A Spy's Life (46 page)

‘At some stage we will need to include this in your statement and then have both notarised, which means a lawyer comes in here to see you swear that the statement is true and that the photograph was taken at the time of the events you describe.’ He paused, swivelled the computer screen so that it was a couple of feet in front of Tomas’s face and rested the picture against the screen.

‘It struck me that there are one or two clues in the photograph that can help us. For instance, we know that the man holding the camera was pointing more or less north because of the time the film was made and the shadows on the ground. That means the massacre took place about forty kilometres south of that mountain range – maybe a little more. I’m not sure. If we can identify these mountains on the map, we can start plotting a corridor in which the site must lie.’ Harland ducked down then bobbed up again. ‘Right, here’s the map I’ve prepared.’ He folded it and propped it against the screen. His mother came round to stand beside Harland. They looked natural together, he thought.

He saw that Harland had drawn a grid over eastern Bosnia. It extended from the Drina River in the east to Sarajevo in the west, and from Foca in the south to Tuzla in the north. The vertical scale was numbered from one to twenty, while the lateral one was labelled A to O.

Harland had got a pencil out and was running it up the map, stopping at each line and turning to Tomas for a reaction. This was no good. Harland’s hand was getting in the way and Tomas needed longer to think about where they went. The trouble was that they had dodged hither and thither with the Serb troops.

‘He can’t see the map,’ his mother said, with an impatience that he knew well. ‘Why don’t you let him look, then call out the numbers and letters?’

Harland nodded.

Tomas was beginning to remember. They’d crossed the Drina River and had gone north to Visegrad, where they camped out the first night. They muddled on in the same direction after that. Then for two days Oleg had gone off and left him with a Serb detachment in a deserted village. He returned on the morning of 15 July. That was the day of the massacre and they had travelled west which would mean they had been somewhere north-west of Visegrad. He found the town on the map and blinked, indicating that he was ready. Harland failed to notice.

‘I think he’s ready,’ said Harriet from the other side of the bed.

Harland began moving the pencil up the map. At each line he turned to look at Tomas’s eyes. Instead of blinking no at each turn, he waited until the pencil reached lines 7, 8 and 9 when he blinked once each time. They repeated the procedure moving west to east. This time Tomas blinked once for the letters H, I, J and K.

Harland snatched up the map and squinted at the area.

‘That means that the mountains in the video film are probably the Javornik group. What’s brilliant is that you’ve picked the area that includes Kukuva.’ He pointed to a speck on the map. ‘I believe that’s where these people came from and that’s important because the authorities will be able to trace their relatives and look for DNA matches. Well done, it’s really good to have pulled that off.’

Tomas thought it was probably the first time he’d seen Harland smile properly.

26

A LETTER TO TOMAS

The next two days passed with little incident. There was no sign of Vigo, and no hint either that they’d been traced by Kochalyin’s people.

Harland busied himself with the report, inserting the pictures and captions into the text, together with a map. He pressed Tomas to add a little more to his statement about Kochalyin’s trip to Belgrade and eastern Bosnia and his recollections of the people Kochalyin had dealings with, particularly the infamous Serb general who’d featured in two of Griswald’s witness statements. He also asked Eva to swear an affidavit about her relationship with Kochalyin which she did in front of the solicitor Leo Costigan. The resulting text gave a lot more weight to the section dealing with Kochalyin’s background and his business dealings in Eastern Europe. She outlined his career in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB (Foreign Intelligence), his period with the Sixteenth Directorate (Communications, Interception and SIGINT) and his roaming brief in Czechoslovakia and Hungary during the eighties, which fell under the auspices of the First Chief Directorate, Department 11 (Liaison with Socialist countries). She showed how this last shadowy role had developed into a criminal career during the first months of the liberation.

To Harland’s surprise, her recall was clear and exact, particularly about his business dealings. For instance she knew a lot about the tax fraud involving heating oil and commercial diesel as well as about the shipments made by Corniche-HDS Aviation, Kochalyin’s company in Belgium. After she made her statement she glanced at Harland with an expression of defiant innocence, a look which alerted him to a secret.

