Final Approach

by John J. Nance

  The answering machine sat with the telephone on a delicate mahogany campaign desk by the stairway. Kell steadied it now against the vibration of the rewinding message tape as he watched the strobe lights of a distant airplane blink across the night sky through the picture windows in the dining room. Focusing his thoughts was suddenly a task. A new possibility had begun fluttering around the edge of his consciousness, but he repressed it. Yet, why had she called Friday to say they would discuss things on Tuesday when they would be together that very evening in Kansas City? The message had to have been left Friday afternoon. And why would she call here to Salina? Their weekend hideaway was to have been in northern Missouri. She knew damn well he wasn’t heading for Salina, unless this was some sort of contingency plan or smoke screen. And where was the message she was talking about? The questions cascaded in his mind, but the answers were not following.

  There was a rueful irony in her leaving a mystery as a last act in her life. Or perhaps she had left the message to tease him—intending that he find it after their weekend together. That must be it. His cellular telephone number in Wichita had electronic voice mail, which worked like an answering machine. He had listened to his messages before leaving Wichita Friday afternoon, and there was nothing there.

  Or was there?

  Kell lifted the phone receiver, punching in his cellular phone number in Wichita. Suddenly the memory wouldn’t come. Had he, in fact, listened to his messages on Friday? Getting away from the last political function, another rubber chicken dinner meeting in downtown Wichita Friday evening, had amounted to an escape. The people there were supporters as well as constituents, so he’d had to be gracious and feign interest, but all he could think about during the dinner, the rambling introduction, and his own speech, was Cindy and the coming weekend. He had left immediately afterward, heading his car toward Kansas City with just enough time to reach the airport before her flight arrived. Could he have forgotten to check?

  On the other end of the line, he heard his own voice begin a familiar litany about being out of range and leaving a message, but he interrupted it summarily with a series of keystrokes, waiting then, impatiently, for the computer to cycle through several mundane calls. With the grandfather clock in the hallway loudly chiming 8 P.M., he had to strain to listen, jamming the receiver tighter against his ear. There were six messages, four of them left Friday during the day. One by one he listened to each recording, but it was the fourth message that contained her voice, and he stiffened with anticipation as it began.

  “Senator, this is Cynthia. About the Kansas City project, the one involving North America. I’m sorry to just leave you a message, but I won’t be available to discuss the project this evening. I’m going to cancel the planned conference. I’d rather not discuss the reasons over the phone, but I’ll be available to meet with you on this subject next Tuesday. I just need some time to … work on this. I’m leaving the office now, and I’m, uh, sorry to change plans like this.”

  Kell stood transfixed for a second before replacing the receiver. She had canceled Kansas City. She had canceled their weekend. That meant …

  The ringing of the phone startled him, almost as much as the speed with which he grabbed the receiver. He was overreacting.

  “Hello?”

  “Senator?” The voice was cool and flat, but instantly recognizable, and the sound of it triggered a flood of thoughts and feelings, emotions and realizations crammed into a split second. She couldn’t be alive! He had not dared to hope she might be alive. He had given up. But all his life, it seemed, the prerequisite for success was a final acceptance of failure—the price of gain, the realization of loss.

  Kell realized he had been holding his breath.

  “Cindy? My God, is that really you?” His left hand climbed to his forehead, as if to quiet the high-speed recalculations of his life raging within. “Lord, I don’t believe it!”

  “Well, you told Fred I was to call you immediately. So here I am. Who else were you expecting?”

  “I … I didn’t expect …” Kell fought to gain control. “Cindy, I just now, just this minute, listened to your message.”

  There was silence from the other end for what seemed a long time before she began again, not seeming to understand.

  “I really don’t want us to talk right now.” Her voice was suddenly unsteady, shaky. “I need to sort things out … the issues, I mean, regarding the, uh, North America matter.”

  “Screw the issues and screw our code words. You’re alive, and I can’t quite believe it. I thought I’d seen you die!”

