Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

FORTY

PASSENGER 1G

I would be lying if I said I wanted to die. It would be more accurate to say that I was prepared to. I hoped the politicians would see that they had no alternative but to agree to our demands, the ticking clock of the fuel gauge sufficient to concentrate their minds. But it seems that for our government, a few hundred lives are disposable. An embarrassment, perhaps, but soon surpassed by more pressing matters. Bad news buried.

As for the others, you must see that I couldn’t have told them? They might have backed out or buckled midway through our preparations; they might have raised the alarm—unwittingly or otherwise—with tearful goodbyes to their loved ones. They might even have let something slip to a passenger, prompting the sort of knee-jerk reaction that might have caused us to crash-land in the ocean. Better for the passengers to believe there was a chance they could be saved.

—No one is going to die, I told the others when I outlined our plans. The government has to believe we’ll allow the plane to run out of fuel so they take our demands seriously. The passengers have to believe they will die in order for us to maintain control. But of course, that isn’t the plan!

It wasn’t a lie, technically speaking. That wasn’t the plan.

But nor was the one I gave them.

—Amazon will divert to a location deep in the Gibson Desert in Western Australia, I told them, where climate action comrades will be waiting with jeeps. We will evacuate the plane and disappear, leaving the passengers to be rescued. We will shed our assumed identities and escape undetected.

Had it been the real plan, it would have been torn to shreds. Escape detection? With half the Australian army deployed to surround us? But it wasn’t the real plan. It was pure fantasy, mine to embellish with whatever I needed to allay the concerns of my ever-faithful followers. Every problem they threw my way, I caught deftly, knocking back an answer that shut down their line of questioning.

—We’ll be climate heroes! Ganges posted. Much virtual cheering followed.

I doubt many of my disciples would have accompanied me in this mission had they known my true intentions. One or two, perhaps—the less mentally stable, the more fanatical environmentalists, but not the others. The others—Zambezi, certainly; Congo, for sure—were here for the new life they’d been promised.

I was fond of Congo. I found him during an open mic night at a comedy club organized in support of Greenpeace. The bar was busy and heckling was fierce, and by the time Congo had hauled his bulk onto the stage and got his breath back, he had already used two of his allotted five minutes. Laughter began to build. There was the inevitable chorus of,Who ate all the pies? as our comedian of the moment finally took the mic from the stand.

“Get a move on!” someone shouted.

His material was weak and his timing off, every joke punctuated by a wheezing cough. But he didn’t give up. And when the slow clapping started, he didn’t flush or stutter. Instead, he took a long, sweeping look around the room, dismissing them all with a loud, “Fuck you, you cunts. I could eat the lot of you and still have room for a kebab.” It got the loudest laugh of the evening.

I followed him to the taxi rank, marveling at his ability to put one foot in front of the other—albeit painfully slowly—when each thigh wrestled for space and his ankles bulged above his trainers. He bought a burger from a kiosk and took it into an alleyway, where he demolished it in three bites, all the time wiping away the tears that glistened in the streetlamp’s glow. I had never seen a man so miserable yet so brave.

His website showed nothing on the “upcoming events” page, but his blog was rich with material. He had become more guarded in recent years—perhaps when he began touting himself about as a stand-up—but his early posts were honest and raw, recounting a sorry tale of bullying and victimization. He was a staunch environmentalist—hence his appearance at the charity open mic night—and he wrote passionately about climate change.

—I saw your gig tonight, I wrote. You’re funny.

I styled myself as a twenty-five-year-old blond from a town far enough away to be safe. Single. Interested. I modeled my interests around everything I’d found in his blog and expressed my delight when he found us to haveso much in common. I introduced him to the group and encouraged him to play an active part in our plans.

—You’re amazing. You’re so brave. So clever. You’re making such a difference.

He wanted to meet. Of course he did.

—Afterward, I told him. In Australia.

I had never used my real name online, borrowing for my activism work the identity of a student who committed suicide, many years ago, midway through the Michaelmas term. Sasha’s family lived abroad, and as I boxed up belongings, it occurred to me that a spare birth certificate and passport might be useful. I had so far managed to avoid surrendering my fingerprints and DNA to the police, but as my political activism grew, so did the risk. Far better, I decided, for poor Sasha to retain any criminal record I might inadvertently pick up.

I adopted several online pseudonyms, providing each recruit with an appropriate mentor. In one guise, I, too, had lost a brother at the hands of the police. I shared a love of computer games in another. For Zambezi, I was the supportive friend; for Congo, the would-be lover. I slipped in and out of each persona, giving each what they needed, playing one off against the other.

I had my sock puppets argue with one another, had the majority round on an outlier, defending my own plans. Once, I staged an eviction, intimating to the others that loose lips had resulted in an unfortunate end for one individual. The compliance was instantaneous.

My recruits were no longer individuals but one homogenous mass, to be moved in whatever direction I pleased. But I knew their obedience could only be tested so far. A dog can drive his sheep for miles without losing a single one, but a fox will still scatter them in an instant. I couldn’t tell them the truth, even though truth would make the headlines we all wanted.

Two thousand people were making their way to the Concert Hall at Sydney Opera House for a community choir service. For three months, more than fifty separate choirs had met in churches, offices, pubs, and houses to practice the same ten songs. I imagined the performers, coming together for the first time backstage, all dressed in black, the only identifiable difference the colored rosettes denoting their respective towns. I imagined the guests—the celebrities, the journalists, the “friends of the Opera House”—forgoing their cocktails in favor of this special treat.

Why the Opera House?

People.

A terrorist doesn’t bomb an empty building, a shuttered shop, a closed-down factory. A gunman doesn’t blaze through a school on the weekend, a shopping mall in the small hours of the morning. Hearts are won by people, not the buildings that house them, and those people must be the right people.

Do you think the burgled single mother on the sink estate gets the same response times as the toffs in the town house? Look at the coverage given to a missing child when she’s pretty and white, then look at the ugly ones, the disabled ones, the brown ones, and tell me people care as much.

I needed to make them care. I needed politicians around the world to sit up and think,We have to do something about climate change. I needed them to say: More people will die if we don’t radically change our approach. It should have been enough that the planet was dying, but I had long understood that it wasn’t.

As the cockpit door closed, I said a prayer. Not to a god but to Mother Earth. I thanked her for her blessings, for continuing to provide for us, even as we abused the privilege and took more than we needed. I felt the plane quiver beneath me, as though it, too, was on my team.

Of course I was afraid. Wouldn’t you have been? Haven’t you been scared on a fairground ride, even though you stepped onto that ride of your own free will? I breathed through the fear; I embraced it. Instead of pain and panic and fear, I visualized the headlines and the summit meetings. I imagined the conversations that would be held around the world—conversations that would begin even as people lay in the rubble, their rosettes torn and tattered. Those people would change the world for future generations. They would be heroes.

The thought was inspiring. I allowed myself to focus more clearly on what needed to happen for my goal to be achieved. I thought of the “death dive” that would send us toward our target. I thought of the twisted metal, the shattered glass, the iconic sails of the Opera House turned to dust. The broken limbs, the staring eyes, the stillness. They took life from Earth, and Earth would take life back.

The symmetry was rather beautiful, don’t you think?