‘That’s it, I’m done,’ Mats heard Feli say. She was breathing harder, probably from crossing an intersection judging from the traffic sounds in the background. ‘I’m ending this now.’
After Kaja, this made her the second woman wanting to cut him off in the span of a few minutes. His last lifeline was about to break.
Kaja, for her part, had simply stopped speaking to him. His former patient had stood silently and switched into tunnel mode when leaving the Sky Suite. No eye contact, frozen expression, robot-like movements. A typical symptom of severe psychological trauma, and entirely comprehensible considering the fact that Mats had just tossed her a mental hand grenade with that video. The images had bothered him enough – he could only imagine what they were doing to Kaja.
That kiss, her deep embrace of the shooter, such an intimate bond – why would she ever return to her tormentor? Could Kaja have been suffering from perceptual distortion so soon?
Unlikely.
Her predicament had actually been too brief to establish the type of emotional captor – captive bond known by the term Stockholm Syndrome. Mats would probably never know the answer, because even if he did survive this night he’d lose his medical licence for trying to manipulate the situation and would never be allowed to work as a therapist again. Certainly not with Kaja Claussen.
‘I’m hanging up now,’ he heard Feli say.
‘No, please, don’t!’ Mats turned on the faucet in the bathroom he was inside now because he thought he might throw up any second. Silken lampshades softly filtered the light from the two lamps mounted to the mirror, making him look less beaten-down than he felt.
‘Please, Mats,’ Feli groaned. ‘I’ve managed to get the number and even the address of the man who’s most likely involved in your daughter disappearance. Klopstock’s driver, Franz Uhlandt. The doctor’s assistant who gave me his business card said he never showed up for work today. So what more do you want? Call the police and let the pros worry about it.’
‘I can’t do that. Not until I’m one hundred per cent certain where Nele is.’
‘Why?’
Mats held his left wrist under the stream of water, to cool his pulse. Then he tore a bunch of tissues from the stainless-steel dispenser next to the mirror, wiped the sweat from his face, and dragged himself back into the Sky Suite living room.
‘You remember Kaja Claussen? The schoolgirl you prevented from committing suicide?’
‘You were the one who did it, Mats – I only put you in contact with her. What about her?’
‘She’s a flight attendant on board this plane I’m in right now.’
‘No way.’
‘It’s true. And, no, it’s no coincidence. The one or more perpetrators – I’m assuming it’s several – have uploaded the Faber video into in-flight programming.’
‘The Faber video?’ asked Feli, confused.
‘The one showing Kaja getting raped by the school shooter. Making the video public was the trigger that made her plan her own shooting spree.’
‘Right, okay. I remember, just didn’t know the name of the tape.’
Mats grabbed the remote and turned on channel 13/10. He only had to press the arrow button three times to jump to the final minute. A few seconds before that unexplainable kiss.
‘For the first nine months, Kaja was the school hero. She’d sacrificed herself so that others could live. Until her spurned ex-boyfriend, Johannes Faber, sent the video out to his friends. Then Kaja obtained a gun and went into the school intent on killing him. And everyone else who’d seen it and ridiculed it.’
‘Right, right, I know all this,’ Feli said, losing patience. ‘But I don’t understand what that has to do with Nele.’
‘I’m supposed to confront Kaja with the Faber video,’ Mats confessed, not revealing to her that he’d already done so.
‘What for?’
‘I’m supposed to trigger her. Reactivate Kaja’s auto-aggressive feelings. Get her to kill herself and everyone on board.’
Feli gasped. ‘This is some kind of joke!’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘This can’t be, it’s—’
‘It’s true,’ Mats interrupted. ‘Those are the blackmailer’s conditions. Nele dies if I don’t make this aeroplane crash. Now you see why you’re my only hope? The name of the person alone doesn’t do me any good. I need to know where Nele was taken!’
Mats had thought it through every which way:
If the police were involved beforehand, he’d be revealed as the victim of a blackmail attempt to endanger a passenger aircraft. From that moment on, the crew would take no risks. They’d immediately isolate him, even put him in preventative detention on board if possible. The prospect of the blackmailer getting wind of that and killing Nele before the authorities located her was just too great a risk at this point.
He froze the video at the exact moment the camera panned over the floor tiles where Johannes Faber had been hiding.
‘Feli?’ he said since she hadn’t responded. Only the background noise told him he still had a connection.
