The Obsidian Chamber

7

Shapely hadn’t been exaggerating about the weight. All fixtures save for the two pilot’s seats had been removed, and the entire passenger cabin retrofitted with additional avgas tanks. Flying without such niceties as FAA regulations made this charter somewhat less expensive than DebonAir had been, but it made it a lot less comfortable, too.

They took off a few minutes after five, Shapely logging the trip as a VFR sightseeing jaunt up to Twillingate so he wouldn’t need to file a flight plan. Once out of sight of the airport, however, he turned the plane eastward, and within fifteen minutes they were over the Atlantic. Here, Shapely descended, flying low, only a few hundred feet above the waves. Despite the alarming altitude, he was clearly a skilled pilot, and one — apparently — with very few scruples about their ultimate destination, so long as the money was good. Proctor could not even begin to guess what kind of unusual business ventures would have required Shapely to make such interesting modifications to his plane. It was small and relatively old, one of the earlier turbofan business jets, and the cockpit was tight and uncomfortable. As they headed east over the ocean, moving out of local radar range, Shapely increased altitude to thirty-three thousand feet: to “save gas,” he explained, with a hurried half a dozen words about atmospheric pressure. The sky turned indigo and then black as the sun set and they flew into the shadow of the turning earth.

Proctor made some calculations in his head. Their plane had a cruising speed just shy of 450 miles per hour; as Shapely had pointed out, Diogenes’s Bombardier was capable of 500. The only thing they were evenly matched in, thanks to Shapely’s modifications, was range. Given his plane’s speed advantage, Proctor estimated Diogenes would reach Shannon Airport in seven hours of flying. It would take them eight and a half to reach the Irish coast. Shapely hadn’t said why they couldn’t land at Shannon; Proctor assumed it had to do with the near-guerrilla nature of their flight and the need to avoid customs. It didn’t matter; given his head start, Diogenes would arrive in Ireland at least two and a half hours before them.

Proctor used his computer to check on the Bombardier’s flight path again, then he shut the laptop, made himself as comfortable as possible, closed his eyes, and — with military discipline — tuned out the Celtic music that Shapely played incessantly over the aircraft’s sound system. He tried not to think of the stormy Atlantic skimming by below him; tried not to think of that final image of Constance being forced into the waiting jet. Most of all, he tried not to speculate on what Diogenes had in store for her — because he knew with conviction that, whatever it was, it could not be good.

It was just after 5 AM local time when their plane once again reached land. Mere minutes later, they were landing at Connasheer Aerodrome, a private airport in the Aran Islands with a runway just long enough to accommodate the Citation. While Proctor consulted his laptop one more time, Shapely got out of the plane and went over to the FBO — the aerodrome’s lone building — where he was met by the airport operator, apparently manning the facility alone. The two embraced, and from their warm chatter it appeared Shapely made this particular run with some frequency. The pilot returned to the plane a few minutes later, smiling broadly.

“My friend’s brother runs a taxi service out of Inishmore,” he said. “If you catch the Rossaveal ferry, you could be at Shannon in—”

“I’m not going to Shannon,” Proctor said. “Not anymore.”

Shapely went silent.

Proctor indicated his laptop. “The Bombardier refueled at Shannon and took off again.”

“Headed where?”

Proctor hesitated a moment. “Mauritania. Allegedly.”

Shapely frowned, standing motionless, the door to the pilot’s cabin half-open. “Mauritania? Christ, mate, that’s… what, West Africa?”

“West Central Africa. Two thousand two hundred miles.”

Shapely passed a hand through his pompadour. “And you want me to…?” He raised his bushy eyebrows.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Bloody Africa… I’ve had a couple of run-ins there I’m in no hurry to repeat.”

“We’ll just be refueling and taking off again. I’m pretty sure Mauritania may be just another waypoint for refueling the Challenger.”

Shapely was still frowning. “Which airport?”

“Akjoujt. Tiny. Far from normal commercial lanes. The kind of place where they don’t ask a lot of questions. Look — just another five and a half flying hours, give or take.”

