The Obsidian Chamber Read online

  By the time his plane had taxied to a stop, the Bombardier was airborne.

  6

  DURING THE FLIGHT from Teterboro, Proctor had used part of the time to research the airport and town of Gander. In the 1940s, Gander International had been a critical refueling point for flights headed to the British Isles and beyond. Now, however, modern jets with far greater range had rendered this role obsolete. At present, Gander was used more frequently for emergency landings: transatlantic aircraft suffering from medical or mechanical problems. On 9/11, with U.S. airspace closed following the destruction of the Twin Towers, Gander had briefly played an important role in Operation Yellow Ribbon, receiving over three dozen re-routed flights in one day. Other than that, however, the airport was a relatively somnolent place, with military operations and cargo flights to Iceland the order of the day. The nearby town was flat, cold, and depressing: windswept and treeless, with a gray sky spitting snow.

  As Proctor pondered what to do next, he hazarded a guess regarding something else about Gander. Because of its remote location and relative proximity to international destinations, it just might be a place where a certain kind of pilot could wash up: air force discharge, ex-airline, transient—a flyboy who, for a price, might be willing to consider unusual or even questionable service.

  He was presently seated at a table in the Crosswinds bar, one of a series of ramshackle structures that perched, limpet-like, just beyond the terminals, runways, and FBO buildings of Gander. The place was empty save for him and the bartender. He glanced at his watch: almost four thirty PM. Diogenes had taken off just over thirty minutes before. He tried to ignore this fact as he took another sip of his Heineken and waited. He had spent the last half hour roaming the airport and its periphery, making discreet inquiries about just such a pilot, and he had finally been directed to this bar.

  Once again, Diogenes was a step—perhaps two—ahead of him. He’d anticipated being followed to Gander, and had a fresh jet fueled and ready to take off as soon as he’d arrived—this time, on a transoceanic flight. His failure to block his tail number from civil aircraft tracking sites hadn’t been a failure, after all—rather, he was so confident in his ability to elude capture that he simply hadn’t bothered. Or perhaps he was enjoying the chase: it was typical of Diogenes to prefer an elaborate game to something less risky and more straightforward. Why else had he allowed him to live? The safe thing would have been to give him a killing dose of sodium pentothal—but, Proctor mused, that wouldn’t have been as much fun. And surely by now Diogenes knew he was being pursued, perhaps as a result of Proctor’s stupid—he saw that now—radio call to Gander tower. His response to the kidnapping of Constance was a catastrophic failure, perhaps the worst failure of his life; but he had to push that aside and get himself under control, to suppress the emotion and fury that was warping his judgment—and proceed with cold calculation.

  Using his laptop, Proctor saw that the Bombardier had filed a flight plan to Shannon, Ireland. Given the fact that the plane was now well over the Atlantic and hadn’t deviated from its initial plan, Proctor felt reasonably sure Shannon was the true destination. Proctor’s two pilots from DebonAir Aviation Services would fly him no farther—no surprise, given that their aircraft did not have transatlantic range. They had practically tossed him out, threatening to alert the authorities if he didn’t immediately pay up and deplane.

  Proctor needed a different kind of pilot for the pursuit ahead, one with a looser interpretation of rules and regulations, if he was going to catch Diogenes. He had been given the name of just one such pilot, who would be arriving at any moment.

  The image of Constance—the back of her head shaking violently as the bag had been pulled over it—came back to him. He took another swig of his beer, pushed the image away.

  At that moment the establishment’s front door opened and a man entered. He was relatively short—about five foot seven—but he carried himself with the confidence of somebody who had won his share of bar fights. He was in his early forties, with a large pompadour of gleaming black hair, and he wore a leather bomber jacket scuffed from decades of service. A thin scar ran from the edge of his left eye back to a capacious sideburn. He greeted the bartender as he took a stool at the bar.

  Proctor looked him over carefully. This was the man he’d been told about.

