Passenger List

by John Scott Dryden

  10

  Rory Murray brushed the pretzel crumbs off his lapel, adjusted his tie and watched the young woman in the Jets hat staring at her cell as she huddled on a bench in Tompkins Square Park. She looked like a little storm cloud. But what did he expect? Her life had been consumed by the loss of her brother on 702, to the degree that it seemed like she’d all but dropped out of school and given up on a glittering future.

  Still, she was key to pinning down many of the passengers’ families for the class-action suit, he was sure of it. But for someone so central to keeping the victims’ cases alive, she was certainly hard to track down. At one point, his investigator had almost been forced to give up.

  Rory tried on a few expressions, finally settling on one he hoped was serious but hopeful, and then he walked over.

  ‘Kaitlin Le?’

  Her head jerked up and she scrutinised him as if he were about to attack her.

  Rory threw up his hands. ‘I’m a friend. Rory Murray. I’m—’

  ‘The lawyer.’ Kaitlin’s face was one of disgust.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve—’

  ‘You’ve been spamming the Facebook group with posts about your business.’

  ‘Hey, don’t see them as business posts! They’re offers of help. You’re doing a real great job keeping the candle alight. But you need a champion. A knight in shining armour, with a sword that can cut through all the red tape and bureaucratic shenanigans.’ This time he held his arms wide as if to say: that’s me!

  ‘I don’t need any help.’

  ‘No, you seem a very capable person. Very capable. But think of all the other families. Don’t deny them. And isn’t it true that we all need help at some time? A problem shared and all that.’

  Kaitlin slid her phone away and stood up. ‘I’ll say this in the politest possible way: leave me alone.’

  ‘I told you, I’m a friend.’

  ‘You really think I’m that stupid?’ Her eyes blazed. ‘You’re a lawyer. You don’t do charity. This is all about hard cash for you.’

  ‘Yes, there are obviously some financial benefits here. But that doesn’t mean I can’t feel for the families as well. The authorities have clearly covered up what happened to Flight 702. There’s a yawning mystery at the heart of that disappearance and no one involved is going to get any closure until the truth is found out. Let me help.’

  ‘You’re good at talking.’

  ‘And that’s exactly why you need me in any court of law.’

  ‘But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last few months, it’s how to recognise bullshit,’ Kaitlin snapped. ‘You want in on this for yourself. I don’t want anyone like that at my back. I can’t trust them.’ She turned and marched away, her voice floating back, ‘Don’t bother me again.’

  Rory grabbed a coffee and sipped on it as he walked back towards his apartment. The caffeine helped him to focus. That was certainly a frustrating encounter, but you didn’t get anywhere in the law by giving up easily. He’d come back to Kaitlin Le when she’d had time to calm down and see reason. He couldn’t afford to let this class action slip through his fingers. He needed this more than anything he’d needed in his life.

  His cell rang and he answered.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Zara? What time is it there? Everything OK?’

  ‘No, actually, it’s not. It’s horrible here. I don’t like it. Can I come back?’

  ‘What, to New York?’

  ‘Yeah. I just want to get away, Dad. It’s awful.’

  Rory sucked on his teeth. ‘You remember what happened last time.’

  ‘I can’t stay here, Dad.’ Her voice crackled with a stifled sob.

  ‘Darling, you need to hang on in there. Get everything right. Get back to who you were before all the … issues. Then come back.’

  ‘Can’t I be in a clinic in New York?’

  ‘Your mother wants to be close to you, you know that.’

  ‘I don’t believe that, Dad. It’s you who doesn’t want to be close to me.’

  ‘That’s not true. Why would you say something …’ Rory bit down on his words. Getting irritated was counterproductive. Zara hadn’t been thinking straight ever since her addictions had taken hold.

  ‘I want to come back. I want to come back. Please, Dad. Talk to Mom. I can’t handle it here. We’re not allowed to go out. It’s like a prison. There are cameras everywhere.’

  ‘It will get better. You’ll get better. You’ll see. It’ll be OK.’

