The Passenger

by Chris Petit

  He drove past the houses of government and over the river to Vauxhall. The swirl of black water added to the sense of symbolic crossing.

  Round’s car wasn’t outside his house. Collard remembered the fancy black Jaguar so smooth and silent it seemed to operate independent of Round’s uncertain control, the view through the expensive windscreen like in a film.

  Collard waited, wondering how to confront Round. Perhaps he would force him to collect more money from cash machines. There would be a certain poetic justice. Round was with the Midland, the listening bank in its advertisements; more like the spooks’ bank, given Tranter’s involvement.

  It was a quarter to two when Collard gave up. Round hadn’t come home.

  He had nowhere to go. He was tired. He had no plan left. He decided to go and sit in the shell of his home and wait for whoever came.

  Damaged Fathers

  Collard parked down the street and sat watching his house. Apart from lights still on in a couple of neighbours’ windows, everywhere was dark. The street was empty. No one was out. He remembered Evelyn’s book on Philby, pointing out how the defection of Burgess and Maclean had been possible because of the English weekend. Collard supposed he wasn’t worth a night-surveillance team. He wouldn’t be going far on his funds and it would be only a matter of time before they picked him up, if he didn’t turn himself in first. He was nearly beaten. There was nothing more he could do for Nick if he was on the run.

  He drove round the block a couple of times past the house, to double check, parked some streets away and walked back, seeing no one. He let himself in. The heating was off and the place was very cold. He kept the lights off. The answerphone was blank. What had been depressing him since hearing Nick’s brief message was the realization that Nick was never coming back. The message was a farewell. Collard was sure of it. Nick was gone. He could search all he liked and he wouldn’t find him. People vanished all the time, walked out of their lives and never went back. Charlotte had done the same, in her own way. Thinking of their life together, Collard thought there wasn’t much for Nick to miss beyond the security, which he probably saw as more constraint than comfort.

  However much Nazir and Churton had exploited his paternal fears, he preferred to believe Nick had extricated himself, coming to his senses at the last minute, not trusting the situation. Nick would get work in bars or waiting tables, joining that drifting migrant population that followed the sun in search of an endless summer.

  Collard went upstairs, where it was even colder. He had no desire to sleep in his matrimonial bed so he went to the spare room on the same floor as Nick’s and wrapped himself in a couple of duvets.

  Sleep wouldn’t come. He had trouble believing Nazir was dead, that he would have trusted him enough to come. He questioned his own position too. As sure as he was that they had meant to shoot him too, they hadn’t. He was still alive. There had been no second shot. But Tranter’s seven-year threat remained.

  He drifted off and came to, suddenly; sure someone was in the house. He strained his ears, hearing nothing. He decided he had imagined it.

  It was dark outside but later than he thought, nearly six. He was about to get up when the stairs creaked. A door opened and closed.

  It wasn’t the police. They would have battered their way in. Collard was paralysed between thinking it was Nick returning home and someone come to shoot him. He heard footsteps on the wood floor of the upstairs reception room, followed by the sound of someone climbing the stairs. Collard didn’t know whether to hide or stay where he was and brazen it out. He took the precaution of standing behind the door.

  The footsteps passed by; a man’s tread, on the heavy side. Collard heard the door to Nick’s room open. He couldn’t make any sense of it and even less of what he heard next, harsh, uncontrollable sobs of despair as a man wept.

  Collard threw open the door. Sheehan was sitting on Nick’s bed and looked up startled. Collard blinked in surprise, unsure what to make of the tears.

  ‘My daughter’s dead.’

  Collard didn’t know what to do other than ask, ‘How did it happen?’

  Sheehan waved the question aside. He fumbled inside his coat for his wallet from which he produced a photograph of three girls.

  ‘Lara’s the one on the left.’

  Collard saw an attractive girl, about eighteen, with the winning smile of superior American dentistry.

  ‘She’s my youngest. The others are married now, to soldiers.’

  Collard handed the photograph back. Sheehan kissed the picture before putting it away.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Collard asked, worried about the man’s state.

