Passenger 19

by Ward Larsen

  HOMELESS

  NEED MONEY

  GOD BLESS

  The last line he had waffled on, religion always a touchy issue, but he decided it was safely non-denominational.

  Now all he needed was a stage. The right corner from which to make his pitch. Stuyvesant thought he might know exactly where to find it.

  He smiled inwardly.

  And I’ll look them right in the eye.

  EIGHT

  The cockpit of a twenty-one seat regional jet is a surprisingly small space. Smaller still after a two-hundred-fifty-knot collision into hardwood forest. That being the case, Davis and Marquez could not inspect the flight deck alongside one another. Access was gained through what had been the cockpit door, until recently a bulletproof Kevlar barrier, now reduced to a splintered six-by-two-foot panel clinging to its bottom hinge.

  The aircraft’s nose had come to rest disjointed from the main fuselage and canted at an angle. The cockpit was largely intact, albeit with significant impact damage. Aside from the broken door, Davis noted that a window on the left side had failed inward, and the forward windscreen center-post had buckled severely, a telephone-pole-sized timber winning that battle in microseconds. The flight instrument displays seemed in reasonably good condition, the wide flat-panel screens now dark from lack of power. Whatever chapters the instruments might add to this luckless story would take time to interpret. Microchips had to be recovered, analyzed, and eventually compared to flight data recorder information.

  Two overhead panels had accordioned, both sides crumpled, although most of the switches and components were recognizable. The center console, where levers were mounted to manage engine thrust and flap extension, could have come straight from the factory floor. Davis shouldered inside the cockpit to inspect things more closely, and was immediately tripped by one very high mental hurdle. The ARJ-35 was certified as a two-pilot airplane. He was looking at three bodies.

  “What the hell?” he blurted.

  “My words earlier were in Spanish,” said Marquez, “but much the same.”

  Davis leaned in further, snapping the mask back over his face to counter stale air that reeked of death. He saw two men in the left seat, stacked like a pair of burlap grain sacks. Both wore uniforms, the usual dark polyester pants, short-sleeve white shirts with epaulets, and black leather shoes. In the right seat was a man in civilian clothes, this body in the best condition of the three. None of it made sense.

  Davis pulled back into the daylight and drew off his mask. “This airplane doesn’t have a jumpseat, does it?”

  “No,” said Marquez, confirming that the third cockpit seat, common on larger airliners, was not an option here.

  “The missing passenger from 2A—that’s him?”

  “Yes, we have made a positive identification.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Rodolfo Umbriz. He is a pastry chef from Cartagena.”

  Davis stared blankly at Marquez, opened his mouth as if to say something, then stifled it. His eyes drifted skyward. Of all the complications he might have imagined, this was not among them.

  He returned to the cockpit. The three bodies, after much trauma and many hours without metabolic process, had reached the point of unpleasantness. He tried to decide which seemed more bizarre. A civilian slumped over the flight controls? Or the two pilots stacked next to him in the captain’s seat?

  Of the two pilots, the one on top seemed in better condition. The most obvious injury was a massive wound at the base of the man’s skull. Dried blood, black and crusted, stained the back of his white shirt. Three stripes on his epaulets suggested this was the first officer. The body underneath had taken more of a beating. The head rested near the failed window, and Davis saw severe damage to the man’s face and neck. He remained strapped in his seat, yet despite the heavy trauma there seemed to be less blood. In truth, hardly any blood at all.

  Davis shifted to the other side of the cockpit and studied the civilian, a sixtyish Hispanic male in a blue madras shirt with wispy gray hair and crushed designer glasses. His seat belt was engaged, minus the shoulder harness that was mandatory on cockpit seats. The body had been driven forward on impact, ending slumped over the control column. Davis noted there was no radio headset clamped over the man’s skull, nor any charts on the clipboard in front of him. Either might imply he knew how to fly an airplane.

  He blurted out the obvious one-word question. “Hijacking?”

  “There can be no other answer,” said Marquez.

