Flynn had been promoted. This time he rated a Superintendent.
He told Detective Superintendent Donnelly the whole story—everything he could think of. He started with the fire at his apartment and the man Laura Wade had identified as Jamil Fahad. He explained the grudge Fahad held against him. He recounted his decision to skip London, and the incident he witnessed on the way to the airport. He underlined the fact that he only chose New York as a destination, and therefore that particular plane, on the spot and the spur of the moment.
He boarded, he said, when the flight was already preparing for departure. He only had time to sit down, glance over his fellow passengers and find the second half of his seatbelt before two policemen turned up asking for his help with their enquiries. He related the interview pretty much word for word, also what he thought about it. Then Inspector Harris’s sergeant had seen the explosion and he had gone to the window to see the pink chrysanthemum bloom.
His first reaction had been a heartfelt, wholly instinctive delight that the plane had gone down without him. His second had been guilt, twisting up his stomach and his soul, for surviving so arbitrarily where so many had died. And his third reaction was that this was Fahad trying again: that he had followed Flynn to Heathrow and somehow got a bomb on board his plane.
And the person who took it on board was the woman in red, the business-woman with the briefcase. She might well have seemed nervous! At that moment she was sitting in a plane that she knew contained a bomb, presumably looking for a chance to leave without drawing attention to herself. She had already left it late when Flynn spoke to her.
The arrival of the police officers and the small stir they created must have seemed a heaven-sent opportunity, and she slipped off the plane in their wake. Otherwise she would have been reduced to feigning appendicitis or some such, and would have come under immediate suspicion when the aircraft crashed. As it was, only the freak chance of a man who had been sitting beside her surviving to spot her on a roving camera shot came between her and the ultimate security of being believed dead.
“You’re sure it was her you saw on the TV?” Superintendent Donnelly was a man in his late forties, not a big man, with grey hair and grey eyes and rather a grey complexion as well, but with some subtle acuteness of personality that suggested rather the blue-grey of steel than the battleship grey of lead.
“I’m sure. I talked to her.”
“What did you say?”
Flynn grinned, with more savagery than humour. “That aeroplanes don’t back into mountains.”
“Can you give me a description?”
She had been about thirty-seven, around five-foot-five, well-built verging on plump. She had curly black shoulder-length hair and dark brown eyes. Her skin had a slightly olive cast. Her accent was Southern with a slight Hispanic edge. She was wearing the red suit, tailored jacket and skirt, over a navy roll-neck blouse with navy court-shoes, and she had a grey briefcase in rigid plastic.
Donnelly gave him a watchful little half-smile. “Mr. Flynn, if you didn’t take any notice of her just say so.”
Flynn grinned. Todd laughed out loud. He suspected Flynn could have issued a similarly comprehensive description of every woman he had met in the last fifteen years. He liked women—almost all of them, regardless of age or colour or type, or their beauty or physical charm. He liked women the way some people like cats, not for what they might do for him but for the pleasure of their company.
Todd said, “Is he right? Was it a bomb?”
Donnelly retreated a little into the protective shell of professional reticence. “We shalln’t know for sure until the people at Farnborough have made a jigsaw out of what’s left. But given the fire at Flynn’s place, and the woman who ought to be dead but seems to be wandering around outside Slough, I’ll be working on that assumption. If we can find the woman she can tell us why she got off the plane. If Farnborough decides it was a mechanical failure or pilot error, she still might have something interesting to say.”
“Will you be able to find her?”
Donnelly was a man not given to extravagant gestures. He shrugged economically. “We’ve a better chance starting now than if you’d thought about it and called us tomorrow. We know where she was half an hour ago and that’s worth something.” He paused, thinking. “I don’t suppose this is a fair question. But you wouldn’t have any idea why—if she planted a bomb, or even if she didn’t—she should go to the only place that everyone with an interest in the crash would be converging?”
