by Mark Burnell
The instructions, which were written on a piece of paper, were precise and concise.
‘I have a statement to make. We demand the freedom of Sheikh Abdul Kamal Qassam. He is to be released from his illegal imprisonment in the United States of America. By midday Greenwich Mean Time tomorrow, he must have left the maximum-security facility in Colorado where he is currently being held captive and he must be airborne. By nineteen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time tomorrow, he must be clear of United States airspace. On account of the distance he will eventually travel, his flight will be permitted to stop once on the eastern seaboard to take on fuel. Once Qassam is confirmed over the Atlantic, a phased release of hostages will begin, culminating in the release of all the remaining hostages and crew once Qassam has reached his eventual destination. If either of these deadlines is missed, retribution will be swift and merciless. Similarly, any attempt at sabotaging our demands will be punished severely. There will be no further communication from this aircraft until shortly before the first deadline. These demands are not open to negotiation. They are final and absolute. We are the Sons of Sabah.’
As Petra followed him back along the upper deck, she said to him, ‘The United States government will never agree to it.’
Reza Mohammed nodded. ‘I know.’
* * *
I am alone in the forward galley. I perform a small series of stretches to ease the stiffness in my back. The aircraft is eerily quiet. Where I am, it is easy to believe that it is empty and I’m glad that I’m not stuck in seat 45K. I look at my watch. It’s three-forty-six GMT. In another quarter of an hour, the terrorists will rotate their positions in the economy cabin, two of them being replaced by Zyed, who is currently roving, and by Mouna, who is taking her shift up on the flight deck. Only Reza Mohammed and I are excluded from this duty loop.
I should feel some pity for all the people at the other end of this aircraft because I put them there but I don’t. I look forwards because I cannot afford to look back.
I try not to think about Frank but he fills my head. What can he be thinking now? That I have disappeared for good? Somewhere in the deeper, darker recesses of my mind lurks the fear that I will never see Frank again. I could die or, worse, I could survive and return to him only to discover that he cannot overlook the landslide of deception. Why should he? He fell for a woman named Marina Gaudenzi. He has no idea who I am. Nor do I.
I am on an aircraft that has been hijacked. I feel like a hostage, a victim, but I am a perpetrator; I feel like Stephanie but I am Petra. Or am I?
There was a time when I thought the divisions were clear. I felt confident as I changed from Petra to Marina to Susan Branch and then back to Petra. It was as easy as flicking through the channels on TV. But now the signals are confused and the picture has become blurred beyond recognition. I am none of the above and, at the same time, all of the above. Petra has been compromised by Marina, while Elizabeth Shepherd, Susan Branch and the others have merged into one amorphous being. And as for Stephanie Patrick, I have no idea who she is any more.
* * *
Reza Mohammed was sitting by the window in the front row of the Club World cabin, his seat fully reclined. His jacket was draped over the back of the neighbouring seat. He looked exhausted. Petra perched on the arm-rest of the chair across the aisle. He opened a blind by a couple of inches before closing it again.
‘The sun is coming up.’
‘Are you going to talk to the authorities again?’ she asked him.
‘Maybe an hour before the first deadline, just to remind them that they have an hour left.’
‘And they’ll say that they need more time.’
‘Of course. And I’ll say they’ve had plenty of time and that they still have sixty minutes.’
‘Can I ask you a question?’
He shrugged. ‘If you want.’
‘How did you do that North Eastern flight?’
She watched the change from disinterest to alertness.
Petra said, ‘Serra told me about it.’
She could see that he wasn’t sure whether to believe her. But she stayed relaxed, as though it didn’t matter to her whether he told her or not. ‘I’m just curious,’ she added. ‘From a professional point of view, you understand.’
Gradually, his initial suspicion waned. ‘It wasn’t difficult.’
‘Serra said it was a shaped Semtex charge. Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you get it in place at JFK?’
‘Ground crew.’
Petra glanced at his jacket, which was across the aisle from her, only a yard away. ‘That can’t have been easy, not with the security and everything.’
