The journey progressed from the anesthetic cleanliness of LAX to the craziness of Central America at a dizzying pace. Olivia thought it was like a speeded-up version of a Victorian exploration: Burton or Speke setting out from London to Cairo in starched wing collars, then plunging deeper and deeper into the African continent, losing their sanity, possessions and teeth.
Mexico City’s airport was wild: the seats were of worn cowhide; men walked past in cowboy boots, sombreros and big mustaches; women sashayed in tight jeans and stilettos, bulging from sequined tops like game-show hostesses; while the game shows and music videos on the big screens teetered on the wrong side of soft porn.
Olivia was busy. She called Sally Hawkins, said she’d like to do the diving story, but stalled her for a few days. She decided to snuffle round the Bay Islands incognito and find out what she could before alerting anyone to her presence. She bought cheap jeans and a sweatshirt, found a drugstore and a shower and dyed her hair red and then switched to her old passport (which she’d rather fraudulently claimed to have lost when she changed her name) and became Rachel Pixley. The thought of airport food usually repulsed her, but here she was seduced by the smells and ate a giant plate of burritos with refried beans, salsa, guacamole and chocolate sauce.
The ATAPA connection to La Ceiba in Honduras was five hours late, the atmosphere at the gate increasingly festive. By the time the motley bunch of passengers boarded the tatty plane, the delay had turned into a full-scale party with free Styrofoam sandwiches and tequila-laced lurid green drinks all round. The man beside Olivia kept offering her swigs of tequila from a bottle, but, as she explained, she was too full of refried beans au chocolat to fit in anything else at all. Forty minutes into the flight, the mindless movie, which had been raucously ridiculed by the passengers, disappeared from the screen and the captain’s voice came over the address system—first in Spanish, then in English.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Is your captain talking. I regret to announce you that this plane is problem and no landing in La Ceiba anymore. We go another place. We let you know. Bye.”
Fear set all her senses on high alert. As she reached into her bag for the pepper-spray pen, keeping her eyes on the cockpit door, her mind was racing. As her thought activity increased, time seemed to slow as people said it did when they were drowning. It was a hijacking, clearly. Since 9/11, she knew, everything in this situation had changed. The important thing now was not to lie low but to act and act decisively.