by Henry Porter
In this case the smaller Citation had been flying below the path of the Boeing and the separation distance between the two aircraft had been less than three nautical miles. Forty seconds before the plane encountered the vortex and went into a roll the pilot was heard to say, ‘Gee, we almost ran over a seven fifty-seven.’
Harland made a note to ask about the separation distance. He seemed to remember that the Falcon had been about eighty seconds behind the Boeing 767. It had stuck in his mind because it seemed such a short time. What did that mean in terms of distance? In the Montana crash the Cessna had been seventy-four seconds behind the Boeing and had begun to roll at a distance of 2.78 nautical miles. So it seemed to Harland that the Falcon might just have been in the danger zone, under three nautical miles from the Boeing.
A few minutes later, his eye was caught by some general notes on wake-vortices. He read that the wing designs of the Boeing 747, 757 and 767 all left unbroken trailing edges from the fuselage to the ailerons. This was what caused the vortex to form. But wind conditions had to be right. Firstly, the wind speed had to be very low. A vortex which lasted over eighty-five seconds could only be generated in a wind of less than five knots. A wind of between five and ten knots cut the life expectancy of the vortex to under thirty-five seconds. He thought back to his struggle in the East River and instantly realised that the wind had been much stronger than ten knots.
He remembered looking up at the Manhattan skyline in the distance and feeling the ice particles against his face. The sea was choppy. The waves lapped against the mound of soil where Griswald’s seat had come to rest.
He read on and found that the wind direction was also crucially important. A vortex usually lingered longest in a cross-wind that tended to increase the rotational energy. If the wind was against the rotational direction of the vortex it would radically reduce its life.
He closed the site and took Clark’s card from his wallet. He dialled and heard the helpful but slightly self-important voice of Murray Clark answer.
‘What can I do for you?’ he said. Harland smiled. Unlike Ollins, Clark had not been got at.
‘I don’t want to bother you. It’s just that the Secretary-General has asked me to find out how things are going along – on a purely informal basis, you understand.’
‘I don’t have much more to add to what is already in the public domain.’
‘Can I ask you some questions? They’re pretty basic.’
‘Shoot. I have some time,’ said Clark.
‘The Secretary-General has a theory that the plane might have been low on fuel and he wonders if that has been considered in the investigation.’
Clark sighed. Harland could almost hear the word idiot.
‘No,’ said Clark. ‘We’ve ruled out that possibility. The plane refuelled in DC. The extent of the fire indicates that it was carrying plenty of fuel.’
‘What about pilot fatigue? Apparently there’s been some concern at the Federal Aviation Authority that pilots are flying when they’re exhausted. There was a crash a couple of years back when the pilot was practically asleep at the controls.’
‘No, no. The pilot of your plane was well rested. A medical exam two months back shows he enjoyed good health. And his safety record was impeccable.’
‘So it’s got to be the … what do you call it?’
‘Wake-vortex. Yes, that is our thinking.’
‘The planes were too close, then?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Clark. Harland could tell his mind was elsewhere.
‘The separation distance for the two aircraft was, what? Eighty seconds? What does that mean in distance?’
‘A little over three nautical miles.’
‘So normally that would be in the safety margin?’
‘Yes,’ said Clark, more alert now having noticed the change of gear in Harland’s questions.
‘What was the wind speed at the time?’
‘Why are you asking these questions, Mr Harland? It sounds to me as if you have an agenda.’
‘It is not my agenda, it’s the agenda of the Secretary-General and the Security Council.’ He added the ‘Security Council’ without a murmur from his conscience.
‘I thought this was an off-the-record conversation.’
‘It is. And I will have an off-the-record conversation with the Secretary-General when we’ve finished speaking.’ Damn, thought Harland. That was stupid. There was no point trying to intimidate the man.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clark formally. ‘I feel I should seek advice before commenting on these matters to you.’
‘Oh, forgive me. I’m sorry. I was getting carried away. I don’t want to compromise your professional standards.’ He waited.
