Flashback (The Saskia Brandt Series Book Two) (16 page)

Hrafn knew that any explosion severe enough to threaten a 737 would produce a wreckage footprint kilometres in area. There was, he had to admit, the possibility that a charge could be placed at the confluence of the hydraulic lines that connected the cockpit to the control surfaces. Then a non-compromising explosion could disable the aircraft. A variation of that malfunction had caused the crash at Sioux City in 1989. But, on the heels of this thought, came another: the pilots would retain some basic attitude control through the increase and decrease of engine thrust. And the problem with the radio communications blackout would not be addressed by that hypothesis, unless the saboteur had disabled the radio too. And what about the final transmission, ‘STENDEC’?

‘Mr Óskarson?’

‘You know, blowing up an aircraft, even a large one, by detonating a bomb is easy. I would say trivially easy, given the narrow range of forces the airframe is designed to cope with. But.’

‘But what?’

‘Inspector, my line of work discourages the development of premature hypotheses. If you try enough keys in a lock, you might find one that fits, but it may not be the correct one. Between ourselves, I indulge my imagination a little in that regard. But I can give you two reasons that make me think Saskia Dorfer/Brandt did not blow up that plane with a bomb.’

‘Go on,’ said Mr Shaw. His eyes were fierce. Hrafn began to like him.

‘One, the wreckage pattern tells us that the crash was a C-FIT, or Controlled Flight Into Terrain. The aircraft was in one piece and travelling under power when it crashed.’

‘And the second?’ asked the inspector.

‘The bomber doesn’t usually board the plane.’

Hrafn opened his briefcase and removed the picture of Saskia taken mid-flight. He gave it to the inspector.

‘Is this Brandt?’ he asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Alias Dorfer, yes. One of the passengers had a camera. If the date stamp is correct, this was taken four minutes prior to impact.’

Mr Shaw said, ‘You know, there are plenty of bombers willing to give their lives for a cause. The terrorists who flew into the World Trade Centre seemed cool with it.’

‘I have to make decisions based on probabilities, not absolutes. A German woman in her late twenties does not fit the profile of a suicide bomber. Not these days. Besides, she’s carrying a gun in the photograph. That implies that things are, well, complicated.’

‘But whose gun is it?’ asked the inspector. ‘Did the flight have sky marshals on board?’

‘No. Current German transport policy keeps sky marshals on randomly-selected transatlantic flights, not intracontinentals. Now, gentlemen, given the late hour, I must press you. Do you have any information that might help determine the flight’s last moments?’

Again, the inspector and Mr Shaw exchanged a look. Mr Shaw, the taller man, folded his arms. ‘My sister, Jem, has some connection with Saskia Brandt. They were both due to board that flight. My sister–’ Danny faltered. ‘Look, she hasn’t done anything wrong, I promise you. She works in a hairdresser’s.’

Hrafn’s reply was interrupted by the overture to
The Marriage of Figaro
, which played when Siggi, his assistant, called. As he reached for his phone, he heard the chirrups of two more. Danny Shaw and Inspector Duczyński, each with trepidation, answered their mobiles too. The three men stood in the snow and listened. Their expressions questioned one another.

‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ said a voice in Hrafn’s ear. ‘Call me Mr Self. I’ve taken the precaution of speaking to you simultaneously. I wish to avoid misunderstandings. Now, please listen. We don’t have much time.’

Chapter Nineteen

Jem did not pass another car on her journey into the mountains. After half an hour, there were neither city lights to be seen nor moon. She phoned Ego and spoke about the special regard Germans had for their forests. Then she asked it who Saskia really was, expecting it to be reticent. The candour surprised her.

‘Saskia’s identity is a computerised representation stored on a high-density, solid-state device of uncertain origin. It has been surgically inserted at the back of her brain. Everything about her can be attributed to this device. That is, everything you would consider the product of her mind. When you asked Saskia a question, it was the device that replied. When you reached out for her, it was the device that took your hand. The device felt your touch.’

‘That’s weird.’

‘Think of it as a homunculus, or little person, truly controlling Saskia’s body.’

