Crashers (27 page)

“He's there with you now?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I think we're the babysitters, Suze. I think the evidence is going to tell us that the Irishman crashed the jet.”

“There was no bomb. And the cockpit voice recorder; there was a thrust-reverser deployment in engine three. The pilots—”

“They didn't miss it, Suze. They didn't sit there for three minutes and forget to check their monitors! You heard the recorder. They didn't panic.”

“Then how—”

“I don't know, but all the engineers and pilots and pathologists in the world won't figure that one out. I think maybe the FBI might. I want Calabrese at the table. With the Go-Team.”

Susan said simply, “Done.”

“Okay. Tell Del? Gotta go.” And she heard him hang up.

 

Forty miles to the north, Ray Calabrese extended his hand to shake. Then remembered where Tommy's hand had just been.

DARIA RETURNED TO THE alley in Covina. Johnser Riley's body lay hidden behind the Dumpster. She planted the bar's napkin and the magnetic room key on him, retrieved his gun and the handcuff s.

She returned to the hotel room; she'd left the door unlocked by blocking the bolt with the HBO guide. She put Johnser's Glock and the handcuff key on top of the TV, climbed onto the bed, and chained her left wrist to the aged radiator.

Then she closed her eyes and willed herself to sleep. Just as she used to do in the field.

Lucas Bell said, “Yes, ma'am. Covina? . . . Closest intersection? . . . Thank you, ma'am,” and hung up. He checked his watch. Almost 4
P.M.
In a little over four hours, the crash would hit the forty-eight-hour mark.

He dashed from his office, rapped on the door of Henry Deits, who looked up from a deep pile of paperwork. “What?”

“The Gibron woman called Ray. I checked with Ray's cell provider. They traced her end of the call to a pay phone outside a hotel in Covina.”

“Okay, let's move.”

Lucas showed Deits the palm of his hand. “Hang on. She killed one of the four. Johnser Riley. And she says the Irishmen definitely downed the jetliner.”

“Ray?”

“He's told the NTSB guys. They're giving him full access to the investigation.”

Diets stood. “Now we're talking. Covina. I want boots on the ground.”

But Lucas was already gone from his doorway.

KAZMANSKI:
Confirmed center autopilot on.

Sounds of airplane in flight.

KAZMANSKI:
Like a baby's butt.

DANVERS:
Damn straight.

More sounds of standard flight.

KAZMANSKI:
Hmm. What's that?

Tap.

DANVERS:
What's what?

KAZMANSKI:
I've got a—Whoa!

Sounds of violent shaking.

DANVERS:
Shit! Trimming rudder to the left! What've we got?

KAZMANSKI:
I—Dammit!

 

Kiki stopped the MP3 player and removed her thick foam headset. She was sitting in the copilot's seat of the swap-out, the exact replica of the doomed Vermeer 111, provided by the airline. Officials at the company assured the Go-Team that this plane was a clone of Flight 818, down to all the retrofitted specialty avionics.

The copilot, Russ Kazmanski, had seen something odd, something that caught his attention. That had been followed by a tapping sound.

Using the knuckle of her forefinger, Kiki reached for the nearest monitor and tapped it once. She frowned, cocked her head to one side. She reached over and tapped the next monitor once. Another frown.

She methodically worked her away around to every monitor and control surface within arm's reach. None of them produced the same tapping sound she'd heard on the digital recording.

She leaned back, thinking about it, absently twirling an escaped strand of her red-brown hair. She tapped the first monitor again, this time with the tip of her finger. She wore her nails clipped short, so that wasn't a problem.

The sound was wrong. She tapped the next one waited, frowned.

Tap. Wait. Frown. Tap. Wait. Frown. The whole circuit again.

Isaiah Grey entered. Without turning around, Kiki said, “Close the door, please.” The door to the flight deck had been closed during the crisis; opening it changed the acoustics of the deck.

“What are you doing?”

“There's a tapping sound on the CVR, just after the copilot said, ‘What's that?' I figure he saw something that wasn't kosher. And a second later, everything went ka-blooy.” She turned in her seat. “You got a minute?”

