by Glenn Cooper
THIRTY-ONE
Three years earlier
It was winter in the Andes and the conditions for skiing were nothing short of perfection. Waves of snowstorms had deposited a firm base and waist-deep, pillowy powder over the best of the ski peaks. In between the storms the temperatures were relatively mild and the sun shone brightly. It was the group’s last night in the Chilean mountains at Nevados de Chillán and the spirits of the nine guests were as high as the altitude. They occupied a private dining room at the five-star Gran Hotel Termas de Chillán where their host, Randall Anning, rose to give a toast.
‘Oh hell,’ said Kincaid, an oil man from Dallas. ‘Randy’s going to talk again.’
‘Well you just button it, Bruce,’ Anning said, grinning ear to ear. ‘Last I checked, I was picking up the tab for the week so you’ve got to listen up when I pretend to be a toastmaster.’
Kevin Fox, an investment banker from New York who was tipsy from pisco, the local brandy, clinked his water glass with a knife for quiet.
‘Thank you, Kevin,’ Anning said. ‘That gesture alone is going to win you my next M&A deal over you, McGee, since you’re more interested in whoring for Gottlieb’s IPO business than showing your host – i.e. me – some goddamn courtesy.’
McGee pretended he wasn’t listening and said, ‘Sorry, Randy, were you saying something? I was just talking to Steve about a hot IPO.’
Over laughter, Anning said, ‘You’re making my point, you bastard. Now, gentlemen – and needless to say, I’m using the term loosely – tonight marks the midway point of our skiing adventure. We’ve had three marvelous days of off-piste helicopter skiing here in Chile and I think we all have learned enough about each other’s athletic talents – or lack thereof – to make some awards. The awards committee consisted of all the billionaires in our group – hey wait, I’m the only one – and the judgments of the committee are final and are not going to be questioned. Understood? OK then, the first award is for the skier who’s got the best form, is the fastest down the mountain, and is far and away the best-looking. Hells bells – that’s me!’
Amidst booing, Anning reached under the table and pulled out a bottle of liquor that he put in front of his place setting.
‘The prize is a bottle of Pisco Puro, which is kind of like a Chilean single-malt scotch. It’s from a single grape variety. Don’t say you didn’t learn anything this week. All right, the next award is for the skier who’s least likely to find another skier buried in an avalanche. And that award goes to Phil Alexander, who couldn’t find the buried beacon on three tries.’
Alexander, a corporate lawyer, protested, ‘Sue me. I contend that my earpiece was defective.’
Anning presented him with an identical bottle of brandy and said, ‘The next award is for the skier who moaned the most about his altitude headache – and that would be Steve Gottlieb. Steve, here’s your brandy plus a couple of Advils.’
Gottlieb got up, bowed, and clutched his head.
Anning kept it up. ‘Here’s an award for the guy with the most garish ski suit and that goes to Mr Yellow and Pink, Neil Bartholomew.’
Bartholomew, a natural gas pipeline builder, took his bottle and said, ‘You fellows only wish you had my sartorial taste.’
‘What the hell does sartorial mean?’ Kyle Matthews, a refinery CEO said. ‘That a pansy word to match your pansy clothes?’
‘No, Kyle,’ Bartholomew said, laying it on thick, ‘it’s a word I learned in a place called school. Ever been there?’
Anning gave a couple more awards and said, ‘Oh hell, the rest of you mugs deserve honorable mention. Come and get your brandy but don’t get too damned drunk tonight. It’s wheels-up at eight a.m. for the real pièce-de-resistance of the week, Cerro Catedral in Argentina. The Cathedral, gentlemen, where you’re going to experience the best off-piste skiing of your soon-to-be enriched lives.’
It was clear that not all the men had heeded the warning about drinking too much because the courtesy van to the airport was uncharacteristically quiet. A private plane, a King Air 350 turboprop, was waiting to ferry them to Argentina. They filled all the available nine seats. The pilot came back to chat with them after he and the co-pilot had finished their checklist.
