Crashers (3 page)

She nodded.

“The table to your left,” she said, catching Jack's eyes and locking them onto hers. “Seven o'clock. Two men and two women.”

He squinted a little, but kept his eyes on hers. She stared straight back.

“Aye?”

“The man facing us is left-handed and is drinking red wine.”

He smiled, sandy eyebrows rising in mild surprise. “Am I that obvious?”

She nodded.

“Lass with her back to us is wearing a houndstooth coat and has a
cocktail with ice,” he said. “Why do Americans drink cocktails with ice?”

“I've no idea,” she said, and slid off her stool. “Shall we?”

 

Jack was with two other men, both of whom had Irish accents; they had secured a table in another room of the restaurant and were watching a horse race on a gigantic TV screen. A fourth Irishman sauntered their way, making a big show of counting out the twenties he'd just won from some lawyer-types at the bar.

“Having fun, are we?” Jack approached, his fingers barely touching Daria's left elbow.

“Aye, tha'.” The big man winked. “I'm winning. What'll yez have, then? 'Son me.”

Jack turned to the big guy, nodded at the money he'd won. “Less of that, you. We're on the clock here. I need your head in the fucking game.”

Daria noticed that the three other men treated Jack as their boss.

“Now,” Jack said. “Be lucky, my lads. The lady is about to show me a good time.”

 

It was almost 9
P.M.
when Daria unlocked the door to her flat and escorted Jack through the door. Inside, she knelt and swept away a Persian rug, revealing a trapdoor. She opened the door. Beneath it was the face of a safe with a ten-digit keypad. She tapped in a code, then cranked the handle and hauled open the door.

Within was a stash of handguns. Glock 9s, a couple of Colt Pythons and a Colt Defender, three Springfield Armory V-10s, a brace of Para-Ordnance P10s, and an PDA P14.

Jack knelt, ran his hand lovingly along the profile of the Colt Python. “You do know how to show a lad a good time.”

THE MEDICAL EXAMINER ACROSS the table said something that Dr. Leonard Tomzak disagreed with. In typical “Tommy” Tomzak fashion, he wadded up a napkin and threw it at the medical examiner's head.

“Stu?” he said. “That there is twenty pounds of horseshit in a ten-pound bag.”

The medical conference had begun in a sterile, white-on-white conference room at Portland's Oregon Health & Science University, complete with PowerPoint presentations and color-coded handouts. The topic—blunt abdominal trauma and the effects on hollow viscus—had drawn specialists from throughout the United States. The panel discussion had been gentlemanly, collegial. The audience in the stadium seating had applauded at the right times, laughed at the right anecdotes, and hadn't seemed surprised that there would be laughing points in a discussion of blunt abdominal trauma.

In short, it was a perfectly dull seminar.

Later, a half dozen of the top specialists moved the conference to a brew pub in downtown Portland. They sat at a thick, varnished wooden table, cluttered with beer mugs and pitchers, and greasy baskets of homemade corn chips and salsa that could melt the enamel off your teeth. Tommy drank seltzer with a wedge of lime.

The bartender, when asked, had provided vast sheets of butcher paper. The physicians drank and marveled over the salsa and drew rough diagrams of spines and skulls and vector analyses. They argued and drew over one another's chicken scratches.

“There seems no doubt whatsoever,” said the most scholarly of the group, a professor of emergency surgery at the Truman Center, University of Missouri. “Concussive damage is the most dangerous, period. The studies have been done again and again.”

Which is when Tommy finished off the last of his seltzer and did the wadding-up-and-throwing thing.

“Tommy! How can you argue with the facts?”

“I'm not,” Tommy drawled. He was leaning back, the front legs of his chair off the floor, his cowboy boots on the edge of the table. “I'm arguing with a guy who hasn't seen a real, live patient since Reagan was in office. Y'all got the American studies, sure, but the WHO stuff that's out right now points to the linear shearing of deceleration trauma. That there's your real killer.”

The professor removed his glasses and smiled kindly. “For a pathologist, you seem to hold an awful lot of interest in live patients, Tommy.”

