Crashers

by Dana Haynes

  Now came the carpentry crew, led by a foreman who’d worked with Walter for several years. She eyed the ruined remains of the jetliner. “Hey, Walt. So, where do you want this thing?”

  Walter pointed to the southern end of the massive hangar. “Over there. I want it in diagonally, nose to the barn door, tail section in that back corner. I want the belly at least thirty feet up off the floor, so the forklifts and scissor lifts can be driven under it.”

  The foreman—calling her a “forewoman” to her face always resulted in a scowl—studied the hangar and made measurements in her head. “We can do that.”

  “Have you seen the nose yet?” Walter warned. He pointed to the front end of the jet, which looked as mangled as a bullet dug out of a brick wall.

  “Yeesh. That’s a mess. The pilot . . . ?”

  Walter’s face turned dark.

  The foreman cocked her head, studied the nose of the aircraft. “We can set her up.”

  Walter said, “Outstanding.”

  “Hey!” They turned. One of the airfield ground crew with security clearance shot into the hangar like he’d been fired from a cannon. “The other Vermeer is on final!”

  OVER VALENCE

  “Roger, Valence tower. We’re on final. November Tango Sierra Bravo One out.”

  Isaiah Grey turned to the copilot seat. Instead of Hayden, Kiki Duvall sat there. She was tapping monitors with a Bic pen. She’d deduced that the acoustic signature of the tapping sound on the flight data recorder might have been altered by the pressurization of the aircraft, so she’d switched seats with the copilot.

  Isaiah caught her eye. “Any luck?”

  Scowling, Kiki shook her head.

  Tommy Tomzak arrived at the hangar just seconds before the eight-o’clock debriefing was scheduled to begin. Laura, the medical examiner’s daughter, borrowed her dad’s car. She’d toned down the Goth look, changing into black jeans and a black T-shirt beneath a glossy black rain slicker. The lace and theatrical makeup were gone, and she looked even younger than her sixteen years.

  “What’s this?” Kiki Duvall asked as Tommy and the girl carried in two heavy boxes.

  “Hardware,” Tommy said. “How was your d— Whoa.”

  He looked around at the now-crowded hangar. The gigantic pieces of the Vermeer were being positioned to one side, while a truck with a long, steel tow bar was backing an identical—but unruined—Vermeer 111 into the other corner. The truck moved at a snail’s pace, gingerly backing the aircraft into place. Isaiah Grey stood near the front wheels, holding a sensor with an infrared scanner. He flashed the beam at the Gamelan input controls, on the belly of the plane.

  Kiki said, “We’ve been busy around here, jefe.”

  “Yeah. Any luck with the CVR?”

  Kiki perched atop one of the folding tables as Tommy and Laura began to unpack the Mac computer liberated from her father’s office. “The lab in Portland is running a digital analysis. We should know every organic clank, hoot, and whistle by tomorrow.”

  Tommy attached a cable to the Mac. “Organic?”

  “All of the sounds made by the plane itself. We have thousands of acoustic samples on file in D.C. We’ll ID all of that stuff, or nearly all of it, by week’s end. It’s the nonorganic sounds—the people sounds, or luggage hitting luggage. That stuff’s tougher to identify. There’s this sound, right in the cockpit, that’s driving me bonkers.”

  Tommy laid a hand on her knee. “Put it on the back burner. It’ll come to you.”

  Kiki smiled. “Hey, you’re the Investigator in Charge.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  “Folks!” Susan Tanaka shouted above the clatter of the carpenters, who were building scaffolding to hold the major sections of the Vermeer in place. “Can we gather over here, please?”

  The crew leaders gathered around the table where Laura was booting up the MacBook Air. At the barn doors, a security guard checked a list of names on a clipboard and stepped aside so Dennis Silverman of Gamelan Industries could enter. He wore a Columbia Sportswear microfiber jacket with the Gamelan logo on the breast, a hood up over his head. His eyeglasses fogged over the moment he entered.

  People scavenged chairs. Some sat on the tables. Walter Mulroney caught Ricky Sanchez’s eye and waved him over. The smile on the younger man’s face warmed up the hangar by a few degrees.

