The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

20

I FOLLOWED FRANK OUT TO THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF the hotel. He lit his cigarette. “I like it over here,” he said, taking a long drag. “You can smoke.” Having cheated death once, he must have felt invincible, because he smoked unfiltereds.

“Are you sure this man is dead?” I held up the picture again. “The records say he’s alive.”

He tapped the picture. “Nuh-uh. The official record is wrong. Hoffmeyer survived, and your guy died.”

“Stephen Hoffmeyer?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be obtuse.” I held up the photo of Roger Fratello one more time. “This man, Gilbert Bernays, and the other one you called Hoffmeyer were both on the plane at the end?”

“Right there with the rest of us.” He picked a bit of tobacco from his tongue. “The records all show that Gil survived and Hoff died. It’s the other way around. It’s part of the cover-up. They want everyone to think Hoffmeyer is dead.”

“They being the government?”

“Yeah. Hoffmeyer was CIA.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m not just saying it. I know it.” He shifted his weight to his back foot and started ticking off points on his fingers. “He spoke Arabic or Farsi or whatever they talked. He said he’d done work as a contractor in Saudi. He wasn’t afraid of the boys with the guns. At all. He spent all kinds of time with them. He always said he was trying to get stuff for us, more food or water or whatnot. He kept them from killing a hostage. He wasn’t just a normal schlub like the rest of us.”

“How did he save a hostage?”

“They were threatening to kill one of us. It turned out it was going to be Peter. Pete Voytag, God rest his soul. It was all so random. It could have just as easily been me.” He sucked a little more life out of his cigarette. “They came and got Peter and took him up there screaming and crying. Next thing, Hoffmeyer just pushes the kid watching us out of the way and goes up there. This kid had a Kalashnikov.” He shook his head, still impressed. “Anyways, there’s a lot of shouting and yelling, not in English. Then the two of them, Peter and Hoff, they both came back. That was it. I don’t know what he said to them, but they never tried that again.”

I made a note to check out Hoffmeyer’s background. It would be easy enough to see if he’d really worked in Saudi. “What else?”

“He knew his way around a situation, I’ll tell you that.”

“How do you mean?”

“Tim and me, we’re not standing here today if it wasn’t for him. He saved us. I don’t know why Timmy doesn’t see that. I think he sees it. He just won’t say it, you know?”

“How did he save you?”

“The night that it happened, the kid they had watching went up to the front of the plane and left us alone. He’d never done that before, so I had to think”-he touched his temple with his middle finger-“what is so important? It can’t be too many choices, right? Either they’re letting us go, or they’re not, and I just had the feeling it wasn’t that they were about to let us walk. I wasn’t the only one, because even though the cabin smelled like piss the whole time we were in there, it started to smell like fresh piss. Everyone was thinking the same thing, that we were all gonna die. After ten days of the worst hell you can imagine, they were about to kill us. It sucked.”

He was a little hard to follow, because he was shoving so many words into such a small space. But I had practice. I knew Dan.

“Then the kid came back through the curtain, and I swear to you, the look on his face, he looked exactly like one of those Columbine boys. Slow, mechanical, completely blank. He came down the aisle and started shooting people, but his face, you know, he looked like he was taking out the garbage. I got up and ran, but there were some that fell, and this kid, I don’t know, maybe he was seventeen, he walked up and just…” Frank put his index and middle fingers together and aimed them carefully at the sidewalk. “He put the barrel up against a man’s head, this human being he’d been talking and joking with, and pulled the trigger.”

He paused for another long drag, sucking until the insides of his cheeks must have touched. I got the feeling looking at his face that it was easy to launch into this story but not so easy to finish it.

“Anyways,” he said, “that was Gil. He was the first one to go.”

My mind went blank for a few seconds, the way a computer screen does when things go haywire. News of Roger’s death had crashed the system for me. All my assumptions were wrong.

He loosened his tie and shoved one hand into his pocket. Again, he turned his shoulder in toward me, and it was almost as if the two of us were watching the incident unfold on a screen in front of us as he narrated. “Then what happened was a bomb went off. The shooting started outside. All of us stampeded for the door. Everyone was yelling and pushing. There was another explosion. This one knocked me down, and I didn’t want to get up. All I wanted to do was hug the floor. There was so much smoke. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. Someone grabbed me by the shoulders and stood me up and shoved me down the aisle. Me and the rest.”

