Free The Pandora Key by Lynne Heitman

cramped space had panels and counters with lots of buttons and dials. It smelled like machines in there and looked like the inside of a cockpit. It also had thick soundproof tiles on the walls to absorb our conversation. He sat in one swivel chair, and I sat in the other.
    “What do you do here?” I asked him.
    “I host a sports call-in show with my partner.”
    “Why would an award-winning journalist leave his job at a prestigious newspaper to do sports call-in on the radio?”
    “Because I love sports.” He gave me a loopy smile. It made me think that some part of him had gone right over the edge.
    “Okay.”
    He checked his watch. “If you want information, ask me now. I’ll tell you what I can, but under one condition.”
    “What?”
    “After you leave here today, you will never try to contact me again. You won’t call me. You won’t come back here. You won’t come to my house. Do you agree?”
    “What if I have follow-up questions for you?”
    “You have to agree to my terms, or I won’t talk to you.”
    “All right. I agree.” What choice did I have?
    “Good.” He sat back and rested his left foot on his right knee. With his long arms and legs, he was all corners and angles. It made him look like the scaffolding on an unfinished building. “Tell me what you know so far.”
    I went through it all with him again. He listened carefully. When I was finished, he found a pad and pen. He wrote something on the top page, tore it off, and gave it to me. I read what he’d written out loud. “Gilbert Bernays? Who is this?”
    “He was one of the hostages. If Fratello was on that plane, it was probably as Bernays.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “You know what happened, right? How the plane got redirected to Khartoum?”
    “I know they took a mechanical.”
    “The plane had a hydraulic leak. They made an emergency landing, and for all intents and purposes, the plane was dead. It was never going anywhere again until they got the leak fixed, and no one was going to fix it for them.”
    “They still had the hostages,” I said.
    “They did, but they had them in the wrong country. They had planned to be in Afghanistan, where they could get advice and counsel from the senior members of the Brigade. If you look at the hijackers who died, the oldest one was twenty-three. That’s part of why things spun so far out of control.”
    “Why did they do it in the first place? What were their demands?”
    “They wanted to force Pakistan to release a radical Muslim sheikh named Ali al-Badat. Pakistan wouldn’t do it. That’s why the thing dragged on the way it did. It was a standoff.”
    “Who is Ali al-Badat?”
    “ ‘The people’s sheikh’ is what Newsweek called him. He was very popular. The Pakistani army stumbled over him by accident in a Peshawar raid. They had to put him in jail, but they weren’t happy about it.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because he had far more support in Pakistan than President Musharraf did. They were afraid he would cause an uprising against the government. I’m still surprised they didn’t let him out. It would have been the perfect excuse, right?”
    “I guess so.” At the moment, I was more concerned with problems closer to home than a geopolitical debate. “What about Gilbert Bernays?”
    “Right. The hijackers needed food and water, so they started freeing hostages. They let the women and children go first. Then the Muslims, then a Frenchman. Eventually, it got down to seventeen Westerners and the eight hijackers. Seven of the hostages were Americans. One of them was this Bernays. I could never find anything on the guy. He was a ghost. No background or backstory. I always thought his identity had been manufactured. Now you’re saying he could be this embezzler.” He reached up and scratched his right cheek with his left hand. I could hear his nails scraping the stubs of his whiskers. “I think that could make some sense.”
    “Why?”
    “There were stories among the