  Susan waved to Tommy. “You want to go first?”

  “Sure. Folks, this here’s Laura, newly promoted to be my technical adviser.” The girl blushed, her fingers almost invisible as they glided over the keyboard. “My medical examiners have been taking shrapnel out of the bodies and charting wounds. We’re more than halfway done, which sets some kinda record. Laura, here, has been logging them, using map-making software. Laura, show them what you showed me.”

  Her eyes went wide. “You can run the program. I’ll get out of your—”

  “No. This is your gig. Show them.”

  Laura gulped. Even though she dressed as a Goth on the streets and at her high school, being center stage was anathema to her. Tommy stepped away from the monitor, fully aware that the images on the screen presented some kind of pattern. What kind, he didn’t know. He hoped the others would figure it out.

  Laura started the slide show of body outlines, with blue and red wounds and yellow trajectory lines. She ran it through once, recycling it back to the first image.

  “Anyone see it?” she asked. “It’s like—”

  “It’s a spiral.”

  Every eye turned to Ray Calabrese. He glanced at their faces, then shrugged. “Like one of those seashells. A what-do-you-call-it? A nautilus. The trajectory lines spiral out from the bodies. Clockwise.”

  Laura swiveled in her folding chair. “Right. That’s it.”

  Susan laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “This is a wonderful bit of work. If you can give us the data on a flash drive, we’ll have analysts at our headquarters blend these images into—”

  “Oh, I did that already,” Laura said, and double-clicked on the Cinema icon. “I hope that’s okay.”

  The screen went black. Then the outline of the Vermeer appeared. It was an overhead view. Bright white numbers and letters began appearing, filling the interior of the outline.

  “This is the plane. There are the seat numbers,” Laura said. “I’m superimposing the trajectory lines, but not the wound marks, onto this. Oh, and I rotated it ninety degrees for a bird’s-eye view. These are the same yellow lines as before.”

  She tapped the mouse. A single, curved yellow arc appeared. It began at seat 6-F—the first body to be autopsied—and arced off to the right.

  “It’s running backward,” Laura explained. “It was easier to extrapolate by starting at the wound and tracing the trajectory backward.”

  The yellow line curved away from the seat. It passed through the outline that represented the starboard wall of the plane. It passed on through the wing, about a third of the way from the body of the jet.

  Another yellow line formed, from seat 16-B. It, too, curved to the right, went through seat 9-E, through the fuselage wall, and through the wing, where it intersected the first yellow line.

  The third, fourth, and fifth lines bloomed. Each had a right-hand curve. Each intersected the others out on the wing.

  Peter Kim said, “Got it.”

  “I’ll be darned,” Walter murmured.

  Kiki whistled two notes. “Engine number three.”

  “Right.” Peter was tugging at one earlobe, analyzing the data in his head. More yellow lines were making a mishmash of the airplane’s outline. Each intersected out at the wing. “That’s why my searchers haven’t found more of the engine. It’s inside the Vermeer.”

  Tommy thought about the finger- and fist-size holes he’d seen punched through the starboard hull when he’d walked through the corpse of the jetliner. He opened the second box he’d carried in. It was filled with evidence bags. “Some of it is. The rest I pulled out of the bodies.”

&n
bsp; “Tommy?” John Roby had entered during the show, his NTSB cap sodden with rainwater. “I’ve talked to the hospitals. The shrapnel from the wounded is en route here, now.”

  “Then that should be all of it,” Peter said. “Once I’ve reassembled the engine, it’ll be confirmed. But here: my people found these.”

  He walked over to an evidence table and selected the three flat blocker doors from the engine, each twisted with a clockwise curve.

  Isaiah Grey took one look at them and his face became pinched. “Partial thrust-reverser deployment?”

  Peter nodded. “Engine number three released a few of these blockers, cutting off the flow of air through the turbine. Somehow, the pilots didn’t see the signal on their monitor.”

  Kiki nodded. “Did it have an audio tone?”

  “The swap-out doesn’t,” Isaiah said, his voice soft, sad. “I haven’t been on the flight deck of Flight Eight One Eight yet, but they’re supposed to be identical.”