He was anxious to send the report, but felt he needed more on the air crash. As he redrafted this section, he thought it might be worth tracking down Murray Clark in the US. Clark was the proponent of the wake-vortex theory, but he might at least be able to provide some explanation for Ollins’s odd line of questioning. Besides, it seemed unlikely that Vigo had blackened Harland’s name with Clark’s outfit, the NTSB, as he had with the FBI.

It was also worth bringing Tomas into this. Everyone agreed he was benefiting from involvement. Tomas had applied himself to his own statement and also to Eva’s which he corrected here and there, adding dates. There was another sign of improvement. The nurses said that he was spending a lot of time using the computer, apparently following Internet trails and reading for his own pleasure. No one knew what he was doing because Eva had insisted the computer should be his private domain, unless he specified that messages were to be read. That seemed right to Harland.

One thing had stuck in his mind. Eva had said that Tomas helped Kochalyin on some technical matters during the period after Bosnia. He had asked about this again and she’d looked blank. Rather than trying to explain it to Tomas in person, he decided to send him an e-mail. This would allow him to digest the problem at leisure.

‘My dear Tomas,’ he wrote, ‘I may see you before you read this, but I wanted to say now that despite all the terrors and tragedy of the past weeks, nothing in my life has meant quite so much as the discovery that you are my son. Thank you for having the courage to find me. I regret my initial reaction when you did find me and I hope to make it up to you.’ He added a reassurance, again pointing out that Tomas’s guilt about the killing in Bosnia was misplaced.

He was aware of a certain stiffness in his style, but he went on to ask if Tomas would apply his mind to the air crash. One of the things he understood about his son was that he possessed exceptional reasoning skills as well as being technically adept. Harland described exactly what had happened before and after the crash then went on to describe the mystifying call from Ollins on Christmas Eve. Why was Ollins so interested in the phone and the angle at which Griswald had held the computer in the last moments before the plane dropped from the sky? These two details seemed to concern Ollins more than what might be contained in the phone’s memory and the computer’s hard drive. That was surely significant.

He re-read the message, feeling that he was maybe asking a little too much of his son, but then sent it anyway. It was important that he say the first part.

Since he was on-line, he decided to look up the NTSB site to see if anything had been added to Murray Clark’s preliminary finding that the Falcon jet had fallen victim to a powerful wake-vortex. There was nothing more so, before trying to track down Clark, he read through some other incidents involving wake-vortex so that he could talk knowledgeably to Clark. He found an accident synopsis concerning a Cessna Citation jet that had crashed in December 1992 after following a Boeing 757 into Billings Logan International Airport, Montana.

In this case the smaller Citation had been flying below the path of the Boeing and the separation distance between the two aircraft had been less than three nautical miles. Forty seconds before the plane encountered the vortex and went into a roll the pilot was heard to say, ‘Gee, we almost ran over a seven fifty-seven.’

Harland made a note to ask about the separation distance. He seemed to remember that the Falcon had been about eighty seconds behind the Boeing 767. It had stuck in his mind because it seemed such a short time. What did that mean in terms of distance? In the Montana crash the Cessna had been seventy-four seconds behind the Boeing and had begun to roll at a distance of 2.78 nautical miles. So it seemed to Harland that the Falcon might just have been in the danger zone, under three nautical miles from the Boeing.

A few minutes later, his eye was caught by some general notes on wake-vortices. He read that the wing designs of the Boeing 747, 757 and 767 all left unbroken trailing edges from the fuselage to the ailerons. This was what caused the vortex to form. But wind conditions had to be right. Firstly, the wind speed had to be very low. A vortex which lasted over eighty-five seconds could only be generated in a wind of less than five knots. A wind of between five and ten knots cut the life expectancy of the vortex to under thirty-five seconds. He thought back to his struggle in the East River and instantly realised that the wind had been much stronger than ten knots.

