Razing Beijing: A Thriller

by Elston III, Sidney

  Someone had somehow managed to sabotage the engine’s ECU, thereby triggering the Mojave explosion. The question that dogged her was how. Among the few who would have had the necessary access was one of her best engineers. As unbelievable as it seemed, Sean Thompson being involved could explain other recent difficulties. But did he possess that sort of ruthlessness? Was he clever enough to also have broken into her apartment? The software engineer seemed somehow incapable of harming even a flea on her cat, let alone conspiring in murder. There could be little doubt that somebody on her staff was complicit. But who, and why? And why would they instruct her, instead of the original saboteur, to carry out the coup de grace on the ECU?

  While they might think they had her under their thumb, she had no intention of cowering. Now that she had hired the smugglers, and planted the seed for deceiving everyone into believing the ECU now beyond repair, it was time to proceed with the next phase of her plan.

  Emily found Thompson alone in his cubicle poring over a stack of printouts. She watched him long enough for her anger to mount. “Sean?”

  Thompson spun around.

  Emily took in the wide-set eyes and willed herself to be calm. “I’m calling everyone into Hawkins’s Conference Room. Can you make it?”

  “What do I need to bring?”

  Her smile was pleasant. “Just yourself.”

  Five minutes later, Emily gazed into nine curious stares with the exception of Rick Abrams, who instead looked as though he had accidentally driven over a cherished family pet. Seeing that everyone was seated, she shut the door to the conference room and chose the chair at the head of the table.

  “First, I want to be clear that none of us has anything to be ashamed of,” Emily began. “We’ve all worked very hard. This problem discovered today does not diminish our achievements. Mr. Stuart asked that all of you be reminded of that fact.”

  Kate Stuyvick-Coble asked, “What’s it mean for the investigation?”

  “Naturally, it no longer makes sense to pursue writing the flight data recorder communication code.” Emily struggled not to make more than fleeting eye contact with any of them. She noted Thompson’s tendency to similarly shift his eyes. “Not until there is some sign that the engine control might be recoverable. But Rick’s initial assessment leaves little likelihood of that.”

  “So, will there be an effort to recover the ECU?” Stuyvick-Coble again.

  “That’ll be up to Mr. Stuart and the committee,” she answered honestly. “My guess is that an effort will continue on a more limited basis.” The group responded with pause at news that would probably mark the end of mandatory overtime. If only they knew why, Emily thought bitterly. What was that Americanism Sandy Cole liked to invoke—In for a dime, in for a dollar?

  “Either way,” Emily cleared her throat and tried to concentrate on sounding matter-of-fact. The trick was to make this appear beyond her control. “Either way, the NTSB had already proposed that we take what amounts for all of us here at Thanatech something of an unorthodox step. Management will now almost certainly agree to proceed. In fact, from what I gather they already have. Against the backdrop of loss of life, and the persistent absence of a likely cause, NTSB representatives will be conducting interviews with...well, select individuals.”

  As the other engineers stared back blankly, Rick Abrams looked up from the table. “What kind of interview?” he asked.

  “As I understand, it’s common practice in NTSB crash investigations where suspicious circumstances—”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!” blurted Stuyvick-Coble. “They want to interrogate us, like they think we’re guilty of something?”

  “I share your feelings, Kate, but I’m told it’s a matter of routine. Under these circumstances none of us, including me, has any choice. The incidence of death always did override Mojave’s classification as a straightforward industrial accident.” She was groping for things to say as she went along; that she could lie so easily was a little disturbing to her. “We’ve treated the recovered hardware as court-admissible evidence. This is the next logical step for an unresolved investigation.”

  “How long have you known about this?” asked Sean Thompson.

  “Only a week or so.” Her staff wore expressions of disbelief. She returned the baffled stares of her audience with a shrug. “I don’t like it any more than you do. Perhaps none of us will be called. The fact is that an NTSB official may notify any one of us over the course of the next few weeks. The interview may include a polygraph examination—”

  “Polygraph?” several asked in unison.

