The Wreck Emerged

by Joseph Webers

  “He said he would think about it. Then right before I left, he told me they knew Stanković was dead even before he told me about him over three weeks ago.”

  144

  Maggie waited, and the man’s tears quickly subsided.

  “I wanted to kill you,” he said calmly, “but my gun wouldn’t work. You were right there, and suddenly I saw the most beautiful human being I have ever seen in my life. Light was coming out of him. He looked to his side, and I saw Prisha holding his hand. She looked more beautiful than I ever saw her before. So pure. So innocent. So trusting as she looked at him. I heard her say, ‘Jesus, can he come too?’ He said ‘Yes’ and turned back to me.” There were fresh tears at the remembrance. “He reached out his hand to me and beckoned. ‘Come’ he said.”

  Maggie looked at him straight in the eyes and asked, “Who was the man?”

  “It was Jesus. I know it was. He looked at me with such longing, such acceptance, such … majesty. As soon as he said ‘Come’, I knew who he was, and what I had done.”

  Maggie looked around. Not a soul had moved except Matt, who had given Jenny to Charlotte. He had raced to the front and was now standing behind the man. She realized her lapel mic was still hot; the whole audience heard what was happening in the front. She stood up and motioned for everyone to sit, then knelt again by the man. She knew the whole evening was being recorded, and she wanted the audience to hear what the man said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “Who are you? What did you do?”

  “I am Rishaan Chabra. I am the one responsible for your airplane being shot down.”

  He shuddered at the sound of his own voice admitting to the deaths of almost three hundred people. There were gasps from the audience, but nobody said anything or moved.

  The inspector turned to one of the constables and whispered, “He’s the one they’re looking for all over Europe. Call the station and have them call MI-5 and MI-6.”

  “As horrible as that was, there is more,” Rishaan said. “It should have happened already, but it is waiting for me to give the signal.”

  Rishaan gave Maggie a good look. “You are looking at me the same as Jesus when I saw him. You are the one who called up the island with your friend. You ruined all my plans, and that’s why I was going to kill you. But my plans were all wrong, I know that now. I just don’t understand why you don’t hate me. Jesus said ‘Come’, but now he’s gone. I don’t know what I should do.”

  “No, he’s still here,” she said. “You just can’t see him right now.” She turned to the inspector. “Can we have a few minutes before you take him away?”

  The inspector nodded, so she said to Rishaan, “I will tell you what to do. It is what I did, and it was what Prisha did also.”

  She stood up and addressed the whole audience. “God is able to take the most rotten of circumstances and make good come out of them. This man will never be able to adequately pay for what he has done. We all know, deep within ourselves, that God’s standards are so high that none of us can ever meet them. Whether you did what this man did or stole tuppence worth of gum, all are guilty in God’s sight. None of us can ever pay the cost for our sinfulness. But God loves us so much that he decided to pay it himself.”

  From there, Maggie outlined God’s plan, and at the end, hands went up all throughout the audience, including Rishaan’s. As she did with the Marines, she explained their part in the transaction with God, then let them receive Jesus in their own words.

  When the murmur of voices had died down, Maggie nodded to the inspector, who escorted Rishaan Chabra out of the building. One of the constables stayed to get the names of all those volunteering to be witnesses.

  The host of the meeting agreed to secure the room for the following night, since it would be hard for everyone to continue after what had just happened.

  “Please come back tomorrow,” Maggie said to the crowd, “especially those who received Jesus tonight.”

  After the last volunteer witness had departed, the constable turned his attention to Maggie. “You will have to come to the station to press charges. It shouldn’t take too long, since we got all the information we need from some of the people here tonight.”

  Maggie wasn’t sure she wanted to press charges. She looked at Matt, who nodded. “I know your heart,” he said. “You want to forgive him. It’s right to forgive him, but it’s also right to press the charges. If you don’t press charges, he may go free and continue to menace society. If he has truly given himself to the Lord, he will know that he has to take what is coming to him.”

