Crashers (31 page)

“I was never a hundred percent about the Irish terrorists,” Ray said. “I mean, they are in L.A. That's for certain. The biggest hurdle for me? It's the whole hate thing. That four Protestants hate anyone or anything enough to take out
that
.”

He gestured toward the Frankenstein airliner on the far side of the hangar.

“Guy kills a guy for money. That I get. Guy kills a guy for love of a woman. Sure. One extremist of faith puts a twenty-two to the back of another extremist's head, double tap to the skull. Happens. But to hate Catholicism enough to knock a Vermeer out of the sky? It never added up.”

“Given what we just saw . . .” Tommy said, nudging his chin in the direction of the Mac.

“Yeah,” Ray said. “Pilot error sucks, but it makes more sense than thinking anyone
hates
anyone or anything enough to do this.”

They sipped their coffee, just two guys.

Tommy said, “I dunno. I fuckin' hate the Lakers . . .” and Ray snorted a laugh.

 

Susan Tanaka looked over at Tommy cracking up Ray Calabrese and shook her head in awe. Who saw that happening?

Behind her, Dennis Silverman said, “Is there a phone around here?”

Susan pointed toward the airfield's office. As the pudgy little engineer walked away, Susan noted the medical examiner's daughter, who was repacking her computer. Susan crossed to her. “It's Laura?”

The girl nodded.

“What do you do?”

“I'm in high school, but I'm taking classes at Portland Community College. Web page design.”

Susan slipped a business card across the table to her.

“Give me a call when you get your degree. I might have something a wee bit more challenging than that for you.”

The girl blushed. “Thanks!”

Susan smiled, turned away.

“Ms. Tanaka?”

She turned back. The girl shifted her vision from Susan to the retreating back of Dennis Silverman. The quicksilver image she'd seen earlier, of Dennis grinning madly, seemed too fantastic to have been true.

“Nothing,” she said.

THE PHONE RANG THREE times before the computer-generated voice said, “Leave a message.”
Beep
.

Feargal Kelly said, “Finally! Fucking thing hasn't worked all night. It's us. We're heading out to the rendezvous site.”

They were in the Greyhound station in Indio, California. Standing next to him, Keith O'Shea kept watch, on the lookout for cops or the FBI. He wished the two of them weren't haloed by the glaring overhead light in the parking lot. It was like a damn stage spotlight. The station had wound down for the night, the graveyard crew starting their rotation and the commuter traffic long dried up. The only remaining travelers were O'Shea and Kelly.

Kelly slammed the receiver back into its cradle. “So what's wrong with the message phone, you figure?”

“Dunno, do I. The shite don't work, then all of a sudden fixes itself.”

They thought about that for a moment; and thinking was neither man's forte. “D'you fancy the FBI has the machine? That that's why we couldn't use it before?”

A quick look at the weather page of the discarded
Los Angeles Times
, plunked down on a bench not three feet from them, would have solved the mystery. Neither man thought to look at the paper.

O'Shea shrugged. “Donal says rendezvous in the Mojave and use the phone to keep in touch. We do as the man says.”

That was good enough for Kelly.

It was well past midnight, EST. The last living souls on the sixth floor of the NTSB headquarters were one janitor and Delevan Wildman, whose in-basket was only now shrinking to match the height of his out-basket. Due to the hour, when the phone rang, he picked it up and said, “Susan?”

“Don't you ever go home?”

Del threw down his pen, removed his half glasses. “Home, home. That word rings a bell. What's up?”

He noted the pause before the answer. “We're looking at pilot error, Del.”

The retired pilot grimaced. “What are you talking about, child? You're only forty-eight hours into this thing.”

“We're more sure than I ever expected to be. The Vermeer had a Gamelan FDR. Have we worked a crash site with one of those before?”

“No.” Del Wildman had facts like that tucked away in his brain for every crash that had been investigated over the last five years. “We've heard reports that the new data recorders are incredible. Are they really that good?”

