‘But Paul was actually upstairs.’
‘Yes. Paul was never in the room. Whole claim of murder being widely witnessed actually built around lies of one man only.’
‘Danny Tang. But how can we prove that Paul never came down?’
‘The camera tapes for the backstairs. It’s not the tapes of Paul going up front stairs that are important. It is the tapes that prove he did not come down backstairs. There is a camera on the back steps. The images from that camera will show that he never came downstairs during time of murder. Silence say more than speech.’
‘We need to tell Oscar Jackson about this.’
‘Yes.’
Breathless, McQuinnie took Wong to the security guard’s chamber.
‘If we can get the tapes or disks from the back staircase camera before someone hides them or destroys them, the lawyers can prove that Paul never came downstairs. It kinda shows the whole thing was a frame-up,’ Joyce said excitedly.
‘Correct. Security man will help us?’
‘We gotta try. He seemed friendly. A bit too friendly, actually.’
‘How do we get in?’ said Wong, looking at the flat panel wall with no door handle.
‘We just ask.’
Joyce tapped at the wall and heard Drexler’s voice. ‘Huh?’
‘It’s me, Joyce McQuinnie? I changed my mind. I want to try some of your special brew?’ She spoke in flutish, girly voice.
‘Heh-heh. I knew you’d be back.’
They heard the door click open.
Drexler’s grinning face appeared. ‘Hello, darling. We’re talking about an irresistible force of nature here. Come to Daddy.’ He held out his large hands.
‘Uh,’ said Joyce, jerking her head to show the guard that she was accompanied. ‘You know Mr Wong? While we’re all here, we wonder if you can do us a little favour.’
Drexler’s grin stayed on his face but its sincerity drained away. He lowered his arms. ‘Yeah? What do you want?’
‘We want the images for the backstairs area at the time of the murder.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’ll show that the intruder never came downstairs at the time of the killing.’
‘We don’t have tapes showing that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Uh, there’s no camera there.’
‘Yes there is. You caught me there earlier today, remember? By the swimwear boutique.’
‘Uh, the camera’s working now. Wednesday it wasn’t. It was broken. It was switched off.’
‘Which? Broken or switched off?’ asked Wong.
‘Hey, what’s it to you?’
‘Broken and switched off are not the same thing.’
‘Are you trying to imply something? I don’t need this.’
‘Whoa, hold your horses. We’re just trying to find out what happened that morning. If Paul Barker didn’t come downstairs, then he didn’t shoot anyone on the lower level, that’s all. It’s important to know the truth,’ Joyce said.
Drexler spread his palms, as if he was asking her to be reasonable. ‘Look. The greenie guy killed the oil guy—we all know what happened. Geez, there were witnesses. All the techies saw him do it. Everyone heard the shots.’
‘Careful,’ said Wong, pointing at Drexler’s left hand reaching for the phone. ‘He is calling someone.’
Drexler stabbed the redial button on his phone.
Joyce’s fist flew to her mouth: it was evident that they’d shown their cards to the wrong man. She slammed the door, shutting Drexler in his sunken bunker. Then she started looking around frantically for something to push against the door. Wong had already seen a drinks’ trolley, which he swung around and wedged between the security chamber door and the other side of the aisle.
Unfortunately, the door opened inwards—which became obvious when an angry Drexler yanked it open. Wong kicked the drinks’ trolley so that it tipped into the bunker, which was at a lower level than the corridor floor. Various vessels tumbled off the trolley. They heard a howl of pain behind them as something heavy landed on the man’s foot. They raced off.
The pair of them ran down the corridor—but where could they go? They were in the aisle of an aircraft. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
Almost immediately, they heard multiple footsteps behind them and heard angry male voices: ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Trouble. That way.’
Joyce stumbled as she raced along the aisle, and then she heard Wong fall back and call out to her: ‘Here, come here.’
She turned to see that he had gone through another small, almost unnoticeable door on the left side of the aisle. She turned and went back to it, jumping through and slamming it shut behind her. It was freezing inside. ‘Where are we?’
‘Internal emergency door heading to luggage section below.’
Joyce realised that the time Wong had spent studying the aircraft plans was paying off—providing them with their best hope of staying hidden.
‘He’s in on this, right? The security guy.’
Wong nodded. ‘Yes. Maybe. Don’t know. Is a frame-up. Few people together. Danny Tang, this guy, maybe other people. Don’t know. I think some group wants oil company man dead, and get Paul blamed for it. So they arrange a murder.’
‘What do we do now? We can’t stay here for the whole flight.’
They heard footsteps race past them. Then they waited until there was silence from outside. Wong gingerly opened the door. There was no one in sight. They crept out.
Joyce chewed her lower lip. ‘This is so scary. There are so few directions we can go in. A plane is a rotten place for hide and seek.’
‘The best place to hide is plain sight,’ Wong said. ‘We go back to Food Street. Always many people there. We must tell Jackson.’
As they approached the main dining area, they were intercepted by Robbie Manks. ‘There you are. You guys disappeared. I thought you’d decided to get off the plane by parachute. Come on, there’s some jolly interesting people I want you to meet.’
