by Craig Thomas
"A car followed my Sandra home from school the other day. She couldn't get the number because it was covered up with mud, she said. I believe her!"
Until that moment, the room their conversation had inhabited had been familiar, and furnished as she would have expected, with all the glossy appurtenances of graft, fraud, bribery. Banks seemed to have pushed her through a door into another, unfamiliar room, where arson had occurred and a schoolgirl had been terrified on her way home.
"Should I believe her?" she asked carefully.
"The car was there the next day, too!"
"When exactly was this?"
"After I ballocked the board meeting. After I threatened to write to the papers, talk to you." His breathing was louder than his voice.
She pushed her hair away from her face. The place seemed suddenly hot and noisy with empty conversations. Yet it was the wine bar that should have seemed normal, Banks' accusations wild and improbable.
Except for Michael Lloyd's body on the carpet, seen through his letter box, and a girl followed twice by a strange, anonymous car, and two cases of arson.
"When were the fires?"
"Afterwards."
After I threatened to… talk to you, she remembered, her stomach fluttery.
Whatever you do, do nothing, Kenneth Aubrey had pleaded.
Kenneth's world had been very real for forty-five years, for the duration of the Cold War. It had been her father's world in part, too.
It had never impinged on her until that moment. Now, the sense of threat was palpable, as if she had become one of Kenneth's agents, and had placed herself in some vague but immediate danger.
"You bloody come and see what a pig's ear the whole bloody project is behind the fancy facade!" Banks challenged.
"Come and see for yourself then tell me where all the bloody money's gone!"
The office of the deputy director of the NTSB, Jack Pierstone, was on one of the middle floors of the Federal Aviation Administration building on Independence Avenue. Its windows looked towards the Smithsonian, then across to the Mall, the Washington Monument and the Ellipse. The view was like an enhanced, wide screen version of that from his own cramped office. The Washington Monument was bathed in a reddish-gold glow and the part of the Reflection Pool he could see looked like the strip on the reverse of a credit card.
Gant stood stiffly to attention, as if before a military hearing of braided and bemedalled senior officers. He'd done that, too, more than once. Jack Pierstone was having more problems than those senior officers, floundering and blustering as he tried to find the words with which to fire a hero.
'… didn't need this kind of publicity-seeking, this idea we offer insurance and backing to failing airline manufacturers," Pier-stone was saying as Gant continued to stare over his head at Washington.
He offered no assistance, no mitigation, but stood as unmoving as when, all those years ago, a general had hung the Medal of Honor around his neck. He was waiting until whatever was to happen to him was over. His eyes were narrowed against the low sun, not against the situation.
Vance had screwed up his life once more. The thought was as quick as the spurt of blood from a fresh wound. Then, almost at once, the cynicism of the thought What Ye stilled any sensation of pain.
"You took totally unreasonable and unsanctioned risks. You played personalities with this thing." Pierstone's voice was becoming stronger with the outrage of embarrassment and self-justification.
"The TV business it was like an endorsement. You had no authorisation to interfere with a South-Western accident investigation or to wilfully disobey standard procedures. Allot which come before the FBI's allegations…" Once again, the engine of his indignation was on the point of stalling. Gant realised that Pierstone had looked at him and seen again the uniform and the medal, maybe even the flying suit.
"I have to suspend you, Mitchell. These are serious charges, especially the FBI investigation. I can't do anything less."
Gant allowed the silence to continue, to build like the approach of a storm.
Eventually, he said quietly: I'll resign, Jack. It's easier all around." He did not look at Pierstone's small, coiled frame behind the desk, preferring the images of the Smithsonian and the spike of the Monument and the reddish glow of the sun. The thin clouds above the city had moved away like slow fish during the minutes of the interview.
Pierstone cleared his throat, fidgeted with papers on his desk.
"I don't know—"
"Yes, you do, Jack. If this had been for Boeing or McDonnell, maybe a blind eye would have been turned. For an airplane-maker important enough to the economy, we'd have been there like locusts. And hell, why not? It's all for the country and we can wrap ourselves in the flag. It's our job, our patriotic duty, to help out.
