Crashers (13 page)

She agreed, and he said goodbye.

 

Twenty minutes later, she sat in an elegant restaurant, doing what she was paid to do: translate.

The FBI had had no trouble getting her work in the United States: she spoke fluent English, French, High Arabic, Hebrew, and Spanish, with a smattering of German and Italian. There were a thousand corporations in the financial district alone that could use an instant translator.

She was still a little weak at the knees from that morning's very hard workout. Fortunately, neither the Egyptian gentleman to her left nor the English gentleman to her right realized it when she entered, or when they stood and shook her hand.

The translation duty was easy enough and barely occupied her mind. Half of her brain was on the night before. There was something wrong about the Irishman, something off. She knew it. It probably wasn't any of her business; she wasn't a spy or a law enforcement agent. Now she was just a freelance translator for several West Coast investment houses. The contact had left her energized, nonetheless.

In the end, the Egyptian sold something and the Englishman bought it. Or the other way around. Two filthy-rich snobs, exchanging something nobody in the world needed. The whole transaction left Daria bored beyond words.

As they bade each other adieu and she was handed a check for her translation services, Daria thought,
Screw Calabrese.

On the street, Daria suddenly remembered an Americanism she had read in the newspaper. “Being benched.” She thought she knew what that meant.
Bench me, Ray?
she thought, slid on her Prada sunglasses, and headed out to find Jack.

Kiki Duvall's cell phone vibrated. She adjusted the ear jack and answered.

“Miss Duvall? This is Brian, from Sonic Broom Label.”

She used her splay-fingered palm to push red hair away from her sandy eyebrows. “Yes. You have it?”

“Yes, ma'am. There's a guy here says he's a marshal.”

Good. Proper evidence protocols. Last night, she'd arranged for a deputy from the U.S. Marshal's office to take her black box—the cockpit voice recorder—to state-police headquarters and to lock up the box until morning. Now, it was in the hands of a recording engineer at Sonic Broom Label records. The marshal would stay with it the whole time and would deliver it back to the NTSB when the engineer had done his magic.

Before Kiki had joined the NTSB, the standard operating procedure for all crashes dated back decades. As soon as the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were captured, they were instantly transferred to NTSB headquarters in Washington's L'Enfant Plaza, where they'd be analyzed. At Kiki's insistence, a new protocol had been established for the CVR. She'd been able to convince the brass that the federal government's audio equipment was vastly inferior to that of major record producers and Hollywood soundstages. Technology in the entertainment industry tended to improve at a dizzying clip and showed marked improvement every few months.

Kiki had gained permission to have CVRs sent to New York, L.A., Nashville, Austin, or Portland, depending on where the jet went down, to take advantage of the best audio technology on the planet.

Rather than speed off to D.C. and separate herself from the downed aircraft and the rest of the Go-Team, Kiki would have digital recordings of the cockpit voice recorder delivered to her within hours. Her process shaved days off crash investigations and had resulted in a fourfold improvement in the audio quality.

She talked to the engineer for a moment, then hung up, detached her ear jack. As she did, Isaiah Grey said, “Good news?”

It was 11:30
A.M.
Susan Tanaka's Allthing was all but finished, and now Susan was about to step out and hold her first press conference. Kiki and Isaiah were backstage at the high school theater. She told him about the CVR.

“Sweet. You were a hell of a pickup for this team. You know that?”

Kiki threw her arm over his shoulder. “You're a nice man, Mr. Grey.”

“Tell that to the PDX ground crews.”

She nodded. “You have crew duty?”

“Yeah,” he said, but didn't elaborate. It was a task few of the crashers ever wanted. He got to be the guy who rooted through the protocols and procedures of the ground crew and the flight crew and tried to figure out who, if anyone, had screwed the pooch. It was not a popular role.

Kiki squeezed his shoulder. “Good luck.”

“Gonna need it.”

 

Thirty feet away, Susan smiled her most charming smile and said, “Feel like punching a petite person?”

Tommy shook his head. “You are an evil, manipulative, lying sack of shit.”

“Yes,” she said, ramping up the smile a few watts.