‘Mr Manks, we have to tell you something,’ said Joyce.
He turned around and started marching the way he came, gesturing for them to follow him. ‘What’s that? Talk to me as we walk.’
‘It’s important. We’ve learned something important about the murder.’
‘Really? Excellent. It’ll be good to get that whole nasty business cleared up as soon as possible.’
‘Paul Baker didn’t kill Seferis. We’re sure of it.’
‘What? But everyone saw him do it. There were loads of witnesses. It’s on video, for Pete’s sake.’
‘We need to talk to you somewhere private—explain how we think it was done.’
‘Do you really mean this? Bit far-fetched, surely.’
‘We know how it was done,’ Wong said. ‘Mr Paul did not shoot him.’
‘Good God.’
Joyce agreed. ‘Things aren’t what they seem.’
‘Often the case,’ Manks said. ‘Come along. If you want to talk in private, there’s a room over here we can use. Step lively.’ He raced down the corridor at high speed, and the other two had to almost run to keep up with him.
They approached a door built into a wall which Joyce recognised. ‘Why are we here?’
‘It’s a good place to talk. Nice and quiet. We won’t be disturbed. Step inside.’
Wong and McQuinnie stepped into the room—into the hands of Drexler, and the small restraining room that he had shown Joyce earlier.
‘Now I gotcha,’ the security chief said, clamping his big hands on Joyce’s arms. ‘You should have been more cooperative earlier.’
Joyce turned to look at Robbie Manks: ‘You’re in on this as well, correct?’
The public relations officer smiled. ‘We’ve spent a long time and did a great deal of very hard work on this little project for BM Dutch Petroleum. And we really don’t want you guys spoiling it. We need to make sure everything goes forward perfectly smoothly. It’s really very import
ant: much more important than you people will ever know. Welcome to Alcatraz.’
Wong and McQuinnie were roughly manhandled into the restraining chairs, their hands tied to the armrests.
‘You can’t leave us here for ever,’ Joyce said. ‘The plane will have to land sometime, and then we’ll spill the beans.’
Manks nodded. ‘True. But by then, unfortunately, you will be unable to cause us any more trouble. You see, we’ll tell people that one of the Pals of the Planet, Paul Barker, committed murder. Two other activists, friends of his, equally evil people, came on board the plane to cause even more trouble. We’ll tell people you made terrible threats to crash the plane and had to be locked up in the restraining room.’
He turned to the canister affixed to the wall. ‘This special gas release system sedates people locked in here. Unfortunately for you, it is going to be accidentally damaged, so that you get a much larger dose than is safe—sleep, delirium, brain damage, possibly death, that’s what’s coming your way. If you’re alive after a couple of hours in this room, you’ll be babbling. What a tragic accident this is going to be. You are heading to dreamland, and you’re not coming back. Bon voyage.’
He switched on the device on the wall, which gently hissed, then Drexler took a large wrench and smashed the top off it so that gas sprayed out at a higher speed.
‘If it’s any comfort, this is the nicest way to die,’ the security chief said. ‘You just go to sleep and that’s it. They say the dreams you have are very nice. Auf Wiedersehen, suckers.’
Manks and Drexler left the room, sealing the door behind them.
For the next two minutes, Wong and McQuinnie yelled and shouted and stamped their feet, trying to attract attention. But the room was soundproofed. They could hear no one and no one could hear them. After another sixty seconds, the gas was starting to work on them and they felt drowsy and delirious.
Joyce felt herself going under. Everything was going white. And then she was asleep.
She heard voices. Her mother? Her sister’s voice, as a child? She saw the old house in which they had lived. She felt the panic disappearing, replaced by a sense of happy calm.
Then there was another voice, sharper, clearer—a male, calling her name?
‘Joyce? Jojo?’
She opened her eyes. It was Army Armstrong-Phillips, a handkerchief held over his nose and mouth.
‘Hello, Joyce. I’m afraid I followed you. Hope you don’t mind? I saw you racing along with Robbie. Would this be a good time to rescue you?’
‘I don’t know, what do you think, CF? Would this be a good time to rescue us?’
‘What?’ Wong asked.
‘Get us out of here!’ Joyce screamed.
‘Okay, okay, I was just asking,’ Army said as he unclipped their wrists.
They stumbled out of the restraining room and Army shut the door firmly behind them.
After a few deep breaths of fresh air Wong and McQuinnie turned and raced along the corridor, leaving Army behind in their wake, and were soon hammering on the staff toilet door.
‘Mr Jackson?’ the feng shui master called. ‘You in your room? Must talk to you. Very urgent.’
The door opened and the loud slooo sucking noise of an aircraft toilet flushing could be heard.
J Oscar Jackson Jnr zipped up his fly.
‘Excuse me. The toilet’s not just a secret entrance. It’s a working toilet, too. What’s the panic?’ said Jackson, somewhat indignantly.
‘We got some news,’ Wong said.
