B006U13W The Flight (Jenny Cooper 4) nodrm (47 page)

‘Thank you,’ Singh said, eager to maintain a brisk pace. He addressed himself to Jenny. ‘Mr Ransome has been good enough to explain to us the circumstances of your meeting with him earlier today.’ And without a trace of irony he added: ‘We are most grateful for your contribution to the return of Flight 199. It’s quite possible that without your intervention the tragic event of a fortnight ago would have been repeated.’

Jenny wanted to shout out in protest that those now nodding in congratulation had done everything in their collective power to silence her, but somehow the words seemed to stop in her throat.

Acknowledging her unspoken thoughts, the urbane Singh deftly piled on more praise. ‘Mrs Cooper, a robust system of justice requires determined and independent judges and coroners, and your embodiment of these qualities is to be applauded. Your suspicions have indeed been wholly vindicated.’

Jenny waited for the ‘but’.

Singh didn’t let her down. ‘That said, we do have something to offer in mitigation. Until we spoke to these three gentlemen this afternoon –’ he waved a hand in the direction of Ransome, Patterson and Sanders – ‘we genuinely had no idea that maliciously corrupted avionics were the most likely cause of 189’s problems.’

Jenny glanced at Sir James Kendall. He was keeping his eyes fixed firmly on his notebook.

‘There was no doubt that something had struck the aircraft, but we remained at a loss to explain precisely what.’

‘You didn’t know about the Apaches?’

Singh’s eyes flicked uneasily to Air Chief Marshal Talbot, who seemed to place the ball back in the civil servant’s court. A wise man, Jenny thought.

‘Or about Mr Sanders’s role in trying to suppress evidence of their existence? People have died. I suggest that your debriefing includes questions about the death of an innocent photographer named Jon Whitestone, and whether Mr Sanders had a hand in Captain Farraday’s fatal accident.’

Sanders remained impassive. Singh considered his response with extreme care, exchanging glances with Eleanor Hammond to be sure of her approval before continuing. ‘Your comments have been noted. You have my word that all relevant matters will be dealt with. But you must appreciate, Mrs Cooper, that nothing of what we have discussed in this room must be repeated once you have left it.’

It was more than a polite request, Jenny sensed. Her answer and the faithfulness with which her actions reflected it would determine her entire professional future. She had no doubt that to step outside the rules of this inner circle would place her permanently beyond the pale. The question was: did she want to be taken to the Establishment’s heart, or was this the moment for a new departure?

‘Mrs Cooper—?’

‘The families of the dead deserve to know what happened – and I include Whitestone’s and Farraday’s among them.’

‘They do indeed, but they can’t know everything, I’m afraid, not even Mrs Patterson. They will be given certain information, of course, but by Sir James, not by you.’

Air Chief Marshal Talbot interjected: ‘We can’t ground the world’s airliners, Mrs Cooper, and nor do we have to. With the help of Mr Patterson and, we hope, his company, this threat will be dealt with.’

Jenny shot Patterson a look.

‘I will be happy to fill you in on the details once I have your assurance,’ Singh said. ‘You must understand that some things are simply too delicate and important to be subjected to all the rumour and conflation that would occur in the public arena.’

‘What about my inquest?’ Jenny asked.

Singh passed the question to Assistant Chief Constable Butler. ‘We’re hoping you can bring it to a sensible conclusion, Mrs Cooper. My force has been as mystified by the circumstances of Brogan’s death as I know you have been. We’ve been making inquiries and we’re fairly certain that he had been engaged as an informer for Customs and Excise in a joint operation with the Irish Garda’s Drug Squad. We believe the Garda tempted him back from the Caribbean with the offer of immunity in exchange for helping them to penetrate the criminal activities of the Real IRA. He had a mixed cargo of cannabis and cocaine on board, which he was en route to delivering to his accomplices further up the Severn. There is some suggestion that he was concerned that his cover might have been blown – the Garda has never quite managed to purge itself of officers sympathetic to Republican terrorists – hence the gun, one suspects.’

‘And I’ll be receiving a statement to this effect?’

‘You will,’ Butler replied.

‘But it wasn’t the plane that caused his death, it was what happened in the water.’