  ‘No, Dad, it won’t.’

  The line died. Zara had hung up.

  Rory trudged back to his apartment. He wasn’t going to let the varied and numerous problems of his domestic life knock him off course. He felt for Zara, he really did. But she was in the right place. Knowing that didn’t wipe out the pain he’d heard in her voice, though.

  He ordered in pizza, then propped himself up in bed with his laptop, alternating between bites and tapping keys.

  When the MacBook pinged with an incoming call from a familiar name, he instantly hit Answer. This wasn’t one he wanted to miss.

  ‘Hola,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful.

  ‘Hello … Señor Murray?’

  ‘Sí. Gracias por responder a mi publicación.’ He’d given up expecting Eva to respond to him after three messages into a void.

  ‘Tu hablas español?’

  ‘Un poco. My first wife … Mi primera esposa era de Venezuela, así que yo … My Spanish is a bit … fuera de práctica. Lo siento.’

  ‘It’s OK, we can speak English.’

  ‘I read about your situation. Thank you for returning my—’

  ‘Jennifer said it was OK.’

  ‘Jennifer? The family liaison counsellor from—’

  ‘The airline, sí. She said you were a good man, that we could trust you.’

  Rory raised his eyebrows. Well, that was unexpected. Not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. ‘OK! All good! As I said in my message, I’m representing a number of relatives and … er … Monika was cabin crew, right?’

  ‘Sí.’

  ‘So, first, I need you to know that whatever the airline may have offered you, and I have no reason to know if they did or didn’t, whatever they may have made you sign isn’t important. If they’re found to have been negligent, the payout we can get you by pursuing this in a court of law will be far in excess of—’

  ‘My daughter is alive.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘She called me.’

  ‘What! When?’

  ‘I want to invite you to our group, Mr Murray.’

  ‘Wait a minute, are you saying Monika wasn’t on Flight 702?’

  ‘No, she was. And I need you to help me find her.’

  The rich aroma of baked goods drifted from the church hall. Rory breathed it in the moment he jumped out of the cab; the only positive to an evening visit to this part of Brooklyn. Eva was waiting for him under the light over the door, a big woman with a face that fell into easy smiles.

  He hailed her and they exchanged pleasantries before she said, ‘We’ve been looking for someone who’ll take us seriously, someone who can help us. Come …’ She ushered him into the warm atmosphere.

  Rory tried to suppress his desire to launch straight in, but curiosity got the better of him.

  ‘When you say you had a call from Monika, what did she say?’ he inquired. Testing the water. Was this woman crazy, grief-stricken or both?

  ‘She said she was healthy and OK, but that she couldn’t come home just yet.’

  ‘Why? Was she being held somewhere?’

  ‘No, but she said there was something she needed to do. She couldn’t tell me. Through here …’

  ‘Did you record the call? Do you have any—’

  ‘Proof? I thought about that a lot. I guess I was so shocked. It was late at night when she called. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting it. I even wondered afterwards if …’ Eva paused, thinking.

  ‘You im
agined it?’

  ‘I can see you’re thinking the same thing, Mr Murray.’

  ‘No, it’s just … well, yes.’

  Eva smiled. ‘But then I met the others.’

  She swung open the door to the meeting place, where three men and two women chatted in the centre of a circle of chairs.

  ‘This is Mr Murray,’ Eva announced. ‘The lawyer I was telling you about.’

  Everyone nodded. A couple raised their hands in greeting. As he pulled up a chair, Rory read the faces: one was suspicious, three were hopeful, the other he couldn’t tell.

  ‘We meet here in the church once a week,’ Eva said. ‘We’ve all been contacted.’

  ‘Why have you come to see us, Mr Murray?’ a beefy guy in a plaid shirt asked.

