[Sequoia]

by Adrian Dawson

  Which is why, as she took her steerage seat next to Lara on the 8:52, the overtly fat German lady scowled, rooted inside an imitation Gucci handbag and sprayed a blast of cheap perfume as surreptitiously as she could. She knew that she would not just be breathing the stale, noxious air which surrounded the young girl now, she would be breathing it for the entire flight; over and over. Re-badged and repackaged by a system whose hunger was acutely disproportionate to the meal that two hundred and forty five exhaling passengers now placed like a sacrificial offering before it.

  Lara felt almost as dirty as she looked, inside and out. She had been running for a number of long days and cold nights, and yet outer appearances were no longer of any consequence to her. She knew that just one more night would finally deliver her to the place she needed to be. After three long and painful years, Lara was finally going home. At least, she hoped she was, though she took nothing for granted. Not any more. Not when there was still every possibility that somehow, in a manner she had yet to calculate, she would die en-route.

  Lara carried enough fear inside her emaciated frame to fill many people’s lifetimes, yet she held no fear of death. To die now would be the easy way out she reasoned; a blessed release from the consequences her naiveté now threatened to unleash. Deep down she was aware that she would even have taken her own life in the days that had passed, had she thought that it might help make anything in this world right again. Perhaps suicide would have brought peace to her mind and allowed her to do the one thing she had wanted to do for so very long now; close her eyes. To the horror of the past; to the greater horror of the future. The things that might happen, unless she made it home.

  Not a fear of death. She knew that much. Only of living.

  Living with the consequences of what she had done.

  She knew that He knew; both that she had been in Germany for the preceding three days, and that she had now - somehow - managed to shuffle aboard the flight to New York. He would know because He always knew. What she did. What she was attempting to do. What she thought and, more often than not, what she felt. He would have followed her every step of the way. He would have watched every futile move she had made and sneered at her attempts from the shadows. She had not seen Him, of course, not once. But then she wouldn’t have, would she? Why would He have bothered to create the shadows that spread like plague across this world unless He could immerse himself completely within them? But He was there alright; He was in everything. Watching. Waiting. Planning.

  And nobody else even knew.

  With eyes narrowed and desperate, she looked back through the first flakes of January snow and stared at lights blazing from the terminal. Slowly and carefully she scrutinised every silhouette formed in every window, wondering if He was cursing Himself for letting her escape. She smiled gently, hoping so.

  She caught her breath. Letting her escape. Of all the words, why had she selected those? Her smile disappeared, fell back to earth as though leaden weights had been attached to her jaw. Letting her… Allowing her… As though somehow this entire escape was delivered with His express permission; to His end. Was she still, even now, kidding herself that she wasn’t well and truly fucked?

  She tipped her head back and sighed. Her arms burned and she clenched her fists and teeth, knuckles white as polished enamel, teeth nothing like. Releasing her hands, she rubbed each of her inner elbows in turn. Even now she had no idea exactly what it was that they had systematically pumped into her, only that they had done it purely to control her mind, to influence her feelings. To keep her calm. Malleable. Was it possible then that even now the drugs were acting to accentuate her fears? Should she dismiss the paranoia she was feeling inside and finally make some attempt to cleanse her thoughts? After all, she was finally on her way. She was free. Surely she would not even have made it this far if she was not going to make it all the way? Wasn’t the fact that she was actually aboard the plane proof enough that she had somehow escaped His grasp?

  No, she decided, not yet. Paranoia aside she would definitely have been followed. She must have been. He planned for every eventuality; that was what He did. In reality that was all He did. He planned, and that was how He managed to operate with such unbelievable efficiency. Which only left her wondering what plan He might be following now, and why it was that He had allowed her to get this far.

  As the engines started to build and the terminal finally disappeared from view she breathed a sigh of hope and relief. If this was ‘it’ then ‘it’ was her final journey; the one that would form the immovable barrier she needed between her mistakes and her one and only chance to rectify them. She hoped. She started to pray, then stopped herself when she realised that she no longer knew exactly who it was that she was praying to.

  The unknowing world which sheltered beyond the glass fell under the shroud of darkness and Lara was presented with an image she had been quite unprepared to see; an image she no longer felt comfortable with. She saw, for the first time in over eighteen months, her own reflection. The window had framed her face into an unwelcome portrait, that of an older self, and she realised for the first time that she would never be viewed as what she had been at the point she had left her home; a child. Somewhere along the line she had become a woman, but without the certainty of knowing when that most important of changes had occurred. From the darkened glass this new Lara stared intently back at her; her face little more than a hollow, soulless shell. It made her feel uncomfortable just to be seated in her own company.