Flynn also shrugged, nowhere near as neatly. The parts of his body always tended towards a certain independence: at times they seemed about to break up a loose alliance and go their separate ways. Except that when you saw his photographs you knew it was an illusion, that where hand, eye and mind were in such accord there was no risk of a separation, however oddly bits of him might behave on occasions.
He said, “Maybe for the same reason I did. It’s hard to explain. It’s like—as if what happened made them family. It was sheer fluke that I wasn’t with them when they died. I felt somehow that I owed them something—mourning, apologies, I don’t know. As if I was their heir, or their witness.” He did not think he was making much sense so he stopped.
Donnelly understood what he was saying. “That works for you. We know you weren’t responsible: you’d have been on the plane if our people hadn’t taken you off—in circumstances which they will be called upon to explain before they’re very much older,” he added grimly. “But if your woman in red deliberately blew up that plane with two hundred and twenty people on board, we have to assume she’s a pretty tough lady and not the sort to be overtaken by sudden impulses of self-recrimination. What was she looking for?”
“Proof that I was dead?” There was a rough edge on Flynn’s voice. Talking about it had helped a lot, but he was still a man who had seen more than two hundred people die because of something he did.
Donnelly shook his head. “She knew you were alive. If she got off when Harris came aboard, she must have seen them take you back into the terminal. The plane left right after that: there was no chance that you were on it.”
Todd voiced what they were all three thinking. “So she let that plane take off carrying a bomb that would kill everyone on board after she knew that the man she’d been sent to kill was already safe on the ground.”
“There may once have been a golden age,” said Donnelly, “when even hardened criminals would give themselves up rather than risk innocent lives, but it had already ended by the time I joined the police force.”
It was a bomb. The accident investigators were sure of it that first night, long before all the pieces had been collected and reassembled in a hangar at Farnborough. The people at Heathrow who saw the explosion knew even before that. Aeroplanes do occasionally fail for structural or mechanical reasons, but they do not usually do it as dramatically as that.
As the investigation continued a picture began to emerge of an explosive device, of moderate rather than massive size, detonating at the after end of the forward baggage hold. The shock-wave had broken through to the inboard starboard wing-tank.
Shimoni got home about midnight. By then she had seen all there was to see. She accepted a mug of fresh coffee then disappeared into her darkroom. Todd thought it might have been natural to show another photographer what she had in the way of equipment and shots, and noticed that she did not.
Flynn did not notice. He was worrying about Laura. “She’ll have heard about the crash by now. She has to reckon New York as one of the likelier places I’d go. She knows she left me at Heathrow half an hour before—before it happened. If she calls my place she’ll only get the Phone Melted tone. She’s no more idea how to find me than I have to find her. We fixed it that way.”
“But she can find out if you were on the plane,” Todd said reasonably. “The same way anyone else can, by ringing the emergency number.”
“She might wonder if there was time to get my name on the list. Hellfire, my name might even be on the god-damned list.” He paused as that sank in. Then he added, “She might call you.”
Todd stared. “Why should she call me?”
Flynn shuffled uncomfortably. “I gave her your number. Well, we needed some way of leaving messages for each other, I didn’t think you’d mind. The last thing you said to me in Jerusalem—”
“The last thing I said to you in Jerusalem, after you’d told me to get off your back and buy a cocker spaniel if I wanted something running round after me, was that if we were no longer partners you could make your own bloody arrangements.” The indignation in his voice was not genuine, and he smiled slowly at Flynn’s expression. “The last but one thing I said was, ‘Call me if you need me.’”
Todd stood up, tapped on the darkroom door. “Leah, we’re going back to my place. There might be something for Mickey on my answering machine. If Superintendent Donnelly calls, let him know where we are, would you? I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Yes, sure,” said Shimoni through the door. Then, under her breath, “If you’ve still some use for the second eleven by then.”