  A thousand miles to the east, Cindy Collins pulled the phone from her ear for a second and looked at it, as if her expression could be seen in Salina. It was a useless gesture for an absent audience, but it was cathartic. His words made no sense. He knew she was at home. The soft decor of her carefully furnished living room had been her refuge since she had stumbled into her small apartment near Dupont Circle on Friday night, consumed with uncertainty over whether she should have canceled their rendezvous in Kansas City. Even after her intended flight had crashed—even after she had realized that most of those aboard had died—she still caught herself feeling guilty. She had ignored the ringing phone most of the day, expecting the press reaction connecting her man with Wilkins but not wanting to deal with it and slightly afraid Kell might call before she was ready to talk. But the incessant ringing finally became too much. At last she had yanked the receiver from the hook to find Fred Sneadman on the other end.

  “You mean the crash in Kansas City?” she began. “I know … I’m still shaking. If I hadn’t canceled on you …”

  “No, no, I don’t mean that,” he replied hurriedly. “I mean, yes I do mean that it scared me to death, but, Cindy, honey … I didn’t get your message from my phone in Wichita until just seconds before you called. I didn’t know you weren’t coming last night.” Kell paused and, hearing no sound from her end, continued, his heart pounding, breathing as if he had just run a three-minute mile. “Cindy, I went to Kansas City, to the airport, to meet your flight.”

  The significance of what he was saying finally grabbed her, and Cindy sat forward on her sofa as if convulsed. He hadn’t known. He had driven hundreds of miles to meet her for nothing. While she had sat on her overstuffed couch nursing a bottle of white wine and feeling sorry for herself, he was watching a real-life horror.

  “Kell, I had no idea.”

  “I was sitting there by the runway where I shouldn’t have been, sitting there in the car waiting for your plane. I saw it crash, saw it torn apart. I thought I had seen you die. I didn’t know you weren’t on it, but thank God you weren’t.”

  “But you always check your messages. You never fail to check.”

  “I was too eager to get away from Wichita … too eager to get to Kansas City to pick you up. I must have forgotten.”

  “You were right there?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been in agony. No one knew you were on—or were supposed to be on—that flight. They haven’t released a passenger list. I was the only one who knew. That’s why I told Fred to call you. I was hoping someone would find out besides me. Lord, I do not believe this!”

  “I’m so sorry, Kell.”

  “That’s all right! I’m just so grateful to find out you’re okay. Yes, I would have been upset had I heard your message. I probably would have called you when I got up here. But … well, I’m full of so many conflicting feelings right now. You know? Why didn’t you come, but then thank God you didn’t. Cindy, we have to talk.”

  “I know.”

  “No, I mean we have to really talk. Now I have a second chance to tell you everything I was wishing all day I had told you, things I had been putting off. I have a chance to tell you I need you, and I love you, and I don’t give a damn who knows it.”

  She did not answer for a few seconds, and Kell realized he was holding his breath for a second time, listening for any nuance, looking for any window to her feelings.

&nbs
p; “I think I love you too,” she began, sounding more distant than before, “but I need to be sure. Things are going too fast. That’s why I didn’t come.”

  “I would have lost you—I thought I had. But I guess that proves there was a purpose in all of this.”

  “Maybe. But we do need to be careful what we say.”

  “Not now.” He was emphatic. The game had changed. There was no longer a game.

  “Yes, Senator, now. I’m not going to let you blow this. You are still attached.”

  “Not for long.”

  “But as long as you are, we stay underground. Especially until we find out if there really is a ‘we.’”

  “Don’t … please. Don’t snatch you away from me again.”

  There was a small laugh on her end. “That statement is a grammatical disaster.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I know you do, but I’m not going anywhere. I just want to be sure, and right now I’m very confused.”

  “I’m coming back tonight.”

