Crashers (33 page)

Tommy squinted, almost shutting his eyes. Through his eyelashes, the jetliner looked almost whole, missing only its landing gear and engines three and four, on the right-hand wing.

Despite the hour, Walter Mulroney was overseeing the work. He turned to see the newcomers, who were heading across the vast interior of the
hangar in his direction. Tommy had retrieved a large cardboard box from the trunk of his car and carried it under one arm. “You're up bright and early.”

Tommy pointed to the flight deck. “We need to get into that cockpit.”

Walter yawned, looking haggard. Tommy realized Walter had burned through the night with the carpentry crew. “No chance. I don't know if it's stable yet. We haven't tested the scaffolding.”

“Fine. We'll test it.” Tommy set down the cardboard box. Its four flaps had been folded over one another like the petals of a flower. He yanked on one flap and they all opened. He withdrew a sealed plastic bag containing a stark white biohazard suit, which he tossed to Kiki. He ripped open a second bag, unfolded his own suit.

To Walter's amazement, Kiki toed off her deck shoes and shimmied out of her jeans. She wore tiny briefs with a floral pattern. He started to protest but realized that Tommy had stripped down to his BVDs, too.

Walter turned to the Vermeer, studiously not looking at either of them. “Tomzak, I don't know what's gotten into you, but I can't let anyone up there yet.”

“File a protest with the Investigator in Charge. Oh, wait. That's me.” Tommy stepped into his coveralls, which were connected to clunky boots, and tugged them up. In a less cocky voice, he added, “I'm sorry, man, I don't mean to flip you shit. It's just that we may have figured out what the copilot saw, seconds before everything went to hell.”

Kiki laid a hand on Walter's shoulder. “Please? It's important.”

He said, “It might not be safe.”

“I can take care of myself. And if worse comes to worst, I can take care of Tommy.”

Tommy said, “Right, we— Hey!”

Walter wasn't happy but, truth be told, Kiki Duvall was the most athletically inclined member of the Go-Team. Not that that would amount to a hill of beans if the scaffolding buckled under them. But in the end, Walter's decision was based more on his experience with the carpenters than faith in his teammates. “All right. It should be safe as houses. Just go easy.”

By seven in the morning, the temperature was eighty-five and the wind that whistled up out of the Baja Peninsula was as dry as chalk. Donal
O'Meara had never been much farther south than the 45th Parallel in his forty-plus years. He had a bad feeling about the day to come.

He and Daria had checked into a fleabag motel near the freeway. O'Meara immediately cuffed her to the headboard of the bed, then jumped into the shower. He padded out twenty minutes later, a towel wrapped around his washboard midsection, and uncuffed her so that she could shower. “Don't dawdle,” he warned. “We've a busy day ahead of us.”

Daria emerged a half hour later, slipping the little floral-patterned dress over her head. It fluttered past her white panties and she adjusted how it fell across her hips. They'd picked up the clothes and mismatched luggage at Goodwill. “Where to, now?”

He eyed her hungrily, but there wasn't time. “We find breakfast, then we steal a car. Are you any good at that?”

Daria ran a hand through her short, pitch-black hair, which fell naturally across her brow. “I can jimmy a lock and I can hot-wire an engine.”

“Clever girl,” he said, lighting his last Silk Cut. He'd have to switch to American cigarettes. “Ten for ten. Let's go.”

Ray Calabrese was on the floor at the foot of his bed, wearing boxers and halfway through one hundred crunches, when his cell phone chirped.

He rose—using only his legs, his hands not touching the carpet—and crossed to the TV stand where he'd left his cell phone. “Calabrese.”

“It's Henry Deits. We got a nibble in Atlanta last night.”

Ray listened as the assistant director related the story of the telephone number found in a gum wrapper at the Irishmen's bivouac. “We traced it to an answering machine in an apartment in Georgia. Everything paid in cash. We think the Irish were using it to contact each other and whoever's working with them. Also, we got lucky and caught an incoming call last night. The caller hung up before speaking but we got the trace.”

Ray said, “From . . . ?”

“You're going to love this: Oregon.”