“I'm just doing some paperwork. I can do it here as well as anywhere.”

“Good. Sit down. I need your body.”

“A guy never gets tired of hearing that.” Isaiah snugged himself into the pilot's left-hand seat, rested his clipboard against the yoke.

Kiki smiled. “I need your body
and
your clothes. To alter the acoustics, just like the captain's did.”

Isaiah said, “It's nice to be needed.”

Kiki dug her headset and control pad out of the pocket of her denim shirt and punched in a number. “Tommy?”

“What!” his voice snapped back over the line.

“Um, it's Kiki. Are you all right?”

“Hell no. My back's killing me and my hands are cramping like a sumbitch. 'Sup?”

“Do you keep a list of the personal belongings of the bodies?”

“Course.”

“What did the copilot have in his pockets?” Kiki looked down at the shoulder harness, which she'd strapped on to approximate how far Russ Kazmanski had been able to reach. She noticed that the pockets of her jeans were inaccessible. “Just his shirt and jacket.”

“Hang on. . . . Let's see, let's see . . .” Kiki heard pages flipping. “Kazmanski. Yeah, got it. Two sticks of gum. Sugar-free. One pen.”

“What kind?”

Tommy said, “Big Red.”

“Pen, Tommy! What kind of pen.”

“Bic. Disposable, fine point. Black ink.”

“Thanks, bye.” She rang off, distracted. “Isaiah, do you have a Bic pen?”

He felt through his pockets, found two pens. “Both Pilots. Naturally.”

She sighed, rubbed her forehead. “Can you get me a Bic pen?”

Isaiah smiled and eased himself back out of the chair. Normally, he didn't like anyone wasting his time, but Isaiah found it fascinating to watch Kiki. She had an intuitive understanding of the science of sound, the way a musical wunderkind can pick up a violin and play a sonata without practicing. He had been secretly studying Kiki on the one other crash they'd investigated together.

“Be right back,” he said.

The searchers from the power-plant crew were working in full breathing apparatus now, the stench of the jet fuel making it otherwise impossible to work in the field.

Three of the searchers gathered by a drainage ditch and showed one another what they had found. Each carried a piece of tempered steel, thin and about the size of a legal pad. Each was designed to be curved, and they were. But each had also been torqued, twisted in a way their designers had never intended. Each twist was clockwise.

The leader of the search flipped open a cell phone and dialed.

Peter Kim slipped on his ear jack and voice wand, then said, “Kim.”

“Sir. We've found four blocker doors and a couple of reverser sleeves in the field. Each has a clockwise warp.”

Peter stood in a lab the size of three handball courts, with very high ceilings and a spiderweb of air ducts and pipes hanging from the ceiling tiles. The room vents maintained a positive air pressure to keep out contaminants. In the center of the room was a worktable, belt-high and as large as the key of a basketball court. A crew of eight—some of Peter's people, some from Patterson-Pate, the engine manufacturer—were slowly stripping apart engine number four, taken from the wing found at the Wheeler residence. Each piece was measured with calipers and the measurements were checked against the “bible” from Patterson-Pate. It was slow, meticulous work.

Peter had lost interest in the process the moment he heard the news
over his satellite phone. Engine number four seemed in relatively good working order considering that it had been taken from a backyard barbecue pit. Now his attention was squarely on the remnants of engine number three, found on the field two miles from the crash site.

“Clockwise torque,” Peter repeated into his voice wand. “That fits with the twists we saw in the engine mounts.”

“Yes, sir. We've got a partially deployed thrust reverser in midflight.”

“Which the pilots didn't correctly identify in time to fix,” Peter added. “Classic pilot error. Okay. Keep on it until you've found every last micron of that engine. I want it all.”

Donal O'Meara rapped on the door three times. Assuming the worst, he waited until the street outside the hotel was empty, then drew his steel Colt Python with the black grip and kicked in the door. He entered low, the revolver aimed in front of him in a two-hand hold.

Johnser Riley was nowhere to be seen. Daria Gibron sat bolt upright on the bed, eyes wide with shock. It took O'Meara a moment to realize she'd been sleeping. She was shackled to the radiator.

