by Craig Thomas
"We've been through that, Mitchell.
There's nothing here…"
Ron Blakey had checked the fuel computer system on sophisticated portable monitors, and then rechecked on his instructions, angrily patient. And nothing… The fuel computer system, every last chip of it, worked. Gant knew there had to be something wrong with the fuel computer… instability, manual control, the uneven struggle against the pitching and yawing of the plane, the final loss of control and engine power when there wasn't enough fuel any more. It was all on the cockpit voice recorder, and what ne had experienced with Vance.
More gently, Blakey said: "I could have that system in the lab for a month and it would still read out the same. Sorry, Mitchell—" Gant pointed at the littered table.
"Except that," he said.
"I've explained what it does—" Blakey responded.
"But not why it's there," Gant snapped.
"No…"
"It's not standard it's not like the other components with the Microlite brand name. It's not like chips that I've seen that do the same job."
"No, it isn't but there's nothing peculiar about it except its looks.
It's just another dumb microprocessor carrying out simple tasks, taking orders, passing them on."
Blakey shrugged.
"So, why is it different?" Gant persisted.
"Why is it handmade — your word?"
"Maybe it's a prototype we can check with Microlite. It didn't cause the accident—"
"You say."
' You say it did. The only thing that looks any different from normal, and that's your answer? That it's that chip? It isn't. I did the tests you asked."
Gant looked up at Blakey.
"Ron please do the tests. However many, however long it takes. Take this back to Phoenix and find out why it dresses up different from the rest of the guys."
Blakey nodded.
"OK it's your call. And the old fella's desperate, right?" he added.
"Right."
They looked away from one another. Both Vance and Burton had been frantically engaged, by means of their mobile phones, in fending off armies of bankers, other creditors, the press, lobbyists, stockbrokers, the TV networks. The voices coming out of the ether were another storm, like the one outside, paralleling the one inside Gant himself.
Gant turned back to Blakey. When he had last glimpsed Vance he had looked ashen, buckled, Barbara at his side somehow drawing strength from him rather than supporting him. Lightning glared through the opacity of the canvas, then the thunder burst around them.
"Jesus," Blakey muttered, and shivered with reaction.
Gant stared down at the trodden sand beneath his feet, the flattened tussocks of grass. The tent was as frail and insubstantial as the 494 would have felt to the pilot. Gant's head jerked up and he stared malevolently at the chip on the table, dwarfed by the fuel flow gauge with its lying needle. It was that unexpected chip, he knew it was The flap of the tent was dragged aside. Flying sand scoured across the instruments, the photographs, ageing them. Gant looked up and saw Vance posed for a moment, the storm behind him. Vivid lightning struck down from the heavy cloud towards the sea. Yet Vance's face seemed more thunderous, incandescently angry.
Blakey assiduously dusted sand from the table. Barbara, her dark hair wild, was at Vance's side, pulling vainly at his arm like a child.
Vance lurched like a drunk to the table, leaning heavily on Blakey, a large hand clasping Gant's shoulder.
"Well? What have you got? What is it?" His breathing sounded hoarse as the rolling thunder died away. The storm was moving slowly away along the Gulf of Finland.
"Ron tell me what went wrong."
Blakey, almost as bulky as Vance, seemed to shy from the older man, his hands gesturing vainly, as if in supplication. Vance's features became ever more virulent, maddened.
"You?" He glared at Gant.
"Come on, boy wonder, tell me what happened to my airplane!"
"Alan, we don't know—" The hell you don't! I'm paying you way over the odds, Gant — and for answers, not apologies!"
Gant clenched his hands in the pockets of his anorak. Burton, dishevelled by the storm and his collapsed business, was standing in the opening of the tent, a stranger who had inadvertently walked in on some family crisis.
"Alan, I can't give you an answer there isn't an answer. Not yet—"
"You told me it was sabotage, Gant! You sounded like you were swearing on your mother's life, for Christ's sake! Now you got nothing?" He turned contemptuously towards Blakey.
