It turns out there’s a live online feed of every registered airborne flight in the world. I’m watching it now as different-sized purple triangles flicker across a lo-fi black and yellow map of the world. A real-life version of the video game Asteroids.
A brief touch of the cursor arrow over each of the larger triangles displays its flight number, its origin, and its destination. The smaller triangles—private planes, jets—simply display their craft type: Gulfstream G550, Falcon 5X, Global 6000.
Our plane was, and still is I suppose, a Gulfstream G650. I look up its specifications online. The G650 can fly eight thousand miles without refueling. That’s pretty much the distance from London to Australia. That’s a really long way for a small business jet. Its top speed is Mach 0.925, transonic. That means traveling at nearly the speed of sound. The speed of sound. It would have been a short flight if they’d made it, wherever they were going. I guess they thought they could outrun the storm.
I look up the most common causes of small-craft accidents. Wikipedia tells me:
Severe instability can occur at transonic speeds. Shock waves move through the air at the speed of sound. When an object such as an aircraft also moves near to the speed of sound, these shock waves build up in front of the plane’s nose to form a single, very large shock wave. During transonic flight, the plane must pass through this large shock wave, as well as contend with the instability caused by air moving faster than sound over parts of the wing and slower in other parts.
That might have been it. Mightn’t it? They just hit the storm and at that speed it knocked them out of the sky. I guess we’ll never know.
I need to look up the tail number next. R-RWOA. I’m hoping it’s a similar system to the car registration system; hopefully, there’s some kind of database online.
After a couple of searches it becomes evident that the “R-R” element of the registration is the country prefix. Registered in Russia. Mark was right. People do get quite nationalistic about their choice of snacks, it’s true.
I check the national aviation database for Russia and somehow, somehow it works. It just works. The details come up. There’s nothing solid, of course. It was registered in 2015 to a company called Aegys-Mutual Consultants. Possibly the least glamorous company name that I’ve ever heard. Sounds a bit like a recruitment company in Basildon. Except small businesses in Basildon can’t usually afford $60 million planes. Yeah. Yeah, that’s how much that plane was worth. Over $60 million. Our house is the most expensive thing we own and it’s only worth $1.5 million. And we haven’t even paid off the mortgage yet. I’m starting to wonder if, whoever these people are, they’d even miss the contents of the bag. It’s obviously not their main business, if it’s even a sideline? But it does make me wonder if they have been missed. There must be someone out there looking. Sixty-million-dollar planes, their crews, and their owners don’t just vanish. They leave a hole, don’t they?
Aegys-Mutual Consultants is a corporation registered in Luxemburg. Which makes sense, I suppose. I don’t know much about Luxemburg, but I do know it’s a tax haven. I’m pretty sure Aegys-Mutual is a shell company. Mark explained them to me once; shell companies are ghost companies set up to make transactions, but the companies have no assets or services in and of themselves; they’re empty shells.
I reopen the flight path feed and scroll over our airspace, the empty black section of screen over French Polynesia: it’s completely blank at the moment, no planes overhead. There won’t be scout planes this far from the mainland, and as the helicopter pilot told us, helicopters can only island-hop out this far. Helicopter fuel tanks aren’t large enough to fly all the way back to the mainland unless they refuel on a plane ship. If someone is looking for this plane, then somewhere between America and Asia is a pretty big search area to cover. But if we had some idea where they were headed or where they departed from, we might be able to work out who they were.
The triangle nearest our island, on the flight map, is currently hovering equidistant between Hawaii and us. A tap reveals it to be a passenger jet from LAX to Australia. Looking at the live feed, it’s clear that planes do fly over the vast expanse of the North and South Pacific Ocean. I always thought airlines tried to avoid it because there’s nowhere to land during emergencies—isn’t it always better to be over land if something goes wrong? At least then there’s the chance of landing—better to fly round the endless water than over it. But it turns out there are still a few transpacific flight paths in the skies above us. People being ferried to and fro, although clearly there’s less air traffic here than over the bustling Atlantic, which is alive right now with color, planes like swarming purple ants crawling across the screen. Not much directly over us, though. Over us it’s mostly commercial airliners from LAX or San Francisco heading to Sydney, Japan, and New Zealand. Then I catch sight of another triangle, higher up on the map than the others. It looks like it’s come across from Russia. I scroll over it. Yes. A Gulfstream G550, private jet. Another one. It’s heading the opposite way from most of the flights over the Pacific—it’s heading left to right, over to Central or North America, I can’t tell which just yet.
