‘Just like cobblestones.’
Another phrase from Mats’ aviophobia seminar leader entered his head now that the plane was passing through an area of ‘heavier wind shear’ over the Atlantic, as the captain had called it a few minutes ago in an announcement.
‘The wings can sway up and down a whole tall storey high without a thing happening.’
Mats sat buckled up in the Sky Suite armchair, fighting an internal battle against the shock waves hitting the Airbus. His fear of flying wasn’t hitting him as hard as he’d feared. Though it wasn’t exactly calming to know that the two wings, which also happened to hold nearly 400,000 litres of explosive fuel, could bend a good few metres without harm. And yet, his fear for his daughter would prevent him from running screaming through the aeroplane or hyperventilating down on the floor of the Sky Suite, gasping for air. Even so…
Cobblestones?
It felt to him more like a fishing boat being grabbed by monster waves before plummeting down from high breakers into a deep ocean trough. He knew of course that the brain perceived height differences to be stronger when the body was moving faster – passing over a pothole felt different at ten kilometres per hour than at a hundred. And the plane’s speed was currently showing about a thousand!
Focus. You need to focus.
Mats scribbled ‘perpetrator not acting alone’ on the notepad before him. The voice had mentioned at least one other lunatic holding Nele. The whole thing involved a broader operation that demanded planning. This ruled out a lone perpetrator acting on an impulse such as jealousy or revenge, a former patient, for example, who felt they’d been mistreated. The more complicit, the greater the risk. This ‘Johnny’ was striving for a goal that had to hold extreme importance for him.
The plane was dumped into another air pocket, an ‘unstable stratification’, as it was correctly called, because of course there were no pockets in the air. Even though it felt like that.
EXPENSE
was the next item Mats wrote down.
They had a vehicle for transporting her, a place where someone giving birth couldn’t be heard screaming, and her abductor.
THE TAXI DRIVER!!!
Dear God, please let Feli find out something.
When was she going to call? She’d been at the clinic for a while now.
RESEARCH!
Extremely important. They knew all about him, about Kaja, and Nele. About their worries, troubles, fears, and traumas. They even had knowledge of his wife dying alone.
ACCESS!
This could be the crucial part.
The kidnappers had access to Nele’s apartment, but also to this aeroplane. They hadn’t needed to place a physical weapon on board – that was the most treacherous part of their plan. A psychological bomb could pass through even the most meticulous ground checks unnoticed. It couldn’t be coincidence that Kaja had ended up on the same plane with him. How had they managed that? And how had they fed the video into in-flight programming?
The video!
Mats turned in his chair so he could see the monitor built into the restroom wall, and flipped back to channel 13/10.
The video began with those same shaky images that Mats must’ve watched a thousand times already while preparing for their therapy sessions.
Kaja called them the ‘gym tapes’ though it was just a single recording, and he’d officially referred to it as the ‘Faber video’. Named after its creator, Johannes Faber.
Kaja had thought they were alone when the school shooter led her into that locker room aiming his pistol.
Mats saw the bright blur that suddenly gained contours.
Heard two girls crying, Trish and Kim, who’d stayed hidden in the showers and were now fleeing the locker room. Half naked, barefoot in track pants, running for their lives that they owed to Kaja. Because she had sacrificed herself.
‘Do what you want with me,’ she said, and to this day Mats was still amazed by how utterly fearless she was. ‘You already have me. Let those two go.’
The same capacity for self-sacrifice was now being demanded of him.
As if the circle were now closing…
Mats fast-forwarded through the minutes to follow. He knew them already. Peer shoving his pistol into Kaja’s mouth. Forcing her to remove her clothes and kneel down before him.
‘Like a dog in heat,’ he’d ordered her. And she’d obeyed. She had to present herself to him down on all fours. The gun to the back of her head by now. Seven minutes long. She was at his mercy, without pause. His thrusting continued until he came inside her, her scream like an animal wounded in the belly.
In the medical report of the rape there was mention of severe tearing in the vaginal tract but also of bite wounds in the shoulder and upper arm. Pressure from the gun barrel had left a bruise on her head. Worse, however, as is so often the case, was the psychological damage. Kaja wetted the bed at night for two months, haunted by nightmares where Peer took her hostage. Night after night she was raped by him, over and over. And even though the school celebrated her as a heroine (Kim and Trisha had even given Bild-Zeitung an interview attesting that they’d had no chance of escaping the killer without Kaja’s selflessness), she was plagued by enormous feelings of guilt.
‘Why didn’t I defend myself, Dr Krüger? Why did I simply let that happen to me like some cheap slut?’
She might have managed to climb out of her deep hole without permanent psychological damage. The self-help group she’d attended (though not regularly) after a period of more intensive support from a school psychologist might well have proved enough.
Yet the video immediately changed everything.
Filmed by Johannes Faber of all people, the boy Kaja hadn’t allowed to ‘do it’ with her the day before the school shooting because she didn’t feel she was ready. When the first shots rang out, Johannes had fled to the girls in the locker room during the ensuing panic. He’d stayed hidden from Peer in the showers there together with Kim and Trisha. Neither Kaja nor the school shooter had seen him and neither were they aware that he was secretly filming the rape with his phone. Only to, right as Kaja was slowly regaining a daily routine nine months later, make the video public in a group email to his sports performance class.
Subject: Here’s how our heroine really got off!
From that point on, everyone’s opinion of her plummeted.
Kaja wasn’t the brave one anymore. She was the whore.
No longer sacrificing herself. Ultra horny instead.
No more the heroine. The nymphomaniac accomplice of a school shooter instead.
Of course, there were many who remained on her side. Many had condemned sending around the abominable video, pointing out that it was all too clear how brutally Kaja was abused. That she’d screamed in pain and not lust like the haters’ comments in the student forums tried to claim. That he kicked her off him like a piece of dirt after he’d finished with her. Shortly before the recording turned black, and Kaja could only be heard whimpering.
That was how it had always looked, judging from the tape Mats had seen before.
The video on channel 13/10, however, continued to play.
What the hell…
Mats practically had to rub his eyes. He undid his seatbelt to get closer to the screen. He focused on the display, and could not believe what he was seeing.
No, it can’t be.
He reversed. To minute nine. And it was just like Johnny had said.
If Kaja’s psyche was the north tower of the World Trade Center, then this video was the aeroplane that steered right into its heart. She only needed to be shown it.
Goddamn.
His blackmailer was right.
It would destroy her.
And change everything.
Everything.