A Spy's Life (3 page)

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Wish I’d shaved and washed before you came.’ He nodded to the nurse who left, almost regretfully. He stood up and looked at them. Clark was short and a little overweight and looked as though he had been plucked straight out of a college laboratory. Agent Ollins was in his mid-thirties and was crisply dressed in a blue suit and white shirt. He had a steady gaze and seemed more purposeful than Clark. They both carried heavy anoraks and had mud on their shoes.

They sat down either side of the little table at the end of his bed.

‘Why are you involved?’ Harland asked Agent Ollins. ‘This isn’t a criminal investigation, surely.’

‘Too soon to say what this case is about,’ Ollins replied equably. ‘We’re hoping that you will be able to help with that. There were a lot of important people on board and we need to cover all the angles. Mr Clark here is going to find out what went wrong with your plane. We take over if we think some party or parties intentionally caused that malfunction to occur.’

‘Fortunate about the cellphone,’ said Clark brightly. ‘You might still be out there if you hadn’t found it. We hear you suffered quite badly from exposure – it’s good to see you doing so well already, sir.’

He turned on a small tape recorder and asked Harland to take them through the flight, remembering anything that might be of use to them.

He told them how he had finished his work in Rockville, Maryland, and had gone to Washington National Airport, thinking that he had missed the ride offered to him by Alan Griswald. He explained that he had met Griswald the week before in Holland. They had travelled to Washington on consecutive days and had hoped to meet up in DC as well as fly together to New York. Both knew they were too busy and the arrangement was vague. However, he had bumped into Griswald at the airport which was how he came to be on the plane.

Harland said that there were some other UN people with him, people who had been at meetings at Congress. They were travelling together but there was some diplomatic nicety which meant that this was not an official delegation from the UN to Congress. Griswald seemed to know some, but not all of them. He remembered there were two or three young women in the party.

‘How did you know Mr Griswald?’ asked Ollins.

‘We worked on the same diplomatic circuit back in the eighties.’

‘Right – you were diplomats.’

‘Yes,’ said Harland. ‘We were diplomats in Europe. Griswald was in Germany and Austria for a long time, with a spell in the Middle East. We served in some of the same places. I saw a lot of him and his wife in those days.’ He paused and took some coffee. ‘Do you want some of this? I’m sure I can get a fresh jug.’

They shook their heads.

‘Were you both in the Middle East?’

‘No, just Griswald.’

‘So tell us about the flight.’

‘We left pretty soon after we met and we flew up to New York without any trouble. About twenty minutes out of La Guardia, I went to the lavatory and noticed that the cabin had grown very cold. As I was about to take a pee, the lights went out. So I went back into the cabin which was pitch black. Then we were struck by some turbulence which was uncomfortable but not severe. I think the pilot came on and told us to fasten our seat belts.’

‘Did the captain says anything else at this time?’ asked Clark, making a note.

‘Maybe. I didn’t pay much attention. We could see the lights of New York below us and we weren’t especially worried.’

‘What else do you recall?’

He said there wasn’t much he could add. He remembered Griswald turning on his laptop to use the light of the screen. As he spoke, Griswald’s face came back to him, lit by a blue-grey aura, smiling at the thought of one of his sons returning from college. Griswald lifted the computer and they struggled to fold away the table in the dark, and then looked down at the Bronx. Harland saw the white rooftops in his mind, the grid of little streets and the scrawl of new tyre tracks in the snow. Griswald made some remark about the weather.

‘Did the lights return before landing?’ asked Clark.

‘No.’

‘Can you remember anything else unusual, sir? What about the sound of the engines? Any significant increase in engine power while you were experiencing the turbulence? Do you recall a change of note in the engine noise as the plane came in?’

‘I’m not sure – maybe just before the impact. I was looking out towards Riker’s Island on the left of the plane and Alan Griswald said something which I didn’t hear. I turned back to face him. Then, bang! I don’t remember much else.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ said Clark. ‘You were looking out at Riker’s from the left of the plane? The first question is this: could you see Riker’s Island?’

