Trevor Armstrong, president of Euro-American Airlines, carried his briefcase as the entourage floated into the building off Oxford Circus. He thought of the study that showed traffic in London had scarcely advanced its pace in a century, since the horse and carriage. The narrow streets were so clotted with the foul fog of auto and bus fumes that a pall always came over Regent Street in late afternoons. He considered this and a dozen other things because he was a man infinitely interested in the world he moved through.
Strode through.
Dennison was his security man, which meant he carried a pistol. Jameson was his secretary—he didn’t trust himself to have intimate business relations with women, he couldn’t keep his hands off them—and Dwyer was chauffeur and gofer. His little family. He was so devoted to Jameson that he named his fox terrier after him, a singular honor that Jameson acknowledged with a gift each year on the dog’s birthday.
Armstrong was forty-seven, wore a light ginger mustache, and played racquetball four times a week. He wasn’t afraid of anything in the world.
There were three elevators in the brass-and-marble lobby of the renovated building and the door was always kept waiting for Armstrong. It was Friday morning, ten A.M.
The elevator brought the silent group to the sixth floor. Here the din of Regent Street and Oxford Circus was muted by foot-thick walls hung with Altman prints, all of them signed artist’s proofs. Armstrong loved Altman’s colors of parks in Paris and New York, and everyone else was expected to love them, too. The colors were sensitive to light. All the lighting on the sixth floor was muted in tribute to the prints. The drawings had been obtained through corporate funds set aside for art acquisitions, and these works were among the things Armstrong intended to take with him when he parachuted goldenly out the hatch just before the big plane of the corporation shattered into a million pieces.
Dwyer veered left at the oak door leading to Armstrong’s office and only Jameson and Dennison followed him in. Dwyer was off to fetch coffee for the boss.
Miss Turnbull, the receptionist, smiled in greeting as Armstrong burst through the doors. She was fifty-five, singularly ugly, and the only safe woman in the building. Armstrong smiled at her as she rose behind her desk. And then he saw the man on the plastic chair by the wall.
He only looked at Henry McGee for as long as it took for Miss Turnbull to hand him the morning messages. He noticed a tan, successful-looking man in a seven-hundred-dollar suit of rich blue wool. Henry stared at him.
He swept into his sanctum, Jameson at his side. His routine was set: He saw no one for a half hour in the morning, the better to frame the strategy of the day. The man in the outer office annoyed him. Miss Turnbull followed the boss into the inner sanctum and explained once she had closed the door.
“He said he’s from the American FBI,” she said. “He said it was a matter of urgency, related to One forty-seven.”
No one in the airline spoke of the crash caused by a terrorist bomb. It was merely 147, the number of the flight.
“That’s annoying,” he said to Miss Turnbull. He turned to Jameson. Actually, he turned on Jameson.
“I thought we had agreement on questions related to One forty-seven. I thought we handled these matters out of office.” The statements were accusations. Somehow, this man who had been given the singular honor of having Armstrong’s dog named for him had failed.
“We do, sir.”
“Obviously, there’s a breach. Who’s our man at Grosvenor?”
Grosvenor was short for Grosvenor Square, the location of the American embassy that had handled the necessary liaison on the investigation. Police forces of two countries were involved; the terrorist cell had been identified as being based in Libya. Beyond that, Trevor Armstrong had little interest; the matter of 147 was an upset in his plans for “placing” EAA in the middle of the European market in time for 1992 and the restructuring of European trade. Any mishap—any perceived inadequacy in the handling of security at the airline—did threaten in that it caused unwanted publicity, cancellation of expected ticket orders, a general “softening” over a period of a few months of public confidence in EAA. EAA had lost six points in New York and seventy-five pence in London in the exchanges. It was too bad. It would cost the airline settlement money as well. Also too bad. But Trevor Armstrong really wished the FBI and the British police would just go away, do what they had to do, and leave him alone.
There was another reason as well, hidden even from Jameson. EAA was now at a point where its value exceeded its price on the stock exchanges. In fact, broken into pieces around the world, the company would be a golden corpse. Armstrong knew it and he knew that Carl Greengold in New York knew it. Very quietly, both men had been buying up more and more shares of EAA—Armstrong to profit when the takeover came and Greengold to effect a takeover that would dazzle the financial world, spin off into two or three books, be denounced on the floor of the Senate, and generally make Carl Greengold even richer than he already was. Armstrong had met Greengold just once at a charity affair. He longed to be like him.
“Thomas is our man,” Jameson said, reaching for the telephone. Armstrong snapped out of his reverie.
“No, that’s all right.” The boss sighed. It might be better to deal quickly and quietly than to ring up the embassy and get the kowtowers active. What Armstrong needed was peace and quiet and time for EAA to heal from the wounds of the bombing. He didn’t want to see the stock of EAA drop further; he didn’t want to send the wrong signal to someone like Carl Greengold; he didn’t want his own stock holdings to drop—Christ, he was leveraged in up to his nostrils. “Send him in, let’s make this quick. We’ve got Sir Robert at eleven?”
“Ten forty-five, actually.” Jameson was Brit; so were Dennison and Turnbull. Dwyer he had brought along from New York because Dwyer was as faithful as an old dog and knew the boss. Funny he had never named a dog after Dwyer.