Unless it's someone like Vance, maybe—" That's unfair and you know it!"
"Maybe it is. Besides, Jack, you can't be expected to override the Bureau. The FBI could be waiting on Independence Avenue right now to make an arrest. Nobody in Federal employment needs that kind of publicity."
Gant looked down at the desk for the first time. Tiny images of the sun, the museum and the Monument were superimposed for a moment on Pierstone's forehead and cheeks like tattoos.
"I resign, Jack. I'll put it in writing and take my chances with Mclntyre. He's not too bright maybe he'll screw up the investigation, who knows?" His smile was wintry.
"He's just motivated by his own failings, after all. The only reason he didn't get to "Nam was for medical reasons, otherwise he'd have been the first to volunteer. You know how the song goes, Jack."
Pierstone himself had flown in "Nam earlier in the undeclared war than Gant himself, flying bombing missions from offshore carriers. Before the US had gotten into defoliation and bombing Cambodia and the Ho Chi Minh trail. Pierstone, as if the past were some kind of bond between them, grinned sourly and nodded.
"Sure."
I'll go draft a letter."
"OK, Mitchell. I'm — er, sorry…"
"I know."
Gant turned away from the windows and the desk and the man behind it.
At the door, he heard Pierstone murmur:
"You take care, you hear."
Gant waved his hand without turning round.
"Sure."
Even before the door closed behind him, he felt the awareness of another failure surround him like a sudden, thick mist. Another screw-up in a life with more past than future. He passed through the outer office and into the corridor with quick, somehow leaden footsteps.
As he waited for the elevator to the foyer, he felt he wanted to silently scream. He could not be certain whether its cause was Mclntyre's malice, Vance's ox-dumb stupidity in paying money into his bank account, or the sensation of the empty apartment that waited for him. That, and the sense of the aimless days he would be spending there.
CHAPTER FIVE
Social and Anti-Social The effect of money had worn away as easily as that of a sedative. Strickland once more confronted his fear of hurry.
Because of urgency, he had had to fly into Oslo's Fornebu airport direct, rather than to Stockholm or Copenhagen, or even Bergen, where he could have approached the target obliquely and anonymously.
He had disguised his departure from France by flying from Bordeaux to
Geneva, then by changing flights and airlines again at Frankfurt before the journey to Oslo.
But, somewhere, for someone who might look, there was the record of his arrival at Fornebu, the scene of his sabotage. Even with a false passport and identity, a stooping walk and greyed hair and a moustache that aged him a decade, he had arrived in Oslo.
He sat in the arrivals lounge, sweating in his crumpled linen suit, his cabin bag beside him, regretting with venomous bitterness the greed so it seemed to him now that had swept aside his habitual, talismanic caution, his profound resolve that he did not work on site, he must be always hands-off. It was his only, but his adamantine, rule of engagement; his code of professio
nal conduct. It had been forged in the aftermath of a debacle when not only had his own bomb almost killed him but the opposition had been waiting for him. Since then, he had always created while others placed his devices in position. He should not have broken his own code…
His nerves jangled, his body temperature fluctuated as if he were passing through the rooms of a bath-house, from sauna to cold dip to sauna again. He glimpsed, like an arachnophobe might have seen in a shadowy corner a large and poisonous spider, his fear of Winterborne and his gofer, Fraser. It was the same fear that had broken in upon him after Fraser and Roussillon had left the farmhouse.
He'd cooked them a Dordogne peasant stew, served them wine and coffee, signed the contract, received the down payment, seen them from the premises. With the washing-up done and the cat on his lap, he had suddenly sat bolt upright in his chair as the last of the daylight darkened outside. The cat had scratched his thighs in surprise.
Strickland had realised that he had been afraid not to agree, afraid not to take the money. Winterborne, using Fraser as his mouthpiece, had effectively insinuated that they would kill him without hesitation if he did not assist them… despite their knowledge that he stored, in a safety deposit box in Rome, meticulous and incriminating records of every assignment he had carried out.