‘As it’s you asking, Mr Harland,’ said Clark at last, ‘perhaps I should help if I can. But this is background?’
‘Surely.’
‘What is it you want to know exactly?’
‘Just the wind speed,’ he said innocently, then added, ‘And the wind direction.’
‘Let me see, the wind speed was between fifteen and twenty knots, gusting twenty-five to thirty.’
‘And the wind direction?’
‘South-westerly, as I recall. Yes, that would be it, southwesterly.’
Harland had what he wanted. He burned to get off the phone but rather than alert Clark, he thought of something else to ask.
‘When will you make your final report?’
‘Any day now.’
‘Thank you so much. I’d better not waste any more of your time.’
He knew that it hadn’t been a particularly subtle interrogation, but that didn’t matter now. The wind speed was far in excess of the necessary conditions for wake-vortex, and the wind direction was completely wrong. He would check with a map, but he was certain that the landing runway pointed southwest – that’s why the Manhattan skyline was way off to the right when he first struggled out of his seat. The plane had landed near enough smack into the wind and there could have been no side wind to give the vortex extra life.
The theory, then, was a fraud, but maybe the NTSB was not consciously guilty. It was possible that the readings from the flight data recorder so perfectly mimicked the action of a plane in the grip of a vortex that the board had opted for the only reasonable explanation – wind speed and wind direction notwithstanding.
He added a couple of paragraphs on the crash and then phoned Jaidi’s office. Eventually a superior-sounding assistant came on the line and warned Harland that the Secretary-General wouldn’t be able to read it for at least five days. Harland protested, to no avail.
He hung up, reminding himself that Jaidi was probably working with at least three of the governments who’d helped protect Kochalyin. These days the international agenda shifted with each revolution of the planet – an air crash that had seemed so tragic and puzzling a few weeks before was now of only minor historical interest. No one was waiting for his report. Indeed they’d probably prefer that it hadn’t been written. And even if the great master of mobility and inclusion did read it, Harland had to face the fact that there was little hope of anything being done about Kochalyin. He would adapt and avoid and survive because he knew the global attention span diminished by the day.
But there were still one or two things he could do to hurt Kochalyin. He copied the report into another e-mail file and sent it to Professor Norman Reeve’s address. Then he thought of the journalist at the press conference in the UN. Parsons was his name: he worked for the New York Times. If he delivered the report to him with background on Tomas’s operation to expose SIS and CIA operations in Europe, it would, he was sure, make a hell of a newspaper story.
So he wasn’t beaten yet. Not by any means.
Tomas had had a couple of good days – just two nasty spasms. The big problem now was the dreams – the dreams about movement. Some mischievous part of his subconscious had decided that he should only dream about the things he used to do. Last night he was cross-country skiing
as he’d done in the mountains as a boy. He could feel the sweat on his face in the cold air as he pushed himself, arms and legs working to maximum exertion. He could see the winter landscape in every detail and taste the hot, sweet red wine that he shared with his mother at the end of each trip. He dreamed about walking, running and touching things, and each time his subconscious articulated the exact pleasure that he would never again enjoy.
He looked out of the window at his new view. A faint print of the half-moon was just visible in the late afternoon sky. Across the square, lights were being switched on in the offices and a woman had opened a window and was now leaning out to smoke. In the premature twilight of the square a figure in a bulky overcoat was standing beneath a cherry tree on which were still hanging a few vivid orange leaves. Tomas had gazed at the cherry often since his bed had been moved.
His attention returned to the room. His mother had come in and was saying an overly polite goodbye to Harriet. She smiled at him and briskly attached the electrodes to his head, switched on the computer and manoeuvred the screen towards him, blocking out most of the square.
He urged his mind to fill with hot thought and with little difficulty pushed the floating white light to hit the new e-mail icon. There was one message on his new server. He read the first paragraph, and smiled inwardly, then moved on to Harland’s description of the moments before the flight. It certainly was an intriguing problem. He would enjoy working on it later.