“Holy shit.” Ray squeezed the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache coming on. “Boss, I do not get this. We saw evidence last night that the crash was pilot error. We have absolutely nothing here indicating terrorism. But Daria's sure. And it just . . . it
feels
right.”

“I know. I still like the Red Fist assholes for it. That phone call? It came from an airfield in a town called, ah, Valence. It's in—”

Ray said, “Are you shitting me, here?”

“What?”

Ray sat on the bed. “Jesus! I was there! Last night! It's where they put the airliner!”

Henry Deits whistled.

“When was the call?”

“Ah, hang on . . . Eight seventeen.”

Ray took a beat. Deits said, “Calabrese?”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“We were there. Then. The NTSB Go-Team. We were all there.”

“Are you telling me . . . Is this crap connected to the investigators?”

“Maybe. Yeah. I . . .” Ray's mind was reeling. “Yes. One of the crashers called a number that our guys also found in the Irishmen's hideout. That can't be a coincidence.”

“So . . .”

Ray said, “We need to background these guys. Got a pen?”

“Go.”

“Okay: first guy to look into is Tomzak, Dr. Leonard. Pathologist, lives in Austin, Texas.” He spelled the name. “Next. . . .”

The carpentry team had built a wooden ladder leading up to the Vermeer, but not connecting to the usual forward hatch, at frame 17, where passengers board and leave. That area was badly warped, the door itself lying on the floor of the hangar, tagged as evidence. Thanks to the fuselage damage, it had been Walter's suggestion to make egress from the midwing emergency exit. That's where the ladder led.

Walter said, “Take it slow, you two. I usually have a steeplejack test that scaffolding first.”

“Got it,” Tommy said.

He and Kiki were covered neck to foot in the safety suits, complete with sealed gloves. They'd clipped their satellite-phone links to the outsides of their suits.

He paused at the foot of the ladder and touched Kiki's elbow. “Listen, this isn't pretty,” he warned. “It's a charnel house up there. It's like nothing you've ever seen before. I puked. Doesn't mean you will, but you might. Here.” He handed her the bag her suit had been sealed in. “If you have to upchuck, use this.”

Kiki stuffed the bag into the web belt of her suit. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

She started scaling the ladder. Tommy followed.

At the top, Kiki waited to let Tommy catch up. He was breathing heavily, annoyed to be so out of shape. “Sorry.”

“Well, you got a workout last night,” she said. Tommy blushed. Her tone was light but her green eyes glowed with more than a little trepidation. “You ready?”

Kiki flicked on her flashlight. Tommy hit his light and led the way in through the emergency door.

The smell was still bad but not as horrible as it had been in the grassy field. During the drive down I-5, the wind had whipped through the fuselage. Still, blood and viscera gleamed on most surfaces, shiny and tacky. Kiki said, “Oh my,” and stopped just inside the door.

“You okay?”

She forced herself to keep her eyes open, forced them to follow the circle of light from her flash. She nodded.

“All right. Watch your step.”

Tommy started down the aisle. It was much easier this time; in the field, the plane had rested at an odd angle, the floor pitched thirty degrees counterclockwise. Now it was as stable as the swap-out, which they could see through the shattered windows.

He ignored the blood-drenched magazines and little pillows, and the bits of gristle that crunched under his feet. Stepping over larger articles of debris, he eased forward, Kiki at his heels.

Halfway to the front, the scaffolding that held them thirty feet off the floor groaned ominously. They froze. Tommy's ear jack crackled and Walter Mulroney said, “Are you all right up there?”

Tommy jostled his mike into place. “Think so.”

They started moving again. Kiki gasped and Tommy turned. Her flashlight rested on a G.I. Joe action figure. The toy rested on the floor beneath one of the seats. A child's fist still clutched it, the wrist bones glistening white.

“The med techs missed that,” Tommy said. “Sorry.”

Kiki was very close to panicking. Or puking. She forced herself to breathe deeply through her mouth. She made eye contact with Tommy and nodded. They moved forward again.

Ahead of them was a band of light. The fuselage and the nose cone were near each other, but with a two- or three-inch gap all the way around. They stepped over that gingerly, hearing the scaffolding groan again. Tommy looked through the gap and saw Walter, staring up at them, three floors below.