"And you, Ron you got nothing, either? You still going along with this guy's theory?"
"We can't find anything. Not yet. But the odds against—"
"Fuck odds!
I have had odds up to here! The company's dead in the water. I know the odds!"
"Daddy calm down, for God's sake!"
"Barbara?" Vance seemed bemused, or stunned. Lightning made the canvas of the tent glow, as if there was some great conflagration outside. Then the thunder.
Vance yelled above it: "You taking his side? Something new for you, Barbara!"
"Alan," Gant said levelly, 'it has to be sabotage. I don't know why and I don't know how but it has to be."
Then prove it!" He banged his fist on the table. The instruments rattled, jumped, the malicious chip sliding across the surface.
"If you can't prove it, and prove it now, then you're no damn' use to me, Gant no damn' use at all!" He was leaning heavily on the table, the litter on the surface quivering with the pressure of his rage and weariness. His face was shiny with sweat, his eyes protruding, his breathing loud and difficult. He seemed to be suffocating on his own rage.
"I will prove it, Alan—"
"But you'll prove it too late!" He waved a lurching arm towards Burton behind him.
The Englishman's features were without optimism, expressing a withdrawn defeat.
"You think he and I have got the time to wait for you to prove anything? We ain't got shit?
The man's entire career had subsided within him, Gant realised. The supremely focused, narrowly defiant ego had slid like a collapsing levee into the river of his rage. The 494 had been his dream, and it had turned on him like a wastrel child and betrayed him, leaving his whole business in ruins. He had clung to Gant's theory not because it was a way of surviving, but because it would keep the airplane pure, triumphant. It would justify the 494 and Vance himself. Now, the theory was unprovable and to Vance it had become untenable.
"I'll get something on the move!" he growled, dragging his mobile phone from the pocket of his waterproof and consulting its memory. Then he dialled a number and waited.
"Yes who's that? It's Vance —!" His face was freshly slick with sweat, his eyes and cheeks swollen.
"Is Olssen there? Olssen, your fucking chief engineer—?
Burton seemed to awake from a light trance, eager to cling to his realisation of the purpose of the call. Gant presumed it was Oslo the maintenance company who had performed the overnight service.
"Get that asshole Olssen to the phone, for Christ's sake! I know the guy is avoiding me! I want to talk to Olssen now!"
He remained leaning heavily on the table, which continued to shudder under the pressure, the chips and screws and smaller instruments responding as to a distant earth tremor.
"What do you think might have—?" Burton began with the eagerness of desperation, then fell silent.
Gant remained watching Barbara, who stood near Blakey as if she had retreated from the epic entre and regarded her helplessness, her lack of influence over her father's rage, with evident guilt. Then:
"Olssen — Vance. I want to talk to you!" Vance was fiercely stroking his left arm as it held the mobile phone to his flushed cheek.
"Listen to me you screwed up, Olssen! Your crummy little asshole company screwed up! My airplane fell out of the sky because of you!"
Gant shook his head angrily, but remained silent. Vance's lips were blue
with rage, his face brick red.
"I'm going to sue the ass off you and your bosses, Olssen. You ruined me! ruin you! Understand understand…?"
Gant did, catching Vance's weight as it lurched, one hand sweeping aside the litter on the table, the other dropping the phone to clutch at his chest, twist the waterproof down like a tourniquet that might stop the pain. Gant faltered under the weight, then Blakey held Vance, lowering him on to a folding chair.
For a moment his features drained of colour and his eyes stared wildly.
Then, as if a huge current had been passed through his big frame, he seemed to staggeringly leap from the chair towards the tent flap, then subside to his knees. Another jolting shock and he lay stretched on his stomach, Blakey and Barbara bending over him, gently turning him over, loosening his clothing. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth wet and working loosely, as if with a foreign language of pain and dread.