He remembered looking up at the Manhattan skyline in the distance and feeling the ice particles against his face. The sea was choppy. The waves lapped against the mound of soil where Griswald’s seat had come to rest.

He read on and found that the wind direction was also crucially important. A vortex usually lingered longest in a cross-wind that tended to increase the rotational energy. If the wind was against the rotational direction of the vortex it would radically reduce its life.

He closed the site and took Clark’s card from his wallet. He dialled and heard the helpful but slightly self-important voice of Murray Clark answer.

‘What can I do for you?’ he said. Harland smiled. Unlike Ollins, Clark had not been got at.

‘I don’t want to bother you. It’s just that the Secretary-General has asked me to find out how things are going along – on a purely informal basis, you understand.’

‘I don’t have much more to add to what is already in the public domain.’

‘Can I ask you some questions? They’re pretty basic.’

‘Shoot. I have some time,’ said Clark.

‘The Secretary-General has a theory that the plane might have been low on fuel and he wonders if that has been considered in the investigation.’

Clark sighed. Harland could almost hear the word
idiot
.

‘No,’ said Clark. ‘We’ve ruled out that possibility. The plane refuelled in DC. The extent of the fire indicates that it was carrying plenty of fuel.’

‘What about pilot fatigue? Apparently there’s been some concern at the Federal Aviation Authority that pilots are flying when they’re exhausted. There was a crash a couple of years back when the pilot was practically asleep at the controls.’

‘No, no. The pilot of your plane was well rested. A medical exam two months back shows he enjoyed good health. And his safety record was impeccable.’

‘So it’s got to be the … what do you call it?’

‘Wake-vortex. Yes, that is our thinking.’

‘The planes were too close, then?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Clark. Harland could tell his mind was elsewhere.

‘The separation distance for the two aircraft was, what? Eighty seconds? What does that mean in distance?’

‘A little over three nautical miles.’

‘So normally that would be in the safety margin?’

‘Yes,’ said Clark, more alert now having noticed the change of gear in Harland’s questions.

‘What was the wind speed at the time?’

‘Why are you asking these questions, Mr Harland? It sounds to me as if you have an agenda.’

‘It is not my agenda, it’s the agenda of the Secretary-General and the Security Council.’ He added the ‘Security Council’ without a murmur from his conscience.

‘I thought this was an off-the-record conversation.’

‘It is. And I will have an off-the-record conversation with the Secretary-General when we’ve finished speaking.’ Damn, thought Harland. That was stupid. There was no point trying to intimidate the man.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Clark formally. ‘I feel I should seek advice before commenting on these matters to you.’

‘Oh, forgive me. I’m sorry. I was getting carried away. I don’t want to compromise your professional standards.’ He waited.

‘As it’s you asking, Mr Harland,’ said Clark at last, ‘perhaps I should help if I can. But this
is
background?’

‘Surely.’

‘What is it you want to know exactly?’

‘Just the wind speed,’ he said innocently, then added, ‘And the wind direction.’

‘Let me see, the wind speed was between fifteen and twenty knots, gusting twenty-five to thirty.’

‘And the wind direction?’

‘South-westerly, as I recall. Yes, that would be it, southwesterly.’

Harland had what he wanted. He burned to get off the phone but rather than alert Clark, he thought of something else to ask.

‘When will you make your final report?’

‘Any day now.’

‘Thank you so much. I’d better not waste any more of your time.’

He knew that it hadn’t been a particularly subtle interrogation, but that didn’t matter now. The wind speed was far in excess of the necessary conditions for wake-vortex, and the wind direction was completely wrong. He would check with a map, but he was certain that the landing runway pointed southwest – that’s why the Manhattan skyline was way off to the right when he first struggled out of his seat. The plane had landed near enough smack into the wind and there could have been no side wind to give the vortex extra life.

The theory, then, was a fraud, but maybe the NTSB was not consciously guilty. It was possible that the readings from the flight data recorder so perfectly mimicked the action of a plane in the grip of a vortex that the board had opted for the only reasonable explanation – wind speed and wind direction notwithstanding.