He paused for another long drag, sucking until the insides of his cheeks must have touched. I got the feeling looking at his face that it was easy to launch into this story but not so easy to finish it.
“Anyways,” he said, “that was Gil. He was the first one to go.”
My mind went blank for a few seconds, the way a computer screen does when things go haywire. News of Roger’s death had crashed the system for me. All my assumptions were wrong.
He loosened his tie and shoved one hand into his pocket. Again, he turned his shoulder in toward me, and it was almost as if the two of us were watching the incident unfold on a screen in front of us as he narrated. “Then what happened was a bomb went off. The shooting started outside. All of us stampeded for the door. Everyone was yelling and pushing. There was another explosion. This one knocked me down, and I didn’t want to get up. All I wanted to do was hug the floor. There was so much smoke. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. Someone grabbed me by the shoulders and stood me up and shoved me down the aisle. Me and the rest.”
“ ‘Stay low.’ He kept telling us that, to stay under the smoke, but then another bomb went off just as we got to this crack, this opening. Everything went sideways. He told me to jump. I looked down, and it was too far down, but it was too damn hot to go back, and he said, ‘Drop and roll. You’ll be fine. Go.’ He pushed me, and I was all of a sudden on the ground, and I did roll, because that was the last thing he said to me, and it was what was in my mind. Then he was there again picking me up and pushing me away from the fire. I turned around to look and see who it was. It was Hoffmeyer. He looked me right in the eye and said to me, ‘Good luck, man,’ and that was it. He ran off.”
“Ran where?”
“Into the smoke. I wanted to go with him, because he was the only one who knew what he was doing. But somebody else grabbed me and pulled me behind something.” He shook his head. Now he was looking at his own movie that only he could see. “I could hear the damn thing burning. Do you know what that sounds like? An airplane burning? It was like a roar, but I could still hear the screaming. I knew they were burning to death. I could hear them, and all I could think was it could have been me.”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry that happened to you.” He shrugged. “It sounds pretty chaotic. As Tim said, a lot going on. You’re absolutely sure Roger didn’t make it?”
“Are you talking about Gilbert?”
“Yes, sorry.”
“I stepped on him. We all did. He was on the floor, and we trampled over him like a bunch of crazed bulls. His head was split open. There was no way he got off that plane alive.”
“What about bodies? Dead bodies don’t get mixed up these days.”
“You can’t believe how hot that fire burned. Instant cremation. And I guess our government had some issues with Sudan getting back the remains. Besides that, if Hoffmeyer was CIA and they extracted him, do you think they would admit to that? Hell no. Blood, beards, bullets, smoke. I must have been confused, right? How could I know?”
He certainly sounded convincing, but so did many in the grassy-knoll set. It was because they believed so passionately. “Seven other men survived. Did anyone else identify Hoffmeyer?”
“No. Well, Timmy, but he won’t cop to it. He doesn’t want to think he’s crazy. He already thinks he’s crazy because he never sleeps. It just goes to show you, don’t it?”
“Show me what?”
“We all burn the same, even the ones with a fortune.”
He said it with half a smile that suggested the tiniest bit of schadenfreude. “You’re saying one of the hostages had a fortune?”
“Gil said his laptop was worth a billion dollars. He tried to ransom his way off with it. They laughed at him.”
“Gilbert Bernays said he had a computer worth a billion dollars?”
“Look, I’m not giving away any secrets here. We all got down and dirty with each other. We thought we were going to die. He told us he stole it off a dead Russian. He just didn’t have what he needed to get to the money.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“A password?”
“Maybe.”
I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until the answer came out. There was only one dead Russian Roger could have been talking about, the one Rachel had killed, and so far, she had failed to mention anything about Vladi having a computer worth a billion dollars.
“To my way of thinking, a billion dollars wouldn’t have made a difference. Whatever those boys were doing, whyever they were doing it, it wasn’t about money.”
“What was it about?”
“Who knows? I don’t think the baby terrorists even knew. They started with this sheikh demand but dropped that pretty fast, so that wasn’t the ultimate goal.”
“Maybe it was planned as a martyr operation from the beginning. The sheikh would have been a bonus.”
“The whole point of a martyr operation is to wreak havoc and spread terror. If these boys were interested in publicizing their cause, why did they insist on a media blackout?”
“There was a media blackout?”
“They gave no interviews and didn’t want any cameras around. The whole thing was a debacle from beginning to end. I’m telling you, we don’t know the whole story of what happened on that plane.”
Something over my shoulder caught his attention. “I think there’s someone in there watching us.”
“Is it the woman again?”
“No. It’s a man this time. I think they’ve put some people on me, if you want to know the truth. It pisses me off. What about my rights? I’m a citizen. I didn’t do anything. Nobody ever told me not to talk about what I saw. I’m going in there and-”
“Let’s go in and have another drink, Frank. We don’t need a scene here with all these good people, do we? Besides, I need to talk to Tim.”
He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and crushed it under his loafer. It was only half gone, but it was the third one he’d lit since we’d been out there.
Frank was the one who found Tim. It wasn’t hard. They were seated at the same table, and brunch was about to begin.
“Excuse me, Tim?” I pulled him away from the table and from Helene, who seemed determined not to let anything go on without her. “I was wondering if you had a contact number for that reporter Max Kraft.”
“He asked me not to give it to anyone.”
“I’m sure he did, but he’ll want to talk to me.” I pulled out the manifest Dan had given me. It had updated contact information for probably seventy-five percent of the survivors. “I’ve got something he’s looking for.”
21
MAX KRAFT LOOKED LIKE A SCRAPPER. HE WASN’T TALL. He wasn’t particularly big. His arms seemed a little long for his body, and he definitely spent more time in front of his computer than working out. From the looks of him, though, you would want him on your side when a fight broke out. He had the look of a man who knew how to fight dirty, and would. He wore his brown-going-gray hair just long enough to prove he didn’t have to go to work in an office every day. He probably owned lots of safari shirts and no neckties.
I had no idea how long he’d been holed up in room 5 at the Novotel, a twelve-room motel on the Left Bank, but when he opened the door and let me into his room, it looked as if he’d lived there half his life. The smell of warm beer and greasy hamburgers lingered. Torn bags of vending-machine pretzels littered the premises, and carefully arranged light blue Post-it notes festooned the dresser mirror.
He closed the door behind me and went immediately to the window, where he had to move the heavy curtains to peek out. “How did you get here?”