by Ward Larsen
So here she was. Kristin Marie Stewart.
Feeling he was on a roll, Davis turned toward the aisle and regarded seat 7C. He slipped his hand into that pocket, and scooped out an old bag of peanuts and a plastic stir stick. Then something else caught his eye.
A crashed aircraft, if nothing else, is a study in contrast. Debris will range in condition from soiled to pristine, from ruined to unblemished. All the same, this was something he should have noticed. Amid the chaos all around, the aftermath of a frenzy of Newtonian mechanics, Davis saw one detail that didn’t fit. On the back of seat 7C, square in the center, were two small holes no larger than a dime. He tested one with his little finger, and then the other. Both went clean through. There was a subtle stain on the upholstery below the holes, a discoloration that didn’t catch the eye because something had spackled the remainder of the seatback, presumably mud from the crash sequence later flecked by rain.
But there was a stain. One that was dark and familiar.
Davis checked behind the seat, but there was nothing to see. The bulkhead was gone, and two feet farther back the shell of the shattered hull simply ended, presenting the forest like a jagged oval picture frame. He was staring intently, deep in thought, when someone shouted his name.
Davis was on the Huey three minutes later, rising into the fading orange twilight. Looking out over the scene, he saw a pair of dim lights to the east sweeping back and forth. At least one crew was still searching the wetlands for the last two bodies. Still searching. That was good, because it meant they hadn’t found anything yet. An optimist’s view, to be sure, and an outlook of which he’d rarely been accused of keeping. The chopper spun mercifully to a new heading, and the scene became more pleasant. Green forest under a painted sky, the sun playing its palette on a high deck of stratus clouds.
He pulled the two passports from his pocket and flipped open Jen’s. Davis ran his thumb over the page with her photograph, the embossments and security strips rough under his touch, but strangely comforting. So tactile and true.
“I’ll find you, baby,” he whispered. “Wherever you are, I’ll find you.”
* * *
Davis arrived back at the Bogotá airport at eight that evening. He was told that Marquez had arranged a room for him at a hotel within walking distance of the headquarters building—probably a place that kept a running contract with the military—and the duty officer at El Centro provided an initial vector.
It was a ten-minute walk to the Hotel de Aeropuerto, a solidly two-star affair. He was given a room on the second floor that had a bed, a tiny table with one chair, and a painting on the wall of a bearded conquistador on a horse. The smell of cheap cleanser chafed his respiratory system, but the place met his most immediate needs—the sheets looked clean, and there was a restaurant directly across the street. Until Jen was found, little else mattered.
After ten hours in the field—enduring three thunderstorms, one landslide, and a near lightning strike—Davis looked more like a survivor of a plane crash than an investigator. There was algae and moss in his hair, his fingernails were black with topsoil, and the crusted mud on his pants and shirt would clog anything less than a commercial-grade washing machine. He took everything off, rinsed his boots in the tub, and threw the rest in the trash. He took great care with his best finds of the day—Jen’s iPod and the two passports. The passports he would surrender to Marquez, as per procedure. The colonel already knew he had the iPod, and hadn’t asked for it, so Davis reasoned that was his to keep.
He pulled a clean hand towel from the rack in the bathroom, got it damp under the faucet, and wiped the iPod clean as best he could. He removed the device from its case, pressed the power button and got a flicker, the screen only lighting long enough to blink a red battery symbol before going dark. Davis stared for a long moment, then set the iPod on the nightstand next to the bed.
He returned to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and was met by a weary stranger. He’d been riding an emotional rocket, and spending last night on the floor of a prison cell, a minor concussion for company, had done nothing to brighten his mood. There had been little good news today, but all the same, he’d made it to sunset without hearing the worst news.
To the positive, his head felt better, and after a hot shower he put on fresh clothes, which meant his other khaki pants and a different drab cotton shirt. Like most former military men, he kept a detached sense of fashion, bordering on none at all. The clock by the bed showed eight thirty, and feeling revitalized, Davis knew what he had to do.
At the restaurant across the street he ordered the dinner special, which turned out to be a mountain of steak, chorizo, rice, and beans. In fractured Spanish, Davis tried to ask for it to go, and a bartender who’d studied accounting for two years at the University of Toledo laughed at him, and said, “No problem, buddy.”
On the way to El Centro he came across a store that sold pirated DVDs and cheap electronic gear, and in a discount bin he found a knock-off charger for Jen’s iPod Touch. The clerk asked for ten thousand Colombian pesos, which Davis didn’t have, so he charged it to his MasterCard having no idea how much he was paying for a few feet of wire and a connecting plug that was made in China.
He walked into headquarters at five minutes before nine. Two newly installed window-unit air conditioners were battling hard, sponging moisture from the viscous air and cutting the heat that clung fast into the late evening. He took a seat at a vacant computer, pulled out his sat-phone, and checked for messages. There were none. Pulling in a long breath, he set the phone down next to the keyboard, and was soon spooning rice and beans from a cup as he caught up with the day’s findings on the tragedy of TAC-Air Flight 223. He ate in the same deliberate manner in which he read, a physical manifestation of both thoughtfulness and fear. Davis didn’t want to miss anything, but sensed that he already had. It was a confining process, to be sure, yet a straightjacket from which he made no attempt to escape.