  ‘I wanted to see your boy’s room.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I think I should have been more forgiving.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. She’s dead. Did you love your boy?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You’re bound to say that. I mean really love him. That would be an exception. Most people put up with their kids at best or actively hate them. I loved my girl more than anything.’

  Sheehan scared and embarrassed Collard and he wondered how to get rid of him. Sheehan rambling on about his daughter—

  Then worked it out and realized and saw Sheehan could tell. Collard sat down, dazed.

  Nothing more than the tiniest gesture, the tilt of her head in Sheehan’s photograph, had given it away.

  The trapdoor he had been standing on for so long released.

  The silhouetted girl in the Polaroid held her head in just the same way as the girl in Sheehan’s photograph.

  The girl in Nick’s Polaroid was Sheehan’s daughter.

  Everything followed from that. It had been her, not Fatima Bey, in Nick’s room that last night.

  Collard remembered their first interrogation when he had given his name and Sheehan broke his pencil and stormed out. This must have been provoked by the shock of recognizing Collard’s name. Sheehan had known Nick before the disaster. Who hadn’t had a hand in Nick’s fate? Collard wondered.

  ‘Start by telling me what Nick was doing on that flight.’

  Sheehan looked at him with pleading eyes.

  ‘I put him there – but I didn’t know what was going to happen.’

  ‘What do you mean, put him there?’

  ‘Quinn, the man in the café with Nick, he was drugs enforcement. Quinn ran an undercover smuggling operation for the DEA through Frankfurt airport.’

  ‘Using the same route as Nazir’s.’

  ‘You know. Quinn took Nick on.’

  ‘At your suggestion.’

  ‘I’m not proud of it. I was angry. I let personal feelings interfere. Your boy was fucking my daughter. The values she had been raised to respect meant nothing to him.’

  ‘Her values aren’t necessarily yours.’

  ‘You liberal hypocrite. He infected her.’

  ‘Because he was, as you put it, fucking her and you didn’t like it, you decided to do what?’

  ‘He was going to get arrested in New York for transporting heroin into the United States.’

  ‘You were going to have Nick sent to prison? Aren’t we getting a little Old Testament here?’

  ‘He was going to get a nasty shock then be released. That’s all.’

  ‘Nick was coming home. The world is full of eighteen-year-olds falling in love and having to separate.’

  ‘She was running away with him.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t – I was travelling with him, remember? She wasn’t on the flight from Frankfurt.’

  ‘She got an earlier flight to London. I guess she knew she could pick up your flight there, because there was space.’

  ‘Was her name on the passenger list?’

  ‘Yes. But so was yours – the list included names of those who were late and missed the flight. Passenger lists are temporary, approximate things not infallible or careful documents. The list means nothing.’


  ‘How do you know she’s dead?’

  ‘When I heard the news, I believed she was on that plane—’ Sheehan choked. ‘I flew to Scotland certain she was, and then you turned up. It became the thinnest of lifelines to ask what if they hadn’t got on the plane, what if they were out there somewhere. So I made you believe, in the hope they were alive and you would find them.’

  Sheehan stood up and picked up the lamp by Nick’s bed like he wanted to smash it. His grief seemed to have turned into a barely contained rage. Collard was afraid the man was about to do something dangerous.

  ‘Nick left a message only the day before yesterday. We can go down and listen to it.’

  He thought Sheehan would be safer away from Nick’s room. Sheehan put the lamp down.

  ‘They’re gone. They were on the plane. Plenty of bodies are still missing. They’ll be lying hidden in the thick forests or a lake. They would have fallen together. It seems obvious now. They had no reason not to be on the plane.’

  ‘Come downstairs. I’ll play you the message.’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

  The old meanness was back in Sheehan’s voice. Collard realized why the man was there. Just as Sheehan had once built up his hope, he now intended to shatter it, infecting him with his despair. Collard didn’t want to listen. Churton could be walking his dog on the heath. Finding a way to confront Churton was more important than Sheehan destroying the little he had left.