Susan said, “We just saw a graphic display of the data. I'm talking comprehensive data, Del. It normally takes our techs weeks to gather this much information. We have a rep from Gamelan on the Go-Team, and he downloaded the data onto a Mac. He said he'd have had the stuff for us yesterday, but the recorder interface was damaged. It's amazing technology.”

Del whistled two notes.

“When I get back,” Susan said, “I'm going to recommend Gamelan FDRs become standard issue on all major carriers.”

Dennis Silverman looked at the telephone receiver as if it were alive. All day long, he'd gotten an out-of-service chime whenever he tried the Irishmen's Georgia-based answering service. At first, when this call had gone
through, Dennis was overjoyed. But before he could even speak, anxiety hit him.

What if the phone had been compromised? Why had it not worked, and now suddenly it was fine?

He set the receiver back in its cradle. He hadn't spoken a word.

Better safe than sorry.

 

Dennis hurried out into the drizzle and climbed into his Outback. He'd been so excited, so jubilant, over the success of his little charade. He couldn't wait to share his good news with Donal O'Meara. But the answering machine spooked him. What did that mean? He'd seen a story on CNN about a storm on the East Coast. Maybe phone service had been disrupted. Maybe it was nothing more than that.

Still . . .

Dennis sat in the brightly lighted parking lot, wondering if the plan was off .

If it is, who cares?
he decided. His plan had worked; worked brilliantly, if he did say so himself.

Gamelan Industries had been making a fine profit selling flight data recorders to airlines. But sales had been flat of late. Some people in the company wanted to blame marketing (which, despite the department's name, never seemed to be marketing much of anything). Others said that the FDRs were just plain too expensive when compared to digital recorders that didn't provide immediate infrared access and a graphic user interface. Not to mention the diagnose-and-repair technology. Still others blamed Boeing and Airbus, which had been slower than their smaller competitor, Vermeer, in adopting the Gamelans as standard equipment.

Dennis Silverman knew the real reason for the slowdown. In the six years that jets had been equipped with Gamelan FDRs, none of them had ever crashed. Since they hadn't crashed, the FAA and the NTSB hadn't seen how damn good the devices were.

No crashes; it was just bad luck that had stalled the company, not to mention stalling Dennis Silverman's profit-sharing contract.

It had taken Dennis weeks, working evenings and weekends in his workshop at home, to create the necessary programming. Rather than fix avionics problems, he'd devised an upload program that could cause them. Big or little, it hardly mattered, as long as it was computer driven. And hell, everything in modern airliners was run by computers.

He could do everything from turning off the lights in the bathrooms to shutting down the engines. Best of all, he could do it all from the ground below a passing jetliner. And since the transmitter used a widely dispersed infrared beam, he didn't have to worry about hitting some obscure target.

He'd tested his contraption on five flights landing at Portland International Airport. They'd been little gremlins, each time. Something small enough not to cause a disaster.

And when the FDRs were recalibrated—which Gamelan engineers did as part of their service contract, every five hundred flight hours—Dennis had made sure to get the boxes delivered to his cubicle.

All five Gamelans had registered the inconsequential errors that Dennis had whistled up for them. The tests had been 100 percent successful.

But when it came time to save the company, Dennis began to have second thoughts. Sure, increasing corporate profits was a pretty good motivation. So was increasing his own profits. But Dennis wondered who else might be interested in his ability to crash an airliner. Surely the world was chock-full of people who had an interest in causing such accidents.

He began reading everything he could find about terrorists and terrorism. He scoured the newspaper and the evening news, taped TV programs on the subject. He did Internet searches on the Pentium-fast computer at his office.

It was on the Internet that Dennis first heard about the Red Fist of Ulster. At first, he thought the “red” in their name meant they were socialists. More research revealed the Ulster myth of a warrior-king who, sailing up to Ireland, promised great honor and riches to the man who first set hand on the island's soil. One of his bravest warriors proved his valor by chopping off his own hand and hurling it onto the beach.

