A Different War mg-4

by Craig Thomas

Whatever Marian had caught on the wing was gone. A glimpse of her features showed that she, too, had dismissed the moment… as Aubrey did. For, as Giles said, they all knew how much the European Commission, in one of its fits of anti Americanism and Le grand Europe moods, had poured into the initial research programme for the Skyliner.

  That was all above board, allowable. Coulthard had looked, for a moment, like a man caught with his hand in the till.

  Mrs. Grey appeared in the doorway and mouthed ten minutes to Aubrey, who nodded and turned to Giles.

  "Another drink, my dear Giles?"

  "Why not? That beef smells wonderful, Mrs. Grey." Aubrey's housekeeper retired to her kitchen suitably recompensed. General Sir Giles was an always welcome guest of Sir Kenneth.

  Aubrey shuffled across the green carpet towards the drinks tray on the Victorian credenza near the bay window. The early summer evening gleamed on the grass of the park and from a hundred windows. Traffic murmured like flies. He poured himself another whisky, clinked ice for Giles' gin, and dismissed the nag of curiosity. Remembering with amusement a time when he would, in Marian's place, have worried at Coulthard like a dog at a bone a terrier at a rat, as one of his field agents had always preferred to phrase it. But, in his case, the interrogation would have been of someone unshaven and without sleep and who posed a threat. That had been a kind of war, and this was not. It was merely business… There you are, my dear," he announced brightly, handing Pyott his tumbler.

  "Cheers to us, and to our very own St. Joan!" He gestured his glass towards the television. Giles Pyott raised his own almost with reverence towards Marian's image.

  He was still awake when the telephone rang in the bedroom of the apartment.

  The illuminated dial of the bedside alarm showed him it was two in the morning. The whole apartment was quiet, empty, the traffic outside seeming to pass it furtively, with a sense of uncertainty. When he heard her voice, he wondered for an instant whether some anticipation of her call had been what had kept him awake.

  "Mitchell-it's… Barbara."

  He had known she would call either her or her father. The TV news had been awash with images of the crashed 494, scorched fuselage lying like an old artillery shell in the sand of the Arizona desert, surrounded by the immobile vehicles of the rescue team, the fire department, the accident investigation.

  Speculation, the fall of Vance stock on the Dow, rumours of jumpy nerves among the bigger creditors, the half-dozen banks Vance had charmed money from… it had been like watching a garment unravelling, its designer label mocked by its shoddiness.

  "Sure, Barbara," he muttered, sitting up in bed and switching on the table lamp beside him. The room did not seem to warm in its glow; the place expressed his mood, even the memories that he at once entertained. The shabby, bitter last year of their marriage, the months of the divorce.

  "What how are you?" he asked, changing the question, drawing back from why she must have called.

  There was an exasperated exhalation, a sound he had thought not to hear again, then she said abruptly: "Daddy needs your help, Mitchell. He's in trouble—"

  He snapped back: "I watch the news on TV. You can't miss him, Barbara."

  "Oh, for Christ's sake-!"

  The good Lord isn't why you're calling, Barbara. How is — what's his name? Tom and the baby?" Again the exasperation, even hatred, in her breathing. He felt cheap and satisfied.

  "Will you help him?"

  "What went wrong?" He was curious, he admitted. There had been nothing but speculation on TV and in the newspapers, and by men whose credentials he either suspected or dismissed. Pilot error… how they loved that old dog. The oldest, most inclusive slur and easiest escape route for guys who shaved safety and quality for profit, extended maintenance schedules, ignored routine checks.

  "We he doesn't know…" She sounded doubtful, angry.

  "He hasn't told you what he suspects? What about the flight recorder?"

  "Nothing to account for the crew died, Mitchell." He wondered, disliking himself at once for the suspicion, whether the lack of information was just another persuasive tactic.

  "It was on the news."

  The banks are crawling all over him, Mitchell. He could be ruined by this-!" The element of hysteria in her voice was uncalculated, genuine. He knew the tone only too well.

  "Did he ask you to call me?"

  After a silence: "No…"

  "No. He wouldn't. What could I possibly know he didn't know already the guy who flew his personal jet and disappointed his daughter?"

