Acts of Faith

Small True Facts

PLANE CARRYING JOURNALISTS SHOT DOWN IN SUDAN

KHARTOUM DENIES RESPONSIBILITY, BLAMES REBELS

CRASH OF SEARCH PLANE NOT RELATED


THERE WAS NOTHING like the deaths of Caucasians to give the war more than two seconds of air time and four paragraphs in the newspapers. And there was nothing like the deaths of three of their own to whip the media into a froth. CNN gave the story big play—their woman in Africa, blown out of the sky in the line of duty. Curiously, the network had nothing to say about what she had been working on.

A press trip was organized to bring correspondents and cameramen to the scene. Fitzhugh and Pamela Smyth secured places for themselves on the plane. Pamela was seeking what she called “closure”; so was Fitzhugh, though of a different kind. He was willing to entertain the possibility that in this instance the Sudanese government was telling the truth.

The trip was delayed a few days by the fighting in New Tourom. When it was deemed safe to travel, the press plane flew to Malakal, where a chartered helicopter delivered its passengers to the crash site, ringed by SPLA soldiers. Michael was on hand, eager to give interviews. Troops were filmed and photographed holding the perforated wing while he pointed at the bullet holes, each about the size of a golf ball, with a rim of bent metal around it. A 12.7- or 14.5-millimeter antiaircraft machine gun, he informed the reporters, one of whom asked if he would comment on Khartoum’s version of events. The usual nonsense and propaganda, he replied. The government had failed to subdue the Nuba, had failed to isolate it by bombing its airfields, and now resorted to terror to stop aid from reaching the mountains.

With Michael on board, the helicopter brought the journalists to New Tourom for a tour of the destruction wrought by the attack. He had insisted on this to present further proof of Khartoum’s perfidy. Quinette joined her husband as guide, offering an eyewitness description of murahaleen thundering through the town on horseback, her account underscored by the stench of rotting horseflesh that still lingered in the air.

As the group trekked back to the airfield for the first leg of the trip home, Michael handed Fitzhugh a sealed envelope for delivery to Douglas—a letter of thanks, he said in an undertone. “Without the assistance you people brought to us, we would have lost this battle and all the Nuba with it.”

Under a grass-roofed shelter at the side of the runway, Fitzhugh and Pamela waited with the reporters for the helicopter to finish refueling. Sitting on the ground against a post, she spotted an object lying in the grass—a small plastic bottle with an orange bullet-shaped cap. She removed the cap and squeezed the plunger, sending a jet of mist into the air.

“Maybe this will help,” she said. “That stench—I can’t get it out of my nose.”

“Could I see that?”

He held the bottle upright between a thumb and forefinger and studied it, like an archaeologist examining an enigmatic artifact. The label read, NASOKLEAR. FOR RELIEF OF ALLERGY AND SINUS SYMPTOMS.

“It was lying right there?” he asked.

“Yes. Maybe I’d better not use it. Who knows where it’s been.”

“Who knows,” Fitzhugh said. He thought of Adid’s “fresh ideas” and pocketed the bottle. Un petit fait vrais—a phrase his Seychellois father was fond of using.

Having not quite achieved closure, Pamela put past enmities aside and called on Douglas to help organize a memorial service for the three aviators. Malachy Delaney and John Barrett presided. The ceremony was held at sunset at the western end of the Loki airfield, some two hundred people in attendance. The clergymen said the sorts of things clergymen do on such occasions. Pamela delivered a moving tribute to Tara, Douglas paid homage to Wesley and Mary, striking a note of comic relief when he touched his nose and said that it was well known that he and Dare had differences of opinion, but those differences had not affected one whit his respect for the man’s abilities and courage, so amply demonstrated on his final flight. When the sermons and speeches were finished, four Knight planes flew over, one peeling away to make a “missing man” formation. A trumpeter from the local police barracks blew retreat. Listening to the fine words and the tragic notes of the trumpet echoing over the twilit landscape, Fitzhugh recalled the vultures pecking at Wesley’s corpse, of the arrival in Loki of the clear plastic burn bags containing the remains of Tara and her passengers. Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth? he thought. Not always, but even when Truth was horrifying, it was preferable to the attractive lie of pretty clichés and the aesthetics of ritual. Likewise when Truth was commonplace. One small true fact, like a bottle of nasal spray found in a place where it did not belong, was in its way beautiful.

