Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (13 page)

Simon got more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for blowing up flight 941, which was enormously generous considering Shub probably guessed he’d have done it for nothing, given the ancillary benefits. There was an element of investment in it though, or maybe even ‘nurture’ was the word. In Shub’s eyes, the people he did business with were split into two camps: customers and contractors. Those who were motivated by factors other than the financial were the customers, politicised fools just waiting to be parted from their money. Those cashing in were the ones he respected, the ones he could relate to.

Simon was, at that stage, doing it principally because he enjoyed it, which was why Shub no doubt felt it mutually beneficial to teach him that the money could be enjoyable too.

Before flight 941, before Shub N’gurath, it was just a hobby, no matter how good he was getting at it; something he did for kicks in his spare time. Despite the enormity of what he had already achieved, and despite even the cash he had accrued, turning full‐
time pro was a far from simple progression. It wasn’t as though he could turn to Alison one night and say, ‘Honey, I’m going to follow my dreams before life passes me by. Are you with me?’

He could tell himself the respectable job and suburban existence were merely a useful cover, but his growing sense of frustration argued convincingly otherwise. They might provide a façade, but it was a façade he could only come out from behind for limited spells: glimpses of a world of freedom that he had to keep walking away from. He was earning a sight more from this ‘hobby’ than from his recognised job, but he couldn’t touch the money. If he suddenly rolled into the driveway in a Beamie Boxter, Alison was bound to ask a few difficult questions, and the Inland Revenue were going to be curious too. He wasn’t doing it for the money and he didn’t particularly want a Beamie Boxter, but it encapsulated his problem. What he wanted was a life that seemed so tantalisingly within reach, a life he now knew he was born for, but first he had to get out of the life he was in.

Walking away was not the obstacle. He had to make sure he wasn’t followed, and that was the tricky part. If he simply disappeared, went out one morning and didn’t come home from work, there wouldn’t be an official investigation, but people would forever be picking over the facts, sniffing for a trail. Alison was unlikely to spend the rest of her life or even the rest of her week asking ‘why?’, and she certainly wouldn’t need to hire a detective to find the biggest answers, but when something isn’t closed, curiosity remains. Add the element of mystery and you compound it tenfold. All these years later, people were still claiming to have seen someone who just might have been Richey Manic: spinning the cycle, feeding the enigma. The number of people who might think they’d recognised Simon’s face in a foreign crowd was considerably smaller, but the principle worked the same. Someone somewhere would always be looking for him, and that was without knowing he’d killed anybody.

Shub N’gurath turned out to be his fairy godmother, the major‐
label A&R man who spotted him jamming in a pub band and said, ‘Kid, you’ve got what it takes. How would you like to be a star?’

The timescale was tight – little more than a fortnight – with the Urkobaijanis in a hurry to get back on the newswires before the end of the month. That had suited Simon fine. It took minutes to devise his plan after Shub told him what was required, and with Bruant supplying the bespoke hardware, he only had to procure a couple of items himself and then fly the route to refresh his memory. The last thing he’d have wanted was a few spare weeks to dwell on all the ways it might go wrong, not to mention extending the task of acting normal at home and, in particular, at work. Keeping the fucking grin off his face around Sintek Energy just for those two weeks had been the biggest challenge of the entire undertaking.

He booked his flights, as ever, through Slipgate.com, invoicing the first journey to himself and the second to Sintek. Doing it through Slipgate on the web allowed him to select his seats and, equally important, verify the type of aircraft. He’d flown the Stavanger‐
to‐
Helsinki leg at least half a dozen times on Sintek business, and it was usually an Avionique 300, but there was one time it had been an Aerospace 146 (which might actually have been with a different airline) and he needed to be sure. Slipgate confirmed 300s for flight 941 on both trips: the reconnoitre and, six days later, the real deal.

He organised the first run for the preceding Tuesday, which he booked off work in lieu of a recent trip to Oslo that had eaten into a weekend. The date of the target flight had already been selected as Monday the twenty‐
sixth, the fate of those on board not decided by himself or even by the Urkobaijanis, but by Harald Johansen in Sintek’s Helsinki office. Simon needed an official reason for his journey, and Monday was the only day of that week Harald was free for a get‐
together. There was a satisfying irony about it: having clocked up so many thousands of miles in pointless business travel, he was going to bow out en route to one final, utterly unnecessary meeting.

