the mist. “See it?”

  “What?” Steven said.

  “Just look.”

  “The wind sock?”

  “That’s right. Where there’s a sock, there’s usually a plane.”

  “You know how to fly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, why not?” Steven said. “I don’t see any other way out of here.”

  Warner slammed the Peugeot into reverse, bumped back onto the two-lane and turned up another dirt road that ran in the general direction they wanted to go.

  ***

  The air sock was attached to a sawed-off telephone pole at the end of a narrow grass strip. Warner got out and walked the field. There were signs of landings, depressions in the soft earth, but none looked recent.

  Steven came up beside him. “Well? Where’s the plane?”

  “Either in that old barn with the tanks out front or somewhere else for the winter. Shall we have a look?”

  The entrance was secured with a massive padlock. Warner pried one side of the rickety wooden door open and shined his flashlight through the crack. There was an old yellow biplane inside, the prettiest thing he’d seen since Claire came home.

  “Go get your maps out of the car,” he told Steven. “I’ll need to do some plotting before we take off. And bring your gun. Screw on the silencer and shoot the lock off. Carefully.”

  “There’s really a plane in there?”

  “There is. A Boeing Stearman, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “A Boeing, huh? Holy Christ, Warner, when I first met you I was worried you were like my father. It turns out you’re crazier than all of us.”

  “I probably was like your father. Hurry.”

  While Steven trotted back to the car, Warner looked over the three red tanks just outside the barn door. They were mounted high off the ground on wooden stilts that were laced together like railroad trestles. He climbed the first ladder, pulled down the hose from the number one tank and sniffed it. Some kind of pesticide, forget that one.

  He climbed another ladder, very rickety, and felt around for the hose to the second tank. Nothing, it had been removed. He looked at the tank more closely and saw that the bottom had rusted out.

  The third tank had the word “Essence” scrawled across its face in crooked black letters. The ladder looked sturdier than the last.

  The hose was in good shape. He took a sniff. Aviation fuel, but there were no gauges to indicate the level of liquid inside. He climbed on top of the tank, unscrewed the cap and shined his light down the filler hole.

  The strangest things, he thought, could look beautiful in the right circumstances. Such as a battered yellow crop duster; or the reflection of liquid in a dark hole.

  He glanced across the field at Steven, who had the maps in his back pocket and was holding his automatic pistol carelessly while he leaned in the car window to say something to Nicole. She raised her head, and he kissed her.

  “Get your ass over here,” Warner shouted. “When we’re in the air, you can nuzzle all you want.”

  Steven flipped him the bird without turning around. He kissed Nicole again, then made up for lost time with a sprint across the field. “Stay up there, Warner,” he said. “No telling where this thing’ll go.”

  Warner, safety advocate for the nation, was still trying to scramble down from the tank, picturing the ricochet hitting 500 gallons of aviation fuel and sending him up in a fireball, when he was greeted by the dull report of a silenced automatic pistol.

  “Goddammit,” he mumbled. He was used to being around people who shared his values; or at least pretended to.

  By the time he got to the bottom of the ladder, Steven had already opened one side of the creaking double door and stood staring at the old yellow bird.

  Warner picked up the lock, which lay in the wet grass with a neat round hole through its center. The kid could shoot. The kid could do a lot of things. Inspiring confidence wasn’t one of them.

  “Jesus Christ, Frank, is this thing gonna fly?”

  “You bet she’s gonna fly, Steven. The old Stearman’s still in use all over the world. She might not meet FAA regulations, but if the truth be known, not much does these days.”

  “So, how old’s this crate?”

  “I’d say seventy years, give or take. But look at this. It’s been retrofitted with a Pratt and Whitney R 985 engine. That means four hundred fifty horses and not too much oil consumption. We’ll fly to one of those deserted islands off the Dutch coast, put her down and cover her before they get any kind of a search organized, then fly our final leg in the dark.”

  “This thing looks like a museum piece.”

  “Let’s immortalize her. Give me a hand.”

