Slowly, she turned to the back seat.
It was empty.
‘Ego?’ she continued. ‘What do you think?’
‘Jem, press the red button next to the satellite navigation device. This will connect you to a response specialist. Pretend that you’ve lost your swipe card. Try a Latvian accent. He or she will give a code that you must enter into the navigation device. This will start the car.’
Chapter Eighteen
Near Regensburg
Hrafn Óskarson lifted the peak of his yellow baseball cap and looked at the wall of the school’s assembly room. On it, Little Red Riding Hood fled through a paper forest. Hrafn turned away from the display and crossed the hall. He wondered why the memories of his childhood in Iceland quickened as he entered middle age. He could remember a morning in his tenth year when he and his younger brother Ragnar had raced to their aunt’s farm near Akureyri hoping to dissuade her from making their beloved rabbits into gloves. She had laughed at their naïvety, at the last of their childhood. This was not news. The rabbits had been born for gloves. Ragnar had cried all the long trip home while Hrafn had framed the experience as his first dose of adult medicine. Children petted rabbits; men wore rabbit gloves.
Why that? he thought. Why remember that, here, when I haven’t thought about it in years?
Hrafn took the passport from his jacket and rubbed away the blood from the gold-stamped title, which read Unione Europea Repubblica Italiana. Inside, the photograph showed a pretty woman with shoulder length, auburn hair. He let her eyes imprint his vision.
In the hours following the loss of DFU323, the Regensburg authorities had sent requests for assistance to the Federal Ministry of Transport, who in turn engaged the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation. The Gold Group of Dr Hrafn Óskarson—a veteran of sixteen inquiries—had been instructed to fly from Lower Saxony to Munich and rendezvous with specialists from Europe and the United States: external field investigation experts, psychologists, and engineers from Boeing. Meanwhile, disaster management teams in Regensburg set about requisitioning administrative offices for Gold Group, hangar space for wreckage, and, as an emergency morgue, a local primary school, where the dead now lay.
Hrafn crouched. Gently, he selected one of the two-dozen recovery bags that covered a third of the floorspace. Its zip moved with a low, throaty sound.
The smelclass="underline" raw hamburger meat, aviation fuel, soil.
The smell recalled the closed investigations of his career. They formed a crossing, each like a stone in a brook, back to the night his Boeing 747 experienced an uncommanded rudder hardover on the approach to Singapore Changi Airport. The anxiety of the memory stung him even now. That roaring thought: No; not on my watch. The full starboard rudder lock would have put the 747 into the Singapore Strait in the time it took to take ten breaths. Only a rapid turn using the ailerons and a sudden push on the stick had saved the aircraft and its three hundred passengers. His luck had been astounding. He had repeated the manoeuvre a dozen times in the simulator and failed to bring her home.
The next day, during the pauses in his interview with safety investigators, Hrafn had composed his resignation letter. He returned, by land and sea, to that cold farm near Akureyri, where his aunt was preparing for the last months of her life. He went back to school and recovered his love of engineering. Five years later, having gained his PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, he joined the FBAAI.
On a whiteboard next to the assembly hall door—here, among the art of children—a doctor had written, Mortui Vivis Praecipant.
Let the dead teach the living.
As Hrafn left the assembly room for the open air, he realised why he had recalled the memory of Ragnar and him hurrying to save the rabbits. Tomorrow would be his brother’s birthday.
Flurries of snow blazed in the glow of the temporary lights that ringed the playground. He passed police disaster cabins, parked fire engines, and the skyward satellite dishes of the media village. Nobody else was around. He stopped, just to appreciate the quiet. Then he pushed on. He was late for a meeting with Human Factors.
Hrafn, and the small audience, leaned forward to scrutinise the photograph that Marcus Bower of Human Factors projected on the screen. The image had been recovered from a charred digital camera. It was pixellated and oddly coloured. It showed a woman in mid sprint. She was running down the aisle of the aircraft. A blur in her hand might have been a gun. Hrafn studied the object as Marcus zoomed into it and resumed his interpretation. There was a Holmesian touch to the fervour with which the psychologists and engineers swooped on the slightest of details. Did the shape of her hair indicate acceleration, and thus the aircraft’s movement? Did lighting inconsistencies imply electrical problems? And, at root, was this person working for the good of the passengers, or had she precipitated the crash? Both? Hrafn accepted a coffee as Marcus wrapped up his presentation. It was midnight, and he had a 6 a.m. appointment with Chancellor Schröder. He said, ‘Marcus, I just came from the morgue. Nicolleta Valli has red hair in her passport photograph, but she recently dyed it blond. That leaves Saskia Dorfer as our candidate for Ms X.’
‘Sure you looked at the right body?’
‘Certain.’
‘If we go for Saskia, then there’s a Berlin angle.’
‘How?’
One of the group leaned into the coloured beam of the projector. ‘Dr Óskarson, a passenger called Jem Shaw, a Brit, failed to board. Shaw’s ticket was bought using the same EC card as Dorfer. The Berlin police report that Dorfer’s apartment was destroyed by fire several hours after she boarded the plane.’
‘Interesting.’
‘One more thing,’ said Marcus, ‘Petersen, the hiker who filmed the crash, told me about a camouflaged man he saw hanging around the scene. We think the guy is a reclusive woodsman called Tolsdorf. Some kind of Boo Radley figure to the locals, I understand. He only comes down to the village at Christmas for a good feed. But he robbed the local Aldi this morning. Beer.’
‘So? It must get lonely up in the woods.’
Marcus smiled. ‘He left the beer.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Emptied the bottles before he left the car park, then took the bottles with him.’
‘Why?’
‘That is the question.’
‘OK. Goodnight, everyone. Tomorrow, we’ll talk to Shaw.’
In the hallway, Hrafn found a cleaner mopping the floor. He smiled apologetically and stepped across the wet laminate. He entered the adjacent classroom. Its walls were covered with circuit whiteprints and telemetry plots. Beneath them, partly obscured, were lists of English verbs and pictures of Tony Blair and Big Ben. Trays of wiring and smashed equipment had been laid across the low tables. A dozen men probed the avionics with their pencils, delicate as watchmakers. Hrafn found a warmish coffee near a stack of miniature chairs and touched the shoulder of William Daker, who straightened. He was an old-school Boeing engineer. Gone were the days, told his weary expression, of analogue flight instruments whose dials held their readings at the point of impact.
‘What do you have?’
‘Bad news,’ said William. He indicated a blackened, curved piece of metal. ‘Here are the docking pins for the cockpit CVR/FDR breaker. The short version? The fuse was deliberately removed before impact. I think we can forget the flight recorder data. It’ll be blank.’
Hrafn sighed. If he were abandoned by his primary diagnostic tools—the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder—he might never file a worthwhile report. The solid-state recording chips in each engine were poor substitutes for the parameterised data of the dedicated recorders.