  "Please not now…" She sounded wounded, exhausted. Then hard-edged as a flint.

  "Will you help, Mitchell? Just a simple yes or no, then we can end this—"

  "How badly is he hurt?"

  "You've seen the Dow? The banks are panicking. Burton, the man who's agreed to buy the first six planes he's suffering, too." Then her filial outrage overmastered all other feelings.

  "He doesn't deserve to fail, Mitchell. Even you'd have to admit that!

  They're all waiting for him to fall he's on his own and he's on the edge. For God's sake help him!"

  He felt as if he was listening to the sound of a collapsing building.

  Her noises were dry sobs, grasps at air and calm. Where her husband was he could not guess or from where she was calling. He owed Barbara precisely nothing except her continued apprehension of the truth that he was responsible for the failure of their marriage. She was entitled to that prop to her confidence, that investment in her new marriage. He owed Vance even less. Headlights slid across the curtains like a searchlight seeking him, then they were gone.

  He went on listening to the silence from the other end of the line. Was she waiting for his reply, or did she think she had already heard it in his silence? Perhaps she was clinging to the phone like a life belt What in hell could he do, anyway even if he was a better accident investigator than most, probably than the guys picking the plane to pieces in Vance's hangar outside Phoenix? It had been a pre-delivery, routine flight. Nothing had seemed wrong, everything was registering normal or satisfactory, the status of every working part… Then the pilot had reported sudden engine failure, declared an emergency and felt the plane carrying him drop out of the sky, determined to kill him and everyone on board. It was the pi lot who hadn't deserved it.

  "Barbara," he said eventually, his voice level.

  "Yes?" Unreasonable hope mingled with self-protective contempt.

  "A guy reminded me, two days ago, I was a federal employee. If I come to you if I find anything then the FAA will have to know. I won't cover up for Alan or you. That's the risk. If the plane's guilty, I'll have to say so whatever it does to the stock and however much it frightens the banks." He paused, then murmured: That's the deal."

  She was silent for no more than a moment, then she asked abruptly: "Can you be here tomorrow?"

  "Maybe. See you—" But the connection had already been broken, as suddenly as if they were lovers and her husband had walked unexpectedly into the room from which she was making the call. He looked at his receiver, then replaced it.

  He had expected the call, he decided. It had been that anticipation that had kept him awake. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. He rested against the headboard, arms folded across his chest. Had he wanted her to call? Maybe… probably. He sensed, from the TV news and the scuttlebutt at the FAA offices, that it was the plane that was at fault, not the pilot. Alan Vance's dream, become a reality, was faulty it didn 't work. And he would prove it. And, because he was a senior accident investigator, he would be able to tell the whole of America on TV.

  Good Morning America… He grinned sourly. Barbara hadn't thought it through, hadn't realised how much he still hated Vance and resented his treatment at the man's hands as the marriage accelerated down its slippery slope to its day in court. Vance had lied about him, blackened him made out he was the jerk of all time and violent, too.

  He'd told the newspapers, anyone who'd listen and
repeat the slurs.

  He continued smoking. Now Vance needed him. Better than that, Vance didn't even know he was coming, didn't know that his beloved only daughter had invited him Yes, he had waited, really waited for her call… When she returned to the Holland Park house from the board meeting of one of the unfashionable charities she helped shepherd, Charlotte Burton found her husband in the first-floor drawing room, the younger boy, Jamie, on his lap.

  Both of them had, apparently, been lulled to sleep by the book that lay fallen on the Chinese carpet. She paused in the doorway, studying him as he struggled awake. The youth that sleep, however exhausted, had given his features, vanished. Jamie stirred and, looking at her, Tim hugged the child.

  "Hi," he said.

  "Er we must have fallen asleep…" He grinned apologetically.

  She crossed the room and stood behind the sofa, her hands resting on his shoulders. At once, his cheek rubbed against her fingers, intent as the gesture of a small, dependent animal. Jamie had probably been tired out by the grim, dedicated intensity Tim always brought to play with his children when he was deeply worried. It was almost as if he were enjoying them for a final time. His lovemaking at such times was, by contrast, apologetic, tender and guilty, as if he had betrayed her.

  "Rough day?" He nodded against her fingers.