“Suze! Hell's bells, I can't—”

“Shut up, stupid boy. You can and you have. You've been IIC for more than fourteen hours and didn't even realize it. You've done wonders.”

“But Kentucky—”

“—Is a place with good college basketball and good bourbon. This is Oregon. They have neither.”

Tommy's shoulders sank and Susan slipped her arm through his. “Admit it. You secretly want to do me right now.”

“Well, yeah. But I'm still gonna throttle you.”

She kissed him on the cheek. “Come meet the media.”

Tommy groaned.

“All right, show of hands,” Susan shouted to be heard. There were eighty-plus journalists clustered in the McNary gym. “How many daily-print people do we have here?”

Hands went up.

“Morning or evening papers?”

“Morning!” someone shouted. “We've got a ten
P.M.
deadline.”

“Mine's eleven!” another voice piped up.

“Okay, how many weeklies?”

More hands. People shouted, “Wednesday!” and, “Thursday!”

“Do we have a weekly from, ah, Tigard?” She consulted her ubiquitous notepad.

“Um, yes.” A twentysomething woman with blond bangs looked surprised.

“Good. Radio? What kind of airtimes?”

“Drive time!” someone said. “NPR wants our feeds by eleven for the East Coast!”

“Well, it's eleven forty-five now, so you've blown that deadline.” The reporters laughed. “Okay, do we have TV?”

Again, deadlines were shouted. Susan wrote it all down in the palm-sized notepad, then checked her notes. The janitors had pulled out a set of bleachers and Susan stood on the second row so that everyone could see her. “All right. The Go-Team will meet each evening to compare notes. Now—”

“Can we sit in?” a newspaper reporter asked.

“No. But I'll hold a press conference every day. Late mornings or noonish. Times will vary, depending on our schedules. My assistants are handing out fact sheets with a Web site. The press conferences will be posted at least two hours in advance.”

Tommy handed her a bottled water and she took a delicate sip. “As I said, I'll hold a press conference every day. Sometimes two, if anything breaks. I may not have anything to tell you, but we'll meet daily anyway. If you've got any questions about the investigation, I'm the person to see. I'll ask section leaders to attend the press conferences on a rotating schedule, or as needed to explain technical details. Is that going to work?”

They begrudgingly admitted that it would.

“This is Dr. Leonard Tomzak. He's our Investigator in Charge. I'll have him available for as many of these as I can.”

“Though not sober,” Tommy said for her ears only.

“Okay, then, here's what we know: CascadeAir Flight Eight One Eight declared an emergency last night at approximately eight thirty, Pacific time. She carried five crew and a hundred and forty-one passengers. Portland International air traffic control immediately cleared airspace and the captain began trying to turn the aircraft. . . .”

Twenty-five minutes later, the press conference broke up. As the media began packing up, Susan called to the young reporter from the Tigard weekly. Surprised, the blond woman struggled her way to the front of the crowd. She wore blue jeans and sneakers and a bulky sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a butterfly clip. No makeup. It was obvious she'd leaped out of bed upon hearing the news and had hurried down to the crash site.

“I can't help the weeklies all that much,” Susan said. “I know how to schedule releases so that the dailies, the radio, and the TV guys are happy, but you don't come out until . . . ?”

“Thursday,” the woman admitted. It was Tuesday morning.

“Right. You're gonna get smoked. But when I can, I'll try to throw some bones your direction, just to keep things equal. Okay?”

“Sure,” the reporter said. “We always get beat by time.”

The way she said it made Susan cock her head to one side, questioningly.

“We can't be first, so we just have to do a better job,” the woman replied. She looked all of twenty-three. “And we do.”

Susan smiled, liking her. She handed her a business card. On the back was a name and phone number. “This is a paramedic. One of my assistants got his name. He's from Tigard. He wasn't even on duty last night because he has a broken arm, but he showed up anyway, in a cast, just to help.”

The reporter's eyes glowed. This was a genuine human-interest story, and with an angle handpicked for her town's readership.

“Thanks! Um, can I ask you a question? Why are you treating us so respectfully? We don't get a lot of that.”

Susan shook her hand. “In the weeks to come, you reporters are going to alternately loathe me and assume I'm either lying to you or that I'm an idiot. It's early days. I need all the good markers I can get.”