  Davis stared at the colonel, thinking this an odd phrasing. He wrote it off to the language barrier.

  “It explains everything,” said Marquez. “The pilots were incapacitated at the time of the crash.”

  “Incapacitated? What makes you say that?”

  A sigh from the colonel. Not impatience, but reluctance. “After a close inspection, I’m quite certain both pilots have bullet wounds at the bases of their skulls.”

  “Bullet wounds,” Davis repeated.

  “It is only my preliminary observation, but having battled the narcos in our country … I’ve seen executions before.”

  “That would be incapacitating.”

  “The pilots will be first in line for postmortem evaluations. We must confirm their cause of death as quickly as possible.” Marquez paused. “A hijacking would also explain why the aircraft deviated so far off its intended course.”

  Davis nodded, but said nothing.

  “Of course, there is more,” said Marquez. He swept two fingers over the bulkhead where the cockpit door had been mounted. “The frame around this door is misshapen from the crash, but otherwise undamaged—except here.” His fingers stopped at the electrically actuated deadbolt lock. “You can see evidence of forced entry. The lock is damaged and the frame bent severely near the bolt.” Marquez next pointed with the toe of his mud-caked boot.

  Davis saw a heavy steel bar on the cabin floor.

  “That was also discovered last night,” said the colonel, “exactly where you see it now.”

  “So you’re suggesting this guy who ended up in the copilot’s seat … he broke into the cockpit using that as a pry bar, then shot both pilots and took over?”

  “It seems clear enough,” said Marquez.

  Davis stepped back and put his hands on his hips. He shifted his eyes from one bit of Marquez’ theory to the next, settling on the crowbar near his foot. He thought, Colonel Mustard in the study with the lead pipe. What he said was, “It all looks pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?”

  “Tell me what doesn’t fit. I want you to challenge this.”

  Davis didn’t have to think about it for long. “In the post 9-11 world any would-be hijacker faces one overwhelming hurdle—how to gain access to the cockpit. And you’re suggesting one guy did this? With a gun and a tire iron?”

  “There are ways to slip weapons past security. The gun would keep the passengers at bay while he used the bar to open the cockpit door.”

  “Would it?” Davis countered. “There’s a new mentality among passengers these days. Anyone trying to breach a flight deck will find themselves up against a mob.”

  “A mob of how many? We are dealing with a small jet. If he was able to work quickly, before anyone realized what was happening—”

  “No,” said Davis. “He might pry through the door in seconds, and he might shoot the pilots. But at that point the flight attendant and passengers would be overwhelmed by an instinct of self-preservation. They’d rush him like a crowd of medieval peasants, only instead of pitchforks and clubs they’d use coffeepots and fists. And in your scenario, the hijacker—who, by the way, is not a particularly intimidating individual—no longer has a viable door to protect him.”

  “That is where you are wrong. This door has a secondary lock, a manual deadbolt that can be engaged from inside the cockpit. If he were to defeat the electronic bolt, I think he might have been able to isolate himself using the backup lock.”

  Davis look
ed quizzically at Marquez. “You’ve already researched the operation of this particular model of hardened door?”

  “I looked into it this morning.”

  “All right—I’ve come this far with you. What’s the motive?”

  “In Colombia we have no shortage of desperation. Terrorism, narcotics, extortion. Or perhaps this man had psychiatric issues. We are looking into his history now. I would guess our suspect planned to fly to Panama or Ecuador, and from there demand a ransom.”

  “So now he’s a suspect? And you’re assuming our chef pâtissier could fly an airplane as easily as he could bake an éclair?”

  Marquez ignored the jibe, saying, “It is possible he has some kind of flight experience. If so, there will be a record of it somewhere. We are already interviewing his family and coworkers, researching his background. By the end of today we will know a great deal more about Rodolfo Umbriz.”

  Davis said nothing for a time, then asked, “Have you found the weapon?”

  “Not yet. But we will.”

