The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [64]
“He had a bomb in his flight bag,” she said quietly. “An armed bomb. That’s why they think suicide.”
Robert stood. He put his hands in his pockets.
“Even one phrase different,” Robert said, “and the whole tape could mean something else. Even with the words exactly as I’ve just said them, the tape doesn’t necessarily mean anything. You know that. We’ve talked about that.”
“Do they know for sure Jack was in the cockpit at the time?” “They can hear the latch of the cockpit door opening and closing. After which Sullivan addresses him specifically.”
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is how Jack could possibly have something that dangerous in his flight bag.”
“Actually,” Robert said, “that’s the easy part.” He turned to look out at the snow. “It’s harmless. Absolutely harmless. Everyone does it.”
“Does what?”
“A lot of international pilots do it, almost every flight attendant I’ve ever known,” Robert said. “Usually, it’s jewelry. Gold and silver, sometimes gems.”
She wasn’t sure she understood. She thought of the jewelry she had received from Jack over the years: a thin gold bracelet on an anniversary, a gold S-chain for a birthday, diamond-studded earrings once for Christmas.
“A hundred times in and out of an airport, you get to know the security people pretty well,” Robert said. “They chat about their families and they wave you through. It’s a courtesy. When I was flying, I probably had to show my passport one time in fifty. And customs almost never looked in my flight bag.”
Kathryn shook her head. “I had no idea,” she said. “Jack never said.”
“Some of the pilots, they keep it to themselves. I guess if what you’re bringing in is a present, it spoils the gift if the wife knows you smuggled it past customs. I don’t know.”
“Did you do it?” she asked.
“Always at Christmas,” he said. “That would be the question when you met in the lobby to take the van to the airport: What’d you get the wife?”
She put her hands into the pockets of her jeans; she stood with her shoulders hunched.
“Why doesn’t Jack say anything on the tape?” Kathryn asked. “If he didn’t know it was a bomb, he’d have been just as surprised as Trevor Sullivan. He’d have said something. He’d have said, What are you talking about? He’d have exclaimed or shouted.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Jack lied about his mother,” Kathryn said.
“So?”
“He didn’t sleep in the crew apartment,” she said.
“It’s not enough.”
“Someone put a bomb on the plane,” she said.
“If it was a bomb, someone put it there. I’ll grant you that.” “And Jack must have known about it,” she said. “It was his flight bag.”
“I won’t grant you that.”
“The Moroccan pilot committed suicide,” she said.
“That was entirely different.”
“How do we know it was different?”
“You’re just playing devil’s advocate,” Robert said to her with some heat. “You don’t really believe Jack did this.” Robert sighed with frustration and turned his back to her.
“You wanted to know about the tape,” he said, “and so I told you.”
She unfolded the fax that she’d tucked under her arm. There were a great many names, nine or ten pages of names, beginning with Jack’s most recent crew and receding in time until 1986, the year he had started with the airline. She looked at the list: Christopher Haverstraw, Paul Kennedy, Michael DiSantis, Richard Goldthwaite... Occasionally, a face would appear, a man or woman she and Jack had once had dinner with, or someone she’d met at a party, although most of the names were unknown to her, and half of them lived in England. In that way, she thought, the life of a Vision pilot was an odd one, an almost antisocial profession. Members of a crew Jack flew with might live fifty miles away or across the ocean.
And then, on a list dated 1992, she saw the name she hadn’t even realized she’d been looking for, the unusual name that rose right up from the paper and traveled through her bones with a charge.
Muire Boland.
Flight attendant.
Kathryn spoke the name aloud.
Muire Boland.
She was pretty sure it was a woman’s name. She wondered if it was French and whether