‘Kaitlin?’
Her eyes fluttered open when she heard her name. She was lying on her back on the bench in her holding cell. Her head thundered as if she’d been clouted with a mallet. Swinging her legs down, she sat up and clutched her forehead.
Marianne crouched beside her.
‘Come on. We need to be quick,’ she whispered.
Shaking off the wooziness, Kaitlin pushed herself up and felt her strength return as she followed Marianne out into the corridor.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘I want to show you something.’
Marianne weaved a mazy path through the building, clearly avoiding any areas where they might encounter resistance. Slipping out of a side door into the bitter night, she crunched through snow in an area of deep shadow away from the floodlights. Ahead, the silhouette of a huge building obscured the stars.
Another side door led into a cathedral-like space – a hangar by the looks of it. Lights glimmered around the edge, but the distant roof was lost to darkness.
It was empty. The concrete floor burned cold through the soles of her boots. She hugged her arms around her.
‘Go into the middle. It’s the only place we can talk,’ Marianne whispered.
As they walked, Kaitlin asked, ‘What is this place?’
‘The final resting place of Flight 702.’
Kaitlin stiffened, looking at their surroundings with new eyes.
‘They took me to see it when I first arrived,’ Marianne continued. ‘They reconstructed it from all the wreckage. Every bolt, every wire.’
‘Where is it now?’ Kaitlin turned in a slow arc, imagining the plane that she’d studied in such intricate detail.
‘They’ve taken it away. They don’t need it any more. It’s all gone, like it never even existed. These people, they’re not jailers, they’re cleaners. That’s what they do, they clean it up. Are you OK?’
Kaitlin rubbed a hand over her eyes. ‘Just feeling dizzy.’
‘Did you eat the food?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Here.’ Marianne handed over a chocolate bar. ‘From the vending machine. Eat. You’ll have low blood sugar. We’re safe here for a while. They’re doing maintenance on the software, so the live feed is down.’
‘The live feed?’
‘To the cells. They’ve stopped monitoring the captives through the night, anyway.’
Kaitlin shook her head, bewildered. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘I know, it’s a lot to take in. But we need to be fast. This is our only chance to stop them. Through here.’
Marianne strode off, leading Kaitlin through to a side room taken up by multiple screens and keyboards.
‘This was the control centre. It’s what the engineers used when they were reconstructing the plane. They’re in the process of decommissioning it.’
Marianne tapped on a keyboard.
‘Only they haven’t yet.’
The monitors flickered on.
‘See, there he is. That’s your “fiancé” right now in his cell.’
Kaitlin watched Thomas pacing around his confined space like a caged beast.
‘Oh my God. Thomas. I thought they gave him back to the British?’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘They said—’
‘It was a lie. Like everything else.’
Kaitlin shook her head, trying to calm her whirling mind. One by one, the important questions surfaced.
‘Where are the passengers?’
‘They’re here.’
‘And Conor?’ She felt her heart patter. ‘I need to see him.’
‘You will, shortly.’
‘I don’t understand why they’re being held here.’
‘The authorities say they’re sick.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Contagious. That’s why they’re being kept in isolation. No one goes in among them except with protective equipment. But it’s been six months, Kaitlin. Look …’
Marianne tapped more keys. More monitors burned into life. Men and women hunched in cells or pacing like Thomas.
‘This is the live feed to the cells. Do these people look sick to you?’
Kaitlin searched those faces, seeing the despair, the suffering. All of them as familiar as old friends from the images she’d attached to her files. None of them appeared ill.
‘The plane was diverted here because intel suggested there was a terrorist on board planning an attack on the US mainland,’ Marianne continued. ‘A biological attack with a manufactured virus stolen from a lab in Iran. Think of it – millions of people dead, the economy, the country, devastated.’
Kaitlin scanned the monitors. ‘This can’t be everyone, though? Where are the rest of them?’
‘No one who was seated in the front ten rows of the plane made it.’
In the long moment of silence, Kaitlin cast her thoughts back over the seating plan, trying to recall those who had been lost.
‘The crash complicated things,’ Marianne said. ‘It made it impossible to gather all the facts. That’s why they brought me here. I’m a forensic psychologist. My job was to interview the surviving passengers to see if I could identify which one could be the terrorist.’
‘Wait a minute. They don’t know who it is?’
‘They have suspicions. Nothing concrete. The intel was gathered from many sources. They were expecting an attack. Waiting for it. There was a huge operation. Different agencies were involved. Multinational. And then there was intelligence that a terrorist was on board. The plane was already in the air by then. Fortunately, we had an agent among the passengers.’
Kaitlin nodded. ‘Chrissy. We were convinced she was the White Matchmaker.’
‘That was a smokescreen to confuse the other side. Chrissy had been working undercover tracking a suspect.’
