Passenger 13 (Ben Hope eBook originals)

by Scott Mariani

  ‘You have the passenger list on file?’ he asked.

  She tapped the screen in front of her.

  ‘Let me take a look,’ he said. ‘And maybe I will have that coffee after all.’

  Ben spent the next half hour studying the computer with such intensity that, watching over his shoulder, Tamara thought he might melt the screen. With the CIC files in one window and running web searches in another, he systematically checked each of the twelve passengers’ names against local and international news reports, as well as whatever else he could dredge up from the internet.

  He started with the four British nationals on the crash flight. Their profiles quickly came together. Colin and Sandra Hartnoll and their son Jamie had been on holiday from their home in Leeds: Colin Hartnoll had taught geography at a sixth-form college, Sandra had been a legal secretary, and Jamie had been taking a year off before University. The fourth Brit was Gordon Love, a retired private dentist who’d emigrated to Little Cayman some years earlier and had been travelling to London to visit his daughter, Helen, and her husband, Clive.

  Then there were the De Groots, a family of four from Amsterdam. According to online news sources Ruud De Groot was an ophthalmologist; his wife Ursula was a stay-at-home mother taking care of little Jan, 8, and Carice, 11.

  Ben could see nothing here at all. He moved on to the next on his list. Monica Steinhart, 28, originally from Long Island, had been a freelance diving instructor based on Little Cayman. On July 23 she’d been travelling across to Grand Cayman to take a class of novices out to Stingray City off the north point.

  The last three passengers to meet their deaths that day had been tourists from Tampa, Florida: Jim Duggan, 22, a postgrad college student and his sister Fay, 19, together with her twenty-year-old boyfriend Terry Bassini, who worked in his father’s motorcycle customising business.

  As far as Ben could see, all twelve had been just ordinary people, pursuing their ordinary lives. Whether it had been work or pleasure that had brought them together on board the doomed aircraft that day, there was nothing whatsoever to suggest anything more than just a horrible coincidence for all concerned.

  ‘What do these figures here mean?’ he asked Tamara, pointing at the six-digit numbers next to each name or group of names.

  ‘Booking references,’ she replied. ‘Nick always believed in keeping the system simple and easy. When a customer makes a booking, we issue them with a number. All they have to do is show up, quoting it when they give their name, for the flight steward to check against the records. That way there’s no hassle with issuing printed tickets. We also take a phone number and an address on the island, for security reasons. It all goes down together on our records.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ben murmured, and went on searching the screen.

  ‘What are you looking for exactly?’ she asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. But there’s something we’re missing here. I’m sure of it.’ He reached for his coffee. It was cold but he took a slurp anyway. ‘Tell me about the co-pilot, Brady.’

  ‘Mark? What’s to tell? He joined CIC just a few months after it started up. Before that, he was with a charter outfit in Nassau. He often rode co-pilot with Nick, sometimes the other way round.’

  ‘What else?’

  Tamara sighed. ‘I think I told you already that he and Cindy – that’s Cindy Masterton, the flight attendant – were going to be married in the Fall. Nick was going to be their best man. What are you shooting at?’

  ‘Ghosts and shadows, so far.’ Ben said. ‘How many Trislanders does CIC have left? Two?’

  ‘Just one flying. The other’s grounded. Business is that bad.’

  ‘Who are the crew?’

  ‘Jack Burgess is the chief pilot, his co is Mort Clegg. Jo Sundermann is the flight attendant. They’ve all been with the company since the beginning. So have the flying school instructors, most of the office staff, even the nice old man who tends the grounds. CIC’s like a little family, Ben. Nothing sinister or corrupt going on. No secrets.’ She paused. ‘Well, just the secret that you already know about.’

  There was a soft knock at the door, and a man Ben hadn’t seen before stepped nervously into the office. Mid thirties or thereabouts, thin and weedy, balding with thick glasses and protruding front teeth. He had three ballpoint pens in the breast pocket of his shirt and was clutching a sheaf of papers to his chest.

  Tamara said, ‘Ben, this is Grant Singer, the company accountant. Grant, Ben was a good friend of Nick’s.’

