by Craig Thomas
The hydraulic pressure faded and he felt the brakes slacken, become spongey. They were going to plough off the end of the runway into the overrun area-at sixty knots, he was flung against his restraints as the
494 hit the end of the runway and rushed on, throwing gravel and debris against the underside of the fuselage. The mirrors filled with dust.
Thirty knots, ten Their speed died and the aircraft came to a shuddering, drunken stop. Dust boiled up around the flight deck windows, obscuring everything… Gant choked back sickness. Vance seemed to be yelling a stream of obscenities, somewhere at a great distance… Quiet. For a moment, until the noise of sirens filled it.
Gant dragged off his headset and then once more slumped gratefully, dazedly aganist the restrain of his straps.
The nose of the 494 dropped as the nose undercarriage leg slowly collapsed, as if he had ridden it like a horse to exhaustion.
The sirens began to wind down. The vehicles, like a pack of small wild dogs surrounding a wounded buffalo, appeared in front of them as the dust cleared from the windows. At once, he made out Barbara's slight form climbing out of the
4WD.
"Shit," Vance murmured, his voice thick with saliva.
"Shit- shit!"
Gant rubbed his cheeks with his hands as Vance pounded him on the shoulder. He inspected the quivering in his fingers. Remembered Hollis. He shook his head slowly, repeatedly.
Thanks," Vance murmured.
"Sure." He looked across at him. The man's features were shining with relief, with the vivacity of hope rescued from desperation.
"Sure…"
The fuel management system. The assholes they must have cut corners, shaved the costs, failed to check the circuitry… something." He loosened his restraints, almost as if he were just awakening and about to stretch luxuriously.
Gant had done enough, apparently. Survived, unlike Hollis and his crew, and thrown Vance a lifeline. He'd be on the midday news, the networks by evening There was a TV camera, perched like a black parrot on someone's shoulder, pointing at them, then panning along the fuselage. A hurriedly poised, power suited female reporter was already preparing to interview Barbara beneath the nose of the aircraft, amid the scenery of the emergency vehicles.
He turned to Vance and glowered at him. Vance shrugged and said:
"I knew you could do it, Gant I just knew it." He grinned, waggling his hand.
"I couldn't pass up the chance to make headlines. All or nothing at all—"
"You're a Class A asshole, Vance."
"Sure. Now, smile you're on Candid Camera? he pointed through the dusty windows.
"When they ask you questions, just keep it simple. A technical fault, but the airplane's fundamentally safe. OK?"
"And you get a Federal seal of approval, right? The NTSB speaks through me."
That's the way the game is played, Gant. Don't be a party-pooper. Hero saves Vance Aircraft. Don't you like the sound of tomorrow's headlines?" He waved towards the inquisitive camera, which had been joined by a second, then a third.
"Don't screw it up. I save my company, you get to be a celebrity all over again. Let's just play it as it lays, uh?" He paused, and a more vulnerable, grateful man looked out from behind the blunt planes and angles of his face.
"And, thanks. I mean it, Mitchell. Thanks."
Eventually, as his relief and anger both subsided, Gant murmured:
"Yeah. Any time…"
"Am I being stupid, Kenneth? Tell me if you think I am."
"My dear, you only ever ask that question when you're all but certain you're right."
"And you only ever employ that patrician tone with me when your curiosity has been aroused."
Marian blew cigarette smoke through the sunlight that blazed in Aubrey's drawing room. The green carpet and walls gave the room a dell-like privacy and invitation.
Mrs. Grey, who spent her time attempting to woo Kenneth from his occasional cigarettes, would disapprove of the scent of the smoke after she was gone, however privileged she was as a former don, present MP and always Giles Pyott's daughter.
Aubrey lifted his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. Their faded blue appeared childishly mischievous. He smiled at her.
"Am I curious?" he asked.
"I suspect you might be." Then, as if brushing the banter aside like the last billow of smoke with her hand, she leaned forward and said:
"You know my suspicions amount to paranoia, Kenneth. At least, I know you think so. I just can't believe he overdosed on heroin."
