by Ward Larsen
“Best for everyone? Even Kristin Stewart?”
“Especially Kristin Stewart.”
“And if I choose to ignore your sage advice?”
Jones heaved a sigh, a teacher weary of an unruly first grader. “Let me put it like this. If you didn’t work for the CIA, Miss Sorensen, and if you weren’t able to pursue any remotely related career on the civilian side—what would you do for a living?”
She stared at him in the half light. “I don’t know, I never thought about it.”
“Maybe you should.”
And with that, the counterfeit Jones walked away. Sorensen watched him fade into the D.C. nightscape, a silhouette against a domed Capitol building struck in brilliant white light. She still couldn’t say who the man worked for, and didn’t understand the ties to Kristin Stewart. Sorensen was, however, sure of one thing. Whoever they were, they were running scared.
* * *
The call reached Strand at his G Street office minutes later. Not liking what he heard, the CEO of The Alamosa Group spent thirty minutes acquiring further information. Only then did he call Bill Evers.
“We made contact with the woman,” Strand said.
“Will she do as we ask?” Evers asked.
“No way to tell. But this is clearly not an official CIA inquiry. She’s only helping a friend.”
“Davis,” said Evers.
“Yes.”
“Then that’s good.”
“The best we could have hoped for. If CIA were to blunder into this en masse we could have real problems. But there was something that took us by surprise.” Strand paused, knowing Evers did not like surprises. “It seems Davis has a daughter—and she was on that same airplane.”
“What?”
Strand said, “She’s the second passenger who’s missing. It does explain a few things. More of what we’ve seen in our surveillance of Davis makes sense, in particular the way he’s pressing so hard. Just to be sure, I made a few calls. Davis works for a Larry Green at the NTSB, a retired Air Force general. Apparently, Green recognized the daughter’s name on a preliminary manifest of crash victims. After verifying it was her, he put Davis on the investigation.”
There was a long pause as Evers considered it. “Does this bother you? I mean, what are the chances of that—Kristin being on the same flight as an NTSB investigator’s daughter?”
“Slim,” said Strand, “but I’ve considered it from every angle. It’s just dumb luck.”
“Luck,” Evers said, almost to himself. “But which kind?”
TWENTY-FOUR
It was nearly ten o’clock when Davis got back to his room. He arrived to find a note from Delacorte taped to his door:
I have information that would interest you. Room 302.
Davis climbed one flight of stairs, rounded the building and found 302 on the back side. The door was open and he found Delacorte sitting on a chair near the window. The room was much like his own, except the painting on the wall was of a mission-style church instead of a conquistador.
“I thought they put flankers up at the Ritz,” said Davis.
“I would prefer anywhere but this room. My air conditioner has stopped working.”
Davis saw a window-mounted air conditioner. The control panel had been removed, and wires dangled free like so much overcooked spaghetti. “Looks like you’ve already tried to fix it.”
“The fan motor has seized—there is no hope.” Delacorte fanned himself with a tourist brochure. “It does not get so hot in Paris.”
“If you want to drag your mattress around the corner you can bunk with me.”
“No, but thank you for offering.”
“I got your note. What’s the interesting information?”
“What you said earlier about landing on an unimproved field,” he raised a finger to imply a revelation, “it caused me to think of other possibilities.”
“Such as?”
“You have suggested that Flight 223 made an interim landing, after taking off from Bogotá but before the crash. We also have a dead copilot to consider, and another man dressed in a TAC-Air captain’s uniform, but who has not been identified.”
Davis nodded. “Not to mention the pastry chef who ended up as pilot-in-command.”
“It will be a challenge, I think, to construct a scenario that brings all these things together.”
“To say the least.”
“I’m afraid I have—what is the term in America?—one more wrench to throw in your machine.”
“By all means, toss away.”
Delacorte pulled out a tablet computer and kept talking as he typed. “In studying the hull I have discovered that certain parts remain missing. Of course, this is not at all unusual in such a devastating crash. There was, however, one absence I thought strange.” He turned the screen to show Davis a photograph of the forward side fuselage. “The main entry door is nowhere to be found.”
Davis studied the picture. He had seen the opening before, even stepped through it once, yet he’d attached no particular significance to the missing door. “Nobody mentioned that it hadn’t been found. I assumed it had broken off and was probably retrieved from the undergrowth.”
“A reasonable assumption. You and I often encounter missing doors. It is usually the result of an evacuation, or sometimes they are removed and discarded in haste by firefighting crews.”
Delacorte was right—doors were often absent. Such a normal occurrence, in fact, that he hadn’t seen it as relevant.
Delacorte continued, “The cabin of an ARJ-35 has four access doors. At the front you have a port-side entry door, the one we are missing, and an opposing starboard service door that was undisturbed in the crash sequence. Aft of these are two small emergency exit hatches, one above each wing. In our mishap the evacuation hatches remained in place—they were never opened. The two forward doors, of course, double as emergency evacuation points, although there are no emergency escape slides as you would find on a larger airliner.”
“So the missing entry door—are you going to tell me somebody survived the crash and opened the door as an emergency exit?”
