Think!
Mats was already on the way to leave but turned back. He needed to force himself to proceed methodically, calming his storm of thoughts and not running mindlessly through the world’s largest aeroplane on some panicked manhunt for a suicidal assassin. There was only one single person he thought capable of wanting to sacrifice herself, but this very person was also the only one he could rule out: Kaja.
She’d even been standing in the elevator when the voice called him. Without moving her lips, without a phone to her ear. It couldn’t have been a recording either because he’d had a conversation with the blackmailer.
Who was a suicide case?
Mats sat down, wrote: ‘What I know for certain’, and tried writing down notes such as:
– Nele is kidnapped and suffering.
– The video wasn’t filmed by Johannes Faber.
– Klopstock makes money off the plane crashing because of his psychological tests.
But he wasn’t capable of much self-control or reasoning.
There was only one certainty clamouring inside his head, and it said: ‘THE VOICE IS ON BOARD!’
And it was precisely this realisation that propelled him out of the suite, past the deserted Sky Bar and into the rear end of the upper level.
First into upper business class, thirty seats, occupied by passengers sleeping, reading or watching movies. The closed windows made everything as dark as the nocturnal animal building in a zoo. The subsequent area, premium economy, was only slightly brighter since the cabin lighting was switched off here too, but there were more seats and so more monitors fluorescing in the dark.
What am I looking for?
Mats saw old men, young women and sleeping children. Yet how could you recognise a suicidal blackmailer with motives that weren’t clear?
He didn’t have the slightest clue, knowing that it was completely pointless scouring all 550 square metres of regular passenger areas, especially since the perpetrator might also be sitting in the cockpit or freight area and certainly wasn’t making calls out in the open with a voice changer over his mouth.
And yet he couldn’t just sit there idle, doing nothing. He was like a goalkeeper who knew he didn’t have much chance of stopping a penalty kick yet still had to decide which side to leap because standing there with his feet planted was just not an option.
The further back Mats went, striding through the whole seventy-five metres of the plane, the fuller it became. In the far rear of economy, around twenty passengers were housed in the same area solely available to him alone in the Sky Suite. A total of two hundred passengers, the vast majority of whom would’ve been more than able to go into the restroom and make a phone call holding a vocoder to their mouth. Anyone and everyone would have to be considered.
– Nervousness
– Excessive sweating
– Erratic movements
– Trembling hands
Mats recalled the symptoms that suicide bombers occasionally displayed, though not always. If they had blocked out their fears using drugs or hypnosis, they could act completely normal until triggering the detonator of their suicide belt.
It was nonsense anyway trying to identify a quite probably mentally disturbed person using traits that didn’t even always apply to politically motivated attackers.
He’d reached the end of the plane and switched to the other aisle by the rear restrooms. Now he marched in the direction of the cockpit. Scrutinised the backs of heads, tops of thighs, smelled stale socks, flatulence, and moist towelettes and knew: this was all completely pointless.
Just as pointless as his blackmailer’s behaviour.
If the voice really was on board and actually taking its own life, why would it need such a complicated scheme? Why not use its clearly existing intellectual and logistic talents to make the plane crash itself?
Why Nele? Kaja?
Why me?
He answered his own question: ‘Because it doesn’t need a bomb or an act, but a psychological incident instead.’
A ‘conventional’ crash, such as one involving hostages, would only have implications for the physical and mechanical security measures performed during check-in.
In this case a psychological explosive was to be ignited, one which no scanner in the world could detect. Which was exactly what they needed him for.
The only thing he still didn’t know was how the world was supposed to learn that he’d been successful in activating the psychological bomb. Though he also feared this was soon going to be made clear to him.
Mats had reached the stairs, near row 33, near the beginning of the front third.
The stairs led down to the galley between premium economy and economy. Two flight attendants sat conversing quietly between the emergency doors and the restrooms. They took no notice of Mats.
They couldn’t be ruled out either.
Neither could Valentino, whom Mats also had to consider as he pressed on with his illogical routine and took a good long look at the passengers while standing in the aisle.
It didn’t take long for his eyes to start screwing up.
Despite the fact that there wasn’t anything unusual to see, not at first. But his mental seismograph had obviously started registering the vibrations of a quake that was still forthcoming, one that less sensitive people presumably could not detect.
Vibrations that had their epicentre in row 47.
The whole window row was now empty, all three seats including 47F, which Mats had reserved for himself and the sleeping man had blocked upon boarding. He still hadn’t got back to his seat, but that wasn’t what drew his attention.
It was the middle row instead, seat 47J. The aisle seat.
Mats advanced slowly, creeping up like a predator trying not to startle its sleeping prey, when it happened: the passenger who lay motionless with his chin directed at the cabin ceiling, his mouth half open and eyes closed, pulled a phone out from under his blanket, took a look at the screen and put it back before acting just as he had been, as if he were still sleeping.
Trautmann. The name pierced Mats’ thoughts like a war cry. The man who was supposedly intending to sleep through the whole flight thanks to his ‘twelve-thousand-dollar pill’ sure had amazingly lucid waking periods.
‘Trautmann,’ Mats heard himself scream after he’d first passed by him and now closed in on him from behind. Alarmed by how loud he was but also by the consequences implicit in his actions. His whole life he’d been conditioned either to resolve conflicts verbally or dodge them. Now he felt his hand automatically find its way into his trouser pocket. Pull out the little plastic box that dispensed ‘dental floss’, and then things reached that very point his patients often described in their near-death experiences: he seemed to leave his own body and, floating above himself, observed himself pulling the noose around the neck of the supposedly sleeping man from behind. And as he did he screamed: ‘Where’s Nele? What have you done with my daughter?’
Not even a second later, Mats lay on the floor of the aisle with his nose broken and a pistol to his temple. Then all went dark.