The red hand, apparently, had remained a symbol of bravery in Northern Ireland to this day. Dennis doubted that it had ever been a symbol of long-range planning, but that was beside the point.

According to one knowledgeable chat room on the Net, two cells of the Red Fist brigade had run afoul of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and were doing time in British prisons after bombing plans had failed. Their goal had been to disrupt the power-sharing government and to revert Northern Ireland to the bad old days of the twentieth century and The Troubles. The group appeared to be violent enough, and in need of a victory. To Dennis, they seemed perfect.

With his skills as a programmer, it was child's play to tap in to AOL and
create a fictional user ID and account for himself, one with no ties to his real life. Surfing under the alias, Dennis drifted deeper and deeper into the online world of the anti-Catholic movement. When he found lurkers—people tapping in to the chat rooms but not chatting—he again hacked their Internet service providers to get their account backgrounds.

He eventually found one lurker who turned up again and again under different tags, each an alias. He traced the lurker's account and determined that the person was a man living in Long Beach, California. Dennis sent him an e-mail—encrypted and traceable to a retirement home in Durham, North Carolina, which he'd picked at random. The e-mail read, “Two swings, two misses. I can assure the Red Fist a hit. If interested, log in on Friday with a brand-new ID. I'll find you.”

On Friday, a different name popped up in one of the anti-Catholic chat rooms. Again, Dennis's home-grown programming showed the true account name of every person logged in. The newcomer was his lurker with a new pseudonym.

Over the next week, Dennis explained his proposal to the lurker: pick a jetliner. If it's equipped with one specific bit of technology, Dennis explained, he could bring it down.

Dennis set up a dummy e-mail account with a real estate firm in Minneapolis—again, picked at random—so that he and the lurker could communicate. It turned out that the lurker was a U.S. government official who had secretly been leaking intelligence to the Red Fist. Given the opportunity to play broker between the anonymous Dennis Silverman and the Irishmen, the lurker was only too pleased to oblige. He offered Dennis five hundred thousand dollars to drop an airplane, but (naturally) demanded proof that the technology worked.

Eventually, they'd had to take the risk of meeting in person. The lurker had picked Las Vegas. It hadn't been love at first sight—they were vastly different coconspirators—but they got along well enough to put the whole plan together.

Dennis had agreed. A date had been set. He'd get one hundred thousand for dropping a random jet, and the remaining four hundred grand for dropping a very specific jet.

“Watch the news,” was the message he sent to the lurker.

“Give me three months,” Dennis's new coconspirator wrote back. “I can get the right people into an airplane, and get some of our like-minded people into the States to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

Like-minded
. That had made Dennis laugh. He wasn't particularly anti-Catholic, and if he'd found an IRA lurker first, that's who he'd have dealt with.

 

And now, here it was, three months later, and the test jet had crashed, just as advertised. The good guys had raced to the scene and had promptly handed the most vital piece of evidence to Dennis Silverman himself. He'd doctored it up nice and pretty, handed it right back to them, and had been patted on the head.

He couldn't wait to drop the real target.

Dennis and his lurker could have continued using the Internet but, over the last few months,
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
had run stories about supersecret government agencies that illegally monitored Internet communications, looking for al Qaeda and other Islamist forces. Dennis and his lurker agreed to terminate their chats and, instead, opted for a much older form of communication—one that had stood the test of time for organized crime for many decades: an answering service, paid in cash, in a faraway city.

Only now, that communication link seemed to be on the fritz.
Could be a coincidence,
Dennis thought. But did he dare take that chance?

The timing was critical. The target was a day away and in California. The Red Fist of Ulster would be on scene to make sure the right people failed to survive the flight. All Dennis had to do was get himself to California and take care of business. He'd already been given permission by his bosses to attend a conference in San Diego. After th—