Tim Stevens
Cronos Rising
One
Half an hour before what would come to be referred to by the European and American intelligence services as the incident, the man known in certain quarters as the Ferryman sat in a glass-walled cafe overlooking Terminal 1 of Frankfurt Airport and thought about the afterlife.
The Ferryman was an atheist, but if any of the various visions of the afterlife held the remotest appeal for him, it was the Muslim variety. The carnality of it all, with its harem of waiting virgins, grounded it in psychological realism, far more than the anodyne Christian nightmare of string-accompanied bliss, which suggested to the Ferryman, who was also a teetotaller, a state of Huxleyite druggedness.
At least those who immolated themselves in anticipation of an eternity of sensual debauchery could be said to be normal, in a certain sense.
Adnan Hanahneh and Umair Jat were two of the most devout Muslims the Ferryman had ever met. Hanahneh, the Jordanian, was demonstrative in his faith, speaking of his devotion with an excitability that bordered on the unstable. Jat, from Pakistan, was more of a closed book, a quiet man slow to anger, courteous and measured in his speech and his actions. But his commitment to his cause was beyond doubt. The Ferryman had been assured of this, and while he was loath to believe anybody else’s assessment of a man, his own impression of Jat, and of Hanahneh, was that they were as dependable as could be hoped for.
Hanahneh had been selected for the Swissair flight. As such, he was the foil, the straight man, the stooge. The fall guy. And though he knew this, he didn’t know what his downfall was set up to achieve. He’d deliberately been kept ignorant, and he understood why. He and Umair Jat had never met.
The Ferryman knew Hanahneh had played his part. Ten minutes ago, as the Ferryman sipped his espresso, he’d noticed the change in the flow of the crowds on the concourse below the glass-walled mezzanine on which he sat. The masses were shifting towards one end of the floorspace, as if being corralled. Quarantined. The subtle security presence hadn’t swelled noticeably, but the Ferryman had watched the behaviour of the infrequent uniformed men, and he hadn’t missed the tension in their postures, their increased tendency to raise their communications devices to their ears.
Something was going on at the Swissair departure gate, far away down the corridors.
The Ferryman signalled a passing waiter and requested another espresso. Unlike many other frequent travellers, the Ferryman didn’t despise air travel. In fact he positively enjoyed the experience. He supposed this stemmed from his childhood in the 1970s, when his parents had taken him on occasional holidays overseas, and he’d loved the thrill of an airport, with its bustle and its chiming announcements, and the hulking planes on the runways outside the windows, pregnant with the promise of escape and adventure. Nowadays, the Ferryman liked airports best in the quieter hours, late at night or, as now, shortly after daybreak. He always arrived early, to allow a smooth check-in and plenty of time to bask in the warmth and humming sounds of the departure area, to savour a coffee and a newspaper before boarding.
Today, he had the coffee, and the pastry breakfast, and the newspaper — this morning’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung — for show. But he wasn’t boarding any flight. In just under an hour’s time, he would make his exit towards the public car park outside the terminal building and locate his second car, not the BMW he had arrived in but the Audi which had been waiting for him since the day before yesterday. And he would disappear into the city of Frankfurt, before catching a high-speed train to Hamburg and a Lufthansa flight out of the country, in a south-easterly direction.
The crowd on the concourse below was changing in its collective body language, and in its emotional tone. There was an unsettled aspect to it, bordering on suppressed panic. Still, the security presence hadn’t been stepped up. The Ferryman supposed they were being discreet, and were congregating around the Swissair gate via some other entry point.
He finished his third espresso, took a bite of his croissant, and ran his eyes over the front page of his Allgemeine Zeitung. The headlines were similar to those of every other paper on the newsstands, preoccupied with the Ebola crisis. Tomorrow, they’d once again be in lockstep, but screaming a very different message.
Although an enormous digital clock dominated the wall of the terminal directly across from the Ferryman, he checked his watch out of habit. Six forty-seven. If the Jordanian, Hanahneh, had played his role to the full, he would by now have been in custody for approximately twenty minutes.
On the runway outside, far away from the departure gate serving the Swissair flight, Turkish Airlines Flight TA15 would have completed its turn and would be rolling into the beginning of its takeoff run.
The Ferryman had learned, over many years, that fear was not something to be repressed, but rather to be channelled. He was now in a position of extreme danger. But he observed the quickening of his respiratory rate, the sudden flood of adrenaline into his circulatory system, and allowed the sensations to play themselves out, without feeling the urge to move his body in response to them. As a result, his senses were heightened: his vision more acute, his taste and his smell sharpened, his hearing amplifying every ting of a spoon against a cup, every murmured voice from the tables around him, until he basked in the simple wonder of the everyday perceptual flow most human beings learn unconsciously to tune out of awareness.
He was in danger because it was possible, at this crucial stage, that Hanahneh would lose his nerve. That, faced with the sudden terror of interrogation, and threats, and the gibbering fantasies of rendition and torture with which his cornered mind would plague him, he’d scream a description of the Ferryman at his captors.
But the Ferryman didn’t think the Jordanian would buckle just yet. Intoxicated by the thrill of the moment, he was more likely to be worn down gradually, over the coming days, when more subtle, psychological methods of coercion would begin to be deployed. Perhaps his captors would introduce a Muslim interrogator, a pious, sympathetic man, who’d persuade Hanahneh that he understood what he’d done, and that he was his sole confidante in the new nightmare world in which he found himself. By then, the Ferryman would be far away; but Hanahneh had a good memory, and he’d be able to supply a description which would give the authorities a close to perfect physical picture of the Ferryman.
Which was why the Ferryman had built in an element of insurance.
The poison was a colourless, tasteless one, designed in Morocco by a master. The Ferryman had slipped it into the Jordanian’s coffee with ease, at their final meeting the night before in the apartment in Frankfurt. The poison consisted of both a neurotoxin and an agent which neutralised the clotting factors in the blood. Both elements would manifest themselves after ten to twelve hours of ingestion, but the poison would be entirely asymptomatic prior to this narrow window.
Hanahneh had drunk the coffee at a little after ten o’clock last night.
He’d be in a police interrogation room, or shackled in the back of a speeding car, or perhaps even aboard a flight heading towards one of the US military bases in Germany, when the convulsions would start. His captors would hold him down and prise his jaws apart, dislocating the mandible if necessary, searching desperately for the cyanide capsule they’d missed. Hanahneh would go into cardiorespiratory arrest even as he turned into a sack of blood, the anticoagulant causing him to haemorrhage from every orifice, every pore.
And perhaps, cavorting with his scores of virgins in paradise, he’d look down on the Ferryman and offer thanks for this opportunity to achieve martyrdom.