She smiled.
Of all the emotions her face had shown in the last few hours – confusion, uncertainty, distress all the way to naked despair – this expression was the most disturbing.
Even more disturbing than that flicker in her eyes, that psychotic background noise that kept finding its way into Kaja’s gaze even in the times of intense emotional isolation. A clear sign of her misery and of the pain gnawing at her sanity. It had even been present when she’d looked right through him from the elevator. But now?
Kaja came closer to Mats with this smile of hers forming at the corners of her mouth, and it was real. Not feigned, not acting, not put on. She didn’t look very happy, but she did resemble someone who was at peace with herself.
If Mats didn’t know better, he might’ve interpreted it as an expression of mental healing.
Instead he got a chill when Kaja stepped up to the table and said in a calm voice: ‘You’re simply too good, Dr Krüger. I should have known. But I’d probably repressed just how well you understand your profession.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, you do not, but I already told you that. You’ve never comprehended a thing. But that doesn’t matter now.’
Kaja opened the minibar and helped herself to a bottle of still water and a chilled glass. She poured it halfway full and took a tiny glass bottle from the inside pocket of her uniform top.
The vial looked like the nose drops that, whenever Mats got a cold, his mother used to drip in with an eyedropper. Except this one was made of green, not brown, glass, and the dropper looked a little more delicate.
‘What is that?’
‘Liquid nicotine. Extremely poisonous,’ Kaja said candidly. ‘I extracted it from e-cigarettes.’
She instilled several drops into the water glass and stirred it with her index finger. The only finger with all its nail polish still intact.
She smiled. ‘I switched a year ago, did you know that?’
Mats shook his head, yet it wasn’t to her question. ‘What are you planning to do?’
Her smile widened. ‘But e-cigarettes don’t taste like anything. And they can be deadly too.’ Kaja closed up the glass vial and shook it.
‘I’m not drinking that,’ Mats said, but she didn’t respond. It was as if he were just an object to her, like some phone recording she’d reached and didn’t expect answers and certainly not questions from.
Kaja looked at her watch, sighed and pulled, from the same pocket she’d got the nicotine, a real cigarette along with a lighter.
‘I was actually saving this for Berlin, once this was all over, but that’s no longer the case.’
She stuck the cigarette in her mouth, lit it and inhaled deeply.
‘Ahhh…’
Grey, fog-like smoke filled the Sky Suite when she exhaled. Mats could hardly smell it because of his bloody nose, but the smoke irritated his eyes.
‘I’ve always wanted to do that.’ Kaja laughed and quickly took another drag. Her stare turned anxious when she said: ‘Oh, man. I should have known. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.’
Mats yanked on his cuffs. ‘Kaja, if you’re being blackmailed too, if you’re somehow involved? You don’t have to do this.’
She looked to the window. She seemed only to be speaking to herself now. ‘I’m not talking about the plane. I’m talking about you, Dr Krüger.’
‘I don’t understand.’
She looked him straight in the eyes for the first time. ‘We’ve been over this.’
‘Explain it to me anyway, please.’
Kaja leaned towards him. ‘It’s not the plane that’s supposed to fall. It’s you. You alone.’
Mats heard the truth coming from Kaja’s mouth and reacted with all his senses.
The omnipresent hissing of the engines in his ears became louder. The taste of blood in his mouth harsher. He even smelled her smoke now.
‘Me? Why me?’
‘You were getting really close to finding out, Dr Krüger. I heard what you asked the sky marshal.’
‘Trautmann?’
She shrugged. ‘That his name? Only the pilots know his real identity. So that we crew can’t reveal who he is if taken hostage. All I knew was that a marshal was on this flight and that you were on the list of suspicious passengers because you’d booked so many seats. After the incident with Valentino, the captain instructed me to isolate you up here in the Sky Suite, to keep you as inconspicuous as possible. I never had any contact with the marshal. If you hadn’t assaulted him, I never would’ve known who he was or where he’d positioned himself.’
Mats thought he felt his head becoming heavier. As if these fragments of reality were pressing down on his mind with their leaden weight.
‘In any case, Trautmann – or whatever you called him – definitely has nothing to do with Klopstock’s company.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m only reclaiming some small compensation for what you stole from me, Dr Krüger.’
‘Me? What the…’ Mats was so dumbstruck he could hardly put words together. ‘I treated you, Kaja. I helped you work through the trauma. From being taken hostage as well as from the video coming out later. What gives you any idea I stole anything from you?’
Kaja smiled her disturbing smile again. ‘You never treated me. Not then. And not now either. Quite the opposite. You’ve been trying to destroy me this whole flight.’
‘Because I’m being blackmailed. I’m sorry. Please, take these cuffs off.’
He stretched out both hands to her.
‘Let me go. We’ll settle all of this. It’s not too late.’
‘Yes, it is. Has been for a long time now. You never did understand, and you never will.’
‘Please, give me the chance to.’
‘No. There’s no time for that now. Look. The plan was for you to start exhibiting behavioural issues on board this craft, and you’ve done that repeatedly. You instigated a fight with a flight attendant. You even assaulted a sky marshal. And the whole time, you were trying to manipulate a stewardess psychologically so that she’d make the aeroplane crash.’
‘But you don’t have a witness to that.’
‘Yes I do.’ Kaja’s lower lip trembled. ‘I recorded all our conversations.’
She pulled a tiny mobile phone from her inside pocket. ‘Which means you don’t have a chance.’