The recon trip was more than a memory‐
refreshing exercise. He needed a Stavanger airside ID and there was only one place to get it. Well, on‐
site there were a number of places, but having killed time there so often, he knew which one would be the easiest. There was a troll in the souvenir shop who always hung her jacket over the back of her chair, presumably so that none of the transit passengers would be denied the sight and smell of her permanently sodden armpits. She made frequent lumbering sorties around the store, leaving her laminate unguarded behind the cash register, itself in safely plausible loitering distance from the greetings card rack. When Simon got there, however, she was nowhere to be seen, and in her place was a diminutive, rodent‐
faced adolescent, eyeing up the customers with a suspicion that suggested it would absolutely make her day if she spotted one trying to purloin a Toblerone. Needless to say, her jacket was firmly on and she was sporting her ID badge like it said ‘I AM THE LAW’.

This necessitated an otherwise highly inadvisable course of action: a trip to the coffee stall further along the concourse. He waited until the queue had cleared (ha ha), and ordered a large cappuccino, something nobody was ever likely to do twice, then made a fumbling show of trying to find the correct Norwegian coinage. All of this helped give the bored‐
looking Euro‐
dork behind the counter the impression that Simon was a wide‐
eyed and bumbling ingenu, something he then compounded by tumbling the Styrofoam cup from the counter and spilling the cappuccino across the floor. The gangling teen had a resigned look on his face as he reached for a cloth; it wasn’t the first time it had happened, but presumably the customers normally tasted it first. Simon was profuse in his apologies, and fussed around him as he crouched down to mop up the mess, the dork too concentrated on keeping his sleeves out of the puddle to notice his laminate being gently unclipped as it dangled from his chest. Simon pocketed the ID, then made a show of being out of local currency when asked if he wanted a refill. The dork was understandably in no mood to offer a freebie, but Simon couldn’t complain. He’d been generous enough already.

After that, he took a walk round to flight 941‘s departure gate and watched the in‐
flight caterers load up their shrink‐
wrapped gastroenteritis. They wore sky‐
blue overalls, as he remembered: separate slacks and shirts, company logo on the breast pocket. He picked up a similar set later in the week at a workware store in George Street and scanned the logo from a napkin he’d lifted on the flight, transferring it using a kid’s iron‐
on T-shirt kit from the computer section at Toys R Us.

High‐
tech terrorism où quoi?

The package from Ghent arrived on the Friday, as scheduled, but Shub made him sweat on the final element: his new passport, onward ticket and blank Amex cheques not showing up until late Sunday afternoon. Before they did, he’d been climbing the walls, concerned that the whole operation was going to be aborted due to this one failure. It was to prove a valuable experience, as from then onwards, on every job he set up, there was always one element that didn’t quite fall into place until very close to showtime. The lesson was not to get frazzled and start channelling all your anxieties into this one thing, as the danger was that the distraction could cause you to miss a more significant unravelment elsewhere. In this case, it was only after the courier turned up at his doorstep that he remembered to check all the battery levels, and discovered the ones Bruant had put in the Walkman were on their last legs, presumably from over‐
rigorous testing.

Bruant’s device was intended to be taken into the passenger cabin as hand luggage, and was consequently built around objects one might plausibly be carrying on board a flight. The components were housed in a modified briefcase with concealed compartments below the lid and above the base. These compartments would not show up under airport X-ray scanners for the simple reason that they would at that point be empty. What they were intended to contain was meanwhile accommodated in plain view for the inspection of security staff: two fruit juice cartons lying loose in the main body of the case. The cartons, in fact, each contained one constituent of a binary liquid explosive, perfectly harmless until mixed (unless of course you bunged a straw in and drank the stuff).