There was no message from Laura, and Superintendent Donnelly did call. His men had picked up the woman in red. She had left the scene of the crash before a search could be made, but a speculative sweep of late-night cafes in the area found her hunched over a cup of cold coffee in a motorway service station on the M4. The policeman who spotted her knew at once who she was, without having to check through the description he had been given. She was crying.
Her name was Maxine Faber and she was a junior executive with an entertainments consortium in Fort Lauderdale. Her name was on the passenger list, the list of the dead.
At first she claimed Flynn was mistaken, that she had missed the flight. He must have seen her in the departure lounge, not on the plane. While waiting to board she had suddenly felt so ill that she considered it wiser to take a later flight. She was in the washroom when the plane took off, and when the explosion occurred.
She was not sure what she did next. There was a lot of shocked activity in the terminal. For a little while she stayed there but there was nothing she could do to help, she was only in the way, so after a time she went back to the desk where she had returned her hire-car and hired it out again. She really had very little idea what she wanted to do or where she wanted to go, but she was clear on one point: she would not be boarding an aeroplane for a little while.
She headed away from Heathrow and away from London, her thoughts in turmoil, driving on automatic pilot. She found herself being passed by a succession of emergency vehicles and, without really deciding to, followed them. When the scene of the crash came into view, picked out of the darkness by a hundred twinkling lights as if it were a children’s party, nausea made her stop the car. Then she walked, aimlessly, drawn to the place where they had died almost as if the two hundred and twenty had been kin, until she was stopped by the barriers. Some time after that she went back to her car and drove away. Donnelly said, “Flynn was never in the departure lounge.”
His quiet voice, precise and without inflection, summoned her back from what had become almost a soliloquy. She blinked her large brown eyes. “What?”
“Flynn couldn’t have seen you in the departure lounge. The plane was already boarding when he got his ticket: he went straight to the gate and he was the last one aboard. The only place he could have seen you was on the plane.”
She began to cry again, bent forward, her curly hair shielding her face. Donnelly waited patiently. By degrees she stopped sobbing and her shoulders stilled; then her face came up, reddened and puffy round the eyes. Her voice was thick and her mouth quivered. “Superintendent, what is it you’re accusing me of?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything yet, Miss Faber,” he replied, deadpan. “I’m asking you to explain your rather curious and deeply convenient actions. And I’m wondering why you’re lying.”
“Somebody blew that plane up and you think it was me. You think I killed two hundred and twenty people.” Outrage and grief warred in her voice.
He explained patiently. “Airlines do not normally carry baggage for passengers who aren’t travelling. As a safety measure. If you change your mind about flying, your luggage is off-loaded. As far as we know only two bags travelled unaccompanied on that flight: Flynn’s, because he was taken off the plane by police at the last minute, and yours. I have yet to hear a credible explanation of how you and your bag got parted. We shall sit here—well, you will, I might take a break from time to time—until I do.”
There was no need for Flynn to see Faber. She had already admitted most of what he could say about her, it was only a matter of time before she offered a reason, truthful or otherwise, for being on the plane and then leaving it. But Donnelly wanted her to see Flynn. He could not justify taking her to view the corpses: confronting a man who should have been one of them, burned and shattered with the rest, was the next best thing. It might not shake a confession out of her—he was not yet sure what she had to confess—but he thought it would shake something loose.
Todd drove Flynn to the police station exactly as if the last three years had not happened. It was too soon for either of them to have realised it, but the older man had quite automatically taken up again the reins of the younger man’s life that had been wrested forcibly from him last time they met. For now, shocked as he was, Flynn was grateful for somewhere to go, some way to get around, someone to do his thinking for him. But when he got his breath back and his feet under him again he would wonder if he would have been wiser to keep the cork in the bottle and manage without the genie’s help.
During the last three years Todd had been driven by Shimoni more often than he had been behind the wheel himself. For four years before that Flynn had done most of the driving. The consequence was that Todd drove like an old maid, not only cautiously but cautious in the wrong ways, hesitating halfway across junctions and yielding right-of-way when it caused infinitely more confusion than claiming it. His reverse parking had to be seen to be believed.