‘It wasn’t as difficult as you might imagine. To begin with, we chose not to try to infiltrate. Instead, we recruited from those already on the staff. I was only involved at the end. But overall, it wasn’t satisfactory.’
Petra frowned. ‘Why not? The outcome was what you wanted.’
‘But the process was too inflexible. It involved too many people, which meant too many risks. We were looking for something else.’
‘We?’
His response was typically enigmatic. ‘I am just one person in a chain.’
With Reza Mohammed at one end, Petra saw the chain extending to the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, and to Kamal Ibrahim Karim himself.
‘Aren’t we all?’
‘Not you,’ he sniped. ‘Money is the only master you have.’
‘It’s still a line of command.’ Reza Mohammed shrugged again. Petra said, ‘I don’t see that money is necessarily a worse master than religion.’
‘Perhaps not. But what does religion have to do with anything?’
‘Isn’t that what this is all about for you? Slaying the enemies of Islam?’
When Reza Mohammed looked at her she was unable to interpret his expression. ‘You would like to think that, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘It would make it easier for you if that was true.’
‘It doesn’t matter to me one way or the other.’
‘I’ve lived in Europe. I know what it’s like to be a Muslim in Europe. I’ve encountered the inherent racism of Europeans, I understand the stereotypes, the demonizing. We’re barbaric savages. We’re fanatics. We’re animals from the Third World.’
‘You’re paranoid.’
‘You think so?’ Petra didn’t reply. ‘The Cold War is finished but the West still needs an enemy. Israel needs an enemy outside its borders so that it doesn’t have to confront the threat inside its borders. Europe needs a common enemy to prevent fragmentation. Powerful American arms manufacturers need an enemy to keep profits high. Fear works. That is why Islam is inaccurately portrayed as a religion of intolerance and aggression. Because it needs to be seen like that.’
‘I thought you said this wasn’t a matter of religion.’
‘It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean that Muslims aren’t portrayed as monsters.’
‘Well if it isn’t religion that’s brought you here, what is it?’
He paused for several seconds before finding an answer. ‘If I die, it will not be in the name of Islam. It will not be for the glory of Allah the Avenger.’
‘What will it be in the name of, then?’
The question was met with silence. Reza Mohammed stared into Petra’s eyes. The anger she had expected to see was not there. Nothing was there.
Eventually, she said, ‘You said you were looking for something else.’
He frowned. ‘What?’
‘NE027.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘So the North Eastern flight wasn’t a success, then?’
‘It was a success but it also showed weaknesses. If I had not placed the device myself—if it had been placed in another part of the aircraft—it might have failed to destroy it. And infiltrating ground crews—or recruiting from them—was never considered a realistic proposition for the future. It’s not something tha
t can be easily repeated. Indeed, it’s not easily achieved in the first place.’
Petra thought about Reza Mohammed’s course at Imperial College and of the course taken by Mustafa Sela. She wondered whether she was now looking at both of them. Sitting in front of him inside a 747, it was easy to picture him in a lecture theatre studying aircraft structure, seeking out the points of greatest vulnerability.
She said, ‘I don’t see how you can get around that.’
‘Around what?’
‘The difficulty of recruiting from ground crews. Or infiltrating them.’
‘Actually, it’s easy, although it’s not something you could ever do,’ he told her, the scorn in his voice quite evident. ‘You have to have volunteers who are prepared to die for something they believe in. I know that as a mercenary, you believe in money, but would you die for it?’
‘Of course not. To a mercenary, Heaven is here on earth and it’s paid for in cash.’
‘Well, that is the difference, then.’
‘A suicide bomber still has to get the device on board.’