"Why not?" he asked, not unkindly.
"Many respectable young people do. It doesn't always happen in filthy public lavatories or on run-down housing estates."
"I grant you that but unless he had his hand in the till… Oh, I don't know! Perhaps he could afford a new apartment, a new girlfriend, a new car and a mainline habit… And perhaps I'm old-fashioned enough not to want it to be true. But it seems too coincidental to me. The very day—"
"Ah. Well, perhaps." He replaced his spectacles, which had been catching the sunlight as he waved his hand airily, the thin wrist bony and skeletal, the flesh almost transparent. The dust motes slowed as he returned his attention to the sheet of A4. These names, you say, are not unexpected?" She shook her head emphatically.
"Well, apart from Laxton."
"Laxton Not-so-Superb as he was known to Cabinet colleagues old enough to remember real apples," Aubrey reminisced drily.
"He was always a denizen of the meaner realms of the body politic, I grant you. Why should his presence surprise?"
"Urban Development his EU brief as Commissioner. He has no possible connection with Aero UK or Balzac-Stendhal. And before you ask, he is not a director nor has ever been. They were companies he must have missed out of his ample portfolio." She smiled, brushing at the stray blonde hair at her temples. Her mane was pulled back from her face and held in a slide. She was soberly dressed in a cream suit.
"And I wouldn't gauge him to possess the clout to lobby effectively either at Westminster or in Brussels. Urban Development was the booby prize or a slight to the new British Commissioner."
"Otherwise, nothing?"
"Nothing."
"Well, let me look at the photographs." He flicked through the prints she had had rush-developed.
"Mm, I would not have employed that unfortunate young man on surveillance without an extensive course in the arts of photography.
These are very poor, even allowing for the weather…" He studied the prints carefully, holding his glasses at slightly differing distances from his eyes, squinting.
"I recognise most of these faces, including dear David. But then, I presume you're not suspicious of David Winterborne in this, are you?"
"Don't be silly. Just because he was always pulling my pigtails, tying me to trees and leaving me for hours, putting frogs down my best frocks
…?" She tossed her head, laughing.
"No, I don't want to pay him back for his childhood cruelties to a mere girl five years younger than himself—"
"Who repeatedly invaded his boyish games, offered probity where there was inevitable cheating, and who accused him at every possible turn of unkindness to his younger brother, your playmate?"
There was a momentary silence as both of them remembered David Winterborne's long-dead younger brother. Then she said:
"I was going to describe a young girl, an only child, so loved that she had no sense of the cruelty children are capable of. But, Dr. Freud, I'm sure you're right."
Aubrey snorted with amusement, then continued to study the photographs, murmuring:
"A great pity he did not have the presence of mind to take some pictures of the men who so frightened him… Although, on the other hand—"
"What is it?" she asked eagerly, almost rising from her armchair.
"Patience is a virtue," Aubrey remarked with mock primness.
"A face here, passing into the hotel. Afof coincidentally present, I think. Here this man." Sh
e was already at his shoulder, leaning over the back of his chair. He smelt the slight, oldfashioned scent of her perfume and remembered that her mother had often worn the same. He patted her hand on his shoulder and she did not resent the touch, though he was certain she understood its motive.
"Who is he?" she asked, straightening.
"Bring me my magnifying glass. In the drawer of the desk there." His request was almost reluctant, as if he had been forced to admit his age. She held it out to him.
The faces in the photograph, through the rain and the slightly wrong focus, enlarged and distorted as if in fairground mirrors.
"Yes. Definitely," Aubrey concluded.
"You know him I don't."
"My world, not yours, dear girl. My world." His voice had an edge of asperity, even distaste. She took the photograph back to her chair and studied the face Aubrey had indicated. Rain-pallid, slightly blurred by the extra flesh of good living and poor camera work A tough, alert face; pale, dead eyes, set above large cheekbones, a long jaw, a shock of greying hair.