  “I was going to ask about that,” the constable said. “Is it possible he made all that up because he knew he was about to be caught?”

  “That might be true in some cases,” Matt said, “but not in this case. I know he was telling the truth.”

  “How can you be so sure?” the constable asked.

  “I saw Prisha, too.”

  145

  Bob, Phil, and JC were still meeting at 5 p.m. when Bob’s phone rang.

  “Bob, this is Chuck. We just got word from Allahabad that Rushil Singh is dead in the prison.”

  “I’m putting you on speaker here. When did this happen?”

  “Best they could tell, within the last half hour, about 2 a.m. here. They found him on the floor, unresponsive. No heartbeat, no visible wounds, no odd smells. They just took him in for an autopsy.”

  “Was he in isolation?”

  “No, they didn’t have that there. He didn’t have a cellmate, though. There are people in and out all the time, even at two in the morning. They have to sign in and show identification, and they are checking those names.”

  “Who knew he was there? Anyone?”

  “No one as far as we know. Turns out they didn’t even have him listed with his real name, at our suggestion.”

  “Okay, thanks. Let us know what the autopsy finds.” They hung up.

  “The autopsy won’t find anything,” Bob said.

  “It was Rudy, then,” Phil said.

  Just then a messenger came in and handed two notes to Bob. “Sir, we got these at the same time,” he said.

  “The first one’s from Rudy,” Bob said. “It says, ‘Singh recruited all six team leaders.’ ”

  “Six?” Phil said in alarm.

  “No, can’t be,” JC said, “We know better than that. He’s just admitting what we already know and trying to lead us on another wild goose chase. Bhatt was the fifth cell, and we would have known about a sixth. Not only that, Singh couldn’t have recruited the team leaders. He was the man on the ground in Allahabad, with Chabra and Stanković. What this tells me is that this is the end of the trail and they won’t give us any more information. What’s the other note?”

  The messenger was still standing where he was when he first came in. Bob gave him a look, but the messenger didn’t budge, so Bob read the note out loud, “Rishaan Chabra is in custody in Cheltenham, UK, for the attempted murder of Rachel Trillbey.”

  JC immediately said, “We need to go there. Quick! Before he ends up like Singh.”

  Bob turned to the courier, who said, “The plane will be ready in twenty. I heard the boss giving those orders at the same time he sent me here. I’ll call the plane, and by the time you get there, there will be three overnight packs and six meals waiting for you.”

  JC sent Nicki a text from the police car bringing them to Dulles International Airport.

  146

  Bob McGee, Phil Henry, and JC Smalley arrived in England at three thirty Friday morning after a six-and-a-half-hour flight. The prisoner was being held at the jail in Cheltenham, and Phil’s MI-6 contact, Frankie Ross, picked them up at the nearby Gloucestershire Airport. Bob already knew Frankie, and they introduced JC.

  “We questioned him for about an hour,” Frankie said as they drove to the jail. “He was most cooperative and admitted everything. Witnesses say he was filled with rage when he came barging into the hotel, but he’s been like a lamb since
the local police took him into custody.”

  “How is Ms. Trillbey?” Bob asked. “We both met her back in the States. Was she injured or killed?”

  “No. He never got a shot off. They said she was quite a trooper. Shaken a bit, but wanted to finish speaking to the audience.”

  They reached the jail, which was heavily guarded, as Phil had requested in-flight. Rishaan Chabra was already in an interrogation room. As they observed him through the one-way window, they saw a man relaxed and quiet. “He’s gotten about four hours sleep,” Frankie said. “We wanted to see if his story changed after he had a chance to think about it, but so far it hasn’t.

  “My impression is he would respond well if the four or five of us, including my colleague from MI-5, sat and questioned him. If I’m wrong, we can change our tactics. The UK had some deaths on the plane, but it was your plane and mostly your citizens. We’ll follow your lead, and we plan to question him more later.”

  The MI-5 agent elected to watch the proceedings from the observation window to avoid crowding the room. He would relay questions to Frankie via her earpiece.

