Chapter 2 : Check-in and Departures

Pre-Flight Checks

Joe and his colleagues review their plans and aims for the forthcoming meetings in Seoul and the field trip to Cambodia. They are laying out a memorandum of understanding which will confirm what exactly each firm and member of the team will be responsible for.

The meeting goes smoothly, surprisingly smoothly. It goes smoothly enough for Joe to have time to text Jenny to see if she is OK, after their interrupted call.

One of the team calls Joe out to the office vestibule, saying that their taxi to Heathrow is due. Joe checks his mobile. There is no reply from Jenny. Small talk flows as the team stand around in the lobby, each of them anxious to be on their way. Joe excuses himself and calls Jenny's mobile. There is no reply. He leaves a voice mail.

The taxi arrives. The engineers clamber aboard and begin their journey to Heathrow. It's late afternoon but traffic is flowing smoothly.

"You OK Joe?" Craig Evans, sitting alongside Joe, has noticed that he seems a bit abstracted.

"Yes, sorry Craig, I've been trying to call Jenny but I can't get through."

"She came to see you off?"

"She did. I think she told her Boss that she had work to do down here, though!"

"Bright girl! She's going to go places!"

Joe laughs. Yes, Jenny will go places, he thinks, but it's the actual places that he still worries about.

Neena has picked up the two members of the vehicle team and is threading her way carefully through the London traffic. The last thing she wants, is to trip a speed camera or jump a red light with her helpless passenger on board.

They reach a discrete garage, where Dr Hahn is waiting in a private ambulance. Neena drives in and the doors close. Once privacy has been established, Anna greets her with, "Hey Neena, all OK?"

Neena looks across at her and laughs out loud. "Yes, Anna I am very much OK and I am very glad to see how very thoroughly you have prepared for this mission!"

Neena's teasing remark is made because Anna has shaved her own head. She has done it to help the hospital staff remember her and it will connect the shaven headed girl from the private hospital with the shaven headed girl who leaves the UK as a medical evacuee, if any more searching enquiries are made, but will anyone realise that it is not the same girl?

Now completely recovered from her "injury", Anna takes up her profession as a nurse once more and helps Heidi, Dr Hahn's practice nurse and the team to transfer Jenny into the "ambulance". They sedate her again just as the injured "Vyera Kuznetsova" should be to make her ready for her trip to Farnborough Airport.

Heidi Eisen has been with Dr Hahn for many years. She knows that sometimes unorthodox things have to be done and she also knows how they are accomplished. She bends tenderly over Jenny. "You have been taken ill," she says, "we are taking you to hospital."

"Huh? Oh?" groans Jenny, still weak and disorientated.

Heidi picks up another preloaded auto-injector syringe and fires a second dose of ketamine into Jenny's thigh. Jenny quickly subsides into sleep. Heidi, assisted by Anna takes a pair of paramedic shears and cuts Jenny's clothing from her body and strips her. Jenny is redressed in the hospital smock Anna had worn and ECG leads are placed on Jenny's chest. Anna puts up an intravenous infusion line connected to a syringe driver, to deliver just enough sedative to keep Jenny on the borders of consciousness but completely confused and quite helpless.

Jenny is catheterised and her urine drained; she is given an enema and her bowls cleansed. They put her in an adult diaper. An oro-gastric tube is passed into her stomach and the remains of her last meal are removed, to reduce any risk of vomiting. As a final precaution, she is given an intra-muscular injection of prochlorperazine, an anti-emetic. Just in case the sedation should provoke nausea.

Once the medical preparations are complete, they set to the crucial task of finalising Jenny's appearance. Neena looks critically at Jenny and then the photograph in the passport they have for her. It is a new version of the Vyera Kuznetsova passport. This time, it contains Jenny's image – well just about. Neena takes a pair of metal bolt cutters and cuts through Jenny's septum ring twice, freeing a segment and sliding the ring from her nose. Then some other crucial details: Jenny's engagement and wedding rings are removed and the skin of her fingers massaged so the imprints left by her jewellery can fade quickly.

Dr Hahn, Heidi, and Neena are now ready to resume their journey to the airport with Jenny - or Vyera Kuznetsova, as she will now become - whilst the Mercedes used for the abduction, is valeted with minute attention to detail and returned by the vehicle team to the hire company.

Before they leave, Neena helps Anna to return to her usual appearance. She takes a very carefully crafted blond wig and applies it to Anna's shaven scalp using skin adhesive so that it will not be accidentally displaced. In particular, very great attention – painstaking attention - must be paid to the areas where the wig meets Anna's skin. The disguise must be perfect so no suspicions are aroused on her journey back home. Presently, the transformation is complete and Anna's appearance has been completely restored.

At 3pm, Igor, another member of the team, receives a text. It's a three digit number. The digits tell him that the target has been lifted successfully, is in custody and he is cleared to execute his final part of the mission.

Igor spends the rest of the day mixing anonymously with the crowds shopping in Birmingham city centre before enjoying a leisurely meal and a movie. He has important work to do later that night.