Douglas’s eulogy had partly rehabilitated his image among those who thought he’d deserved Dare’s punch in the nose. Fitzhugh didn’t think that was why he gave it. He sincerely wanted to honor the dead. The words he spoke were sincere. His sincerity added to Fitzhugh’s suspicions, for he knew the American was never more fraudulent than when he was most sincere.

Fitzhugh had presented Michael’s thank-you note to him. It included a new coded shopping list. With the danger of being exposed eliminated, Douglas was inspired to resume Busy Beaver’s operations. Perhaps he was driven by financial pressures as well. Tara’s fate had a decided chilling effect on Knight’s flight crews. Several had refused missions to the Nuba and other no-go zones, which caused some independent agencies to take their business to one-horse air operators desperate enough to risk their lives. Douglas himself appeared to think he was invulnerable, so much so that he began to fly the gun runs himself, with Tony as his copilot. Fitzhugh didn’t know if Hassan Adid was aware that his managing director was up to his old tricks; nor did he care. He was preoccupied with looking for another petit fait vrais. “What are you, a f*ckin’ detective?” Yes, Tony, I am, he thought, but without badge, gun, warrant, or intent of arresting anyone. I only want to know the truth of what happened.

He made a mental catalogue of his small facts:


Two planes carrying the people who could do the most harm to Douglas and Adid go down on the same day.


The bottle of Adid’s brand of nasal spray.


Wesley’s strange request.


The grease-stained mechanic’s coveralls in Tony’s hut.

He compiled the questions the small facts raised:


What were the odds of the two aircraft crashing on the same day?


Was Adid at the New Tourom airfield, and if he was, when and for what purpose?


How did he get there?


Why did Wesley ask him to retrieve the water jug and plastic bags and what did he mean when he said that someone had to clear out in a hurry?


Why had Tony balked when asked to search for the wreck of Wesley’s plane?

He concluded that he had slightly more than nothing.

He persuaded the UN authorities to send a crash-investigation team to look at the Hawker, and when they returned with photographs, key pieces of the wreckage, and the plane’s voice and flight data recorders, he told them to keep him abreast of their findings. They cautioned him not to hold his breath; even when a wrecked plane is in relatively good condition, as the Hawker was, crash investigations took a long time.

All right, he would do his own.

 

” ‘WAAAH! I FEEL good, so good . . .’ ” VanRensberg, Knight’s flight mechanic, was singing on the tarmac, headphone clamped to his ears. He flipped Fitzhugh a wave and went on gyrating, shaking his big ass. ” ‘I feel good, so good, so good . . .’ “ A couple of Kenyan mechanics laughed at the crazy mzungu. An Afrikaner imitating James Brown was amusing.

Fitzhugh gestured to take off the earphones. “Could I talk to you a moment?”

“Sure,” the mechanic said, switching off his Walkman. “I’m not busy.”

“I see that. This must be a private conversation.”

VanResenberg squinted with one eye. “Don’t notice anybody listening in.”

“It has to do with Wesley’s crash,” Fitzhugh explained. “His plane had been overhauled a few days before. Do you know who did the work?”

“No. It wasn’t any of our people.”

“I was talking to him on the radio before he went down. He said some odd things. He was having trouble with his fuel pumps. Then he asked me to fetch a water jug and some plastic bags from a rubbish bin near the hangar. He told me not to empty the jug if there was anything in it.”

“And?”

“There was nothing in the jug, only a little dirty water. The bags were clean. What do you suppose he meant? What’s the connection between a discarded water jug and his fuel pumps?”

VanRensberg asked to look at the jug, and Fitzhugh brought him to the company truck and pulled the container out from behind the seats. The mechanic screwed off the cap, poured a drop or two of the contents into his palm, sniffed, and stood staring at the jug for several moments.

“If you had enough of that sludge in your fuel tanks, it could foul up the fuel pumps. Maybe that’s what he meant.”

“How? Give me a lesson in aircraft mechanics.”

