He turned away, then paused as though some thought had just entered his head. When he turned back he was smiling a tiny victory. Probably the only kind he ever knew. “That said, as you are the Relations Director here,” he added, “you might let him know that it is regarding his daughter.”
despised in her eyes
Genesis 16:4
Every one of this world’s inhabitants has a refuge; a place they visit when the comfort of their day-to-day world is temporarily shattered. It is usually a place filled with memories, good and bad, and a place in which the even clearest waters of hope are nearly always flowing over tiny fragments of regret. If the person who visits this place feels the need for a temporary sense of guilt, as many do, then these fragments can quite easily be stirred. They rise from the base and cloud the view, but they settle again, taking with them even the unseen particles and leaving the water clearer than it had ever seemed before. Some people visit the highest peaks so that they may look in tranquility across the world they wish to escape, others have a room they call their own in a building they may not. No two people are alike. Some can even find their place on a bustling city street or in the crowded carriage of a rush-hour subway train.
The reasoning is simple; for it is not the place they visit that is important, but rather the place to which they travel. This place, so full of those subtly altered memories, is not a tangible place on earth but a spiritual place within their mind; a place they can visit any time they wish. There are those who are convinced that, due in no small part to pressures of modern living, we do not visit this place often enough. The piece of gravel, earth, wood, metal or grass on which people choose to position themselves at the time of transcendence is immaterial, so long as it possesses the basic requirement of a perception of peace. And these, being as individual and uniquely complex as the human race itself, are too numerous to list.
Returning to the ranch after the funeral those who knew Lara, though perhaps not the truth of her death, competed for ever more extravagant stories of her youth. The time she let the handbrake off Jack’s new Jeep and totalled the rear end; the time she broke her arm falling from the summer-house roof, climbing to examine a bird’s nest. Everyone had a story and everyone else attempted to supersede it with a sharper, more defined embellishment. It lasted into the dawn hours when eventually, one by one, they began to delicately submit their excuses and leave. When only a few remained, Jack decided that he too had had enough and he stole upstairs to his home office, housed in a once dusty attic space now lined with pine and littered with computers, press cuttings and photographs of the family that had once been his.
Here, he reasoned, he might finally be able to find his place.
The only light, save for a cold blue square thrown across the polished floor, came from the much gentler light of a randomly selected virtual picture housed in a gold-framed plasma-screen beneath the western eaves. Today the system which controlled the ranch had selected a Rubens; ‘Marie de Medici landing at Marseilles’ painted in 1623. For a few moments Jack sat back in his chair and stared at the painting. Within the accurately rendered strokes, for reasons he could not explain, he began to see the face of his daughter, his late daughter, taking the place of the heroine. A triumphant return watched over by angels and greeted by an ecstatic crowd. It may have been a glorified approach, but it was still one which undoubtedly stemmed from the same sense of pride and relief that he himself had envisaged one day. The day on which Lara Bernstein would decide that there was still a place for a father in her life. The day that he would hold his daughter and vow never again to let her go. The day that had so very nearly been his. Like Marie, Lara - he believed - had finally been coming home.
Home.
Where the hell was that now?
Through the semi-gloom that surrounded ‘Marie’ he could see numerous Polaroids of his daughter pinned to the boards, and of Elizabeth taken many years previously, long before the car accident which had stolen a truly irreplaceable wife and mother from his existence. But the reason Jack was here, in his personal space, was because he already knew that looking at the photographs alone would not be enough. He saw these images almost every day, scanned as they were into a laptop computer which rarely left his side, and their sheen had faded as though they had become little more than structured decoration to an empty life. They were also fixed in an all too inconsequential fragment of time.
A moment.
So it was from a corner of this room, this tangible piece of earth that fulfilled his basic requirements, that Jack started the journey back to his place. A place where Lara still laughed, cried, lived and loved. A place where she was still happy, where she read books by night and rode horses during the day.
How ironic then, he thought without humour, that at the moment Flight 320 was being torn asunder in the skies over the Netherlands, Lara was actually riding horses, here in Glendale. She was guiding Misty, the favourite of her three Peruvian Paso mares, across the length and breadth of her father’s ranch. At approximately eleven o’clock Pacific Time, however, Misty’s stubborn nature which had so endeared Lara to her at the time of purchase, cost the girl her life. She faltered at a regular fence, throwing Lara awkwardly into the disjointed row of stumps where only three days before, prior to late winter trimming, there had been an impenetrable cushion of blackthorn. Her neck was broken on impact and she died instantly, her body laying undiscovered until a little after two when Nina, her father’s fifty-eight year old housekeeper, became concerned. She dispatched a member of the ranch staff to search the estate. When she was pronounced dead at the scene Jack Bernstein, attending a chess tournament in New York, was informed immediately and - distraught - he returned immediately on his private jet.
Lara was twenty three years old, unmarried and therefore left no children.
No heirs. End of the line.
Lara Mae Bernstein did not die on Flight 320.
Lara Mae Bernstein was never even aboard Flight 320.
And that, for the time being, was the official report.