  Davis sensed something beneath this answer, but it wasn’t confidence. “So tell me,” he said, “when will you go public with this theory?”

  “Dios mío! To the press? We are nowhere near that point. I am only trying to keep you informed, tell you the road our investigation is taking.”

  Davis nearly blurted something about what kind of road involved a sexagenarian pastry chef commandeering a packed airliner. He held his tongue, and Marquez, as if reading his doubts, said, “We have not yet ruled anything out, Mr. Davis. As far as the press goes, our accident is drawing less attention than most. The aircraft was relatively small, and the crash site very remote. There have been no photographs, other than a few dim images we released ourselves.” His arm swept out in a smooth arc. “With our army friends on the perimeter, it will stay that way long enough.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “You should get to work, perhaps spend your morning in the eastern sector. Go see if you can find your daughter, Mr. Davis.” The colonel patted his shoulder in a comforting gesture, which might or might not have been genuine, before turning away toward the clearing.

  Davis watched him go, all careful steps and confidence. When the colonel was gone, he turned and looked again at the frame of the cockpit door and the crowbar at his feet. He took another long look at the bodies inside. In the end it wasn’t the alleged hijacker that held his attention, but rather the two pilots. Davis leaned left and right, and he did see wounds near the bases of their brainpans. What bothered him about the picture wasn’t that they probably had been executed. It was something more broad, something he couldn’t quite pinpoint. A simple, one-word impression wedged in his mind.

  Unprofessional.

  His thoughts were interrupted when a pair of uniformed men arrived with three body bags.

  “We clean up, okay?” the lead man said in strongly accented English.

  Davis backed away. “Yeah, go ahead.”

  NINE

  They call it rain forest for a reason. Moments after Marquez departed in the Huey the sky began to darken, and in a matter of minutes, the great slabs of cumulonimbus overhead reached their saturation point. It wasn’t as much a rain shower as a regional waterfall. The treetops were barely visible, and gusts whipped foliage into undulating emerald curtains.

  Rather too late, Davis took shelter under an open-sided tent. Thick raindrops peppered the roof, a thousand tiny explosions meshing into a low-frequency white noise, the overhanging canvas flaps snapping wildly in the wind. Davis was more wet than dry, and in the pulsing gusts he had the peculiar sensation of being hot and cold at the same time. He stood alongside a dozen Colombians, a mix of army enlisted men and the colonel’s field technicians. There was also an exhausted powerplant expert from Pratt & Whitney, a man who’d flown in overnight from Miami and caught the first available chopper. Davis doubted the engines had anything to do with this crash—one of the few points he and Marquez agreed upon—but the big manufacturers always liked to have an ear to the ground while blame remained an open question.

  There were three folding tables, and all had been turned into seating. Someone opened a cooler full of food and soft drinks, music began playing, and a spontaneous midday siesta began in earnest. Attacking a sandwich that might have been beef and cheese, Davis struck up a chat with the soldier standing next to him.

  “How long is your duty out here?” he asked the cabo primero, or first corporal.

  The young man smiled amiably. “We come last Friday. Stay three, maybe four days. More if our jefe say.”

  “It was lucky you were so close to the crash site.”

  “Two other squads were near, but we were closest.”

  “Sounds like a big exercise. What kind of training were you doing?”

  “Training? I don’t know about training.”

  Davis foraged in the cooler for a second sandwich. “So what … you were just out here waiting for an airplane to crash?” Davis’ stab at humor was lost, the corporal only giving him an odd look.

  “Sorry,” said the soldier. “English no so good.” He walked to the other side of the tent and began talking to a captain.

  The rain began sweeping sideways, marginalizing the tent’s usefulness. Nobody seemed to care, least of all Davis who had far more pressing things on his mind. Raindrops pelted his face as he downed his second sandwich, ham and avocado on thick-sliced bread. He was determined not to waste a moment. If field work was impractical, he’d use the time for sustenance and to organize his thoughts.