‘I could see an orange glow which I assumed were the lights from the prison.’

‘But surely you mean you were looking out to your right, not left.’

‘No, I was in a rear-facing seat, across the table from Alan Griswald.’

‘Ah, I see. I guess that’s one of the reasons you’re here. Being at the back of the plane and facing backwards meant that you avoided the whole force of the impact. Tell me, was anything about the approach unusual?’

‘No.’

‘You didn’t think that the plane was unusually low?’

‘No, I didn’t. Have you any theories yet?’

‘Right now, we’re considering a number of possibilities. The flight data recorder and the voice recorder were recovered on Wednesday; both are being analysed at our headquarters in Washington. We’ll get the results at the weekend.’

Ollins plucked a piece of fluff from his suit, looked up at the ceiling and began speaking.

‘As yet we don’t know why the plane crashed, Mr Harland. None of the theories about icing, wind-shear, poor visibility or a freak collision with Santa’s reindeers comes anywhere near to explaining it. How could this aircraft, flown by a pilot with over ten thousand flying hours, come in without any reported problems and just nose-dive into the runway?’

Harland got up from the edge of the bed, walked a few paces and worked his bare toes up and down to get rid of the prickly sensation in his feet. They watched him.

‘Nobody has told me what actually happened,’ he said, looking at Clark. ‘I mean, I still don’t see how the other plane was involved. Surely it was nowhere near where we came in?’

Ollins exchanged a look with Clark, as if asking his permission.

‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘Your plane comes in too low, banks right and clips the light tower with the starboard wing. An explosion occurs in the fuel tank, debris flies back, tears into the cabin at the rear and loosens the spars supporting the starboard engine. The engines have already been put into maximum thrust because the pilot realises he needs altitude. All three engines are full on. The Falcon climbs momentarily, comes down, rolls through ninety degrees, banks right and hits more light towers with incredible force. The fuselage sustains more damage and the starboard engine becomes detached and is thrown forward for a considerable distance. It hits the wing of a Learjet waiting to take off. The Learjet explodes and catches fire, killing all seven passengers and the pilot. Meanwhile the Falcon is ploughing a trench at a thirty-degree angle from the runway towards the Learjet. Then your plane also catches fire.’

‘Jesus,’ exhaled Harland. ‘How on earth did I get out?’

‘Some time at an early stage in this sequence,’ replied Ollins, ‘the seat anchors in your section of the Falcon break free and you are propelled out of the fuselage and land in the soft terrain at the edge of the East River.’ He paused and gave a bleak smile. ‘The chances of anyone surviving this crash without injury must be one in fifty billion, Mr Harland. People don’t get breaks like that too often. I think you’ll realise that when you see the wreckage.’

‘You want me to see the wreckage?’

‘Not so much the wreckage, but I would like to take you over the crash scene and have you look at a reconstruction we’ve set up there.’

Harland sat down on the bed. Clark asked if he wanted them to leave. But Ollins was clearly disinclined to go just yet.

‘There are a few more questions I want to ask you before we leave,’ he said. ‘It’s important that I have your attention for just a few more minutes, Mr Harland. One of the things we need to do in this investigation is to construct profiles of all the passengers and crew. We need to know a little more about your life also.’

A part of Harland went on guard. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘First off, tell me about your work, sir. You’re doing a special report for the Secretary-General’s office. Is that right?’

‘That makes it sound more important than it is. I’m looking into the ownership of the supplies of fresh water in Asia and Eastern Europe.’

Ollins looked puzzled. ‘Please explain.’

‘One of the big problems facing the developing world – in fact, the entire planet – is the shortage of fresh water. There are too many people and the major fresh-water resources, chiefly lakes and aquifers, are being drained at a very fast rate. The reduction in some of the bigger lakes, like the Aral Sea, is showing up on satellite photographs. Others, like Lake Baikal, which contains about a fifth of the world’s fresh-water supply, are being polluted by industry – a big paper mill in that instance. What this means is that fresh water is becoming a very scarce and valuable commodity. The Secretary-General wants to know who owns what. He believes that it’s going to become an important issue. He wants a briefing as much as anything else.’