  The long mousy hair that had once danced around her face with loose curls had been replaced with close shaven black stubble, her pathetic attempt at disguise. Fine lines spread from cracked lips to sallow cheeks like cracks in glass and the eyes; the windows to a lost soul, had been boarded up with cold reserve. There was no shine left, no hope or excitement and certainly no clear vision of a future. She could not believe that she had changed so much in such a short space of time. Where was the fresh-faced girl she had always assumed that she still was? The girl whose smile, in photographs added to flesh-out mundane body copy, had brought life to numerous newspaper stories of her father in days gone by.

  Days she had hated.

  Days she missed.

  When the plane finally lifted from the white satin runway, climbing steeply into the contrasting black of a winter sky, she finally understood that the Lara she had once been, had been and gone. Possibly forever. What worried her most was that she had yet to discover who it was that would ultimately be taking her place.

  Craving fragments of normality, she picked the headphones from the elasticated holder of the seat in front and began to unravel the wires in quiet therapy. A previous passenger, no doubt in their excited hurry to leave the plane, had left them tangled in a complex web and she realised that it would take her a long time to get them straight.

  A long time. Like the last few days of her life it would take a lot of patience and a desire not to be beaten.

  She just had to believe she could do it.

  Though she was unaware at the time, and though she would never be granted the opportunity to learn, the instant Lara placed the plugs in her ears and turned on the radio was, coincidentally, the instant that the plane reached eight thousand feet and the pressure inside the cabin finally stabilised.

  Flight 320 flying Frankfurt to New York was fully laden but, like all commercial flights, accurate manifests ensured that everything on board was accounted for. Everything. According to the personnel manifests, there were three members of the flight crew, two pursers and eleven flight attendants serving two

  hundred and forty five passengers. Similarly; the hold and baggage manifests for the flight showed that on this occasion the Boeing 747 was carrying almost twenty tons of cargo including military mail, over one hundred bags of commercial courier mail and 340 passenger suitcases.

  Except... one of those manifests was wrong.

  There were actually 341 suitcases. It might only be a slight error, but the harsh truth w
as that manifests possessed no sliding scale. Wrong was wrong. Wrong indicated a breach. A dangerous breach.

  Unknown to anyone on board, least of all to Lara, as the required altitude was reached another piece of technology inside that single undocumented suitcase had activated a switch, one with much darker intent than the one controlling in-flight entertainment. A barometric trigger - activated simply by the surrounding air reaching the desired pressure level - clicked into place with a quiet, mechanical lack of remorse.

  The switch started a digital timer which immediately began to count downward from 45.00 minutes. Had it been necessary, that setting would have allowed the suitcase to pass through Frankfurt’s thirty minute security pressurisation chambers unchallenged. After which it would simply reset. To those sitting many feet above the hold the innocuous click was inaudible. There would be no warnings. As was the case with people who operated with unbelievable efficiency there would be no clues, no prints and no trace.

  As she finally felt the confidence to succumb to a deep sleep, its pull was so great that Lara felt as though she might never awake. Settling in for the long flight ahead, nobody aboard Flight 320 could have envisaged the irony of such thoughts.

  In her mind as she drifted, the words of her father, still repeating: Retreat. A carefully concealed preparation for attack... And with every cycle, the phrase became shorter, ultimately condensing itself into the only word that really mattered. She realised that it was no longer the voice of her father. It was Him; her Nemesis, attacking her in a thousand diverse voices. She tried in vain to convince herself that the tones He used were not displaying an increasing sense of delight in the futility of her actions.

  Retreat. An appropriately dirty word for what Lara had somehow forced herself to do. Retreat was not any form of attack, no matter how hard she tried to convince herself. Retreat was retreat. It was the act of running away. She had not ‘retreated’ from school on numerous occasions as a child any more than she had ‘retreated’ from home three years ago. She had run away. And now, in whatever ragged clothes she might choose to dress it up, that was what she was doing yet again. She was running. The only real difference was that this time she was leaving behind the one person in this world that she felt she had ever loved unconditionally.

  She was leaving behind her son.

  Three rows behind, Father Emile Tomazo looked away from the in-flight magazine and carefully removed his glasses. He closed his eyes for an instant and pondered a journey which would culminate in a talk to the underprivileged of the Big Apple’s Latin Quarter. And yet now, having spoken briefly to the young girl, it seemed as though his entire trip might somehow have been tainted. Opening his eyes again he looked over the seat-backs and watched the girl in reverse three-quarter view, her own eyes closing and her breathing slow and heavy. He knew that she carried a weight with her and he felt shamed that he had not taken a little more time to alleviate it. Some words of spiritual comfort might have offered some respite from her fears, perhaps. Somehow, he doubted it. Even so, perhaps when the flight was settled and the seatbelt lights were extinguished his sense of duty to his Lord would make him amble down and deliver some anyway.

