hand appear more prominent, while it deepened the furrows at the corners of her eyes and leached color from her hair. She hadn’t intended to make any impression, yet it was as if she’d consciously given him a preview of the future, challenging him to sound his love and discover if it had the depth to make the surrender she was asking of him.
He was relieved that Diana had decided to relent and give them another chance; but after he went to bed, relief turned into mild terror. Their future as a couple was entirely up to him. Doubts about his constancy assailed him. Maybe she was right—better that she suffer some pain now than more later—and yet he felt that she was asking too much of him. She’d known the risks when she got involved with him; she ought to be willing to take them and not expect ironclad guarantees. But then he recalled how she’d looked, standing there in the fading light, and thought that he was being unfair. There were risks she could not afford.
In the morning, without knowing why, Fitzhugh was determined to act as if nothing had changed. He followed his routine, rising at five to be on hand for the early flights, making up the next day’s schedules after breakfast, checking cargo manifests. He greeted Rachel and the ground and air crews in his usual cheerful manner. He took care of paperwork—lease payments, invoices, and so forth. At lunch he met Tim Fancher and Rob Handy to arrange a flight for them and several tons of supplies and equipment. The two missionaries were going to establish ministries in the Nuba mountains. They were brimming with enthusiasm for this project and couldn’t tell that he barely heard a word they said.
He spent the afternoon at two distasteful tasks. The first was delivering ten percent “commissions” to aid agency logisticians; the second was preparing a report for Hassan Adid, who was expected to arrive later in the day. Knight Air’s sugar daddy wanted to see how well the company had done in the past quarter. It had done very well, with gross sales of $1.6 million. Douglas’s Nuba Day experiment had been a success by and large. The mortar attack and the air raid had scared off a couple of independent agencies, but the rest had reacted as Douglas had hoped and predicted. Knight Air’s planes were flying nearly every day. A significant share of its income, however, had been earned from the gun-running done by Dare’s shell company, Yellowbird. In the interests of cloaking its activities, its records were kept on a separate set of books entrusted to Fitzhugh’s care. Half its earnings were automatically transferred each week from its bank in Uganda to Knight Air’s bank in Nairobi. This had presented a problem in bookkeeping: How to account for the extra income? It was solved by a simple expedient: For every actual mission flown by Yellowbird, a fictitious Knight Air mission was created. The phantom flights were then entered on Knight Air’s books, complete with phantom dates and destinations. The deception did not end there. Since the real customer, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, also had to be concealed, another client had to be found to explain who had paid for the flights. Wesley and Douglas thought that Barrett’s International People’s Aid could play this role, but they needed his consent, which required expanding the inner circle to include him. The ex-priest who thought the war was an extension of the Crusades not only gave his consent, he gave it with enthusiasm.
Thus the report to be presented to Adid was somewhat fraudulent, and in compiling it Fitzhugh felt like a white-collar criminal. True, the bottom line was an honest, accurate figure, but if Adid had known that nearly ten percent of it had come from arms smuggling, it was safe to predict that he would have withdrawn his interests from Knight Air and never invested another dollar. He would have considered the risk-reward ratio way out of line and placed no confidence in the cover that Douglas and Wesley had devised. Indeed, Fitzhugh himself had little confidence in it. Were the UN security office to get wind of what was going on, discovering the financial link between Knight Air and Yellowbird would not require a particularly vigorous investigation, and all attempts to make plausible denials would then sound most implausible. The least that would happen would be the loss of Knight Air’s UN-authorized contracts,