Читать книгу Аэропорт / Аirport онлайн | страница 27

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.