  Since this was international, it was CIA responsibility, and Bob was the lead for the Americans. He introduced his party of three.

  “Rishaan Chabra, we are not here to question you about your actions yesterday evening. We are here to question you about the shooting down of Air World Airlines flight 94 and your plan to spread nerve gas in cities in India, China, eastern Europe, and the US. We know about Luka Stanković and Kevin Bhatt, and eighteen billion rupees.”

  “I will help you any way I can,” Rishaan said. “I will tell you everything I know.”

  “Before we start asking the questions, I want to know why. Why are you so willing to tell us everything? You were working on this for a long time. Why the sudden change?”

  “I tried to kill the woman, Maggie Trillbey. I wanted to kill the man, too, but mostly the woman. I hated them both, because they ruined my plans. I was going to wait until their meeting was over and I could escape afterwards, but something came over me, and I lost my mind. I tried to shoot her, but I forgot about the safety lever. Suddenly, I saw Jesus, and Prisha was at his side. He beckoned to me. ‘Come’ he said. As soon as he said that, I knew what I had done was very, very wrong.”

  “Who is Prisha?”

  “I loved Prisha, and she loved me. But she died of cancer caused by the pollution. As she lay dying in the hospital, someone must have told her about Jesus and she gave her life to him. When I saw her right before she died, she tried to tell me, but all I heard her say was that she was one with God. She asked me to do something about all the pollution. So I spent my career trying.”

  “So Jesus said ‘Come’ and that’s why you’re cooperating?”

  “I didn’t know what to do until Ms. Trillbey explained God’s plan to me and the whole audience.”

  “What was the plan?”

  Rishaan’s tears started to flow. Frankie listened to the voice in her earpiece, and said to Bob, “They recorded her entire talk. You can watch the whole thing.”

  “Yes, please get me a copy.” Then to Rishaan, Bob said, “What happened next?”

  “I saw Jesus again. He looked very stern. I wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go. I was very ashamed. He said, ‘There is a very high price to be paid for what you did.’ In an instant of time, I saw every single one of the people I had killed. I could see what I deserved. It was hideous. Then he looked at me again, and his expression had changed to the one I saw the first time. He said, ‘But I have paid it for you.’ He lifted my face up, and I knew what I had to do. I’m doing it for him.”

  “Start at the very beginning and tell me about this nerve gas plan. Were you trying to avenge Prisha’s death?”

  “No. We were doing it to save the whole planet from global warming. We thought of it as sacrificing a few to save many.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “My colleague Dasya Khatri and a scientist we met at a conference, Rushil Singh. We discussed it for months. India was so polluted, and the government couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Where did you get the nerve gas idea from?”

  “A chemical engineer from Serbia, Stanković, who had moved to India, joined our group. He said there was an insecticide they had developed in Serbia. He thought he could convert it to a very lethal gas by getting it to join with another chemical, but he was having trouble with the joining. I helped him. We worked out the details, and found we could make it join by using certain ultraviolet light. Once it joined, it effervesced rapidly. The two parts were fairly inexpensive, and did not become lethal until joined together.”

  “How did you know it would work on people?”

  “We tried it on small animals, then on large pigs. It was very quick. Later, we threw the animals in the Ganges. We wanted to do one more test, on humans.”

  “The Russian couple.”

  “Yes. Rushil volunteered to set it up. ‘Foolproof’, he said. But it didn’t work. The couple never opened their luggage. What was supposed to happen was, when they are in their hotel room, they open the luggage and the device functions, and they succumb before they can notify anyone. The gas dissipates and neutralizes before the bodies are found.”

  “Who built the device that was going to kill the couple? It was fairly ingenious and wouldn’t be noticed by an X-ray.”

  “I don’t know anything about the device. I thought it would just be part of Rushil’s arrangements. He said he would take care of it.”

  “Do you know how it got into their luggage? Weren’t you afraid it would be noticed by the baggage security agents?”

  “I don’t know many of the details. I believe it was put in at their start point in Russia. Rushil said they tore the overseas tag so it would come off during handling, and when it got to London, they would think it was domestic baggage so it wouldn’t be checked again.”