  “Apparently. You’ll likely be asked questions about your responsibilities, security practices governing files and computers, that sort of thing. Just be honest. This is not a legal proceeding and nobody is being charged. I’m told you will be asked to not discuss details of your interview. For that matter, we’ve already been told that for all practical purposes, we should look upon today’s discussion as if it never took place.” Hopefully she won’t be called to explain her harmless, albeit manipulative ruse, before she’s had a chance to see if it works.

  Emily took a moment to glance around the room as her version of reality sank in. As professionals, it had never occurred to them that they might be subjected to this unthinkable suspicion—Emily was pleased. “I’m certain none of us has any reason to be concerned.”

  * * *

  “ON THE OTHER HAND,” Stuart said evenly into the telephone, “if I could speak with him, then perhaps I won’t need to see him.”

  A sigh. “Very well,” Cole’s secretary replied. He heard the click indicating a transferred call. During the several minutes of silence, Stuart realized that despite everything else going on, it was still the bureaucratic distractions that he most hated about Thanatech. Attempting even the simplest task was like wading through molasses.

  Cole’s monotone broke the silence. “What can I do for you, Stu?”

  “I need to see you about the investigation. It’s very important.”

  “Now would be fine.”

  Rounding the corner on his way to the CEO’s office, Stuart nearly ran into the chief bureaucrat—er, chief engineer—walking the opposite way. Hackett seemed surprised to see him. “Good morning, Morton. Or is it afternoon already?”

  Hackett glanced at his watch. “Shouldn’t you be at your status review?”

  “Actually, I asked Chang to run it. If I’d known I’d be bumping into you, I’d have had her write me a hall pass.” He smiled.

  Hackett appeared slow to find the humor in that. “You and Emily are waging one elec-tro-fying juggernaut, aren’t you? Only, I hear there’s been a little problem.”

  “Well maybe you should start attending our reviews again. Excuse me, Mort, I’ve got Cole waiting—”

  Hackett reached out and gripped Stuart’s hand; Stuart gripped back and found himself uncomfortably close to Hackett’s smiling face. “Carbon seals,” Hackett chuckled, shaking his head. “Couple years ago I suggested we take all these friggin’ carbon seals, pile ’em into my grill and I’d cook up your staff a bunch of Delmonicos. Remember? I think we’d all be a little better off, had you taken my offer.”

  “I thought eating beef was bad for the environment. Sorry, gotta go.”

  STUART SMILED hello at Cole’s glowering secretary and, without knocking, pushed open the door to find his boss poring over periodicals on his desk. Not looking up, Cole raised a finger as he finished his reading while Stuart walked in to sit down. Among the items drawing Cole’s formidable intensity were the company’s recent 10K and a copy of Barron’s.

  The CEO was known throughout the company as a fastidious time manager. Arriving to work each day at 6:00 A.M., Cole liked to say that by 8:00 A.M. everyone’s desk should be ‘as clear as the mind that cleared it.’ Stuart judged that the unseemly piles on Cole’s desk probably represented a month’s worth of mail, draft reports, crumpled napkins and magazines stained with coffee-mug rings. The monitor of his desk
top computer was dark.

  “Did you know,” Cole finally said, his finger tracing down a column in the open leafs of Barron’s, “since Merrill and DLJ downgraded their recommendations last week, the market value of options issued to my Thanatechnology staff have declined by four-hundred fifty-two million dollars?”

  Stuart studied the man’s unshaven face. Though in his late fifties, lately his boss could pass for someone approaching seventy. His hair and cotton-knit shirt looked as though they’d been slept in. “What the market giveth, the market taketh away,” Stuart said, intending lightheartedness.

