Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

FORTY-THREE

2 HOURS FROM SYDNEY | MINA

The vest isn’t real. It’s not a bomb. The words in my head are echoed by the voices around me, as though the more it’s repeated, the more we’ll all believe it. It’s not a bomb. She’s not wearing a bomb. The vest isn’t real.

Or is it?

How can we trust this woman, this pseudo doctor more likely to take a life than save it? How do we know this isn’t part of the plan, designed to push us toward our own demise?

Sweat’s running down the side of Ganges’s face, soaking into his collar. He’s breathing fast, rocking on the balls of his feet, but I’m not worried about him—he’ll fall the second he’s pushed. Behind him, in the entrance to the business-class cabin, Zambezi stands firm, and across the cabin, Niger waits, every muscle poised. He watches me, and I know he’ll move the second we do, but I can stop that. I’ve planned for that. These people stand between me and my daughter as surely as if I could see her behind them, and nothing is going to stop me reaching her. Eleven years ago, I made a terrible mistake, and I’ve lived with it ever since. I shouldn’t be here, but I am, and I have to make it count.

“What did she tell you?” I address my question to Ganges, the most likely to answer me.

“Just what we needed to know.” His answer is slippery, like Adam’s when he’d come home hours after his shift finished, telling me he went to see a mate, ran into traffic, had a problem with the car. I know what a lie looks like.

“Missouri told us the plane would be flown until the UK government gave into your demands or until we ran out of fuel. If that was the case, all of you would have known there was a chance you’d die, but that’s not what your faces said just now. You never thought you’d die, did you?”

Ganges doesn’t answer. His eyes dart from side to side, mouth working as though he’s chewing gum. I wonder how many fighter jets there are, whether they all fire at once—the way firing squads do—or whether one person has to live with the knowledge that they’ve brought down a plane. I wonder what it’ll feel like, whether it will be fast, whether it’s better or worse than crashing into a building. I imagine the sky, spinning around me, the panic rising as the altitude drops down, only that isn’t my imagination, it’s a memory and—

I ground myself. Stop this. Focus on now. On here.

There are hundreds of passengers. Half a dozen hijackers. We can do this.

And yet.

Most of the passengers are still hunched in their seats, clinging to loved ones, frantically messaging everyone back home. Can I rely on them to rally when we need them? I think of Carmel, her life cut short in the cruelest way. Explosives aren’t the only way to kill.

“She lied to us!” The shout comes from halfway down the cabin, where a vastly overweight man is getting to his feet. He fills the aisle, damp circles around his armpits and in dark crescents beneath the bulge of his chest. “She said the plan was a bluff. No one would get hurt.”

“You stupid fucking gorilla!” Niger says. “No one’s supposed to—”

“—tell them the plan?” The big man’s tone is sarcastic. “Well, guess what, dick-brain? There is no fucking plan!”

“We have to trust Missouri.” Niger looks around the cabin at his comrades. “We have to follow her. This is everything we’ve worked toward. Remember what we’re fighting for!”

Zambezi is nodding feverishly, her gaze falling between the cabin, Niger, and the locked flight-deck door. The other hijackers are looking to Niger now, too, in the absence of Missouri, and I can feel us losing them. If they see Niger as a replacement leader, we’ll lose any chance of getting back control of the plane.

We have to move. As soon as the authorities know what Missouri has planned, the fighter planes will be given the order to fire.

“Stay calm,” Niger says. “Hold your positions.”

“You’re going to listen to him?” I say, turning to take in as many hijackers as I can see. “He’s been lying to you.”

“What the fuck are you—”

“He’s been seeing her, behind all your backs.” I point to Zambezi, who looks at Niger for help, her mouth working wordlessly. As soon as I saw him properly, I’d immediately remembered the two of them in the bar, the familiarity of the way she looped her thumb into his pocket. It had struck me as odd that two people who had clearly met before were traveling in separate cabins, and I’d wondered if perhaps my instincts were off the beam—if memories of early dates with Adam were coloring what I was seeing.

“None of us has met before,” the big man says. He’s shaking his head, insistent but confused. “I’m Congo. Did any of you know that?”

Ganges backs him up. “We’re not allowed. Missouri doesn’t—”

“Fuck Missouri!” The shout comes from the doctor, who’s out of her seat and pushing past to get to the front of the cabin. “You piece of shit, Niger. You finished with me because you said it was jeopardizing the operation, and all the time, you were shagging that!”

