“Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“You’re beautiful.”
She flinched. “I’m disfigured.”
Thomas shook his head and stared into her eyes. “Not to me. Never to me.”
“Tom, just stop it, okay? I can’t do this right—”
He reached across the table for her hand. She couldn’t decide, in the moment, whether to pull away or not.
Their phones both rang at the same time.
Sarah sat up straight and pulled the Samsung from her inside pocket. She had a special ringtone for Jessica, so she knew it was her before she answered. “Jess? What’s up? Whoa, whoa, whoa, calm down. Jesus, are you kidding me?”
Sarah listened as her colleague rambled down the phone. Thomas’s expression grew ugly at the same time as hers. He was taking a similar call. Sarah could barely believe what she was hearing.
Five hundred dead. Final tally unknown.
A fresh disaster had befallen the United Kingdom.
Sleep would have to wait.
The waitress brought over their pittas, but by then Sarah and Thomas were already rushing out of the restaurant.
The drive to Watford took less than an hour, mainly thanks to Thomas pushing the Alfa’s speedometer past ninety for most of the journey. When they reached the town, they manoeuvred through a police cordon and headed towards flashing lights. A billowing black smoke cloud cut through the bleak afternoon sky, and they saw it long before they reached their eventual destination.
Thomas parked in a side street outside a bakery. The shop’s large front window had shattered, and the scent of freshly baked bread wafted out and mixed with the odour of burning metal. A sour taste filled Sarah’s mouth. This was going to be a bad one.
I can feel the death.
Am I developing a sixth sense for misery?
She and Thomas exchanged glances as they got out of the car. They walked in silence towards the area of town where Mattock and his team would be waiting for them. The disaster had struck a supermarket off the A411. It was an urbanised area, which meant mass casualties.
They passed a Chinese restaurant, a newsagent’s, and a glass-fronted building society with half of its windows obliterated. Eventually, they made it onto the blockaded A411, empty aside from a few cars here or there that had crashed. The disaster must have distracted the drivers. They walked at a snail’s pace, as if neither of them actually wanted to see what they were there to see. But there was no avoiding it, and around the very next bend in the road the devastation presented itself in its full, breathtaking plumage.
The wreckage no longer resembled a plane. It was more a piece of grotesque modern art. One white wing remained intact, jutting out of the supermarket’s roof like it was still trying to cling to the sky, but the other wing was nowhere to be seen. Chunks of fuselage and simmering engine parts cluttered the supermarket’s car park, along with masses of unidentifiable debris. Ashes and soot clung to every surface. All around, police struggled to console mortified onlookers and shell-shocked survivors. People screamed. Children cried. Husbands hugged their trembling wives. Mass tragedy was a tapestry Sarah could weave from memory, but each one had its own colour and smell. This one was subdued greys and blinding whites, with a sharp scent of burning chemicals.
Tragedy had once again struck the United Kingdom.
Once again, Sarah had to make sense of it.
The wreckage had been sectioned off by reams upon reams of police tape, making it impossible to get close. The only people within the inner cordon were rescue workers and firefighters dealing with several blazes still raging in and around the supermarket. Twisted blackened shopping trolleys scattered the crash site along with dozens of soot-covered vehicles. The windscreens of most had shattered.
Sergeant Mattock stood with a team two hundred metres away, easily recognisable from his combat uniform and the red bandana hanging from his breast pocket, which made it easier for his men to spot him in the field. When he saw Sarah and Thomas, he moved to greet them, grabbing Sarah by the arm and squeezing affectionately. “Good to see you, lass, but this is a shit show of epic proportions. Last I heard, there’s seven hundred dead and more bodies being uncovered all the time. Not a single survivor from the plane and two-thirds of the people inside the supermarket copped it too. Someone will pay through the nose for this. This is the kind of fuck-up that bankrupts companies and puts even rich men in jail.”
Thomas folded his arms and assumed an authoritative pose. “Is a malfunction suspected?”