Dr Hahn follows the M4 west. Joe's taxi is heading the same way. As they pass junction 4, Joe's minicab, heading for the Heathrow Exit, happens to pass in front of Dr Hahn's vehicle as it makes its way to another airport. Joe has no idea, of course, how close he has been to his sedated, captive, wife.

Hahn snorts at the careless driving of the taxi as it swings off the motorway and on the slip road. Dr Hahn turns on to the M25 south, then on to the M3. There's the usual press of traffic but, today, they pass through without incident.

After one hour and thirty minutes travel, they leave the motorway, turn down the A325, into Aerospace Boulevard and drive up to the airport

At London Heathrow Terminal 4, Joe McEwan elbows his way into a crowded terminal from the taxi drop off and joins the back of a long queue for check in. The other engineers have each chosen their own queues. It's a bit of a joke between them; last one through to the departure lounge pays for the drinks. Joe pushes the trolley with his bags on slowly forward as the queue for check in moves steadily but not quickly forward. He looks across at his grinning colleagues in the other queues. He's going to lose. A small child in the arms of the woman in front of him is howling. Joe hopes she's in a different part of the plane.

Eventually he reaches the check in for Korean Airlines and hefts his bags from the trolley and drops them on the scales. Joe looks relieved as they weigh in just below the magic 20 kilos. The girl behind the counter takes his ticket and passport, beams with her standard, practiced, "designer" smile and goes through the whole "Did you pack this yourself?" routine. Joe, with a patience born of a hundred flights over the last few years, smiles and nods at the appropriate points; happy at the end of it all simply to have succeeded in gaining his boarding card although worried as ever, by his disappearing baggage. He joins the queue for security, snaking through the terminal, shuffling forward every few minutes but this time without the encumbrance of his suitcases.

Airside

The ambulance with Jenny, comfortable and hovering on the borders of sleep and wakefulness in the back, parks at the Executive Flight Centre.

Dr Hahn goes to report to the duty manager and the medical officer. Heidi Eisen will accompany the patient to Moscow before returning to London on a scheduled flight. The Russian Embassy people have been very understanding and helpful. In the circumstances, there has been no delay over a visa for Heidi. Two other members of Anatoly's team are already in the terminal and are waiting airside of security and passport control.

The medical officer and Dr Hahn discuss Vyera. They review her X-rays and case record of the sleeping patient. Dr Hahn points out that he does not believe in half measures when analgesia and sedation are required. After all, the relief of pain and anxiety are surely one of the blessings of life today? Further technical matters are discussed. The MO and the charming Dr Hahn shake hands: they agree: the patient is fit to fly.

The vehicle is admitted onto the apron and drives carefully towards an immaculate blue, white and silver Bomardier Global Express in one corner of the airfield. Down one side of the Bombardier's fuselage it proclaims: Aнатолы Kустенски Предприятие. And down the opposite side, for those in any doubt: Anatoly Kustensky Enterprises. Security and UK Borders Agency staff are there to meet the party.

A Passport Control official comes over to check the travellers. He takes the red passport belonging to the woman casualty. To ease her pain during the journey from London she has been sedated and has now been carefully lifted on a stretcher and placed onto a trolley. He opens the cover, guarded on the outside by the double-headed Russian eagle. It states that she is Вера Анатольевна Кузнецова. The photograph shows a young lady, just like the girl on the trolley. But of course, it is the girl on the trolley. The official glances at Hahn. He indicates one of the other members of the party, now gathered by the aircraft steps. Valentine notices the doctor's nod and comes over to meets the enquiring gaze of the official. Valentine says: "She is my niece. She fall from horse" Valentine takes in the quizzical gaze of the official as he compares the passport photograph with present appearance of вера Кузнецова.

The official is satisfied. He smiles encouragement and the formalities are complete. The security staff, the medical officer and the border control people have done all they can to speed Vyera and her helpers through the formalities and on to their aircraft.

Jenny is vaguely aware of things going on around her. She is barely conscious of the movement but senses the changes in light and the changes in temperature as she is moved. She hears people talking about someone called "Vyera". None of the staff take the slightest interest in her. She feels there's something not exactly correct about the way that she is being treated, that no one seems to want to ask her if everything is all right but it's no more than a vague unease and, in any case, she doesn't feel she can do anything about it.

Joe finally succeeds in passing security and passport control. Hopping on one leg as he tries to put one of his shoes back on, having retrieved them from the x-ray machine's conveyer, he wonders how much longer it will be before they all have to submit to a full cavity body search before passengers are even allowed inside the terminal building.

Joe curses the fact that he's flying economy. Not for him the quiet oasis of the business lounge. He has to put up with the hectic pushing and shoving and fight for one of the few seats that have been squeezed in reluctantly, as a small concession to the idea that not all passengers want to shop, all the time. Joe flops down on an uncomfortable plastic seat, tossing the leather shoulder pouch that he uses as a flight bag on to the seat beside him and checks to make sure that he's picked up everything after the security search. He looks at his watch. It's almost time to begin the trek down to the boarding pier. There isn't really enough time for a coffee or a drink. His friends have already left the bar. Joe isn't that disappointed. The coffee in the terminal is even worse than the coffee on the flight. And besides, it was his round.