27
STRANGE MEETING
Harland left Century House by the underground car park and walked eastwards through the dismal quiet of a public housing estate. He’d told Cuth’s driver to stay with Eva, who between spells with Tomas was looking for an apartment near the hospital to rent for a few weeks. They were beginning to feel they were getting in the way at Century House.
A few minutes later he left the housing estate to cross a main road stalled with traffic, and merged with the crowds of commuters at Waterloo station. It was then that he sensed he was being followed, but this time by a more expert team. He stopped on the main concourse of the station, bought an evening newspaper and took the escalator down to the Underground, returning to the concourse on the upward escalator. He didn’t spot anyone, but he felt the familiar weight at the back of his neck. He wondered whether they had picked him up at Century House, or later.
He paid for an all-zones travel card and for the next hour or so hopped on and off a dozen trains. Then he began to notice that the watchers were no longer bothering to hide themselves. As he travelled round the loop of the Circle Line he realised that there were now five individuals stuck to him. Every move he made they followed. Eventually he confronted a tall man in his mid-thirties who was carrying a knapsack, and asked what the hell he thought he was doing. The passengers around them looked on with the disengaged interest of London commuters. The man didn’t reply but simply smiled back at Harland as though he was some kind of lunatic. At Victoria he got off and made his way to the street exit. As he fed his ticket into the automatic gate another man, in suit and tie, approached him.
‘What the fuck do you want?’ Harland demanded.
‘Mr Vigo would like a word.’
‘What for? To play charades in some clapped-out building?’
‘No, sir. He suggests you meet in a place you know.’
‘Where?’
‘Carlton House Terrace.’
‘Then why all this fucking around?’
‘We were looking for an appropriate moment, sir.’
‘Bollocks you were.’
‘There’s a car outside. We can be there in a few minutes.’
‘I’ve been through this before. I’ll go by cab, if you don’t mind. Number three Carlton House Terrace, right?’
The man nodded.
Twenty minutes later his cab pulled up outside the familiar porch in St James’s. Nearly thirty years before Harland had been there, invited by a man who called himself Fletcher. There had been three interviews in all and at the final session Fletcher had asked him to sign the Official Secrets Act, at which point his induction into MI6 had begun.
It was obvious that Vigo wanted to give Harland an unambiguous signal, firstly to demonstrate that he couldn’t move in London without being followed and, more important, that he, Vigo, was no longer running a crew of irregulars. He had access both to a full surveillance team and official SIS premises.
Harland was shown into the grand but sparsely furnished room where he had once sat across from Mr Fletcher and his two silent colleagues on a warm spring afternoon. Vigo came in almost immediately.
‘Hello, Bobby. It’s good of you to take the time. I wanted to have a talk in what are rather changed circumstances.’
‘Which are?’ Harland noticed that the look of bustling confidence had returned to Vigo’s expression.
‘We met under rather difficult circumstances last time. We didn’t perhaps have the kind of discussion that we needed to have. I accept this was my fault and I’d like the chance to clear things up now. That’s all.’
‘What do you want to clear up, Walter?’
‘Any false impression you might have received.’
Harland laughed.
‘I want to persuade you we have been working on the same side all along, Bobby.’
‘No Walter, that doesn’t work. You work for Kochalyin. I work for the UN, which despite its faults is still a force for good. You work for a man who has killed countless numbers of people.’
‘I do wish you would stop being so dramatic, Bobby. What you say is simply not true.’
‘You expect me to believe that after you tried to threaten me with an Official Secrets charge; after your band of occasionals chased me round London; after my son – yes, I know you must know he’s my son – was tracked down using special equipment at GCHQ to locate his telephone? Walter, you’re in this up to your neck and just because Tomas is no longer a threat to your grubby arrangements, don’t think that I or the UN have any intention of hushing things up.’
