Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  “No. And neither do the authors of that report. Not any longer. The reports are being rewritten.”

  Mumford barked out, “Is that right?”

  “Absolutely,” Ben-David answered.

  “Well, Jesus Christ! Why didn’t I hear about this?” Mumford huffed for a few long moments. No one interrupted. No one answered him. The answer was obvious: He was hearing about it right now. “What exactly was the cause of death, Dr. Ben-David?”

  Ben-David looked to Daggett.

  Mumford corrected, “You don’t need Daggett’s permission to talk. You need mine.” He tapped his chest. “This is my office. This is my fucking field office!”

  “Special Agent Daggett directed my attention to—and I subsequently challenged my colleagues to examine—the level of carbon monoxide in the blood. The toxicology report.” He paused, uncomfortable. He seemed to be thinking—looking for layman’s terms? “There was a fire on board. We know that.” He looked to Lynn Greene, who nodded her agreement. “One good indication of fire is carbon monoxide in the blood. It’s often the killer, which is exactly what was believed to be the case here. In fact,” he said, tapping the folder in front of him, “the toxicologist believed the two crew members had been overcome by carbon monoxide and had then died upon impact. Body fragmentation, as Mr. Daggett has just said. A plane crash is difficult for pathologists because you have body fragmentation and fire. Special Agent Daggett directed my attention to something in the report that the medical examiners had missed, which was the high level of carbon monoxide, and the lack of any other chemical toxicant in the blood. Plastic burns to a vapor; it gets into your lungs and into your blood. In a fire, soot gets lodged in your trachea. In the case of flight sixty-four, there is no record of soot in the trachea of either man. Even given a very few seconds, as was the case here, we should have seen something in the trachea. Lung tissue samples from both crew members has since been examined in the California DOJ toxicology lab in Sacramento. They found not only an extremely high concentration of carbon monoxide but the presence of white phosphorus.” He paused again. “We checked with the gentlemen now on the other end of that telephone,” he said, pointing. “There is no source of white phosphorus on a Duhning 959-600. Not on any Duhning aircraft, for that matter. We then checked the cargo manifest. None there either.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” Mumford said. “Where’s this leave the actual cause of death?”

  “If I may,” Daggett said, interrupting. “We’re coming right to that.”

  Mumford didn’t like it. Nonetheless, Daggett continued. “Chaz, you and I talked about this detonator. The mini-det.”

  “Right. Sure thing, Michigan.” He faced Mumford. “The long and the short of it, Dick,” he said, emphasizing his friendship with Mumford, “is that we have pretty good evidence a very sophisticated detonator was aboard sixty-four. Nothing to take to the courts—but fuck the courts. This guy intended to detonate at a specific moment, almost immediately after takeoff. Weird, I know, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. Furthermore, we have zero evidence of any explosive on board. Zero. So what the fuck, Chuck? Go to all that trouble and have nothing to detonate?”

  Daggett said, “The mini-det, Chaz.”

  “Yeah, right. Evidence found in Bernard’s hotel room suggests the presence of a mini-det. A miniaturized detonator. Pretty high-tech shit, but not impossible for a guy like Bernard to get his hands on. A mini-det flashes hot—real hot. You score the outer casing just right and instead of popping it flares. Flares hot enough to melt some metals. Plenty hot enough to start a cockpit fire. One of the chemical residues we look for in crash debris, something to indicate the presence of a mini-det, is white phosphorus.” He was nodding to emphasize his point. He pointed at Ben-David. “Sounds like he found the white phosphorus.” He nodded some more, looked over at Daggett, took his cue nicely, and sat back.

  “Which leads us to Lynn Greene with the FAA,” Daggett said.

