The Professor of Truth (10 page)

You rearrange the pieces of the narrative. Some things become simpler, others more complicated. That chain of client, procurer, perpetrator can be dispensed with. Now there is a hostile regime—“rogue state” is another favoured term—with agents of its own who could have constructed and placed the bomb. It has been sponsoring or carrying out acts of terrorism for years. There is every possibility that it was involved in this one.

You start a trail from your regime. Your
new
, hostile, rogue regime. There is a man who works for you, a junior operative in their intelligence service. Very junior—he services their cars. Let’s call him Ali. You don’t know how good a mechanic Ali is but he’s a lousy informer. For months he gives you nothing of any value. Then one day he does. He gives you a name. He knows you have been looking for someone—let’s say someone whose life is open to interpretation—and he finds someone, a security officer for the national airline. Ali knows this person. You check him out. Yes, you reckon, this could be the one you have been seeking.

His name is Khalil Khazar.

You are perfectly aware that Ali is not reliable. He wants money. He wants protection. He wants a new life in the USA, a better life for his wife and child. (Yes, and who can blame him for that?) He will tell you anything. Nothing he tells you should be taken at face value. You understand. It’s okay.
The more you pay Ali, the more he tells you. The more you like what he tells you, the more he earns. He tells you a great deal about Khalil Khazar, and some of it is useful to your restructuring of the narrative.

Because of his job, Khazar travels. He spends a lot of time in hotels, in meetings in anonymous breeze-block buildings on industrial estates on the outer edges of city sprawl. Airports are a second home to him. Lagos, Zurich, Riyadh, Prague, Cyprus, Malta. Sometimes he travels under his own name, sometimes he uses a coded passport with another name, issued at the request of the regime’s intelligence service. Why does he have such a passport? Why do such people, of any state, have multiple identities? Well, it doesn’t matter. The point is how you interpret such movements. It doesn’t look good for Khalil Khazar, but it looks better for you. You build up a picture of who he is, where he has been. Where he was on a particular day. On the morning of the day in question he was on a Mediterranean island. He’d arrived the day before, stayed the night, then flew home again, on a flight that left the island around the time that another flight took off for Germany. That second flight connected with a flight to London, a feeder flight to the transatlantic flight that was destroyed by a bomb that evening.

So now you have one trail leading from the hostile regime to an island, and another trail leading from the wreckage of the aircraft to London. And they are connected—tenuously, but connected nevertheless—by two flights, one from the island to Germany, and one from Germany to London.

You go through it a hundred times. You examine it from
every angle. The bomb exploded on a plane that took off from Heathrow, London. Was the bomb loaded,
ingested
, at Heathrow? If it was, then Khalil Khazar can’t have been involved. He hasn’t been in London for years. Travel there is restricted for him because there are no diplomatic relations between the UK and his country. If Khazar isn’t involved, then neither is his country. Think again. You have two trails that almost meet. To make them meet, the bomb must
not
have been ingested at Heathrow. It must have come in from somewhere else, on another flight, on a feeder flight, and been transferred to the New York flight. Okay, this makes more sense. The two trails don’t come together in London. They come together on the island. You follow the bomb back to Germany, back to the island’s airport, and you try to work out how Khazar could have put the suitcase containing the bomb into the system there.

But it would make so much more sense to load the bomb at Heathrow
.

Not for Khalil Khazar. Impossible for him, because he was never in London. On the day of the bombing he was on the island, at the airport, catching a flight home. And also it would depend on the type of bomb. If the bomb was detonated by a barometric timer, of the type built by the terror group based in Germany, then yes, logically Heathrow makes more sense. The way it works …

But you know the way it works. You are angry and frustrated now. You are going round in circles. You do not need this. You know how a barometric timer works
.

How it works: it lies dormant so long as it is on the ground. Doesn’t matter where it is, in the boot of a car or the hold of an aircraft, it is asleep. The timer is activated only when the plane is airborne, the mechanism reacting to the drop in air pressure as the plane gains height. Activation usually occurs seven or eight minutes after take-off depending on the rate of climb. The way the group in Germany set their devices, the timer would then run for thirty minutes before triggering the bomb. If it was that kind of bomb, you’d expect it to have detonated thirty-seven or thirty-eight minutes after take-off.

Which is what happened
.

But you’re on a different trail now, so it
couldn’t
have been like that. You go through it once more, voicing your hypotheses, scribbling down timings, working it out all over again. You’ve missed something, perhaps something obvious. If Khazar planted the bomb, he could
not
have introduced it at Heathrow. But if it came in on another flight it would have blown up before it even got to Heathrow,
if
it was triggered by a barometric timer. So—of course—it had to be another kind of timer. The bomb
had
to be triggered not by barometric pressure change but by ticking time. You set the timer running, you get the suitcase into the system, and when the time runs out the bomb goes off.

It’s so simple when you say it. But how does the bomber know how long to set the timer for? He puts the suitcase on one flight, it’s to be transferred at another airport to a second flight, then in London transferred on to the target flight, and then it’s to blow up
over the Atlantic. One unaccompanied suitcase going through all those airports, all those security systems, with all the possibility of detection, baggage mix-ups, delayed departures and arrivals—how long does the bomber give it? Maybe it doesn’t matter where or when or on which plane it blows up. Maybe if he’s an inefficient bomber it can blow up on the ground with no one on board for all he cares. But he isn’t inefficient. He has a job to do, and he cares a great deal about getting it right. There is money in it, and vengeance, even a cruel, barren kind of justice. The trouble with your simple explanation is that it isn’t simple at all. It’s ludicrously complex and has a huge likelihood of failure. If the bomber wants to bring down a particular plane he’s going to put the bomb on to that plane, not any other, and he’s going to use a device that detonates only when that plane is well into its flight
.

