City of War (42 page)

“And how many of your wealthy clients’ fathers have tried to make a match with their daughters?” I asked.

He smiled. “One of the hazards of the business. But
the first time I went down that road and didn’t marry the girl, word would go out. And in Egypt, that would end my business—and my love life.”

“Handsome, ambitious and smart,” Archer said. “What are you doing Saturday night?”

We all laughed.

We drove for an hour and a half across an unchanging moonscape. Occasionally, there would be a cart on the side of the road or some low, brown houses in the distance, but other than the thinning traffic, scenery was all but nonexistent.

And then out of all this brown arose an ocean of green. It was like we’d blinked and been transported to an endless Dutch countryside, broken occasionally by long rows of palms. We drove for miles surrounded by this lushness before coming to a turnoff marked by a sign in English and Arabic.

I was impressed that the private road was as well-paved as the main highway, and as we followed it, I asked Osiris if he had seen this before.

“When I was in school, sometimes we would bring our dates out here. We’d pull off the road and have a picnic in one of the fields. It smelled so wonderful. Like nothing in the city. It was almost a guarantee your girlfriend would want to make love. You had to watch for the sprinklers though.” He laughed.

We rounded a curve and a city of covered work areas came into view. Scores of men were potting plants and placing them onto skids that others then wrapped in plastic. A little further on, the road branched, and Osiris took the right fork. “I’m not sure this is correct,” he said. “I’m guessing.”

He was on the money. Very soon, we were passing a ten-foot stucco wall on our left that ran as far as the eye could see. A little while later, we came to a gate and turned in
to face a pair of wide steel doors etched with stylized car-touches. There seemed to be no way to summon anyone, so Osiris got out and pushed on the gates. They opened, and we drove through.

I’m not sure anyone could have prepared me for what lay ahead. Mr. Nazarak had replicated Luxor’s Avenue of the Sphinxes, and for a hundred yards, dozens of massive sandstone sentries stood guard over a tree-lined lane. At its terminus sat a columned palace draped in the most beautiful hanging gardens since Babylon.

Archer came awake and looked out at the magnificence. “My God, where are we? Newark?”

Suddenly, there were men running at us from all directions. They wore white turbans and khaki uniforms and were pointing Kalashnikovs—locked and loaded.

From the backseat, Archer said, “Yep, Newark.”

Amen Nazarak spoke English, but he was much more comfortable in Arabic, so bringing Osiris had been fortuitous. However, in any language, he was adamant that no one was permitted to see his daughter.

As we sat drinking honeyed tea in a vast room of low sofas, Oriental rugs and randomly strewn cushions, we looked out over a man-made lake, where snow white swans and blue herons seemed to have been designed into the view. Amen was cordial, if not warm, but Bastet, he explained, was still traumatized by Flight 990. All these years later, she still required medication to sleep and had lost some cognitive ability. She frequently became lost in unfamiliar surroundings, and she had difficulty remembering friends’ names.

Trauma is an indiscriminate debilitator, and I do not ever minimize its power, but this seemed excessive for someone who had only been a ramp agent for a doomed flight. When Osiris put my comment to Amen, he flashed angry, then he put his head in his hands. “It was not the tragedy, it was the torture afterward.”

Gradually, haltingly, he revealed that in the wake of the
crash, Egypt Air became obsessed with convincing the world that their pilots did not commit suicide. Regardless of the cockpit voice tape and the telemetry from the flight data recorder and ground radar, Egyptian aviation officials—under intractable and threatening orders from the government—worked backward from a conclusion of engine or structural failure. That most people with any IQ laughed at them didn’t matter. It was their story and they were sticking to it.

Partly, it was to establish a defensive position for the litigation certain to follow; partly, it was a very real concern that thousands of future horrified travelers might just up and cancel their Egypt Air reservations; and partly, it was cultural. All of it was stupid, because in the end, even though the investigative team noted the airline’s and government’s objections, the official NTSB report is unflinchingly brutal. For whatever reason, rational or psychotic, Relief First Officer Gameel Al-Batouti deliberately dove his 767 into the ocean at close to the speed of sound, taking with him 216 innocents.