Mattock shrugged. “I’ve been trying to get answers, but nobody is ready to share. There’s a pair of crash scene investigators inside the cordon. I plan on grabbing one if I get the chance.”
“Okay,” said Thomas. “Good work, Sergeant. I’ll check in with home base and find out where we’re at. Let’s hope this wasn’t an intentional act.”
They could all agree on that. The past few years had been relatively peaceful compared to the tumult of the preceding decade. The world had even started, dare Sarah think it, to feel safe. With Al-Sharir gone, the terrorism community had gone into hiding.
But there are always new madmen ready to take Al-Sharir’s place.
Once Thomas was out of earshot, Mattock relaxed. He patted Sarah on the shoulder gently, which probably took concentration for a man more used to snapping necks. “How’re things going with Howard’s investigation? Ready to make a move yet?”
She shook her head. “Not yet, but the investigation is heating up. It won’t be long before we pull the trigger.”
He nodded over towards Thomas, who was on his phone twenty metres away. “You and him still doin’ the merry dance?”
“Always. He still sees a future where he and I settle down and grow old together. I don’t know if it’s delusion or stubbornness. Anyway, right now I want to concentrate on what I’m looking at here. This is bad.”
“Ain’t it just.” He moved closer to her and lowered his voice. “I didn’t want to say it in front of our glorious leader, but there’s a witness with a decent account of the crash. She’s being treated for shock in the taxi rank across the road. You should go listen to what she has to say.”
Sarah glanced in Thomas’s direction and saw he was still busy on the phone. Across the road, several single-storey buildings had been battered by flaming debris, but a small taxi firm still had its windows intact. Parked outside it was an ambulance.
“Don’t tell Thomas where I’ve gone,” she said. “I’d like a chance to question her without an overseer.”
“I thought you might. I’ll tell him you went to take a shit.”
Sarah chuckled, but she stopped herself when she saw the burning hellscape. Had she become so immune to such devastation that she could laugh?
If I didn’t laugh, I would scream.
Sarah turned her back on the crash scene and crossed the empty, litter-strewn road. She headed around the ambulance and towards the taxi rank, where a bearded police officer greeted her at the entrance. She had to flash her badge to get by.
The taxi office was grimy and uncarpeted, with a tall reception desk taking up one side and a small leather sofa taking up the other. A middle-aged woman was sitting on the sofa with one arm stretched out across her knee while a paramedic took her blood pressure. A nasty scratch cleaved its way across the left side of her face and would likely leave a scar. Sarah could sympathise, although her disfigurement didn’t bother her so much these days. Sometimes, she even used it to her advantage. During investigations, people either pitied her or were unsettled. Both reactions made it harder for people to lie to her.
Sarah flashed her badge at the paramedic and greeted the woman, who said her name was Eileen Chadwick. The poor dear was clearly in shock, alabaster-white and trembling like a drum skin. A stain on her thigh might have been from vomiting. “I’m really sorry to pester you, Eileen. My name is Sarah and I’m an agent with the MCU. I believe you witnessed today’s accident.”
Eileen
gave a high-pitched squeak. “Accident? It was more than an accident. I thought the world was ending. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
The woman spoke loudly and energetically, which boded well. Shock was usually worse for the souls who turned sullen and unresponsive. Sarah nodded at the woman. “Of course, Eileen. It’s an unbelievable tragedy, no question about it, but did you witness anything that might help make sense of what happened? Was the plane on fire when it came down? Any smoke coming from the engines?”
Eileen shook her head. “It fell out of the sky like a lump of coal. One second I was crossing the road, heading for the supermarket, the next, a plane comes down and explodes right in front of me. There was no fire or smoke. It just came down like a missile, nose pointed straight at the ground. It happened in a split second, but the image is imprinted on my brain.”
Sarah raised an eyebrow. “It crashed straight into the ground? It didn’t try to land or glide?”
“Nope. Was like a missile.”
Sarah pointed to the scratch on Eileen’s face. “Did that happen during the explosion?”