“You’ve got two pumps for each engine,” VanRensberg began. “A low-pressure and a high-pressure. The first one brings the fuel up from the tank and to the engine. The high-pressure pump sprays the fuel into the burners. If crud clogged up the filters in the low-pressure pump and it quit, the high-pressure pump would feed fuel to the emergency fuel controller. Are you following me so far?”

Fitzhugh nodded.

“So that wouldn’t be a good situation—you’d have unfiltered fuel going into the engine—but it would still run. If there’s water in the fuel”—VanResenberg hesitated. “I’d better back up a little. Fuel is what lubricates the high-pressure pump. If there’s water in the fuel, it could cause the pump to seize up and shut down because water isn’t a lubricant. The pump quits, the engine quits. That’s a bad situation no matter what you’re flying, but it’s bloody bad if you’re in a Hawker as old as Wes’s—a seven four eight that vintage doesn’t have auxiliary engine power controls like, oh, say a Cessna two-oh-eight or a Let. Nothing you do will get the engine running again. And if it happens in both engines, you are well and truly f*cked. But I don’t think that’s what happened to Wes, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Fitzhugh leaned against the Toyota, trying to absorb the technical information. “Why not?”

“Here’s a lesson in elementary chemistry. Water is heavier than aviation fuel. If Wes had water and mud in his tanks, it would have sunk down to the sump—that’s the lowest point in the tank. And it’s automatic in preflight to drain the sumps. Any water and crud would have been drained out.”

“I see. Of course Wesley wasn’t known for the thoroughness of his preflight checks.”

“He would’ve done that, Fitz. Like I said, it’s automatic.” VanRensberg’s teeth showed through his sweat-dappled beard. “I get what you’re thinking. Did somebody put muddy water in Wes’s tanks? Well, even if sombody did, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Wes would have gotten rid of it on preflight.”

“I will tell you why I think so. Wes said another odd thing. That whoever left those things—the jug and the bags—did it because he had to clear out in a hurry. He suspected sabotage. I am guessing, yes? But I believe he meant that the culprit fled in a rush because he saw someone coming, someone who might have caught him in the act.”

“Nasty, Fitz. Very nasty thought.”

“Yes, very. Please don’t mention to anyone that we had this conversation.” He placed the earphones back on VanRensberg’s head. “Keep feeling good.”

The next day, while Douglas and Tony were off on one of their Busy Beaver missions, Fitzhugh borrowed a spare key from the compound’s manager and broke into Tony’s hut. Inside, from among the stack of flight and operations manuals, he dug out repair and maintenance manuals for a Hawker-Siddley 748 and a Rolls-Royce 514 turboprop—the engine on Wesley’s plane. Tony’s coveralls had been laundered and were on a hangar. Although someone as sloppy as he wouldn’t notice that the manual was out of place, Fitzhugh was careful to put it back where he’d found it. Un petit fait vrais.

He returned to the office, where he found VanRensberg waiting for him. The mechanic said he would like to have another private conversation. Rachel being at lunch, Fitzhugh replied that here was as good a place as any and sat down.

“I’ve been thinking about our talk yesterday,” VanRensberg said. “If Wes suspected someone of pouring dirty water into his tanks, why did he ask you to retrieve the plastic bags in addition to the water jug? I’ve asked myself, If the fuel had water in it, then why wasn’t the contaminant eliminated in preflight? Sloppiness on Wes’s part? Maybe. Or was it this?” He held up a freezer bag and snapped it. “Plastic, like aviation fuel, is made from petroleum. It has hydrocarbons, also like fuel.”

“This is another chemistry lesson?” Fitzhugh asked, bemused.

“A nasty lesson. You pour the muddy water into the plastic bags, seal them, and then squeeze them into the tanks through the fuel-fill. The plastic remains intact for some time. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say how long, but for a time. So when the pilot drains his system prior to takeoff, the contaminants will be sealed up in the bags and will not be eliminated. But eventually the fuel will dissolve the plastic, the mud and water will become mixed with the fuel, and the pilot will have a failure of his high-pressure pumps and then engine failure.”

Fitzhugh felt a catch in his throat.

VanRensberg said, “I understand there is an accident investigation going on?”

“That’s right.”