Then that bomber must be the wrong bomber.

The right bomber used a different kind of timer.

You talk to your forensics experts again—your future lab technician and chiropractor—and they go back to the fragments of clothing from the primary suitcase and have another look. And they find something, a tiny fragment of circuit board embedded in a shirt collar. So tiny it might almost have been missed. In fact it
was
missed first time round; well, not missed but overlooked, there’s some confusion over when and where it was found and how it was catalogued or not catalogued, which would explain why nobody thought there was anything special about it back then, but now they do. Now it is very special. It is the key to everything. It comes from a timer, the right kind of timer, the kind of timer that will fit with the narrative that has a bomb
in a radio cassette player in a suitcase going on its merry undetected way from one airport to another even though a warning was circulated to look out for bombs in radio cassette players because you and the Germans and God knows who else
knew
there was at least one of the damn things out there. But that was before, that was the old narrative, and now you have turned the page, and there you find that a batch of these other, non-barometric timers was once supplied by the manufacturer to the hostile regime and that Khalil Khazar, travelling the world under his own name or another,
could
have had a role in acquiring them.

And then Ali gives you another name. He understands, as you do, or
because
you do, that the bombing wasn’t an act of individual insanity but one of shared ideology. If Khazar was involved, he can’t have acted alone. So Ali gives you Waleed Mahmed, also employed by the national airline, its station manager at the island’s airport. As with Khazar, the suggestion is that there is more to him than appears on the surface, that his work for the regime goes far beyond what is given in his job description. Whenever Khazar is on the island he spends time with Waleed Mahmed. Waleed Mahmed is a well-known face around the airport, especially at the check-in and information desks. This is not to say that he is free to wander wherever he likes, but he does have detailed knowledge of the airport and its security procedures—which, as it happens, are very thorough and very thoroughly adhered to. Anybody wishing to circumvent those procedures would find such knowledge useful. Khalil Khazar and Waleed Mahmed together make an interesting team.

But Waleed Mahmed’s whereabouts on the day in question are not known. It cannot be established if he was at the airport, or even on the island. Nobody can be found to verify where he was. If he had been at the airport, where his face was so familiar, somebody, surely, would have remembered. This does not rule him out as a suspect, but it makes it all the more important to concentrate on Khazar, who, carrying a false passport, went through the airport that day.

Ali the car mechanic has done well for you, done well for himself, earned himself and his family a new start in America, but his paid-for testimony won’t stand up under legal scrutiny in a courtroom. Which is where, sometime, somewhere, this is all heading. You need to press and bend one more piece into place in the jigsaw, so that you can pin this crime on Khazar and Mahmed, one or the other or both, and, through them, on your hostile, strategically unimportant, wickedly motivated rogue state.

One more piece. You need an eyewitness.

I was staring at the window. A constantly shifting curtain of white flickered outside. The snow was now so thick that it made the daylight sickly and feeble, and it was not even three o’clock. I wondered how I was going to get Nilsen out of the house if the weather did not improve.

“We are almost there, Dr Tealing,” he said. “We are almost at the end.”

I said again, “You are too late.”

He shook his head.

I said, “Do you really think I will join in this ridiculous game of yours, after all these years?”

“A witness,” he said. “Someone who saw Khalil Khazar handle the suitcase on the island. He was at the airport, on the day of the bombing, in order to fly home. What else was he there for? It’s too much of a coincidence, and you know what we think of coincidences. Surely we can find someone who saw him. Join in, Dr Tealing? Yes, of course you will. You already have. You can’t help yourself. As I was saying. We need a witness.”

He was right. I could not help myself.

“Parroulet,” I said.

FTER THE BOMBING, ONCE THE SHOCK DIMINISHED
and I began to accept that what had happened really had happened, I found myself having dreams about Alice, myself and Alice, night after night. Had I gone for counselling, no doubt I would have learned that this was normal, part of a process. But I chose to be my own counsellor, standing outside and apart from myself sometimes as I grieved, and I worked it out unaided. She was my daughter, but she could not be with me in the new reality I inhabited; reasonable, then, that she should walk and run and laugh instead through my shallow sleep. She was always happy in these dreams, never fearful or hurt or anxious. Sometimes we were at home, watching television together, or out in the garden. Often we were on a beach, kicking at the frothy ends of waves. I would pick her up and carry her deeper, threatening to launch her into the sea. She’d be screaming and laughing, knowing—absolutely trusting—that I would never ever let her go no matter how very nearly she might seem about to leave my grasp. And someone—I wanted it to be Emily but I never got to see who it was—was taking pictures of us. Alan and Alice posed for the camera: hunter with seal under arm, ogre with captive princess, man with daughter
clinging to neck. But it wasn’t Alan, it was me, and the dreams were more wonderful, more intense and pure, than the experiences on which they were loosely based. I wished I could have stayed in them forever, those happy-ever-after dreams, but of course I couldn’t. I would wake from them with tears pouring from my eyes, and lie in the darkness a few steps from the empty bedroom where she had once slept. After a while I would get up, and go downstairs to try to read. This was years before I got involved with the Case. No wonder I cannot remember all the literature I have read: great chunks of it passed before my eyes in those dead nights. I took it in but where it went after that I do not know.