The woman acted as if she’d forgotten, hand rising towards her cheek, fingers prodding at the wound tentatively. “I… I think so. Never felt it at the time, but there was a lot of stuff flying through the air when the plane hit. I keep wondering…” She shook her head and let out a hollow chuckle. “I keep wondering what it was that hit my face. It could have been part of a person, you know? A piece of bone. A child’s tooth.”
“The debris was most likely from the plane’s fuselage.” Sarah didn’t know if it was true, but she wanted to reassure the woman. It obviously failed because Eileen started hyperventilating. The paramedic gave Sarah a look that suggested she needed to go away. The last thing she wanted to do was harass a victim, so she thanked Eileen and left without complaint. She had learned a little, but not a lot.
Like a missile, she said.
Mattock stood where she’d left him. “She tell you the plane fell out of the sky like a dart?” he asked.
“Yeah. If it were a simple malfunction, the pilot would have tried to glide the plane down safely, right?”
“I’ve known pilots keep a plane in the air for an hour with no engines. Whatever this was, it was sudden. So sudden the pilot couldn’t do a thing.”
Thomas ended his phone call and rejoined them. “The pilot got off a twelve-second distress call before the plane crashed,” he said. “The audio is with our analysts along with all the data from the cloud.”
Sarah frowned. “The cloud?”
Mattock frowned as well. “What you talking about, boss?”
“Apparently, a handful of modern planes have been outfitted with the ability to send back flight data in real time. It’s not as comprehensive as a black box, which we haven’t discovered yet, but it’ll give us the broad strokes of what happened. I’m going to head back to the earthworm and oversee the data gathering. Sarah, are you coming? You can brief your team and have them working on this. Take them off the Russian Mafia operation for now, okay?”
Sarah thought for a moment before deciding she didn’t want to spend the next hour trapped in a car with Thomas. She needed to be active. She needed to be at this scene a while longer to let it fully sink into her bones. “No, I’m going to stick around here and try to get hold of the crash site investigators. I need to know more before I hand this off to my team.”
Thomas looked put out, but he nodded. “Okay. I’ll hang around another half hour and see what I can find out. Then I’ll head off. You’ll have to make your own way back.”
“No problem, I’ll get a taxi.” Sarah looked back at the taxi firm’s office being used as a treatment room. “Maybe one from the other side of town.”
Thomas turned and put his phone back to his ear, but then he lowered it again and turned back. “Oh, did you find out anything from the witness?”
Sarah flinched. “Huh?”
Thomas chuckled. “All these years and you still hate having to work with others. I won’t bother questioning the woman myself, but did you learn anything useful?”
It was true, Sarah hated having to rely on anybody else, but when she considered why she hadn’t involved Thomas in the interview, it wasn’t as simple as being antisocial. There were trust issues, to say the least, and working alone meant only having to trust herself. “I’m sorry. I should have had you join me, but I didn’t learn anything anyway. Only that the plane was clearly out of control when it crashed. To be precise, the witness said it came down like a missile. Straight at the ground. Nose first.”
Thomas winced. “That’s not how planes come down. Not unless someone forces them.”
“I know.” Sarah nodded slowly. “My guts are telling me this was no accident. Somebody did this.”
Mattock grunted. “Terrorism it is, then.”
“Then we have work to do,” said Thomas. “Let’s go do it.”
“I want y’all on this every second.” Dr Jessica Bennett put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat, trying to hide their shaking. “If you need to pee, grab a cup. If you need food, put your hand up and I’ll get you a bag of chips. But do not stop working. Find me answers.”
Jessica was in charge of the earthworm until Thomas returned. While the MCU was predominantly based in the UK, a sizeable chunk of its funding came from Washington, which was why both the director and deputy director were American. That was the trade-off agreed to by the Pentagon. Besides being American, however, there were few similarities between herself and Director Thomas Gellar.
Thomas was a schemer, always eyeing up whatever position was dangling directly overhead. There was a glint in his eye every time he met the prime minister or someone else high up in government. His regular updates to Pentagon officials were sickeningly self-aggrandising.
