Читать книгу Аэропорт / Аirport - Артур Хейли - Страница 12

At approximately the same time D. O. Guerrero was surrendering to failure.

D. O. Guerrero was a gaunt man, slightly stoop-shouldered, with a protruding, narrow jaw, deep-set eyes, pale thin lips, and a slight sandy mustache. His age was fifty; he looked several years older.

He had been married for eighteen years. By some standards, the marriage was good. But in the past year, a mental gulf had opened between the Guerreros which Inez, though she tried, was unable to bridge. It was one result of a series of business disasters which reduced them to near poverty, and eventually forced a succession of moves, including the one to this drafty, cockroach-infested, two-room apartment.

A few weeks ago, in a rage, he had struck Inez. She feared more violence and, soon after, sent their two teen-age children to stay with her married sister in Cleveland. Inez herself stayed on, taking a job as a coffee-house waitress, and the work at least provided money for food.

Inez was now at her job. D. O. Guerrero was in the apartment alone.

He held a confirmed reservation, plus a validated ticket—for tonight—on Trans America Flight Two to Rome. Inez had no knowledge of the ticket to Rome.

The Trans America ticket was for a round trip excursion which normally cost four hundred and seventy-four dollars. However, by lying, D. O. Guerrero had obtained credit. He had paid forty-seven dollars down, acquired by pawning his wife’s last possession of any value—her mother’s ring.

He had avoided a credit investigation by typing deliberately misspelling his surname, changing the initial from “G” to “B,” so that a routine consumer credit check of “Buerrero” would produce no information, instead of the harmful data recorded under his correct name.

In any case, when checking in at the airport later tonight, he intended to have the spelling corrected—on the Trans America flight manifest as well as on his ticket.

Another part of D. O. Guerrero’s plan was to destroy Flight Two by blowing it up.

His own life was useless, his death, though, could be of value, he intended to make sure it was.

Before departure of the Trans America flight, he would take out flight insurance for seventy-five thousand dollars, naming his wife and children as beneficiaries. He believed that what he was doing was a deed of love and sacrifice.

D. O. Guerrero had selected Trans America’s non-stop flight to Rome, because he reasoned, his own plan must preclude the recovery of wreckage. A large portion of the journey of Flight Two—The Golden Argosy—was above ocean.

Guerrero calculated that after four hours’ flying Flight Two would be over mid-Atlantic. A finger through the loop, a tug on the string! And the explosion would be instant, devastating, final, for whomever or whatever was nearby. It would send the aircraft, or what remained of it, plummeting toward the sea. The debris of Flight Two would remain forever, hidden and secret, on the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Flight insurance claims—in the absence of any evidence of sabotage—would be settled in full.

It was a few minutes after 8 P.M.

One final thing to do! A note for Inez.

I won’t be home for a few days. I expect to have some good news soon which will surprise you. D.O.

It wasn’t much of a note to mark the end of eighteen years of marriage but it would be a mistake to say too much. Afterward, even without wreckage from Flight Two, investigators would put the passenger list under a microscope.