‘I’m honored to be your pilot today,’ the captain said. ‘My name is Joaquin Araya. My co-pilot, Matias Espinoza, and I will fly you and all your expensive skis down to Carlos de Bariloche, a distance of nearly 800 kilometers. Flight time today will be just under three hours. The conditions are overcast but we won’t be flying into any heavy weather. I recommend you keep your seatbelts fastened when you aren’t at the refreshment center or heading to the lavatory just to be safe. Enjoy your flight, gentlemen.’
Anning, whose head was crystal clear, was in the front-most seat, the only one that swiveled, holding court and doling out plastic cups of coffee when the aircraft leveled off at 27,000 feet. Before they were socked in by clouds, the Andes peaks were a sight to behold, crisply scalloped and pure white.
Steve Gottlieb was seated beside Neil Bartholomew. The two of them hadn’t talked all that much on the trip and they used the opportunity to get to know each other better.
‘So, Steve, how is it you know Randy?’
‘We met a couple of years ago when he was looking at acquiring one of my portfolio companies.’
‘Oh yeah? Did the deal happen?’
Gottlieb laughed. ‘He wanted too low a price.’
‘He’s a cheap bastard, isn’t he?’
They were in the row behind Anning who swiveled, said he heard the remark, and swiveled back to the book he was reading on his tablet.
‘Well, let’s just say we saw more value than he did. Anyway, he’s sniffed the butts of a few of my companies since then. We’ll see if we ever make a marriage.’
‘What kind of companies do you invest in?’
‘Our fund isn’t monolithic. We do all sorts of technology plays from med-tech to robotics to software solutions.’
‘You an engineering type or a finance guy?’ Bartholomew asked.
‘At this point, both, I guess, but I’ve got a Masters in mechanical engineering from Yale.’
‘Nice, very nice.’
‘How about you, Neil?’
‘Business major, Texas A&M. I’m an Aggie, through and through. Went to work in nat-gas right out of college and never looked back. Kids?’
‘Does a wife with temper-tantrums count?’
‘I think it does, Steve.’
‘Then yes, I’ve got a kid.’
They were ninety minutes into the flight when everyone in the cabin heard it.
A plink, then a loud pop.
The cockpit door was open and everyone in the front could see and hear the pilot and co-pilot reacting to the situation.
‘What’s happening?’ Phil Alexander said from the rear.
Anning was the closest. ‘Fucking hell,’ Anning said. ‘It looks like the pilot-side windshield’s cracked.’
‘That’s not good, is it?’ Kevin McGee said.
‘Firmly in the category of not good,’ Anning said. ‘Let’s all pipe down and let these boys up front do their jobs.’
The pilots, maybe due to stress, reverted to Spanish, and while the co-pilot was about to radio for permission to make an altitude change, there was a much louder pop and then an almighty whoosh when the windshield leaf catastrophically delaminated and flew off.
The cabin immediately depressurized.
Oxygen masks deployed.
The roaring sound was deafening. No one could hear each other’s shouts.
Then the plane lurched to the left and banked down hard.
The failed windshield leaf had been sucked into the left turboprop and had shredded the blades. A blade fragment had become shrapnel, shearing off the left horizontal stabilizer and elevator.
Anning pulled a dangling mask to his face and peered into the cockpit. The co-pilot was reaching over to the captain who was slumped against his harnes
s. A spray of blood flowed out the open window from the wound in the pilot’s chest where he’d been pierced by a chunk of the shattered propeller.
The plane began corkscrewing, nose down through the thick cloud cover. The co-pilot pulled on his oxygen mask and shifted his attention from the pilot to the controls. He wrestled with the control yoke and rudder pedals and managed to marginally get the nose up. But they were losing altitude fast.
The clouds cleared.
A mountain was looming.
Anning lost sense of time. The side of the mountain was getting closer and closer. The roar of the wind was too loud for anyone to hear the co-pilot shouting, ‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’
Gottlieb became aware that his face was cold and numb. His eyes were closed. He tried to wriggle his nose but it was too stiff.
‘Ow!’ he cried. His right elbow and right knee hurt terribly.