  Singer gave Ben a handshake like a damp facecloth. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt,’ he said hesitantly. ‘But I was just going through the bank records for the last month and there’s a discrepancy here that I need to run by you.’

  Tamara hesitated, then said, ‘All right, I have a minute.’ The accountant spread his sheaf of papers across the far side of the desk and began going through them with her.

  Ben got up from the desk, walked aimlessly around the office, thought about a cigarette. His mind was swirling with thoughts and questions, and he was only half-aware of what Singer was saying in his insistent, whining voice.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ Tamara said.

  ‘There on the statement printout,’ Singer whined. ‘The payment reference number. Now look on our own records. How come it’s not there?’

  ‘Ask Wendy. She does all the data entry.’

  ‘I already did. She’s no idea what happened here. Without that information, we can’t refund the customer if he was booked on one of the cancelled flights.’

  ‘It’s only a few dollars, Grant,’ Tamara said. ‘Can’t we deal with this some other time? I’m kind of in the middle of something here. Tell you what, you leave the papers with me and I’ll go through them afterwards.’

  ‘Only a few dollars,’ the accountant muttered under his breath as he left the office. ‘Sorry about that,’ Tamara said when he’d gone. ‘Grant’s a valued member of the team but he gets a little anal sometimes. What’s up?’ she added, noticing Ben’s expression of puzzlement.

  ‘Can I have a look at those?’ he asked, walking around the desk to examine the accounts paperwork.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just a feeling.’

  ‘I shouldn’t let you see confidential business documents,’ Tamara said. ‘But hey, you’ve already seen everything else, so why not?’

  Ben was already studying the anomalous figures that Singer had underlined in ballpoint. The payment in question had been made on July 21, two days before the crash: the sum of eighty-eight Cayman Islands Dollars, paid by credit card by a Mr L. Moss. As Singer had pointed out, there was no mention of an L. Moss on CIC’s own records. No payment, no payment reference, no phone, no address.

  ‘What flight did this Moss book on?’ Ben asked.

  Tamara shrugged. ‘Well, that’s the whole point. There’s no way we can tell that right now.’

  ‘The information’s lost?’

  ‘It’s not lost,’ she said irritably. ‘I’m sure it’s just mislaid. Things are a little screwy at the moment, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Does CIC often mislay booking data?’

  ‘Of course not. Grant would have a heart attack.’

  Ben was silent for a minute, then asked, ‘When did flights start running again after the crash?’

  ‘Jack and Mort went out again for the first time the day before yesterday,’ Tamara said. ‘They’re out right now, as we speak. But we’re still only firing on one cylinder. We’ve had to make a load of refunds, hundreds of customers either pissed off about losing their flights or scared to get on one of our planes. It’s pretty dire.’

  ‘But this L. Moss hasn’t come forward for his refund?’

  ‘There’d be a record of it if he had.’

  ‘Then maybe Moss was on one of the flights before the crash?’

  ‘Could have been anytime between the twenty-first and the twenty-third,’ she said, nodding. ‘Or else it could have been in the last couple of days.’


  ‘Then even if his name and booking details somehow got accidentally wiped off the computer records, the flight steward would still have had a record of him boarding the plane.’

  ‘Theoretically. Why are you asking all this?’

  ‘Can you check?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I can try.’ Tamara glanced at her watch. ‘Jack and Mort will have landed on Little Cayman around now. I don’t think they’ve got more than a couple of passengers. Let me see if I can call the flight attendant direct on her cell.’ She put the desk phone on speaker and hit a speed dial button. ‘Hi, Jo, got a moment? Need to confirm a boarding reference to see if we need to refund this person or not, but I can’t find any record of it at this end. Customer’s name is Moss, Mr L. Moss. If he did fly, it was sometime before we shut down, or sometime since we started up again.’

  ‘L. Moss?’ a woman’s voice said over the speaker. ‘Nope. Don’t think so. Wouldn’t be any of mine.’

  ‘You sure you don’t remember him?’

  ‘Pretty sure. You know me.’