When Shapely said nothing further, Proctor reached into his bag, took out a handful of stacked bills. “I gave you thirty thousand for the flight from Gander.” He waved the stack at Shapely. “Here’s another thirty-five thousand. That will more than cover the Mauritania leg. And there’s even more if we have to keep going.”

Shapely stared at the money. Sixty-five thousand dollars — more, Proctor guessed, than the man would make in a year of whatever specialized kind of smuggling he dabbled in.

After a minute, the pilot sighed. “Bollocks,” he muttered, holding out his hand for the second stack. “All right. All right. Let me gas up, check the engines, and eyeball my charts.”

Within twenty minutes they were airborne once again and headed due south, over international waters, just skirting the west coast of Ireland. Shapely had taken a couple of small white pills from a plastic bottle, popped them into his mouth, and washed them down with a giant mug of coffee.

Now Proctor was once again examining his laptop. Despite the odds, he reflected, they were lucky in at least two ways. First, landing at Shannon had cost Diogenes time: time in customs; the refueling delays common at a large airport; probably a crew rotation. All this had shaved half an hour from his lead, cutting it back to just two hours. Second, the route to Mauritania was almost entirely over water. A straight shot to Akjoujt meant they would barely graze the westernmost tip of Portugal, avoiding Europe and all its potential in-flight complications. The only body of land they would pass over was Western Sahara, a disputed territory too preoccupied with its own troubles to pay any attention to their plane — so long, that is, as no engine problems or other mechanical trouble forced them to make an unscheduled landing.

Proctor knew next to nothing about Mauritania, save that the country consisted almost entirely of the ever-expanding Sahara desert and that it was racked by poverty, child labor, and even slavery. He could think of no reason why Diogenes would be heading for such a flyspeck of an airport, save one: a refueling stop. Shannon had obviously been such a stop: the Bombardier would have exhausted its fuel crossing the Atlantic. Clearly, Diogenes was not approaching his ultimate destination, whatever that might be, in a straight line: rather, the range of his aircraft was dictating his stops. And Proctor’s aircraft tracking apps had specifically shown a “CL30”—code for a Bombardier Challenger 300—en route to Akjoujt from Ireland, with no deviation in flight plan.

Once they reached Akjoujt, however, Proctor knew that he would no longer be able to rely on the Internet to track Diogenes’s movements. At such a tiny Mauritanian airport — an ideal stop for private planes in a hurry and with no interest in answering many questions — there would be ways around such formalities as the filing of flight plans. Proctor would have to make use of other methods to determine the man’s ultimate destination — because he felt in his bones that Akjoujt would be the penultimate stop. Four hops in a Bombardier or Learjet was enough to reach almost any destination in the world — and Diogenes was already on his third leg.

They reached Akjoujt — a flat, hot, desolate place, dry as mummy dust, with the sun boring like a heat lamp out of the sky — not long after eleven. Proctor quickly located an airport official who spoke decent English and — for a hefty consideration — was only too happy to talk about the big, gleaming Bombardier that had landed there. Yes, it had stopped to refuel. Yes, it had taken off again. The man knew its final destination, because he had overheard one of the pilots mention it. The plane was headed for the Hosea Kutako Airport in Windhoek, Namibia.

Given his lead, and his faster aircraft, Diogenes should have been over three hours ahead of them… except for a circumstance that the airport official now related. The Bombardier had been delayed taking off from Akjoujt. The man didn’t know what the reason was, exactly, except that the delay had to do with a problem involving one of the passengers. Ultimately, Diogenes’s jet had lifted off for Namibia just ninety minutes before.

Proctor considered the possibility that Diogenes had bribed or lied to the man, providing him with a false destination. After all, there was no way he could track his quarry’s plane any longer using normal technology. But his gut, which he always trusted, told him this man was speaking the truth. Besides, if Diogenes had already paid him to lie, the official wouldn’t have charged Proctor so much money for so little information.

He climbed back into the Citation. “We’re headed for Namibia,” he told Shapely.