  Sheehan balled his fist. Collard flinched, thinking he was about to be hit. Sheehan punched the wall instead, making a hole in the plasterboard.

  ‘They’re dead, that’s all that matters.’

  He watched the thin trickle of plaster dust running down the wall.

  ‘It isn’t hard to mess around with someone’s bank account and that wasn’t Nick speaking to you. It was a message to my daughter. I spliced it off and sent it on to you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To keep you going. Maybe you would find them if I couldn’t. I was in denial, Mr Collard, as you are now.’

  ‘What made you change your mind? They could be still alive.’

  Sheehan shook his head. ‘Time. There has been nothing. We would have found them by now. They would have left some trace. There would have been a sign.’

  ‘Who is Fatima Bey?’

  ‘Oh, Jesus. OK, I feel bad about her. She’s an actress who hasn’t worked in years. There’s little call for ethnic roles in Germany. She was happy to fuck me for the part. Nick had nothing to do with her.’

  The man’s cynicism took Collard’s breath away.

  ‘Did you know that plane would get blown up?’

  ‘I swear on my daughter’s head I didn’t.’

  ‘What does this come down to?’

  ‘It comes down to Nazir. He sold us the wrong information about the plot.’

  ‘But he was organizing the plot!’

  ‘I know. I was the one dealing with him.’

  ‘You were Nazir’s American control?’

  ‘Control’s the wrong word. It was more like a working relationship. Nazir was in the business of selling intelligence.’

  ‘And Nazir bombed that plane.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘At the same time as selling out the plot.’

  Sheehan nodded.

  ‘But you said you didn’t know it was going to happen.’

  ‘He led us to believe it was going to be the day after. The twenty-second.’

  Collard thought: So many lives on board, so many stories being acted out. People running away, people thinking of leaving people, people plotting to cheat on loved ones, people worrying about money, people fretful of undiagnosed illness, balanced against all the hope travelling on that flight, the anticipation, the prayers, the new job, the love and renewal and reunion symbolized by the holiday season, all those invisible threads snapped and irretrievable.

  ‘I would not have put your son on a plane knowing it was going to get blown up. To be blunt, it would have given my daughter too much to mourn.’

  ‘Why did you believe Nazir when he said the twenty-second?’

  ‘Because a senior American official was flying that day. Nazir’s intelligence was correct. He identified the official despite his name and travel plans being kept secret. Nazir said the plane was going to get blown up because of the propaganda value of killing that official. We believed him and were ready to move on the twenty-second.’

  ‘What official?’

  ‘Richard M. Nixon. Former President of the United States. But Nazir double-crossed us. He’d intended all along for it to be the twenty-first.’

  Police sirens sounded in the distance. Collard worried they were for him, that Sheehan had organized them because he and Churton had been in it together from the start.

  The sirens grew louder. Collard left Sheehan staring downcast at the floor and returned to the room he had slept in, opened the window and looked down the street, calculating if he had time to get out before the sirens reached the house. It was a cold, sunny morning. A bright flash from a window opposite caught his eye and was gone immediately; the sun briefly reflecting off something. The sirens continued on up the hill, a reminder that he was probably chancing his luck staying there. There might still be time to find Churton on the heath.

  Collard was going to leave Sheehan to make his own way out when something stopped him. He stood on the landing trying to decide what Sheehan was up to. He opened the door. Sheehan was standing with his back to him. The sound of splashing first made him think Sheehan had turned on the basin tap. Then he saw. Sheehan was urinating on Nick’s belongings that had been thrown in a heap on the floor.

  Sheehan said, over his shoulder, ‘Don’t do anything stupid or I’ll shoot you.’

  He moved round, pissing all the while, until he faced Collard, cock in one hand, pistol in the other. The tight grin did nothing to mask his angry contempt. Collard stared at Nick’s sodden belongings. Sheehan’s piss steamed in the cold. He wanted to kill Sheehan.

  ‘I’ve been saving this up for a long time. Your boy was scum.’ Sheehan leered and started to laugh. ‘That’s better.’

  Collard was already gone, running downstairs and out of the house. The last thing he heard as he fled was a shot and he didn’t stop until he reached his car.