  “Is Stanković still in India?”

  Rishaan briefly held his head in his hands, realizing how thoroughly he had plummeted from the noble he had considered himself. Then his courage returned, and with it a determination to own up to all his actions. “No, I killed him. He came to me and said there was a problem with the formula. I thought he was being a coward. He threatened to tell the team leaders, so I shot him and threw him in the Ganges, too, where we threw the pigs.”

  “All the team leaders, as well as the teams, are now in custody. What was the problem with the formula?”

  “I didn’t let him get that far. As far as I knew, the formula was perfect.”

  “Where in India were you doing all this?”

  “Khushro Bagh Prayagraj. Everyone calls it Allahabad. We all lived there. Dasya, Rushil, Luka, and I.”

  “You and he must have written down the ingredients and processes for the final formula and any trials. Where are those?”

  “Rushil started acting strange toward the end. I thought he might be planning to take over the project, as we called it. When I killed Luka, I took all his papers, added mine to his, and buried them all under my garbage receptacle. I didn’t want Rushil to get them.”

  “We need to get them. What is your address there, and the others you named?”

  Rishaan told them, and Bob stepped out for a moment while everyone else took a break. Phil said to JC, while they were outside the interrogation room, “He is being amazingly calm and precise about all these details. He doesn’t seem proud of what he’s done, but he isn’t denying anything, either.”

  “Yes,” JC said, “it’s like he is saying the answers for someone else.”

  After his call to Chuck in New Delhi, Bob continued the questioning.

  “I appreciate your cooperation,” he said. “I guess you know things won’t go well for you.”

  “I expect as much.”

  “We know the passenger plane had the booby-trapped suitcase aboard. Why did you shoot it down?”

  “It was really Rushil’s idea, but I’m t
he one who gave the order, and I grieve that I did that. Rushil had someone in Minnesota watching the couple, but when the luggage was put on the flight back to Russia, that lookout lost track of it. He called us and we panicked. We thought that if the device functioned after they landed, it would jeopardize the whole project. We should have known they couldn’t trace the device to us, and our project would be well underway before they figured out what happened. We believed, too, that the plane would never be found once it sank in the Atlantic Ocean.

  “We had gotten a Russian MiG by faking a training accident with the Indian Air Force, and we thought we could use MiGs to disperse the gas. So we got those steel tanks built and we ordered two for each MiG. Rushil had contacts who got us more MiGs because the Russians were changing models and they were looking to get rid of the old ones. When we found out the MiGs wouldn’t work, we switched the project to delivery vans, but kept the MiGs at abandoned airfields in different parts of the world near our project sites.”

  “Where did the MiGs fly from, the ones that shot the plane down?”

  “There’s an unused airfield in Cuba called Nicaro Airfield. My good friend Pranay Kashyap and his associate Rohan Kapoor were MiG pilots. They flew them and helped design the tanks. When we found out about the luggage, I called Pranay. They calculated if they filled both tanks with fuel, and with the internal capacity, they should be able to reach the flight corridors between Chicago and London, and return safely. They started filling the tanks while we got our contact in Brazil to tap into online systems to find the flight information.”

  Phil wanted to reach across the table and strangle him immediately, but realized that that would be the end of the interrogation.

  Bob asked Rishaan if the pilots were still there, and Rishaan recounted the conversations he had had with Maria at Nicaro Airfield. “So both pilots are dead,” he said.

  “Why did you send the planes to Brazil? What did you want with that?”

  “We planned to run the project from Brazil, from a safe location near the Amazon. Rushil recruited Kevin Bhatt, an Indian citizen who lived in Brazil shipping all kinds of wood to markets in New York and other places. We paid him well, and had him build us an operations area we could use. We hired aviation mechanics and other people to keep that place active. Bhatt had a boat for shipping the wood, and he also did a lot of business in Cuba, agricultural products and such. He would visit Cuba to get a plane on his way back from the States.