Mats swallowed hard. ‘You really think this is enough to convince authorities they need to implement wholesale psychological checks of crew and passengers?’
That will earn Klopstock millions.
Kaja nodded. ‘Maybe you didn’t get the news in Argentina – in a few weeks the European Parliament will vote on a bill to make checks mandatory. What do you think lawmakers will decide after knowing hundreds of passengers narrowly escaped death today? And that such a scenario can be prevented in future? All because routine tests will block mental time bombs like me and suicidal passengers like you from boarding in the first place.’
Suicidal?
Mats pointed at the water glass with the liquid nicotine. ‘I’m supposed to drink this? So it looks like suicide?’
As conclusive evidence of my psychosis. And to eliminate me as a witness.
‘That was the plan.’
‘That’s insane. What did you think would happen? That I’d do this voluntarily?’
‘Have you done anything voluntarily yet today, Dr Krüger?’
Nele.
Mats could see her all over again, her eyes bulging, the agony and pain on her face. He instantly heard her screaming in his head.
‘Where is my daughter? What have you done with her?’
‘I don’t know,’ Kaja said, without blinking, without looking away, without any kind of tell that she was guilty of a lie.
‘Then who does?’ Mats asked. ‘Who planned all this?’
‘That doesn’t matter now. Soon no one else is going to care.’
Mats tried but couldn’t make rhyme or reason of Kaja’s cryptic claims.
‘You all think you’re going to get away with this? You never will. Someone is going to start wondering why my daughter disappeared on the very same day that I flipped out on board a plane.’
Kaja took another drag of her cigarette, now burned down to a third, and blew smoke right into Mats’ face. ‘That may be. But then, at some point, the police will find a laptop in your Buenos Aires apartment. With a flight simulator program on it for this very same route you’ve flown, Dr Krüger. Plus the authorities will discover all those emails between you and Franz Uhlandt.’
Klopstock’s driver? was Mats’ first thought. If he remembered right, that was the name Feli had figured out earlier.
‘A mentally ill vegan who fantasises about taking babies from pregnant women in order to make a statement against industrial milk production. You encouraged him to implement his plan, using your daughter. Provided him with money and cameras.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘According to the information on your computer it is. You’re a deranged man, Dr Krüger. You never got over the death of your wife, even emigrated because of it. Your daughter hates you, and you can’t bear that Nele will soon start a family while you yourself lost your own.’
‘This is insanity!’
‘Which is the way the public will see it, yes. You fell victim to insanity. You’d been depressed for years, and lonely, and Nele’s pregnancy was the trigger for your suicidal plan to try and take as many people as possible with you when you die. Happy passengers going to see their families. And patients like me, who’d already started the kind of new life that you yourself had been denied, Mats.’
It was the first and last time that she ever called him by his first name.
‘It all probably could’ve been detected with simple blood tests and somewhat expensive psychological testing. I myself would’ve been exposed as unable to fly in any case. But now…’
She pointed at the glass with the neurotoxin.
‘No way!’ Mats yanked on his cuffs again. The plastic dug into his wrists.
He pointed at the glass. It seemed the only piece of leverage left, in a game whose rules he still didn’t comprehend.
‘I won’t take one drink of it. Unless you let Nele go, and I can speak to her immediately. As soon as Nele is safe…’
Kaja stood up. ‘Forget it. It’s not my call whether your daughter gets free or not. It’s up to the vegan to decide. We don’t have any control over him. We’re just glad he provided us with that photo and audio. Otherwise, he’s completely solo. That was at the heart of our plan. No one would end up being able to establish any connection between us and him. You are the only link, Dr Krüger.’
‘No connection?’ Mats nearly screamed it. ‘The man is Klopstock’s driver!’
Kaja blinked. ‘You found that out? Nice job. But what does that end up proving? Nothing. Because Klopstock has nothing to do with our plan.’
‘Come off it.’
‘It’s true. André doesn’t know a thing,’ she said, and Mats was about to object when it occurred to him that Kaja had to have at least one other accomplice here on board. And yet it couldn’t have been his notorious fellow psychologist. Feli had just seen him in his office today.
‘Who was I talking to on the phone the whole time?’ he asked Kaja.
Who is the voice?
Here on board.
‘Enough questions.’
Kaja pressed her cigarette out on the tabletop with trembling fingers and smiled just as pleasantly as she had at the beginning of this, the most hopeless exchange that Mats had ever conducted in his life.
She took the glass with the liquid nicotine solution in her hand, swirling it like an expensive red wine.
‘I’m not drinking it,’ Mats declared.
‘You said that already.’ Kaja smiled, placed the glass to her lips, and emptied it in one gulp.
Mats turned white as chalk.
Next, Kaja opened her phone and kept tapping on a button until it sounded one long beep.
‘There. Our conversations are deleted. So much for that,’ she said, and her smile had vanished. Only sadness remained in her tired eyes. That unmistakable look of certainty that her life was soon to end.
‘Why?’ Mats asked.
Whispering. As if in a daze. Again he didn’t get an answer.
‘I’m on my way to go put an end to all this.’
Mats tried standing up, but his cuffs jerked him back down in his seat.
‘What do you mean? Wait, what do you mean “put an end to it”?’ he yelled after her. ‘I thought the plane wasn’t supposed to crash. Right?’
‘Yes, that’s what I said,’ Kaja responded, already standing in the door. ‘I should have known better. You were simply too good, Dr Krüger. You opened my eyes. Which, unfortunately, now means that the plan has changed.’