  Voluptuous Ambiguity

  Angleton thought Sheehan was losing the plot. He was off on some crazy Hitchcock riff, not just making up stories, but actually hiring actors.

  Angleton thought of Hitch’s Foreign Correspondent, where they shot a man’s double on the steps in the rain, which allowed for a high-angle shot of a disturbance of umbrellas as the shooter forced his escape through the crowd.

  Collard had been a trigger pull from oblivion in the Tropical House. The bullet meant for him had jammed in the gun. It happened more often than people thought.

  If Angleton had been writing Nazir’s script, he would have made Nazir blackmail Churton into letting him restage the old Harry Lime trick of a false death and convenient disappearance – bloody Graham Greene again!

  An alternative scenario would be Churton subcontracting the job to Mossad, keen for the publicity of Nazir’s scalp, which Nazir would then anticipate by taking the precaution of sending an unsuspecting doppelgänger to take his bullet, leaving Nigel Churton shitting his paisley silk shorts about the coming home to roost of those secret arms deals with Iran and the prospect of forensic evidence turning up bomb parts with Made in Britain stamped all over them; Happy Christmas, Love Iran.

  Angleton appreciated the Shakespearean scale of it all: a bizarre combination of the political and star-crossed with the two young lovers and their fathers as surrogates. He remembered a detail from the day: a public announcement from airport information; Sheehan trying to reach his daughter. A second announcement had coincided with Nick becoming agitated. Oh, the ironies.

  Angleton thought of Goethe: ‘And so they all, each in his own way, reflecting or unreflecting, go on with the
ir daily lives; everything seems to take its accustomed course, for indeed, even in these desperate situations where everything hangs in the balance, one goes on living as though nothing were wrong.’

  The issues were: who did Sheehan and Nazir ultimately work for; and had Nazir deceived Sheehan from the outset or had he too believed it would be the twenty-second, leaving another party to pre-empt matters?

  The possible involvement of unknown third parties had been the bugbear of Angleton’s career. His private recurring fear was he had been run all along without realizing, piggy-backed by invisible third parties. Spy as bug. Spy as alien body.

  He contemplated Milgram’s six degrees of separation and how many moves it would take to connect the man sitting in seat 20C to the stranger in 44F. Angleton was waiting for the resurrection of a broken-down old Nazihunter whom he previously believed had been nullified into harmlessness.

  Justified Paranoia

  Collard was too late for Churton on the heath. There was no sign of him walking his dog, only joggers and regular walkers. Collard was still in shock at the revelation of Nick and Sheehan’s daughter. Sheehan’s eyes had been devoid of any light. The man was so unpredictable that the shot Collard heard could have been him putting a bullet through his head.

  He found a bench, sat down and got out Evelyn’s hieroglyphics: tantalizing clues without the benefit of coherence, a series of phrases waiting to be organized by thought and turned into sentences: loan rate@0.5%!!!; ‘DEFD’; NC chair IMS 74-84; ECGD@85%; ‘For agric use’!; TDG=TGM engineering>TI Machine Tools; TI Grp NC dep ch: MATRIX.

  At the bottom of the page was scrawled: ‘Ask where NSO money goes: ECGD. Abracadabra!’

  He knew Evelyn’s shorthand was a cryptic summary of his own framing. NC was Churton, who had chaired something called IMS and was deputy chair of the TI Group. Matrix meant nothing. Collard knew about the DEFD and the ECGD because Joost Tranter had been part of it. It was obvious now that Tranter was the interface between banking and the intelligence services. Round had pushed Collard’s company to expand into the overseas market, bringing in his own people, including Tranter, who represented the Defence Equipment Finance Department, a banking arm specializing in favourable loans for export business, which in turn had close links to a new government set-up, the Export Credit Guarantee Department, which existed to insure up to ninety per cent of the value of any export risk. Collard, who was concentrating on the fledgling domestic market, had paid insufficient attention, and had anyway been mollified by Tranter’s offer of an extended overdraft on the company’s domestic business.