  Lynn squared her shoulders. It was a case of nerves for her, but it had a great effect: She had Mumford’s attention. Lynn, who had sided with Daggett all along. Lynn, who had brought him the glass bulb that—as far as he was concerned—had turned the case. “We hear two distinct sounds on the Cockpit Voice Recorder just before impact. One is a soft pop … the second is a hissing. Within two seconds, the bodies of both men collapse onto the controls. This is confirmed by the Flight Data Recorder. Several switches were thrown that, upon reconstruction, could only be caused by”—she lifted her arms out—“a body falling forward like this.” She collapsed forward to dramatize it. Daggett noted with pleasure that everyone was fully focused on her. She sat back up. “The hissing continues. Because the copilot mentions the fire extinguisher, we decided to take a closer look, wondering if it might be the source of the hissing. This morning we received the results of a lab test conducted on the cockpit fire-extinguisher. Evidence suggests that the end of the fire extinguisher was subjected to extremely high temperatures. It’s possible, even likely, that the detonator itself was part of the fire extinguisher. Inside the pressure gauge perhaps. There is further evidence of white phosphorus, again indicating the detonator to which Mr. Meecham referred. My guess is that the mini-det not only started a fire but melted the pressure gauge, releasing whatever gas was contained inside that cylinder. Examination of the fire extinguisher itself revealed it was not filled with fire retardants, but instead an extremely high concentration of carbon monoxide. A potentially lethal concentration.”

  Daggett pointed to Dr. Ben-David, who said, “Pure carbon monoxide, discharged at a close range, would fully coincide with our findings, and would more completely explain the cause of death.”

  Then he pointed to Chaz Meecham, who said, “And the presence of white phosphorus would explain why we failed to find evidence of explosives. He didn’t use any. All this guy wanted was for a mini-det to melt his detonator to nothing. While at the same time opening the fire extinguisher. He burns up what little evidence might have existed, and lets the gas do the rest.”

  Mumford’s mouth was actually hanging open. Daggett thought if he had tried, he could have dropped a paper clip in there.

  When he recovered, Mumford said, “So let’s say I believe you. Let’s say sixty-four was sabotaged; let’s even go as far to say it was sabotaged by one of Bernard’s detonators. And that means Der Grund, and quite possibly Anthony Kort. Let’s say I buy all that, okay?” He paused while his eyes searched the ceiling in thought. “Why bother with something this elaborate? If all he wanted to do was drop a plane, why the fuck bother with all of this?”

  The resulting silence was so intense that Daggett could hear the congestion in Ben-David’s lungs.

  “What the fuck was the point?” Mumford asked.

  In the end, there was only the truth as he knew it. Daggett said tentatively, “Kort didn’t want us knowing the plane had been sabotaged. He wanted it to look like an accident. Why? I think it’s because he plans to do it again—to drop another 959, here in Washington. That’s why Bernard made two identical detonators and why he delivered the second one here.”

  “We don’t know that!” Mumford protested. He was a stickler for accuracy.

  Daggett pressed on. “Whatever Kort has planned, has something to do with those tests Ward conducted on the Duhning simulator. You put all of this together and it still doesn’t explain what he needed the simulator for. Why repeat the same test—with only slight variations—a half-dozen times?”

  “And do you have an answer for that?” Mumford asked.

  “No, sir. Not yet. But given all of this, I think we’re getting closer. I think it’s time we had better find out.”

  Daggett waited while Mumford looked impatiently at everyone in the room. There was a mixture of confusion and expectation on each face. Mumford seemed ready to explode. He finally looked back at Daggett. “Well, don’t just sit there. Get on with it!”

  24

  * * *

&nb
sp; When Kort answered the phone, the LED on the small black box he had connected to his room’s telephone glowed red, and he knew immediately Monique’s line was tapped.

  Panic stole over him, unfamiliar and frightening: She was compromised. He had to avoid her at all cost.

  “It’s me,” she announced informally.

  “I’m sorry?” he said. “I think you have the wrong number.”

  A long pause occurred as she considered his words. He was dealing with his own sense of panic; he could only imagine hers. There was no time to wait. The FBI—or whoever was on to them—might have trap-and-trace in place. The trap-and-trace would identify his number immediately. As they spoke, cars could be rolling. If she wouldn’t acknowledge …

  “I’m calling Dallas,” she said, in a constricted voice.