  "Are you in this evening?" His head shook.

  "Sorry, Charley." He stretched his head back and stared up at her.

  "You're so beautiful," he announced, and she quailed inwardly. He was ragged, becoming unravelled. It was even obvious in the way he carefully handed Jamie to the carpet, as if he was dealing with something Ming and fragile, bought with a loan he could not repay.

  "That bad?" she steeled herself to say, adding: "Has Greta made your tea, Jamie?"

  Jamie, pushing tracks of a toy lorry into the thick pile of the carpet, nodded. He was still Daddy's boy, herself and the au pair just females for the moment.

  "Yuck. I left it salad. That's all she eats. Yuck!"

  Where' sTony "Cricket nets," Jamie replied. There were three years between them, but they still attended the same prep school. Next year, Tony would begin at Winchester, Tim's old school.

  "Cricket — yuck."

  Burton, stroking her hands with his own as they rested on his shoulders, chuckled.

  "Disgraceful slur on the beautiful game."

  "Footballers and golfers are richer than cricketers," Jamie observed, idly turning the pages of the book from which Burton had been reading.

  Lord of the Rings- of course. It was Tim's idea of literature as well as what children should imbibe with their mother's milk or their au pair's salads.

  "Richer than me, too, before very long," Burton murmured, and he flinched as her grip involuntarily tightened on his shoulders.

  "Sorry," he added, patting her fingers.

  "Who are you wooing this evening?" she asked, staring over his head, across the room to the marble-topped sideboard, the two Louis Seize chairs, one on either side, and at their figures reflected in the French mirror with the trumpeting angel surmounting it. She always and perhaps to her slight, shameful disappointment appeared the more mature of the two, the more purposeful, self-confident. Quite often, especially in mirrors and when unaware, Tim was still the schoolboy who had desperately sought, even bought, his friendships; who had always played amanuensis, second fiddle to boys better at sport, or more intellectually equipped.

  Life's eternal straight man, as he said of himself.

  "Anyone very important?" She shrugged his shoulders, as if plumping them like cushions.

  "Sir Herbert of Bank A, Lord Sisfield of Bank B, Mr. Martin of Bank C, Herr Adler of Bank D… The biggest creditors' biggest guns. Crikey-!"

  he added self mockingly Charlotte was forced to answer his ingenuous, open smile. They studied one another in the tall mirror. Burton sighed.

  Ten more minutes of this and I'll be able to carry it off," he murmured, then continued: They're giving Alan Vance an even harder time, I gather. Really squeezing Angrily, she snapped: "Never mind Alan Vance! If his aeroplane hadn't fallen out of a clear blue sky you wouldn't be in the midden!"

  "I took the lead, Charley, I really did. take the brunt of it, I said to him. He wanted a creeping barrage, like a Great War general some small American carriers, maybe a Far East airline, a few of the holiday charter firms…"

  She gripped his shoulders fiercely.

  "I know all that, Tim, I know!" she said through clenched teeth.

  "But it was the plane that failed, not you. Now—" She was quickly sitting beside him. Jamie had wandered off towards the kitchen and Greta or the housekeeper.

  "Now," she repeated, 'how bad are things? Really."

  "Cash flow is down. The big carriers are trying to undercut me cut my throat, more likely. They can stand the loss. Maybe I can't. I'm not sure yet. The team's doing some projections for me…" He tried to lean against her but she remained sitting bolt upright, hands folded on the lap of her narrow cream dress. He smiled at the effort of restraint she indulged in order to appear frowningly assertive, inquisitorial. He raised his hands in mock surrender.

  "Alright, alright. Seriously, a few months more of it — all the summer traffic across the Pond and my losses could be enormous. Which means the debts will not be serviced properly interest payments and the like and I won't have a cheaper plane to put into service to recover the losses. Unless, my darling girl, I can charm the pinstripe trousers off the men in suits tonight and every other night they demand to have dinner with me—" In spite of her resolve, she smiled for a moment. He grinned back.

  "Unless I can, I won't be able to buy new aircraft, I won't be able to fly the Atlantic cheaply. I won't' his features at once became angry, filled with a hateful disappointment 'be able to open the Australian route. The big carriers all the bastards who've been trying to screw me for ten years… they'll have won. I'll go the way of Freddie Laker, Charley. I really will!"

