by Jo Bannister
And the woman in red. Had she tried to kill him? Had she killed two hundred and twenty people trying to kill him? Why?—because Fahad had paid her? It was not much of a reason. The loss of Bab el Jihad was not very much better, if she was doing it for the Palestinian cause. Fahad had lost a handful dead, rather more imprisoned but still only a fraction of those who had died in the aeroplane. Could he really, after three years, still hate Flynn so much? Enough to burn his apartment, enough to burn his woman, more than enough to kill Flynn—but two hundred and twenty people neither of them knew?
It hardly seemed possible. It did not accord with what he remembered of Fahad. The man was ruthless by any standards, seriously brutal when it suited his life’s cause. But on a personal level he had been capable of as much kindness, decency even, as other men. Flynn knew he was also capable of mayhem but was unable to judge whether Fahad would resort to mayhem of this type and on this scale.
Donnelly met them in the foyer and took them to the interview room where Maxine Faber was being watched over expressionlessly by a WPC. Though Todd was not invited, nor was he told to wait at the desk, so he stayed with Flynn—partly because Flynn was still a touch shaky but mostly because Todd was more than a touch nosy. He called it professional curiosity.
Donnelly too noticed that Flynn walked as if he could not feel what was under his feet. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” said Flynn; then again, less forcibly, “I’m all right. I’ll be even more all right when people stop asking.”
The policeman was unconvinced. “While you’re here you might as well have a word with our tame doctor.”
“What do I need with a doctor?” Flynn’s voice snagged like barbed wire. “I wasn’t on the god-damned plane. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“All the same,” Donnelly said imperturbably.
He wanted to say something else to Flynn before introducing him to Maxine Faber, but Flynn’s attitude made it pointless. He had wanted to warn Flynn that he would find it difficult. Either this woman had tried to kill him and had involved him in the deaths of two hundred and twenty strangers, or she was like him a freak survivor of an epic tragedy. Perhaps the interview would end without establishing which, but either way the emotions of both of them would be under assault.
What Donnelly was proposing to do was unusual. He expected to be discussed behind a succession of doors; but it would not be the first time and, though sooner or later there would be a last time, he doubted if this would be it. A man with two hundred and twenty murders to investigate was entitled to a certain latitude. It would be different if he was putting Flynn in danger. But this thing seemed to have happened because someone knew exactly who Flynn was, and anyway he had already met Faber. Even if she claimed he had not.
Perhaps nothing would come of it anyway. If Faber had taken money for the contract killing of a man on a crowded airliner by means of an explosive device, probably she had no better nature to appeal to. A woman capable of being moved to remorse by evidence of her guilt would not have gone into that line of business in the first place. But there were other possibilities worth exploring. If she had agreed to do it in a fit of religious fervour—if that tan was due less to the Florida sun and more to Middle Eastern genes, if she were a supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—perhaps she had not anticipated how it would feel: to kill so many and then to see Flynn alive. If she went for his throat, that was probably how it had been.
Or perhaps she had been persuaded to take the package on board—Semtex, probably, invisible to normal scanners—in the belief that it was something other than a bomb: drugs for instance. The money offered would be good. He could afford to be generous with his promises—Fahad or whoever. She was to be on the plane when the thing went up and never claim the balance of her fee. But in that case, why did she leave the plane?
Donnelly found Todd a seat outside the interview room and, quite firmly, showed him to it. He looked up at Flynn. “All right?” Then he opened the door.
Faber looked up as they went in. She did not need to be reminded who Flynn was. She remembered their conversation. She smiled, too vividly, her lips carmine, her eyes bright with tears in waiting, and said, “Sitting at the back isn’t the complete answer.”
“I noticed that.” Flynn’s voice was low, his face grim. Without the manic grin that was his trademark he looked years older, but then, he had nothing to grin about. He believed this woman was responsible for two hundred and twenty deaths and her only regret was that the figure was not two hundred and twenty-one. Hatred welling in his breast like bile, he raised hot, angry eyes to meet her gaze.
