by Holly Watt
Sometimes, Casey thought, you just knew.
She photographed the photograph, holding her phone carefully, so the glass didn’t flare light.
Then she carried the silver frame into the sitting room.
‘Have you seen this photograph before?’ she asked.
‘Oh . . .’ Lady Newbury’s face crumpled. ‘Oh, doesn’t he look lovely?’
Casey realised that she had barely glanced at Milo. He did look happy in the photograph, she thought. A shadow lay across the sand in front of him; the man taking the photograph.
‘When do you think that photograph was taken?’ asked Casey. ‘Could you tell from Milo’s haircut, or anything?’
Lady Newbury concentrated on the photograph, for a moment, stroking her son’s face with her finger.
‘It must have been taken since last summer,’ she said at last. ‘I gave him . . . I gave him that shirt for his birthday . . . Last August . . .’
A tear splashed on to the frame.
‘I am so terribly sorry,’ said Casey, because she was. She always was.
‘He looks so happy, doesn’t he?’
‘He does,’ said Casey. ‘He does.’
‘It must have been such a lovely holiday.’
17
Casey was in a better mood as she headed back to the office. She bumped into Ross as she walked through the entrance. He was clutching a Pret A Manger bag, and humming the Dambusters theme tune.
‘You really should try and eat lunch before 3 p.m. one day,’ said Casey wisely.
‘You really should try and get the paper off stone on time with only these jokers to hand,’ said Ross. ‘Lunch is the least of my fucking problems.’
Off stone, the moment a paper was approved for printing. The whole day centred on that second.
Casey and Ross walked up the escalator into the newsroom. No one ever stood on the escalator. The door to one of the tiny offices off the main newsroom was closed, with a chair wedged under the handle. Ross looked with interest through the door’s glass panels.
‘Why’s the home affairs editor locked in a cupboard?’ he asked the room.
‘He tried to punch the Whitehall correspondent,’ said the deputy news editor, not looking up.
‘Jesus,’ said Ross, looking at the portly Whitehall correspondent, who was lolling against the news desk. ‘How the fuck did he miss?’
The deputy news editor shrugged; he was concentrating on the list.
‘What was the fight over?’ Casey asked.
‘He called him a byline bandit,’ the deputy news editor gesticulated vaguely.
‘He is a byline bandit,’ said Casey.
Ross looked through the glass panels again. The home affairs editor had his feet up on the desk and was eating an apple. He flicked a V- sign at Ross.
Two signs were stuck to the glass panels. One said ‘I’m watching porn’ and the other said ‘The phone’s connected to a sex chatline, in Australia’.
Australia was underlined three times.
‘Thing is,’ said Ross, reading the list over the deputy news editor’s shoulder, ‘we do really need that page lead on home-grown terrorism and he probably won’t do it until we let him out.’
‘Drop home-grown terror down page,’ said the deputy news editor helpfully. ‘Then you can leave him in there another half-hour. He can do a down page in twenty minutes.’
‘Fine,’ said Ross.
Casey sighed. Still in her running kit, she really needed to go down to the slightly unsavoury showers in the Post’s basement.
‘Come have a look, Casey.’ Laura, one of the senior opinion writers, was drooling over a photograph of a white sand beach. ‘Doesn’t it look heavenly?’
Laura wrote clever articles about women enjoying sex, and therefore got 400 rape threats a day. Casey liked her. She wandered over, admired the picture.
Under the beach, in swirling blue writing, was the promise: All you could ever want.
‘Glorious,’ said Casey. ‘You doing it for travel?’
‘Yup,’ Laura winked.
Journalists get a lot of free holidays, which is why the travel section tends to have a rather more flattering tone compared with the rest of the paper. Complementary has a homophone.
‘I’m going cycling along the Danube this summer,’ interjected the slightly pompous chief opinion writer. ‘Stopping in Salzburg for Der Rosenkavalier.’
‘To each their own,’ grinned Casey.
