Authors: Roberta Latow
‘Then it is in fact what you told me: all for the love and possession of a woman.’ Jim was astounded.
‘That’s right. I very nearly did become a murderer. Jealousy, even more than love, had taken me over.’
So, thought Jim, Ahmad was not telling him his story because Jim had demanded it but because Ahmad had been shocked. For not only had Jason survived, but he had been dying a slow death for years. The life of Ahmad’s friend, a great love and partner, had been destroyed. The dispassionate way Ahmad was telling his story suggested to Jim that Ahmad considered Jason, dead or alive, quite out of his life. But his feelings of responsibility for Jason were very much alive. He wanted his friend to stop hurting, and to live again, if that was what Jason wanted. Jim thought to himself, This is real macho friendship, real macho love. He was even quite moved by it, yet more so when Ahmad continued and revealed:
‘Whatever you may think, it was not premeditated, what happened next. It was chance. Men playing the big gamble. Mike was right. I bet him a million dollars that he could not fly his vintage aircraft – a Hawker Civil Hunter, a supersonic, single-seat plane – against the clock from the Rockies to the Himalayas. He needed the money; he wanted the challenge, the adventure. And he goaded me into taking the bet. He wins, he gets the million. I win, he gives me Arianne – “But not just on permanent loan. Permanently.” That was exactly how he put it. It was a mad bet, but we were both out of control, each sure he would win. We agreed it was to be a secret between us. With him out of the picture, I was sure I could win that small vestige of love she held back from me. It was all I really wanted. Arianne as my sexual slave – I already had that. As permanent fixture in my life? Well, I already had that, too. Arianne without Jason? I wasn’t sure how that would work. But it was too good a prospect to resist.
‘I took the wager. He took a shallow dive into a Himalayan mountain. It hadn’t once crossed my mind that he might crash. He was the best of the best of pilots. I was shattered when the news came. There was no information, no investigation. I couldn’t live with that. I found it impossible, not having any answers. That was why I hired you in the first place. Arianne and I clung to each other like lost souls those first weeks after the crash. It was a miracle that the crash had been sighted at all.’
‘Why did you tamper with my report? Why claim that parts of the body had been found? Why fly a coffin of rubble back to the States and bury it in a grave after a funeral that you knew was a mockery? Why not tell the truth – that no body nor even any part of Jason had been found?’
‘He was gone. He’d vanished. And he took part of our life, Arianne’s and mine, with him. He broke the
ménage à trois
that had become a linchpin to my happiness. Not just mine, but Arianne’s as well. I hated him for leaving us, and I loved him for giving Arianne to me. We needed something to mourn. Who, in the end, knows what my motives were?’
‘And you and Arianne?’
‘Ah, a case of crime and punishment, of sorts. In the first weeks after the accident we were together in grief, and I mean real grief. But then, as time wore on, we missed him so terribly it became impossible to be together. It only increased our pain. It was easier to stay in touch by telephone, letter, gifts. To see each other was to be reminded of when he was alive and we were as one.
‘Then once, months after the burial, we agreed to meet and try to have sex together. The attraction for each other was still there, and we were hungry for each other, but his absence was profound – it ruined it for us. As three we were sex at its best, and it worked for us. As two, impossible. We never tried again. We rarely saw each other, but kept in communication. She was a lost soul without him, living with his ghost – she loved him so much that was enough for her. It was nearly three years before we could fully exorcise the ghost of him. I wanted her back. She wanted me, I knew that when I saw her in November in London, but I waited for her to come back to me.
‘When she called to ask if she could come on Christmas day to Cairo, I knew an erotic life for us was on again. It suddenly occurred to me that, if I wanted her in the same way Jason had had her, I might have to marry her. The more I thought about it, the more it became a possibility. That was when I called you to Cairo. It was what made me make one more attempt to find absolute proof that he was dead. My happiness with Arianne depended on it. I wanted him never to rise between us again. Never in my wildest dreams did I believe you would find him alive.’