  Steven motioned for Nicole, but here Warner drew the line. He said, “I want her to stay with the car and keep watch. We’re going to be concentrating on getting this airplane ready. We need her to do something useful.”

  “I thought maybe she could be useful here. You know, load the old barge up, things like that.”

  “Not yet.”

  Warner met Nicole halfway across the strip and had a word with her. He spoke gently. Here was a young girl being hunted down by her own father. Even in her fear, confusion and sadness, she was pleasant to look at, pleasant to talk to. She graci
ously accepted his explanation of why she needed to stay with the car. He liked her. It hurt him deeply to know that she would probably come to harm before this day was over.

  Warner found Steven going through tools on a greasy workbench. “By the way, Frank,” he said, “how much fuel did you find?”

  “Plenty, a lot more than the aircraft will hold. I’d like to convert those pesticide tanks under the wings into supplementary fuel tanks.”

  “You think we can make it to Claussen’s without refueling?”

  “Easily. We’ve got less than a thousand kilometers to cover and prevailing winds are at our tail. We’ll need some oil, but that’s it. We’ll take a few liters with us, top up when we land on the island. Come here. You get started flushing those tanks. I’ll rig a fuel delivery system.”

  ***

  Nicole put on Steven’s other baseball cap, the one he wasn’t wearing. She got out and sat on the trunk of the Peugeot. Every once in a while she glanced at the barn. The door was open. She could see Steven and Warner working on the airplane. She had no idea what they were doing, but whatever it was gave her reason to hope they might somehow escape her father’s noose.

  To the east the sun was rising, transforming the cold gray mist along the horizon into a blanket of orange and pink. She tried to concentrate on the gentle undulations of the hills near Belgian border; tried to find some semblance of inner peace.

  But she found none. She was still grappling with the realization that her own father had been involved in Sophie’s murder and the deaths of thousands of innocent people.

  She did not begin to feel better until she saw Steven and Warner pushing the old yellow biplane out of the barn and into the first light of the sun. They rolled it next to the row of tanks. Steven climbed a ladder and passed Warner a hose.

  When the fueling was done, Steven climbed into the cockpit. Warner took hold of the prop and heaved.

  Nothing.

  He did it again and again. On the sixth or seventh try, she saw smoke belch from the engine. Several tries later the engine coughed and sputtered to life.

  Steven climbed down and shook Warner’s hand. She was smiling and waving at them when an unshaven man with a scythe stepped out of the woods. The man stopped in front of her, staring with small suspicious eyes.

  “What’s going on over there at Bonier’s hangar,” he growled.

  “You know those guys?”

  “Yes, I do. I am with them.” She was frightened, but this time she was determined not to fold in the face of danger. She looked him over as if he were the intruder.

  “Well, what in the hell are they doing?” the man snapped.

  “Do you work for Monsieur Bonier?” Nicole asked.

  “No, I don’t work for him. I look after his property when he is in Paris.”

  “Oh, I see. Then he must certainly have told you about the service on his crop duster.”

  “What?”

  “Monsieur Bonier hired Churchill Aviation, an English firm that specializes in aging planes, to take over the maintenance and service.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know. Monsieur Bonier is adamant that the repairs be done right this time. His airplane might have to be flown to England if it can’t be fixed here. Those are his instructions.”

  “Oh, really?” The man scowled, then turned and disappeared into the forest as swiftly as he had come.

  Nicole drove to the barn and reported the incident.

  “He’ll be back,” Warner said from the wing. “Let’s pick up the pace. You two start transferring things we need from the car to the plane – maps, blankets, four liters of oil, the minimum. Weight is a problem. I’m going to drain some fuel. When you finish, pull the car into the barn and drape the lock over the hasp. Let’s move!”

  ***

  After his surprise encounter with Sophie Marx, Claussen drove toward Grenoble. It took him less than an hour on the car phone, arm-twisting former members of his Cold War network in Washington and the airline industry, to reach the conclusion that Frank Warner was the source of the CVR. Warner’s involvement, together with the knowledge Sophie had managed to dig up, meant that his adversaries were more numerous, and in higher positions, than he had believed.