  He pictured the screams he had seen in her eyes at the time she had almost begged her question toward him, her fragile voice possessing all the weakness and desperation he had always assimilated with a confessional. Worse, he could almost feel her grip on his arm again, her slender fingers desperate and tight.

  “If I knew nothing of God or Sin, would I still go to hell?”

  Though taken aback by the question, and sceptical as to how it might relate to her ragged appearance, it had only taken Father Tomazo the briefest moment to reply as honestly as he could.

  “Of course not,” he had said. “Not if you did not know.”

  And her eyes had instantly lost themselves and become cold. Not at him, presumably, but at the institution with which his waxen collar affiliated him. As she turned away, the contempt in her voice had been some of the harshest Father Tomazo had felt in fifteen years of serving his God.

  “Then why the fuck do you people tell us about them then?”

  Promising himself that he would do whatever he could for the girl, Father Tomazo replaced his glasses and turned back to the banality of the magazine. She was a soul craving direction. He had seen many before; he would see many again and his mind was made up. He would do what he was duty-bound to do - offer whatever guidance she would allow.

  He sighed heavily and flicked the page without reading the words, unaware that at the precise moment he did, every person on board Flight 320 had exactly thirty-nine minutes and thirteen seconds left to live.

  * * * * *

  Dieter Wölfe, unceremoniously slumped in what remained of the blue velour at Amsterdam Air Traffic Control Centre, was the first to sense that something was seriously wrong with 320. Fighting the fatigue of a straight-ten shift, he had been tracking the flight’s graphic representation from the instant it crossed the border between Germany and The Netherlands. Initially everything appeared as normal, a small green box with a cross in its centre representing the plane itself and a code sitting alongside indicating the squawk signal it transmitted. It told him that the plane had reached 30,000 feet, with the last six digits showing the elapsed time in seconds for that day.

  Wölfe’s shift should have been complete almost ten minutes ago, but he had reluctantly allowed his already late relief to fix coffee before taking over. As he dutifully watched the screen and struggled to keep his interest level as high as the planes themselves, something happened; something that Dieter Wölfe did not like the look of one little bit. It acted like a catapult, rocketing his heavy frame forward and opening his eyes wide. The mind might become tired over time; instinct never does.

  With the digits reading 64529.7 - 29.7 seconds past 5:55pm - the coding and the cross vanished from the screen. Completely. Then, seven or eight painfully-elongated seconds later, the green box; the one created by radar signals from the ground bouncing from the outer skin of the plane, broke into four much smaller boxes which began fanning out into almost a mile of airspace. Instinctively Wölfe reached for his radio telephone and tried to contact the aircraft’s crew. Nobody answered. He tried several times and each attempt offered the same response:

  The sound from the radio was static - the pieces on-screen, unfortunately, were not.

  He turned to Erik Feltz, the Oceanic Clearance Officer whose task had been to assign Flight 320 a track across the Atlantic, and saw that he was busy investigating his own screen. A quiet man who looked perpetually worried, Erik’s expression had gone up a notch. He looked a little scared. His track assignment had yet to be acknowledged and such an important piece of information, detailing a set route and altitude across the ocean, called for nothing short of the clearest and most precise confirmation available. Erik, it seemed, was still waiting. Like Dieter, he had similarly tried several times to radio Flight 320, but their frequency was throwing back only one thing - a dark, ominous crackle.

  Illuminated green by the bank of monitors, the two men stared at each other with a jaded disbelief, neither knowing quite what to say. Neither daring to ask the question they both wanted to ask.

  What in God’s name had just happened up there?

  Panicking, Wölfe looked around for his supervisor, Gerald Ulrich, eventually catching sight through the nicotine-stained window of his office. He was placing a telephone handset back into its cradle and shaking his head; his face creased by an expression that spoke many foreboding volumes. A few seconds later he emerged, smoothing his large moustache with measured strokes and carrying a hastily scribbled note.

  “You guys…? I just got a call from some old guy flying a Cessna into Hilversum,” he said with a concerned but distant expression. His accent was thick and slow. “Claims he’s seen some explosion above ground near Elspeet. You fellas know what traffic we have in that...?”

  He stopped dead in his tracks, his words swiftly
following suit. Fifteen years in Air Traffic Control was enough to tell Ulrich that what he had just seen of on Wölfe’s screen spelled the kind of words he had no desire to utter. The boxes were multiplying, fanning out and… ultimately… fading away. They danced on the screen like green stars in a clear night sky, their glistening beauty only serving to belie the destruction they undoubtedly represented.

  “Clipper 320,” Wölfe offered lamely, his eyes savagely transfixed and his voice involuntarily breaking into almost as many fragments as the plane he was identifying.

  It was almost a full minute before Ulrich felt able to respond. “Mother of God,” he said, gently blaspheming for the first time ever in his forty-eight year life.