Breaking Point (20 page)

She fell to her knees on the floor and sobbed.

VARENNA, ITALY

Susan and Kirk sat on a bench by the cobblestone pathway that encircled the village. She was reading
The New Yorker
on her iPad. He was up to sitting thirty minutes at a time without aggravating his back injury. He was reading something by Lee Child that he was realizing, just now, was beginning to be uncomfortably familiar. “Crap. I think I've read this,” he grumbled.

His wife reached over to rub his thigh through thin, Irish-cotton trousers. “That almost always happens, babe,” she said without looking up. The man had many great qualities but he absolutely could not remember any plots.

Kirk popped a Vicodin and stared at the sleeping ducks and the rocking sailboats for a while. The ferry from Menaggio approached the dock. Life went on around them but not quickly. Things took their time in Varenna.

Susan's computer tablet pinged: incoming e-mail. She glanced at the server, frowned. “It's Del Wildman.”

“Open it.”

Susan turned to him. “We're on vacation, babe. I shouldn't be reading e-mails.”

Kirk Tanaka said, “Shut up, dummy.” He kissed her bare shoulder. “Ever since you heard about Isaiah, Tommy, and Kiki, you've been tight as a steel drum. It's driving you crazy, not helping. Check Del's e-mail. I'm not going anywhere.”

Susan leaned over and kissed her husband on the mouth. He tasted like citrus. “I love you.”

“You have remarkable taste in men.”

Susan opened the e-mail. A little, vertical frown line formed on her forehead. “It's the day-one prelim from the Montana crash. From Beth Mancini. Del's asking if I could take a look at it.”

“Why not? You told me you were worried about Beth catching a complicated crash. I don't mind. Here.” He stood, wincing, hand bracing the small of his back. “I'll go grab us some coffee. I need to stretch my back.”

As he limped toward the nearest little taverna, Susan began scanning the preliminary report.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

One shift per week, Amy Dreyfus worked as a line editor on the night Metro desk at the
Post
. She was in training to be an editor. Which meant she left work after the top of the eleven o'clock news on Friday and after scanning the wire services one last time. She was the PIC, or Person In Charge, but, upon grabbing her coat, that duty fell to the copy-desk chief.

The second-day follow-up of the Polestar Flight 78 crash in Montana had taken up fourteen column inches on page 7A, the last page that night dedicated to national news. Only one copyeditor had read the story, plus the slot editor. On the Metro desk, Beth mostly read local stories the paper's own reporters had written, although she did scan the wires to see what was moving. She had opened the Polestar story but never got past the second paragraph.

She'd gotten home around 11:45, had a glass of good pinot grigio, read three chapters of a Robert Crais thriller, then climbed into bed next to Ezra Dreyfus at 12:30 Saturday morning.

A patent lawyer who ran his business out of their spare bedroom, Ezra always got up first on Saturdays. He made pancakes for their eight-year-old son Levi who was glued to Saturday morning cartoons. He let his wife sleep in until noon.

Usually.

It was only 10:30 when Ezra sat on her side of the bed and shook her shoulder. She wore a Where's Waldo T and a pair of his boxers. “Hmm?”

“Kidlet? Hey.”

She opened her eyes, blinked. “You're a good-looking man,” she slurred.

When he didn't smile, she got up on one elbow. “Ezra?”

He showed her page 7A of the
Post.
She got to Andrew Malatesta's name in the eighth paragraph and threw her hand over her mouth.

HELENA

A transcript of the Polestar Flight 78 flight data recorder was uploaded to the NTSB high-security server. Teresa Santiago used her pass code to access it, then curled up on the bed in her hotel room with a legal pad, a pen, and a sweetened chai tea. She went through it line by line.

*   *   *

The team leaders met at ten in Beth's suite. She had arranged for coffee, orange juice, apple juice, bottled water, and baked goods. Teresa handed out her one-page summary. She'd kicked off her sandals as soon as she'd entered; one of those people more comfortable barefoot than shod.

Ray Calabrese joined the crashers today. Beth had argued that keeping him out made no sense, since Ray was a trained investigator and had a keen eye for detail. Peter Kim eventually agreed.

Gene Whitney looked pallid and rumpled and had mottled bruising around his lip.

Beth said, “Are you okay?”

He just nodded.

Peter, with his degree in electrical engineering, read the one sheet and got the gist of it first. “Short circuit, second bus panel?”

Teresa nodded. “Yes. Took out the altimeter and their comms. Leveque Aéronautics of Quebec made the system.”

Hector said, “Anyone else remember a crash, couple of years ago in Germany? Leveque avionics package shut down by a short circuit?”

Jack Goodspeed sat forward. “Düsseldorf. It was a KLM flight, like, three years ago, yeah.”

Reuben Chaykin pushed out his lower lip and nodded. “We maybe got a pattern. Got to love patterns.”

Peter's smile tightened. “Good. All right. Jack, did you pull the panel out of the flight deck?”

“No. We'll get that today.”

“Thank you. Dr. Jain, did you get tox back?”

The laconic pathologist nodded to her palm-top. “Just now. No poisons, no drugs. Both had a beer the night before with steaks and french fries.”

“Thank you. Gene?”

The big man shrugged and leaned forward, holding a coffee in both of his large hands, eyes on the hotel room's carpet. “Pilots had great reputations. I've asked around. Navy fliers. Experienced.”

“Fine. And everything was okay with the ground crew in D.C.?”

Gene sipped from his lidded coffee. “Yeah.”

Peter made a check mark next to Gene's name.

Most of them had heard the cockpit voice recorder the night before, so he skipped Hector Villareal's name. “Jack?”

“County sheriff's office is giving us off-duty deputies to keep the lookie-loos away from the site. If we don't have to rebuild, and I'm thinking we don't, I want to do a chop-and-haul.”

