“Won’t they see, though, that Farraday offered you a deal?
Doesn’t that suggest he’s trying to be fair?”
“Christ!” Pate shouted, knocking the phone away from L’Hommedieu’s ear again. “He only did that to use us—make you, the union, everyone think he was fair—can’t you see that?”
Searing was shaking his head. “The man’s loony-tunes,” he said.
L’Hommedieu nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. Not that it mattered now. He had brought out Pate’s anger and he had to defuse it. For the time being anyway. He needed to introduce some angle Pate hadn’t thought of and would have to chew on. But what? Pate had already chewed on the matter, for months probably. L’Hommedieu glanced at his notes— “Threat real? Captain dead? Weapon?”
“Mr. Pate,” he said, “This is somewhat off the subject, but airport security will want to know how you got a weapon aboard. Could you at least tell us that, since it no longer matters to you?”
Pate was quiet for a half a minute. Then he said, “You want to know if the captain’s really dead and how. So I’ll tell you straight out, pardner. He is. Because there wasn’t any alternative.
“Was he a scab?” L’Hommedieu asked.
“Affirmative,” Pate answered tersely. “But I didn’t do it for that. I did it because this ain’t no hostage situation. Not if I’m taking this thing to Phoenix to drive it into the ground.”
L’Hommedieu wrote IF on his pad. Why was Pate so evasive about his threat? To throw them off? Or was it unintentional? Was the captain dead or not? This was a crucial point, he realized.
“Is it necessary to follow through on the threat?” he asked quickly. “Couldn’t you just be bluffing it?”
“Pardner,” Pate said. “I spent the last three days asking myself the same question. And what I decided is simple. There’s no purchase in bluffing on this. None at all. I’m fording a rising river, that’s what I think.”
Now L’Hommedieu didn’t believe him, though. And he had an idea suddenly, a theory, which he hoped was right. “You know what I think?” he said. “Off the record, just between you and me? I think your story is a lot better if you live to tell it. I think you know that, too, but you’ve got to make this threat seem real, don’t you? Then you land the plane and you’re some kind of hero. No harm, no foul, as they say. No one gets hurt, statement made.” L’Hommedieu paused, got no response. “That’s what I think you’re up to,” he added.
“Think what you want,” Pate answered. “Makes no difference to me.”
“But how about just between us, you let me know what you’re really up to. We keep it a secret. Isn’t that a lot safer?”
“If that’s what you want to do, you go ahead with it,” Pate said. “Sounds good to me.”
And so they were back to square one, L’Hommedieu thought. “Was it an accident?” he tried. “Did you not actually mean to kill the Captain? Emil, maybe it wasn’t premeditated. Or is it a blank in your memory? Think about this before you answer, Emil.”
He hoped there’d be a long pause, but there wasn’t.
“I might be insane,” Pate answered, “but I won’t plead it. You just don’t get it, do you? I climb out of this plane and say I went crazy and that’s all anyone would hear.”
“Then you do plan to tell your own story.” L’Hommedieu felt triumphant. He’d finally caught him in a contradiction.
But Pate made a sound like a laugh. “We’ve been trying to tell the story for a year now—about the house that Jack built. How he’s treated us like dogs, dragged us by the leash because he figures we’re too professional to whine. But good men have killed themselves already, L’Hommedieu—just couldn’t take it no more. I almost shot myself. I sat there with the gun in my hand, and that’s when I figured it out. Amazing when you get to where you can’t stand yourself anymore. When you get that low—”
Pate stopped talking. The soft buzz of static came through the receiver.
“I’m sorry,” L’Hommedieu said. He was stunned. He could think of nothing else to say because now he did believe Pate.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Pate answered. “Everybody’s sorry like that. The five-minute sorry. I don’t need sorry. None of us do. We need to make things right, and I’m on the inside, where I can. I’m doing this for my friends and the rest of the people Farraday’s choking. I’m going after him the only way I can. I’m not just making a statement, I’m going in there and ruin the sonofabitch. And you know what, L’Hommedieu? I don’t give a hang what you or anyone else thinks about me afterwards.”