Against Winter-borne, he was certain that evidence no longer offered a guarantee of his safety.
So, he had agreed. The price-hike had been a mere formality.
He glanced up. The long northern evening lay like a golden cloud over Oslo and the sloping land with the narrow Oslof jord beyond it. The panoramic windows of the passenger lounge let in too much landscape and seemed to expose him as the only still, fixed figure in the lounge's terrain.
Simple job… your own cleverness… The fragments of his self-assurance glinted like a window shattered by an explosion, but would not cohere. An airliner lifted into the evening, turning orange-red then golden then silver as it rose into the rays of the low sun, navigation lights winking. Beyond the main runway were the airport's maintenance hangars, liveried planes dotted around them.
Simple job… The replacement fuel computer system circuitry lay innocuously inside his PC, in the cabin bag. Simple job… your cleverness… The papers that described him as an engineer with Vance Aircraft were in his pocket. One of the two Vance 494 airplanes was in a maintenance hangar for overnight checks before resuming its schedule of shuttle flights around the Scandinavian capitals… Simple job, then, to appear overalled beside it, to replace the fuel computer board with his own, which contained the redoctored chip which would jettison the fuel while the instruments continued to read normally… and which would now reconfigure itself on impact or engine-stop, declaring itself to be harmless, fully operative. This time there would be no trace, no ability to outguess him and recognise sabotage… simple.
He breathed a little more easily, his chest less asthmatic ally tight with the tension that Winterborne, his location, his immediate future all generated. It was that simple. One more appalling crash and the
494 would be consigned to aviation notoriety and history. Gant could not this time interpose nimble-mindedness and experience between his design and execution. It would all happen with the functional reliability of an electronic component. Perhaps two dozen people would die, since passengers were reluctant still to trust the 494. The carnage would be minimal stand-by tourists and commuters but sufficient. The 494 would be grounded, Vance Aircraft would collapse, imploding under the pressure of the banks, the NTSB, the European politicians.
He admired Winterborne's ruthlessness. However, after this, he would walk away.
Disappear for a time. One of his other bolt holes rather than the Dordogne farmhouse whose tranquillity he so much valued.
Strickland glanced at his watch. Eight in the evening. They'd be working on the 494 for most of the night. He had time for a meal. Yes
… his stomach seemed much less unsettled since he had refused the plastic tray of food on the flight from Frankfurt. He stood up, picked up his bag, and began searching the overhead signs for the location of the restaurant. Simple job… The long Georgian facade of Uffingham was floodlit against an orange sunset as her constituency agent's Land Rover came out of the avenue of oaks and the house surprised her, as it always did, with memories and its own beauty. It was, in Pevsner, the most beautiful house in Warwickshire, perhaps the entire Midlands, and to her it was utterly precious.
She had spent many of her childhood holidays there, with or without her parents, depending on Daddy's postings and Mummy's eagerness or reluctance to accompany him. She had, in an important sense, grown up there, perhaps even more so than David Winterborne and his brother.
Clive Winterborne's family had owned the house for six generations someone in their military, clerical and political ancestry had been in trade, she often reminded Clive, to have afforded such a house and estate in the middle of the last century; its building and inhabitation having bankrupted the gentrified Whig family who had created Uffingham.
Clive had inherited the house from a bachelor uncle, having refused all interest except his massive shareholding in the Winterborne commercial empire, founded and web-centred in Singapore in the heyday of political empire. Instead, he had fallen into the role that nature, looks and habit seemed to have designed him for, that of paternalistic country gentleman. His Eurasian wife, whom Marian always had difficulty remembering which saddened her had returned to England with him after the army in Malaya and elsewhere. Just as he had wanted nothing to do with Winterborne Holdings, so he had disdained MoD, even against her father's blandishments. Instead, he had given himself, increasingly and with a seeming urgency after the death of his beloved wife, to good works… one of which had been to persuade her, so he always maintained, to first stand for the constituency.