“So I assume the investigators drained the tanks and took fuel samples for analysis. They may detect the presence of water in the fuel, but they will find no trace of plastic because it has the same chemical makeup as the fuel. It will have vanished without a trace. And the investigators are likely to conclude that the pilot did an improper preflight procedure.”

The simplicity of it! Fitzhugh thought. The elegant simplicity of it!

“And Wesley, besides his reputation for not being thorough in his preflight, was in a rush that day,” he said.

“Yes. I heard that he was,” said the mechanic. “So if I was the one who sabotaged the plane in the way I have just described, that’s what I would want people to think. Wes was careless to begin with, and his hurry made him more careless.”

“That is your opinion?”

VanRensberg hesitated, glancing back and forth as if to make sure no one was listening in. “A theory, not an opinion. No—a suspicion. Wes lost both engines. A catastrophic failure of both engines isn’t likely. I’ve heard he almost made it. What do you think? You were out there.”

“Yes, it looked that way,” Fitzhugh answered.

“If any pilot could land a Hawker-Siddley dead-stick, he could. Maybe he was sloppy, but the man could fly. Nasty business.”

“Thank you, VanRensberg,” Fitzhugh said. “Thank you for the chemistry lesson.”

At the end of the week, routine banking business took him to Nairobi. If it hadn’t, he would have concocted a reason to go. When his business was concluded, he recollected a remark Wesley had made after the shareholders’ meeting and asked to see the branch manager, an Indian gentleman from whom he requested the records for Knight Air Services Limited for the previous twelve months. As a partner in the company, Fitzhugh was authorized to see them. The manager put on a puzzled expression and shook his head. The firm had been dissolved, as you must know, he said. The records had been disposed of. Yes, Fitzhugh replied, he was aware the the firm had been dissolved but was unaware that its bank records had been destroyed. Could he please see the records for Knight Relief Services? These were produced: a sheaf of deposits, withdrawals, and monthly statements in a file folder. Fitzhugh paged through them quickly, stopping when he observed a transfer of funds from the Uganda Central Bank to the account. It came to $72,000. That would be Busy Beaver’s earnings in the first week of its existence, four flights at $18,000 each. The debit column showed a withdrawal for $36,000, presumably the company’s share in the fifty-fifty split with Tony. Beside the figure was the notation “Wire transfer” and on the next page the words “Credit Suisse Bank, Geneva,” followed by several sets of letters and account numbers. Numbers but no names. And what is this? he asked. A request for a wire transfer of funds from this account to that account in Switzerland, the manager replied, in a tone implying that he considered the question idiotic. Fitzhugh prided himself on his tolerance but had to admit to owning one unreasonable prejudice: he didn’t like Indians. Their accent grated on his ears, and in their manner they managed to be obsequious and supercilious at the same time. Thank you, he said, masking his irritation. And did the manager recall if such wire transfers had been made when Knight Air Services was in existence? If so, who authorized them? Excuse me, Mr. Martin, but are you conducting an official audit? What is the reason for these questions? Fitzhugh merely smiled, thanked him for his time, and left.

Could Douglas be runing guns for the money? he thought, hailing a taxi for Jomo Kenyatta Airport. For the money alone and all that business about providing for the Nubans’ defense so much claptrap?

The taxi dropped him off at the Department of Civil Aviation, where he paid a call on his old friend, the director. This was his day to walk paper trails. He requested copies of recent flight plans filed from Wilson Field. He gave her a range of dates. Pleased to accommodate him, the source of her favorite American cookies, she made a phone call, said yes, they were available, and sent him to another office, where a clerk gave him the plans in a manila envelope. Fitzhugh took out the flimsies and read the information various pilots had scrawled in the boxes and blanks, at the dated stamps and signatures on the bottom of the forms.

Aircraft identification: 5Z203. Type of aircraft: G1C. Departure aerodrome: Wilson. Destination aerodrome: JKIA, for Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Total EET: HR. 08. Min. 00. Pilot in command: Braithwaite, D. Filed by: Pilot or representative—and there Fitzhugh saw a signature almost as familiar as his own. The date stamp in the lower right-hand corner indicated that the flight had been made on the seventh of the previous month. He looked at a calendar—the seventh had been a Saturday. The crashes occurred the following Monday.