The man stared at him with red-rimmed eyes. “You’re bullshitting me, right?”

“No.”

“You know how far that is from here?”

“Yes. Three thousand, six hundred miles.”

Scratching one of his sideburns, the pilot said, “That’s nine more hours of flying time. I’ll be a wreck.”

“It’s the last leg. You can sleep for a week once we get there.”

“Do you know how many hours over the FAA maximum I am already, mate?”

“I didn’t think trifles like FAA regulations concerned you.” And Proctor gave his bag, and the cash it contained, a meaningful pat.

“Bloody hell.” Shapely shook his head in disbelief. “Well, it’s your funeral. I’m so fagged I’m likely to augur in, or fly us straight into a mountain.” And with that, he popped a few more of the little white pills.

Hosea Kutako International Airport was large and — at quarter to eleven in the evening, local time — surprisingly busy. While nowhere near as strict as an American or European facility, the tower had questioned their lack of a flight plan, and Shapely had been forced to come up with a complicated story involving a leaky gas tank, trouble with his communications equipment, and a vulture’s close encounter with one of the jet intakes. Proctor had been surprised the pilot was still capable of such a feat of imagination: he’d been flying almost twenty-four hours straight now, and his jauntiness was long gone.

“I’m a corpse, brother,” he told Proctor as they turned off runway 26 and taxied toward the airport’s lone terminal. “If you want to fly any farther, you’re going to have to grow wings.”

“You’ve done well,” Proctor said, glancing out the windscreen. Then he froze. There, parked on the tarmac, was Diogenes’s Challenger.

“Stop,” he told Shapely.

“But—”

“Just stop.” Diogenes reached into his bag, pulled out another few stacks of hundred-dollar bills, quickly counted off forty thousand, and tossed them at the pilot with a hurried thanks. Then he opened the passenger door and was off, racing toward the parked jet even before the Citation had rolled to a halt.

Three hours, he thought as he ran. He’s just three hours ahead of me.

It had been an exhausting game of cat and mouse — from plane to plane, over oceans, over continents, keeping on Diogenes’s tail despite all the man’s stratagems. The Bombardier wasn’t going anywhere — one of its engine cowlings was up, and the door to the passenger cabin was open, the deplaning ladder still down. Diogenes and Constance wouldn’t be far, now. With any luck, they were still in Windhoek.

With a little more luck, they might even still be at the airport — perhaps in the arrival hall.

Reaching the jet, Proctor raced up the steps two at a time into the passenger cabin. It was empty, but the door to the cockpit was ajar. Inside, a man wearing a pilot’s uniform was seated in the left-hand seat. He was scribbling something on a clipboard.

Proctor ducked into the cockpit, grabbed the man by his lapel, and bodily lifted him out of the chair. “Are you the pilot from Shannon?” he asked.

The man blinked at him in surprise. “What the hell—?”

Proctor tightened his grip on the collar, adding pressure to the man’s neck. “Answer the question.”

“I’m… I’m one of them,” he said.

“The other?”

“He left the airport an hour ago. He already gave his statement. I gave mine, too.”

“Statement?”

“About the tragedy.” The pilot was recovering his self-possession. He was evidently American. “Who are you?”

“I’m asking the questions,” Proctor said. “What tragedy? And who were your passengers?”

“There were two of them. A man and a woman.”

“Names?”

“They wouldn’t give us names.”

“Describe them to me.”

“The man was about your height. Slender. Closely trimmed beard. Strange eyes — one was a different color than the other.” A pause. “He had a scar on one cheek.”

“And the woman?”

“She was young, maybe early twenties. Dark hair. Pretty. Didn’t get much of a look at her, actually. She was drunk.”

“And that was it? Just the two?”

“Yes. At least… at first.”

Proctor tightened his grip on the man’s collar. “What do you mean—at first? What’s this about a tragedy?”

The pilot hesitated. “Well… it was the young woman.”

“What about her?” Proctor asked. “What about the young woman?”

The pilot looked down, then raised his eyes again to meet Proctor’s gaze. “She died midflight.”