And found there a reflection of all the torn and tangled emotions whirling in his own mind: the rage, the grief, the guilt—at surviving, but more at the gut reaction that his life was worth more than all those deaths; the loss of equilibrium, of perspective; the way from time to time, mostly with weariness, the awesome thing slipped from the forefront of his mind, and he wondered where Laura was and what he was going to do next and whether he could fix the apartment, and then it came back at him with the force of a blow and he felt like a murderer.
All these things were in Maxine Faber’s eyes too. They were the reason she had been crying in a motorway service area instead of putting miles behind her. She was no more responsible for all those shattered lives than he was, unless in the same involuntary way. Even then her conscience had less to bear, because without her someone else would have been found to carry the device on board, but nothing would have happened without Flynn.
His voice was still low, still gruff, but the rage compressed in it was gone. In its place she almost thought she heard compassion. “Can you tell us what happened?”
So she told him. None of the three of them could have said why she was willing or able to respond to Flynn when an hour of astute, pertinent, perceptive interrogation by Donnelly had brought forth only tears and lies. But a kind of kinship had been created when these two people escaped the death planned for two hundred and twenty-two. It would be with them for the rest of their lives, a communion that no-one else in the world could share in. Donnelly’s gamble had paid off. Faber told them what she knew.
She had believed unreservedly that the suitcase with her name on it in the baggage hold contained cocaine. The shipment was on its way from Rotterdam to New York: she took it over in London for the trans-Atlantic leg. She had done the run before and suffered from a minimum of nerves. The anxiety Flynn noted was neither a fear of flying nor a worry about New York customs but a very immediate panic prompted by a casual remark from a passing stewardess that some policemen had asked for the flight to be held so they could talk to someone on board. Naturally she assumed it was her.
What she did next was natural too: she went and hid in the toilet. While there she did perhaps the quickest thinking of her life. Then she opened the door, walked into the galley, helped herself to some remnants of cabin staff uniform she found there, also a sheaf of papers and a clip-board, and when the cabin door opened and the two policemen were working their way down the aisles she walked purposefully to the hatch and left. No-one noticed. At the first cloakroom she came to she lost the clip-board and the uniform, became a civilian again and left the terminal. She was hiring her car when she heard the shocked little gasps that were her first indication of what had happened.
When she realised which plane it was that had crashed, all the conflicting emotions that had surged in Flynn tumbled over her too. What she had told Donnelly about events after that had been the truth: she found herself at the scene, then leaving and driving, then stopping. Then the police picked her up.
So she was a drug courier—a mule. That explained the lies: with her luggage destroyed along with the rest of the plane, only her own words could incriminate her. All she needed was a plausible excuse for not taking the flight and she was in the clear.
Donnelly said, “Does the name Fahad mean anything to you?”
She looked blank. “No
.”
“Obregon?”
She looked down at her lap. After a moment she looked up again. “There’s no point me denying what you can check with a phone call. The firm I work for in Fort Lauderdale: Tomas Obregon owns it.”
Chapter Six
“So what the hell is this?” demanded Flynn, not quietly. “Open season on me?”
“There has to be some mistake,” said Todd. A stationary van lurched into the path of his car. “I can imagine all sorts of people wanting to take pot-shots at you, Mickey, but two different ones in the same day? I don’t think even you’re that unpopular. Your friend Laura: could she have made a mistake?”
Flynn thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t see how. She didn’t pick him out of a line-up, she put together one of those PhotoFit composites. I recognised it as Fahad.”
“Then could you have been mistaken?”
“No way. It was him. I couldn’t have made a better picture of him myself.”
Todd frowned. For once he avoided looking at Flynn as he spoke. “Mickey, you had a pretty rough time at his hands. It’s bound to have left—scars, and probably more in your subconscious than in ways you’re aware of. It’s possible that you’re always going to see him in the shadows. Anyone threatening you may always tend to look like Fahad.”
“Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” They traded a grin, almost like old times. Already the spectre was hanging a little less heavy. Serious again, Flynn went on: “Gil, it was him. It was like he was there in the room with us. Laura had never even heard his name, only saw him the once, but she put together a picture as good as a photograph. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”
“You didn’t see him?”
“I told you, all I saw were flames. And Laura shut up in the kitchen, too scared to make a run for it, waiting to burn. And Derek.”
“Derek?”
“Derek the senior wino.”
Even senior winos tend not to hang about the same place for three years. Todd had never met him. “Did Derek see them?”
Flynn rolled impatient eyes. “Who knows what Derek saw? Including Derek. He sees things that aren’t there. He thinks there’s an anaconda living under the floor.”
“Did anyone ask him?” Todd knew the problems of getting a cogent story out of a career alcoholic. They were the same as, though greater than, the problems of getting a cogent story out of any eye-witness. He knew from long experience that if he were to ask six good men and true to describe the same incident he would get six detailed, authoritative and wildly divergent accounts. Between noticing different aspects and remembering them imperfectly, their testimony would be chaotically contradictory. Thus their honest descriptions of the same robbery could range from a West Indian armed with a shotgun knocking down a shop-keeper and rifling his till to a white man with a solarium tan armed with a replica handgun waving his fist under the assistant’s nose and making his get-away empty-handed after failing to open the till.
Eye-witness testimony, which laymen think incontrovertible, is in fact so seriously unreliable that courts must look for supporting evidence to corroborate even the most honourable of witnesses. But still sometimes it is all there is, and seekers after truth must do what they can with it, understanding its weaknesses and interpreting as best they may where necessary.
All that goes for eye-witness testimony goes ten-fold for wino-witness testimony. But still it may be all there is, and must then be explored for all it is worth. If Derek had seen something, Todd would find out—even if it proved harder to work out exactly what it was he had seen.
Derek had seen nothing. He had not even seen the snake that morning. He had seen Flynn racing up through the building—Flynn had shouted at him, he could not remember why—then a lot of men in yellow trousers arrived and it started raining. All his bedding was wet that night. It was enough to drive a man to sobriety.
They left him pondering the unfairness of life and went to inspect the wreckage of Flynn’s apartment. (Even Todd, who was a fundamentalist as regards the English language, accepted that the word “flat” was an inadequate substitute.) It was comprehensive. They stood at the livingroom window, or at least the aperture it left, looking over the river.
Todd cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose you need me to tell you no life insurance company would look at you twice.”
Flynn gave a little snort that could have been mirth. “Insurance be damned. There’s a bookie up the Tottenham Court Road who gives odds on things like the Second Coming and the next pope being a woman, but you try laying money that I’ll still be alive by weekend.”
“What are we going to do about it?”
Flynn did not comment on it, but he had noticed and appreciated that plural pronoun. He shrugged. It looked like a heron shrugging. “What can I do? I tried ignoring it and damn near got Laura killed. I tried running, and got two hundred and twenty people I didn’t know from Adam killed. What’s left—fight back? I’d even try that, if I could get near the bastards.”
Todd was looking pensive. “We don’t have to fight them, at least not yet. All we have to do is talk to them—find out what’s going on.”
“I know what’s going on. They’re trying to kill me.”
“Both of them—Fahad and Obregon? In concert? By turns? I don’t believe it, Mickey. Look, the only thing in the world those two men have in common is their dislike of you. A South American drug baron and a Palestinian guerrilla?—they wouldn’t be able to find one another even if it occurred to them they might want to. No, this is either one of them or the other. Or—”
“Or what?”
Todd shrugged, broad shoulders rising bear-like up his thick neck. “Or it’s someone else again, laying a smoke-screen.”