  Picking up his Heineken, his laptop, and his bag, he walked over and took a seat next to the man. As a scotch on the rocks was placed before him, Proctor put down a twenty. “That’s on me,” he told the bartender.

  As the fellow nodded and walked off to break the bill, the man in the leather jacket looked over at him appraisingly. “Thanks, mate,” he said in a working-class English accent.

  “Roger Shapely?” Proctor said, draining his beer.

  “That’s right. And you are?”

  “The name’s Proctor.” The bartender came back with the change and Proctor pointed at his own empty beer bottle. “I’m told you’re a man who can take people places.”

  The appraising look deepened. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On who I’m taking, and where they’re going.”

  “You’d be taking me. To Ireland.”

  The man named Shapely raised his eyebrows. “Ireland?”

  The fresh beer arrived. Proctor nodded, took a swig.

  “Wish I could help you out. But my plane’s a Cessna Citation A/SP. Not equipped for hopping the pond.” Shapely smiled ruefully.

  “I know all about your plane. It’s powered by two Pratt and Whitney JT15D turbofans, and it’s been modified from the standard two-crew model to be flyable by a single pilot. It’s also been modified—by you—to carry fewer passengers and extra fuel. Fuel enough to get you almost four thousand miles.”

  Shapely’s eyes narrowed. “Somebody’s been doing a lot of talking.”

  Proctor shrugged. “Hasn’t gone farther than me.”

  Silence for a moment. Shapely took a sip of his scotch. He was clearly thinking—and sizing Proctor up. “What’s the job—exactly?”

  “Somebody left this airport forty minutes ago, bound for Shannon. He’s got something I want. I need to go after him.”

  “You mean, chase him?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a bit of a lark, isn’t it? If this is about drugs, count me out.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  Shapely pondered this. “What kind of bird we talking about?”

  “Bombardier Challenger 300.”

  The man shook his head. “No good. Cruising speed’s more than fifty miles per hour faster than my Citation.”

  “All the more reason to get a move on.”

  “I can’t take you to Shannon.” As Proctor looked up from his beer, he saw the pilot break into a sly smile. “But I can get you close. If we have a tailwind, that is: any headwind and we won’t make it as far as the Irish coast. What do you weigh?”

  “One seventy-five.”

  “Any cargo?”

  Proctor pointed a thumb at his laptop and bag.

  “Can’t bring anything else. We’ll need a full load of avgas for that kind of hop as it is.” Shapely scratched his head, clearly doing a mental calculation. Then he leaned over in his seat, gazing out the window of the bar toward the airport’s wind sock, just visible from their vantage point. “Look’s like the wind’s in our favor. Now it’s just a question of money.”

  “I’ll also need you to keep the flight off the books. Just in case Ireland’s not our final stop.”

  “Round the world in eighty days, is it? Then it’s not a question of money. It’s a question of more money.”

  “Eight dollars a mile. Round-trip fare. If we leave right away.”

  Shapely paused, considering. “If you’re some kind of cop, this is entrapment. You know that, don’t you? You couldn’t charge me with shit.”

  “No cop. Just somebody in need of a ride. And a pilot who doesn’t ask questions.”

  Sh
apely drained his drink. “Twenty thousand, up front. Ten more when we get there.”

  Proctor saw that the bartender’s back was turned. He opened his bag, removed several stacks of hundred-dollar bills, and passed them to the pilot. “Here’s thirty.”

  The man fanned them quickly, then shoved them into the pocket of his coat. “I’m assuming you’d rather avoid customs, luggage or no luggage.”

  “Right.”

  Shapely nodded. Then he patted the pocket that contained the money. “Let me stow this somewhere, make a call or two to set things up on the far end. Meet me at North Gander Aviation in fifteen minutes. It’s beside hangar four.”

  Then he stood up, gave Proctor a thumbs-up, and quickly exited the empty bar.

  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 determin
e 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.