Ollins listened to this impatiently. ‘But this wasn’t always your line,’ he said rather too quickly.

Harland realised that Ollins had already talked to people at the UN.

‘You probably know that I’ve done a lot of things. Banking for a short time when I was young, British Foreign Service, Red Cross for ten years. I started out as an engineer – that’s what I studied at Cambridge and that’s how I can find my way around this subject.’

‘That’s a lot of different careers to cram into one life. You’re only in your late forties?

‘Forty-nine.’

‘The Foreign Service – that’s the diplomatic service, right?’

‘Yes, I just said that I knew Griswald in the diplomatic service.’

‘Were you hired by the UN to do this report?’

‘Not specifically. I came to advise about rapid relief programmes. Three years later, I’m still here. I’ll be ready to report in six or seven weeks. Then we’ll see what happens.’

‘And you were visiting Rockville in connection with this report?’

‘Yes, there’re a couple of companies down there that have large water interests. I’m trying to assess their current holdings and the extent of their ambitions.’

‘A kind of investigation, then?’

‘In the loosest sense, yes. It’s a case of tracking down who owns what.’

‘So you could make some enemies in this line of work?’

‘Not really, most of the material that interests me is in the public record – somewhere. It’s just a question of finding it and, as I say, establishing the plans of some of the big multinationals.’

He could see that Ollins was tiring of this line of questioning. He’d give it ten minutes, then make an excuse to get rid of them both.

‘So tell me a little more about the flight. Did you talk to anyone besides Mr Griswald?’

‘I said hello to Chris Lahmer and André Bloch. There were a few other faces I recognised – a man from UNHCR but I forget his name.’

‘Philippe Maas?’

‘Yes, that’s right. They were all sitting near each other. I assumed they’d been at the same meetings in Washington.’

‘So you can only put names to three or four people on the plane?’

‘Yes, I suppose that’s right. Is that important?’

‘Well, it’s like this. We have one unidentified body – a man. And we’re not even sure that we have the right toll yet, because we could have lost people in the water. It took a while to find you and it’s conceivable that other victims were washed out into the ocean.’

‘But surely there was a passenger list – a manifest of some sort?’

‘No. There should have been. But this was a private flight that didn’t cross any national borders so it was forgotten, I guess.’

‘Yes, but this man must have been missed by his relatives.’

‘That’s what we thought. But we’ve had no calls. The problem is that pretty much everything was burned. A few personal possessions escaped the fire – thrown out of the plane with you and Mr Griswald – and we are working on those. We may retrieve more material and there is the possibility of identifying bodies by dental records, jewellery and other possessions. It’s going to be a long operation. But you’re right, it is kind of strange that we haven’t gotten a call.’

All this time, Clark remained silent, occasionally checking that his tape was going round, but otherwise studying Harland benevolently.

‘What does that suggest to you, Mr Harland?’ continued Ollins.

‘I don’t know – possibly no one knew he was on the plane. Maybe he was a foreign national who would not be missed immediately by his family. But presumably if he was on the UN plane, he was connected to the UN in some way and someone – a secretary or a department head or people at one of the national missions – would notice his absence?’

‘Exactly the same thoughts occurred to us. It is odd. But look at it this way. If you’d been killed it might have been some time before anyone made the connection between the crash and your disappearance. Might’ve been a few days before anyone went back over your schedule and made some inquiries in Maryland and then put it all together. That’s why we need very accurate descriptions of the people you saw on board. Then maybe we can start to work out who he was. I want you to think about them all and make some notes for me. I also want you to go over the journey again and record anything out of the ordinary – the smallest detail may be of crucial importance to this investigation, as Mr Clark here will tell you. Think of the passengers, Mr Harland – what they were carrying, where they sat, who they talked to. Think about the behaviour of the crew, what the captain said to the passengers – everything. I know it may be painful for you at this time, but I’m telling you, we need some help here. We’ll talk again tomorrow and maybe you’ll feel strong enough to come out to the airport and look over the model of the plane we have out there.’