The first reason Lara had not been aboard the flight was because Jack knew only too well that two hundred and sixty other passengers had also died that night. Two hundred and sixty sets of relatives who wanted their own fight for justice and their own voices to be heard. They did not want to hear how multimillionaire Jack Bernstein’s daughter had died, with a sub-paragraph about two hundred and sixty seemingly inconsequential (and probably unnamed) others.
The second reason was that Jack had no desire to explain where it was that his daughter had been for the last three years. Not when he didn’t actually know himself.
Why the hell didn’t he know? What the hell lack of a father had he actually been?
There had been no way to hold a real funeral, not for a long time. Not one with a body at any rate. Even Jack’s extensive political connections could obtain no definite answers as to when the forensic examinations in Germany might be complete or when the bodies might be released. There were many, however, who needed an outlet through which they could pour their initial grief, so MaryBeth had suggested the riding accident and the dummy service. That way Jack could deal with the condolences and tears whilst they were delivered with the truth of spontaneity. He had no desire to wait month upon endless month for his little girl to be remembered. He needed to remember her now. He needed her to take her hand in his, look at her and smile.
He wanted her to walk with him to his place.
But memory, more than any other human facet, is selective in the extreme. The subconscious has an inner filter of its own which removes the bad and delivers the good, as though protecting from the things that hurt most when it feels the subject is hurting too badly already. Consequently, the pictures Jack viewed in his mind were also old; nothing more than blurred sepia-tones of a small child, sharpened and sterilised pure white by the passage of time. The more recent images, those of Lara the young woman, would not come. Jack’s subconscious was only too aware of the p
ain they would carry with them.
Using the ranch computer’s built-in FireNet Access System, he used the jog/shuttle wheel on an ergonomic remote to dial up his own personal file, held on the mainframe at the IntelliSoft campus five miles away. He wanted to hear his daughter speak. Not a distant memory but a recent call. He had seen the daughter that had gone away. Now he had a burning desire to reunite himself with the one who had somehow failed to return.
‘Marie de Medici...’ was gone in a gentle fade of pixels and the screen became the standard folder listings similar to those seen on systems worldwide. Jack’s personal file, heavily encoded, was primarily digital junk; useless bits of information and test coding, but within it was a subfolder containing all his personal mail. Every single message he had ever received was included, logged by sender and subdivided by date and time.
He accessed the folder ‘LARA’ with a twelve character alphanumeric password and scrolled down to ‘D-CAM’, the screen listing all the movie files recorded over the years by the video-cam fitted beside the screen of Lara’s laptop. Most were real-time conversations from her trips as a child, split screen images showing both Lara and Jack as they spoke, but not the three he accessed now. These, transmitted during the last journey she ever made, contained only her image and her words. Even now it cut deep under Jack’s skin to know that she had chosen to record the messages and download them complete rather than have a conversation with him one-to-one. Even then she had probably been thinking that her father would only spare her time when it suited him, not when it suited her. How could she speak to him in real time when she did not believe that he had any real time to give her?
As he looked at her face, framed by long mousy-brown hair, he tried to remind himself that this was not the Lara of Flight 320. From the forensic teams in Germany he had learned that she had cut her hair short and dyed black what little she had chosen to keep. Even so, these were the last true memories he had, the last images of Lara taken anywhere in the world. The only irony he felt was that he still did not know precisely where.
He selected the first of the three files; ‘DC/LAR/0087/GPSNL’ and double clicked, his daughter’s face appearing above the timeline where the Rubens had been visible only a few moments ago. Her mouth was frozen in the instant that she began to speak. The last two letters of the file name indicated that the GPS, the Global Positioning System which would have given her precise location, was ‘NL’ - not live. Wherever it was she had been though, she had been indoors, seated in a room decorated with blood-red wallpaper flecked with gold. In the background were a collection of obscure items resting on a black shelf, a blurred fragment of a painting housed in an oversized frame just visible over her right shoulder. Confined by the plasma-screen’s golden frame and frozen as she was, she had never looked more like the painting he had never managed to commission, or indeed more beautiful. Taking a slow deep breath, Jack moved his index finger to the three-dimensional icon marked ‘4’ on the remote and pressed...
He already knew what this movie comprised; a ten minute message telling him only that she was safe, that she had met some new friends and that they would be travelling to Europe the following month. There was, she said, somebody they wanted her to meet. It did not say who they were, where she was, where in Europe she was going or who exactly she would be called upon to visit. Such was his daughter’s desire for independence at that point in her life that the entire message told him what she wanted him to know - that she was alright and very little else.
“She sure was a beautiful young lady.” A deep voice, powerful and yet laden with something that Jack felt more of than he could ever hope to explain.
He jumped slightly in his chair, though probably not enough for his visitor to notice. Behind him the oversized frame of Senator Andrew McKinnock remained motionless in a three dimensional square of moonlight rendered hazy by freshly blown cigar smoke. As Jack turned the Senator’s eyes narrowed, looking first to the picture on screen then trying in vain to interpret his friend’s thoughts. He smiled lamely, walked forward and added his own hand to the many that had pushed the weight of grief deep into Jack’s shoulders that day.
