Mats reacted to the soft doorbell chime like a cold finger creeping up his spine once he realised who’d just opened the door to the Sky Suite.
‘Augusto Pereya,’ said the roughly forty-year-old pilot, removing his hat in introduction. The man had olive skin and dark hair thinning a little on the back of his head. His nose was crooked and misshapen, reminding Mats of a poorly squeezed toothpaste tube. He wore a white shirt and dark tie with his anthracite-coloured jacket that had four golden stripes on the cuffs. ‘I’m the captain of this plane.’
‘Is there a problem?’ Mats asked the Argentinian, speaking to him in Spanish.
‘May I come in?’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ Mats moved out of the way of the door, and the relatively short yet rather strong-looking pilot followed him inside. Pereya scanned the Sky Suite and his eyes stopped on Mats’ untouched meal cart right as Mats’ phone rang in his trouser pocket.
‘What’s this about?’ Mats asked undeterred, but Pereya said: ‘Go ahead, Dr Krüger. Have at it.’
‘Come again?’
‘Our ad.’ The captain bared a row of coffee-stained teeth. ‘Incoming calls are free on LegendAir all month. So, you’d better take it. Calling back will only cost you. Those cutthroats are currently charging ten dollars a minute.’
Mats pulled out his phone. ‘Aren’t they expecting you back in the cockpit?’
‘I’m on a break; first officer took over.’ He wagged a hand at Mats’ phone. ‘Go ahead, I can wait.’
Mats smiled at him helplessly and took the call from an unknown caller. ‘Yes?’
‘How far have you got?’ asked the fake Johnny Depp voice. Again Mats could hear the actual speaker’s breathing in the background. He still had no clue who he was dealing with.
‘Okay, sure. Thanks for your call,’ Mats said and intentionally exaggerated feigned happiness. ‘This all sounds great, but I’ll need a little more time to get the documents together.’
‘There’s someone with you?’ the voice said.
‘Uh, yes, exactly.’
‘Is Kaja with you?’
Mats smiled at the pilot and shrugged as if to say, ‘Sorry, I’ll be with you in a sec.’
Pereya only nodded casually, not bothering to sit down.
‘No.’
‘Another passenger?’ Johnny asked.
‘No, I’m sorry.’
‘So someone from the crew?’
Mats sighed. ‘Uh-huh, but I’d first need to discuss it with him. He is the boss, as you know.’
‘The captain? The captain is with you?’ The voice turned even more menacing. ‘One false word to him and your daughter is dead. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right, fine. I’ll keep it brief, and you’re simply going to have to listen.’
Mats glanced at Pereya again, who now seemed interested in the monitor on the wall even though it was only showing the flight path he already knew along with data for altitude, wind speed, outside temperature. Negative sixty Fahrenheit.
About as cold as my soul feels.
‘Are you ready for further instructions?’
Mats kept prevaricating. ‘Um, yes, sure. I can remember.’
‘Good, Dr Krüger. Then pay good attention: once Kaja is at that point, and I hope for Nele and your baby that it’s soon, she’ll need a weapon. It’s advisable for you to keep this weapon on you in case things get serious and you need to act quickly.’
‘Fine. So where should I send the documents?’
‘We have placed the weapon under your seat.’
Mats’ mouth turned dry. It was all he could do not to sigh out loud. ‘Oh… uh. Yes. Okay, but…’
A weapon? Where? Under which of my seats, goddamnit?
He cleared his throat. ‘Uh, there are several offices in the building. I’d need the exact one.’
‘Ah, right. You booked several seats, you scaredy-cat. We chose the finest one. 7A. In business class.’
It had to be that one.
‘Very well.’
‘You’ll find the weapon with the life vest.’
Mats closed his eyes, and felt nauseous as he said into the phone: ‘Wonderful, thanks a lot. Got it. Yes, best regards too.’ He hung up.
‘Everything all right?’ he heard the pilot ask. Mats had turned his back to him near the end.