  Davis tried to tear apart the hijacking theory, but to shoot down such a circumstantial premise was like firing an air-to-air missile at a ghost. Moving on, he rehashed the rest, and one detail tugged at him again and again. The jet had ended up well off course. What at first had seemed an oddity now appeared vital. Hijacking or not, someone had been at the controls of Flight 223, and they’d brought it here. But who had been flying, and what was their intention? He was virtually certain Marquez would find that their pastry chef, Umbriz, had no flying experience. If that was the case, there were only two scenarios in which the man would have killed the pilots and taken over the jet. One was a suicide mission, perhaps with a political agenda. The second was that he was flat out deranged. Neither seemed likely.

  But what then?

  He checked his watch to note the exact time of each clap of thunder that seemed near. On reaching the first ten-minute interval of silence, Davis headed outside. His example was not followed—the party kept going strong. It was undeniably irritating, yet he decided to let it play out. Davis knew his level of commitment was unique, and could not be expected of the others. The rain tapered quickly, falling to a steady drizzle, and the jungle acquired a new heaviness. He stepped over streams of fresh runoff, forded through puddles of muck, and soon his clothes were riding his skin like a suit of wet rags.

  He circled the fuselage, ending near the tip of the aircraft’s nose. An engineer would refer to it as station zero, the baseline longitudinal location. From that point, moving aft, the numbers increased, serving as reference units by which to gauge modifications, repairs, and weight and balance measurements. Davis would use station zero as his own starting point, thinking it the most methodical way to proceed.

  He poked and prodded the radome, and under the cracked fiberglass housing he noted a damaged weather radar antenna. Climbing briefly onto the spine two feet farther aft, he saw nothing of interest. An unidentifiable piece of debris jutted from the ground along the port side, and Davis went down on his knees. With bare hands he dug through dirt and peat, and soon identified the part as a valve connected to a pencil-thin hydraulic line, almost certainly part of the nose gear assembly underneath. Not a noteworthy find, but one more thing to be logged and accounted for. That was how 99 percent of an investigator’s time was spent—documenting what wasn’t important in order to find what was.

  An hour later he stopped for a water break.

  After t
wo, Davis stole a glance at his watch.

  It was noon on Monday.

  The second worst day of his life.

  Which meant things were getting better.

  * * *

  The last helicopter to Bogotá from the crash site was set to leave at 6:45 that evening. Davis was given a ten-minute warning to be ready. He’d spent the entire day combing through wreckage, from nose to tail—or at least where the tail used to be. He’d found little to inspire him, and nothing to counter Marquez’ theory that they were looking at a hijacking. But then, there was also nothing to support it. Bent metal gave little inference as to what might have distilled in one man’s mind.

  He reached the final row of seats shortly before the chopper was to arrive, and for the last time that day Davis stared at seat 7B. He’d been avoiding it, of course, like an elderly passerby might pretend to ignore a graveyard, yet he couldn’t return to Bogotá without one last look.

  The seat appeared much the same, unblemished upholstery and cushions over an unbent frame. He realized that after finding Jen’s iPod he’d ventured no further into the seatback pocket. Davis slipped his hand in again, forcing the pocket wide, and behind an emergency evacuation card he saw something else. It was instantly recognizable—a dark-blue passport issued by the United States of America.

  Davis made sure there was nothing more, then pulled the passport clear. It had to be Jen’s, and on the second page he found her picture. The document was four years old, the photo taken in her early high school years. Davis saw a passport smile less muted than most, captured before her spirit had been flattened by the death of her mother, and long before she would leave home for college at that double-edged age of independence.

  The sound of the Huey rattling overhead brought Davis back to the present. It was time to go, but on a sudden impulse he checked the pocket in front of the window seat, 7A. There was no iPod, but to his surprise he found a second passport. This too was an American-issued item, and inside he found a picture of a girl Jen’s age. She had the same color hair and similar features. They could have passed for sisters. He remembered the final message Jen had left on his phone. She’d been at the airport in Bogotá and had already made a friend.