Jack turned back to the screen; Lara was still speaking. “Like her mother,” he said, trying to smile.
She sounded excited, he thought. Three days after she had left him with nothing but a hastily written note and she sounded excited. Where was the guilt he had wanted her to feel? The longing? The regret?
“So... how’re ya feelin’ buddy?” Andy asked. His words were fuelled by genuine concern.
The silence crossed an invisible boundary.
“Sorry, dumb question.” He squeezed into a chair to Jack’s left, soft leather groaning under the excess weight his wife had tried in vain to help him shed.
“I thought you’d gone already.”
“I’m on my way,” Andy said. “Of course both Nina and MaryBeth tried to stop me coming up here to say goodnight but what can I say, I’m a politician. Talk my way into any party.”
Jack smiled, though he was not really listening any more, his eyes were still fixed on those of his daughter. It was as though she had somehow made it home and was standing before him now, everything all right in his world once more. It was not long before the eyes, like the smile, were pulled toward the ground by the weight of truth; one of many things he now understood possessed a power which completely dwarfed his own.
An awkward pause; Andy not knowing what to say and Jack hoping to God he never managed to figure it out. He wanted neither to speak, nor to hear any more intolerable words delivered in tones which people actually believed might ease his suffering. He just wanted to be left well alone, dwelling in the silence of regret.
But he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t. Because there was still one thing he needed to know about the bombing of Flight 320. One thing which Andy, having placed himself at the forefront of the enquiry, might just be able to proffer an answer for – one whose foundations had been sunk into something a little more concrete than idle speculation. Suspecting he would not like the answer, it was also the one thing he had not wanted to ask whilst the others had been gathered downstairs.
“Why did they let them go?” he said quietly. From the echoes of emptiness, his words almost shook the room.
“Sorry?” Andy asked. A simple stall that he hoped would give Jack time to realise that knowing the reason does not actually do anything to alter the fact.
“The Libyans? Mil’el?” Jack explained, undeterred. “As I understand it, and I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, the Germans actually had them last year. So why did they let them go? Why, Senator, when they had the bastards caged, did they open the door and give them freedom to run amok and kill my fucking daughter?”
Andy sighed. Jack only ever called him ‘Senator’ was he was deliberately trying to place a boundary between a softened official request and a hardened friendship. “Lack of evidence,” he said. The statement, truthful as it was, sounded pitifully weak even in his own head. He could not begin to comprehend how it might sound to Jack.
“Lack of evidence?” Jack turned suddenly. “Lack. Of. Fucking. Evidence. I might not have the full story, Senator, but I’ve read enough. so I damn well hope you’re gonna tell me you’re joking.”
“Please don’t shoot the messenger,” the Senator replied in one lengthened breath. “I feel the same way as you, Jack, really I do but that’s what they cited.” He shrugged. Lame.
“How the... How the hell could that happen?” The fragile glass which surrounded Jack’s anger was cracking under the strain.
“Because Germany works under Napoleonic code,” Andy explained with a sigh, his eyes finding distant places to send his gaze, “not the common law system that we and the Brits use. According to their rules a magistrate or law officer has only twenty four hours to decide if there’s enough proof of a crime to continue holding. The Judge in this case, a real foot-in-the-political-ladder guy called Mitgleid, decided that Germa
n Intelligence had not produced enough evidence and he just...” he waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, “...let ’em go.”
“Let ’em go,” Jack repeated deliberately, his gestures scornfully repeating those of his friend. “And y’know... there’s me thinking they’d nailed the bastards red-handed.”
“About as red-handed as you can get,” Andy said. Like Jack, he knew last year’s truth. What he also knew was the bureaucracy that had underpinned - and ultimately undermined - the situation. The dirtier story that the world at large had never been told. “Apparently people have to die before it’s classed as red-handed in Mitgleid’s eyes.” His face demonstrated that his own acceptance of the situation had also been far from easy.
“So what exactly happened?” Jack asked.
Andy took a breath. “One of Mil’el’s senior men, Dalkamouni, had been spotted in Germany about two years ago by their domestic intelligence service, the Bundesamt Verfassungsschutz - the BfV,” - he delivered the pronunciation with typical clumsiness - “At that time he was in Neuss, hiding out in the house of his sister and brother-in-law. Within a few days his younger brother showed up at the house carrying...” - he thought this one through - “...two bronze Samsonites.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed, though he was looking straight forward, at nothing in particular. “You mean the same brand of case used to load the bomb onto 320?”
“Well, nobody knows for sure, but you tell me...? Bronze Samsonites in Neuss, unaccounted bronze Samsonite showing extensive blast damage on 320. It’s a popular brand, sure, but even so... it does kinda stink doesn’t it? Well, the BfV keep watching these guys and then, in July last year, Dalkamouni got himself a visitor by the name of Abdullah Mal-Makhoub.”
Jack frowned. Unlike many people Andy might speak with, no doubt, he did not recognise the name. The names of known terrorists rarely came up during the kind of conversations he was used to holding.
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