Vigo sat with his hands across his stomach and produced a look of elaborate sympathy, which also included elements of pity, indulgence and disdain.
‘That is in part why Robin has asked me to see you.’
He had dropped the name of the sainted chief of SIS, the untarnished Sir Robin Teckman. That meant something too. Harland sighed.
‘Okay, Walter, spit it out. What’s been going on? Some kind of battle at SIS in which, no doubt, you have triumphed?’
‘You know I’m not at liberty to discuss these things.’
‘But the answer is yes, isn’t it? That’s what you’re trying to tell me in your sly little way with all this – the crack surveillance troops, tea and cakes at Carlton House Terrace and using Teckman’s name. What happened to Miles Morsehead and Tim Lapthorne, eh? Taken early retirement; fixed up with undemanding posts in the oil industry?’
Vigo said nothing.
‘So,’ said Harland, ‘all that crap over Christmas was part of some SIS mud fight. You had your own pantomime season, Walter, mustering your little army and playing spies. You do know we’re dealing with a war criminal? It’s no more complicated than that – a very sadistic man who has killed an awful lot of people. You know that Oleg Kochalyin was the man who did me over in ’89?’ Harland looked at him hard. ‘Yes, you bloody well did know. And you knew the reason behind it, didn’t you?’
‘I guessed at both, Bobby. I had no definite knowledge, certainly not enough to inform you that these were certain facts.’
‘Did you know that Tomas was my son?’
‘No, and we had no idea he was responsible for the transmissions.’
‘That’s rubbish. You knew. You must have known. That’s why GCHQ helped track the signal from his phone.’
‘You’re wrong, Bobby, and you’d be well advised to keep such idiocies to yourself.’
‘Then how on earth did they find him on the Embankment?’
‘They followed him from your si
ster’s house. When he arrived early, they realised he was waiting for someone – a contact. That turned out to be you, which is why they opened fire when you arrived. We would have tried to give you protection but you managed to give my team the slip, and of course we didn’t know what he looked like so he was able to leave your sister’s house without being spotted by us.’
‘But why didn’t they kill me at the river? Why haven’t they tried to kill me since?’
‘I think they have. We heard about Zikmund Myslbek’s death. We know that your journey after that was pretty fraught. In fact in many ways it’s surprising that you made it back here. As far as the shooting at the Embankment goes, I think it’s fair to say they thought you had been hit and were floating down the river. Anyway, by that time I gather the two unfortunate constables had arrived on the scene and the gunmen had to make good their escape. Believe me, we really were trying to protect you.’
‘Crap,’ snapped Harland. ‘You were using me. You thought I knew a lot more about those coded transmissions than I did and you were using me as a bait.’ He thought for a few moments. Vigo watched him working it out. ‘But you had limited resources because someone in SIS was telling Kochalyin what was going on. That’s why you were working with your little band of trusties. In fact I’d guess that a considerable faction was embroiled with Kochalyin in one way or another. But then the baffling part of it for you and everyone else was why the messages kept on being transmitted. You couldn’t work it out, could you? You knew I wasn’t responsible and you knew Lars Edberg was in hospital on life support.
‘It was at that point your interest moved on. The Lipnik pictures were old hat. You couldn’t give a fuck about them because they only represented a tiny fraction of what Mortz and Tomas had put together. You were obsessed with a far greater threat and also a far greater prize. The threat was to your beloved service which was hurting from the sheer amount of detail that Tomas published – the eavesdropping operations against your competitors in Europe, the undermining of contract negotiations, the men and women hired to leak economic plans. And let’s not forget the planes that left Ostend, collected their cargo of arms in Burgas and flew on to supply the nasty little wars in Africa. You couldn’t afford for any more to come out – nor could the Americans, or the Dutch or the French or the Germans or the bleeding Belgians. So you had to stop it, and on the morning I paid my visit to your house, you knew you were within an ace of doing so. That’s what that meeting was about: you were briefing your band of trusties after the latest batch of transmissions.’
