“What do you want? Not bombs.”
“Better than bombs. When we get our load, then we move to Dublin and start figuring on who our mules are gonna be. And all along, we got to find the target, the right target.”
And he squeezed her thigh beneath her dress again and she realized it was the thought of an instrument of death that had aroused him. She didn’t think she was afraid of him — she wasn’t afraid of any man — but it rattled her in that moment to realize Henry McGee was sexually aroused by terror.
8
Flight 147. There were 286 people in tourist class, 19 in business class, 6 in first class.
The people in tourist class were arranged across three sections of seats. The seats were narrow enough to be uncomfortable to all but the smallest of the adults. There were sixteen children who were also uncomfortable but not because of the seats. Like all children, they had not learned the suffering patience necessary to endure the tedious hours of flight. They didn’t like this at all and squirmed their little bodies this way and that to find some soothing position. Some cried, some talked, some had managed sleep in the narrow seats.
They ate a precooked dinner of underdone veal, mashed potatoes, vegetables of different colors, either lime Jell-O or lime jelly, coffee in plastic cups, and a small bit of carrot cake. There were dinner rolls and pats of butter sealed in foil. After dinner, the movie screen at the front of the cabin showed Halloween Heaven, a film merging the genres of horror and romantic comedy. There were many drinks sold in small bottles, the most prevalent liquor being vodka followed by gin followed by Scotch followed by Canadian blended whiskey.
The seats in business class were marginally larger but were arranged in less crowded rows. Two men in this section ignored dinner (approximately the same meal as that served in tourist but with the addition of a half bottle of very bad California wine) and worked at their laptop computers. One composed a memorandum explaining the market niche for his firm in the new Common Market of post-1992. The other composed incredibly blunt pornography, partially to combat the boredom of the transatlantic flight, partially because he thought he could show his work to the black-haired male flight attendant who showed every sign of being as gay as the computer-user.
In first class, roast beef was served on china plates of a particularly sturdy, cheap design. The roast beef was individually sliced by a man in a toque blanche at the front of the section. There was free champagne, which was too warm. One veteran first-class traveler was asleep, his feet encased in slippers given out by the airline in a flight survival kit that included a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, and cologne, as though these items would not have been brought along by the first-class travelers. The name of the airline — Euro-American — was emblazoned on the side of the plastic kit containing the gratuities.
There were no children in first class and only one child in business class.
The plane followed the familiar great circle route that extends northwest from the European north coast, across Britain, almost to the tip of southern Greenland.
Those who wished looked down on the winter waves slamming the shore of Greenland. It was November and there was ice on the land and in the ocean. The plane continued to describe its arc as it now turned south and west toward the North American continent.
In the cockpit, the crew of three had finished their meals. They had all chosen the roast beef. Their trays were stacked at the back of the crowded cockpit, which was dark, the better to read the maze of gauges, lights, and computer readings. No one was actually flying the plane in the sense that a driver drives a car. The plane flew itself, and it was exactly six miles behind the Air Canada 747 that had preceded it off the runway at Heathrow at one P.M. Air Canada would veer toward Toronto over Labrador while Euro-American would begin its gradual descent toward John F. Kennedy on Long Island.
The day was clear and calm. Calm was relative at thirty-seven thousand feet because of the jet stream, but calm nonetheless. The business of transatlantic flight is not complicated and its perils are few. The plane followed the plane in front of it just as the plane behind — was it Air France? — followed the Euro-American bird. Everyone maintained intervals. Everyone watched the routine unfold on the computers.
Three hundred sixty-two minutes into the flight, the plane blew up.
The bomb had been secreted in a case of French bordeaux in the front baggage compartment below the business section and between the two swept wings of the Boeing 747.
The bomb was relatively small. Everything was relative when it exploded. Plastic ceiling panels and floor panels shattered into infinity.
Everyone was dead within seven seconds. There was barely time to scream.
The blip of the plane disappeared from all radar.
The bits of the plane and bits of passengers began a scattered descent over twenty miles of winter ocean. The following plane shuddered as it was buffeted by the waves of explosive air, and a stewardess in first class spilled a glass of champagne on a passenger. No explanation for the turbulence was offered to the passengers by the captain of the following plane, who thought it would merely upset them. They would hear all about it in two hours, after landing at Kennedy.
9
The huge, shabby rail terminal in Naples opened onto the sprawling, shabby, beautiful city that tumbled down the hillside to the sea. The atmosphere was different from Rome. The city was slower, perhaps more passionate, a little sloppy like a businessman whose shirt collar is loosened and whose tie wears a gravy stain. On some narrow streets, the smell of urine on the walks mingled with the faintly garbagelike breeze blowing up from the bay.
Henry McGee sat at a sidewalk table of a trattoria just below the train terminal.
He had taken the express from Rome to Naples and he had been waiting for twenty-five minutes. He appreciated the city sights around him and drank them in with yet another cup of cappuccino. It was the middle of the afternoon and the sun was warm. A sleepy early afternoon. A perfect time to make a deal.
The lead story in that day’s International Herald-Tribune was about the mid-Atlantic bombing of a Euro-American Airlines flight to New York. Henry had read it twice. It might have been fate, he decided. The target had been picked for him by some minor-league terrorists who wanted to teach the Great Satan America a lesson. As though the bombing of a single airliner would halt the transatlantic trade.
Henry thought it was a waste, an utter waste. Not of lives but of effort. What exactly would the terrorists get? The point of doing anything — especially doing terror — was to get some controlled result. There would be public grief and private sorrow from the bombing; funerals and denunciations by politicians; big lawsuits and a crackdown on airport security procedures… and then, nothing. The world would go on pretty much as before. Nothing would have been gotten.
Henry knew what he wanted to get.
At that moment, the fat man sat down in the empty chair on the other side of the table.
Henry looked up from the paper.
The fat man had three chins and a face like a bowl of oatmeal. His frog eyes were large and distended and his fingers were sausage links rolled into doughy palms. He wore a tan suit with a grease spot on the left lapel. His collar wings were bent and his tie was askew. He was perfect for the city he lived in, Henry thought immediately.
“How much money did you bring?” the fat man said without introduction.
“Enough to get you interested.”
“Do you have it?”
“Sure.”
“That’s trusting of you,” the fat man said. He had a slight accent that betrayed a Mediterranean — not necessarily Italian — heritage. He tried out a smile that was ominous. “I might have confederates with me. Men who will stop at nothing. They could rob you and kill you—”