  “So what?” Peter set aside the blockers. “They should have had ample time to see the signal on the monitor. They could have recycled the reversers, or shut power to that engine. Either would have saved their lives.”

  Tommy sat on the table beside the Mac. “I’m still trying to wrap my brain around pilot error. Captain Danvers just doesn’t seem like a screw-up.”

  “Whatever,” Peter said dismissively. He moved to the box of shrapnel and carefully began taking out the evidence bags, one by one. He peered at each piece. They’d been cleaned of all blood and viscera. Walter joined him.

  Susan turned to Dennis Silverman. “Have you had an opportunity to analyze the flight data recorder?”

  Dennis adjusted his tortoise-shell glasses. “Yes. Um, I could run this on that Mac, if it’s okay.”

  Laura used the apple-Q keystrokes to shut down her programs, then stood and waved to the folding chair, pleased to be away from the center of the circle. She sat on a table, her Doc Martens up on the surface, and hugged her knees to her narrow chest.

  Dennis inserted a thumb drive, then waited for the icons to come up on the screen.

  “Here we go.” He glanced up at the people clustered around him, enjoying the spotlight. “The Gamelan is the most sophisticated FDR on the market, and CascadeAir bought the top of the line. There was some damage to the input monitor itself. But the recorder was in the tail cone, and it escaped unscathed. I got some good data here. Watch.”

  Rows and rows of raw numbers scrolled down the screen, far too fast to read. “This is just the DOS shell,” he said. “We’ve got a graphic interface. Here.”

  He tapped the keypad. The numbers blinked into oblivion, replaced by an illustration of a perfectly formed Vermeer 111, seen from a side angle. He moved the curser to a bar of tools on the left side of the screen and rotated the plane’s image. Once again, it was a bird’s-eye view.

  Pinpoints of green light flickered all across the body and wings of the jet. Many were clustered around the tail section, the wings, all four engines, and the cockpit, but other green lights glistened elsewhere, too.

  “Green is good,” Dennis said. “All of these servos and circuits are reading green-for-go.”

  Tommy said, “A few are yellow.”

  “Yes. A briefly misfired circuit. A joint that’s misaligned, even by a few millimeters. Nothing to worry about, but the Gamelan marked every yellow light and would have reported them to the pilots, after the flight. Hey, who flew in that jet?”

  He pointed to the swap-out. Isaiah raised his hand.

  “Did you download the FDR when you got here?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll run that one next, show you guys what an uneventful flight looks like. But for now, watch this.”

  He turned back to the screen. More green lights popped on, disappeared. There were hundreds of them.

  Dennis said, “Wait for it.”

  A light flashed candy-apple red on the right wing, right atop engine number three. It stayed red.

  “Note the time,” Peter Kim said.

  Tommy noticed a clock reading off hours, minutes, seconds, tenths of seconds, and hundredths of seconds, in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. They were moving very quickly, ten times their real speed. The destruction of the Vermeer was on fast-forward.

  The red light didn’t disappear. It stayed on. Another appeared beside it. The seconds ticked away maddeningly. A third red light.

  “Ah, damn,” Isaiah muttered.

  “If the pilots had corrected, those lights would have blinked off,” Dennis explained. When the clock read 20:40.15, the entire engine turned bright red. More red lights spread like a virus into the fuselage.

  Kiki Duvall said, “Is that your shrapnel?”

  Tommy nodded.

  A bouquet of bright red lights, more than a dozen, appeared in the nose of the plane at 20:41.06 exactly. The images froze.

  Dennis said, “Impact.”

  Everyone was quiet for a time. The carpenters continued to work madly at the other end of the building, their hammers and power tools echoing, forklifts beeping in Reverse. Walter and Peter returned to emptying Tommy’s box of evidence, but didn’t speak. Laura, the youngest person in the room, looked from face to face. Some still watched the motionless screen. Others averted their eyes, studying their shoes or their hands. She looked at Dennis Silverman, and her stomach roiled. For a split second, a gleeful grin flitted across his face, more like a brief seizure than a true smile. The face seemed to glow, if only for the time it took Laura to blink. Then it was gone.

  She looked at Tommy Tomzak. He was rubbing his eyes, fatigue playing across his face.