For a moment L’Hommedieu felt all hope leave him. If what Pate said was true, then there really was no point to negotiating. It was a sham; they were merely going through the proper motions, like actors who already knew the outcome to the play.
But then he saw another contradiction, an opening. A risky one, but he’d have to chance it. “You’re talking to us,” he said. “That proves something. Tell me why you’re even talking to us. What does it prove?”
“Prove?” Pate said. “It don’t prove a thing. But I’ll guarantee you the media’s grabbing this right now. So I’ll keep talking and give them more story. I want them to know exactly what’s going on. I can shut you off, but you can’t shut me off. So I’ll be checking in for the next two hours, L’Hommedieu, just like normal. And by the time I get to Sky Harbor everybody in the country’ll be watching. Especially Jack Farraday. And he’ll be feeling the rope getting tighter and tighter, and there won’t be a damn thing he can do about it.”
Desperately now, L’Hommedieu searched his memory, but there seemed absolutely nothing in it that would help him. Nothing he’d read, no case histories, no drills he’d ever been a part of. None of them had prepared him for Emil Pate, a hijacker whose means was his goal—the hijacking itself his final act.
But was he, in his own mind, dead already? L’Hommedieu found himself believing against it. Pate’s record, the tone of his voice, his willingness to talk all argued that he was at least hoping, deep inside, for another solution. Or he was bluffing. Unless he was being very clever, or very honest. And maybe honesty was the direction to take now.
“Well, you’ve got me in a terrible bind, Mr. Pate,” L’Hommedieu transmitted. “You know how this whole thing is supposed to go down. You make a demand, and we haggle over it. I try to get you to land the plane. Finally you realize what a grave mistake you’d be making, and you walk out and then you go on trial and it all comes out, just the way you want, but you’re still alive.”
“You want a demand?” Pate said. “Okay, get somebody to do to Farraday what he’s done to me. Then I’ll land and give it up.”
L’Hommedieu exchanged a questioning glance with Searing. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you,” he said to Pate. “How exactly could we effect that punishment?”
“Maybe I’ve got the only way, pardner,” Pate answered in a mocking tone. “Unless you can get somebody to shoot Farraday in the next two hours. That’s my demand.”
It was an impossible demand, and Pate knew it. Worse than no demand. L’Hommedieu felt the helplessness close in around him. He stared down at his notes, at the second parallelogram he’d drawn, the second side of the cube. He tried to think. It was a demand, though. Clear and simple. What they wanted. And most initial demands were impossible.
“Theoretically, Mr. Pate,” he transmitted, “You’re after Jack Farraday, right?
“Ain’t even theory,” Pate answered sharply.
L’Hommedieu took a deep breath as the idea came fully to him. He’d have to think fast now, keep talking and lay it all out, answering Pate’s objections before he made them. “But meeting that demand,” he went on, “it’s literally—obviously—impossible, practically speaking. You know that as well as I do, and I have to believe that it isn’t really what you want—no, you want Farraday discredited, ruined. You want him out of the business. What if we could arrange for Farraday to make amends and then quit? You’d give up hanging him
if he got out of New World, wouldn’t you? What if he’s actually up against the wall right now, and your threat would be all it would take? What if we could get him to meet you—you still holding all your cards? What if you could live to see him go out? And what if we could make certain guarantees? That’s not impossible, Emil. It’s real. Maybe there’s a way here, for you to get what you really want.”
There was a long pause this time. L’Hommedieu looked at Searing again, and at Travis. Their expressions showed him the uncertainty he hoped Pate was feeling. An uncertainty that would lead to a reasonable demand.
Then the headset crackled again. “No way,” Pate said. “No way you could arrange anything like that.”
L’Hommedieu was ready. “But if we could,” he answered immediately. “Would you land? If we could guarantee you the right to take off again?”