Page by tedious page, he forged ahead.
* * *
The small room was in a nondescript building on G Street in Washington, D.C. Two analysts, a man and a woman, blinked simultaneously when one of their computers chirped an alarm.
“What is it?” the man asked.
The two sat facing one another at opposing desks, and it was the woman’s machine that had alerted. “He just bought something with his MasterCard in Bogotá.”
“What?”
“It looks like … a charging cable for an iPhone.”
“An iPhone?” The man performed a quick cross-check. “He doesn’t own one. Davis is strictly an Android guy, and the sat-phone he was issued Sunday is a standard Iridium platform potted with our special variant of the operating system.”
The woman gave him a suffering look.
“Okay, okay—you knew that. Hang on.”
As he typed, the woman shrugged a sweater over her shoulders. The room was dimly-lit and windowless, and the thermostat kept, strictly under lock and key, at a chilly sixty-eight degrees. Even at the end of August.
“December 15 last year. He bought an iPod Touch at the Best Buy in Manassas, Virginia.”
“A Christmas gift?” the woman mused. “Or could he have bought it for himself?”
Thirty seconds later he had the answer. “During the last week of December someone downloaded nearly a thousand songs through his home computer.”
“Paid or pirated?”
It was his turn to frown. “A thousand songs? Who pays for that much music these days?”
“Sorry.”
“Hang on,” he said, “let’s be sure—I’ve got the playlist right here.” After less than a minute, “No, this doesn’t match the music on Davis’ Spotify account … not even close. It’s got to be the daughter’s, a Christmas present. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Okay. But why would he take his daughter’s iPod, full of her music, to Colombia?”
“And then forget the cable?”
Silence as they both pondered it.
“I don’t get it,” he said weakly.
“Me neither, let’s move on.”
“What’s he doing now?”
She looked at her screen. “We’re getting every keystroke through his phone—he must have set it down right next to the damned keyboard. He’s searching for performance data on ARJ-35s.”
“Okay, at least that makes sense.”
“What should we do about the iPod?” she asked.
“You know the orders.” An extended silence ran. “Where is Stuyvesant?”
The woman had to check. “He’s on another bus. Florida this time.”
“They might reach out to him there—the South Americans are all over Florida.”
“Maybe. But that’s out of our hands. And you didn’t answer my question. Are you going to send this little tidbit up?”
The man sighed. “Where is Strand now?”
She checked the schedule and told him.
“We can only use a landline there—even he has to turn his cell off.”
“The number is listed right here on the schedule. He put it there for a reason.”
The man relented, picking up a phone and placing the call. After two rings it was picked up across town in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Right next door to the White House.
TEN
Davis found Marquez in a conference room preparing to go home for the night.
“You are working late tonight?” the colonel asked as Davis eclipsed the doorway.
“I don’t exactly have a family to go home to right now.”
“Did you learn anything useful this afternoon?”
Davis pulled the two passports and dropped them on a table. “One is Jen’s. The other belongs to the girl who was sitting next to her, Kristin Stewart. I found them in the seatback pockets.”
Marquez took both and flipped through the pages. “That is a strange place to leave them.”
“I thought so too. Jen knows better than to put important documents where they might be forgotten. Now, the iPod being there—that doesn’t surprise me. But for both girls to leave their passports in their seatback pockets. That’s not right—there’s a reason.”
Marquez shrugged it off, a man already mystified by the teenagers he kept at home. He put the passports in a cabinet, locked it, and said, “I will keep them for now.”
“What about you?” Davis asked. “Anything new to report?”
“Unfortunately, no. Nothing since we last spoke. Tomorrow morning I am going to the medical examiner’s office. They will have the results of the postmortems on our pilots. Ten o’clock at Al Hospital Occidente de Kennedy. You are welcome to come.”
“I think I might. Is that where all the bodies are being held?”
“Yes, for the present time.”
“Okay. Before you leave tonight can you give me any information you have on the pilots?”
“Of course, we have a file on each man.”
“I’d also like to see the video footage from the boarding area.”
“I will talk to Rafael before I go. I can tell you I’ve watched it four times myself. Our suspect, Señor Umbriz, is only briefly visible as he gives his boarding pass to the agent. Apparently he arrived late—which in itself tells me something.” Marquez looked at him as if expecting a response.
Davis didn’t give one.
“If that is all,” said Marquez, “I will see you tomorrow morning. Try to get a good night’s sleep.”
* * *
Rafael set up a monitor in a side room and gave Davis a quick tutorial, then left him alone. The video was black and white, a fish-eye view from a camera mounted near the jetway entrance, looking back across the gate area. Davis cued the video to a point fifty minutes before the flight’s departure.
In the beginning there was little action, and he fast-forwarded liberally. Roughly twenty minutes before the scheduled push-back time passengers began lining up. They stood casually between twin rope-lined stanchions, waiting to board a doomed airliner. Davis imagined there had been a similar scene a century ago, when the passengers of an unsinkable ship boarded at a pier in Southampton, England. As ever, fate traveled as a quiet companion.