“Oh come on,” growled Flynn, “how the hell many people do you think there are with reasons to want me dead?”
“There were four on the list you put together after this.” His gaze travelled the gutted room. “Perhaps we should get in touch with all of them, see what they have to say. The one responsible might consider himself safe enough to boast about it. At least then you’d know where you stand.”
Steps on the stone stairs surprised both of them. As Todd turned to look he saw Flynn’s long body seem to shrink against the smoke-blackened wall and his eyes flared darkly. He thought, He’s afraid—he’s really scared. Then he thought, Of course he’s afraid, somebody’s trying to kill him—he might act as if being young and feckless and earning big money makes you immortal, but actually he’s no more immune to pain and death than I am. In his shoes I’d be scared shitless.
But it was nothing to be scared of, only Derek panting bronchitically up the last of the ten flights. He had remembered something. “A man. Came looking for you. Yesterday, after everybody had gone.” The sentences had to fit in with his breathing. “Said if you came back—to give you this.”
It was a business card. Still puffing, Derek held it out in his big grimy hand. Somehow it had stayed pristine in his custody, as if all his efforts and whatever sense of responsibility remained to him had been channelled into keeping it safe. Flynn took it, glanced at it once and put it in his pocket. He thanked Derek solemnly and Derek beamed and stumped away.
Todd said, “Who was it?”
Flynn sighed. “Byron Spalding, Deering Pharmaceuticals. He’s been the bane of my life since I photographed their god-damned chemist. OK, it’s nice to win prizes, but it’s month-old news now and they’re still looking for copies of the pic—for trade magazines and house magazines and one for the foyer and one for Auntie Home’s album for all I know. They wanted to buy the negative, were quite pissed off when I told them I don’t sell negatives. Almost wish I had now. It was on the plane, I don’t think I’ll get much more mileage out of it now.”
Todd had thought of writing to the four men who might have grown tired of waiting for Flynn’s funeral. But of course he would think that: all his life except for the first
seventeen years he had defined his place in the world by what he wrote. He had influenced public opinion and private values. He had campaigned, and challenged the campaigns of others. He had taken on the establishment and the sanctity of received wisdom, and if he had not won every battle he knew he had left his mark on his adversaries. In the course of nearly forty years as a journalist Todd had seen much that he had written given short shrift, only to turn up later in the guise of new government thinking or a courageous opposition stance. He had infinite faith in the potency of the written word.
Flynn belonged to a different generation and a different trade. He grew up on instant food and throw-away ideologies. His idea of an old song was one which had been in the charts for four weeks running; his idea of a classic book was one which was not a TV show first. The Chinese saying “The oxen are slow but the earth is patient” had no appeal for him: the most patience he ever displayed was to wait in a traffic jam without thumping his horn.
Photography too is the ascendency of immediacy over the considered, of appearance over meaning, full of impact and undemanding of intellect. It disdains to explain itself. The photographer, like the Hollywood starlet, is almost entirely concerned with filling the eye. Deeper issues have to be plumbed by some other medium.
So perhaps it was inevitable, a reflection of their different roles in and attitudes to life, that whereas Todd thought of writing to the four men, Flynn proposed going and knocking on their doors.
Todd was aghast. “Well, it’ll tell us what we want to know. The one who’s trying to kill you is the one who answers the door with a loaded 12-bore.”
Flynn was aware of the risk. But doing nothing was also dangerous. Whoever wanted his life enough to destroy a plane full of people would try again and probably soon. If he played it by the book he would end up having it read over him. His best chance of walking away from this was doing something unexpected.
The former MP was a separate case, but the other three were by definition men beyond the reach of law. Each would have been behind bars had it been otherwise. The police could neither touch them nor guarantee to keep them at bay. If the man who tried to kill Laura found her again he would finish the job. Then he would move on: to Todd for sure, and after him to anyone and anything that mattered to Flynn until he was content with the pain inflicted and decided to take his life too.