So while Flynn appreciated his kindness at driving him across the city at three in the morning, he was not finding it a relaxing experience. He wished he could think of a tactful way of taking the wheel because, even in shock, he was a safer driver than Todd was. Todd took his eyes off the road to talk.
He said, “Did you get much sleep?” and a lamp-post rushed at them threateningly.
Flynn tried not to grab his seatbelt. “Some.” He had not. He had lain on his back in the dark room with his eyes wide open, seeing over and over again the seminal scenes of the day projected like slides inside his mind. Laura in the midst of the fire. The people on the plane. The PhotoFit picture of Fahad. The pop-singer in the Porsche. The rosy flowering in the darkening sky beyond Heathrow. The devastation beside the Thames where the big pieces and the little pieces of the destroyed aeroplane had been scattered like barren seed.
And the woman in red. Had she tried to kill him? Had she killed two hundred and twenty people trying to kill him? Why?—because Fahad had paid her? It was not much of a reason. The loss of Bab el Jihad was not very much better, if she was doing it for the Palestinian cause. Fahad had lost a handful dead, rather more imprisoned but still only a fraction of those who had died in the aeroplane. Could he really, after three years, still hate Flynn so much? Enough to burn his apartment, enough to burn his woman, more than enough to kill Flynn—but two hundred and twenty people neither of them knew?
It hardly seemed possible. It did not accord with what he remembered of Fahad. The man was ruthless by any standards, seriously brutal when it suited his life’s cause. But on a personal level he had been capable of as much kindness, decency even, as other men. Flynn knew he was also capable of mayhem but was unable to judge whether Fahad would resort to mayhem of this type and on this scale.
Donnelly met them in the foyer and took them to the interview room where Maxine Faber was being watched over expressionlessly by a WPC. Though Todd was not invited, nor was he told to wait at the desk, so he stayed with Flynn—partly because Flynn was still a touch shaky but mostly because Todd was more than a touch nosy. He called it professional curiosity.
Donnelly too noticed that Flynn walked as if he could not feel what was under his feet. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” said Flynn; then again, less forcibly, “I’m all right. I’ll be even more all right when people stop asking.”
The policeman was unconvinced. “While you’re here you might as well have a word with our tame doctor.”
“What do I need with a doctor?” Flynn’s voice snagged like barbed wire. “I wasn’t on the god-damned plane. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“All the same,” Donnelly said imperturbably.
He wanted to say something else to Flynn before introducing him to Maxine Faber, but Flynn’s attitude made it pointless. He had wanted to warn Flynn that he would find it difficult. Either this woman had tried to kill him and had involved him in the deaths of two hundred and twenty strangers, or she was like him a freak survivor of an epic tragedy. Perhaps the interview would end without establishing which, but either way the emotions of both of them would be under assault.
What Donnelly was proposing to do was unusual. He expected to be discussed behind a succession of doors; but it would not be the first time and, though sooner or later there would be a last time, he doubted if this would be it. A man with two hundred and twenty murders to investigate was entitled to a certain latitude. It would be different if he was putting Flynn in danger. But this thing seemed to have happened because someone knew exactly who Flynn was, and anyway he had already met Faber. Even if she claimed he had not.
Perhaps nothing would come of it anyway. If Faber had taken money for the contract killing of a man on a crowded airliner by means of an explosive device, probably she had no better nature to appeal to. A woman capable of being moved to remorse by evidence of her guilt would not have gone into that line of business in the first place. But there were other possibilities worth exploring. If she had agreed to do it in a fit of religious fervour—if that tan was due less to the Florida sun and more to Middle Eastern genes, if she were a supporter of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—perhaps she had not anticipated how it would feel: to kill so many and then to see Flynn alive. If she went for his throat, that was probably how it had been.
