Dead Letter Drop

12

As we taxied down the runway I churned over every detail I could remember about Sumpy, from the time I had first met her. I wondered whether that first encounter could have been a set-up: it was at a preview drinks party at the Frick Gallery, to which I had been invited by an old schoolfriend who was working for Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York.

The exhibition was of erotic surrealism; in my view it was the art world’s way of having an exhibition of hardcore pornography and calling it respectable. Sumpy had felt much the same way, as we both found ourselves staring at the same set of very overgrown organs. ‘Jealousy will get you nowhere,’ she had said.

Unless the numerical puzzle of my little plastic friend contained a king’s ransom in the form of a computer program for producing perfect original Cezannes, I couldn’t think of any reason Sumpy could have for wanting to get rid of me. Right now, as I wondered idly whether the plane would succeed in lifting off the ground and up into the sky, or whether it would plummet into the two-storey housing estates beyond, and as I wondered idly about my myriad of other problems, the one and only certainty I had was that Sumpy was for real.

The seat belt and no smoking sign went off, and the air started filling with cigarette smoke. The plane was full of tired and fed-up-looking businessmen, a few of whom knew each other and held murmured conversations, but most were either reading or sleeping.

I retraced yesterday’s procedure of renting the Buick, driving back to the Travelodge, collecting Sumpy and then dropping her off to meet Lynn, and then I realised: it was her goddam lipstick. I’d forgotten all about it. On the way to Lynn, Sumpy was putting on her lipstick; I’d swerved hard to avoid a cab driver who thought he was in a one-way street, and the lipstick had rolled onto the floor and vanished out of sight. She said not to bother after I’d groped under the seats for a couple of minutes, she didn’t care for the shade too much anyway.

Whoever was after me had obviously figured that by bugging her, they’d keep a tab on me, since they figured I wouldn’t be too far away. It must have been a damn powerful bug for them to have tracked me to Boston, since sure as hell no one had tailed me from New York to there. The lipstick would have been the ideal hiding place for a bug, and the bug could have been planted in it at any time without her knowledge; equally, she could have known all about it, and dropped it deliberately. I didn’t know what to believe; in my heart of hearts I didn’t believe Sumpy could be involved, but at the same time I was sufficiently long in the tooth to know that in my game anything could be, and frequently was, possible.

‘Can I get you a drink, sir?’

She was gorgeous. She could have got me anything in the world. It was clear from her disapproving stare that she didn’t feel the same way about me. I had no idea what I must have looked like, but I was pretty damn sure that it wasn’t too hot. I ordered another bourbon; she even took my money in advance.

I lowered my tray, then pushed the button in the armrest to recline the seat-back. A white plastic label in front of me told me I was sitting in seat 8B. The empty seat next to me, by the window, was 8 A. The other side of the aisle, the seats were 8C and 8D. I was in a Boeing 737, one of the smaller of the passenger jets in general commercial use. I idled some minutes away working out the number of passengers the plane could seat. But my reckoning it was 114, plus a few jump-seats for the crew. And then the penny dropped.

It dropped making about the same noise as a truck loaded with plate glass colliding with a nitroglycerine tanker, during which time the gorgeous iceberg had come and put my drink down and gone away again and I hadn’t even noticed. 14B. Airline seats? Rows of four seats; rows of six seats; rows of eight seats. Small airliners had four seats, like this and the Douglas DC9. Larger ones, like the DC8 and the Boeing 707 had six seats across — three and three — and the Jumbos — the Boeing 747, Tristar, DC10 and Airbus — had ten seats across — three by each window and four in the middle. It did fit but it still didn’t make any sense. I wanted to check further and summoned the iceberg back. ‘How many seats are there in this plane?’

‘One hundred and fifteen, sir.’ She was off again down the aisle before I could say anything else. I’d been one out. Not bad.

The iceberg’s team-mate wasn’t so pretty, but at least she was human. She took my list of questions to the flight deck and came back with the answers. The numbers of seats on every commercial airliner in current service corresponded exactly with the information from my plastic chum.