  She put her arms around him and pulled his head on to her breast.

  "Nice," he murmured.

  Not nice, she thought. Not the prospect of financial ruin. She would live in a hut with him, on crusts and love, if necessary — though she wouldn't choose it.

  She remembered the grotty flats, the dingy Victorian terraced house in north London they couldn't afford to do up or alter… She did not want to return to them. For there was, naturally, little in her name, not even the house here or in the Cotswolds. Tim daft bugger had always used his money as collateral.

  One of those perfectly awful magazine features only two months earlier had named him in the top two hundred wealthiest people in Britain… which, then, was the measure of the value of Artemis and his other interests. Outside the business, he was not independently wealthy.

  There was no crock of gold in Switzerland or anywhere else. If the business failed, so did he and she wasn't wealthy either. Tim hadn't cared enough about money, only about achieving, about winning- which he never measured in millions.

  "He'd better make that aircraft work, then, hadn't he," she murmured into his thick, greying hair, 'your friend Alan Vance? So he can get you out of the mire and me and the children with you. Oh, you silly bugger, Tim, why didn't you give me a million or two against a rainy day!"

  He laughed, quite genuinely.

  "I didn't think I needed to," he confessed.

  "And you never asked!"

  "When do you have to start flying the Vance aircraft? Latest?"

  "I should have had it for this summer. The banks have been happy to wait because the two we've got stoogeing around Scandinavia are performing well and bringing in passengers. There's one small airline with two 494s in New Mexico. They're turning in good figures, too. But I don't think they'll wait, not now. You've seen the papers, the TV Christ, you'd think the bloody plane was held together with string and sticky tape and flown by means of a rubber band!"

  "What is wrong with it, then?"

  He threw up his hand
s, then sat up on the sofa. He looked at her with such an exaggerated seriousness that she felt he was mocking her. Then he said:

  "Vance doesn't know. He doesn't bloody know, Charley. And if he can't find out, we really are in the shite we really, really are! Up to our necks and beyond." He stood up and began pacing the room. Their confidentiality and intimacy were at an end. His mind was already marshalling argument, proposal, charm, fabrication in anticipation of the evening meeting.

  "But it must be bloody serious to make an aircraft fall out of the sky without the slightest warning! So serious it might be impossible to remedy. Oh shit!" He tugged his hands through his hair.

  "Oh, shit, shit, shit!" He turned to her as if to a stranger, his eyes gleaming.

  "I can't see any way out, Charley, I think we've bloody had it. Artemis is going out like a dim bulb, and I can't do anything to save it!"

  She towelled her blonde hair in a rough, pummelling motion, as if it had somehow offended her, watching her actions in the mirror above the carved wooden fireplace, positioned to make her sitting room seem larger. Her cheeks were still pinked from the shower. Her eyes, blue and without make-up, stared knowingly back at her, examining the first crow's-feet of her late thirties.

  Laughter lines, she pretended, just like those on either side of her mouth.

  However, she smiled at her reflection and knew she wasn't doing too badly for her age. She continued to watch herself, almost with that strangest of childhood sensations, seeing the person in the mirror, reflected back, as oneself. Was she really that person? She possessed her mother's high forehead and cheekbones, her full mouth. And Giles' piercing blue gaze, finished off by her grandmother's blonde hair, worn shoulder-length. It wasn't a bad amalgam, she admitted indulgently.

  Then, aware of her vanity and the recollection of men's admiration bubbling just below the surface of her thoughts, she moved to the window of the sitting room and studied the fall of the evening sun across the Chelsea Physic Garden which lay behind the mansion block of flats. Hers was on the top floor.

  Sipping at her gin and tonic, she grazed the rows of neat, white-painted shelves which housed her books and her collection of records and CDs. Then she scowled suddenly as she recalled herself to the day's last duty and flicked the answer phone to replay the messages she had missed while at the Commons that afternoon. The Prime Minister, to the embarrassment of the greater part of his own side of the House, had stumbled like a three-legged dog through PM's Questions, challenged on Europe, Ulster and sleaze with equal and equally impotent ferocity.