Crashers (34 page)

They entered the convenience store. An air conditioner as old as Daria hacked ineffectually behind a lottery-ticket display and dropped condensation onto the counter. It was maybe two degrees cooler than outside. “Can
you at least tell me where we're going?” she asked, pulling a plastic bottle of water out of a refrigeration case and holding it against her breastbone.

“You can stop asking,” O'Meara said, his voice muffled because he was half leaning into the open case, the inside of the glass misting with every word he spoke. “We're there.”

Susan Tanaka faced the crowd of reporters and their entourages of sound and camera crews. The certain knowledge that pilot error had doomed CascadeAir Flight 818 felt like a deadweight in the pit of her stomach. “All right.” She swallowed. “First question?”

Only one of the local television stations was airing the press conference live. James Danvers sat on the couch in his hotel room, his son perched on his knee, his sister to his left, and his mother-in-law—Meghan's mom—to his right, listening to every word spoken by Susan Tanaka.

They were all surprised when they heard a knock at the door.

Kiki Duvall and Tommy Tomzak climbed down the wooden ladder, the cartoonishly large boots of their suits sticky with body fluids. They stripped to their underwear, then stuffed the protective garments into a laundry hamper marked
HAZMAT
. Walter noted that Tommy wore a Star of David on a chain around his neck. With his rough language, Walter had assumed he wasn't a man of faith.

Peter Kim was waving to a deliveryman toting a hand truck and three plastic evidence boxes. Pulling up his Dockers, Tommy nodded in that direction. “What's up?”

“Shrapnel taken from the survivors at Portland and Salem hospitals. I'm still looking for the HIV.”

Tommy and Kiki exchanged looks, then stared at the blood-soaked
suits they had just doffed. “Wanna run that one past me again?” Tommy asked.

Peter rolled his eyes. “Hydraulic isolation valve. Relax, you weren't wading through any blood-borne pathogens. Well, you probably were, but none I know of.”

Kiki knelt to tie her shoes. “Thanks tons.”

“Hmm. Find anything?”

She produced the spoon, tucked into an evidence bag.

“The significance of which . . . ?”

She shrugged. “Loose ends. I hate 'em.”

Walter Mulroney approached with two of his structures crew, both wearing Tyvek. He began instructing them about which avionics controls to remove first, including the panel that should have warned the pilots of the reverser deployment.

Tommy turned to Peter. “Why are you still looking for that valve thing.” He pronounced it
thang
. “I thought the reverser problem was the culprit.”

The engineer sighed irritably. “Loose ends,” he said, moving toward the evidence tables. “I hate them.”

The questions began with the lawsuits that Bud Wheeler—owner of the farmhouse where the starboard wing had been found—had filed against the NTSB, CascadeAir, Vermeer Aircraft, the pilots' estates, the Air Line Pilots Association, Patterson-Pate Industries, Portland International Airport, and, most specifically, Peter Kim.

Susan wasn't happy to be discussing a case that, she felt, had been the product of Peter's arrogance. Mercifully, it delayed discussion of the obvious pilot error.

Ray Calabrese arrived from his hotel in Wilsonville exactly as three cars from the FBI's Portland field office pulled into the muddy parking lot. Everyone climbed out and sprinted through the torrential rain for the safety of the hangar.

Ray spotted Tommy and Kiki dashing from the wrecked plane to its unwrecked clone. He wondered what was up.

The agents gathered around Ray. “Talk to security first,” he said. “Get the names of everyone who was here last night. You: dust the pay phone out front and any other phones you can find. You: get me a judge who'll cut a warrant. I want to be able to search every room in their hotel by noon.”

His agents scattered.

 

Kiki strapped herself into the copilot's seat of the Vermeer swap-out and pointed to the left-hand seat. “Park it.”

Tommy parked it.

Kiki eyed the monitors and banks of equipment before them, deciding which surface of the spoon to tap with. She chose the edge of the ladle. She reached out, tapped the panel nearest her seat. She frowned, shook her head.

She tapped the next one. Her grin brightened the flight deck, her eyes popping wide.

“Tommy,” she whispered. “This is it. This is what Kazmanski saw just before everything went haywire. This is the monitor he tapped.”