  ‘Okay, thanks, Jo.’ Tamara ended the call. ‘You know, he could still turn up,’ she said to Ben. ‘He might call anytime, yelling for his money back along with all the others.’

  ‘I can think of one reason why he wouldn’t do that,’ Ben said.

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘We could be looking at the crash flight’s thirteenth passenger.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Tamara stared at him. ‘Moss couldn’t have been on board,’ she protested. ‘They recovered all the bodies … except for Fay Duggan and the little Dutch boy.’

  ‘In an ocean full of sharks and barracuda, that doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t there,’ Ben said.

  Tamara blanched and sat down heavily in the desk chair. ‘But …’ she began, then fell silent and bit her lip in agitation. ‘The security video,’ she said suddenly. ‘That would tell us right away. Everyone boarding an inter-island flight gets filmed on surveillance camera at either end. Nick hated the idea, but the authorities insisted on it after 9/11. Not that anyone ever checks the footage.’

  ‘Can we view it on here?’ Ben said, pointing at the computer.

  Tamara nodded. ‘I can narrow it right down to the date and time.’ While she was clicking keys, Ben got up and went over to the coffee machine for a fresh cup.

  ‘Christ,’ she said after a few moments.

  He turned. ‘Found it?’

  ‘Hold on.’ She clicked more keys. ‘Shit. I don’t believe this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not here,’ she said. ‘It’s not giving me anything.’

  Ben stepped up behind her chair. ‘Try the previous day.’

  Tamara keyed in the date July 22 and hit Enter. Almost instantly, the video footage appeared onscreen: a high-resolution digital image of a line a line of passengers waiting to board. Most of them were wearing shorts and T-shirts, floppy hats, dark glasses, cameras on straps. A little girl was skipping up and down dragging a teddy by the leg.

  Tamara stopped the playback. ‘Let me try again,’ she muttered, typing July 23 back in and stabbing the Enter key.

  Nothing. Blackness.

  She turned to Ben. ‘It’s been deleted,’ she gasped.

  ‘Who else has had access to the system?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Ben walked away from the desk, thinking furiously. In his mind’s eye, he played back his memory of the pretty blonde who’d been arranging flowers in the CIC lobby the day before. He remembered the curious way she’d watched him leave.

  Shortly after that, the black Chevy Blazer had seemed to pick up his trail. Almost as if it had been waiting for him. The same black car that might, just might, have picked Bob Drummond up from his place several days before and magicked him away somewhere.

  ‘What about Jennifer?’ Ben said.

  Tamara looked taken aback. ‘Jennifer Pritchard? The temp?’

  ‘Where is she now?’ he asked.

  ‘She called in sick first thing this morning.’

  ‘How long has she worked here?’

  ‘Only since July 22. She came through an agency.’

  ‘The day before the crash. CIC had been advertising a vacancy?’

  Tamara nodded. ‘Like I said, business had been picking up like crazy. She came with all the right paperwork, Ben. References, qualifications, the works. We knew all about her.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘You don’t know anything about her. If you don’t believe me, call her at home, right now.’

  ‘Now? To say what?’

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said. ‘Just make the call. Go ahead.’

  Tamara got the number from the files and picked up the phone. She dialled. Waited a moment, then looked at Ben. ‘There’s no dial tone.’

  ‘That’s because the number doesn’t exist,’ Ben said. ‘Call the agency. They’ll tell you they never had a Jennifer Pritchard on their records.’

  ‘This is insane,’ Tamara said.

  She checked. Ben had been right.

  ‘You’re never going to see her again,’ he said. ‘She was planted here to delete information from your system. Now she’s gone.’

  ‘But then why was she still here until yesterday?’

  ‘Because of how suspicious it would’ve looked if she’d upped and vanished right afterwards,’ Ben said. ‘And because it takes a few days for a new story this big to die down to nothing. They might have been worried about somebody like me turning up asking questions. They needed someone to listen at doors, to call in the troops to check out anyone who might still be snooping around.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘That’s simple enough,’ Ben said. ‘The same people who don’t want it known that the crash flight had a thirteenth passenger,’ Ben said. ‘Namely a Mr L. Moss.’