‘I can’t make up my mind,’ Laura went on. She clicked on a photograph of Machu Picchu. ‘There are so many things I want to do, so many things I want to see.’
‘We are so lucky,’ the chief opinion writer carried on, ‘to live at a time when it’s so easy to visit almost anywhere.’
‘I’ve always wished that I had spent more time in Syria straight after university,’ said Alice, one desk along, who wrote opinion pieces about the Middle East and therefore got even more abuse than Laura. ‘Because you wonder if you will go again, during our lifetimes. And that makes you think about worlds that are getting bigger and smaller, all at the same time . . .’
Casey sensed a lengthy dissertation coming on. It was easy to get bogged down by the comment desk. She turned towards the investigations office.
‘Miranda, I’ve been thinking . . .’
She stopped, abruptly, all words forgotten. Ed was leaning against the wall.
‘Hello, Casey.’
She couldn’t breathe. He was walking towards her, as if that were a normal thing to do. He held out his hand, and it felt impossible.
‘Miranda’s been filling me in,’ said Ed. ‘It sounds . . .’
But Casey was whirling around, electric speed, and racing across the office.
She bolted down the escalators, and was out in the street. Running again, and now every step was an agony. Ed had followed her for the first few paces. He could have caught her easily, but even in a newsroom that looked odd. So he hesitated, and stopped. She could hear him, just for a second, calling her name.
How could Miranda have brought him in? Just like that. How could she? Was the story the only thing that ever mattered to Miranda?
Casey reached the park.
Round and round and round.
The sun was dropping now; the magical sloping light of an English evening.
Round and round and round.
Her phone went. Miranda. It went again. And again.
‘Don’t make me triangulate your phone,’ the text bleeped in. ‘Because I can and I will.’
It rang once more, and Casey was just about to clear it when she saw the name. Adam Jefferson. The terrified boy in Geneva.
‘Adam?’ Casey staggered to a halt. The world reeled.
‘Casey. Hello.’
‘How are you, Adam?’
‘I’m good, I’m good . . . The thing is,’ he went on. ‘I thought you would want to know. This woman called Jessica Miller turned up. I think that was her name, anyway.’
Even through her exhaustion, Casey felt the name fizz down her spine.
Jessica Miller had taken over Miranda’s job at the Argus, stepping up to run their investigations team. She was their main rival.
‘What did you tell her, Adam?’ Casey just managed to keep the urgency out of her voice.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You told me not to say anything about this to anyone. And I haven’t. I promise I haven’t. Not a word.’
‘So what did she say, exactly?’
‘I don’t remember quite,’ he said. ‘She did ask if Milo had ever said anything about a trip to Africa. And asked if I had heard how he died. I just shrugged.’
‘Well done, Adam.’ Casey wondered if he had been at all convincing.
‘Then I pretended to freak out about talking to a journalist,’ Adam went on. ‘Said that my boss hated the press, and would go mad if I spoke to her any more, and got away. I wasn’t surprised this time, like I was by you, and that helped. She left me her cell number, just in case,
she said.’
‘OK. Good.’
So often, Casey felt like a counsellor; so often out of her depth. In the face of human misery and terror, rage and despair. But she listened. She listened. It was all she could do. After Adam had fled Azarola’s office, back in Geneva, they’d all sat together on the long tan sofas. Azarola had looked at the vase of lilies on the table as if he had never seen them before.
‘Thank you,’ Miranda had said. ‘I don’t think he would have spoken if you hadn’t scared the shit out him.’
‘My grandmother went to Argentina from Europe.’ Azarola had stared straight ahead. ‘She lived in Austria before the war. She was Jewish. Her mother escaped, with two daughters. Over the border, somehow. They never said how. They could never even speak about it. But her father went to a camp. Disappeared. They never knew what happened to him.’
He’d got up and walked across to the window. Looked out, over the lake, to the mountains of Switzerland.
‘My grandmother was a refugee,’ said Azarola.
Now, as Adam carried on, Casey watched the park darken around her.
