'Good. That is his manifesto, and it is my manifesto. We may not be able to prevent the proposed Israel-Egypt accord, but we can prevent some of its consequences. Have you met Yasser Arafat?'
'No.'
'If you met him, you would follow him. I can do nothing for Poland, but I can do something for Palestine. You understand?'
'Of course.'
He was on a liberation kick and he was sincere about it and therefore dangerous: the political terrorist is the man who could create new and better worlds if he could express his dreams with intelligence; having none, he can only express his frustration.
I leaned forward again, wanting to know things.
'But you said that the bomb is the key factor. Do you mean — '
'The bomb is always the key factor. In the ultimate show of strength, that is the form of strength that is shown. Surely you know that.'
He looked up as someone came off the flight deck: I heard the sliding door hitting the stops. I turned my head and saw Ventura. They'd been taking it in shifts to mount guard on the flight deck and Ventura had been there for the last twenty minutes. He was a narrow-chested man with a bald head and slow wet eyes: he looked like a disinterested assistant in men's haberdashery but he had killed Hunter in Geneva and he would kill me when the showdown came unless I could preempt him.
'I need you up front,' he said.
Zade moved quickly and I felt the power in him as he swung past me. The sliding door banged shut behind them and I changed my seat so as to face forward. Sassine went nervously for his gun but I didn't take any notice because he was as high as a kite and his reactions were notably slow: I could 'have got his gun and shot Zade or Ventura or possibly both as they came back from the flight deck but Kuznetski and Ramirez were behind me now and so was Shadia.
Sassine seemed ashamed of his show of nerves and crossed his legs and pinched out his reefer and put it in a tin box marked «Aspirin» in Czechoslovakian and began talking rapidly about the paradoxes of political history and the undercurrents of popular thought and their influence on the world revolutionary scene in terms of pseudo-neo-Fascism and its abortive attempts to achieve liberation for the elite. One of the port engines cut out and came back on power while he was talking but he didn't notice it.
Behind him, farther along the aisle, Ramirez was watching me with one hand on a sub-machine-gun, and I saw him glance to the window. Sassine went on talking and I assessed his potential for creating difficulties: I thought Zade would probably have trouble controlling him when it came to the crunch. He was a thin, hollow-eyed man in his twenties, haunted by things he had done or perhaps by things that had been done to him, and I believed he would put a bullet into Pat Burdick's head and my own as well if he thought it would be politically correct.
The engine cut twice more, coming back each time, and five minutes later Zade and Ventura came back from the flight deck and stood talking in urgent whispers in the catering area forward of the passenger section. I couldn't hear anything they said. Sassine was recommending the advantages of what he called 'socialistically-oriented referenda' as a means of 'reaching the proletariat' without disturbing the 'mass-media syndrome' when the port engine cut out and stayed out. The background noise was diminished by one quarter and was noticeable even to Sassine.
Zade and Ventura had stopped talking and were moving forward again when the flight deck door banged back and the pilot stood there, a tall mahogany-faced type with four gold rings on his sleeve and his cap on the back of his head. He spoke directly to Zade.
'Okay, you better get this. I'm the captain of this ship as long as she's in the air and I want to tell you something in case you didn't happen to think of it for yourself. We have one engine out and it can happen again so I'm going to take her into the first place that can give me clearance, and if you don't like it you can shoot me right between the eyes and you've got a hundred and thirty thousand pounds of junk going through the air at thirty thousand feet and it's doing five hundred knots and she's all your baby, know what I mean? You think that guy in there can take her down? He's not a pilot, he's a navigator and he couldn't land a goddam bicycle. I realize you've got the biggest ass in the ball-park so I thought I better just tell you the score.'
He turned and went back to the flight deck and slid the door shut with a bang.
The Boeing was in a wide turn and drifting lower.
My watch read 12:31 and I altered it to 10:31 provisionally: I didn't know which airport we were going into but it wouldn't be far from the time zone for Miami because we'd overflown it.
Zade and Ventura were on the flight deck and the door was open but I couldn't hear any voices. Kuznetski had come forward to ask Sassine what was happening, and Ramirez was squatting on a front-row seat in the coach class section with a sub-machine-gun across his knees and the other on the seat alongside. When Sassine came back to talk to him I moved down me aisle to where Dr Costa was looking after the girl.
Shadia was with them and I couldn't say everything I needed to say but the main thing was to keep Pat Burdick's morale up in case she had to look after herself while I was busy.
'How are you feeling, Pat?'
'I'm okay.'
She was lying back on the tilted seat looking up at me with dulled eyes, but managed to smile.
'You know I'm here to look after you, for your father?'
'I didn't know.'
Her eyes showed a flicker of interest now.
'I've talked a lot to these people, and they've told me that whatever happens they've no intention of harming you. We're going to reach a working agreement with your father, some time today, and then you'll be free to go home.'
She went on looking up at me, frowning a little against the reflected light on the ceiling.
'Are you just kidding me along?'
'No, I'm not. You don't need any false reassurance — you're too tough for that.'
Dr Costa took the pad off her forehead and dipped it into the bucket of ice and squeezed it out and put it back.
'I don't feel very tough. I feel really spaced out, over all this. Do you know what they want from my Dad?'
'Yes.' Because Shadia was listening. 'And it's nothing he's not ready to give them, in exchange for you.'
I pressed her 'hand and straightened up and looked at Costa and he came back along the aisle to talk to me.
'How bad is she?' I asked him.
Shadia hadn't followed us. I think she didn't like to come too close to me, possibly because she was superstitious: with part of her mind she saw me as someone who'd come back from the dead.
'She needs to be in a hospital,' Costa said.
He was short and rumpled with soulful brown eyes that spoke of devotion to a dozen gods, whichever could get his attention first. He smelt faintly of herbs.
'What's your diagnosis?'
He shrugged.
'It could be blackwater fever, or it could be yellow fever; the symptoms are much the same in the early stages.' He looked up at me dolefully. 'Do these people mean what they say?'
'It depends what they say.'
He looked along the aisle.
'Poor child. They say they will show humanity. Where will they find humanity?'
I turned round a little so that I had my back to Shadia:, this wasn't an intelligence cell but she might have had training in lip-reading somewhere along the line.
'Dr Costa, have you given any sedation?'
'Sedation? Oh no, she-'
'Don't give her any. If you can give her stimulants without doing any harm, you should do that.' He broke in but I stopped him. 'I might not have long to talk. I don't know what's going to happen but I want to get the girl out alive if it's possible. She might have to run, or look after herself in an emergency. If I can give you any warning, I'll do that.' I moved again, walking back with him along the aisle. 'I'm quite sure we can all reach a peaceful agreement as soon as contact is made with the other party.'