  “No, no.” He said, “I’m in Washington. You do have the wrong number.” He hung up. There. It was done. Over. His operation was coming apart at the seams.

  He had to keep them one step behind. He had to keep moving. He had to force all other thoughts from his mind—close all the compartments—and focus on the individual elements essential to his escape. He threw open the Yellow Pages—Taxi—while the little black box on his phone line remained the center of his universe. Kort dialed. The dispatcher answered. Assuming his line was also tapped by now but hoping it wasn’t, Kort calmly ordered a cab under the name of Anthony—Carl Anthony—for twenty minutes from now. His heartbeat reminded him of horse hooves on cobblestone. Miraculously, the LED on the black box remained dark. He was about to celebrate his anonymity when it lit up brightly. Kort’s knees went weak.

  Compromised!

  The resulting flurry of activity he threw himself into helped overcome his sense of panic. He disconnected and pocketed the small box that warned of telephone surveillance, headed straight to his weapon, checked that it was loaded, and slipped on the holster. He placed an additional two magazines in his left pants pocket: it gave him twenty-seven shots. Not many against an army of FBI agents.

  How many would they send? How certain would they be? How much time did he have? He checked his watch. Thirty seconds had passed.

  He shoved some clothes into a flight bag and in a single sweeping gesture cleared his toilet articles and cosmetics off the shelf above the sink and into the bag. That would allow him a change of disguise. He pocketed the copies of Caroline’s keys. Glanced around.

  No time … He had been careful in this room. There would be precious few fingerprints found here. Precious little evidence, even for forensic specialists.

  He slipped quietly down the back stairs, through the empty kitchen, and out the back door. He walked quickly—but did not run—down the back alley, alongside a neighboring yard. Ten minutes later he arrived at the Farragut North Metro station.

  As he descended the escalator, he kept a sharp eye for any possible agents—but it was too difficult to gauge. Any of these people could be agents. All he saw was a transit cop hassling some vagrants. It planted the seed of an idea in his mind.

  He boarded the first train available, taking a seat near the overhead button marked Emergency Stop—$100 fine for illegal use.

  Monique was the biggest problem. How much had he actually told her? he wondered. Too much. Hell, anything she knew was too much. He had given in to her, revealed more than he should have.

  In a perfect world, she would be “made redundant”—as Michael called it—before she brought the operation down around her. Michael had used free-lancers for such jobs on at least two occasions. Kort had worked with them both, though at a distance, acting as bait so the hit men could identify their targets. Kort had committed their impassive faces to memory. They were certainly faces to remember, faces from which to run if he ever saw them again. Michael kept his house in order; no one was ever fully out of his reach.

  But what to do about her? Not only did she know far too much, she was the key to the operation. Its entire premise revolved around his ability to pass himself off as a guest of In-Flite Foods, to enter the field side of the airport as he had in Los Angeles. To substitute fire extinguishers. It depended on Monique.

  He disembarked at the third stop—Judiciary Square, how appropriate!—alert for any tails. He waited, now certain that he wasn’t being followed, and rode the Red Line on to Union Station.

  Tricks: he knew a hundred. But he felt no safer.

  If he killed Monique, what then? Would they think of this? Would they use her as bait?

  Monique was beside herself.

  She headed straight to her bar and poured herself a deep vodka and tried to sort things out. She poured herself another. The wrong number! The ice melted and she didn’t bother replacing it. She couldn’t feel the liquor, couldn’t feel anything but fear. Think! She scolded herself, drinking down another just as fast. Think!

  What would Anthony do? Would he desert her? Kill her? Protect her?

  Wrong number! It rang in her head. The Greek! The fucking Greek had given her to them. Had to be. Bastard!

  She poured herself another.

  She felt tempted to look out the window. Were they out there right now? She had no way of knowing what they knew. Were they guessing? Her training dictated that she be the exact woman today and tomorrow as she had been yesterday: flirtatious, sure of herself, a good businesswoman with a nose for vulnerable markets, a provocative woman of the nineties. An actress. Could she do this? Was there any choice?