He opened his eyes and blinked in abject confusion. He was sitting in his airplane seat, seatbelt in place, but there was no airplane. His shoeless feet were sunk into snow. Everything surrounding him was pure and white and very cold. Flurries of snow swirled around him.
He looked to his left. His seatmate was also strapped in but Neil Bartholomew’s head wasn’t there and his powder-blue sweater was red with blood.
Gottlieb screamed.
Anning awoke. He heard a scream in the distance.
He was looking into the remains of a cockpit. Both pilots were as mangled and twisted as the metal. He looked behind him and saw snow, only snow. The fuselage had been ripped from the front of the plane at a point just behind his seat. He did a quick inventory of his person. Everything seemed to work and he wasn’t in any significant pain.
‘Hello!’ he shouted at the man who had screamed. ‘I hear you!’
‘Help!’
‘Who is it?’ Anning shouted.
‘Steve Gottlieb!’
‘It’s Randy, Steve. Who else is with you?’
‘Neil’s dead.’
Anning said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ way too softly for Gottlieb to hear. Then he shouted, ‘Are you hurt?’
‘Yes!’
‘OK, let me come to you! Just hang on a minute!’
Anning unbuckled his belt and stepped through the partially collapsed opening into the cockpit. He thought both the crew were dead. Bones showed through trousers, but the co-pilot was breathing.
‘Hey, wake up!’ he said, pulling on the man’s ear.
There was a low moan.
He couldn’t remember the fellow’s name. ‘Hey, we’ve crashed. Did you radio a mayday? Did you radio our position?’
The man opened his eyes a bit and tried to speak.
‘No radio. No time,’ he rasped, closing his eyes.
‘Is there an emergency beacon on board?’ Anning said, pulling on his ear again.
His eyes opened one last time. ‘No ELT.’
‘Is that the beacon?’ Anning said, but the co-pilot’s breathing shuddered then stopped.
Anning swore and turned toward the snow. His first step sank him to the middle of his thighs.
‘Steve, where are you? Call to me!’
‘Here!’
Anning squinted and looked around, trying to pin the direction the voice was coming from. He was on a slope, a steep slope. He saw something silvery quite a distance downhill.
‘Call again!’
Gottlieb’s voice wasn’t coming from that direction. He had to be uphill; Anning began slogging against gravity until he saw the incongruous sight of two men strapped into side-by-side seats, one with a head, one without.
He made it to Gottlieb’s side and tried not to look at Bartholomew’s corpse.
‘Who else is alive?’ Gottlieb asked.
‘I don’t know. The pilots are dead. I think a section of the cabin is down the mountain a way. What hurts?’
‘My arm and my knee.’
‘Do you think you can walk? We should get down there.’
‘I can try.’
‘The snow’s deep. I’ll help you.’
They had no way of judging how far down the mountain the rear of the fuselage had landed but it took an agonizing hour of walking and sliding to get there.
It was missing the wings and tail but it was largely intact. It had sheared off behind Anning’s seat. Gottlieb’s row of seats had spilled out on impact. Gottlieb collapsed in exhaustion and pain and he rested his back against the hull while Anning had a look inside. The rest of the seats and their occupants were intact. Anning grimly walked through the cabin, taking stock of six dead men until he got to Phil Alexander, the lawyer, in the last seat, just forward of the lavatory and luggage space.
Alexander was conscious, his eyes staring wildly.
‘Phil, I’m here.’
‘Where am I?’
‘We crashed.’
‘We did? I don’t remember. Fuck, it’s cold.’
‘We’re on the side of a mountain. Steve Gottlieb’s alive. That’s it.’
‘I can’t feel my legs. My belly hurts.’
‘Shit. Let me think. Stay there.’
‘Randy, you asshole,’ Alexander said, grimacing in pain. ‘You think I’m going to get up and dance the fuck out of here?’
Outside the wind had picked up and it was snowing harder, coating the silver fuselage in a white skin. Anning sat beside Gottlieb and gave him the score. For the first time since the crash, Gottlieb cried.
‘We are so fucked,’ he said.
‘It’s not good, my friend,’ Anning said. ‘No two ways about it.’