  Susan Tanaka cleared her throat. “The pilots had, what? Two and a half minutes?”

  “Almost three,” Isaiah said. “Their monitor was hot for three minutes.”

  “Well, it’s not here,” Peter said, removing the last evidence bag from the box.

  Tommy said, “What isn’t?”

  “Hydraulic isolation valve,” the smaller man muttered, mostly talking to himself. “Last piece of the puzzle. Doesn’t matter. I’ve got enough to begin a report. Walter, when can I start getting shrapnel out of the fuselage?”

  “The carpenters will have it secured by morning. I’ll go in first, test it for steadiness. Your team can sweep for evidence by, say, noon?”

  Peter nodded. “I think we’re close to done here, Susan. And on the second day, too.”

  He clapped dust off his hands and approached Tommy. “I was against you as IIC, Tomzak. But we’re going to set some kind of record here. I admit: you kept the field immaculate. Congratulations.”

  Tommy nodded, not enjoying the compliment in the slightest.

  39

  LUCAS BELL CLOCKED OUT and drove to a Taco Bell. He downed a stuffed steak burrito and a Pepsi in the parking lot, hoping nobody he knew would recognize him. Lucas liked to brag about his state-of-the-art kitchen and his culinary skills. He had taken cooking classes in Paris and Avignon. He loved to throw parties with four, five, six courses of international cuisine. How embarrassing, then, if his secret craving for Taco Bell ever got out.

  It was going on 9 P.M. but he had field agents all over the town of Covina, looking for the Gibron woman and the Irishmen. They’d been combing the town for more than four hours, with no luck to show for it. He pulled out his notepad and reread what the field team had reported: Daria and one of the Irishmen, Riley, had stayed at a flea-bitten motel off the freeway. The leader of the group, O’Meara, had stayed three blocks away. Breaking up their profile, Lucas assumed. No word yet on the other two—O’Shea and Kelly. But agents had found the body of Riley, behind a Dumpster at his motel. A severe blow to his windpipe had killed him. He had also bled from his ears, but they’d have to wait on the autopsy to figure out what that was all about.

  And since then: zip. O’Meara and the Israeli ex-pat ex-spy had vanished.

  Lucas was dead tired but he was the ranking investigator in the case, ever since Ra
y Calabrese had been repositioned in Oregon. He turned his Lexus around and headed right back to the Los Angeles field office.

  As he walked in, an investigator with a shaved head and stud earrings said, “Hey, you’re back.”

  “Miss anything?”

  “Yeah. Forensics found a scrunched-up paper wrapper for a stick of gum in the abandoned tenement. Inside the wrapper was a phone number.”

  Lucas started to say, What’s the number to? but the shaven agent said, “You know, where you got your ass kicked.”

  “Yes. Thank you. I vaguely remember the abandoned tenement. What’s the telephone number?”

  “It’s an answering service in Georgia. Atlanta. We think maybe it’s how the terrorists communicate with each other. We’re getting a court order from a night judge in Atlanta right now. Give us a half hour, we’ll have these pricks’ communications link.”

  Jesus, Lucas thought. Go get a burrito and all hell breaks loose.

  VALENCE AIRFIELD

  Isaiah Grey handed the Gamelan monitor from the swap-out jet to Dennis Silverman, who linked it via a USB drive to the Mac.

  Ray Calabrese wandered away, not interested in seeing what the data from a normal, successful flight looked like.

  The first piece of technology installed for the Go-Team—before the computers, the microscopes, the faxes, the telephones—was a coffeemaker, one of those big aluminum beasts that could double as a torpedo. Ray grabbed a chipped mug touting the 1988 Oregon State Fair. It looked relatively clean. He poured a cup, watching the carpentry crews mount a scaffolding to hold up the wings of the damaged craft.

  The wiry pathologist from Texas, Tommy Tomzak, walked over and poured himself a cup. He, too, turned to watch the workers.

  Tommy took a swallow and winced. “I gotta cut down.”

  Ray said, “Yeah.”

  They watched the crews on the far side of the hangar, listened to the whack of hammers and the whine of saws.

  “You heading back to L.A.?” Tommy asked.