  Cole nodded and gazed distantly out the windows into the clear blue sky. “UTC’s shares have risen over fifteen per cent in the last month, did you know that? Wait until our first order cancellation.” He squinted his eyes. “I’ll let you in on a secret, one which probably won’t surprise you. You guys aren’t the only ones taking a bath—so are a certain handful of Washington power brokers. Know what happens if they lose faith in us? They pull their support, cave in, and before you know it, Big Oil gets a few more permits to drill. At some point the price of oil will plummet, then nobody will want this expensive contraption of ours.”

  Stuart admitted having no head for politics, but he wondered if Cole was suffering some sort of paranoid delusion. “Do you really think so? Every other day it seems like another of these green initiatives goes belly-up for some reason or other. The price of oil seems to wander along regardless. I mean, our propfan is significant, but not that significant.”

  “If our policy supporters don’t see an upside, which they won’t unless they perceive we’ll deliver, it might very well happen. Nobody in that town has any stomach for footing an undeniable loser.”

  Stuart clenched his fist. “We are not going to have any order cancellations.”

  Cole’s bushy-gray eyebrows arched upward. “Good news, then? You know, your two weeks are up today.”

  “I need another three weeks.”

  Cole appeared to remain calm. He rose from his chair and walked to the window. He turned a moment later and faced Stuart with a pained expression. “Lay-off notices go out Wednesday. You personally are being sued into oblivion. Why should I not believe that after three more weeks, you won’t be back for another three?”

  Stuart had not heard anything about the lawsuits since the meeting between his own attorney and Thanatech’s legal counsel. “We did have a breakthrough the other day.”

  “Hackett stopped by and told me about it.”

  Stuart had reason to be skeptical of anything Hackett might say. “Did he.”

  “He was very complimentary, in fact.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that we’ve suffered a setback. We need a little more time to sort it all out.”

  “Susan,” Cole raised his voice to summon his secretary. A moment later the office door gently closed. Cole folded his arms and looked at his vice-president of development programs with what Stuart interpreted as both disdain and sympathy. “The board and I feel the time has come to reassign the Mojave Task Force leadership.”

  Stuart had reason to be surprised—he was devastated. Another part of him welcomed the idea. “Is that so?”

  “There’s a justifiable sense that progress has generally stagnated. The consensus seems to be that people are spinning their wheels with this theory of yours, that some electrical malfunction triggered the failure. What we need is not perfection but hard decision making. Fix the most likely problems, or whatever”—Cole waved his hand in the air—“and get the damn production line and engine orders flowing again. Life, as they say, must go on.”

  Stuart frowned—they had actually done a lot of those things already. He fought to suppress a bitter sense of disappointment. Never before had he been, well, swept aside. “I’m convinced we’re still dancing around the source of the failure. Look, I’ll certainly support your decision as well as the efforts of whomever you appoint.” At least he might have a hand in selecting his replacement. He would then turn in his notice.

  Cole narrowed his gaze. He sat down behind his desk. “I don’t think your support is going to be necessary.”

  “Wait a minute. We’ve both got a stake in resolving—”

  “Why not take some time off?”

  “I don’t want any time off.”

  “This is no longer about what we want, Stu.”

  Stuart searched the haggard face for an explanation. Tiny beads of perspiration dotted Cole’s forehead. “What the hell is this?”

  “Do I really have to spell it out for you?”

  The two men fixed each other’s stare—Stuart realized what he had become. He was to Jim Cole an embodiment of the crash’s ensuing frustrations; the board’s sniping over delay, bad press, and punishing losses; the lawsuits; earnings projections spiraling downward. He imagined that Cole saw him as a living reminder of the death of his daughter, and the demise of what had always been portrayed as an idyllic marriage. On the other hand, Cole had to know that the program would not have gotten even this far had he not recruited him for the job. Although they had not since spoken of it, Cole surely recalled his personal veto of Stuart’s decision to cancel the flight.

  “Why carve me out altogether?” asked Stuart.

  “You’ve managed to become a liability.”

  Stuart nodded; it was all he needed to hear. He stood from the chair. “Let me try to rephrase that: the political capital of my departure is worth more to the board than is my staying on to solve the problem.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it. There’s also the widely held view that you simply don’t fit into the culture here.”

