been. Do you know his name isn’t even Harvey? It’s James Harvard.”
“How do you even know it’s the same person?” I asked incredulously.
“I Googled him. Found a picture.”
Bloody hell. I can Google for hours and get nothing. I bloody hate people who can get precisely what they want from the Internet.
“I think you’re clutching at straws,” I told him. “And I don’t think it’s Harvey.”
“Why the hell not?”
I sighed. I didn’t really want to tell him. It sounded like an excuse.
“This partner? Wright said it was a woman.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“He’s not bright enough to do that on purpose,” I said. “And besides, Luke, think of all the most vicious people you know. I bet most of them are female.”
There was a silence. I’d dug myself into a hole here.
“The lady has a point,” Luke said eventually. “Right. I’m going to see what I can get from Ace on this.”
“You’re just going to call them up?”
“No. I’m going to hack into their communications. I’m going to e-mail you all the reservations we have for James Harvard. Every one has a different phone number. See if any of them are live. The password to get online is Sunnydale. Oh, and I’ll see if I can get a manifest for the 128. See if anything looks suspicious.”
With that cheerful request he signed off, and I was left with a bewildered and frightened locksmith, a new door with a mortise lock, and a lot of calls to make.
I paid the locksmith double, really hoping I’d get some nice cash from SO17 for this and knowing I probably wouldn’t, and booted up the computer.
James Harvard had travelled all over the world with Wright. Every reservation gave a different address and phone number.
I hate making phone calls. The Internet was a revolution for me because I could keep in touch with relatives I didn’t like and school friends I hardly talked to, I could order things and learn about things without having to talk to people. But this time I knew I was stuck.
“Hello,” I said when the first number picked up. “Can I speak to Harvey, please? You don’t know anybody called Harvey? I’m sorry, I must have dialled wrong. Thank you. Bye.”
I then repeated this about a million times. Probably half the numbers I dialled weren’t the numbers on the computer. I hardly cared. Harvey wasn’t at the end of any of them.
I mean, really. Luke was talking crap. How could sweet, clever, clean-cut Harvey be involved in killing a hundred and forty-three people?
The computer bleeped to tell me I had new mail. I looked at the sender—Luke (
[email protected], how original)—and the subject: Now who’s innocent?
Dreading the message, I opened it up. It was the passenger manifest for the doomed AC128 to Glasgow. James Harvard had booked a ticket online, but he hadn’t checked in.
Oh God.
I sat back in my chair, trying to put it together in my head. Harvey was in this horrible plot with Wright. Together they were sabotaging Ace Airlines so share prices would come down and they could buy it cheaply. It all seemed so overblown. If Wright wanted the airline that much then why didn’t he pay full price for it?
I opened up Google and typed in David Wright. I got a million matches, half of which were irrelevant. I tried again with David+Wright+Wrightbank. This narrowed it down but mostly to press releases and financial advice sites.
I thought for a bit, then searched within the results for Ace Airlines.
Bingo.
There was a five-month-old interview from a dull business mag where Wright said he was interested in branching out into the aviation industry. “I think this is the most important part of the travel industry,” he said. “Even more important than cars. People are flying where they would have driven or taken a train. Domestic flights all over the world have taken off—no pun intended. And since September eleventh, fares have plummeted. Passenger numbers have hardly diminished, but fares have gone down drastically. The low-cost sector of the market is incredibly interesting.”
Not as incredibly interesting as you , I thought. This article had been published at about the time things started going wrong at Ace. I’d hardly noticed the change—there were always delays and tech problems, and over the summer things had been as frantic as ever. Around September, things started to quiet down. End of summer. I hoped.
But if I thought about it, then there had been increasing numbers of problems.
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