Gun aimed at her midsection, O'Meara rose. “Where's Riley?”

“Here and gone,” she said, her shock disappearing quickly.

O'Meara cocked the stocky steel gun. “Talk sense, woman.”

“Riley was here for about five minutes, before he put this on me and left.” She rattled the handcuffs. “He was gone maybe forty minutes, an hour. I asked him where he was going. He told me to shut up. Then he fiddled about with the window in the bathroom, trying to open it or something. Now, will you please get me out of this damn thing? The key's on the TV.”

O'Meara looked. It was, but so was Johnser's Glock 9. He'd gone out unarmed. O'Meara moved to the bed and touched her forehead with the barrel of the Colt. “If you're fucking with me . . .” He let the threat go unfinished and turned to the door.

“Donal?”

He turned back.

“Can I at least have the remote control?”

He left.

.   .   .

That fucking Gibron woman,
O'Meara fumed. There she was, shackled and unarmed. Certainly she couldn't have done anything to that 230-pound package of violence that was John Padraic Riley. Still, she'd been a wild card ever since she'd shown up. Everything she'd said and done seemed to help their cause. But all of O'Meara's finely honed soldier's senses seemed slightly off-kilter in her presence. She was like a lodestone in a shop full of compasses.

Daria had said that Johnser had fiddled about with the bathroom window. O'Meara circled the hotel, counted off the windows until he came to the back of room seven. A grimy, sun-beaten Dumpster had been shoved up to the window. It looked out of place, that close to the wall. O'Meara pried open the lid and peered inside. Nothing. He looked around at the other side.

Johnser Riley's eyes were wide open, hands wrapped around his own throat, mouth open in a perfect O, revealing two gold teeth. He was curled up, almost in a fetal position, and flies buzzed around a trickle of dried blood that ran from his exposed ear to the collar of his fine, white shirt.

O'Meara knelt, his face red, his breath coming in shallow gasps, the air seeming hot as hell as it escaped his lungs. His vision blurred as tears arrived.

Johnser. Jesus, God. Johnser.

He wiped tears off his cheek. He'd drawn his gun but couldn't remember when. He was holding the black grip so tight that his wrist cramped up. Willing himself to calm down, O'Meara breathed in as much air as he could, filled his lungs to capacity, held it, exhaled. He swatted at the flies buzzing around his lifelong friend.

He tucked his Colt back into his belt. He closed Johnser's eyes. He checked the man's pockets and found nothing but a napkin embossed with the logo of a sports bar. None of the money stolen from the Egyptian's mansion. No wallet.

“Oh, God, Johnser,” he whispered. “Who'd you piss off this time, my lad?”

 

O'Meara returned to the hotel room. Daria sighed theatrically and made a show of rattling the handcuffs.

He stared at her, unmoving. She stared back. Could she have killed Johnser Riley? Maybe. She'd kicked the shite out of that FBI fella back in Los Angeles. Also the fat Arab at the mansion. And that, while handcuffed.

But could she have moved that massive Dumpster to hide Johnser's body? Not bloody likely.

Daria gave up the staring game first. “What?”

“Nothing.” He went to the TV set and grabbed the handcuff key, tossing it to her. One-handed catch. Daria unsnapped the cuff, rose from the bed, and flexed her knees and back. “Where's the big man?”

“He went ahead.”

O'Meara crossed to the bed stand, picked up the phone, and dialed eight for long distance, then a ten-digit number.

Daria said, “If it's room service, I could kill for a bloody Mary.”

O'Meara ignored her. Over the line, a mechanical voice said, “We apologize, but telephone service has been disrupted. Thank you for your patience.”

“Gobshite!” He hung up, turned on the television, found it already on CNN. He moved one station down, to CNN Headline News.

And five minutes later, discovered that phone service was out for all of Georgia and the Carolinas.

His Atlanta telephone exchange was useless.

He hung up, turned, found Daria sitting on the bed, slipping into her Spanish boots, dark eyes studying him. “Change of plan?”

“Here.” O'Meara showed her how much of the stolen money he had left. “Think that'll buy us another change of clothes?”