Tommy leaned over to his right, squinted at the panel. He said, “Sumbitch.”

Russ Kazmanski had seen something odd on the monitor of the Gamelan flight data recorder.

 

They couldn't have planned it better if they'd hired a choreographer. Ray marched into the hangar as Tommy Tomzak and Kiki Duvall emerged from the undamaged jetliner and jogged down the portable stairs. Peter Kim, his head down and a plastic bag in his hand, crossed from the other side of the hangar. All four converged in the middle.

“Tomzak.” Ray nodded. “Something strange has come up. It's looking like this whole thing is linked to the Irish terrorists, after all.”

Tommy said, “We found something weird, too. Hey, Peter. What do you got?”

Peter Kim cleared his throat. He was clearly annoyed about something. Ray had met the slight, intense man only a couple of times, but he always seemed annoyed; just more so now than usual.

Peter held up a plastic evidence bag marked
LEGACY GOOD SAMARITAN HOSPITAL
.
“I found the hydraulic isolation valve from engine number three. Seems it was lodged in the thigh of a survivor.”

Kiki said, “What's wrong with it?”

Peter's face grew darker. He held up the bag for the others to see. “Nothing. It looks pristine.”

Ray glanced at his watch. “Can this wait? I—”

“If the thrust reversers kicked in by accident,” Peter cut him off, “this device should show scoring, here and here.”

He pointed to the device.

Tommy said, “Looks okay to me.”

“Yes. Which indicates the deployment was not an accident. It was an ordered deployment.”

Kiki squinted at the device in the bag. “That's crazy! You've gone from assuming the pilots were criminally negligent to just plain criminals. I don't buy that they'd purposely crash—”

“Of course not.” Peter's imperious tone increased a notch. “I've already accounted for the other valves from engine number three, and they look perfectly normal, too. And that's not logical. If you deploy the reverser and only one or two blocker panels descend, the other valves—the ones governing the parts that fail to descend—should show scoring. If it's an accidental deployment, then the valves governing the blockers that do descend show scoring. For all of the valves to look fine after a partial deployment makes no sense. It means some of the blockers were ordered shut and others ordered to stay open. Engines aren't made to do that. You couldn't sit on the flight deck and orchestrate something like that if your life depended on it. Which, of course, in this case, it did.”

Ray said, “Sabotage?”

Peter shrugged his narrow shoulders, rippling the otherwise perfect lines of his designer suit.

Kiki said, “Could the flight data recorder do this?”

“No,” Peter said. “It records problems, that's all.”

But Ray was shaking his head. “Silverman said his company's recorders are programmed to fix minor faults, if they've recorded them before. The Gamelans can learn. And they're proactive.”

“Active,” Peter corrected absently, his mind racing. “The opposite of reactive is active.”

Without any warning, Tommy said, “Shit!” and reached into his shirt pocket for his ear jack.

The Danvers family sat hip to hip to hip, red-eyed, glued to Susan Tanaka's press conference. Isaiah Grey sat on the bed, watching. He knew what was coming, and he wanted—no, needed—to be here for their questions. And their recriminations.

Neither Tommy nor Susan had sent him. It wasn't his job to be the Danvers' counselor, but he didn't want the family to be alone when the words
pilot error
were spoken. As the only pilot on the primary Go-Team, he felt a link to Meghan Danvers. He felt he owed it to her and her family to be here for this.

“Anything further on a cause for the crash?” an off-screen reporter asked.

Isaiah watched as Susan Tanaka adjusted her microphones. “Ah, yes. Our Go-Team has made a preliminary finding. I repeat, this is preliminary. There's much investigating to do yet. According to our work so far—”

Susan paused, frowned, reached into the pocket of her raisin-colored blazer, and withdrew something. “Ah. Can you hold on a moment, please?” she asked the journalists.

Isaiah recognized her ear jack, identical to the one in his pocket. Susan placed her legal pad in front of the bouquet of microphones and half turned, speaking into the voice wand.

James Danvers leaned around his mother-in-law and made eye contact with Isaiah. The baby on Danvers' leg chirped gleefully. “What's going on?”