‘You’re an asshole,’ she growled finally.
‘True,’ he said.
‘You have any idea what you’re doing to me?’
He’d thought she’d only been talking about Kaja, but it was just as unreasonable of him to be demanding so much from her. ‘I know it’s your wedding day. But, Feli, please—’
‘Screw the wedding day!’ she screamed into the phone. ‘Human lives are at stake. Hundreds, my God. And you’ve made me an accessory. Now I can’t just act as if I didn’t know anything. I now have to call in the police.’
Mats groaned and was tempted to bash in the plasma screen with his fist, remote and all.
‘No, for God’s sake, don’t do that. You’ll kill Nele.’
‘Oh, Mats. Your daughter is worth more than anything in the world to you, of course she is. I understand that. But to me? What if I don’t find Nele? I can’t just try to help you save one single life all so that you end up sacrificing a whole plane full of people if we don’t find her.’
Mats was getting dizzy. Nothing he could say seemed to be working.
‘But that’s not what you’re doing, Feli. Listen to me. I’ll keep away from Kaja, I swear to you. I’m not giving in to the blackmailer’s demands. No one on this plane will come to any harm.’
‘I’m supposed to believe that?’
‘Yes.’ He continued lying. ‘Trust me. I’m no mass murderer.’
But he was. And a malicious, cunning one at that.
Feli hesitated. The background traffic noise was gone. She might be sitting in a taxi or have stepped into a building entrance. My God, what he’d give to be standing right before her, holding her hand and making it personally clear to her all that was at stake.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘If you’re lying and I don’t inform anyone soon, I’ll have to live with the guilt of a hundreds of souls on my conscience.’
‘I’m not lying, Feli. Look. We’re still in the air for over six hours. If you notify the authorities now, the crew will be warned and the perpetrators will find out their plan’s been blown. And they’ll kill Nele at once. Her, and her baby.’
‘We don’t need to tell them anything about you or the plane. Only that a pregnant woman’s gone missing. And I did give you that tip about Uhlandt.’
‘Yes, I thought about that too. But how can you guarantee that the blackmailer won’t hear about the cops investigating?’
‘Maybe he already knows about me,’ Feli argued.
‘Maybe, yes. But you’re not an official threat. Whatever these lunatics want from me, it has to be something really, really big. Something that cannot be taken public. Which it will be as soon as I call in the police. I’m scared it’s still too early for that. Please, Feli, I’m begging you. Just gain me a little time. Find out where this Franz Uhlandt took my daughter, and then, I swear, we’ll notify the police and this nightmare comes to an end. Okay?’
Feli fell silent a while, and on the phone their pause seemed to echo that monotonous white noise of the plane. Mats felt like he was in a wind tunnel. Everything was rushing all around him. Finally Feli said: ‘Like I said: you’re an asshole, Mats.’
Then she hung up without telling him whether she was going to listen to him or dial 110.
Mats dropped the phone, buried his face in his hands.
Oh, God, what should I do? What can I do?
He wiped the tears from his eyes, then searched for the remote to banish this miserable image from the screen. That was when he saw it, from the corner of his eye.
Because of the headache still seething behind his eyes, and his nausea, and that leaden exhaustion weighing him down, it took a while for him to be cognizant of what was being presented to him.
On the monitor.
In freeze-frame.
In the lower corner, in the shower of the girls’ locker room.
On the blurred tile.
A tiny detail, barely recognisable. Captured only because he’d happened to pause the video at that exact second.
Is that what I think it is? Mats asked himself and wished he could zoom the image or at least print it out. He stepped closer to the monitor – and made a fatal error. Hoping to make that frozen detail more visible, reversing and fast-forwarding a little using the monitor’s touchscreen function, he lost the exact frame.
The airline’s playback software was far too clumsy, kept jumping five seconds. What he really needed was a fucking slow motion button.
For fuck’s sake.
No matter how hard he tried. The video simply wouldn’t pause on that exact spot he needed to confirm his suspicions. Yet he was certain that his eyes hadn’t deceived him.
He had seen it, even though it was less than a couple of centimetres long. The very thing that put Kaja’s trauma in a whole new light.
And, even though Mats couldn’t verify why he was so certain at the moment, he did trust his gut, which was telling him that his daughter’s kidnappers had made one huge goddamn mistake.