‘Maybe the pilots radioed a mayday before we went down.’
‘The co-pilot was alive for a minute when I got to him. They didn’t.’
‘Hopefully the plane was equipped with an emergency transponder,’ Gottlieb said.
‘Is that an ELT?’
Gottlieb nodded vigorously. ‘Emergency locator transmitter.’
‘Shit out of luck, Steve. They didn’t have one.’
‘Then we’re dead,’ Gottlieb said. His cell phone was in his jacket pocket. ‘I just tried my phone. No bars.’
‘We’re not dead yet,’ Anning said. ‘I’m going to need your help to get Phil out of there.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s filled with bodies.’
‘It’s snowing out here, Randy. There’s no shelter. We should move inside.’
‘What about the bodies?’
‘I’m no doctor but I don’t think dead men need shelter. Let’s drag them outside and figure out how to cover the opening of the plane. Then we can try to get a handle on Phil’s injuries and see if there’s any food on the plane.’
Anning agreed with the plan and then said, ‘I’m telling you right now, Steve, if we have to eat human flesh to survive, I will do it.’
Gottlieb groaned, ‘For fuck’s sake, Randy, we’ve been on the side of this mountain for less than two hours and you’re already talking about cannibalism?’
THIRTY-TWO
Cal was ten miles outside of Midland, Texas when Murphy called with a data dump on Belinda Hartman. He steered the RV into the slow lane and plastered his cell phone against an ear.
Hartman had a large online presence, at least academically, but Murphy wasn’t sure that it was all that illuminating. Cal had to agree. Her CV was pure-bred. Undergraduate at Yale. Masters at Yale. PhD at Yale. Straight on to the Yale faculty and currently an associate professor at the Yale School of Engineering. Hell, she probably peed Eli-blue, Cal thought. She taught courses in mechanical engineering, bioengineering, and even a seminar in entrepreneurship. She was in the double-century club with over a hundred published papers and over a hundred patents.
On a hunch Cal asked Murphy, ‘Can you check when Steven Gottlieb got his engineering degree from Yale?’
Murphy told him to hang on and went to the website of Gottlieb’s venture capital firm. His bio was still there even though he had well and truly departed.
Murphy told him.
‘Was that when she was there?’ Cal asked.
‘There we have it,’ Murphy declared in a minute. ‘Classmates.’
‘So, the two of them knew each other in school,’ Cal said. ‘Maybe they were an item back then, maybe the affair started later in life after Gottlieb was married. He goes on to fund engineering companies, she’s an inventor. A year and a half ago they have a meeting with Randall Anning. What’s this meeting about? That’s the question.’
‘You can’t ask Mr Gottlieb,’ Murphy said. ‘At least not in this life. That leaves Anning and Hartman. But what evidence is there that it had anything to do with our Marys? Gottlieb’s a venture capitalist, she’s a technologist, Anning is involved in drilling for oil and whatnot. Maybe it’s simply to discuss a business venture.’
‘We don’t have any evidence that it had something to do with the girls. None whatsoever. But it’s intriguing, don’t you think? We know that Gottlieb wanted to talk to me about them and someone killed him before he had a chance. We know that he and Anning endured something awful together up in the Andes. I’m betting this meeting the three of them had was significant.’
‘Doubtful that Anning is going to be a font of information,’ Murphy said.
‘That’s why I’m calling Hartman the second I hang up with you.’
The number listed on the YSE website was an office line. It rang through to voice mail with an instruction in Hartman’s voice that if the call was urgent to dial zero for the departmental secretary. It was late in the day, five thirty on the east coast, and Cal figured he’d come up empty. But a young man picked up and said, ‘Engineering.’
Cal told the secretary that he was a colleague of Hartman’s from Harvard and that he had an extremely urgent need to speak with her. After a brief hold, the man told him that it looked like she’d left for the day. Cal persisted and managed to get him to cough up her mobile number.
She sounded like she was on a car speakerphone.
‘Hartman.’
‘Professor Hartman, this is Professor Cal Donovan from Harvard. I’m sorry to bother you.’
‘Do we know each other?’ she asked.