He made a copy of the flight plan, one more small fact, which contained one big falsehood. He felt no satisfaction, only a sickness of the heart.




HASSAN ADID’S SECRETARY said he was full up with appointments for the day but would be pleased to meet Fitzhugh for dinner.

It was at the Tamarind, Adid’s favorite restaurant. Fitzhugh arrived early to calm himself with a double scotch, neat. Adid came in a little late, swinging an attaché case, his stylish jacket and trousers testifying that their wearer was no ordinary urban African in an ill-fitting knockoff but a man of the world.

He apologized for his tardiness—a last-minute phone call. After the preliminary chitchat, the fussy business of asking the waiter for recommendations, he asked what was on Fitzhugh’s mind.

“The meeting you and Douglas had last month,” he replied. It was the only lead-in he could think of. “I was wondering, what were your fresh ideas?”

“Fresh ideas? Ideas about what?”

“Our—our problem.”

The first course came: salad for Fitzhugh, lobster bisque for Adid. A none-too-observant Muslim, he paused to sniff and taste the Fumé Blanc, then signal his approval with a flick of his brows.

“What problem are you referring to?”

Of course he would play dumb. What else could Fitzhugh expect? What, for that matter, did he expect to come out of this get-together? A confession? “The story that reporter was working on,” he said.

“Ah, that,” Adid said, perfectly composed. “It was nothing, so I told Douglas to do nothing. If you want to call that a fresh idea, you may do so.”

“Nothing?”

“It wasn’t the problem he seemed to think it was. In any event, it is not any kind of problem now.”

“It certainly isn’t.”

Adid cocked his elegant head aside. “It’s a moot point.”

“Mute,” Fitzhugh said. “I prefer mute.”

“It’s too bad what happened. A dangerous business, flying in Sudan.”

“I’m curious. Why did you think the story wasn’t a problem?”

“To say that Knight is profiting off a war? That’s been said before. And what is the difference if we are? One goes into business to make a profit.”

Shrimp in a cream and brandy sauce was set before him. “That’s what Douglas said? That we were going to be painted as war profiteers?”

Adid accepted his grilled Malindi snapper. “I don’t know why he flew all the way to Nairobi to discuss that. Was there something he did not mention?”

Even Adid could not lie this well, Fitzhugh thought. This is too cute and coy to be anything but honest. Too confused to answer, he said, “So your meeting was cordial? Douglas told me it was an ugly scene.”

“Hardly ugly. I was annoyed with him for taking up my time with a small problem he could have easily handled himself.”

“Maybe he did,” Fitzhugh said. “I’m not sure how easy it was.”

“And I would have been annoyed with you if you had taken up my time during business hours with this conversation.” He snatched a handkerchief from his pocket and sneezed. “But I’m pleased to have dinner with the once-famous Ambler of the Harambe Stars. My son has kept the autograph you gave me when we met the first time.”

“Yes, I recall,” Fitzhugh said, experiencing a moment of deflated expectation. Here was a man who had once smuggled contraband ivory, a man who with his father had been a suspect in the sabotaging of Richard Leakey’s airplane. Fitzhugh had been geared up for a confrontation with the author of six murders but got instead a banal villain who faked bankruptcies and schemed to crush competitors and wasn’t even a coconspirator, much less a criminal mastermind. It was oddly disappointing; it was as if Adid had let him down.

“Speaking of that first meeting, a private word with you?” Adid asked.

“Yes?”

“What is your opinion of Douglas? How does it go, working for him?”

“My opinion? Why do you ask, if I may ask?”

“You recall what he told us at that first meeting? That he had been a fighter pilot in the Persian Gulf War for the American Air Force? He also said his father had been a successful land developer who died of heart failure. I make it a point to know as much as I can about my managers, and when I took over Knight, I looked into Douglas’s background. It took a little time. He was in the American Air Force, but never in the war and never as a fighter pilot. A common soldier. His father was a successful man, but he didn’t die of heart failure. He was murdered.”

To this revelation, Fitzhugh had nothing to say.

“It was a famous case in the city he comes from. Tucson in Arizona. It was in all the newspapers. It seems his father’s business became a laundry for Mexican drug money, he was going to testify against them, and they blew him up in his automobile. You never had a hint of this?”