Or perhaps she had been persuaded to take the package on board—Semtex, probably, invisible to normal scanners—in the belief that it was something other than a bomb: drugs for instance. The money offered would be good. He could afford to be generous with his promises—Fahad or whoever. She was to be on the plane when the thing went up and never claim the balance of her fee. But in that case, why did she leave the plane?
Donnelly found Todd a seat outside the interview room and, quite firmly, showed him to it. He looked up at Flynn. “All right?” Then he opened the door.
Faber looked up as they went in. She did not need to be reminded who Flynn was. She remembered their conversation. She smiled, too vividly, her lips carmine, her eyes bright with tears in waiting, and said, “Sitting at the back isn’t the complete answer.”
“I noticed that.” Flynn’s voice was low, his face grim. Without the manic grin that was his trademark he looked years older, but then, he had nothing to grin about. He believed this woman was responsible for two hundred and twenty deaths and her only regret was that the figure was not two hundred and twenty-one. Hatred welling in his breast like bile, he raised hot, angry eyes to meet her gaze.
And found there a reflection of all the torn and tangled emotions whirling in his own mind: the rage, the grief, the guilt—at surviving, but more at the gut reaction that his life was worth more than all those deaths; the loss of equilibrium, of perspective; the way from time to time, mostly with weariness, the awesome thing slipped from the forefront of his mind, and he wondered where Laura was and what he was going to do next and whether he could fix the apartment, and then it came back at him with the force of a blow and he felt like a murderer.
All these things were in Maxine Faber’s eyes too. They were the reason she had been crying in a motorway service area instead of putting miles behind her. She was no more responsible for all those shattered lives than he was, unless in the same involuntary way. Even then her conscience had less to bear, because without her someone else would have been found to carry the device on board, but nothing would have happened without Flynn.
His voice was still low, still gruff, but the rage compressed in it was gone. In its place she almost thought she heard compassion. “Can you tell us what happened?”
So she told him. None of the three of them could have said why she was willing or able to respond to Flynn when an hour of astute, pertinent, perceptive interrogation by Donnelly had brought forth only tears and lies. But a kind of kinship had been created when these two people escaped the death planned for two hundred and twenty-two. It would be with them for the rest of their lives, a communion that no-one else in the world could share in. Donnelly’s gamble had paid off. Faber told them what she knew.
She had believed unreservedly that the suitcase with her name on it in the baggage hold contained cocaine. The shipment was on its way from Rotterdam to New York: she took it over in London for the trans-Atlantic leg. She had done the run before and suffered from a minimum of nerves. The anxiety Flynn noted was neither a fear of flying nor a worry about New York customs but a very immediate panic prompted by a casual remark from a passing stewardess that some policemen had asked for the flight to be held so they could talk to someone on board. Naturally she assumed it was her.
What she did next was natural too: she went and hid in the toilet. While there she did perhaps the quickest thinking of her life. Then she opened the door, walked into the galley, helped herself to some remnants of cabin staff uniform she found there, also a sheaf of papers and a clip-board, and when the cabin door opened and the two policemen were working their way down the aisles she walked purposefully to the hatch and left. No-one noticed. At the first cloakroom she came to she lost the clip-board and the uniform, became a civilian again and left the terminal. She was hiring her car when she heard the shocked little gasps that were her first indication of what had happened.
When she realised which plane it was that had crashed, all the conflicting emotions that had surged in Flynn tumbled over her too. What she had told Donnelly about events after that had been the truth: she found herself at the scene, then leaving and driving, then stopping. Then the police picked her up.
So she was a drug courier—a mule. That explained the lies: with her luggage destroyed along with the rest of the plane, only her own words could incriminate her. All she needed was a plausible excuse for not taking the flight and she was in the clear.
Donnelly said, “Does the name Fahad mean anything to you?”
She looked blank. “No.”
“Obregon?”
She looked down at her lap. After a moment she looked up again. “There’s no point me denying what you can check with a phone call. The firm I work for in Fort Lauderdale: Tomas Obregon owns it.”