Fortuin had joked while handing them the salt, saying that he’d graduated from biochemistry and pharmacology to molecular gastronomy, and was committed to get them some oil and some protein next.
Theo looked at his prison mates, scrutinizing them one by one. How different people were! Some took their abduction really badly, cried a lot, or let themselves spiral into worry and depression. Lila Wallace, their flight attendant, was one of those. Dr. Teng, for understandable reasons, considering his family was in the test subject population, was another. Dr. Chevalier, who had held on bravely for a couple of days, was coming apart, thinking of her husband with advanced coronary artery disease.
Others were calm, probably keeping their feelings bottled inside, or engaging the use of reason and logic to fight the feelings of terror and absolute powerlessness brought by what was happening to them. Drs. Mallory and Davis were like that. Calm, composed, holding it together, at least on the surface.
Finally, Drs. Fortuin, Bukowsky, and Crawford were irritatingly accepting of the entire situation, applying the precepts of positive thinking to the point where he wanted them slapped back into reality. Yes, people, even if you’re still alive now, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be dead the next minute!
And then there was him, struggling with the huge burden of guilt he felt, so overwhelming he couldn’t even breathe sometimes. To be responsible for the abduction of hundreds of people, for the death of Dr. Faulkner and who knows how many more to come… He didn’t know how he could live with that burden, even if they somehow made it out of there alive.
Because it was him, Dr. Theo Adenauer, who the Russians had hijacked the plane for; he knew that for sure. After all, he was the world’s highest regarded expert in molecular psychopharmacology and transitional addiction. Whom better would they choose if they wanted a psychotropic drug formulated? It was him they put in charge of the research team. That Russian doctor, Bogdanov, knew exactly who he was and what his lifelong work was about.
The latest antidepressant that had hit the market, the first one in history to reduce suicide risk in patients by more than 90 percent, was his formulation, the result of five years of research. The pharmaceutical company had valued it at more than four billion dollars within a week of the drug obtaining FDA approval for release in the United States. Yes, whom else would they have hijacked the plane for?
His head hung low and deep ridges formed around his mouth, underlining the tension in his lips. He was no longer proud of his professional achievements. It was the first time in his life he’d felt such overwhelming guilt. Shame. Despair.
“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Dr. Bukowsky said, chewing vigorously his half-cooked cabbage with added salt.
“Who?” Gary Davis asked.
“You know, the people who normally search for missing planes,” Bukowsky replied. “Don’t they have crews, teams who search for planes? There’s always someone… A plane doesn’t just disappear, and no one’s looking, right?”
Theo Adenauer put his plate down noisily. He hadn’t even eaten half his food.
“No one will come rescue us, because no one is looking,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Gary Davis asked, blood visibly draining from his face. The American was so impressionable.
“If the plane appears to have crashed in the Pacific, that’s where they’ll be looking,” Theo replied, “for bodies and debris, not for people to rescue. Not for us.”
“So… you’re saying there’s no hope?” Dr. Chevalier’s voice reached a high pitch, conveying her desperation and anguish in just a few words.
Dr. Bukowsky reached out and grabbed her hand, trying to comfort her. Tears started running on her face, and her hands started shaking uncontrollably, as she muttered, “It can’t be… It can’t be…”
Mein Gott… Theo thought. He should have known better than to eliminate all the hope these people had, even if it was built on a false, delusional foundation. Some bedside manner he had.
“There’s always hope, Marie-Elise, you know that. Life is a mystery, ja? You don’t know what’s going to happen next. Correct?”
“I definitely didn’t know what was gonna happen when I boarded the damn flight,” Dr. Crawford said bitterly. “But I, for one, ain’t giving up hope, no matter what he says,” she added, pointing at Adenauer. “They’ll come looking, don’t worry. You’ll see.”
They chewed silently for a little while, as he studied them some more. His victims, all of them, suffering through hell.
His fault.
…19
Tom’s den looked more and more like a war room, and the air was getting stuffy, hard to breathe. The walls, long since stripped of their artwork, were covered with sticky notes, a six-foot wide wallboard, and flipchart paper. Two laptops took the small table. Alex and Lou kept their heads close together, looking keenly at the screen of one of the laptops.
“See?” Lou said. “This is how it appears. It gives categories of commonalities with other passengers or crew. Crew names are in blue, the rest are in black. And whatever pattern the software sees, it will add as parameters after the name, with numbers indicating occurrences.”
“Got it,” Alex replied.
“Not me,” Steve said. “Let’s walk through an example.”
“Sure,” Lou replied. “See this guy? Mark Atchkins? After his name, you have San Francisco (47), engineer (5), married (219), two children (98), 47 years old (19). That means he’s from San Francisco, like 47 other passengers, he’s an engineer, just like five other individuals, and so on. Got it?”
“Yes, got it, thanks,” Steve replied. “Do we think age, number of kids, marital status are relevant?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Alex said. “Good thought, Steve. It clutters the results. Even location, I don’t think it’s that relevant. But I’d love to see income bracket.”
“All right,” Lou replied. “Give me a few minutes to reconfigure.”
“Can you summarize the data somehow? Scrolling through 441 names like this would take forever.”
“On it, boss,” he replied with a wide smile, and started to type.
Alex sprung off her chair and took a rolled-up sheet of paper from the corner of the room.
“Steve, will you please help me hang this?”
“Sure, what is it?”
“The biggest map they could print at the local print shop,” she replied, handing him a couple of pushpins and unrolling the four-foot wide print. They grabbed the corners of the printout and stretched on their toes to pin it as high up on the wall as possible.
“There, excellent,” she said, then grabbed a bunch of blue pushpins. “Let’s map XA233’s flight plan.”
She browsed the Internet a little until she found a site that showed all the main flight routes. She started pushing pins into the map to match the flight route shown on the Internet, all the way to its destination, San Francisco. It wasn’t a straight line. The flight routes were smooth curves, arcs, optimized distance against the Earth’s curvature. When it came to flight routes, the shortest distance between two points was not a straight line.
From Tokyo all the way to its destination, XA233 was supposed to be above water. No land anywhere in its flight path; just a massive expanse of blue water. The closest XA233 was supposed to come to land was within 100 miles or so of the Aleutian Islands, but the plane had never made it that far. Damn…