“ ‘Stay low.’ He kept telling us that, to stay under the smoke, but then another bomb went off just as we got to this crack, this opening. Everything went sideways. He told me to jump. I looked down, and it was too far down, but it was too damn hot to go back, and he said, ‘Drop and roll. You’ll be fine. Go.’ He pushed me, and I was all of a sudden on the ground, and I did roll, because that was the last thing he said to me, and it was what was in my mind. Then he was there again picking me up and pushing me away from the fire. I turned around to look and see who it was. It was Hoffmeyer. He looked me right in the eye and said to me, ‘Good luck, man,’ and that was it. He ran off.”

“Ran where?”

“Into the smoke. I wanted to go with him, because he was the only one who knew what he was doing. But somebody else grabbed me and pulled me behind something.” He shook his head. Now he was looking at his own movie that only he could see. “I could hear the damn thing burning. Do you know what that sounds like? An airplane burning? It was like a roar, but I could still hear the screaming. I knew they were burning to death. I could hear them, and all I could think was it could have been me.”

“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. “I’m sorry that happened to you.” He shrugged. “It sounds pretty chaotic. As Tim said, a lot going on. You’re absolutely sure Roger didn’t make it?”

“Are you talking about Gilbert?”

“Yes, sorry.”

“I stepped on him. We all did. He was on the floor, and we trampled over him like a bunch of crazed bulls. His head was split open. There was no way he got off that plane alive.”

“What about bodies? Dead bodies don’t get mixed up these days.”

“You can’t believe how hot that fire burned. Instant cremation. And I guess our government had some issues with Sudan getting back the remains. Besides that, if Hoffmeyer was CIA and they extracted him, do you think they would admit to that? Hell no. Blood, beards, bullets, smoke. I must have been confused, right? How could I know?”

He certainly sounded convincing, but so did many in the grassy-knoll set. It was because they believed so passionately. “Seven other men survived. Did anyone else identify Hoffmeyer?”

“No. Well, Timmy, but he won’t cop to it. He doesn’t want to think he’s crazy. He already thinks he’s crazy because he never sleeps. It just goes to show you, don’t it?”

“Show me what?”

“We all burn the same, even the ones with a fortune.”

He said it with half a smile that suggested the tiniest bit of schadenfreude. “You’re saying one of the hostages had a fortune?”

“Gil said his laptop was worth a billion dollars. He tried to ransom his way off with it. They laughed at him.”

“Gilbert Bernays said he had a computer worth a billion dollars?”

“Look, I’m not giving away any secrets here. We all got down and dirty with each other. We thought we were going to die. He told us he stole it off a dead Russian. He just didn’t have what he needed to get to the money.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.”

“A password?”

“Maybe.”

I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until the answer came out. There was only one dead Russian Roger could have been talking about, the one Rachel had killed, and so far, she had failed to mention anything about Vladi having a computer worth a billion dollars.

“To my way of thinking, a billion dollars wouldn’t have made a difference. Whatever those boys were doing, whyever they were doing it, it wasn’t about money.”

“What was it about?”

“Who knows? I don’t think the baby terrorists even knew. They started with this sheikh demand but dropped that pretty fast, so that wasn’t the ultimate goal.”

“Maybe it was planned as a martyr operation from the beginning. The sheikh would have been a bonus.”

“The whole point of a martyr operation is to wreak havoc and spread terror. If these boys were interested in publicizing their cause, why did they insist on a media blackout?”

“There was a media blackout?”

“They gave no interviews and didn’t want any cameras around. The whole thing was a debacle from beginning to end. I’m telling you, we don’t know the whole story of what happened on that plane.”

Something over my shoulder caught his attention. “I think there’s someone in there watching us.”

“Is it the woman again?”

“No. It’s a man this time. I think they’ve put some people on me, if you want to know the truth. It pisses me off. What about my rights? I’m a citizen. I didn’t do anything. Nobody ever told me not to talk about what I saw. I’m going in there and-”

“Let’s go in and have another drink, Frank. We don’t need a scene here with all these good people, do we? Besides, I need to talk to Tim.”

He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and crushed it under his loafer. It was only half gone, but it was the third one he’d lit since we’d been out there.

Frank was the one who found Tim. It wasn’t hard. They were seated at the same table, and brunch was about to begin.

“Excuse me, Tim?” I pulled him away from the table and from Helene, who seemed determined not to let anything go on without her. “I was wondering if you had a contact number for that reporter Max Kraft.”

“He asked me not to give it to anyone.”

“I’m sure he did, but he’ll want to talk to me.” I pulled out the manifest Dan had given me. It had updated contact information for probably seventy-five percent of the survivors. “I’ve got something he’s looking for.”