  As she helped herself to three ice cubes, she switched on the television set and tried to be normal. What was normal? Eating a lot of junk food. Drinking vodka. Walking around in only her underwear on the hot nights. Masturbating in the shower … Jesus, did they have microphones in place? Did they have cameras? Did they know every little intimacy? Were they listening right now? Were they watching her? She coiled more tightly in the chair and hugged the glass.

  Was it true that their microphones were strong enough to pick up a heart rate?

  If so, then what were they thinking right now?

  Kort checked his duffel bag at the baggage counter at Union Station. He rented a Toyota from the Union Station Avis counter using the Carl Anthony credit card for the last time, with no intention of ever returning the vehicle. He knew the FBI would soon question the owners of the bed-and-breakfast, who would give them his alias. The first thing they would then do is conduct a name search with credit card companies, banks, airlines, rent-a-car agencies, other hotels—anything and everything that would give them the next link to him. The credit card could be traced. His one remaining card, under a different name, was necessary to his escape. In a perfect world, it might still serve that purpose.

  As with any drive that involved expectation, this one seemed to drag on indefinitely. Thirty minutes passed as slowly as several hours. He got lost twice, despite his attention to the map, but finally drove past the address he had gleaned from the envelope Caroline had used for a shopping list.

  The house was singularly unremarkable: common, quite small, and poorly landscaped. It reminded him of several safe houses he had used over the years.

  For his needs the property was perfect: A high wooden fence defined the perimeter, making it unlikely, if not impossible, for an adjoining neighbor to see a prowler.

  He drove the neighborhood once, alert for any night owls. By the darkness of the houses, most everyone was asleep—a bedroom community living up to its name.

  He drove the ten minutes back to the main road and found himself a twenty-four-hour donut shop where he shared a countertop with a reformed alcoholic and a pair of weary traffic cops under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights, and the rambling monologue of a waitress on diet pills. Sipping coffee, with a pair of cops not ten feet away, added to his confidence. He was nobody. Invisible.

  He burrowed his way into a USA Today, catching up on everything from the Kremlin’s monetary policy to Madonna’s latest video, ate a jelly-filled donut and switched to decaf for the third cup. At a few minutes past one o’clock the
cops returned to their patrol car. By two o’clock, Kort was the only one left, although the occasional motorist stopped for “brain food.” Kort made a men’s room stop and crammed himself back into the Toyota. He had reviewed his plan internally a dozen times. Now, at two-fifteen in the morning, it was time to carry it out. In a perfect world, he would be in and out of the house in a matter of minutes.

  A van, several years old, was parked in the driveway. He had missed this on his first pass. Christ, what else had he missed? He parked the Toyota down the street and waited to see if any neighborhood lights came on.

  After several minutes, his copy of Caroline’s keys in hand, he left the car, easing the door closed so as to avoid making any noise. He headed directly to the front door. A streetlamp threw a pale blue aura across the front porch. Kort could feel himself disappear in the shadows. There were four possible keys to try. It had to be done quickly and quietly. Alone in his room, he had practiced handling the keys so as to do this efficiently, but nothing fully prepared him for the actual moment. The trick was to do this slowly—to study the matchup of the key and lock before making any contact between the two. But in the darkness, this proved much more difficult than he had expected. The first key didn’t fit. He felt his scalp go prickly with sweat. The second key entered, but didn’t turn. It made noise coming out: to him a cymbal crash.

  The third key turned and the door opened.

  He stepped inside.

  Thankfully, the door shut as silently as it had opened. He was no cat burglar. This was unfamiliar ground—in every way. Breath short, heart pounding, he withdrew the penlight from his pocket and switched it on. He had taped some gauze over its lens to mute its effects. The woven pattern of the gauze, like a large, white net, spread out ahead of him. He pressed on.

  He found himself standing in an uncomfortably small sitting room. Cheap furniture. A television. A shelf of paperback books. If this room was any indication, the floor plan was a rat’s maze.