I took a walk down the aisle and found seat 14B. Its occupant looked like an ex-Harvard law student who was rapidly on his way to becoming a partner in a Manhattan firm. About 32, square tortoiseshell glasses, hair short and neat, good-looking with strong Jewish features, he was talking earnestly and seriously to an awkward-looking man on his left, either a colleague or a client. They were wading their way through a thick pile of photocopies, which, as I walked back past them again, I could see to be a real estate transaction. The man in 14B looked tough enough to take on any other lawyer, but not tough enough to have killed someone for the seat he was sitting in.

I sat down again. What, I wanted to know, was the significance of airline seats? What, in particular, was significant about 14B? Why had 14B been missing from every set of seats? From Orchnev’s brief letter it was apparent that Fifeshire knew the answer.

I began to feel very cold as a chill started to run up and down inside me. Maybe those people who had gone to such lengths to kill me in the last few days had also tried to stop Fifeshire from being able to tell; maybe Battanga, who had been killed in the car, hadn’t been the target at all; maybe the Mwoaban Government were right and there was no such thing as the Mwoaban Liberation Army, and it was Fifeshire and not Battanga who had been the target.

I greatly envied Sherlock Holmes his Watson: the sheer comfort of having someone around with whom to talk things over, if only to get it off one’s chest and have a good night’s sleep, and be rested and have a clear mind for the morning. Holmes also had a clear brief before embarking on each case; I’d had virtually nothing.

I wondered if already I had gone too far; perhaps after Orchnev’s suicide I should have reported the facts back to Scatliffe and then awaited his instructions. But, to be fair to myself, I hadn’t had much of a chance. I knew now that the sensible thing to do would be to get off this plane in New York and get on the first one out to London. But I had a feeling I had latched onto something important, something that maybe, just maybe, no one except me knew, and I had to follow it through alone. My main problem was going to be to remain alive.

We touched down in La Guardia at half eleven, and I took a cab straight into Manhattan. I got out a couple of blocks from the Intercontinental building and made straight for the car park ramp. I didn’t want to go in the front entrance and have to sign the night book, so I settled in the shadows in the hope that someone would drive out soon. The offices operated around the clock, although on a thin shift at night.

I had to wait longer than I thought, and it was a full two hours before the electrically operated door ground up, and a weary computer technician drove out; I ducked under the door just as it started closing again, and walked through the almost deserted parking lot to the service stairway. I climbed fourteen flights, running into no one, and emerged into the dark corridor of the personnel floor. There was little likelihood of anyone being around on this floor at this hour — it was now after 2.00 — but I didn’t turn any lights on to be on the safe side.

I went into the file room, shut the door, and switched on the lamp that was built into my watch. I quickly found the file I was looking for. It had the name Charles Harrison neatly typed on a plastic strip on the top, and I started to read the story of his life, as told by the Personnel Officer of Intercontinental Plastics Corporation — not one of the world’s most sensational narrators.

Charlie Harrison was born in a suburb of Birmingham, Alabama, educated there at secondary school, graduated to Princeton and gained a first in computer science. He went to IBM, stayed there five years, did a further two years with Honeywell, and joined Intercontinental as head of the computer department six years ago. For someone of his background it seemed odd to me that he should have joined a company like Intercontinental; his leaning was obviously computers, and whilst the company had two massive computers, it only used them for its day-to-day business requirements; it didn’t build and develop computers — Harrison’s speciality — only their plastic cabinets.

I switched on the photocopier and waited while it warmed up. All was still quiet. I photocopied all Harrison’s records, switched the machine off, replaced the file, and left the building again via the car park, this time going out the fire escape door which opened from the inside.

I walked a safe distance from the building and hailed a cab to the Statler Hilton, a suitably anonymous giant of a hotel, where I figured they were unlikely to be bothered by someone checking in at 3.00 in the morning without any luggage, because people did that all the time. The American Express card is a great substitute for a trunk load of baggage.