  “I thought that was why you hired me.”

  Cole held out his hands. “The world can’t wait any longer. Airlines are threatening bankruptcy as we speak. I’ve bought you all the time we can afford. I’m sorry, Stu. Consider yourself on indefinite leave, effective immediately.”

  Stuart jabbed his finger at his boss. “Not on leave, Jim.” He turned and headed for the door. His hand grasped the doorknob.

  “Have it your way,” he heard Cole say as he opened the door. “You’re fired.”

  “Oh no you don’t.” Stuart turned to face the CEO. “You can’t fire me, I just quit.” Stuart slammed the door hard enough behind him to hear Cole’s golf trophies rattle on their shelves.

  28

  DEVINN EMERGED from the restaurant and tipped the valet, satisfied that he had just enjoyed one of the most expensive lunches of anyone in town that day. He merged his emerald green Maserati into traffic flowing along Knickerbocker Road, and a mile further entered the southbound lane of Columbia Road.

  All that remained before his departure was the tidying of loose ends. Sean Thompson’s apartment was located in a working-class neighborhood where Middleburg bordered the older section of Hinckley Heights. Most of the people who lived in the complex held jobs and were out during the day. Devinn pulled the car to a stop in front of building ‘D,’ as he had every day of the past week. He entered the building and descended the short flight of steps to the basement. Walking past the furnace and a pair of coin-operated laundry machines he noted that the clothes dryer was running. A tenant somewhere in the building did not concern him; he would be back outside in less than a minute.

  Attached to the wall beside the electrical service meters and breaker panels was a gray metal telephone junction box for each of eight units in the building. Devinn removed a key from his pocket and opened the padlock on a ninth such box, acquired at the local building supply. Devinn removed the storage data card from the compact recording device inside, and then substituted the blank from the breast pocket of his sport coat. He replaced the padlock and snapped it shut, slipped the recorded SD memory card along with the key into his coat pocket and walked back outside to the car, plenty of time to spare for attending his next meeting at Thanatech.

  While driving slowly east through residential side streets it seemed to Devinn that things previously in shambles were f
alling into place. His decision to thwart the investigation and destroy the potentially incriminating evidence had succeeded, along with an unintended bonus: not only had Stuart’s investigation been discredited, but the wealthy executive was also being drummed out of the company. While this recent subterfuge had been risky, he could finally claim that the Mojave matter had been put to rest. To hear his handler tell it, Devinn’s antsy benefactors were severely disappointed that he had not retrieved everything from the cache inside the dead Iranian’s Rivergate apartment. At least he would recoup some of the credibility that the botched Mojave sabotage had cost him.

  Devinn removed the SD memory card from his coat pocket and inserted it in the slot of the Sony mp3 player in the console beside him.

  Thompson’s first two calls were incoming solicitations from a credit card and Internet service provider. The next came from Thompson’s older brother who, as Devinn knew, lived in Cincinnati and with whom Sean shared the occasional burden of travel to visit, plans that usually included the older sibling’s girlfriend. A seven-digit pulse tone signaled Thompson’s outgoing call and one by now familiar to Devinn; the bachelor regularly ordered out a nine-inch deep-crust pizza with extra cheese, mushrooms, and sausage. The next call went to his brother, the gist of which was to reschedule his planned visit to Cincinnati this weekend, citing demands of his job.

  Devinn pressed the fast-forward button through another series of incoming solicitations. He exited Royalton Road onto the northbound ramp for Interstate 71 and merged into the right-hand lane.

  Devinn next heard another outgoing pulse tone followed by four rings and the greeting of a young child’s voice; Thompson hung up immediately. A wrong number? Thompson dialed, again a child answered, again Thompson hung up the telephone. The next outgoing call apparently went to a neighbor because Thompson requested, and the woman agreed, to pick up his mail for a few days beginning tomorrow, Thursday.