BUD AND IRENE WHEELER walked gingerly down the stairs of their farmhouse. Bud wore corduroy jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and floppy slippers. Irene was in her nightgown and robe. They were both seventy, and the stairs had been a lot friendlier to them once upon a time.

“Didn't sleep a wink,” Bud growled for the third or fourth time.

Behind him, Irene Wheeler said, “I know, dear.”

“Thought for sure I heard someone down here. Thought for sure!”

“I know, dear.”

In the kitchen, Irene put on the kettle for a little lunchtime tea and got the makings of tuna fish sandwiches out of the fridge. Bud went to the back door, opened it, stepped outside, bent gingerly, and retrieved the dog's water dish. Irene turned from the fridge, glanced over her husband's stooped back, and realized that a gigantic airplane wing had scythed into the ground, destroying their barbecue pit and part of the porch. It stood up at a ten-degree angle and was taller than their old maple tree.

Bud walked to the sink and began filling the dog's bowl. “Thought for sure I heard something last night.”

.   .   .

In the high school parking lot, the crashers discovered that Susan had arranged for four Sentra rentals, all identical. Isaiah Grey took a set of keys. “I'm heading to the airport. Anyone else?”

“You'll pass the crash site,” Walter Mulroney said. “Give me a lift?”

Tommy's satellite phone chimed and he answered it as Kiki Duvall announced that she was heading back to the hotel to get the digitalized cockpit voice recording, then would head to the crash site. John Roby said he would join her, since he had determined in his own mind that there would be no bomb residue to look for at the crash site.

Tommy disconnected and turned to Peter Kim, tossing him one of the sets of keys. “Petey? They found your other wing. Farmhouse, couple miles away. Trooper's waiting for you at the crash site and will take you there.”

Peter nodded, wordlessly, and climbed into the sedan.

That left Tommy and Susan Tanaka. “I'm heading into Portland, too. Gotta autopsy the pilots.”

“On one hour of sleep?”

He shrugged. “It's why I love being a pathologist. No small talk. No asking polite questions. You just open 'em and poke around inside.”

“You're a highly demented person, Dr. Tomzak.”

He climbed into the third Sentra. “Maybe you oughtn'ta put me in charge of this circus!”

“So tell me about this Daria,” Lucas Bell said.

Ray Calabrese made the turn onto Pico and shrugged. The dashboard clock said it was noon, straight up. The lunch-hour traffic was a bear and the rain was coming down lightly. The storm would burn off soon. “She came into the country three years ago, after a career as a spook. She'd have been a terrific asset for the CIA or even the Bureau, if she wasn't such a flibbertigibbet.”

Lucas studied him for a moment. “You straight people say the damnedest things.”

“Yeah.” Ray nodded. “We tend to look a lot alike, too. You ever notice that?”

They cruised past the bar Daria had told them about, looking for a place to park.

“Gibron. She's what? Lebanese?”

“Israeli,” Ray said. “She was a deep-cover Shin Bet agent, assigned to live in the West Bank, which she did for several years. She found out that a right-wing contingent in her own operation was afraid al Qaeda was going to get a toehold in Jerusalem, maybe even split the city like Berlin. They decided to have a liberal member of their own Knesset assassinated and to blame Islamist extremists. Daria didn't think that was right, and she didn't know who in her own agency she could trust. She didn't know who was CIA and who wasn't, and she didn't know if she trusted them, either.”

“Smart girl.”

“Yeah. Fortunately, there was an FBI operation in Beirut, there to train Israeli soldiers how to hunt for bodies in blown-up buildings.”

Lucas snorted. “You wouldn't think they'd need help with that. They should be experts.”

“We had some new heat-source-seeking technology. I was with the team. Anyway, she found us and we made a sort of crazy decision. The hit was happening within a couple of hours, so we informed Washington, then interceded ourselves. We stopped the plot and we won the thanks of the Knesset and Washington and all was well. But Daria took two bullets in the midsection. We didn't know who to trust any more than she had, so we evac'd her to Ramstein, and once she was better, she asked for asylum in the U.S. The brass said yes.”