He studied the passengers one by one, and in shades of gray saw a mixed clientele, some dressed for business and others less formally. Sales meetings, in-law visits, second honeymoons. Summer internships. There were twenty-one good reasons why people were getting on TAC-Air Flight 223, and not a single person appeared to have reservations about the pending journey, including the pastry chef from Cartagena who boarded near the end and looked the most disinterested of the lot. There was no agitation in his manner. No sweaty brow or fearful, darting eyes.
One passenger, of course, demanded the bulk of his attention. Davis allowed himself that. He held steady as he watched, pushing away the chance that these sterile images might be the last ever captured of his daughter. She was near the back of the line wearing a familiar pair of jeans and a loose khaki shirt covered with pockets. She’d bought the shirt specifically for the trip, and he’d teased her that she looked like Indiana Jones—or at least the female, undergraduate version. She looked happy and vibrant, immersed in her big adventure. He watched Jen exchange a few words with her seatmate, Kristin Stewart, who responded in kind. Davis wasn’t a lip-reader but he didn’t need to be. Where do you live? What’s your major? How long will you be here? The usual.
Again, he was struck by their similar appearance. Roughly the same age, same over-the-shoulder auburn hair and willowy build. He forced his eyes away and tried to pick out the last passenger in Row 7. Davis remembered the name from the seating chart. Thomas Mulligan. Mulligan—like an extra shot in golf. His attention settled on an Anglo at the end of the line, behind the two girls. A man whose busy eyes alternated between the terminal area and his phone. Not nervous. Alert was more like it. Watchful. Perhaps searching for an associate. He seemed to be alone, and by the way he was dressed—casual gray coat and pressed trousers—Davis fixed him as a businessman. A Yankee trader in South America selling drilling equipment or washing machines.
The most interesting frames were near the end of the video. They were all moving toward the gate, and presenting boarding passes to the TAC-Air agent. Almost imperceptibly, Davis saw Kristin Stewart turn and say something to Mulligan over her shoulder.
Davis played it back, and by the third replay he was sure. Aside from Jen, Kristin Stewart had made another acquaintance.
At some point, she had also met Thomas Mulligan.
* * *
By eleven that evening Davis’ concentration was ebbing. He’d moved on from the video to study a pair of manila file folders, the background on the pilots. The majority was government information pertaining to airman certificates, security and background checks, and medical licenses, all retrieved from records kept by the Colombian Special Administrative Unit of Civil Aeronautics—the local version of the FAA. The remaining information came from TAC-Air’s corporate personnel files. These files each contained a photograph of the respective pilot standing against a wall, behind them the corporate logo of TAC-Air. That same photo would appear on the corporate ID each wore on a lanyard at work, and was probably on file in a half dozen government ministries.
Davis began with the second in command.
Hugo Moreno, thirty-one, had been the first officer on Flight 223. He’d worked for TAC-Air for four years, accumulating 2500 hours of flight time, including 700 on the ARJ-35. Moreno was a Colombian national and had worked his way through the ranks of aviation the old-fashioned way, flight instructing at a small government-run aviation school, followed by a three-year stint flying night freight over the Andes—a test of airmanship if ever there was one. He was married with two children and lived in a rented apartment on the outskirts of Bogotá.
Captain Blas Reyna, forty-five, was more of an enigma. Fifteen years with TAC-Air, he had 9000 hours of flight time, 4500 spent on the
ARJ-35. His previous experience was simply listed as “corporate,” with a half dozen types of business jets flown. He was divorced with no dependents, and his address of record was a postal box in Cali. Neither pilot had anything in their files about disciplinary action, and both appeared to have solid training records.
Before closing Reyna’s file, Davis paused at the cover photo of the captain in uniform, and there struck the same mental stop he had this morning as he’d stood looking at the bodies. The word burbled into his mind once more: unprofessional.
But in what way?
He went back to Moreno’s TAC-Air file and studied the photograph. There was no doubt about it—this was the man he’d seen this morning, the body on top of the stack with three stripes on each shoulder. The identity of Captain Reyna was less definitive due to the head trauma, but a long hard look at that photograph erased any doubts. It was another match. So what bothered him about it? He flicked through Reyna’s file again and found an old background check. It looked like a standard government form, and while there was no photograph, Davis saw a thumbprint and signature at the bottom of a page of Spanish legalese.
The genesis of an idea surfaced. He dug deeper into Reyna’s government records, and at the very back found an old and yellowed page—his original application for an airman medical certificate. He looked at the vital statistics, and finally found the problem. A very big problem. Of course, one mismatched number could be a simple clerical error. But it made no sense at all. Davis went back to the photographs of the two pilots and compared them to one another. Then he checked copilot Moreno’s vital statistics. Together with what he’d seen at the accident site, it all clicked into one very disturbing scenario.
Davis sat for a moment with his hands clasped behind his head, ruminating on how best to deal with it. He considered the next day, his meeting at the hospital with Marquez, and decided it would present an ideal opportunity to sort things out.