“Actually, quite the opposite. That door will likely never be found.”
Davis looked at him quizzically.
Delacorte tapped the screen. “As you see, the door is a clamshell design, upper and lower halves hinged to the entryway frame. The bottom half contains an integral set of stairs, used at remote airports where no jetways or airstairs are available.” Delacorte switched to another image. “I took photographs of the hinges—these are from the bottom half of the door.”
Davis looked closely. Two heavy steel fittings had clearly failed, both twisted severely to the breaking point.
“I inspected them very closely,” said the engineer, “and I can tell you that they failed very clearly in torsion.”
“Torsion.”
“A terrific force twisted the door and ripped it off the airframe quite cleanly. The top hinge is nearly identical. I also discovered two dents on the leading edge of the inboard port wing, and another on the number one engine cowling. All of this supports my theory.”
Davis finally understood. “You’re saying this door opened in flight … that it was ripped off its hinges.”
A satisfied Delacorte said, “Almost certainly.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Delacorte’s finding changed the picture completely. It also created new complications.
“Okay,” said Davis, “so we have a door that came open in flight. Could that have caused the crash?”
“This was my first thought as well, but I do not think it fits. True, the wing was damaged, but not in a way that would affect aerodynamic performance. This aircraft has no leading edge flaps on the wing, which would be prone to causing instability if damaged. The tail is a more critical surface, however, I see no damage there that correlates to door separation.”
“The engine?”
“Yes, I considered this also. The outer cowling was dented, impact damag
e from the door, I would say. This led me to examine the engine, both the fan and turbine. I found no acute rotational damage—only the graduated distortions one would expect from an impact with the forest.”
Delacorte allowed a moment for Davis to digest it all.
“Of course,” he continued, “this is all no more than one engineer’s opinion. With time, everything can be verified by way of laboratory inspections.”
Davis shook his head. “That would be fine if we had time, but in my opinion you’ve already passed the most critical test—it makes perfect sense.”
“What do you take from it? You realize what must happen for this door to be opened in flight.”
Davis did know. Over the years there had been regular occurrences, often sensationalized in the media, of mentally unbalanced individuals trying to open aircraft exit doors in flight. What on the surface appears dramatic and threatening, however, is in fact a non-event. Passenger aircraft are pressurized to counter the thin air at high altitude, and among manufacturers the design specifications are more or less universal, the differential pressure being roughly eight pounds per square inch at service altitude. Simply put, a cabin door six feet high and three feet wide is held in place during cruise flight by an effective force of over twenty thousand pounds. Davis and his entire rugby team would never budge a fully pressurized door.
That said, there was a way to open a door in flight, a scenario that was problematic for one very good reason—it involved cooperation from the flight deck.
“The pilots could have depressurized the cabin,” said Davis.
“It is the only way,” agreed Delacorte. “But why would a crew do that?”
As Davis thought about it, disjointed details began to mesh. “Remember—we still have the issue of the disappearing Captain Reyna. Let’s say Flight 223 landed on an grass strip somewhere, then took off again and flew to where it crashed. That requires at least one pilot on board to get the jet airborne and pointed in the right direction. We found three people in that cockpit. Two, as far as we know, weren’t even pilots. The other was the first officer, and he was dead before the airplane went down. I’m guessing maybe a long time before, which would mean our copilot, Moreno, had no part in this scheme.”
Davis watched Delacorte struggle to put it all together.
“If you think about it,” Davis said, “there’s only one person who could have made everything work.”
“Captain Reyna.”
“Exactly. I’m guessing he shot his copilot, probably before they even diverted to the remote airstrip. That way he gets no challenges about why they’re changing destination. When they land in the jungle, the two missing girls are taken off, and the body we found in the captain’s seat is brought on board. A John Doe already dead and dressed in a uniform that didn’t fit. That all works, but only if Reyna had help, somebody waiting for him on the ground.”
“C’est incroyable!” said Delacorte.
“No less incredible than the paperwork I came across two nights ago. Captain Reyna’s personnel file was altered so that his physical characteristics matched those of our mystery corpse.”
Delacorte’s gaze narrowed.
“I’m sure of it,” said Davis. “Major Echevarria is looking into the details, but the very fact that he hasn’t shot this down tells me we’re on the right track. Somebody with official access has been altering evidence. The way I figure it, when Flight 223 made its second takeoff that night, the girls were no longer on board and Reyna was in the cockpit with two dead men, probably behind a locked door. The part I’ve been wrestling with was Reyna himself—what happened to him? You just gave me the answer.”
After a long moment, an overwhelmed Delacorte said, “You are now going to tell me he used a parachute? Is that even possible?”
“D.B. Cooper thought so.” Delacorte stared a blank, and Davis realized his reference to the legendary hijacker had fallen flat. “It was back in the seventies. A guy hijacked a Boeing 727, said he was carrying a bomb. The plane landed, and Cooper ordered two bourbon and waters while everything played out, even paid for them and tipped the flight attendant. Once he had his ransom and the passengers were deplaned, they took off again and headed out over the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle. Cooper took off his tie, put on a parachute, and ordered the pilots to depressurize the airplane and lower the aft stairs. Then he jumped.”