  ‘My firm, Murray & Wexler.’ Rory handed out his business card. ‘Please, take my card. We’re representing a number of relatives of passengers on board Flight 702 and we’re building a case against the airline, the plane manufacturer and its associated companies. And the more families who join us …’ He glanced around those faces again. ‘I’ll be honest, though, I’m a little confused. I mean, you seem to be saying you’ve had contact with passengers on Flight 702.’

  ‘We have,’ one of the other men said.

  ‘But the plane crashed into the Atlantic.’

  ‘We don’t believe that. That’s why we need your help.’

  A woman with long grey hair leaned forwards. ‘We think the plane was diverted to a secret location. Our loved ones were coerced into carrying out some secret work for the government, that’s what we believe.’

  Belief.

  Rory smiled and nodded.

  ‘Let me show you something,’ the man in the plaid shirt said, pulling out his phone. ‘This is my son, Lucas. He’d been on a vacation in France with his mom. She’s French. They were both coming home on 702.’

  Rory watched as a video rolled of a child reciting a poem:

  The Moon comes every night to peep.

  Through the window where I lie:

  But I pretend to be asleep;

  And watch the Moon go slowly by.

  ‘What a cute kid,’ Rory gushed. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  The man wafted a hand, dismissing his sympathy. ‘Lucas had an extra toe on his left foot. Before his mother took him away, we talked about having it removed. Not that it was a problem, but just growing up, we didn’t want him to have any insecurities about being different. We didn’t want him to spend the rest of his life having to buy different size shoes. So, look closely.’

  He played the video again.

  ‘What am I looking for?’ Rory asked.

  ‘He has five toes on his left foot. The sixth has been removed.’

  ‘Is it possible his mother had it done when she took him to France?’

  ‘It takes at least six weeks to recover from that kind of operation. His foot would be bandaged or in plaster for at least six weeks. But look: no scar even. I’ve had doctors examine this and they say that Lucas was operated on at least two months before this video was taken. At least.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He was operated on after Flight 702 disappeared.’

  Rory nodded, keeping his eyes on the frozen image on the video so he didn’t reveal what he was really thinking.

  ‘All of us here have been contacted,’ Eva said. ‘Emails, calls …’

  Rory looked to the man in the plaid shirt. ‘And you were sent this, when?’

  ‘I found it. Online. I’ve spent the last six months scouring the internet looking for him.’

  ‘Your son, Lucas,’ Rory mused. ‘What’s his surname?’

  ‘James.’

  ‘There were six minors on Flight 702. I don’t recall a Lucas James on the passenger manifest.’

  ‘His mother was travelling on a different name.’

  ‘What name was in his passport?’

  ‘I don’t know. She was trying to stop me from seeing him. I think she changed his name when she left the family home.’

  ‘Wait. She took your son to France?’

  ‘We were going through a difficult patch. We needed time apart. But then we spoke and we decided we wanted to be together again. And they were coming back.’

  Rory smiled. He didn’t know what to say. But as he looked around those faces again, he saw the desperation lodged just beneath the surface. They wanted everything made right, the world put back as it had been when life made sense. He felt a pang of compassion for these poor souls. It was a long time since something like this had happened. He pushed the feeling down. He didn’t like it. It was too destabilising, too much of a distraction from his aims.

  ‘Have you had contact from the airline?’ he asked.

  ‘They don’t accept that my son was on the flight. That’s why we need you.’

  ‘Look, I really appreciate you inviting me here, but unfortunately, I’m late for another meeting,’ Rory said, standing. There wasn’t much here that would help his case. In fact, some of them might damage it.

  ‘But you’ll help us, right?’ the man in the plaid shirt pressed, looking pained.

  Rory smiled weakly as he stood from his chair.

  As Rory stepped out into the night, one of the other men hurried down the church hall steps. He had an expensive haircut and had the look of those guys from high-powered legal firms who always made Rory feel small.

  ‘Mr Murray. I’m Jim Travis,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I run this group. I just wanted to say that not everyone here is imagining things. People do that, sure. But some of us are real. I lost my dad.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  ‘Don’t say that. I’m serious. I just want to honour his memory by helping all of the other grieving relatives. They need support. We don’t ask too many questions of those who come. We don’t want to judge. Sure, we get a lot of … well, you know what I mean, but that’s OK. This is a safe place where I hope people can find some peace in the world. That’s all we want. All I want.’