Jim wanted to say to Ahmad, ‘You’re a couple of depraved, evil, self-serving bastards underneath all that rage to live and charm.’ But he had met enough people in his business to know that Ahmad and Jason were not unique. He had dealt with much worse, men far more evil than the man sitting across from him. Jim was not a judgemental man. He could rarely be that in the business he was in. He had no doubt that Ahmad had spilled out that story not because Jim insisted on the truth, but because he was shocked by the news that Jason was alive. Ahmad was reevaluating the past in order to be able to deal with the problem facing him. Jim had heard other men’s secrets come tumbling out under similar circumstances. He had to admire Ahmad – he knew himself well and liked himself. Why wouldn’t he? He always paid the tariff to live the life that suited him, emotionally and otherwise. He was a man honest to himself in his depravity. There was not a hint of false sentimentality in all that Ahmad had said. Jim saw that the man in front of him was feeling honour-bound to save Jason’s life, if that was possible; if not, at least to make him more comfortable in his dying.
Jim took one of the cherries from the bowl on the table by its stem and popped it in his mouth, then another, and another. He spat the stones into his hand. After several more, he placed the stones and stems in a small white saucer on the table. ‘Delicious.’ Ahmad ladled out cherries and their liqueur into two bowl-shaped, long-stemmed glasses. He passed one across the table to Jim. He sipped the drink and ate several cherries himself. Jim reached for his briefcase, removed Mike’s report on Jason Honey and placed it on the table next to him, then broke the silence between them.
‘We answered your brief and have treated it as highly confidential, as you requested.’
‘I’d like you to keep it that way.’
‘Then you expect the report to go the way of the photographs – up in flames?’
Jim placed a hand on the sheaf of papers and was about to push them across the table to Ahmad. ‘Presumably you would like to read them first?’
Ahmad raised his hand in dismissal. ‘No. Just give me the facts relative to finding him, and the hows and whys of what has happened to him.’
‘Let’s get some fresh air,’ suggested Jim. He rose from his chair and went to the bar to settle the bill.
In the street, Ahmad ordered his car and driver to follow the two men through the streets of Montparnasse a few hundred feet behind them. It was April and the sun was warm. The trees were in full bud and the Parisians were once again savouring the apéritifs and coffee in the street cafés.
Jim began his report: ‘I’ll start from the beginning. After I left you in Cairo on Christmas Eve, I went over the original investigation with the men who had run it. It had been a tough job because of several factors, the first being the location of the crash: halfway up a mountain in one of the most remote places on earth, with no local authority of any force to help. Their inability to locate any traces of a corpse led them to search a fifty-mile radius, looking for any inhabitants who might have rescued the pilot. In three weeks they found one small village, where nobody had seen or heard anything. Then they met a single witness who had seen the plane “fall out of the sky”. It was that man, and two others who were trekking down to the valley and to Islamabad, who had reported a crash. They supplied an approximate location. They stated that no one parachuted from the plane. I don’t want to make this any more ghoulish than I have to, Ahmad. But, by the time the local authorities in the district located the site, three weeks had passed. The authorities and later my men agreed that no one could have survived that crash. No remains were found, and the only explanation came from the local militia who were doing the rescue operation. They believed that animals had gotten there first. Scavengers had picked the
wide area of debris clear of any remains. Hence our report to you that no body was ever found.
‘I assembled the same men who had worked on the investigation. After going over every detail I called in two more men to join the new search for Jason Honey. New blood on an old case is always a good thing. We were three solid days going over every detail of what we knew about the accident, pinpointing on the map every location they had been in search of evidence. Then Mike, the guy you just met, came out with, “You were looking in the wrong place. The pilot never crash-landed with his plane. You were looking for him on the right mountain range, but on the wrong mountain.”
‘The protests lasted for several minutes until I insisted we listen to Mike’s theory: “The plane was sighted as it was diving out of the sky and no parachute was seen. Look at this.” He held up a photo of a Hawker Civil Hunter, then he continued, “I bet that after Jason Honey had bought this supersonic fighter plane to add to his collection of vintage aircraft, he reconditioned it and kept the original ejector-seat. That plane came out of the sky and into view empty. The villager who spotted the incident could not have been close enough to see a man at the controls. He only assumed that a pilot was still in that plane. Jason Honey ejected high above the Himalayas, and we’ll find him or his remains as much as a hundred miles from the scene of the crash. Certainly on the far side of the mountain from where the search was made. Or on a different mountain altogether.”