‘I can only repeat my earlier request, Mrs Cooper,’ Singh said. ‘It goes without saying that all of us only want what’s in the public interest.’

She had made up her mind to get up from the table and leave the room when Patterson broke his silence. He spoke in a feeble, faltering voice. ‘Mrs Cooper, I thank you for all that you tried to do for my family. Your task would have been so much easier if I had had the courage to tell you what I knew . . . I understand you were responsible for turning the plane around so quickly this morning. I probably owe my life to you . . . You have my word that I will be dedicating my efforts to making sure a disaster of this sort is never allowed to happen again.’

She could see in his eyes that he meant it. He was no longer the buttoned-up corporate man she had first met in the mortuary a fortnight ago. He had the look of a penitent now.

‘Mrs Cooper?’ Singh asked again.

‘All right. Agreed.’

‘Thank you.’

Looks of relief spread across the committee members’ faces. Moreton let out an audible sigh. At last he had delivered.

Singh spoke for no more than ten minutes, succinctly placing all the facts as he knew them in chronological order. Much of it Jenny already knew or had surmised: she had deduced that malware had been remotely inserted into the A380’s flight computers, possibly before the components were even installed in the aircraft, and she had also known that Ransome Airways’ booking system had been manipulated by the same unseen hands into grouping Han, Patterson, Towers, Duffy and Nuala Casey on the same flight. What she hadn’t fully grasped was the sheer enormity of the electronic war in which the downing of 189 was the first bloody skirmish, or the precise intention behind Kennedy’s Washington summit.

The battle had been escalating for at least ten years, Singh explained. China saw the advent of global electronic communications as the number one threat to its internal stability, and to defend against this had erected what had become known as the Great Firewall, through which only approved internet traffic could flow. The US had then set about finding means of bypassing it in the hope of igniting the sparks of a mass democracy movement in the Communist superpower. In retaliation, the Chinese government sponsored efforts to use the internet as a means of threatening vital infrastructures in Western countries: power, water, telecommunications, electronic banking, stock markets and aviation. Controlling and disrupting such systems remotely was every bit as effective as other means of warfare, and China possessed vastly superior manpower with which to wage it. As the balance of power slowly tilted towards the East, it became increasingly apparent that this was a Cold War the West was in danger of losing.

Doug Kennedy was put in charge of a team fighting the war on the aviation front. A series of suspicious mishaps in air traffic control systems, coupled with an unexplained spate of errors in previously dependable fly-by-wire aircraft, pointed to outside interference. His task was to isolate the problem and gather together the personnel to fix it. The summit set for 10 January was the result of many months of careful persuasion. Aided by Sanders in the UK, Kennedy had sweet-talked, cajoled and ultimately threatened his way into persuading some big players to come to Washington. Captain Nuala Casey was on the guest list because of her unique overview of the latest reported malfunctions on commercial aircraft. Cobalt, represented by Greg Patterson, was targeted for its singular expertise in both preventing and orchestrating viral attacks on complex computer systems. Alan Towers and his associate Dr Ian Duffy were well ahead of the competition in developing hardware with the potential to be immune from outside interference. Kennedy wanted them prised out of the purely commercial sphere and under the watchful supervision of the US government. Jimmy Han was already a loyal friend of the US and needed little persuasion to offer his manufacturing muscle as one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer hardware. Already exiled from his homeland, he was in the front line of the struggle for Chinese democracy, a cause he felt would ultimately triumph only when information flowed freely amongst his billion and more compatriots.

‘As you can appreciate, Mrs Cooper,’ Singh said, drawing towards a conclusion, ‘between them, those four men and one woman represented a body of knowledge whose value could safely be considered priceless – easily worth the loss of a few hundred innocent lives.’

‘Will there be retaliation?’ Jenny asked, realizing how naive she sounded as soon as the words left her mouth.

‘It all gets weighed in the balance,’ Talbot answered. ‘I am sure that at some point there will be consequences.’

Silence fell across the table. Glances were exchanged, indicating that the committee’s business was drawing to a close.

‘We appreciate your cooperation, Mrs Cooper,’ Singh said. ‘It won’t go unacknowledged.’