When the telephone call was over, she hurried towards the office. It was a race, now. A race to a death.
Casey rushed back up the escalators. Ed and Miranda were still in the office, as she had known they would be.
‘OK.’ She walked into the investigations room. ‘OK.’
Miranda slipped out of the room, muttering about a cup of tea.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Ed awkwardly. ‘I thought Miranda had discussed it with you. I should have guessed she would just — ’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Casey was aware, suddenly, of her running clothes and flushed face. She dropped into the scruffy armchair in the corner of the room.
‘We’ve been discussing the options,’ said Ed.
Miranda reappeared, juggling three cups of tea with burned fingers.
‘The Algerian stamp in Milo’s passport is smudged,’ Miranda began. There was no hint of apology. For a moment, Casey tried to remember if Miranda had ever apologised. ‘So we can see when he crossed into Libya, but you can’t see the date he landed in Algeria, or which airport. It’s a bit of a bugger.’
She caught a glimpse of Casey’s stony face.
‘I said I’d talk to the lawyers about last week’s minor fuck-up,’ said Miranda quickly. ‘Back in a bit.’
Clutching her tea, she vanished from the office. Silence descended.
Moving to her desk, Casey saw that the map was centred on southern Algeria. To the south, she could see its straight-line border with Niger.
A straight line on a map in Africa means the border was drawn with a ruler thousands of miles away. And just like among the peach orchards of the Bekaa, the local population is often indifferent to that line. The straighter the line on the map, the more blurred it is on the ground. And when you don’t care about ruler-drawn borders, smuggling is just transport. Where once it was long caravans of camels and gold, now it is pickups and drugs and weapons.
And people, of course. Still a commodity, to be shifted thousands of miles, through the endless desert dust.
‘Let’s look at the airfields down there,’ said Casey. ‘There should be quite a few. Some of them are still the Second World War ones. They built them all across north Africa.’
She pulled up a list. Tindouf. Béchar. Touggourt. In Salah.
‘They’re most likely to have flown into southern Algeria.’ Casey concentrated. ‘And then they’d have driven to the crossing towards Ghat, just inside Libya.’
She stared at the map. ‘We could start with Illizi.’ Casey included Ed grudgingly. ‘It’s one of the bigger towns in the south, over the border from Libya.’
She fidgeted for a moment longer, aware of Ed watching her, then found a description of Illizi. ‘There’s a big national park nearby. The Tassili n’Ajjer . . .’ She stumbled over the words. ‘So that tourists wouldn’t look quite so odd, travelling through there. They’d look a bit weird, but it’s not impossible.’
‘But how do we know it’s Illizi?’ he asked. ‘And even if that is where they are flying, what do we do?’
‘Let me think,’ she said, impatient with herself.
Casey was used to taking this scrap of information here, and swirling it into that little detail there. A clue here, the key to that lock there. A loose thread here, changing the whole tapestry.
Planes, she remembered, can be hunted, just like everything else.
It was the CIA, oddly, who learned that the hard way. Back when morality was being redrawn, in the aftermath of 9/11, America began shifting suspects around the world. Men with bags over their heads were transferred through a Gordian knot of jurisdictions, ending up in countries where torture was a starting point. Extraordinary rendition, they called it. Ghost flights transited around the world, stopping off at black sites, specks on the map where the prisons have no names and the prisoners have no future.
But, despite all that secrecy, the planes, with their big clear tail numbers, could not be hidden. Plane spotters and databases and civil aviation authorities – almost accidentally – provided the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
There was N379P, a Gulfstream V, which flew from Indonesia to Egypt, from Jordan to Afghanistan.
And N313P, a Boeing 737, which went from Thailand to Diego Garcia, from Poland to Guantánamo.
Or N85VM, a Gulfstream IV, flying from Morocco to Romania, from Dubai to Afghanistan.
And piece by piece, journalists fitted the jigsaw together.
Now Casey tapped her keyboard.