"His name is Fraser," Aubrey was saying.
"He is a former field agent quite a senior and experienced one of my service. An erstwhile intelligence officer of particular, even peculiar skills."
"You don't like him? He worked for you?"
"As little as possible. Others quite liked his somewhat direct methods. Many agents wouldn't work with him, if they could possibly avoid it. You see, his survival instinct was capable of overriding all other priorities including the lives of his colleagues." Despite the chilliness of his account and the evident distaste of his tone, there was a dreamy, reminiscing pleasure on Aubrey's features.
"Patrick Hyde, of whom you may have heard me speak—"
"Endlessly. How is your long-lost son, by the way?"
Aubrey all but pouted, then smiled.
"I gather he prospers in the Penal Colony of Australia. Free of me at last, perhaps… But Fraser is our concern. Hyde would never, on any account, work with him."
"Why not?"
"Fraser was a psychopath. Is."
"In SIS?"
"Many of his skills were just what was required. He was also successful, efficient. Not all agents possessed the same abilities, nor the same personalities.
Fraser was one of the truly bad apples we could turn to some account on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty's Government and in the further defence of the realm.
Despite your disapproval!"
Then…?" she asked, still as shocked as a child might have been.
Then it is possible that your friend did not acquire his heroin addiction until yesterday." He shuffled in his chair, as if eager for activity, plagued by restlessness. I'll make some enquiries, Marian.
I'll try to discover what the appalling Fraser has been doing in the way of gainful employment since he left the service."
"When would that have been?"
Two or three years even as many as four. I must check."
"And you think—?" She paused. Michael Lloyd's body, lying on his new carpet, seen through the letter box's slit, as if a scene from some wide-screen movie shown on television. She felt tears, and anger, equally.
"Do I think? Mm perhaps I do. If Fraser's employers, whoever they are at present, felt that your young friend's presence was a threat… then Fraser would take just such a direct means to close the door with as much finality as he could. Yes… Fraser is certainly capable of killing your friend."
CHAPTER FOUR
Ghosts in the Machines His office was, for the moment, a dusty, cramped space in need of repainting close under the roof of the Commerce Department. The perspective from its one small window, jammed shut and wire-netted against the pigeons, was bounded by the Washington Monument and the White House. Since he was not a political animal, it had come as a surprise to Gant that he had been given the view. The office itself was much more indicative of his lowly status as a Federal employee.
Hands still in his pockets, he turned from the window and the morning sunlight falling across the Ellipse and its acres of grass, which made the Monument a dazzling and unreal white. There were reports on his desk that needed his attention, though none of them was urgent. Mostly they were filed copies of accident reports that had been forwarded to the headquarters of the Accident Investigation Office by the various state investigatory units which were only loosely linked to the National Transportation Safety Board. He rubbed his hands through his cropped hair, his sense of frustration childishly acute, unreasonable.
He had returned to a kind of sense-deprivation the flotation tank of his daily existence after the flight and the crash landing. He disregarded the newspaper and TV coverage, which Vance had milked and ignited in turn; that had all been Vance's prize.
The two 494s of Albuquerque Airlines were flying again, half-full, though the two planes Burton had in Europe were slower to be trusted
… even though they were not fitted with the fuel computer system that had failed. Vance had, on TV, publicly changed the subcontractor, reverting to an older fuel computer system which would be marginally less efficient but which had a track record. Also, he was very publicly suing the errant manufacturer for millions of dollars. The media had gone along for the ride; Vance was crowing again, like some overpaid sports star, and they liked that.
He didn't savour the exploitation of his own role, the images of "Nam and himself in uniform and the scrappy accounts of his Cold War career.
The MiG-31, the Firefox, sitting in the Skunk Works at Burbank, stripped down, its pieces of fuselage lying about its skeleton like the ripped-off shards of a giant beetle. Other images of MiL gunships, references to Winter Hawk.