Reza Mohammed was dismissive. ‘That’s the easy part. Did you know that I walked on to an Alitalia flight from Rome with a gun in my hand-luggage once? It’s true. About two years ago. I was astonished when I got to London to find it sitting in the bottom of the bag. I don’t know who put it there. I think it was a careless mistake probably. Having said that, I was not astonished that I managed to get through Rome’s security with it. And a bomb is so much easier. You take it in parts. A trigger housed in a personal stereo, perhaps. The timer—if you even need a timer—could be a cheap watch. After that, some batteries. And then the explosive itself, of course. If it’s liquid, you could take it in any kind of container. A bottle of contact-lens cleansing solution, for instance.’
‘Then you go into the toilet, put the pieces together, put them in a bag and…’
‘And then place it. That is the important thing. On an aircraft like this, in some parts of the cabin, you’re sitting just eighteen inches above the fuel tanks. And do you know how strong the cabin floor is? Not very. It’s tested to take the pressure from a woman’s stiletto heel and not much more. The North Eastern flight was an experiment. A starting point. It was a one-off that could not be multiplied or repeated, but it pointed the way forward.’
‘To what?’
‘Everything that is happening now.’
* * *
It’s as though I’ve been winded; I’ve forgotten how to breathe. I remember something Anne Mitchell once said to me, just as I was making the transformation from Stephanie to Lisa. She said, ‘You don’t know what true degradation is until you have to discount yourself, only to find out it makes no difference.’ I feel something similar now. This is a new low.
That my parents—that any of those on board NE027—should have died in the way that they did is too dreadful to forgive or forget. But that they should have died in what was, essentially, a partially successful experiment makes it even worse. I never thought that was possible. And, in a sense, it shouldn’t be. After all, they’re dead. What does it matter now? Nothing will bring them back.
But the feeling will not be denied. The emptiness inside me now seems, somehow, deeper than before, in the same way that as a child, when I tried to envisage outer space, I could not cope with the concept of infinity. Space had to come to an end somewhere, it seemed to me. But if it did, what kind of barrier would bring it to an end and what would exist beyond the barrier? Perhaps this is the equation that best expresses how I feel right now: sorrowful and hollow multiplied by infinity plus one.
The shock of Reza Mohammed’s revelation plunges me into turmoil. I hope that it doesn’t make its way to the surface. I try to gather my scattered emotions and focus on the task ahead.
I tell him that I’ll be in the First Class cabin if he wants me. I rise from the arm-rest on which I have been perched. I stretch and carelessly brush his jacket with my hip. It slips to the floor. I pick it up and replace it. He never sees the sleight of hand as I pluck the disk from the inner pocket he patted earlier. This is a skill that Magenta House never taught me. This is a skill I inherited from Lisa. The last time I used it, I stole wallets from two drunken Bulgarian businessmen in a seedy hotel in King’s Cross.
This is easier.
* * *
Alone in the First Class cabin, Petra sat in one of the seats and opened the lap-top. The need to know basis. That was how Serra had dispensed information. Reza Mohammed was correct. The data contained on the disk had no obvious value. But Petra knew that the files were hosts for a series of hidden programmes, including one for implementing encryption and one for reversing encryption. Serra had designed the system so that the lap-top and the disk operated in tandem. Without engaging with its counterpart, neither functioned fully. Together, they formed a perfectly self-contained system. It had been Rosie who had explained to Petra how to search for the hidden components.
She stumbled from one error to the next, as she slowly made herself familiar with the host directories and the sub-directories contained within them. She examined the FDS/12 folder on the lap-top. FAT, FAT/1 and FAT/2 were empty, as they had first appeared when she had seen them in Serra’s apartment, but FAT/3 was not. She tried to open the file and was asked for a password. She remembered the very basic fourteen-letter code: LESFILSDUSABAH. Sure enough, the screen cleared and was replaced by a page headed FAT/3. Beneath it were twelve lines and fifty columns of jumbled numbers and letters. At the bottom of the page she was offered a choice: Proceed or Cancel. She pressed ‘Proceed’. The screen asked for another password. She entered LESFILSDUSABAH again but was rejected. She tried SONSOFSABAH, then SERRAMARC and various other versions of his name, before moving on to the names of the terrorists. For half an hour, she fed guesses into the machine but was constantly denied.
