Dead Tomorrow

would be possible to love a human being more than he loved her. She was with him, in his heart, in his soul, in his skin, his bones, his blood, every waking second.
    The thought of anything bad happening to her was more than he could bear. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt nervous for his own safety. Nervous of something happening that might prevent them from being together. Just when they had found each other.
    Such as this plane crash-landing them all into oblivion.
    He’d never been a nervous flier, but today he watched the ground coming steadily closer, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. Overshooting. Undercarriage collapsing. Skidding off. Colliding with another plane. Bird strike. Power failure. He could see the runway now. Distant hangars. Lights. The mysterious markings on the runway and signs at the edge that were like a secret code for pilots. He barely even felt the wheels touching down. In a perfectly judged landing, the plane went seamlessly from flying to taxiing. He heard the roar of the reverse thrust, felt the braking pulling him forwards against his seat belt.
    Then, over the intercom system, a hostess with a soft, friendly, guttural accent welcomed them to Franz Josef Strauss International Airport.
    The reardoor of the taxi opened and the woman alighted, her chic dark glasses shielding her eyes from the wintry glare. She paid the driver, giving him a small tip, and, towing her wheeled overnight bag, headed off into the departures hall of the domed terminal building.
    An attractive woman in her late-thirties, she was dressed smartly and warmly in a long camel-hair coat over suede boots, a cashmere shawl and leather gloves. After years of dyeing her hair brown and keeping it cropped short, she had recently let it lighten of its own accord, and it was almost back to her natural, fair, not-quite-blonde colour. She had read in a magazine that when a woman is seeking a new man, she will often change her hair. Well, that was right in her case.
    She went across to the Lufthansa section and joined the queue for the Economy check-in desks for Miami, a city she had last visited fifteen years ago, in a former life.
    The woman behind the counter went through the routine questions with her. Had she packed her own bags? Had her bags been out of her sight? Then she handed her back her passport, her ticket and her frequent-flier card.
    ‘Ich wünsche Ihnen ein guten Flug, Frau Lohmann.’
    ‘Danke.’
    She spoke perfect German now. That had taken a while, because, as everyone had correctly told her, it was a difficult language to learn. Towing her bag, she followed the signs to the gate, knowing from all her many experiences at this airport that it was a long journey.
    Riding up the moving staircase, her phone rang. She pulled it out of her handbag and brought it to her ear.
    ‘ Ja, hallo? ’
    The voice at the other end was crackly and indistinct. It was her colleague, Hans-Jürgen Waldinger, calling her from his Mini Cooper on a bad line. She could barelyhear him. Stepping off the top of the escalator, pulling her bag over the lip and raising her voice, she said again, ‘ Hallo? ’
    Then the line went dead. She walked along a short distance, following the signs for the Departure Gate in zone G, heading towards the first section of the moving walkway that could take her to the hall. Then her phone rang again. She answered.
    Hans-Jürgen, barely audible for the crackling, said, ‘Sandy? Sandy?’
    ‘ Ja , Hans!’ she said, and stepped on to the walkway.
    Eight hundred yards away, at the arrivals section of zone G, Roy Grace, clutching his thick briefcase, and approaching from the opposite direction, stepped on to the parallel carriageway of the same moving walkway.

84
    To Glenn’srelief the sea was calm, or at least about as calm as the English Channel was ever going to get. Even so, the powerboat was still pitching and rolling quite enough in the gentle swell. But so far he felt fine. The breakfast of two boiled eggs and dry toast that Bella had recommended was still safely inside his digestive system rather than becoming part of the boat’s colour scheme, and he hadn’t yet experienced any attack of the roundabouts that had done for him on his last voyage.
    It was a cold but glorious day, with a steely-blue sky and bottle-green sea. A gull circled low overhead, on the scrounge and out of luck. Glenn breathed in the rich smells of salt and varnish, and the