He had turned off the set and gotten another beer from the icebox, regretting that he was being used by Vance; regretting more, perhaps, that he had broken open his new self only to find it the wrapping on a mummy's corpse and nothing more… Underneath the veneer of this office, his job, the secretary in the even smaller room next door, his pay cheque everything had crumbled into dust as soon as he had been exposed to flying, danger, his supreme skill with machines that flew.
He could taste the dust in his dry mouth now. It had been stupid, so stupid, to have gone back, to have put himself The intercom blurted.
When you sold the farm, he thought bitterly, and moved on, you didn't return to it on Sundays and the Fourth of July. You forgot it.
"Yes?"
"Agent Mclntyre from the FBI is here to see you, sir."
Gant grimaced, then said: "Show him in, Mrs. Garcia."
He took up his position at the window once more, hands in his pockets, shirtsleeves rolled, shoulders slightly hunched as if in anticipation of an assault from behind. There were grey squirrels on the lawn in front of the Commerce Department. He heard the door shut behind Mclntyre, and sensed the enthusiasm of enmity that the FBI man brought with him into the cramped office.
"You're really appreciated by the NTSB, uh, Gant?" he heard.
The FBI Building faced the Department of Justice across Pennsylvania Avenue.
They called that one of the ironies of good government.
"What do you want, Mclntyre? I'm busy."
"Sure, I can see that."
A chair scraped on linoleum and Mclntyre's weight made its ricketiness creak in protest as he sat down. A lighter clicked and he smelt cigarette smoke.
"No, I don't mind if you smoke," he murmured.
"Gant, you're a real cure."
Gant turned to face Mclntyre. The man's features, blunt and square, shone with the heat of the room and with some undisclosed satisfaction.
The nose was too small for the size of the face, perched like a sculptor's first, unsuccessful attempt at proportion below narrowed eyes and amid hard, un impressible lines. Gant sat behind his littered desk.
"OK what does the Bureau want? You'd like to pick over my service career, my voting record what?"
Mclntyre shook his head.
"Something more recent, Gant. Someth
ing between you and Vance. Vance the crook."
"I was doing my job."
Mclntyre waggled the hand that held the cigarette.
"And got well paid for it."
Gant frowned.
"I didn't seek publicity. I just found out why an airplane crashed, Mclntyre. As a public servant."
Mclntyre removed a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and smoothed it on the desk before turning it so Gant could study it. It was a bank statement.
"See what I mean about well paid? The latest entry…? Drawn on the Vance Aircraft account at First Arizonan. A hundred thousand dollars.
Paid to you, as a public servant."
Gant looked up bleakly.
"You mother."
Again, Mclntyre shook his head.
"It's no frame, Gant. Vance sent you a transfer for a hundred thousand yesterday.
You didn't know? For getting him off the hook with his bankers or is it your cut of the Federal funding we talked about earlier?" He was openly grinning now.
"Jeez, I wouldn't want to have to explain this on TV! You'd be even more coy than you were after you got that plane down." He leaned forward. The Bureau can make a case out of this, Gant one that ties you in with Vance. We'll begin by serving you with a subpoena the Senate Committee will serve you with one, requiring you to give evidence at the hearing into Vance's affairs… while the Bureau keeps on digging. Your grave," he added.
His eyes gloated. Gant knew his own posture was one of defeated truculence, that of the farm boy watching a storm flatten corn defiant only out of complete lack of expectation. Vance always had to prove he had offered you his thanks and you understood he had. The hundred thousand was just that, done without thought of consequence or propriety; a thank you that enabled you to buy things that would remind you of his gratitude.
Barbara's attempt to show concern for him, enquire into his present life, had been just as intrusive, but less damaging. It didn't look criminal. The payment did.
"What can I say?" he bluffed.
"Maybe I've got the lottery ticket somewhere in the apartment?"
"A real cure, like I said." Mclntyre's satisfaction was complete; he could, for once, adopt a moral superiority. Gant had screwed up with a bribe. The man could taste his pleasure. He shook his head.