“L’Hommedieu,” Pate said. “This isn’t working. I know that all you care about at this stage is getting me down, so it’s the one thing I won’t agree to do. Not even as a what-if. Got that?”
Yes, L’Hommedieu knew that had been a long shot. But now he had another idea. “How about this? We get Farraday on the radio, tapes running, and he says he’ll quit. It doesn’t save you from prison, but you live. You see tomorrow. You win, and you get to see it. You see your friends win. You’d spend time in prison, but someday you’d walk out.”
Pate was quiet again, for almost ten seconds. Then he said, ‘Getting Farraday to quit—you’d find that a tough one to wrangle, pardner. That’s my point.”
“Maybe you could, though. You tell him what you’ll do.”
“You’ll never get him on the radio. Not in time.”
“Maybe we could. I think we have the power to order it, in fact.” L’Hommedieu looked up. Searing nodded.
“Emil,” he transmitted. “The principal here, Otis Searing, has just confirmed that we can order Farraday to talk to you. We’ll patch him in, wherever he is. Then you tell him what he has to do. Tell him what the options are. You make the deal. We tape the whole thing, get it to the press. What have you got to lose?”
There was another long silence. L’Hommedieu held his breath now. If Pate said no, what did he have to fall back on? The wife—Katherine Winslow? He looked up. Peggy Lofton had just come through the door to Operations, hauling a big blue National Geographic atlas. She placed it down on the table beside L’Hommedieu, open to the map of the northwestern United States, and she pressed her finger down just above the place where the corners of Oregon and Washington met the Idaho border. The town of Lewiston was there, and then, to the east, upriver, was Lapwai, in the middle of a large patch of pale pink across which was printed, “Nez Perce Indian Reservation.” Suddenly L’Hommedieu knew what had seemed familiar about the configuration of Pate’s face: It had reminded him of the image on the front of Big Chief notebooks.
But how did realizing this factor in? So what if Pate had American Indian blood? Did it make him think differently about himself? About the world?
L’Hommedieu realized he didn’t have time to think about that now. Except that Pate was taking too long to answer. Or maybe not long enough. Maybe he did need another distraction. Another dose of analysis.
“What more do you want?” L’Hommedieu transmitted, “What, besides Jack Farraday are you after, Mr. Pate? Some kind of immortality? Are you acting out a fantasy?”
“That ain’t my job to figure out,” Pate answered immediately. “It’s yours.”
“It’s yours, too,” L’Hommedieu answered. “If we could figure out the root cause of your motivation, we might be able to find some way to control it.”
The radio was silent for ten seconds. Then it crackled. “Pardner,” Pate said quietly, “I’ll try to explain this one more time. My ‘root cause’ is that Jack Farraday slipped this rope around my neck and pushed me right off the edge, okay? And I could’ve hung there and choked, just like all the rest. But instead I got my hands loose. That was the hard part. Now I’m doing the easy part. I’m climbing the rope. I’m going to hang the hangman, pardner, understand?”
“I understand you’re not an insane man,” L’Hommedieu said. He halfway meant it too. “From the way you talk, Emil, I believe you know right from wrong. And I believe you know what you’re doing is wrong.”
“Hell yes it’s wrong!” Pate answered. “I just killed a man. I’m going to kill a hundred and thirty more people, including myself. But sometimes doing wrong is the only way to make things right.”
Pate had sounded utterly sincere this time, and in the moment that followed, L’Hommedieu believed only one thing—that he meant to carry through with the threat. It left a hole in his chest where new hope had been. “But you’re going to miss the outcome,” he said, trying not to show his despair. “When it’s not even necessary to. When you’ve already made your point.”
“I’m forty-nine,” Pate answered, his voice quiet again. “I already made one huge mistake signing the merger. Except it puts me here, where I can get that monster. So I either do this now, or tomorrow I put a hole in my own head. Or kill myself in a padded cell, or drink myself dead some day in some ditch with no one knowing what happened or why. Pardner, I started this life headed that way. I won’t end up there.”