Gant snatched up the mobile phone from the sand and dusted it brusquely. Burton retained shock like an anaesthetic. Barbara was murmuring, drying Vance's face with a handkerchief while Blakey placed a folded garment beneath his head, then glanced at Gant.
'… man from your own factory, your own expert, checked the fuel computer, where your trouble was supposed to have been…"
Gant's thumb remained on the off button.
"Wait," he snapped. Then to Burton: "Call for an air ambulance — do it now!" He realised that their shock was turning to puzzled contempt.
Vance's heart attack had to be that had altered the tent's small universe, the physical and psychological laws that governed it. How could he, their eyes said, want to talk to Olssen now? He waited until Burton had begun dialling, then he turned his back on them.
"OK. Mr. Vance wants me to talk to you. I'm FAA, got it? Please repeat what you just said what man from Vance Aircraft? When?
Where?"
'-did not wish to listen to what I had to—"
"I don't have time for all that, Mr. Olssen. Just tell me about this man." Vance was still breathing, struggling to swallow air like a fish drowning in it. Gant ignored the small, tight pain of pity in his chest.
"You claim there was someone from Vance Aircraft in Oslo two nights ago. What was his name? Who was he supposed to be?"
There was a groan from Vance, though it might have been some incoherent protest from Barbara or Blakey. Burton was talking urgently into his phone, describing symptoms.
"He called himself Massey. But, you mean he was not' He was not," Gant affirmed.
"Massey? There's no Massey at Vance Aircraft. What did he do? Why did he say he had come?"
He felt icily cold now, utterly detached from the scrabbling of feet in the trodden sand, the chirruping of alarm and comfort. He knew he was right.
"He had been sent to check the fuel computer system, because of the first accident, he said. It was not necessary, since the system was a different one, but he had been asked by Mr. Vance to make certain."
"Sure. You saw him working?"
"No. Jorgensen did, for a while one of the engineers. He was with us an hour. He was an expert- I spoke to him myself, he was definitely from Vance Aircraft, there was no reason to think otherwise."
The slight singsong of the Norwegian accent was beginning to grate, as if it was the aural equivalent of the naivety of Olssen's opinions. The guy was an expert. He'd have had to be, to doctor the fuel computer… with another of those. Gant glared malevolently at the chip, which remained on the table even though the floor of the tent was littered with the stuff Vance had swept away with his hand. He had to speak to Olssen, face to face he needed a description, a verbatim account of what the expert had said, how he had spoken, his nationality.
And question this guy Jorgensen, who had also spoken to the expert.
"We'll need to talk, Mr. Olssen. I'll drop by. My name is Gant — my real name."
"But you are—?" The tone was at once conciliatory, even ingratiating, then immediately defensive.
"But, how could we have known—?"
Gant flicked the off button and put the phone in his pocket.
Reluctantly, he turned to look at Vance, a mixture of sensations invading him, making demands on him.
The image was appalling, cold. Vance's mouth was open, loose, gulping air slowly. Burton waggled his phone, shaping with his lips, They're on their way.
Barbara was sitting in the sand beside her father, holding his hand, murmuring continually. Blakey was seated on the chair as if studying a map drawn in the distressed sand. Gant stepped outside the tent without speaking to any of them.
Vance might get over the coronary, he might not. He looked awful.
The sky was less lurid, the temperature after the humid claustrophobia of the tent surprisingly low. He shivered and hunched against the wind, watching the lightning, distant and toylike now, flickering over the tiny dark specks of other islets. The gap before the thunder was seconds long. The wind made his eyes water.
The man in Oslo, the unknown expert, had probably killed Alan Vance, along with fifty other people, and Hollis and his crew. Gant looked westward, out beyond the long, low headland on which Hanko perched, towards the Baltic. The grey sea was lightening, beginning to become fish-scale silver as the clouds broke. Over there somewhere was Oslo.
The expert would be long gone, back into the shadows by now, leaving no trace. The wreckage down there held no clues, either. He stared at the fuselage as lightning seared on the edge of his retinae. It was almost dragged off the rocks by the storm, upended in suddenly deep water, like a damaged fish.