  When a call to Delors produced the shocking news that Nicole Michelet was no longer at her aunt’s, Claussen decided the hour had struck to end his association with his partners and slip off to his second home in Bolivia.

  He faced only one obstacle: French Intelligence Services, if they happened to stumble on to his intentions before he made it out of Europe.

  To feign his continued active participation in defense of the conspiracy, he fed Delors his information on Sophie Marx’s murder and Warner’s arrival in France. To create the appearance of his continuing commitment, he came up with a fictional scenario even Haussmann seemed to like: the French police would attribute both the murder of the journalist and the disappearance of Mademoiselle Michelet to Steven LeConte, an American drifter.

  Claussen was certain his fugitives would use Warner’s rental car when they made their break. They wouldn’t get far with the entire European law enforcement establishment looking for them. They would soon be arrested and taken into custody, either in France or another EC in country. Once that happened, Delors and the SDECE would know how to deal with them, how to make things look “right.”

  “And you, Walter?” Delors asked. “What are your intentions?”

  Claussen was approaching the autoroute intersection at Beaune. Instead of continuing south toward Grenoble, he turned east on A36 and headed for Switzerland. “I shall continue to supplement the work of your forces. Quietly, of course. This LeConte character seems to be a careless type. His address book reads like a road map to his circle of acquaintances in Europe. If he and the others should somehow manage to slip through your net, which I doubt possible, rest assured they won’t slip through mine.”

  Delors said, “We can still pull this off successfully, can’t we, Walter?”

  “Absolutely. Judging from what I’ve been able to learn in the States, no one suspects the real reason Warner is here. He told his staff at the NTSB he was in need of a brief vacation. I’m sure that’s what he’s told everyone else. As for the American government, all they care about is an excuse to fight the last war with Iraq again.” Claussen smiled to himself and pushed his foot a little deeper into the accelerator. “They need a scapegoat, Paul. The couldn’t care less about the truth.”

  “And Sophie Marx? She can’t have been working on this alone?”

  “No, but the reason she was using a bum like LeConte was to keep every aspect of her story under wraps. An experienced news person might well have betrayed her. Now she’s taken that story to the grave, leaving only one person with an inkling of the truth. That person’s hours on this earth are numbered.”

  “I still feel uneasy. I want you to keep on searching for anyone else who might possibly know or suspect – and take appropriate action.”

  “Of course, Paul. Remember. Disclosure would hurt me as badly as you. Now, let me tell you something that will help you relax. I was speaking of the American obsession with Iraq. It gets better. The US is planning to devastate the country before dawn Monday, promoting itself from the only nation to have ever used nuclear arms on women and children to the only nation to have done so twice. Once they’ve killed a few hundred thousand civilians while the Arab world looked on, they’ll be our best allies in making sure the truth is never known. Never.

  “Now, Paul, go to work. Turn your dogs loose. Have every border crossing sealed. Have every airport, railroad station and ferry dock watched. Have every road patrolled. Alert Interpol – and don’t neglect to actively involve your citizenry. Get descriptions of the fugitives and their car on every media outlet. Saturate the airwaves with bulletins and photographs. Depict this as a truly revolting crime perpetrated by an American derelict, the type of person who poses a danger to e
verything decent – everything French. If you do that you’ll have very little to worry about.”

  “Perhaps, Walter. I must say one more thing before we end this conversation. I’m still a little stunned by the incompetence of Michelet. His daughter was an obvious risk. Neither Albert nor I can fathom how he let it come to this.”

  “Nor can I, Paul. But first things first. We’ll have time to deal with him later.”

  “Good night, Walter.”

  “Good night, Paul, and good luck.”

  Claussen deactivated his cellular car phone. He crossed the Swiss border at Basel before stopping for gas and food. He looked at the night sky while the attendant was filling up the large Mercedes tank.