Tommy brushed back an unruly hank of hair that fell near his left eyebrow. He wasn't really dressed for the professional lecture circuit, favoring khaki trousers, cowboy boots, and a blue denim shirt with a red-and-white-striped tie, loosened, the top shirt button undone. He also didn't make any effort to hide his Texas twang. “A whole lotta dead folks get carted into my operating room, Prof. I'm the guy digging around inside these folks. You can trust me on this.”

One of the trauma specialists—a woman who'd come down from Seattle for the conference—watched Tommy carefully and tried not to make it obvious. He wasn't classically handsome, but he had a tight, leathery roughness to his skin, as if he had spent a lot of time working or playing in the sun. His hair was black but turning gray around his neckline, and it was cut poorly, a straight, black hank hanging over his forehead and occasionally scraping his eyebrows. Five-eight and wiry. Also, no wedding ring. The Seattle trauma specialist checked her watch and wondered when this confab would end. She definitely planned to ask him out for a drink.

Before the argument could come around—for the fifth time—to the same points, a pediatric trauma specialist from New Orleans stepped out of the women's restroom, her eyes darting to the TV screen behind the bar. She stepped closer, peered up at the screen. She waved down the bartender,
asked him to turn up the audio, then turned to the debate. “Tommy? You better see this.”

Tommy craned his neck around, wondering why they always put TVs so damn high in bars. The picture was grainy, a bouncy image taken from the air, probably from a helicopter. A banner in the upper corner read
SPECIAL REPORT
, along with the station's call letters.

Tommy squinted; he wasn't wearing the glasses he needed to drive and play golf. But he could make out the image well enough. The helicopter was hovering over a scorched, burning field of grass. A long, rough trench had been gouged into the earth. The camera shifted to the right and revealed the smoldering tail of a jetliner.

The front legs of Tommy's chair hit the floor with a thunk. “Ah, shit.”

The peds expert at the bar took the remote from the bartender, upped the audio even more. “It just happened,” she said. “It's near Salem, south of here. I know you're with those air-crash people, I figured—”

Tommy's face reddened. “I was. I quit.”

One of the doctors at the table turned to him. “Crash people?”

“NTSB, yeah.”

Someone said, “NT . . . ?” and the peds specialist said, “National Transportation Safety Board.”

A neurosurgeon from Shanghai said, “When did you quit? I hadn't heard that.”

Tommy watched the screen. “Three, four months ago.”

The professor's eyebrows rose. “You're fifteen minutes away by helicopter. I always thought time was of the essence in these situations.”

Tommy said, “You got a helicopter?”

The woman who had been checking Tommy out was one of the hosting physicians from OHSU. She reached for her purse and produced a cell phone. “We're a level-one trauma center. We've got one, sure.”

Tommy watched the smoldering scene for a moment, then checked his watch. Almost 9
P.M.
He felt his stomach tightening up and wondered if his ulcer was making a comeback. He nodded without looking at the woman beside him. “Get me there.”

Susan Tanaka dashed through the darkened halls of the National Transportation and Safety Board building, empty except for the night cleaning
crew. The clocks showed midnight, Eastern Standard Time. She zigged around two guys with floor waxers. “Excuse me,” she shouted. “Coming through. Pardon.”

Susan was a small woman, only five-two, and she probably didn't weigh 110 pounds soaking wet. The men got out of her way all the same.

Her BlackBerry chirped. Susan wore it in a holster attached to the belt of her wool, camel-brown pin-striped trousers. She swept back the matching Max Mara jacket and snapped up the phone with the fast draw of an Old West gunslinger.

“Tanaka. Sorry, look out!” She zoomed past another janitor.

“Susan?” The shouting voice on the other end was tinny and hollow, the call definitely long distance. There also was an odd whooshing noise in the background.

“Who is this?”

“Tommy Tomzak. You heard?” She realized that he was shouting to be heard over that whooshing noise.

Susan rounded a corner, barely missed knocking over a security guard. “Oops. Sorry. The Vermeer in Oregon? We're on it. Where are you?”

“About five minutes from the site!” Tommy said.

Susan screeched to a dead stop, her Prada heels almost skittering out from beneath her. “What!”

“I was in Portland, at a conference! They're flying me out! I'll be on site in a couple of minutes! I can keep the site pristine until you build a crew! Susan? Can you fucking hear me over this racket?”