He would find him, the expert. For his own reasons, he had to find him
… for being shafted by the NTSB and having to resign… for Vance… for the sake of having been right too late to make a difference. He hated that bleak, accusing thought.
"Ray, stop looking at your watch and worrying about your lunch!" Marian snapped, swiping a hand at hovering flies.
"Sorry," Banks murmured insincerely. He was bored, truculently discomfited because she seemed no longer to be concentrating on his problems, his little patch of delayed work.
"We shouldn't be here," he added.
"Oh, dear!" she mocked.
They had followed the canal as closely as possible towards the basin that had half mutated into a vast marina. Crowded on to the banks were renewed warehouses, slip ways rows of shop-fronts, cafes, blocks of flats, iron-gated developments of new housing. It was a scene that was incomplete, like a child's puzzle where one compared two sketches and tried to decide what alterations had been made from one to the other ladybirds now with six spots not five, a tree with a branch missing.
They had played with such puzzle drawings at Uffingham, on rain swamped days during school holidays.
Here, the marina was presented to her in a series of artists' impressions and computer images in a glossy brochure Banks had retrieved from the boot of the Mercedes, together with the map-like architect's drawings which now rested across her lap. There, around them, was the actual marina, and she had to glance from sketches to actuality several times before the huge site began to reveal its unfinished state. What had been a dazzling smile had missing teeth, plaque, carious decay. There was a warehouse still dilapidated there, intended as an office block. Farther over, across the still water that remained feet lower than it would eventually be, the wrought iron of high gates, behind which was little more than a building site rather than expensive executive homes.
There was millions in unfinished work around the canal basin, beyond which towered the blocks of two new hotels, built for American chains and completed on schedule. In the distance was the new symphony hall and the conference centre, the exhibition complex, the metro system's hub station and the new railway above it… and on and on, stretching west and south towards the present centre of the city.
And yet, this all looked no more completed, even if as substantial, than Bruegel's painting of Babel except for the holiday absence of human activity.
The dust around the spot where they had parked seemed unprinted, oddly settled. Babel… She always remembered that painting in Vienna whenever some particularly grandiose European scheme passed across her desk or her television screen.
Vanity, vanity, saith the Preacher… But here, it might be crockery, crookery, she reminded herself.
"Seen enough?" Banks asked hopefully, unabashedly patting his stomach.
There's an even bigger slowdown than I'd thought," he added helpfully and in order to hurry.
"Is there?" she replied archly.
The signs of it were everywhere. A village-green project, surrounded by cheaper, cottagey housing, had not begun two miles away… two tall office blocks were merely empty boxes turned on end. Around their emptiness, more endlessly recurring building sites.
She slipped from the car seat and walked the few paces to the high fence that surrounded the marina, pressing her face close to its trelliswork of wire. Less than fifty yards away, vandals had pulled a short length of the fencing away from its stanchions. The metro station's entrance was on her side of the canal basin. It seemed dusty but complete, even to its City Metro blazon atop a flagstaff-like steel pole. Banks began sighing impatiently behind her.
"I'd like to have a look at the metro station, Ray. There's a gap in the fencing just along there." She pointed exaggeratedly.
"Didn't you mention that, according to rumour, work on the tunnelling had been slowed down?"
That's mostly the council's money, and private investment," he replied, feigning boredom.
"And perhaps twenty million from Brussels," she murmured. They like underground trains in Europe."
"Look," Banks began, 'we've seen enough, haven't we? I mean—"
"Ray, what do you think is going to happen if we engage in trespass? The canal basin isn't MoD property, so far as I'm aware. Come on let's see how advanced this advanced urban passenger transport system is, shall we?"
She strode eagerly along the fence, a broad smile on her face. It was as if the calculations she had made were of profits from her own investments… Someone is counting just like that, she told herself.
David…?
She ducked down and eased herself through the gap torn in the fence.