Jackson summoned them into his room behind the toilet. ‘Uh, just hold your breath as you step through. My stomach’s kind of weird these days. Special diet.’
In the envoy’s private room, the feng shui master explained that they had worked out how Seferis was killed, and how Barker had been framed for it. He explained how Manks and Drexler had tried to silence them.
‘Jesus,’ Jackson breathed. ‘That’s nasty. That’s really—’
‘Army saved our lives.’
‘Army?’
‘A close friend of mine.’
Joyce said she believed Kaitlyn MacKenzie was in on the scheme too. ‘I don’t think Paul tricked her into getting him onto the plane. I reckon she approached him. It was all part of the set-up. That’s why she’s so reluctant to talk about it.’
Jackson tapped his pen on the desk.
‘I got some news for you, too. We’ve been in touch with the authorities in Hong Kong. They’ve confirmed that someone on the ground in the engineering team was found to be operating under entirely false documentation and has been detained.’
‘Danny Tang,’ Joyce said.
‘The police are going to email the details and a photograph to us so we can compare notes.’
‘There’s email on this plane?’ Joyce asked excitedly.
‘Kid, this is Skyparc. There’s everything on this plane.’
‘Can I check my gmail?’
‘No.’
‘What do we do now?’ Joyce asked.
‘Martial your facts. I’m going to call a meeting—get Sir Nicholas Handey and all the top people in on this. The truth had better come out and be spread as widely as possible before Manks and his people try anything else.’
Less than an hour later, the twenty senior-most people related to Skyparc Airside Enterprises were in the main upper deck conference room of Skyparc—the room Wong had feng-shuied just one day earlier. There was an air of excitement. Rumours were flying around that there had been an unexpected breakthrough in the murder investigation.
Sir Nicholas Handey was chairing the meeting.
Robbie Manks and Ryan Drexler were not present—under Oscar Jackson’s instructions, Sir Nicholas’s private bodyguards had detained them and they were securely tied up in the flight attendants’ rest quarters.
Jackson was on his feet, explaining the situation into the microphone. ‘For many years, people interested in the environment have been aware of increasingly bitter and complex battles between the energy companies and the environmental activists. These have ranged from low-key protests at oil facilities, to letter-writing campaigns, to guerilla-type attacks. Fortunately, the vast bulk of the skirmishes have been good-natured. They tended to climax with a pro-environment banner being unfurled at some facility or other. They rarely involved violence or loss of life. The names we associate with such protests include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Conservation Society, Pals of the Planet, and so on. But there were times when the temperature was raised a little higher, so to speak, with groups like Earth Agents, for example, who did not shun violence.
‘The emergence of all these groups, good and bad, resulted in an equal and opposite reaction. The energy groups hired public relations companies and spent vast amounts of money advertising themselves as the good guys, people who were just doing an honest day’s work and trying to keep your lights switched on so that families could feed their babies and so on. Just as most activists used wit and humour and a light touch, most companies fought back rather gently, with advertising campaigns. But just as there were extremists among the environmentalists, so there were factions in the industry who believed that a much tougher reaction was necessary: a reactive group that would share a characteristic with the Earth Agents—a total disdain for the law. I am a worker for a charitable foundation, but I also have a wide brief to keep up to date with developments on both sides of the environmental lobby. My people have been keeping an eye on a secretive group known as Darkheart, set up by renegade elements in the energy industry, to react violently to violent attacks—or to attack first and describe it as “pre-emptive action”.
‘In recent years, the aviation industry has come under examination, because of the amount of carbon damage it does to the environment. So when this new plane was launched, there was some effort made to portray it as a “green” project, or at least “greener” than other planes: the idea being that if you had to burn carbon, this plane would do less damage than others. Rath
er wide claims were made. I am sure people like Sir Nicholas expected criticism of this project. A great many interested parties became involved in the discussion. And this was not just a debate of polarised opposites. There were many people in the middle. I guess the people I represent are among them. I come from a foundation led by one well-connected individual in particular, whom I shall not name. But my employer is at the same time very much part of the establishment. We want Britain and British businesses to thrive—but not at the expense of its environment, or the environment elsewhere on the planet. That’s why I am here.
‘We expected there to be a not inconsiderable amount of debate about this plane on its maiden world tour. However, we did not expect the shocking events of Wednesday: the murder of Dmitri Seferis. Nor did we expect some other revelations, which have only just become apparent in the past few hours.
‘We don’t really know the full details of what has been going on, but some very disturbing information has come our way. We are deeply indebted to Mr Wong here, and his assistant Ms McQuinnie, for their work in uncovering some very unexpected and deeply worrying information. As you know, Mr Seferis was brutally murdered on this aircraft two days ago. A man, an intruder, was apprehended almost immediately afterwards. He has been charged with murder. But it has emerged that the obvious conclusion was not the correct one in this case. I will hand the floor to Mr Wong at this point.’
‘Floor? Not mike?’ the feng shui master said.
‘Yes. You have the mike. We just call it the floor. It’s just… well…what we say.’
Wong blew into the microphone to see that it was working before he started to speak.
Mr Wong Goes West Page 18