‘We can look up the Illizi flights,’ she explained. ‘On the days before and after Milo crossed into Libya. There won’t be too many planes going in and out of somewhere like Illizi.’
The endless scrolling tail numbers came up.
‘What are you looking for?’ asked Ed.
‘I don’t know yet.’ She waved him away, still cross. ‘I’ll know when I see it.’
She made a list of all the planes that had flown in and out of the airport, in the weeks before and after Milo’s passport crossed to Tinkarine.
‘Not there.’ He crossed out the words. ‘Not Illizi.’
Casey stared at the map again.
‘Djanet,’ she muttered. ‘Just over the border from Ghat. The road goes straight through. And it’s only a bit smaller than Illizi.’
‘But what if he flew commercial?’ asked Ed. ‘What if . . .’
She barely heard him, deep in her treasure hunt. ‘The pattern . . .’ She was talking to herself. ‘There has to be a pattern.’
‘And what if he just didn’t fly to Djanet either?’
That snapped her attention: ‘We’ll just keep looking.’ Coldly polite. ‘Airport after airport. We look for as long as it takes.’
The office quietened around them. She carried on researching Algeria, and its long, brutal border with Libya.
And then, quite suddenly, she stopped.
‘There.’ She pointed. ‘X587J.’
He smiled at her, enjoying her confidence.
‘How do you know?’
She swung the screen around, showing him the photograph. A marketing shot of a plane coasting through a cloud dreamscape, its tail number designed to be visible through clouds. The Bombardier Global. A private jet that can carry up to a dozen people in secretive white glamour.
‘That Bombardier has been flying in and out of Djanet on a regular basis,’ said Casey. ‘Not too often, maybe once or twice a month. But enough. The rest of the time, it does ordinary charters, flying all over the world. But it always heads back to Djanet. That’s the plane they’re using. I just know it.’
The Bombardier Global can stay in the air for thirteen hours, Ed read out from beneath the photograph. It can fly almost anywhere.
‘Where does it come and go from? On the flights to Djanet?’ he asked.
‘London, Paris, Los Angeles,’ said Casey. ‘It doesn’t seem to matter. The pattern is that it
flies someone in, say from Berlin, and then picks them up four or five days later to take them back to Germany. Then there’s a slightly erratic number of days until the next round trip. There isn’t an overlap, and I suppose there wouldn’t be, for this sort of thing.’
‘In that case, these people,’ Ed diagnosed, ‘probably don’t actually want to meet out in Algeria.’
‘Probably not an initiation ceremony then.’ Casey rubbed her forehead. ‘Miranda and I thought it might be.’
They smiled at each other, united briefly by success.
‘Milo had a photograph of a champagne glass in his flat,’ said Casey, taking out her phone. ‘It looks like the interior of that Bombardier.’
Ed studied her photograph.
‘It’s the same seating layout.’
‘The next question’ – Casey focused back in – ‘is who the hell does that plane belong to?’
Together, they trawled the Internet. But nothing came up. The plane had been built a few years earlier, then sold into anonymity. In the end, Casey leaned back in her chair, and stared at the ceiling.
‘If I tell you about something, can you promise you won’t say anything about it to anyone else?’
‘I promise,’ he said easily.
‘I mean it. I should ask you sign an NDA, I suppose, at the very least,’ she said. ‘But it all takes time, and I am not sure how much time we have.’
Journalists throw around NDAs – non-disclosure agreements – like confetti. And ignore them when it suits.
‘It’s fine,’ said Ed. ‘You can trust me.’
And Casey knew, deep down, that she could.
So she told him about Wynford Mortimer, the huge dump of leaked accountancy files, that was the strictest secret, known to only a few people at the Post.
‘We could put X587J into the Wynford Mortimer database,’ said Casey, ‘and just see what comes up. It might be nothing.’
She fired up the Wynford Mortimer files. Eleven million documents stored on a server. Held offshore, ironically enough, just in case.
Once she was in, the minutes ticked past.