The briefcase’s telescopic support arms detached at the base, and a few twists of their bottom‐
most sections brought forth tapered plastic injectors, to which you attached the cartons once you were airside. A modified Walkman supplied the pumping mechanism, connecting to an insulated port at the centre‐
rear of the case, its busy little cogs also turning a tape for the benefit of security inspectors. The pump drew the liquid into the concealed compartments above and below, where it mixed, ready for detonation. Mixing and detonation were controlled via a necessarily bulky mobile phone, the anachronistically large Ericsson housing the detonator and a digital altimeter, as well as an LCD display that projected the expected graphics when you pressed its buttons. The altimeter could be set to trigger mixing and detonation at specified altitudes. Simon selected three thousand feet, being the height the in‐
cabin display had read on his recon trip when they were directly above Boknafjorden.

To all of this he had added an object of his own: a battery‐
operated personal fan, as sold in the travel‐
gadgets section of every airport. This one had a few modifications, one of which being that it was now remotely operable via his electronic car key. Completing the briefcase’s contents were some work folders from Sintek in a zip‐
locked PVC binder, to which he added a newspaper, a magazine and a kingsize Mars bar at the airport newsagent.

He only had to clear security once, at Aberdeen, which he regarded as a soft point of entry. It was just too insignificant to have all but the most bog‐
standard cursory surveillance, with the most dangerous articles passing through the detectors being contraband half‐
bottles smuggled by the North Sea roughnecks. Once airside, he didn’t have to pass any further checks, as at Stavanger there was no need to leave the departure area between flights.

The first thing he did when he got there was to visit the now once again troll‐
monitored gift shop, where he made the highly appropriate purchase of a bottle of champagne, plus a pair of jeans and a plain white T-shirt. Next, he went to the gents’ toilet, locked himself in a cubicle and carefully assembled Bruant’s device, before undertaking the preparatory work on his own gizmo. This consisted of unravelling the champagne’s wire restraint and partially loosening the cork, before replacing the wire and connecting it to a conduit at the head of the travel fan. He gave the bottle a good shake and put it, with its entangled attachment, in the duty‐
free carrier bag. Lastly, he squeezed the jeans and T-shirt into the PVC binder, sealed it, then placed it delicately into the cistern.

He had booked an aisle seat in the backmost row, mere feet from both the toilets and the fuel tanks. The 300 was boarded by steps at the front and rear, and despite his seat allocation, he entered fore. He got the fare‐
inclusive smile from the stewardess on the door as she counted the passengers aboard, then joined the queue behind the familiar logjam of travellers storing their hand luggage, getting up to let each other in or playing pass‐
the‐
parcel with the statutory in‐
flight screaming infant. Amid this anxious settling‐
in activity, no‐
one paid much attention as he placed his duty‐
free bag in an overhead locker and then moved further on up the plane.

Another stewardess was on meet‐
greet‐
and‐
count duty at the aft steps. He gave her a ‘silly me’ smile and shrug as he approached from the wrong direction, waiting until she was obscured by another boarding passenger before taking his seat, so that she didn’t take specific notice of where he was sitting. He placed his jacket – containing wallet, passport and return tickets – in the overhead locker, and sat down.

The flight was quiet, as expected, which was why he’d selected the midday run rather than early morning or late afternoon. It would be preferable if he had no‐
one sitting next to him or indeed opposite, something further ensured by choosing the back row, which was the last to be allocated by the boarding computers. Another passenger nearby wouldn’t be a disaster – as no matter how many times he’d seen people get up and move seats prior to takeoff, he was yet to see someone query it with the cabin staff – but it was prudent to minimise possible complications. He held on to the briefcase in the meantime: ideally he would place it below the seat, but if he had company, he’d stow it overhead, out of sight, out of mind.

After a few minutes, the aisle was clear but for a ski‐
bum type having one more go at stuffing his Michelin‐
man inflatable anorak into the locker above his seat. The trolley dollies were exchanging confirmatory looks. It was almost time. He slid the briefcase under the seat next to him and pretended to read his magazine. A blue figure brushed past him, heading down the plane: the aft stewardess going to meet her fore counterpart, the dolly‐
in‐
chief, to add up the numbers. That left one more behind him, sliding metal drawers and banging hatches as she performed her preflight catering preparations.