Airframe (10 page)

A revision of the prototype Virtual Heads-Up Display units, to be delivered in the next two days.

A memo from Honeywell advising replacement of the D-2 electrical bus on all FDAU units numbered A-505/9 through A-609/8.

Casey sighed, and went to work.

She was tired when she got home. The house seemed empty without Allison’s lively chatter. Too tired to cook, Casey went into the kitchen and ate a cup of yogurt. Allison’s colorful drawings were taped on the refrigerator door. Casey considered calling her; but it was right around her bedtime, and she didn’t want to interrupt if Jim was putting her to sleep.

She also didn’t want Jim to think she was checking up on him. That was a sore point between them. He always felt she was checking.

Casey went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She heard the phone ring, and went back into the kitchen to answer it. It was probably Jim. She picked up the receiver. “Hello, Jim—”

“Don’t be stupid, bitch,” a voice said. “You want trouble, you’ll get it. Accidents happen. We’re watching you
right now
.”

Click.

She stood in the kitchen, holding the phone in her hand. Casey had always thought of herself as levelheaded, but her heart was pounding. She forced herself to take a deep breath as she hung up the receiver. She knew these calls happened sometimes. She’d heard of other vice-presidents getting threatening calls at night. But it had never happened to her, and she was surprised at how frightened she felt. She took another deep breath, tried to shrug it off. She picked up her
yogurt, stared at it, put it down. She was suddenly aware that she was alone in a house with all the blinds open.

She went around the living room, closing the blinds. When she came to the front window, she looked out at the street. In the light of the overhead street lamps, she saw a blue sedan parked a few yards up from her house.

There were two men inside.

She could see their faces clearly, through the windshield. The men stared at her as she stood at the window.

Shit.

She went to the front door, bolted it, locked the security chain. She set the burglar alarm, her fingers trembling and clumsy as she punched in the code. Then she flicked off the living room lights, pressed her body to the wall, and peered out the window.

The men were still in the car. They were talking now. As she watched, one of them pointed toward her house.

She went back to the kitchen, fumbled in her purse, found her pepper spray. She clicked off the safety. With her other hand she grabbed the phone, and pulled it on the long cord back to the dining room. Still watching the men, she called the police.

“Glendale police.”

She gave her name and address. “There are men parked outside my house. They’ve been here since this morning. I’ve just gotten a threatening call.”

“Okay, ma’am. Is anybody in the house with you now?”

“No. I’m alone.”

“Okay, ma’am. Lock your door and set the alarm if you have one. A car is on the way.”

“Hurry,” she said.

On the street, the men were getting out of the car.

And walking toward her house.

They were dressed casually, in polo shirts and slacks, but they looked grim and tough. As they came forward they split up,
one walking onto the lawn, the other heading toward the back of the house. Casey felt her heart thump in her chest. Had she locked the back door? Gripping the pepper spray, she moved back to the kitchen, turning off the light there, then past the bedroom to the back door. Looking through the window in the door, she saw one of the men standing in the back alley. He was looking around cautiously. Then his gaze turned toward the back door. She crouched down, slipped the chain across the door.

She heard the sound of soft footsteps, coming closer to the house. She looked up at the wall, just above her head. There was a keypad for the alarm, and a big red button marked EMERGENCY. If she hit that button, a screeching alarm would sound. Would that scare him away? She wasn’t sure. Where were the damned police, anyway? How long had it been?

She realized she could not hear the footsteps any more. Cautiously, she raised her head until she could peer out the bottom corner of the window.

The man was walking down the alley away from her now. Then he turned, circling the house. Heading back to the street.