‘Mike was absolutely right. Jason was found more than a hundred miles and two mountains away from his plane. Mike and his team had a lot of good breaks once they had plotted with a crack team of sherpas where to climb. We could have mounted a helicopter search but no permissions were forthcoming for the air-space. So the search-team were dependent on the goodwill and gossip of the people they came across for information which would have been otherwise unobtainable except by means of a trek. They never aroused any hostility. Quite the contrary. They brought out the hospitality in the people. Finally they got wind of a foreigner who was being kept alive by villagers and the travelling doctor, who went through the district once a year.
‘They found him. Still keeping to the brief you gave, they
never let on they’d come in search of him. He had become an oddity in the village, a precious visitor whom the villagers cared for in turn. He had been found in a deep coma and remained in a persistent vegetative state for nearly a year, kept alive by some fairly primitive feeding-methods. His injuries, well, I’ve already told you about them – and his addiction. They don’t believe he can survive being moved, so they insist on keeping him there and caring for him. The way they look after him and the amount of heroin he uses cost money. He’s supplied well. He told my men he had stuffed two six-pound gold bars in his jacket before he ejected from the plane and that was enough gold to see him out. Mike told Jason they would try to get him out by helicopter as soon as possible. Mission of mercy and all that.’
‘Did he agree to that?’ Jim noticed that Ahmad’s question was delivered in an icy, matter-of-fact manner, as if his interest was charitable rather than personal.
‘It was hard to tell.’
‘What do you mean, it was hard to tell?’
‘He laughed. Told the men it was too late. Then he drifted away on them. He used to do that several times a day. Just drift off and not speak. Mike was sure he heard everything, but he was just too pained out. He had too little energy to reply. Jason Honey must have an incredible will to live. He’s just not ready to die. He’s fighting the final goodbye, but he’s hung on to life and hope too long. It’s worn him out.’
‘I want him out of there, and as soon as possible. For the moment I don’t want my name or his wife’s – or, for that matter, his – mentioned. A mercy mission by some vague organisation will do. You have to be very careful. I don’t know why he would be carrying two gold bars. But I do know a gold run is a serious offence. Nor do we know what happened to his plane. What made him abandon it? Until we have him safe in a hospital in Paris or London or New York, you go along with whatever he tells you. If he wants to see me, he’ll ask. He’s a broken man – I doubt he will ever want to see anyone he loved again. But that has nothing to do with you. Your job? Get him out of there. Alive if you can, dead if that’s the way it has to be.’
‘A corpse at any price – is that it?’ (A cheap shot, thought Jim, but the wily bastard deserves it.)
‘Crudely put, Jim.’
Ahmad did have a way of making Jim feel like a lout. He couldn’t but smile to himself when it popped into his mind, How is it I’m holding all the cards but he’s winning the game? Jim could understand why men and women were devoted to Ahmad: he had a lethal charm, was a devil incarnate – and who didn’t fancy dancing with the devil? He knew that, long after this business was over, he and Ahmad would keep their acquaintance going. But, for the moment, what bound them together was business as usual.
‘Even if we do get him out alive – you realise he is likely to spend the rest of his life in a hospital?’
Ahmad ignored the question. Instead he stopped walking and signalled for the Rolls following them to pull forward. ‘After you, Jim.’ Once the two men were seated and Jim had told Ahmad where he wanted to be dropped, Ahmad opened a compartment mounted in the back of the front seat of the car and produced a brown manila envelope. ‘Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on account. Will that do for the moment?’
Jim placed the envelope in his briefcase. ‘For the moment.’
‘What is the tariff so far? How much will bring my account up to date? Do you want some working money?’
Once Jim had answered all the financial questions and Ahmad had established an arrangement for future funds, Ahmad surprised Jim. ‘Companionship is obviously the other thing I must supply for Jason. I can’t merely put him in a hospital without someone to stimulate his interest in life. I’d like Mike to be his minder, his friend. I also want you to keep me abreast of things as they happen. You, Jim. Not one of your operatives. Not even Mike. Jason’s to have anything he wants. And if he wants to get in touch with me or his wife, you let me know immediately. Mike is to make no direct contact with Arianne Honey.’