Her concentration was fragmented. The lingering aftertaste of Reza Mohammed’s revelation combined with the fear of discovery undermined her ability to focus. Every few seconds, she looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching, and the longer she remained unobserved, the tenser she became.
She turned her attention to the twelve lines of the FAT/3 file to see if she could detect any kind of pattern among them. Again, she came up with nothing. An image of her parents came to her. Standing in the field that ran down from the house to the stream, they were smiling at her. It was a cold bright day, the wind blowing the grass into a shimmering sea. She returned to the password and entered NE027. The two letters and three digits waited in the box for her confirmation. She looked at the twelve rows and fifty columns above, the senseless grid of six hundred. She pressed the button to proceed.
A mass of letters and numbers—more than half, Petra estimated—were suddenly highlighted in blue. Then they vanished. Those that remained moved around the screen, sorting themselves, assuming new positions. When the screen settled, there were still twelve lines, but the columns had been reduced to nineteen in number. Petra looked at the first line. BA117LHR0845JFK1125. British Airways flight BA117, departing Heathrow at eight forty five, due in to New York’s Kennedy Airport at eleven twenty five. She looked down the list. Two flights from Frankfurt, three from Amsterdam, one from Paris, one from Zurich, one from Gatwick, four from Heathrow. Three of the flights belonged to British Airways, three belonged to American Airlines, two to United, two to Delta, one to Lufthansa, one to KLM. Ten of the dozen were due to be airborne by midday GMT, all twelve were scheduled to be in the air an hour later. Beneath the FAT/3 heading there was a date. Today.
Contact-lens cleansing solution and the Anglo-Egyptian Cargo Company on the Earls Court Road. She remembered now that in the room at the back, among the rest of the stored merchandise, there had been two cases of bottles of contact-lens cleansing solution. She also remembered cheap Casio wristwatches and batteries in bulk, and although she couldn’t recall personal stereos for triggers, they could easily have been concealed within another product. Or perhaps th
ey were merely stored elsewhere. The point was, Reza Mohammed couldn’t have known that she had been inside the Anglo-Egyptian Cargo Company. When he talked of bomb assembly, he made it sound theoretical, whereas Petra now knew that he was being specific.
The Sons of Sabah. Serra had not been lying when he’d told her that she had only seen some of them. She should have known; the signs were there. There had only ever been ten hijackers but the FAT/3 list had always run to twelve.
Whether it was Serra or Kamal Ibrahim Karim, the architect of the plan had understood what was really important about terrorism: striking disproportionate fear into the hearts of the innocent. Reza Mohammed had almost laughed when Petra had stated the obvious; that there was no possibility that the American government would release Sheikh Abdul Kamal Qassam. That was the whole point. The objective of the Sons of Sabah was not to get Qassam released. The objective was to terrorize.
At midday, Reza Mohammed would make contact with the authorities once again and ask if Qassam was free. They would say that the request was impossible, or they would stall, at which point, Mohammed would presumably break off communications and wait for events to unfold. The dozen destroyed aircraft and the four thousand dead would be seen as punishment. High in the mountain passes that form the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, the reclusive and nomadic Kamal Ibrahim Karim would have his victory.
In truth, he was the man who had murdered Petra’s parents, her sister and a brother. But she no longer cared about that. Karim was faceless and remote, an anonymous monster in another part of the world. But the faces of the passengers on the twelve flights due to leave Europe later in the morning were real. She knew them all. In their homes and hotels, they would be waking up now, having breakfast, packing. The businessmen would be trying to shave minutes from their busy schedules. The tourists would be looking forward to holidays that were about to start, or enjoying the warm embers of holidays that were about to end. There would be those who were excited at the prospect of reunion and those who were leaden-hearted at the prospect of separation. For the flight crews and cabin crews, today was supposed to be nothing more than another day at the office. These people were her family, they were Martin Douglas, they were her.
