Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

THIRTY-TWO

PASSENGER 1G

Flying a plane isn’t easy.

We needed a pilot—that was clear—but attempting to bring an existing commercial pilot around to our way of thinking would have been a struggle, risking the end of our plans before they’d even taken shape. I attempted to find a discredited pilot, but they are not as easy to locate as, say, struck-off doctors, whose details are widely available.

In the midst of my research—mostly involving online forums—it became evident that many aviators shared a love of computer-simulated games. It seems extraordinary to me that after a week in a cockpit, anyone would wish to spend their days off manipulating a pixelated plane across a screen, but there you go. Apparently, modern simulators are so lifelike and so responsive, it’s almost like flying a real plane.

I’d been going about this the wrong way, I realized. Why search for a pilot to bring into the fold when I could fashion a pilot from an existing disciple?

There were two possibilities. Yangtze was our resident IT specialist. It was he who had set up our forum on the dark web and ensured it would self-destruct as the flight took off, who had created our numerous Facebook pages, which I’d used to harvest followers in such a subtle way, they hardly noticed.

Unlike most of my group, I had not found Yangtze; he had found us. We operated via a rudimentary message board locked down by a series of supposedly complex passwords. I turned my computer on one day to find a grinning skull pasted across the log-in box. As I attempted to find a way in, the screen dissolved before my eyes, colors puddling on the bottom of my monitor. Aping from my inbox informed me of the point of this clever trick: I could pay a thousand pounds for the safe return of my website, or he would forward the contents to the police.

I laughed at the audacity. Our exploits, back then, merely skirted around the edges of the law; discovery would have been an inconvenience but not a disaster. A thousand pounds seemed a curiously low amount for a would-be blackmailer, and I replied to the email with an alternative offer. If we intended to carry out more significant direct action, it was clear we would need a more secure online home, and I had found the person to create it.

Yangtze was a strange man. He had inherited a large sum of money from a grandparent, and it had made him both listless and entitled. He was, I discovered, not remotely interested in the reason for our group, only the challenge of hiding it. The combination made him an asset but also a risk, and I would no sooner put him in control of a plane than I would give him a gun.

Amazon, too, was rather a wild card, but I had succeeded in taming him in a way I never had Yangtze. As with most of the others, I’d found him online, deciding early on that the group could benefit from his skills. He was a difficult man, with bouts of mania that made him quite unstable.

The key to recruitment is matching desire with fulfillment. On a basic level, this is your salary—you need £28,000 per annum; I’m paying £28,000—but a shrewd employer will go a step further. Skilled headhunters will scour social media accounts to identify their targets’ weak points before going in for the kill.We have an excellent childcare scheme, on-site gym, medical package… We have team drinks every Friday. We work from home. We dress down…

Amazon’s weak spot was interesting.

I just want to game! read the one-line bio on his profile. I took in the rest of his feed. The lack of interaction from others; the posts he shared and then deleted. No, I thought, you want recognition. You want to be liked. You want to show your parents you haven’t wasted your life. I looked at his other posts too—the shares of far-right “patriotic” images and the many, many petitions signed for scattergun causes—and I knew that here was a man whose anger and frustration could be channeled in any direction I chose.

I sent a link to my Grand Theft Auto profile. I figured he wouldn’t ask questions, and he didn’t, just added me that afternoon. As we played, I scattered thoughts like seeds.

—Fucking lefties stopping people wearing poppies, can you believe it?!

—Did you see that bint in the paper? Accepted drinks all night then cried rape?!

—International Women’s Day? When’s International Men’s Day, then?!

He grabbed each one and ran with it, confirming my suspicion that he had no thoughts left of his own, that years of gaming had dulled his mind to such an extent that he now needed opinions fed to him, like a patient on a drip. Slowly, I filtered the content until my prompts were purely environmental, until it was him, not me, who introduced them.

When I was confident he was one of us, I went in for the kill.

—Friend of mine’s looking to employ gamers—some software company needing to test how robust their systems are. Interested?

Of course he was.

For a year, I “employed” him, tasking him with hacking the levels on an FPS game, then sending the exact same game, saying the security had been tightened.

—You’re amazing! I told him when yet again, he beat the system. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

It cost money, of course, but our income was good. The starving polar bear image—such a hit on our Household Hacks pages—resulted in a regular stream of donations. People who give money “for the environment” don’t ask how it will be used.

Moving Amazon from shooting games to flight simulations was a struggle (Where’s the fun if you can’t kill people?) but by then, he was conditioned to accept whatever work I gave him. I sent him up and down the country to try out actual flight simulators until he felt as comfortable in a flight deck as in his gaming chair, then booked a series of lessons in light aircraft—never at the same airfield twice.

—The instructor said I was a natural! he messaged after his first go.

I took a moment to reflect on how far he’d come in such a short time. I’d never met Amazon in person, but I imagined he was standing a little straighter, holding his head a little higher. The same had happened for Zambezi, who was a far cry from the battered wife I’d picked up from the floor. Our work—our important, world-altering work—was transforming people’s lives closer to home too.

It takes around sixty hours of flying to get your private pilot license, and Amazon must have clocked up thousands of gaming hours that year alone. By the time he stepped onto Flight 79, he had a private license and dozens of hours in Boeing 777 simulators. More than enough for what I had in mind.

After all, how much training do you need to fall from the sky?