"Alan, I can't give you an answer there isn't an answer. Not yet—"
"You told me it was sabotage, Gant! You sounded like you were swearing on your mother's life, for Christ's sake! Now you got nothing?" He turned contemptuously towards Blakey.
"And you, Ron you got nothing, either? You still going along with this guy's theory?"
"We can't find anything. Not yet. But the odds against—"
"Fuck odds!
I have had odds up to here! The company's dead in the water. I know the odds!"
"Daddy calm down, for God's sake!"
"Barbara?" Vance seemed bemused, or stunned. Lightning made the canvas of the tent glow, as if there was some great conflagration outside. Then the thunder.
Vance yelled above it: "You taking his side? Something new for you, Barbara!"
"Alan," Gant said levelly, 'it has to be sabotage. I don't know why and I don't know how but it has to be."
Then prove it!" He banged his fist on the table. The instruments rattled, jumped, the malicious chip sliding across the surface.
"If you can't prove it, and prove it now, then you're no damn' use to me, Gant no damn' use at all!" He was leaning heavily on the table, the litter on the surface quivering with the pressure of his rage and weariness. His face was shiny with sweat, his eyes protruding, his breathing loud and difficult. He seemed to be suffocating on his own rage.
"I will prove it, Alan—"
"But you'll prove it too late!" He waved a lurching arm towards Burton behind him.
The Englishman's features were without optimism, expressing a withdrawn defeat.
"You think he and I have got the time to wait for you to prove anything? We ain't got shit?
The man's entire career had subsided within him, Gant realised. The supremely focused, narrowly defiant ego had slid like a collapsing levee into the river of his rage. The 494 had been his dream, and it had turned on him like a wastrel child and betrayed him, leaving his whole business in ruins. He had clung to Gant's theory not because it was a way of surviving, but because it would keep the airplane pure, triumphant. It would justify the 494 and Vance himself. Now, the theory was unprovable and to Vance it had become untenable.
"I'll get something on the move!" he growled, dragging his mobile phone from the pocket of his waterproof and consulting its memory. Then he dialled a number and waited.
"Yes who's that? It's Vance —!" His face was freshly slick with sweat, his eyes and cheeks swollen.
"Is Olssen there? Olssen, your fucking chief engineer—?
Burton seemed to awake from a light trance, eager to cling to his realisation of the purpose of the call. Gant presumed it was Oslo the maintenance company who had performed the overnight service.
"Get that asshole Olssen to the phone, for Christ's sake! I know the guy is avoiding me! I want to talk to Olssen now!"
He remained leaning heavily on the table, which continued to shudder under the pressure, the chips and screws and smaller instruments responding as to a distant earth tremor.
"What do you think might have—?" Burton began with the eagerness of desperation, then fell silent.
Gant remained watching Barbara, who stood near Blakey as if she had retreated from the epic entre and regarded her helplessness, her lack of influence over her father's rage, with evident guilt. Then:
"Olssen — Vance. I want to talk to you!" Vance was fiercely stroking his left arm as it held the mobile phone to his flushed cheek.
"Listen to me you screwed up, Olssen! Your crummy little asshole company screwed up! My airplane fell out of the sky because of you!"
Gant shook his head angrily, but remained silent. Vance's lips were blue with rage, his face brick red.
"I'm going to sue the ass off you and your bosses, Olssen. You ruined me! ruin you! Understand understand…?"
Gant did, catching Vance's weight as it lurched, one hand sweeping aside the litter on the table, the other dropping the phone to clutch at his chest, twist the waterproof down like a tourniquet that might stop the pain. Gant faltered under the weight, then Blakey held Vance, lowering him on to a folding chair.
For a moment his features drained of colour and his eyes stared wildly.
Then, as if a huge current had been passed through his big frame, he seemed to staggeringly leap from the chair towards the tent flap, then subside to his knees. Another jolting shock and he lay stretched on his stomach, Blakey and Barbara bending over him, gently turning him over, loosening his clothing. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth wet and working loosely, as if with a foreign language of pain and dread.
Gant snatched up the mobile phone from the sand and dusted it brusquely. Burton retained shock like an anaesthetic. Barbara was murmuring, drying Vance's face with a handkerchief while Blakey placed a folded garment beneath his head, then glanced at Gant.
'… man from your own factory, your own expert, checked the fuel computer, where your trouble was supposed to have been…"
Gant's thumb remained on the off button.
"Wait," he snapped. Then to Burton: "Call for an air ambulance — do it now!" He realised that their shock was turning to puzzled contempt.
Vance's heart attack had to be that had altered the tent's small universe, the physical and psychological laws that governed it. How could he, their eyes said, want to talk to Olssen now? He waited until Burton had begun dialling, then he turned his back on them.
"OK. Mr. Vance wants me to talk to you. I'm FAA, got it? Please repeat what you just said what man from Vance Aircraft? When?
Where?"
'-did not wish to listen to what I had to—"
"I don't have time for all that, Mr. Olssen. Just tell me about this man." Vance was still breathing, struggling to swallow air like a fish drowning in it. Gant ignored the small, tight pain of pity in his chest.
"You claim there was someone from Vance Aircraft in Oslo two nights ago. What was his name? Who was he supposed to be?"
There was a groan from Vance, though it might have been some incoherent protest from Barbara or Blakey. Burton was talking urgently into his phone, describing symptoms.
"He called himself Massey. But, you mean he was not' He was not," Gant affirmed.
"Massey? There's no Massey at Vance Aircraft. What did he do? Why did he say he had come?"
He felt icily cold now, utterly detached from the scrabbling of feet in the trodden sand, the chirruping of alarm and comfort. He knew he was right.
"He had been sent to check the fuel computer system, because of the first accident, he said. It was not necessary, since the system was a different one, but he had been asked by Mr. Vance to make certain."
"Sure. You saw him working?"
"No. Jorgensen did, for a while one of the engineers. He was with us an hour. He was an expert- I spoke to him myself, he was definitely from Vance Aircraft, there was no reason to think otherwise."
The slight singsong of the Norwegian accent was beginning to grate, as if it was the aural equivalent of the naivety of Olssen's opinions. The guy was an expert. He'd have had to be, to doctor the fuel computer… with another of those. Gant glared malevolently at the chip, which remained on the table even though the floor of the tent was littered with the stuff Vance had swept away with his hand. He had to speak to Olssen, face to face he needed a description, a verbatim account of what the expert had said, how he had spoken, his nationality.
And question this guy Jorgensen, who had also spoken to the expert.
"We'll need to talk, Mr. Olssen. I'll drop by. My name is Gant — my real name."
"But you are—?" The tone was at once conciliatory, even ingratiating, then immediately defensive.
"But, how could we have known—?"
Gant flicked the off button and put the phone in his pocket.