“I wish you’d tell this to Jack Farraday,” L’Hommedieu said. “Why not?”
There was no answer. Another dozen seconds passed. Then Pate said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
Then there was nothing but static.
“He’s switched off,” Otis Searing said, pulling loose his headset. “Dialed to another frequency.” He tossed the set onto the desk in front of him and then folded his arms and looked at L’Hommedieu. L’Hommedieu looked back at him, frowning.
“Can’t get him back?”
Searing shook his head. “Too many frequencies. All we can do is keep the phone patch and hope he calls us.”
L’Hommedieu nodded, but he didn’t like it. They needed a better system. “Get another call in to New World headquarters,” he told John Travis. “Tell them to tell Farraday we may need him to talk to the hijacker.”
Tucson Old Town Hilton Hotel
Albuquerque, New Mexico
17:37 GMT/10:37 MST
Three simple folding chairs had been lined up stage-left, behind the podium in the Sandia Room, the Hilton’s main banquet hall. Phillip Masters, the Operations vice-president, sat in the first. He would open the meeting. Jack Farraday sat next to Masters and would speak second. In the third chair was New World’s new vice-president in charge of public relations, Walter Frye. He would be introduced today, and tell the ninety-plus New World pilots gathered that morning just how New World intended to market its new image to the press and the networks of travel agencies around the country.
“They’ll be a tough audience, but I’ll loosen them up,” Masters had promised Frye on the flight in from Phoenix earlier that morning. He had spoken as if to reassure the new man, but now, seeing the Albuquerque audience for himself, Frye suspected that Masters had been trying to bolster his own courage. Walter Frye had faced some mean audiences before—the New York business press, clamoring shareholders, spooked managers fearing for their jobs—but none had ever held the quiet menace of these New World pilots gathered in front of him. He could understand what Masters had meant when he’d said that going into Albuquerque—the old Westar hub—was like traveling into newly conquered territory. The natives were indeed restless.
Masters got up now and called the meeting to order, but still the scowling crowd went on with their conversations, oblivious to his piping, nervous authority. He went ahead and gutted out his opening lines, finally quelling them to a hostile silence. Frye glanced over at his new boss. How small and thin Jack Farraday looked this morning. How would he cope with this room of bitter, irate people?
Walter Frye’s job at New World, the way Phil Masters had explained it three weeks ago, would be to get across the real Jack Farraday. “Jack’s been taking it hard i
n the press,” Masters had said. “They don’t even know him. And the pilots—they blame him for bad weather. He needs your credibility.”
Frye did possess plenty of credibility, something few flacks of his age and experience had managed to hang onto. Teddy-bearish, soft-spoken, and very Texan, he exuded homeliness and common sense and integrity. And it wasn’t an act. Walter Frye had always believed the best policy was to speak plainly, let his down-home nature show through. So far this philosophy had worked, taking him smoothly from the big-room cubicle to the private office at Exxon Oil. He had been naive, though, in his way. For ten years he had willed himself to see only the positives of Exxon, and of the people he had sheltered from public scrutiny. About a year ago he had found himself depressed by the whole Houston mentality.
Then, last month he had happened on a Fortune article about New World Airlines—the revitalization of the company, John H. Farraday’s problems with the unions. Basically, it had seemed to Frye that Farraday was a numbers man, a Wall Street whiz who could cope with a billion-dollar deal but not with a room full of irate employees. Walter Frye had sold himself to New World on this point: He could give Farraday PR that would lend him a warmer, softer public image. Yes, he looked too much like a math instructor—seemed distracted, as if the machinery in his head were whirring along, oblivious to other people. Was this inadvertent or by conscious intent, however? Frye had met CEO’s who in private were expansive and bluff, as well as those who were placid and reserved. All of them had shared a public self-control that was practically regal. Was that Farraday’s talent, too? What was he like in private, Frye still wondered, for he had only met Farraday briefly at the end of the hiring interview. In private would he be as mild, as nonplused by all the emotional tension here today?
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