“No, never.”

“It disturbs me, his telling stories like that. I don’t care who a man lies to as long as it is not to me.”

Adid sneezed again.

“Could you use this?” Fitzhugh took the nasal spray from out of his pocket.

“Ah, a fellow sufferer.”

“Oh, no. I happened to find this in a rather odd place. At an airstrip in the Nuba mountains.”

“Why odd? I do not suppose those people are immune to allergies.”

“Have you ever been to Sudan, Hassan?”

“To Khartoum several times on business,” he answered.

“I meant to southern Sudan. Or to the Nuba.”

He gave a look of distaste. “Why would I ever want to go there?”

Fitzhugh left the spray bottle on the table, one small fact discarded in exchange for others.

 

TURKANA BOYS WERE playing bau under a tree—the quick movements of young black hands, the click of white stones. Smoking an Embassy, Fitzhugh stood in the shade and pretended to watch the game’s progress. He felt an imperative to act but wasn’t sure what action to take. To call his evidence circumstantial would be generous; to even call it evidence was a stretch. Nevertheless, he was sure he was in possession of a large true fact, monstrously large, and he deeply wished he’d never acquired it.

An old Turkana passed by on spindly legs, his staff with wooden headrest on his shoulder. A PanAfrik Hercules took off, and shortly another plane came in from the west, a Gulfstream Two. 5Z203. Fitzhugh started back to the office, forcing himself not to think. Think too much, you won’t do anything.

Cap thrown back, Douglas breezed in, tossed his logbook onto his desk, then sat down and filled it out from notes taken in flight. Fitzhugh, erasing the board, feigned absorption in tomorrow’s schedule. Finished with his log, Douglas went to the coffee urn.

“Where’s Rachel?”

“I gave her the afternoon off.”

“We’re out of coffee. She’s supposed to keep it full. The crews like a jolt when they get back.” Then in a jocular tone: “I like a jolt, and I’m the boss.”

“Well, I gave her the afternoon off.”

“Is that a new fringe benefit?” He poured water into the urn and scooped coffee into the basket. “So how was Nairobi?”

“Nairobi was Nairobi.”

“Thought you might have patched things up with Diana while you were there.”

“I don’t use company time for personal business. I had dinner with Hassan. We discussed the meeting you had with him last month. On the sixth, wasn’t it?”

Douglas stood with his shoulder to the wall, legs crossed at the ankles, thumb hooked into the handle of his mug.

“I would like to hear why you lied to me,” Fitzhugh said. “I believe I am owed an explanation.”

Nimble as ever, Douglas replied, “All right, I did what you thought I’d do. Chickened out. I told him we were going to get smeared as war profiteers on CNN. Man, I’m sorry.” Fitzhugh shrank away as Douglas reached out to touch him. “You never let me down, but I let you down. Didn’t have the balls. But—I don’t mean to sound callous—it doesn’t make any difference now.”

“A moot point.”

“Yeah.”

Fitzhugh reached under his desk for the water jug. “Would you recognize this, Douglas?”

“Are you going flaky on me? What the f*ck are you talking about?”

“You were the one with the fresh idea,” Fitzhugh said, with a confidence produced by his anger. “Or perhaps you would call it a cool idea. The thing that surprises me is that you thought of it all on your own and carried it out all on your own, with considerable help from Tony. I was sure Adid was behind it.”

The red light on the urn winked. Douglas pressed the spigot and stood blowing across his mug. “Man, you are in a state.”

“Tony had a reason to sabotage Dare’s plane—he hated them both. He had the opportunity—it was just a matter of sneaking in there when it was dark with dirty water and a few plastic bags. He would know what do to—a trained flight mechanic.”

“Whoa!” Douglas said with a wild laugh at the absurdity of it all. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! What did you smoke when you were in Nairobi?”

“Only a few cigarettes. When I was at the bank. I suppose I could talk to you about embezzling company funds, but that’s rather a misdemeanor compared with this.”

“Get the f*ck out of here before I—”

“Before you what? You’re going to listen to this. Tony could have found out that Wesley was flying Phyllis on Monday from only five people. Three had no reason to tell him. The fourth, me, never spoke to him. Which leaves you. You had a discussion with him before you went to see Hassan. Yes, you told him to cancel the arms flights, but you had some other things to say. When was the last time you were at Jomo Kenyatta?”