Miss Turnbull was already gone. Armstrong looked at the messages on his desk. Cargo was the real problem at Heathrow, not only for EAA but the other carriers. Too damned much theft. And then it reached JFK and the real stealing began. The October figures were appalling and he thought Dennison was falling down on the job. He fingered the FBI card in his hand.
“Hello, Mr. Armstrong. Special Agent Cassidy,” Henry McGee said.
Armstrong turned up his smile three degrees. Jameson sat at his secretary’s desk, pen poised. Henry shook Armstrong’s hand and turned to Jameson. “What I got to say is for you, Mr. Armstrong.”
“I don’t like unrecorded conversation,” Armstrong said, moving to his desk.
“You’ll like this one.”
Armstrong paused. London tried to boom through the foot-thick walls and failed. What was that tone of voice? Armstrong thought about it for a fraction of a second. “All right, Jameson.”
The secretary rose, capped his pen, started for the door. Henry blocked his way. Jameson went around him, faintly annoyed by the man.
The door closed.
Utter silence for three seconds.
“Well?”
“Something bad is gonna happen.”
What was the accent? Armstrong frowned.
“I don’t—”
“Siddown,” Henry said, and smiled, his teeth lighting up the darkness of his face.
“Who are you?” Because he knew this man was not an FBI man.
“I know how these things work, Trevor. Public is fickle but has a short memory. Today they remember Flight One forty-seven but, hell, that’s water over the dam. If you stopped flying airlines because their security was shit, you’d have to go by boat. Ain’t an airline in the world really gives a shit about security except for the Jews and that’s because they’re playing for real against nations of terrorists. What you want is not to have people think you’re just unlucky.”
Everything was chill. Armstrong thought of reaching for the intercom, putting Dennison in the room and putting this man out of it. Henry didn’t move and neither did Armstrong.
Another three seconds of silence.
“Who are you?”
“What if planes crash and there ain’t no bomb?” said Henry McGee. “Could happen. That’d piss everyone off. Like them Caravelle planes in the fifties, kept crashing, people wouldn’t take them after a while. Wasn’t a bad plane but, what the hell, that’s the way it goes. You keep reminding people you run an unlucky airline and they start making jokes about you. Ain’t no way to stay in business, not for a middling carrier like yourself.”
“You’re threatening?”
“Sure. What the hell do you think this is about?”
Armstrong decided. He reached for the intercom at the moment Henry revealed his gun. It was a Walther PPK, a policeman’s gun, very neat and dark.
“Who are you?” Armstrong said for the third time. “How’d you get in here?”
“Had a card. Badge. ID. Usual shit. Your security stinks, I think you ought to fire your security man.”
Armstrong thought the same thing.
“Here’s the drill, Trevor honey. You don’t believe me. You gotta have a demonstration. It’s gonna come fairly soon. Alert security, all that. It helps to keep the boys on edge. But it don’t matter. We’re gonna make the first thing small, not involve a lot of people, but it’s gonna prove my point.”
“Which is?”
“Bombs are stupid. A lot better is something that does the same thing without looking like it’s the same thing.”
“You won’t get out of this building.”
“Sure I will.”
“What’s your name?”
“Felix Frankfurter. What the fuck do you care? The point is, you trade at seventy-seven. You don’t want to lose another six points on the New York exchange. You start smelling bad and the confidence is lost. You’re putting together a deal, a nice deal, you’re going to get out of this airline in a year with a lot of money by selling it to a greenmailer who’s gonna break it up in little pieces. And you’re gonna sell the airline down the river for a lot of money. I know that. Some of the inside guys know that. That takeover guy, that Carl Greengold, he’s gonna tear this airline a new asshole before it’s over. But what if EAA has a lot of accidents all of a sudden and suddenly, people find other ways to fly to Europe and the U.S. They ain’t gonna buy three-day-old fish. Or an airline that’s falling. Maybe Carl would lose interest if the stock started dropping real fast and he’d just back out. How much stock you got, Trevor? I bet you got a lot and I bet you’re in hock from tits to ass. Am I right?”
“Who sent you?”
“I sent myself. I even tie my own shoelaces now. Trevor, you got to understand what I’m trying to message. I want five million dollars. You can slush that to me out of your own pocket. I know you can. I know you have to. You’re gonna make what? A buck and a half when you sell this company down the toilet to the breakup artists?”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Shit, man. I know everything. And you know I know. The point is you don’t know exactly what I have in mind.”
“You’re crazy. I can’t be blackmailed.”
“Extortion. That’s the word you’re groping for.”
Henry took a step toward him and snapped the safety.
“Look at me, Trevor.”
“What do you want me to see?”
Henry smiled. Trevor was frozen dead still. The day had shattered around him. He thought he was embalmed.
“I want you to be afraid,” Henry said. “I know you’re a little afraid now but I want you to be big afraid. The only thing is gonna make you afraid is losing all that money when you could make a little contribution to the widows’ and orphans’ fund and be left alone.”
“Would I be left alone?”
“Sure. I don’t want to play this game more than once.”
“Why me?”
“Luck.” He smiled. “Was reading about that crash of Flight One forty-seven when I was striking a deal. I figured: Why not you? Did my homework and you were elected prom queen.”
“What are you going to do?”
Henry said, “I’m going to scare the living shit out of you, Trevor.”