  He lowered his eyes, his face flooding with emotion. Rory felt another one of those annoying bouts of compassion.

  ‘Anyway, if you want names, addresses, telephone numbers, there’s a girl who lost her brother. She was going round visiting lots of relatives, collecting stuff, maybe you should talk to her.’

  ‘Kaitlin? Kaitlin Le?’

  ‘Yes, Kaitlin, that’s right.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to her?’

  ‘A few weeks ago. Actually, she was supposed to come to one of our meetings. But she never turned up.’ Jim smiled. ‘She’s pretty intense. Driven, maybe. But she’s got a big heart. That counts for a lot.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Rory said. ‘Kaitlin is definitely someone I need to speak to.’

  Back in his apartment, Rory lounged on his bed, trying to put out of his mind all the faces of those people in the support group. He flicked on The Tonight Show and let it drone in the background, hoping it would distract him, when his cell rang.

  Rory frowned at the name that flashed up and then answered. ‘Petra?’

  ‘OK, I’m authorised to send through the airline’s proposal.’ Brusque, no-nonsense, but that was Petra. He’d never got a minute of small talk out of her during all the months they’d been in contact.

  ‘Proposal?’

  ‘We’re putting together a settlement. I’m contacting all of the lawyers representing families.’

  Rory muted the TV. ‘The airline wants to settle? Why now? It’s a bomb, that’s what they’re saying. So, what’s going on?’

  ‘Come on, Rory, beggars can’t be choosers. Read it and we’ll get together.’

  ‘You don’t understand. This isn’t about the money, Petra. My clients want the truth.’ Even as the words fell out of his mouth, he was surprised to realise for the first time that they were true.

  ‘You’re quite the crusader, aren’t you, Rory?’ Petra’s voice dripped with acid. ‘You need to look at this seriously and get back
to me if you don’t want your clients to miss out. Everyone else is on board with it. What’s your problem? You need the money. Everyone in the business knows that.’

  ‘What’s my problem? My clients want to know what happened. If it was a bomb, how did it get on board? They want an apology, an admission of culpability. That’s how they’ll get peace. That’s how they’ll begin to rebuild their broken lives. They want the truth and then we can talk about compensation.’

  ‘So, do you want it or not?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The proposal. I’m just giving it to you ahead of the meeting as a professional courtesy.’

  ‘Send it over.’

  ‘There you go.’

  Rory’s laptop dinged.

  ‘See you at the meeting on Thursday.’ Petra hung up as abruptly as she’d called.

  Once they’d hung up, Rory opened the file and began to read, but his mind kept returning to what he’d said to Petra. Who was he? He didn’t recognise himself any more.

  11

  The hotel bar was low-lit with plenty of shadowed corners for off-book business meetings or illicit assignations. More importantly, it had a door directly off the street. Kaitlin slipped into the drone of low conversation and the chinks of ice falling into glass then looked around.

  A familiar face hovered in the half-light in a corner booth where all entrances were visible. The man’s hand flickered in barely perceptible greeting.

  ‘So, you are FBI. I knew it,’ Kaitlin said when she took her seat.

  The craggy-faced man opposite was the man with the coloured jackets who’d unnerved Dolores both times they’d met in the diner.

  ‘Agent Dennison,’ he said. ‘Thank you for meeting with me. Can I get you a drink?’ He raised a glass of Scotch to her.

  Kaitlin ignored the offer. ‘You made me look like I was delusional thinking that I was being followed.’

  ‘My apologies. I was working undercover. It was necessary—’

  ‘To be an ass?’

  Dennison shrugged. ‘Yeah. Goes with the territory sometimes.’

  ‘So, what are you doing here? Conducting interviews in bars isn’t standard FBI procedure, as I now know very well.’