Jessica, on the other hand, cared about the MCU above all else. She had been a key component in its rebirth – along with Howard, Sarah, Mattock, and Palu. She and her colleagues had helped the agency to first survive, and then thrive. The Major Crimes Unit was their baby. Countless people were alive today because of its existence, and no matter what offers came her way, Jessica would forever dedicate herself to the continuing success of MCU. In fact, she had created her own promotion to deputy director rather than move somewhere else to further her career. She had fought for the position because she had feared Thomas’s intentions for the agency after he had taken over from Palu, but she might possibly have overreacted. Despite Thomas’s ruthless ambition, the MCU continued to do good work under Director Gellar’s supervision.
I used to think Sarah was a train wreck, so perhaps I have a nasty habit of misjudgement.
Well, she pretty much is a train wreck, to be fair, but she’s also the bravest son of a gun I ever met.
I should give Thomas a break.
“Ma’am?”
Jessica glanced at one of her analysts. The team was spread in a circle, analysts sitting at computers spaced around the room’s perimeter. Jessica stood in the centre, overseeing a bunch of stuff she barely understood. The analyst was named Manraj. He was just a kid – or at least it felt that way to her – but he was bright and motivated. “What is it, Raj?”
“I downloaded the pilot’s mayday recording from air traffic control.”
“Okay, great. Play it for me.”
Manraj turned up the volume on his monitor and double-clicked a file on his desktop. A congested audio recording started playing, a pair of panicked male voices amidst a cacophony of beeping alarms and howling wind. “…out of control… systems not responding… interference… losing altitude. Help…” A pause. “I can’t…” Silence.
The audio didn’t end with an explosion. It just cut off.
“Is that all we have?”
Manraj was half swivelled around in his seat. Her lack of enthusiasm deflated him. “We’re receiving flight telemetry from the Civil Aviation Authority,” he said positively. “That should tell us the condition of the plan
e when it came down. If the health monitors were working as they should have been, we can try to narrow down what malfunctioned – or find out which parts of the plane were overridden.”
“Overridden?”
Manraj shrugged. “Well, yes, it’s a possibility. The pilot made no mention of anyone physically threatening the plane, but if this was a malicious act, it could have been a cyberattack.”
Jessica pinched her nose behind her spectacles and took a deep breath. “Are you telling me criminals can hack into planes and fly them into the ground now? Is that where we’re at?”
“It hasn’t happened yet” – Manraj sounded unsure – “and it probably hasn’t happened now, but in theory it could be possible. The more advanced aircraft become, the more they rely on automated systems and complex software. All software can be hacked if a person understands it well enough. I actually studied the potential risk of cyberattacks against airliners as part of my final year dissertation. I think it’s possible that—”
“Okay, Manraj. Let’s just focus on the evidence in front of us, okay? Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
A chill slithered down Jessica’s spine. Manraj was clearly projecting his biases onto the investigation, which was a sign of his inexperience, but there was, of course, the chance he might be correct. Youth brought new ideas, and new ideas were right as often as they were wrong.
Why hijack a plane and commit suicide when you can just hack into one from a laptop and watch the fireworks show?
Terrorism had only grown more frightening as the years passed by. The bad guys weren’t KGB spies or lone gunmen any more. The threats were both invisible and in plain sight. Hackers, viruses, school shooters… Heck, there were even economic terrorists to contend with nowadays – financial wizards who could destabilise a country’s financial well-being by manipulating the markets. The number and types of threats had multiplied and were even more indiscriminate in their targeting. The entry conditions for terrorism had lowered substantially, and in these heady days of 2021, a dingy call centre in India could steal more money from the local economy than ten teams of bank robbers – and to make matters worse, the scammers usually got away with it. Crime was starting to pay, and there were better ways to skin a cat than homemade bombs and rusty AK47s. Terrorism had got smarter, more efficient.
Terminal (Major Crimes Unit Book 4) Page 3