It’s hard to know where to even start to look for these people. These ghost people. Google offers no information on missing flights over the past few days beyond a story about a missing light aircraft in Wyoming. I think I can safely say this is not our guys. Some weekend hobbyist, I suppose, who got carried away, or a crop farmer who made a fatal mistake. I’m sure that mystery will solve itself. Either way, there’s nothing to be found online about our missing plane.
I search for private airports in Russia. There are loads, of course, and I’m guessing if you’ve got money, air traffic control can probably keep you off the grid there, if need be. Perhaps that’s true anywhere.
I’m suddenly reminded of the people we saw in the first-class lounge at Heathrow. The millionaires who didn’t look like millionaires. Why weren’t they flying in their own planes? Or chartering? A quick search reveals that chartering a private jet from London to LAX costs around four thousand pounds for one person on an empty leg flight and thirty thousand for the whole plane. A standard first-class ticket, without using any points, is about nine thousand pounds round trip. If you’re rich enough to fly first-class, why not just hire a jet? Hell, why not buy one?
Maybe they’re not savvy enough. Maybe they’re not rich enough. Maybe the people in that lounge weren’t even paying for their own tickets.
Either way, it all feels very different now. First class doesn’t seem quite so impressive somehow. It all feels a bit…well, silly in comparison.
These ghost people live in a world that, up until now, I had no idea existed. A world I wouldn’t even begin to know how to access.
I’m not sure we’re going to find out anything that these people don’t want us to find out. I mean, let’s face it, I’m not a spy; I don’t have access to databases. Resources…
But then…that does give me an idea.
Maybe Mark would be able to recognize them. He saw them, after all, he saw their faces. Albeit in pretty unnatural circumstances. I try to imagine what he must have seen, those corpses swaying like reeds, bloated in the water. Don’t go there, Erin.
“Mark, if I showed you some pictures, would you be able to recognize any of them? The pilots? Those passengers? The two men and the woman?”
He takes a moment. “Why? Did you come up with something?”
“I’m not sure yet. But do you think you could?” I tap away at the keyboard, trying to find what I’m looking for.
“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m pretty sure I’ll never forget what they looked like.” That’s the first time he’s talked about them that way, as if he too is haunted by them. I sometimes forget he feels things too. Does that sound strange? But by that, I mean I sometimes forget he has fears too, weaknesses. I try so hard to suppress mine I forget he must be doing the same. He sits down next to me on the edge of the bed so he can see the screen. I’ve pulled up the Interpol website. I click on the Wanted Persons tab top right. There’re currently 182 wanted persons listed, 182 photographs for Mark to look through. I think it’s fairly obvious what we’re dealing with now. I know two million dollars is fuck all to people who can afford a sixty-million-dollar jet, but I have the feeling this bag isn’t the sum total of their business.
Mark looks up at me. “Seriously?”
“It can’t hurt, can it? Scroll through. Check.” I hand him the laptop and leave him to it.
I grab my phone and go out onto the decking. I want him to check the FBI wanted list next and the British National Crime Agency list after. I find them easily with a quick Google search on my phone. Rows of FBI mugshots load up just like the Interpol site.
They’re a seedy-looking bunch. But then, to be fair, I suppose you could put a picture of Mark’s mother on an FBI watch list and she’d somehow manage to look seedy. I glance back at him through the glass door, his face lit up by the screen’s glow. It can’t hurt to check, can it? Even if he sees nothing, at least we’ve tried. And we will find something eventually or he’ll have to go back down there. We need to find some clue as to who they are, or we’ll just have to go back, leave the money down there, and forget the whole thing.
I suddenly remember the iPhone. It’s still in the gun box in the bag, which I’ve hidden at the top of the wardrobe behind the spare hotel pillows. Right at the back. Mark’s already vetoed using it, even turning it on. He insists we should chuck it. But it could save us so much time if we just used it. Just once.
The battery’s dead. I know this because I’ve already tried pressing the power button. I tried it while he was in the shower earlier. But no power.
If I could just charge it, then we’d know immediately who they were. We could stop searching.
I look at him again through the glass: his face is concentrated, focused. He’s worried about culpability, of course; I know he is. He’s thinking ahead, he’s thinking practically: if something happens, if we have to go to court. If we turn the iPhone on, it’ll be solid evidence that we have the bag. It’ll pick up signal and the account will show when and where. Even if we put it all back underwater, in the plane, under the sea. It’ll show up on some network server somewhere that it was receiving a signal after the crash. It’ll prove someone found the crash, the dead people, all of it, and told no one. Hid the evidence.
But then again it might just all be fine. I might just turn the phone on and find out whose it is and that could be it. I mean, if I make sure it’s on airplane mode, it won’t pick up a signal at all and that should be fine. No mobile phone record. No evidence. I can definitely do this. I can fix this. I know I can.
I’ll charge it tonight.