Staying low, Casey ran back to the front of the bungalow, to the dining room. The first man was no longer on her lawn. She felt panic: Where was he? The second man appeared on the lawn, squinted at the front of her house, then headed back toward the car. She saw the first man was already in the car, sitting in the passenger seat. The second man opened the door and got in behind the wheel. Moments later, a black-and-white squad car pulled up behind the blue sedan. The men in the car seemed surprised, but they didn’t do anything. The squad car turned on its spotlight, and one officer got out, moving cautiously forward. He talked to the men in the sedan for a moment. Then the two men got out. They all walked up the steps to her front door—the policeman and the two men from the car.

She heard the doorbell ring, and answered it.

A young police officer said, “Ma’am, is your name Singleton?”

“Yes,” she said.

“You work for Norton Aircraft?”

“Yes, I do …”

“These gentlemen are Norton Security. They say they’re guarding you.”

Casey said, “What?”

“Would you like to see their credentials?”

“Yes,” she said. “I would.”

The policeman shone a flashlight while the two men each held out their wallets for her. She recognized credentials for Norton Security Services.

“We’re sorry, ma’am,” one of the guards said. “We thought you knew. We’ve been told to check the house every hour. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s fine.”

The policeman said to her, “Is there anything else?”

She felt embarrassed; she mumbled thanks, and went back inside.

“Make sure you lock that door, ma’am,” the guards said politely.

“Yeah, I got ’em parked in front of my house, too,” Kenny Burne said. “Scared the hell out of Mary. What’s going on, anyway? Labor negotiations aren’t for another two years.”

“I’ll call Marder,” she said.

“Everybody gets guards,” Marder said, on the phone. “The union threatens one of our team, we detail guards. Don’t worry about it.”

“Did you talk to Brull?” she said.

“Yeah, I straightened him out. But it’ll take a while for the word to filter down to the rank and file. Until it does, everybody gets guards.”

“Okay,” she said.

“This is a precaution,” Marder said. “Nothing more.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Get some sleep,” Marder said, and hung up.

She awoke uneasily, before the alarm went off. She pulled on a bathrobe, walked to the kitchen to turn on the coffee, and looked out the front window. The blue sedan was still parked on the street, the men inside. She considered taking her five-mile run, she needed that exercise to start her day, but decided against it. She knew she shouldn’t feel intimidated. But there was no point in taking chances.

She poured a cup of coffee, sat in the living room. Everything looked different to her today. Yesterday, her little bungalow felt cozy; today, it felt small, defenseless, isolated. She was glad Allison was spending the week with Jim.

Casey had lived through periods of labor tension in the past; she knew that the threats usually came to nothing. But it was wise to be cautious. One of the first lessons Casey had learned at Norton was that the factory floor was a very tough world—tougher even than the assembly line at Ford. Norton was one of the few remaining places where an unskilled high school graduate could earn $80,000 a year, with overtime. Jobs like that were scarce, and getting scarcer. The competition to get those jobs, and to keep them, was fierce. If the union thought the China sale was going to cost jobs, they could very well act ruthlessly to stop it.

She sat with the coffee cup on her lap and realized she dreaded going to the factory. But of course she had to go. Casey pushed the cup away, and went into the bedroom to dress.

When she came outside and got into her Mustang, she saw a second sedan pull up behind the first. As she drove down the street, the first car pulled out, following her.

So Marder had ordered two sets of guards. One to watch her house, and one to follow her.

Things must be worse than she thought.

She drove into the plant with an uncharacteristic feeling of unease. First shift had already started; the parking lots were full, acres and acres of cars. The blue sedan stayed right behind her as Casey pulled up to the security guard at Gate 7. The guard waved her through and, by some unseen signal, allowed the blue sedan to follow directly, without putting the barrier down. The sedan stayed behind her until she parked at her spot in Administration.

She got out of the car. One of the guards leaned out the window. “Have a nice day, ma’am,” he said.

“Thanks. I will.”

The guard waved. The sedan sped off.

Casey looked around at the huge gray buildings: Building 64 to the south. Building 57 to the east, where the twinjet was built. Building 121, the Paint Shed. The maintenance hangars in a row off to the west, lit by the sun rising over the San Fernando Mountains. It was a familiar landscape; she’d spent five years here. But today she was uncomfortably aware of the vast dimensions, the emptiness of the place in early morning. She saw two secretaries walking into the Administration building. No one else. She felt alone.