Tommy approached the flight deck with an odd sense of vertigo. The last time he'd been here, it had been nose down, everything facing the wrong direction. He shone his flashlight on the galley refrigerator. There was a jumble of footprints on its surface, at chest height. Kiki said, “How in the world did those get there?”

“They're mine. Ain't that weird?”

He swiveled the light through the galley, stopping at a drawer that was jammed halfway open. “That's what I thought. See?” He reached in and pulled out a red plastic swizzle stick. “If you get coffee with cream from a stewardess, they don't give you a spoon.”

“It's ‘flight attendant,' not ‘stewardess.' And I know what they give passengers. I want to see what the flight crew gets. Did you check Kazmanski's autopsy?”

Tommy had, surprised to find the Multnomah County Medical Examiner in his office before seven. “Kazmanski's stomach turned up positive for coffee with milk. Thoroughly undigested, too. He'd just swallowed it before he died.”

Kiki shouldered past him onto the ruined flight deck. The windows had been smashed on impact and the smells of the hangar—including the aroma of fresh-cut wood—blocked out much of the stench here. The pilot's left-hand seat had been torn apart by Tommy's volunteers on Tuesday, to get to Meghan Danvers.

The copilot's seat had been wrenched off its tracks and hung at an odd angle against the flight controls. Viscera glistened on the remains of both chairs. Kiki knelt and played her flashlight slowly across every surface. Tommy stayed standing, his light shining over her head. He kept it steady so that it wouldn't make the shadows dance.

Kiki scoured through splattered blood and wads of paper that had escaped three-ring binders. She used a pencil to shift detritus aside. Two minutes later, she held up a shard of porcelain. “You don't get coffee in nice cups like this, not if you're a passenger.”

“So if the flight crew gets better cups . . .” Tommy left the thought dangling.

Kiki resumed her search. It took another three minutes before she said, “Bingo.”

A ventilator shaft behind the copilot's seat had been wrenched partway open. She slipped two gloved fingers through the opening and withdrew a stainless steel spoon.

It held a brownish residue. She held it under her nose. “Coffee.”

She stood and turned. Tommy was staring past her at the ruined avionics equipment. “What?”

Without answering, Tommy tapped several numbers into the satellite phone control box on his belt. “Peter? It's Tommy. Where are you?”

“Three stories beneath you,” the voice came back immediately. “It was stupid to go in there, Tomzak.”

“Good seeing you, too, Pete. Listen, Silverman, the guy from Gamelan? He said the pilots had about three minutes of warning that a reverser had kicked in. Right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know which monitor that would have shown up on?”

Peter Kim didn't try to hide the note of annoyance. “Of course.”

“So can you pull that monitor out of here and reconstruct what was on it? I mean, is there any way to know which lights were on and which were off, when it was smashed?”

After a pause, Peter said, “Actually, yes. We can tell if a filament was hot or cold when it broke. Why?”

“Do it,” Tommy said. “We've proven the fuselage is safe. Get someone up here and get that monitor tested. Okay?”

Peter sighed loudly. “But of course. You're in charge.”

DONAL O'MEARA CLIMBED OUT of the stolen Jeep and mopped his neck with the palm of his hand. They had arrived in Boca Serpiente, California. It was going on 9
A.M.
and already sweat prickled his brow, discolored a V shape on the front of his T-shirt. “This is like some fucking alien planet,” he groused.

O'Meara had chosen khaki trousers, hiking boots, and a T-shirt from Goodwill. Daria wore cuffed shorts with hiking boots and a light cotton shirt with epaulets and breast pockets. She wore the tails of the shirt tied off just under her small breasts. She looked perfectly comfortable as the thermometer outside a convenience store hit eighty-six.

O'Meara pointed to a store that boasted
GAS, GRUB AND AMMO!

“They better have a fucking beer in here, or I'm shooting someone,” O'Meara said.

Daria studied him over the top of her glasses and beneath the fringe of her bangs. “Didn't think you could abide American beer.”

“It tastes like a rat pissed in the can, but it gets any hotter, and I'm not going to give a damn.”