Is it in your gift? she had asked. Laughing, he had replied, Probably.
She smiled now, remembering, as the Land Rover climbed the curving drive up to the house. A long stone balustrade, like a fortress' ramparts, contained the forecourt and the house as it looked southwards over farmland. The vehicle passed a huge urn sprouting a profusion of summer colour, and began threading its way across the gravel between the litter of Rolls Royces, Porsches, BMWs, Volvos and four-wheel drive executive weekend vehicles. Chauffeurs lounged against dark limousines.
Marian was grateful to breathe in the fresh evening air.
Swallows swooped about the house and she heard the screams of mobbing swifts.
She caught a glimpse of them flicking amid the forest of chimneys. The
Vanbrugh facade, cream in memory, was garish in the floodlighting. The doors beneath the portico were wide and lights spilled out. She could hear faint music, fainter than the rustle of Bill's wife's acres of taffeta and silk as she climbed from the high front passenger seat. The gorgeous redundancy of material in the gown, and its ladybird colours of red and black, rendered her own costume more mannish than ever. She had decided on her close impersonation of a man's dinner jacket and trousers, her hair tied back in a brief, bushed tail, her waistcoat shimmering like petrol in a pool of water.
"OK, Pat?" she asked as the central locking bleeped to Bill's satisfaction. His wife glanced up, as if the creases of travel in her gown were a matter of reproof from Marian, then she continued smoothing the taffeta and silk into pre-inspection satisfaction. She evidently felt Marian's outfit the next most obvious declaration of sexual orientation to dungarees.
"Good!" Marian announced brightly, wishing for a cigarette. She had not smoked in the Land Rover out of deference to Pat's intense hatred of tobacco… but perhaps the mannish suit might relieve her jealous suspicions of Bill's relationship with her. Poor Bill… "You look gorgeous," he dutifully informed Pat, who visibly brightened. Then they were crunching over the gravel towards the house, mincing between Jaguars, a pair of matching Ferraris, down the tall alleyways of off-road vehicles clustered as thickly as at some large agricultural show. More t
hickly, she observed.
Bill appeared nervous, Pat suppressed like a water main on the point of bursting.
Two compliments at her gown, a peck or two on the cheek from the moneyed or notable, and she would become a swan, having been a self-conscious duckling.
Then Marian saw Clive, hovering beneath the portico as if he was unsure whether or not he had an invitation to his own house. Once he recognised her the smile at her outfit was immediate and gently sardonic, his widened eyes registering Pat's confection he seemed enlivened, certain.
She kissed his drawn, leathery cheeks as she had so often done, then he was shaking hands with Bill and Pat. David Winterborne, his features less patrician than those of his father, his eyes less welcoming, stood just behind Clive. Yet he, too, seemed to brighten, even if only at the memory of an old antagonism, as he saw her.
"Hi, Davey." The diminutive had always irritated him.
"Hi, Squirt."
They embraced almost by instinct, warily and briefly, yet with the warmth of the long-familiar. Then Clive was fussing them into the cavernous main hall, which extended from the front to the rear of the house. The columns, niches, statuary, the matching pair of Daniel Quare long case clocks were all so familiar to her that she almost turned off to the closed doors of the library or the drawing room.
The band is on the terrace, and the tent is on the lawn," Clive offered brightly, and she patted his arm. He, her father and dear Kenneth ranged themselves always in her imagination like great ancestral portraits, dwarfing the other men she had known, making them invidious by comparison.
"Kenneth's hovering somewhere near the musicians perhaps one day he may learn to enjoy Mozart!" Clive added, shaking his head mischievously.
Then: "I'm displeased with that father of yours, my dear why he needs to have a regimental reunion tonight of all nights, I do not understand!" Smiling, he shooed her onwards down the hall, towards the already apparent, slight and stooping figure of Kenneth Aubrey. Marian was struck, with a piercing sadness, by the age of the two old men, their decrepitude, as if it had been suddenly exposed by a bright, merciless light.