‘Yep, everything’s great.’ Mats smiled and pointed at the armchairs. ‘Please, take a seat.’
‘Thanks. I’m fine standing.’
Mats nodded nervously. ‘So what’s this about?’
‘I was just speaking with Frau Claussen about you.’
‘You were?’
‘And I’m concerned.’
Aha. So that’s what this was about. The captain must’ve got word she wasn’t doing so well.
‘That’s not something I can talk about it,’ Mats said, hoping to rely on doctor–patient confidentiality.
Pereya nodded. ‘I understand. Very well actually.’ His cap moved from one hand to the other. ‘Nevertheless. Is there something I need to know?’
Mats unwittingly reached for his throat. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, I want to be completely honest with you. Frau Claussen doesn’t quite seem to be her usual self.’
‘In what way?’
‘She dropped a tray full of glasses in the galley.’
‘What does that have to do with me?’
The pilot’s stare hardened. ‘That’s what I’m asking you, Dr Krüger. When I asked Frau Claussen if she needed a break, she said, and I quote, “I’m doing fine; I just had an intense discussion with Dr Krüger is all.”’
‘Aha.’ Mats pretended to be unmoved.
The captain abruptly changed the subject. ‘As a psychiatrist, you’ve probably heard about the proposed PPT law?’
Mats nodded. ‘Uh, sure.’
The PPT, or pre-psych test, was the name for a dubious procedure that supposedly provided fast-track testing for identifying certain patterns of psychopathological behaviour. Mats considered it charlatanism and scare tactics. Yet after the Germanwings catastrophe, in which a mentally ill co-pilot killed hundreds of people by locking himself in the cockpit and crashing his plane in the Alps, demand had multiplied for early psychopathological detection. Mandatory participation in standardised multiple-choice psych evaluations as well as blood tests were becoming the favoured methods of regularly examining an entire crew for the use of psychotropic drugs.
‘I consider PPT to be completely useless,’ Mats added. ‘Just as you can’t tell a perpetrator by their hair colour, you can’t see into their mind with the help of some questionnaire. And not everyone taking antidepressants is unable to work, let alone a danger. There’s good reason why most figured the law wouldn’t get a majority in the European Parliament.’
Pereya nodded. ‘Nevertheless, we at LegendAir are contemplating voluntary tests that well exceed the legal minimum.’
Mats tried to endure the pilot’s intense stare. ‘That’s interesting, but I’m guessing you didn’t take the trouble of coming here just to tell me that?’
The pilot took a step closer. ‘I want be completely honest with you, Dr Krüger. I’m not worried about Frau Claussen. She’s a capable, if somewhat overworked, crewmember. For me, it’s about you.’
‘Me?’
‘I only wish we’d already adopted a PPT procedure so we could do a series of tests on you right here on board. Because I have an extremely bad feeling in my gut and would like to know just what’s going on with you. Someone like you would be just the person for preventative examination.’
He laughed joylessly.
‘I mean, you first attracted our attention when you booked several seats at once, and then you suffer a panic attack right after take-off. Later, you start causing havoc with my crew. You actually accuse one flight attendant of assault, and then you go harass Frau Claussen.’
‘I didn’t harass anyone,’ Mats said. A thought had occurred to him. If he remembered correctly, one of his colleagues had been heavily involved in PPT research. A doctor, whose name he’d heard for the first time today after a long, long time: Klopstock!
That cannot be a coincidence.
Mats told himself to Google it as soon as he had an opportunity.
‘Let’s not waste words. All I want is for you to stay clear of Frau Claussen. Okay?’
Mats showed no reaction.
Pereya, on the other hand, smiled in an apparently conciliatory manner and gazed around the Sky Suite. ‘You’ll make do somehow up here without her, I take it?’
He put his pilot’s cap back on, and suddenly his voice superbly matched his cold-steel eyes that he now fixed on Mats: ‘I do not want to hear about any more incidents. Do we understand each other? That way I won’t have to consider taking further action.’