There was a logic within the idea. It explained Saskia’s perfect recall, her oddness, her virtuoso performance of violence. And yet: Whose eyes had Jem stared into? If Saskia’s conscious mind was contained within the device, what was contained within her flesh-and-blood brain? Was there another woman trapped inside that body, screaming unheard?

‘So the device sent you a mayday.’

‘It did once, and that confirmed its approximate location. It has not signalled since. I can’t be sure if it has survived the crash intact. Saskia may not be recoverable.’

‘God,’ said Jem. ‘It’s like she’s... a black box.’

‘We’re here.’

Jem steered the car into a small lay-by. She extinguished the headlights. The silence and the darkness, though expected, became a space for her loneliness to fill. She closed her eyes for five breaths. They opened with clearer night vision on snow-bright ground and glistening tree-trunks. She remembered the leather spine of the Grimm’s fairy tales that had unlocked the curtained door in Saskia’s apartment. And she recalled a music box that had played something by Bach. She opened the car door. She imagined new sounds in the silence: the patter of a wolf on patrol, its mouth shut and low, the flutter of a witch abroad.

Ssssssssssssss
.

‘It’s cold out there,’ said Ego. ‘If your phone’s power fails, warm the battery. We may be separated. Don’t lose heart.’

‘OK.’

‘Do you see the dusky colour reflected by the clouds? That’s Regensburg. Keep it behind you and try to stay walking uphill.’

~

She locked the car with the radio fob. The indicators splashed orange. Then she took the torch – a metal, heavy comfort – and cut a piece of light from the darkness. She moved through the powdery mires, alert for other footsteps in the hush. The trees were black bars. She drew the cold air through her nose. At first, she could not separate the odours. Then she identified something like incinerator smoke and remembered the putrid rat Danny had discovered that wet August in Poole when they were eight or nine. And the tang of polystyrene melting on the woodland fire that had warmed Jem and her mates when, years after the rat, they downed Diamond White by the bottle, and spun the empties to mark the unlucky victim of an interrogation, sexual and hilarious.

‘One is never too old to play with matches.’

‘KGB or CIA, what’s the difference?’

‘Never follow me. Understand?’

‘I understand.’

She stepped on something that deformed like an oil can, and when she raised her foot, it barked across the forest and she understood that a great space had opened before her. In the failing light she saw scabs of ash and the grave of a whole aeroplane, wings and engines and all. A yellow cordon stretched away to her left and to her right.

Holy fuck.

Then.

Clock hands meeting at midnight. The night, under whose auspices Saskia had blossomed like a moonflower. Perfume drifting: conservative and sensible, mixed for her in the south of France. Her hair was long and never stronger was Jem’s urge to nose its waves. Later: a policeman, unconscious alongside his car, and Saskia reaching back for a fallen Jem.

The cavalier smile.

‘Take my hand.’

Reaching back.

The hopelessness was devastating. On what, truthfully, had she based her hope that Saskia was alive? A feeling? How could her intuition compare to the forces that could undo the fabric of a building’s worth of metal and plastic, swimming pools of fuel, this tonnage of raw meat? Saskia was hopelessly gone. Perhaps her superimposed spirit watched, alongside fellow passengers and crew as Jem lifted her phone and sobbed, ‘Ego, what now?’

But the phone had died. She pressed the power switch. Nothing happened. Was the battery too cold? She slipped the phone into her waistband and stepped back from the debris, fleeing, heading towards the blackness. The powder reached her knees as she strode. She pressed the car key. Nowhere did indicator lights blip.

She had been cut off from Ego and the heavy torch was no longer a comfort. It was painting her like a target. She turned it off.

Unseen, a branch broke.

‘
Sss-sss-sss
,’ she stammered, looking for the branch. ‘
Sassssssssssskia?
’

Calm.
Only the weight of snow had broken it.

She backed against a trunk and slid down. Clods of snow struck her shoulders. She felt as though she could stay here. She put her nose to her knees and pulled a full, chill breath.

Her neck straightened.

Perfume.

‘It was made for me in the south of France.’

Her muscles, tired to the point of collapse, quivered as she stood.

‘
Sssssss
,’ she whispered. ‘
Sss-sss
...’

