“Stupid fool!” muttered the businessman, staring at the drawn curtain in confusion. Had this grinning idiot not seen the girl? Had she stepped into the rest room upon his approach? Where was she?

Fully a minute passed. The four Arabs aboard were so concerned with the girl’s failure to emerge through the curtain, an automatic weapon in her hands, they failed to notice that everyone else on the plane was sitting with his head down, staring at the seat back before him.

Unable to control themselves longer, the two Arab students who had sat together in the waist of the plane rose and started back down the aisle. As they approached the smiling, daydreaming steward with the green eyes, they exchanged worried glances with the older businessman and the muscular lad who was the woman’s companion. The older man gestured with his head for the two to pass on behind the curtain.

“May I help you?” Hel asked, rolling up the magazine into a tight cylinder.

“Bathroom,” one of them muttered, as the other said, “Drink of water.”

“I’ll bring it to you, sir,” Hel said. “Not the bathroom, of course,” he joked with the taller one.

They passed him, and he followed them behind the curtain.

Four seconds later, he emerged, a harried expression on his face. “Sir,” he said confidentially to the older businessman, “you’re not a doctor by any chance?”

“Doctor? No. Why?”

“Oh, it’s nothing. Not to worry. The gentleman’s had a little accident.”

“Accident?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get help from a member of the cabin crew. Nothing serious, I’m sure.” Hel had in his hand a plastic drinking cup, which he had crushed and creased down the center.

The businessman rose and stepped into the aisle.

“If you would just stay with him, sir, while I fetch someone,” Hel said, following the businessman into the service area.

Two seconds later, he was standing again at his station, looking over the passengers with that expression of vague compassion airline stewards affect. When his gaze fell on the worried muscular young man beside him, he winked and said, “It was nothing at all. Dizzy spell, I guess. First time in a supersonic plane, perhaps. The other gentleman is assisting him. I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately.”

A minute passed. Another. The muscular young man’s tension grew, while this mindless steward standing before him hummed a popular tune and gazed vacantly around, fiddling with the small plastic name tag pinned to his lapel.

Another minute passed.

The muscular lad could not contain himself. He leaped up and snatched the curtain aside. On the floor, in the puppet-limbed sprawl of the dead, were his four companions. He never felt the edge of the card; he was nerve dead before his body reached the floor.

Other than the hissing roar of the plane’s motors, there was silence in the plane. All the passengers stared rigidly ahead. The flight crew stood facing the front of the plane, their eyes riveted on the decorated plastic panel before them.

Hel lifted the intercom phone from its cradle. His soft voice sounded metallic through the address system. “Relax. Don’t look back. We will land within fifteen minutes.” He replaced the phone and dialed the pilot’s cabin. “Send the message exactly as you have been instructed to. That done, open the envelope in your pocket and follow the landing instructions given.”

Its pterodactyl nose bent down again, the Concorde roared in for a landing at a temporarily evacuated military airfield in northern Scotland. When it stopped and its engines had whined down to silence, the secondary entrance portal opened, and Hel descended on mobile stairs that had been rolled up to the door. He stepped into the vintage 1931 Rolls that had chased the plane across the runway, and they drove away.

Just before turning off to a control building, Hel looked back and saw the passengers descending and lining themselves up in four-deep ranks beside the plane under the direction of a man who had posed as senior steward. Five military buses were already crossing the airstrip to pick them up.

Sir Wilfred sat at the scarred wooden desk of the control office, sipping a whiskey, while Hel was changing from the flight attendant’s uniform to his own clothes.

“Did the message sound all right?” Hel asked.

“Most dramatic. Most effective. The pilot radioed back that the plane was being skyjacked, and right in the middle of the message, he broke off, leaving nothing but dead air and the hiss of static.”

“And he was on clear channel, so there will be independent corroborations of your report?”

“He must have been heard by half a dozen radio operators all across the North Atlantic.”

“Good. Now, tomorrow your search planes will come back with reports of having found floating wreckage, right?”

“As rain.”

“The wreckage will be reported to have been picked up, and the news will be released over BBC World Service that there was evidence of an explosion, and that the current theory is that an explosive device in the possession of Arab skyjackers was detonated accidentally, destroying the plane.”

“Just so.”

“What are your plans for the plane, Fred? Surely the insurance companies will be curious.”

“Leave that to us. If nothing else remains of the Empire, we retain at least that penchant for duplicity that earned us the title Perfidious Albion.”

Hel laughed. “All right. It must have been quite a job to gather that many operatives from all over Europe and have them pose as passengers.”

“It was indeed. And the pilots and crew were RAF fellows who had really very little check-out time on a Concorde.”

“Now you tell me.”

“Wouldn’t have done to make you edgy, old man.”

“I regret your problem of having a hundred-fifty people in on the secret. It was the only way I could do it and still keep your government to the lee of the Mother Company’s revenge. And, after all, they are all your own people.”

“True enough. But that is no assurance of long-term reliability. But I’ve arranged to manage the problem.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Where do you imagine those buses are going?”

Hel adjusted his tie and zipped up his duffle. “All hundred-fifty of them?”

“No other airtight way, old boy. And within two days, we’ll have to attend to the extermination crew as well. But there’s a bright side to everything, if you look hard enough. We’re having a bit of an unemployment problem in the country just now, and this will produce scads of openings for bright young men and women in the secret service.”

Hel shook his head. “You’re really a tough old fossil, aren’t you, Fred.”

“In time, even the soul gets callused. Sure you won’t have a little farewell drink?”

Part Five.

Shicho