‘Dr Aziz, the doctor from Syria. He was the suspected terrorist.’
‘He died in the crash, so we can’t confirm his involvement.’
‘And Chrissy?’
‘She didn’t survive the crash, either. She was in the cockpit with the pilot.’
Kaitlin bit her lip. Now she could understand the paranoia of all those agencies, the desperate lengths they’d gone to, snatching her from her home, interrogating her, lying to her.
‘When I arrived here, it was a mess,’ Marianne said. ‘Such a huge amount of intelligence, all pointing to different scenarios, different possibilities. And twenty-two traumatised survivors of a plane crash, all of whom could have been infected with a deadly virus.’
‘The virus was released on the plane?’
‘That was the working assumption. Someone died during the flight. A woman called Wendy LaPeer.’
Kaitlin’s thoughts flew back to her meeting with the evangelists’ daughter on that chill, bright day just off Long Island Sound. ‘The missionary travelling back from the Congo with her husband.’
‘She had a fever and died. Passengers got concerned something was spreading. Everybody’s so paranoid after the Ebola pandemic. It only took a few people to start coughing and there was panic. Chrissy scrambled up to the cockpit and got a message out to say the attack had begun.’
‘And that was when everything went wrong? All because of people leaping to assumptions.’
‘You’ve got to understand the threat level, the fear of an attack.’
‘But Wendy LaPeer had nothing to do with it.’
‘No. After Chrissy’s message went out, Homeland Security thought the virus had been released. A decision had to be made fast. They couldn’t risk landing the plane on the US mainland. So, it was diverted here. They had to dump fuel because the runway was too short. It crashed on landing.’
Kaitlin weighed up what she was hearing, watching the misery in those faces on the monitors. She could now see how the parts of the puzzle she’d uncovered with Rory fit into place. Conor had known for some time that the hacker group was planning a ‘spectacular’, possibly biological, attack. When he’d seen the sick evangelist on board, he’d put two and two together and he’d alerted Thomas, who passed the intel on to his connections. They in turn would have alerted Chrissy, who would have confirmed the virologist was on board and the details of the sick evangelist.
‘Why is this a secret?’ she said. ‘Why haven’t the survivors been released?’
‘Because it’s such a massive fuck-up. None of the agencies trust each other. Everyone is protecting their backs. That’s why we’ve had so many cover-ups, some of them, frankly, half-assed. And that totally misjudged decision to plant the evidence of the wreckage.’ She took a deep breath to steady herself. ‘No one will tell the world what happened until we know for sure what happened and that it’s safe.
‘The problem is that so many of the passengers died when the plane crashed, including the pilot, Susan Klemant. None of the survivors got ill. They couldn’t find the virus. They examined every inch of the plane. Took it apart. Every bolt, fixture, even the catering trolleys. Nothing.’
‘Maybe there was nothing.’
Marianne shook her head. ‘There was definitely something. The intel was clear. A biological weapon had been identified.’
Kaitlin felt the weight of that statement settle on her.
‘Do you know why they chose me?’ Marianne said.
Kaitlin glanced at her and in the pale light of the monitors thought that she looked years older.
‘I’m very good at my job. I interviewed the Unabomber, got him to talk. I was an intern with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives during the Waco siege. I discovered then that I could talk to people and that I was able to get people to talk to me. I got them to remember the things they’d even forgotten. I seemed to know these people. To understand them. But here …’ She shook her head. ‘So far, I’ve failed. That’s why I need you.’
Kaitlin whirled. ‘Wait – you arranged for Conor to call me?’
‘Arrange isn’t the right word. But I knew that if I presented him an opportunity, if I turned my back for a moment, he’d take it.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘We need to approach this from a different perspective. As the plane was about to take off, someone hacked into the entertainment system. We think a Russian hacking group was behind this and may be connected.’
‘Connected to what? If there was no virus on board … ?’
‘There’s something we’re not seeing. Some connection. We have to find the truth because the stakes are so high. The virus exists, but …’ She held out her hands. ‘I want you to help me to get Conor to talk.
‘We know there was a terrorist on the flight and Conor knows who it is, I’m sure. Dr Hallin just wants to tear people’s brains apart. That’s what he was trying to do to you. But not only do I think that’s unethical, but it’s also evil. I don’t like to use that word, but I can’t think of another way to describe it. It’s not how I work.
‘The authorities would never have sanctioned bringing you in. They’ve spent the last few months shutting down any connection with the outside world. So, I took matters into my own hands.’
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Because it’s your only chance to save your brother and get out of here.’
Kaitlin bristled. ‘I’ve been lied to, I’ve been arrested, tortured. They’ve threatened to deport my parents. And you’re one of them.’
‘I’m not. You have to believe me.’ Marianne grabbed Kaitlin’s shoulders, the passion crackling through her. ‘Because I’m going to take you to Conor.’