Her sudden, downhill strides slit the dunes. She fell from one tree to another. Fronds scratched her scalp. The powder grew wet underfoot and the dampness reached her ankles. The perfume was a will-o’-the-wisp; present and absent by turns. When, seconds later, she reached the trough of the valley, her exhaustion could no longer be outrun. She let her forehead rest against bark.

Snow quietness descended.

Yet the air was not empty. There was an element of static, of
ssssssssssss
.

Running water.

Jem crawled on, though her palms flamed with cold. Her breath shrank to snorts. A stone struck her shin and she was felled. She tumbled down a stony bank and stopped, sitting upright, with her boots on a hard surface. She had lost the torch but she could see a frozen stream sparkling beneath a sickle moon. There was a hut on the opposite bank. The wide, low roof was decked with firs. Behind it, trees rose. The forest and the hut had combined like the hands of father and son. Only a halo of red suggested the doorway.

Jem walked upstream and crossed the water on three concrete stepping stones. She placed each foot heel-to-toe until she reached the door. It did not squeak as she pushed it open. Warmth and smoke and a meaty smell puffed from the interior: a room lit by oil lamps and the flickering roundel of a pot-bellied stove. She looked about in wonder. A chandelier of powdered sausages and game birds hung from the low ceiling. A Dutch drier rocked over the stove. It held camouflaged trousers, long underwear, socks, and a dripping newspaper.

‘Hello?’

Jem closed the door and pulled across its blackout curtain. There was a cloth-covered table beyond the hanging sausages. She remembered her mobile phone and placed it near the stove to warm. On the table were empty beer bottles and a stack of newspapers. Next to them was a half-bitten piece of bread. An opened plastic container held some sliced meat and a paring knife.

Chapter Twenty

On the hill that overlooked the small hut, there was a triangular clearing formed by three ancient pines. The limbs of the largest had bent under the weight of snow. Tolsdorf, the woodsman, was braced in a familiar wedge halfway up the trunk. His deer-hunting rifle rested in a notch convenient for surveillance of the hut and its small hinterland of piled wood.

Tolsdorf was as still as the tree. He felt twenty years younger. He had gathered his wits to a single point: his left eye, open on the rifle’s burning green image intensifier. He breathed through his nose. He was not too cold; rather, the cold of this night had entered him and calmed him.

He had been settled against the trunk for more than four hours and was now ready to climb down and call this night done. But, in the instant before he looked down to place his feet, he heard a new note in the sounds of the forest. The new note did not belong.

Sure enough, she came from the south-east. Her footfalls told him that she was no native of the forest or the snow. She was easy to locate with the rifle. Her arms were outstretched like bird wings, aiding balance, whiskers for tree fronds in the dark. Everything about her confirmed that she was the help Tolsdorf had been waiting for.

At first, her physical weakness puzzled him. How would she be able to fight the Ghost? Could it be that her purpose was to bring the killer here, nothing more? Tolsdorf tried to arrange the discrete elements of his knowledge as though they were playing cards in a hand, but his concentration – narrowed to that green, blazing disc – was not equal to it. The scattered pieces were little more than knucklebones. They told him nothing beyond his fears.

He felt for the bar of chocolate in his hip pocket, broke off a piece, and chewed slowly as the woman crossed the stream. He saw only part of her face beneath her hood. She stopped. Looked around. Looked at Tolsdorf, who she could not possibly see. Tolsdorf smiled. The lower spike of his three-point crosshair rested on her chin.

And then she was gone into the hut.

Tolsdorf’s bristling at this trespass was, he noticed, both automatic and useless. The sensation made him smile.
So I am not dead yet. I am still connected to something of the world. There is still meat on the old bones.

Behind this feeling was one of excitement.

It is happening. The Ghost is coming.

Tolsdorf did not know how long he would have to wait. He knew to expect that this man was following the girl. But at what remove? Might he be biding his time? How strong was his knowledge of the forest? Could he read the forest like Tolsdorf could read it? Did he know that Tolsdorf waited, armed?

These questions itched at him. He was no man to answer them. He was old and wily, but no strategist.