Simon Moreton took his cue to see her out. ‘Thank you, Jenny. Can I offer you a lift home?’

Jenny turned back to Singh. ‘You haven’t told me what happened on the water.’

‘We’re still trying to establish the precise facts,’ Talbot cut in. ‘It seems likely that American personnel were acting directly on Kennedy’s orders. We can presume they attempted to destroy the avionics of the downed aircraft rather than let them fall into our hands, and it probably also follows that they made every effort to ensure that there were no surviving witnesses to their actions. In the latter respect, at least, they were successful.’

‘The Americans don’t trust us?’ Jenny needled. ‘I thought we cooperated fully over terrorism.’

More uncomfortable glances were exchanged. Jenny suddenly felt foolish but didn’t understand why.

‘We’re considered leaky,’ Sir James Kendall said, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s our press and, I’m afraid, people like you they fear, Mrs Cooper. Somehow we’ve lost the knack of keeping a secret.’

Ignoring his note of disapproval, Jenny persisted. ‘Someone tried to kill Brogan, or at least ensure he didn’t survive. That can’t be allowed to go unpunished.’

No one answered her.

‘And what will the public be told? No one is going to believe it was a lightning strike after what happened today. You can’t continue to issue misinformation for ever.’

Singh took up the baton again. ‘Please try to be content with what you have already achieved, Mrs Cooper. Not even you can improve the situation any further. The contaminated avionics will be analysed; a solution will be found.’

Jenny wasn’t content, far from it, but she could truthfully say there was nothing more she could have done.

Several inches of snow had fallen overnight, covering the valley in a white shroud that had frozen hard in a searing east wind. The snow ploughs had left the tiny lane from Melin Bach untouched, forcing Jenny to creep slowly down the hill cutting the first tracks of the day. The smothered landscape looked as subdued as she felt. The radio bulletins carried the latest speculation that Flight 199 had been forced to land because of a faulty electrical component supplied to the aircraft’s manufacturers. Familiar-sounding officials reassured the listening public that very occasionally faulty components slipped through the net, but that this would never be allowed to happen again. Jenny almost found herself believing them.

Likewise, she almost trusted Simon Moreton’s assurances that diplomats were now working day and night to ensure that no more airliners were plucked from the sky, but it was little salve for her conscience. When, in a few days’ time her inquest resumed, it would end in an open verdict, leaving Brogan’s girlfriend, Maria Canavan, with unanswered questions and a lingering suspicion that the man she had loved had been an unredeemed criminal. Mrs Patterson, too, would never be allowed to know that in the interests of keeping their shady mission secret, the operatives in the Apache helicopters had left her daughter to the mercies of the freezing river. Picking her way through the winding miles of snow-covered forested gorge, she felt like a traveller on a journey that might never end.

The uneasy sensation stayed with her even as she broke out of the wilderness and crossed the bridge into the tamed English countryside. Following the motorway into Bristol, she scolded her imagination and reminded herself that she had banished irrational feelings to the past, but there it was: a real and undeniable sensation, as tangible as any in the corporeal world; a presence that sat neither next to nor behind her, but seemed to occupy every aspect of her space, and which was urging her to something. Who could it be? Was it Brogan or Amy Patterson? Don’t be so stupid, she told herself. You’re over all that now. You’ve been into the darkest places; you’ve shared everything with Dr Allen there ever was to share; there are no ghosts left to haunt you.

But as she crunched across the pavement in Jamaica Street the sensation seemed to grow stronger still. Approaching the entrance to her building, she started in alarm as a burly, red-faced man threw open the front door and marched angrily out. It was Alison’s husband.

‘Terry?’

He glared at her and stormed past, wrenching open his car door.

Jenny hurried inside and along the hallway. She called out Alison’s name.

‘Mrs Cooper?’

She was sitting calmly at her desk, dressed in a neat navy suit, her hair elegantly set. The room was serene and orderly. Fresh flowers stood in a vase on the waiting-area table.

‘I just saw Terry . . . I thought for a moment—’

‘That he’d strangled me?’ She let out an ironic laugh. ‘I could have strangled
him
. He would have deserved it, too – the tramps he’s been consorting with in Spain.’