But what did any of this have to do with Bastet Nazarak, surely the lowest person on the totem pole that night? Not even her father could answer that. Bastet had never confided any of the specifics to him, and afraid he might further compromise her already delicate mental state, he hadn’t asked. It looked like we were at a stalemate when all of a sudden, a quite tall, extremely pretty, dark-haired young lady walked into the room. She was wearing faded jeans and a dark blue blouse and had her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She would have been over thirty, but she looked much younger.

“I heard my name,” she said, looking at me. “Are you here about the crash?”

We all stood, and Amen started to say something, but our driver stepped in. “Miss Nazarak, my name is Osiris Vagotis. These people are friends of my father’s. He is a respected businessman in Alexandria, but we used to live in Cairo. We left after he was imprisoned for having a Jewish partner. Of course, that was not the reason given on the arrest warrant.
That said he was accused of tax improprieties, but during the beatings, all they asked was why he was friends with a Jew.”

Bastet came all the way into the room and sat down across from Osiris. She looked at him with wide, expressive eyes. “Please call me Bastet. What is your father’s name?”

“Mathias. Mathias Vagotis.”

“Is he…still alive?”

Osiris nodded. “Very much alive, and he never misses an opportunity to tell people what happened. He believes evil can only survive in the dark.”

I saw her lower lip tremble. After a moment, she said, “They beat me too.”

Osiris leaned forward and took her two hands in his. Her fingers were long and slender, and she wore a thin silver bracelet on her right wrist. “Your father has told us. He’s deeply concerned about you. But if Mathias were here, he would urge you to do what he has done. Shine a light on bad things.”

Bastet looked at Archer and me for the first time. “What are your names?”

Archer answered. “This is Rail Black, and I’m Archer Cayne.”

“I’ve seen your picture in magazines,” she said to Archer, then turned to me. “Are you an American too?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

I could see Amen Nazarak in my peripheral vision. He was sitting back in his chair, the tension on his face gone. This was probably the first time his daughter had said anything about Egypt Air in his presence.

“And you’re not with the government or the NTSB?” she asked.

“No, Bastet, I’m not.”

“Then what is it you would like to know, Mr. Black?”

“Truthfully, I’m not sure. Maybe if you could just walk me through that night.”

She collected her thoughts. “It was raining, and the agent who parked the jetway when the plane arrived hadn’t done
a very good job. There was a gap at the top letting water in. So during boarding, I put on my coat and held an umbrella over the space to keep the passengers from getting wet.” She paused. “There were children, you know.”

I did know, and it was heartbreaking, but I didn’t want her to get bogged down in the sadness. “Which door were you using?”

She came back to the present. “Number one; 767s board through first class. Most of the passengers were already onboard because the flight had originated in Los Angeles. It didn’t take long to get our few on, along with the relief pilots.”

“Did you know anybody in the crew?”

“EA’s not a big operation in the States. Everybody knows everybody, but flight crews socialize more with each other because they’re on the road together. The rest of us go home at night.”

I understood and nodded.

“After everybody was aboard but still getting settled, I folded my umbrella and stepped into the plane. I saw the pilot talking to some military men in business class. The conversation was animated, and since normally the pilot would be in the cockpit, I asked a flight attendant what was going on. She said one of the military officers had gotten on in L.A. without his paperwork.”

Bastet must have seen the question on my face. “Military personnel have to carry several documents. The most important are their orders. It determines how the airline logs the seat, and who will reimburse them. Pilots have to fill out a lot of extra forms and can be fined if they don’t get a copy. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve seen pilots insist that a military passenger without paperwork get off. Most of the time, though, they just give the guy a lecture and make arrangements to get it later.”

“The captain was El-Habashy.”

“Yes, and pretty soon, he came forward, shaking his head, and went into the cockpit. I looked down the first aisle and
saw that most passengers were already seated, so I went back onto the jetway and waited for the order to close the door.”

I started to say something, but Bastet put up her hand. “Let me tell this my own way.” Her tone had a new urgency to it, and it struck me that this was going to be the first time she had told what was coming to anyone.