“Lena—” begins Niger, but there’s an outraged gasp from Zambezi, who leaves her post to stand next to him, and I turn and look at the others, because if there’s ever going to be the right time, it’s surely…

“Now!” I say, and I run, the sudden movement beside me telling me that Cesca, at least, is coming with me. Yangtze’s blocking the flight-deck door, but Rowan and Derek are coming too, and they grip the younger man’s shoulders and drag him out of the way. He’s tall, but there’s no substance to him, and he crashes to the floor even as he’s throwing a punch, limbs splayed like a discarded mannequin. We have nothing to lose now, and the knowledge gives us all strength.

Cesca taps in the emergency code to the keypad on the flight-deck door.

I hold my breath. Under normal circumstances, the pilot would be looking at the cameras right now. At the first sign of anything amiss, they can override the access, but there’s every chance Missouri won’t know how to—

Click.

We’re in.

The sun’s coming up, a hint of gold tinting the clouds that swirl around us, endless and dizzying.

Here, let me show you…

If Lena was lying, this is where it ends. In the release of a trigger, in a sharp explosion. In fire and shrapnel and too many shards of bone and metal to ever be pieced back together. My chest feels tight, blood roaring in my ears so loudly, it drowns out the sound of the plane.

Here, let me show you…

I shake away the memory, but I still can’t move. I’m transfixed by Mike’s body on the floor and by the slumped body of the sharp-faced hijacker—Amazon—in the left-hand seat. Both men are dead. There’s an angry ligature mark around Amazon’s neck, and the same around Mike’s, and I think how easy it is to bring a weapon on board a plane—an innocent piece of cord inside a drawstring bag or hooded top.

Missouri’s in the right-hand seat, her hand on the yoke and a piece of black plastic hanging uselessly from her sleeve. Cesca and I move as one, but the flight deck is cramped, and Cesca steps on Mike’s arm, flung out across the floor. She stumbles, crying out with the horror of it all, and I reach to pull her back—

Too late.

There’s a terrible noise—a guttural, primeval scream. Cesca stands upright for a split second, blood pouring from a gash in the side of her head. Then she falls.

Missouri has the fire ax, taken from its clip beside her seat. Sharp enough to cut its way out of a wreckage, sharp enough to break a skull, to pierce a brain. She places the ax across her lap.

No.

I say it out loud, roaring it, shouting it for this time and the last time and for every time I should have said it.

Sun pierces through the glass, a rainbow carving the flight deck in two, separating the dead from the living. Everything slows until I’m aware of every breath, every movement, and as Missouri’s hands touch the steering yoke, I reach into my pocket.

Here, let me show you…

No, I think. Let me show you.

Finley’s headphones pull against Missouri’s neck, the ends wrapped around my fists. Her hands claw at her neck, fighting for the wire, but I pull harder, dropping to the floor and bracing my legs against the back of the seat. I can smell the metallic tang of Cesca’s blood, feel the tangle of limbs against mine, but still I keep pulling. I try to imagine Missouri’s bulging eyes—her lolling tongue—only it isn’t her I’m seeing, it’s a man. Another pilot.

There’s a sudden feeling of weightlessness as the wire snaps, and I fall back. I scramble to get up, pain in my arms from the force I’ve been using, but Missouri isn’t moving. Have I killed her? Is it over? The space around me feels at once too small and too big, the clouds moving so much, it feels as though I’m the one who can’t be still. I’m aware of Rowan and Derek moving around me, dragging Mike and Amazon outside. Sound comes back to me as if my ears have been blocked, everything taking on a clarity it’s never had before, and I crouch by Cesca, who isn’t moving. Derek hands me a cloth, and I press it to the wound on her head.

“Stay with us, Cesca,” I whisper, hot tears stinging my eyes. We’re so close now. So close. I look up to find Rowan standing there. “Upstairs,” I tell him. “There are two more pilots.” I give Rowan the code for the relief bunks.

Cesca’s eyeballs flutter beneath closed lids, a network of tiny veins visible beneath the taut skin.

“Help me get her into the galley. There’s a first aid kit in the big locker by the fridge.”

We’re half carrying, half dragging her out of the flight deck when there’s a sudden bang, and the door to the bunks flies open. I choke back a sob of relief. We’re going to be okay. I can get a message to Adam, to Sophia, and they’ll know that I kept my promise. That I’m coming home.

Only it isn’t Ben or Louis in the doorway.

Rowan looks between me and Derek, his mouth fighting to find the words.

“The two pilots,” he says eventually, shaking his head as though he could deny his own truth. “They’re dead.”

Blood roars in my ears.

Ben and Louis are dead.

Cesca’s unconscious.

We have control of the plane, but no one on board knows how to fly it.