She shrugged her shoulders, shaking off her fears. She was being silly, she told herself. It was time to go to work.

Rob Wong, the young programmer at Norton Digital Information Systems, turned away from the video monitors and said, “Sorry, Casey. We got the flight recorder data—but there’s a problem.”

She sighed. “Don’t tell me.”

“Yeah. There is.”

She was not really surprised to hear it. Flight data recorders rarely performed correctly. In the press, these failures were explained as the consequence of crash impacts. After an airplane hit the ground at five hundred miles an hour, it seemed reasonable to think that a tape deck might not be working.

But within the aerospace industry, the perception was different. Everyone knew flight data recorders failed at a very high rate, even when the aircraft didn’t crash. The reason was that the FAA did not require they be checked before every flight. In practice, they were usually function-checked about once a year. The consequence was predictable: the flight recorders rarely worked.

Everybody knew about the problem: the FAA, the NTSB, the airlines, and the manufacturers. Norton had conducted a study a few years back, a random check of DFDRs in active service. Casey had been on that study committee. They’d found that only one recorder in six worked properly.

Why the FAA would mandate the installation of FDRs, without also requiring that they be in working order before each flight, was a frequent subject of late-night discussion in
aerospace bars from Seattle to Long Beach. The cynical view was that malfunctioning FDRs were in everybody’s interest. In a nation besieged by rabid lawyers and a sensational press, the industry saw little advantage to providing an objective, reliable record of what had gone wrong.

“We’re doing the best we can, Casey,” Rob Wong said. “But the flight recorder data is anomalous.”

“Meaning what?”

“It looks like the number-three bus blew about twenty hours before the incident, so the frame syncs are out on the subsequent data.”

“The frame syncs?”

“Yeah. See, the FDR records all the parameters in rotation, in data blocks called frames. You get a reading for, say, airspeed, and then you get another reading four blocks later. Airspeed readings should be continuous across the frames. If they’re not, the frames are out of sync, and we can’t build the flight. I’ll show you.”

He turned to the screen, pressing keys. “Normally, we can take the DFDR and generate the airplane in tri-axis. There’s the plane, ready to go.”

A wire-frame image of the Norton N-22 widebody appeared on the screen. As she watched, the wire frame filled in, until it took on the appearance of an actual aircraft in flight.

“Okay, now we feed it your flight recorder data …”

The airplane seemed to ripple. It vanished from the screen, then reappeared. It vanished again, and when it reappeared the left wing was separated from the fuselage. The wing twisted ninety degrees, while the rest of the airplane rolled to the right. Then the tail vanished. The entire plane vanished, reappeared again, vanished again.

“See, the mainframe’s trying to draw the aircraft,” Rob said, “but it keeps hitting discontinuities. The wing data doesn’t fit the fuse data which doesn’t fit the tail data. So it breaks up.”

“What do we do?” she said.

“Resync the frames, but that’ll take time.”

“How long? Marder’s on my back.”

“It could be a while, Casey. The data’s pretty bad. What about the QAR?”

“There isn’t one.”

“Well, if you’re really stuck, I’d take this data to Flight Sims. They have some sophisticated programs there. They may be able to fill in the blanks faster, and tell you what happened.”

“But Rob—”

“No promises, Casey,” he said. “Not with this data. Sorry.”

Casey met Richman outside Building 64. They walked together in the early-morning light toward the building. Richman yawned.

“You were in Marketing, weren’t you?”

“That’s right,” Richman said. “We sure didn’t keep these hours.”

“What did you do there?”

“Not much,” he said. “Edgarton had the whole department doing a full court press on the China deal. Very hush-hush, no outsiders allowed. They threw me a little legal work on the Iberian negotiation.”