“While I was waiting, the man sitting in Seat 1-B, a special courier who’d gotten on in New York, was talking to a woman standing in the aisle. The woman seemed upset about something. Then a flight attendant told her she’d have to return to her seat in coach because they were getting ready to close the door. The woman started back, but she looked terrified.”

I remembered Archer’s telling me how fearful Bess was of flying. She’d just suffered through five and a half hours in the air, and now she was about to have to endure ten more. She
was
terrified.

“A few seconds later, the courier stood up and unbuckled his case from Seat 1-A. Special couriers have two seats—”

“I know,” I said. “One for them, another for their case. Then what did he do?”

“He got off the plane.”

Bastet continued talking, but they were just words coming from far away. My mind was racing. I was pulled back to reality by Archer’s shouting, “THAT MONSTER IS ALIVE! OH MY GOD, THAT FUCKING MONSTER IS ALIVE!”

Amen had a look of shock on his face at the outburst, and Osiris seemed a little taken aback too. The only person who wasn’t rattled was Bastet, who just stopped talking and calmly waited for things to settle down.

I got my arm around Archer. “We’ll explain later,” I said to Bastet and asked her to continue.

“As soon as the courier went past me, the woman he’d been talking to came running up the aisle in a panic. She was yelling, ‘Truman, Truman, where are you going?’ I knew the man’s name was Truman York, because as the ramp agent,
it was my job to put special couriers on the plane before general boarding began and to inform the rest of the crew who they were. Mr. York had also been on that same flight several times before, and I remembered him.”

Bastet paused, like she wanted to make sure she got the sequence of events right. “The senior flight attendant stepped in front of the woman and told her that she had to return to her seat, but she just kept yelling, ‘Truman! Truman!’

“Then a strange thing happened. Mr. York came back down the jetway and stopped right behind me. He called out to the woman, ‘I’ve got to do something, Bess. I’ll meet you in Marseilles. Mascotte Vieux Hotel, remember?’ And then he was gone. The woman wanted to get off too, but the flight attendant said she couldn’t. By that time, some of the passengers were upset, and one of them told her to sit down. I saw her start back to her seat, but I’ll never forget the look on her face. I can’t lie down without seeing it. It haunts me every night.”

“Why did they let the man off the plane and not the woman?” It was Amen asking.

“We’re not even allowed to talk to a special courier unless he talks to us. If you tried to impede one, you’d be fired on the spot.”

“Bastet. Can you describe the case?” I asked.

“Aluminum, about like this.” She held her hands roughly three feet apart. “Maybe twelve inches deep, and the same width as a first-class seat. With wheels and a handle that pulled out so you could tilt it when you walked. It was the same one Mr. York always carried.”

“And it was on a cable attached to him.”

She nodded. “Yes, down his left sleeve, which I was told meant he was right-handed. I never saw him with a gun, but special couriers are permitted to carry one, so it could have been under his suit coat. He only had to show it to the captain.”

“But the captain was occupied,” Archer said.

“Like I said, Mr. York went on before anyone else. I don’t remember where the captain was then. But the first officer could have been called out to see it as well.”

I could feel Archer shuddering. I wanted to get out of there before she lost it, but I wasn’t finished. Interestingly, Bastet seemed fine. Almost like a weight had been lifted.

“Had Truman York ever gotten off the plane before?”

“Not on any of the flights I worked.”

“You didn’t tell anyone about Mr. York when they interrogated you, did you?”

She shook her head. “Four months in that slimy cell, but I knew it would be a lot longer if I got into that. Nobody else who survived saw it, and it didn’t have any bearing on the crash, so it was a matter of self-preservation.”

“How do you know it didn’t have anything to do with the crash?” Amen blurted. “It could have been very important.”

Bastet looked at Amen with great tenderness. “Father, the relief first officer put that plane in the water. Everybody knows it, and it’s wrong to pretend otherwise. Egyptians do commit suicide. They get depression like people everywhere…or they just do crazy things with no explanation. Like Osiris’s father said, bad things live in the dark. We have to talk about them, not make believe we’re different.”