The plane almost leapt into the air as if making light of its single passenger. Carlos kept the plane in a steep climb, flying it parallel to the Bay Bridge. In the far distance he could see the tower blocks of Baltimore city centre. When he was about halfway along the bridge he made a slow turn to the left, and continued to climb.

As he handled the controls, Carlos tried to work out where they had gone wrong and why the operation had fallen apart. It wasn’t that he wanted to apportion blame, it was that he rarely failed and when he did it was always because someone else had let him down. He went over and over the steps in his mind, looking for the weak point. Not Mary Hennessy, of that he was sure. And Matthew Bailey had done everything that was asked of him. The snipers too.

Maybe it was just bad luck, plain and simple. Maybe the gods had just decided that Ilich Ramirez Sanchez would not be allowed to retire, to rest on his laurels and spend his old age with his wife and family. His luck had clearly run out the day he’d escaped from France. He was like a cat which had used up all of its nine lives. The displays on the radios in the control panel were blank. There was no one that Carlos wanted, or needed, to speak to.

He flew south, down the centre of the Chesapeake Bay.

Carlos thought about his wife and children. He wondered how they were, and if Magdalena had found the time to get the stereo repaired. They had a nice house, a house he could relax in, with several acres of well-tended garden behind a high stone wall.

He turned the plane to the left until the heading indicator showed that he was flying east. He remembered how his children had cried when he’d told them that he’d be leaving them for a while, and how they’d nodded seriously when he’d made them promise to take care of their mother. His own mother had cried, too, and she’d held him tightly as if knowing that she would never see him again. He remembered, too, how urgent Magdalena’s love-making had been on his final night in the house, his suitcase packed and locked on the floor at the end of the bed.