  Tamara gaped at him. She shuddered. ‘Oh, my God. What do we do?’

  ‘First thing, you need to get off this island. It’s dangerous for you here. Go and get your kids from your mother’s place in Miami and take them on a holiday somewhere. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Okay?’

  She hesitated, then nodded sullenly. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Call me when you get there. Don’t use your regular phone, use the secret one you used for calling Nick.’

  ‘What about you?’ Tamara said, looking at him with big eyes.

  ‘I need to borrow a couple more things from Dwight,’ Ben said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The lawyer’s fifty-foot motor yacht, the Santa Clara, was moored at Harbour House Marina a few miles from George Town, off North Sound Bay. Tamara had been quite happy to let Ben have the keys to her husband’s pride and joy, and after returning to his hotel to grab a couple of hours’ sleep and a shower, Ben made his way to Harbour House, strolled out along the jetty where scores of gleaming boats and yachts rocked gently on the swell, and climbed on board.

  In the handsome wheelhouse, he quickly familiarised himself with the controls and set the GPS navigation system on a course for Little Cayman. The twin 500-horsepower engines fired up with a throaty burble. He slipped the moorings, the stern and bow thrusters pushed the boat away from its dock, and they were off.

  Ben crossed the calm blue waters of North Sound at a steady fifteen knots cruising speed. His course took him through main channel between the northern tip of the island and the jagged outcrop of Fisherman’s Rock, after which he was in open sea. Once Grand Cayman had disappeared entirely over the southern horizon, Ben was able to let the motor yacht more or less steer herself. Now and then he sighted another vessel, mostly smaller boats, apart from the cruise liner that passed by, huge even at more than a mile off.

  He’d had two main reasons for wanting to cross over to Little Cayman by sea rather than by air. The first was the advantage of being able to land wherever he wanted on the shores of the smaller island, free from the snooping eyes of anyone who might be watching his mo
vements. The second was that the other items he’d borrowed from Dwight Martínez couldn’t be so easily carried on board a public shuttle flight. The Highway Patrolman revolver was inside Ben’s green canvas bag on the bunk in the main cabin, next to the semi-auto Remington home defence shotgun from the lawyer’s gun cabinet. Dwight was turning out to be a handy supplier.

  As to Ben’s reasons for wanting to visit Little Cayman in the first place: he figured that just because the enigmatic Mr Moss had been conveniently deleted from CIC’s computer files, it didn’t mean that all trace of him could be erased from existence. If the guy had boarded the flight on Little Cayman, there’d be a trail, however obscure, leading back from there. All Ben had to do was find it.

  For a long time, the Santa Clara burbled on alone across the empty sea. Only the slightest breeze ruffled Ben’s hair as he stood at the deck rail, smoking a cigarette and gazing out across an endless expanse of the most vivid blue water he’d ever seen, so clear that shoals of colourful fish were visible now and then beyond the ripples from the Santa Clara’s hull: thousands of them, moving in one coordinated mass just a few feet below the surface.

  Then a dark shape flitted up from the depths and the shoal of fish he was watching scattered in panic.

  Tiger shark, all twelve or thirteen feet of him. Ben recognised the wedge-shaped head and dorsal stripes all too well from an uneventful but memorable encounter during joint underwater combat training with New Zealand SAS near Auckland a couple of years earlier. As he watched, the shark’s fin split the water momentarily, disappeared below the surface; and with a flick of his tail he was gone.

  Just a reminder not to trail one’s fingers and toes in the lovely refreshing water.

  After a few hours, the shores of Little Cayman came into view. As the Santa Clara motored towards a tranquil little cove, Ben reflected on how tiny the island seemed, a cockleshell surrounded by endless ocean. Little Cayman’s highest point was just forty feet above sea level, but the strong likelihood of the entire place being swept clean away in the event of a Tsunami obviously hadn’t been enough to dissuade the 175 or so permanent inhabitants that Ben’s guidebook told him lived and worked there.