“You can’t talk to me like we’re in a police interrogation room.”

“When was the last time you were at Jomo?”

A smile broke across the clean American face, that guileless, beguiling smile. “Five years ago, when I landed in this country.”

“Thank you. Thank you, for once, for the truth. And here is the lie that proves the truth.”

Fitzhugh stepped across the room to hand him the flight plan. He felt, in the still, elongated seconds it took Douglas to read it, like a cuckold presenting his wife with proof of her infidelity. Douglas raised his eyes, the gray irises steady and concentrated.

“I know what a false flight plan looks like,” Fitzhugh said. “It doesn’t take eight hours to fly from Wilson to Jomo and back.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“You too, a busy beaver. In case Tony’s midnight mechanics didn’t work, or if they did, in case a pilot like Dare overcame the problems and lived through it—and he damned near did—you flew yourself to the Nuba mountains with a backup plan. You had a talk with the Archangel. I can guess what you said to him—If this story gets out, I’m screwed and so are you. Your troops will be back to throwing spears at gunships. You convinced him that under no circumstances must that plane be allowed to complete its journey. So just in case Dare shows up, Lieutenant Colonel Goraende, shoot down the Hawker and blame it on the Sudanese army. You hadn’t counted on a last-minute change of planes and pilots, and I don’t suppose the thugs Michael sent to do the dirty work knew a Cessna from a Hawker. All they knew was to shoot down a plane coming in on Monday morning. I guess we can say Tara was collateral damage. Convenient, though, that she’s out of the way.”

“Fitzhugh Martin, private eye,” said Douglas, shaking his head in dismay. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d say you lost your—”

“Go to hell.”

Douglas folded up the flight plan and gave it back. “You look surprised, my man. I’m not worried what you’ll do with that.”

“You don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Actually, I do.” He went to the file cabinet, withdrew the company checkbook, and sat down. “No boss would have tolerated listening to one tenth of the shit I’ve just listened to. But—I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating—I couldn’t have brought this airline to where it is, couldn’t have done it without you. That entitles you to the rest of the year’s salary as severance pay.” He filled in the amount and held the check across the desk. “You’re going to take this and walk out of here. That’s what you’re going to do.”

Fitzhugh was disappointed to see him resort to something so blatant and crude. It was worthy of a tinpot Kenyan politician. But he had to watch becoming too judgmental. “I couldn’t have done it without you.” That was another small true fact, and the deaths of those six human beings was another collaboration. With all the big and little moral compromises he’d made in the past three years, with all the rationalizations, justifications, and lies, all the pretending that what he knew to be true wasn’t true, he had enabled Douglas to do what he’d done and to think he could get away with it, as he probably would. In his own moral transformation, Fitzhugh had been like the frog immersed in water that is slowly heated; adjusting its body temperature to an ever-more-lethal environment, it is insensible to the danger it is in and boils to death. He had leaped from the pot just in time. Much longer, and he might have tolerated even this crime. His escape, however, was no absolution. He’d been an accomplice of sorts , and now he was being tempted to make one more, one final compromise. Knowing it would be fatal, he said, “If I quit, you don’t owe me anything. So I quit.”

“You’re sure? What you said to me was disgusting. Still and all, I wouldn’t feel right, seeing you walk out of here with nothing.”

“I can assure you, your feelings don’t count for anything.”

“Have it your way, then,” he said, tearing up the check and writing “void” on the stub.

“There are so many things I would like to know,” Fitzhugh said. “Most of all—not why, that’s easy—but how? How did you bring yourself to do it? How did the motive get translated into action? This was mass murder. Of people you knew. Did you ever have a moment of doubt, of hesitation?”

Douglas regarded him with the expression of a bemused boy, and Fitzhugh felt much the same deflation as he had last night. Like most people, he’d always assumed the face of evil would look its part, monstrous, grotesque, theatrically ugly; but here it was before him, the face of a bird-watcher, blandly handsome, veiled in innocence.

“Fitz, you are no longer an employee of this airline. I have work to do. I have to ask you to leave.”