  “No Kell, don’t …” She felt the tears on her face, and that surprised her, but the image of him all alone at the farm, pacing around like a caged animal, so powerful yet so helpless, tugged at her.

  “No, that’s okay,” Kell was saying, “I won’t see you until you’re ready, but I’m in no mood to sit out here in a wheat field until Monday evening.”

  Cindy smiled, unseen, as she ran her hand through her long, blond hair—a mannerism he loved. She knew how impatient he could be.

  “I won’t batter down your door. But I may sit outside it looking unbearably lonely if you won’t let me in.”

  “Now wouldn’t that be a wonderful image for some future confirmation hearing—‘Lovesick senator wastes away outside bimbo’s boudoir.’ The Miami Herald could relate to that. They’d figure you were practicing for a presidential run.”

  “You’re no bimbo, honey.”

  They had slipped back into normal conversation, he realized, normal bantering, her sharp sense of humor teasing and enticing him. Normal, but not completely so. There was still reserve in her voice.

  “No, I’m not a bimbo … but I’m not your wife, either, Senator Martinson.”

  He couldn’t quite find a reply for that, just a silent promise to change that fact as fast as the law would allow.

  “Will you call me when you’re ready?” he asked.

  “Not until Tuesday, Kell.”

  “I love you, Cindy.”

  She heard his voice break as he said the words, yet she choked on her reply. It was the one phrase she had prayed he’d use someday. Why did it scare her so now?

  “I know,” she said simply, replacing the receiver as gently as if she were caressing his face, personal and professional worries competing furiously in her mind.

  She had tried to defuse the controversy a year ago, but Kell had become firmly entrenched as Wilkins’s most outspoken critic on the Hill. Wilkins had publicly slandered a valued friend of Kell’s in the House—a former Vietnam POW who happened to be black—questioning his patriotism. Not even Cindy could control Kell’s outrage at Wilkins’s attack, and though his statements on the floor of the Senate had been eloquent and gentlemenly rebukes, one unguarded comment to the media had been the lead story on the national news and had propelled the Martinson camp into an unnecessary battle. “This man is a racist and an insult to the Congress,” Kell had said. “While the voters have the right to send anyone they choose to represent them, the Congress has the right to reject those who are unfit to serve, and Mr. Wilkins is morally unfit for any public office. I’m going to do everything I can to get rid of him.”

  Suddenly the weekend’s TV images of burning airplane wreckage and voice-overs regarding Larry Wilkins’s extremist positions merged with Cindy’s mental picture of Kell sitting mere yards away from the runway as his perceived archenemy had died in a crash that some reports were already claiming was sabotage. The implications were all too clear. There was a disastrous possibility—however remote—that Kell’s Friday night whereabouts might somehow become public knowledge, and there was only one word that seemed to sum it up. Cynthia Elizabeth Collins plunked herself into an armchair and addressed the far wall.

  “Shit!”

  It was 11 A.M. Sunday morning in Washington, yet the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board had already logged four hours of pacing around his den, keeping an eye on the television coverage from Kansas City. Now the face of a CBS anchor filled the screen before the scene cut to Kansas City International Airport and a brief interview with the NTSB’s Joe Wallingford. Dean Farris stopped his pacing to stand in front of the set, quietly studying his subordinate’s performance with suspicion. His wife, looking on from the kitchen, had seen him upset over Wallingford before. “A loose cannon on a rolling deck,” Dean had called him.

  Wilma Farris put down her coffee cup for a moment and watched her husband, concerned as usual at his preoccupation. They had been in academic heaven just three years ago, he a full, tenured professor of management at the Stanford Business School, and she a contented homemaker happily raising two kids. She had never begrudged his interest in politics, though he had spent far too much time helping the local Republican party for over a decade. But when the Republican occupying the White House had needed a panel of respected and ideologically trustworthy businessmen and academics for a blue-ribbon panel on deregulation and airline safety, Dean Farris had been in the right place at the right time, and a building political debt of many years was partially repaid with the appointment.

