At 06.15 hours that morning, a Beechcraft King Air B200 air ambulance registered to a company in Eisenstadt, Austria, had taken off from Oxford’s Kidlington airport with a destination of Bad Vöslau. It had touched down about three hours later. It had been piloted by Egon Aehrenthal and co-piloted by someone called Dietmar Koubek. There had been a single passenger.
12
The Blue Danube
As the 19.30 Austrian Airlines jet lifted from the tarmac at Heathrow, Ethan relaxed for the first time since discovering the bodies in his grandfather’s study. In his inside jacket pocket nestled the doctored passport that had seen him through passport control and would take him into Austria and beyond if necessary.
He’d paid Lindita three thousand pounds for it. Passports were her speciality. She’d cloned an ePassport for him, using RFdump software to download data from an original, before loading it onto a blank chip. Once that was done, she’d added some visa stamps from her stock and asked Ethan to add a false signature. She’d restyled his hair, added a fake moustache (she had a box of them, all different sizes, shapes and colours) and coloured contact lenses, taken a digital photo of Ethan, tipped it into the clone, and covered the ID page with a hologrammed plastic sheet.
And the original passport? Still safe and snug in its owner’s pocket or a hotel safe. Ten days earlier, its RFID chip had been read from a short distance away by a Solejmani gang member in London, using a reader he’d bought on eBay for two hundred euros.
Ethan was travelling as Dafydd Williams, a teacher from Swansea. Apart from their age, the two men had nothing in common. Passport control wouldn’t be able to compare the photo in Ethan’s version with the one in Williams’s original.
He passed through Austrian passports and customs, then out into the main concourse. As he did so, a wave of overwhelming tiredness swept over him, almost dragging him down all the way into dark waters. He’d planned to hire a car and drive straight to Bad Vöslau, desperate to get on Aehrenthal’s track. But lack of sleep over the past few days had left him limp and uncoordinated, and he knew he couldn’t risk making mistakes.
Deciding on sleep, he walked to the NH Airport Hotel and checked in to a single room. Here again Lindita saved his bacon. She had created an online bank account for Dafydd Williams, into which Ethan had transferred a large balance. Once this had been done, it was a simple matter for her to encode all the necessary details onto the magnetic strip on the back of a blank Amex Centurion black card.
‘It’s real thing,’ she’d said.
‘Real?’ He’d picked it up. It was in his wallet now. And he remembered how strange it had felt. Heavy, even though it was light.
‘Is titanium,’ she’d said. ‘Is not plastic. Is only maybe ten thousand made in whole world. Cost two and half thousand dollar from year. You only get from invitation. Is only for very rich.’
‘Won’t it make me stand out?’
She’d shaken her head.
‘You carry this in hand, you buy almost anythings you wants. Is no limit.’
He’d nodded. He still had no idea how much this was going to cost him, what the final bill would look like. He’d spend all he had and more to rescue Sarah, to see her safe and well again.
After checking in (and learning the true meaning of the word ‘fawning’), he went straight to his room and made a telephone call. There was something vital to do before he could risk putting his head on a pillow. The number had been given to him by Lindita. Half an hour later, there was a knock on his door. Ethan didn’t know the name of the man who stepped inside, nor did the man know his. Money was passed over, and Ethan took a small parcel in return. Not a word was exchanged during the brief transaction.
He slept badly that night. Not even tiredness granted him sweet dreams. The places he entered were uncanny realms of nightmare, where words and images combined to tarnish his soul. Sometimes he would wake with the taste of ashes in his mouth, or a vision of death before his unseeing eyes. More than once, he was returned to the tomb and its humid, musty smells, and more than once he saw his grandfather pinned to the wall and watched as Sarah was stripped and threatened.
When he woke at last, the nightmare still lay on him like a fog. He felt a terrible fear mixed with guilt. He was, after all, on the run from a murder charge, and if he couldn’t find and save Sarah, he would never be able to prove his innocence. His greatest fear was not prison, or what he would face inside as an ex-cop; it was for Sarah, whose face was as clear to him as his own face in the mirror while he shaved.
He rented a four-wheel drive, a Mercedes ML, and headed south. The urban landscape began to open out to the east after Wiener Neudorf. He picked up speed on the Süd Autobahn as it swept like a sword between fields on his left and a cluster of small towns on his right that formed an almost unbroken chain between Vienna and Wiener Neustadt. As the traffic thinned, he rammed his accelerator down hard, taking the car smoothly up to just below the speed limit of one hundred and thirty kilometres per hour.
Sometimes the buildings would open, revealing high forested hills that ran back westwards to the Alps. Snow covered the fields, as white as lilies; it lay like sifted flour on the forests, it covered the roofs of passing houses as if laid there to provide insulation. Outside, it was minus three celsius. The air was crisp and pure beneath a dark blue sky. He drove with his eyes fixed on the road. His thoughts were dark and bitter, constrained by memory and anger. The dream had not quite left him, and though the white fields and the lambent air did their best to lighten his spirits, his mood remained low. Anxiety gnawed at his thoughts like a rat, filling him with the fear that he’d done the wrong thing, headed in the wrong direction. Sarah could still be in England, he had no way of knowing. Aehrenthal could have killed her, dumped her body somewhere, and headed back to some sort of hiding place here in Austria.
On his hip, in a concealed holster, he wore the gun Lindita’s man had brought him before he slept, a Beretta 93R. The 93R had two unusual features for a handgun: a front grip that could fold down beneath the barrel to permit two-handed action, and a shoulder stock, now tucked away in Ethan’s bag. The man had left him with a box of 20-round magazines carrying 9mm Parabellum rounds, and shown Ethan how to set it for single-fire, burst-fire, or semi-automatic modes. The gun gave Ethan some comfort, but the last thing he wanted was to get caught up in a gunfight.
He left the autobahn just after Baden, got himself onto the ER59, and drove a short distance along side roads to Bad Vöslau airport.
Aehrenthal had touched down in the Beechcraft at 09.30 hours on the morning of the previous day. He’d piloted the plane along with a co-pilot. The Beechcraft had been configured as an air ambulance, and there had been a passenger in the rear, a woman called Ileana Paulescu.
Hearing this, Ethan frowned.
‘Did you see the woman?’
He’d found a representative of the airport management agency, Flughafen Wien AG. The man wasn’t sure that the details of Herr Aehrenthal’s journey should be made available to a stranger. But Ethan had brought the police warrant card he’d pretended had been stolen. He flashed it, knowing he wouldn’t be asked to compare it with his passport.