“I don't—” Isaiah's comm unit pinged, too. “Hang on.” He slipped his on.

The Danvers family watched him (live) and Susan (on TV) doing the exact same thing.

“What's up?” Isaiah whispered into the voice wand.

“Isaiah? It's Kiki. Are you with the Danverses?”

“Yes.” On the TV screen, Susan Tanaka's eyes grew wide.

“Tommy's talking to Susan right now,” Kiki said. “I hope we stopped you in time.”

“Stopped?”

On the screen, Susan pushed back her shoulders, stood a little bit taller, and returned to the press microphones. “Ladies and gentlemen . . .” she started.

In his ear, Isaiah heard Kiki say, “It was sabotage, Isaiah. Not pilot error. Don't tell them Captain Danvers did this!”

“That was my Investigator in Charge,” Susan told the media.

It was bizarre, hearing this news from Kiki Duvall (at the Valence hangar) in one ear and from Susan Tanaka (in Keizer) in the other. “I'm sorry, but he says our preliminary findings as to cause have been disproved. So we do not have a standing theory on cause. I'm sorry.”

She didn't sound the least bit sorry. Isaiah wasn't, either. He let out a whoosh of air, rested his elbows on his knees.

“Thanks, Kiki. I'll get back to you,” he said and signed off.

“What?” James Danvers could hardly stand it any longer.

“Like the lady said.” Isaiah nodded to Susan's image on the TV. “We don't know the cause of the crash. Not for certain. But the Go-Team seems convinced it was not pilot error.”

He pronounced the last three words with exquisite care. The family began hugging one another, crying. Those three words sounded so much better than the words Isaiah had come here to tell them.

By ten o'clock it was ninety-two degrees and the wind whipsawed around the creaky little Land's End Motel about three miles outside of Boca Serpiente, population fifty-six. The aluminum siding on the motel, once white, had been reduced to the color of bad mayonnaise by the relentless sun and buffeting dust. The rooms were laid out in a C pattern, with a gravel courtyard and parking spaces in the middle, a single cactus, limp and bedraggled, propped up in the exact center of the parking area. A sign facing Route 45 read
LAN S EN MOTE
.

The only vehicles in the lot were a Vanagan from Wyoming and two Harleys. Daria Gibron drove up in the stolen Jeep and paused on the roadway, studying the fleabag motel.

Donal O'Meara, sitting in the ripped leather passenger seat, was starting to look a little more acclimated, even though his T-shirt had developed a dark V of sweat across his chest. Daria, born and raised in the Middle East, looked as cool as a lady eating cucumber sandwiches at a cricket match. She had rarely felt truly hot since coming to the States. She almost wept with pleasure with each deep breath, the air raking through her lungs, the taste of dust on her tongue.

They studied the motel for a moment, then turned in, parking the Jeep behind the van and out of sight of the road. O'Meara handed her the
dwindling wad of cash and told her to check in. While she did, he circled the building and found a cracked green garden hose with no nozzle. By the time Daria returned, O'Meara's head and torso were drenched in the lukewarm water, his hair, worn short, matted to his skull.

“We're here,” he told her.

“Really?” She glanced around at the two-lane blacktop, the crappy clutter of buildings a half mile away, at the sun-peeled paint of the motel. “Where's here?”

“Fucking slice of hell,” O'Meara muttered. “C'mon. We've business partners to meet.”

AT THE VALENCE AIRFIELD, Tommy's phone pinged. “Tomzak.”

Susan Tanaka said, “Want to tell me what this is all about?” He heard her slam a car door and rev an engine. She was leaving the press conference.

“We know three things this morning that we didn't know last night,” Tommy said, waving across the hangar to Walter Mulroney, who was consulting with the carpenters.

“One,” Tommy said. “Peter found some kind of framistat that, he says, points to sabotage.”

Susan said, “Hoo boy.” Tommy could make out frantic honking in the background but didn't ask.

“Two: Ray found something really spooky.”

“When did he go from ‘that damn FBI mole' to ‘Ray'?” Susan asked.

“Ha-ha. Listen, someone tried to call that terrorist cell Ray's been telling us about. He thinks the call came from somewhere in this hangar, just after last night's debriefing.”