  She had seen little of him for the next nine months as he took to the project with immense seriousness. It was ironic that he hated to fly, but his theory of management transcended technical knowledge: a good manager could manage anything, including a blue-ribbon panel, or so he believed. With the final report’s release, she had prepared herself for a return to California and normalcy. Instead, the White House had called again, flushed with pride over the fact that Farris and his commission had absolved the administration’s free-market-at-any-cost policies of any blame for declines in the airline industry’s safety margins under deregulation. This time, they said, the President wanted him to move to Washington to take over as chairman of the NTSB. Dean was thrilled, but Wilma had come to regard their new Reston, Virginia, home as a prison, her friends and family three thousand miles away.

  What frightened Wilma Farris the most was the change in her husband, and his sudden lust for greater position someday. They had not discussed it, but she knew he was eyeing a cabinet post in a future administration. And whether her energetic fifty-two-year-old spouse could achieve it or not was never a question in her mind.

  “No! Goddamn it, Joe, no!” Dean Farris’s voice echoed off the televised picture of Joe Wallingford and rang through the house, startling their golden retriever, who jumped up from the kitchen floor to stand, quivering, at attention.

  “What is it, Dean?”

  He turned around to face her, pointing at the offending screen, his bony, angular features screwed up in disgust, an unkempt forelock of dark hair hanging down to his right eyebrow. With a beard, a frock coat, and a stovepipe hat, he could have played President Lincoln, she thought. Several reporters had made the observation, and it amused him.

  “Last night I specifically told Wallingford to make it clear we were investigating sabotage along with everything else, and this morning he makes the statement I told him to make, but then tells the world one more time—as if they hadn’t heard it the first time—that there is absolutely no evidence that would lead anyone to believe there was any sabotage.”

  The dog was standing in the kitchen doorway now, tail wagging furiously, looking mightily confused as he watched his master for the slightest hint of a command. Dean Farris dropped his arm and walked around the sofa toward Wilma, shaking his head, his deep baritone voice tinged with a reminder of his Oklahoma youth.

  “Now you just watch, Willie, that phone will ring again within t
he hour with someone else on the Hill worried that I may be losing control and letting my people play politics with a crash investigation.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “We have to put on a good show. As long as Wilkins’s supporters are riled up, we have got to look like we’re taking sabotage seriously. Wallingford—damn his hide—makes it sound like we’re not.”

  “You think it was sabotage?”

  “It doesn’t matter whether it was or wasn’t. We’ve just got to look like we’re kicking over all the rocks at the same time. Wilkins’s people are repulsive, but they’re a powerful group in the South.”

  “I think I’d better contact Susan Kelly. I trusted her to baby-sit Wallingford and she isn’t doing the job.”

  Consciousness had come hard for Dick Timson all weekend. He had barely achieved it at all during Saturday, and then only for short periods. Sunday morning was no exception.

  He had a memory of banking an airplane into a final turn for an airport runway somewhere, but there was nothing else—until the walls and ceiling of an operating room had come into focus in the dark hours before dawn after the accident. Then the images had dissolved into a fitful sleep of sorts. That was … when?

  “What day is it?” The husky-voiced words startled Louise Timson, who had been dozing in a chair next to his bed.

  “Dick?”

  “What … where am I again?” He put a tentative hand to his left temple, which was throbbing. This was a hospital, he remembered that. There had been a crash. There were nightmarish scenes he couldn’t identify which had passed for dreams, and he had wobbled in and out of semiconsciousness it seemed for an eternity.

  “It … it’s Sunday morning, Dick. You’re in a Kansas City hospital—Truman Medical Center.” Her voice seemed tremulous, but he hardly noticed. Eyes squinting, head pounding, he lay back into the pillow and tried to focus, realizing it was his wife’s face hovering before him, a distraught look in her eyes.

  “My God, Louise, what’s happened? I … I know there … there was a crash. You told me. I don’t remember …”