“Yes,” said Delacorte, “now I recall. He was never found.”
“Nope. But if nothing else, D.B. proves our point.”
Delacorte wrestled with the idea. “Reyna kills his copilot and flies to a remote airfield where the girls are removed? Then he takes off again, depressurizes the airplane … and jumps leaving no one on board to fly?”
“No one except his dead copilot and a corpse that was put in the cockpit while they were on the ground—that made the body count nice and neat, and it would have worked nicely if the crash had created the usual fireball. After Reyna jumped the passengers had one last hope, a pastry chef who broke into the locked flight deck and did his damnedest to save the day. He didn’t quite do it, but he flew long enough to burn down fuel, and he probably guided the jet to strike at a relatively soft angle. That preserved a lot of evidence for us.”
“You are suggesting that Reyna sacrificed an entire aircraft full of passengers. How could any pilot do such a thing?”
“Morally? I have no idea. The more pertinent question for us is why he would do such a thing.”
Delacorte cast a critical gaze. “I have never heard such an outrageous theory in any investigation.”
“Neither have I,” Davis agreed. “Unfortunately, it’s the only solution that lines up with the facts.”
“Perhaps. But this theory you propose is convenient in one way, my friend. It allows a chance that your daughter is still alive. I must ask—could your heart be driving your solutions more than the evidence?”
Davis looked Delacorte in the eye. “I don’t know, Pascal. I really don’t know.”
Davis got up to leave, and as he made his way back to his room the burden of Delacorte’s question hung like a great weight. Which was leading? His heart or the truth?
* * *
At midnight Davis pulled off his boots at the foot of the bed. He was glad to have the Frenchman around. Even if Delacorte was an engineer by training, his instincts were good, and he had that flair of imagination found in all good investigators—the ability to ask with a clear mind, What if?
His own air conditioner blew like an Arctic wind, and he lay on the bed and tried for sleep. He plugged Jen’s songs into his ears, and like the last two nights a tiger-striped iPod became his last tenuous link to his little girl. His last link to sanity. He flicked idly across the screen and saw a camera symbol. He’d never realized the gadget had a camera. Something else he should have known. His thumb hesitated. Was it a violation to look at her pictures? Of course it was. Davis rationalized that if he ever had to explain, he would say he was acting in an investigative capacity.
He hoped to hell he would have to explain.
He tapped the button and began flicking through pictures. There were none of him, but he didn’t take it as a slight. He saw a selfie of Jen with her roommate. Jen with a pair of Asian boys he’d never seen. The oldest was from last Christmas, Jen with three of her old high school friends, all of them sporting Santa hats and shot glasses, a riotous party in the background. Davis held steady. The glasses were full, of what he could only imagine. He wrote it off for what it was—an inevitable rite of passage. Hadn’t he done the same thing at that age? A year ago, certainly two, he would have blown a gasket at underage drinking. Now? Maybe he’d mellowed. More likely—since she’d gone off to school he missed her desperately. Somewhere along the road of adolescence, Jen had grown up, become as much a friend as a daughter. Then again, if he ever caught her drinking and driving he would back her against the nearest wall and do his best drill sergeant impersonation—which was very good.
Davis
reached the end of the picture show, the last frame apparently taken from inside her back pocket—what happened when you sat down with the camera mode active. He lowered the Touch briefly, then did a double-take. The last frame wasn’t actually a photograph—an arrow in the middle of the screen told Davis it was a video. He wondered when it had been taken, but there was no obvious date stamp. He hit the little arrow and the movie began to play. The video never changed, only a blank screen with a blurred tinge of brown on one side. The audio that came through the earbuds, however, nearly caused his heart to seize.
Jen’s voice. “I see men with guns outside.”
A different female voice replied, “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
Jen again. “Is there an ambulance? They said the copilot is sick—maybe that’s why we landed here.”
Shouting in the background, loud and authoritative in Spanish. Then two unmistakable cracks, sharp and loud. Even through the earbuds Davis recognized the sound of gunshots, and he knew where they had been directed—Special Agent Mulligan. As if to confirm his conclusion, hysterical shouts followed, and then a shriek of, “Thomas! No!”
Jen’s voice came through, shakier now. “Oh my God! They’ve killed him!”
A man began shouting orders over the chaos: “No te muevas!” Don’t move.
Things fell quiet. The invaders had made their point, had assumed control. Davis heard the second, distinctive female voice fall to a whisper. The words were spoken close to the microphone, which meant they could only have come from Jen’s seatmate. The girl he’d seen her talking to in the boarding area video, and who Jen had mentioned in her final phone message.
Kristin Stewart.
Passenger 19.
“Jen, listen to me! If you want to get out of this alive do exactly as I say!”
There was a pause, and he imagined Jen staring at her seatmate, a look of consternation fused with dread: the man in the seat next to her was bleeding out, and multiple assailants stood brandishing weapons. But Jen had always been good under pressure, and in that silent gap Davis could almost sense her bucking up. He envisioned her making eye contact with Kristin Stewart, perhaps giving a deft nod.