Susan swiped back her pitch-black hair, which she wore straight and shoulder length. Her suit was impeccably cut and her silk blouse was the color of brandy. She was a senior incident investigator. In a field dominated by men who wore jeans and steel-toed boots, Susan Tanaka had a reputation for her taste in clothes, wine, art; in short, in everything.

“Are you un-quitting?”

“Hell no! I'll handle the rescue work until your crew leaders get here.”

Susan shook her head in awe. “Tommy, the eastern seaboard is socked in. There's a tropical depression off the coast of Georgia. We won't get out of here for hours. If you want in, you're in, but I'm going to make you my Investigator in Charge.”

“Tanaka! You're as crazy as any five people I ever met!” he hollered. “No way, no how!”

“Tommy, this will be your fourth major crash investigation; one as
part of the pathology team, one as leader of the pathology team, and one as Investigator in Charge! At your age, that's incredible.”

“Yeah, but that last one was Kentucky,” he replied darkly, “and that was a clusterfuck! Look, I'm not the guy for this work and we both know it. Get out here fast as you can.”

And he hung up.

She closed her BlackBerry, started running again. She made it to her office just as one of her assistants arrived, wearing sweats and sneakers, pillow creases evident on her cheek. Susan waved a sheet of paper in front of her.

“We've got a liner on the ground. You call the names on the left, I've got the right. Hurry up; we're building a Go-Team.”

SAN FRANCISCO: KATHRYN DUVALL sat on a couch with a bowl of dry Special K cereal and a tortoise-shell cat on her lap. She was watching
Chocolat,
which she'd Netflixed for the fourth time. The special pager she kept with her twenty-four hours per day chirped.

Lawrence, Kansas: another pager woke up Walter Mulroney. An early riser, Walter had been in bed by nine and fallen asleep with a copy of
East of Eden
on his chest.

Pensacola, Florida: Peter Kim had been making love to his wife when the pager went off at their split-level home overlooking the Gulf. It would not be making too fine a point of it to say that the call ruined the moment.

New Haven, Connecticut: Isaiah Grey was sound asleep, his legs tangled with those of his wife, a fat tabby cat, and the eighty-pound Irish setter that insisted on sleeping perpendicular to them. It took Isaiah a minute to heave the dog off him so he could reach his pager.

Thirty thousand feet over Illinois: John Roby was en route to Toronto. By FAA regulations, his satellite pager couldn't be kept active while he flew, so Susan Tanaka's call was patched through to the copilot of the Boeing 757, who called the senior flight attendant, who went out to first class and informed John that he was being rerouted to Oregon, once they touched down.

“Yeah?” He'd been asleep when the attendant came back. It took him a moment to get his bearings. “Where's Oregon, then?”

The woman smiled. John's scruffy English accent identified him as a resident of Manchester. “Pacific Northwest, between California and Washington. You're with the NTSB?” She kept her voice low, not wanting the others to hear.

“Yeah. Something must be up.”

“I'll go up front and ask. The pilots usually hear from the towers. What are you, an investigator?”

“Aye.”

“Are you a pilot or engineer?”

He said, “Mad bomber.”

The Life Flight helicopter from Oregon Health & Science University touched down a little after 9
P.M.
Tommy was sweating despite the cold, and the sour, acidic feeling in his stomach hadn't gotten any better. He wasn't dressed for the field, but at least his cowboy boots were better designed for fieldwork than the loafers he'd considered wearing. One of the other docs had loaned him a fully lined coat. The temperature had just dropped under forty degrees.

Fire trucks were just now arriving from both directions, Portland and Salem. Ambulances were on the scene, too, at least six, with more dome lights visible in the distance, inching through insane traffic to reach the scene. Traffic on Interstate 5 had slowed to a crawl in both directions, and the emergency vehicles were moving exclusively along the shoulders. State troopers were there, but they didn't have much work to do.

For all that frenzy, Tommy couldn't take his eyes off the blackened, still-smoldering gouge that had been clawed diagonally through a field of grass. The tail section and about a third of the fuselage lay nearby, the grass before the open end of the fuselage littered with overturned seats and human bodies and survivors. The rest of the fuselage was a quarter mile away. One wing was missing.