For some crashes, the only way to solve the mystery is to pick up each piece of the downed airliner and rebuild it. But if the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder offer up a culprit—say, a short circuit on the flight deck—then the costly process of rebuilding the craft can be bypassed in favor of a chop-and-haul—separating the plane into sections, loading them on flatbeds, and driving them to a hangar, just to hold on to them until the investigation is over.

Peter said, “I'll take that under advisement. Reuben?”

Reuben Chaykin sighed theatrically. “The damage, the fire, I got debris spread everywhere. It'll take a month, tops, to get all of the pieces to a proper engineering facility, confirm what happened.”

“With luck,” Peter said, “that won't be necessary. We have—”

“Yes, it will.”

“What?”

“It'll take a month at least but we'll do it. I know we have a likely culprit, a binary malfunction. But…” He gave the room a broad shrug. “I can't confirm till we do this right.”

Peter nodded. It was a good, by-the-book answer and he appreciated it. “Then we'll do it right. Thank you. And if Jack's team isn't going to have to do a rebuild, we could divert some of his people to Powerplant.”

Jack gave Reuben the thumbs-up. “Sure thing!” Peter noted that the big, handsome man's bonhomie no longer annoyed him quite so much.

“All right.” Peter made his last check mark. “Anything else for the good of the order?”

Beth Mancini put a pen and a condolence card down in front of Peter. “It's for LaToya Grey. I got her flowers, too.”

Peter scribbled his name and passed the card and pen to his left. “Anything else?”

Ray Calabrese raised his hand.

“Yes, ah…?”

“Ray. I talked to Kiki. She wants to help. She'd like to hear the cockpit voice recording.”

Peter and Hector spoke simultaneously. Peter going with, “That would be against regulations, no.” And Hector going with, “Sure. I'll get her…”

They turned to each other. Peter made a
tsk
noise. “Ah, no. We're following procedure on this one.”

Gene had been sitting quietly, leaning forward, elbows on knees and not making eye contact with anyone. “You shitting me?” He looked up at Peter with bloodshot eyes. “You've seen what Duvall can do with audio. She's the goddamn Sonar Witch.”

Hector nodded. “She has that reputation. No, I'd appreciate her ears. Tell her I'll get it to her right away.”

Peter frowned. “Was I unclear? Did my words confuse anyone?”

Beth Mancini, thinking,
Oh, God. Here we go.

Teresa Santiago said, “I worked with Kiki on one other crash. She's amazing. I vote yes.”

Peter turned to her, slowly. “I'm sorry. Did you say
vote
?”

Lakshmi Jain was next. “I don't care, one way or another. But it would be outside standard procedures.”

Reuben Chaykin shrugged. “She's not a civilian. She's not media. She won't talk out of school. And if she's that good…”

The tide in the room quickly turned against Peter, who capped his expensive gold pen and stood, buttoning his suit coat. “Folks?” When they stopped talking, he went on. “This discussion lasted about a minute, which is fifty-five seconds too long. I think we're done here.”

He stepped toward the door but stopped when he was in front of Teresa.
“Vote?”
He shook his head, walked out.

Everyone sat quietly, uncomfortable. Gene said, “Well, shit, that went well.”

Dr. Jain stood. “He's the Investigator in Charge.”

Gene sipped coffee. “He's also a jackass.”

Beth jumped in. “Okay. Meeting adjourned. Thanks, everyone. Good work here.”

Her cheery smile fooled no one.

CRASH SITE

Calendar lay on his stomach, binoculars to his eyes, and watched the remains of the Claremont VLE. Things couldn't have been much worse.

First, a sheriff's deputy walked the perimeter of the crash site. Calendar had the skills and the weapons to take out the man. But that course of action would alert everyone that the crash had not been an accident.

Second, fire crews were on scene, keeping an eye on the blaze about a mile away. It had died down a bit during the night, during a windless evening. But they were close enough to see the fuselage, further limiting Calendar's offerings.

Finally, a tall, painfully thin woman with jet-black hair in an NTSB windbreaker and ball cap showed up around eleven and started ordering people around.

The crash site was a damn circus.

He checked his watch.

He was only an hour away from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Plenty of time.

*   *   *

Lakshmi Jain identified herself to the sheriff's deputy guarding the Claremont VLE. She ducked through the hole in the center of the fuselage, and dug a palm-size flashlight out of the messenger bag she carried over one shoulder. She made her way through the debris, stepped on the torn-out door to the flight deck, and ducked inside.

The bodies had been removed but not the stench of death. Lakshmi ignored it. The dead deer—or about two-thirds of one, she corrected—lay where she'd first seen it. There was no standard protocol for removing or not removing an animal carcass from a crash scene.

She drew a tablet computer from her shoulder bag, activated it, and studied the still photos she'd taken of the pilot, Miguel Cervantes, concentrating on his spinal injury.

She walked gingerly through the cockpit to the sole remaining seat, the left-hand seat of the lead pilot. She studied the bloody thumbprint on the catch of the safety harness, the congealed blood from the arm wound on the seat. She knelt and scanned the floor—which had been a wall—noting the blood drops, their size and shape. Blood from the arm wound had dropped straight down, but hadn't blossomed into large splashes. She imagined Cervantes crawling, on his knees and one good hand, back to where she had found him. He must have stood up. Then he died of his wounds, fell back against the curved bulkhead and slid to the seated position in which she'd found him.

She studied the tablet again, and the spinal injury.

She sat in the dark for a while and ran the scene over and over in her head.

HELENA

At 11:15
A.M.
, Beth Mancini called Peter Kim. He picked up on the first ring. “Kim.”

“Hey. It's Beth. Um, where are you?”

“Ten minutes from the crash site.”

She blanched, turned, and looked at the 167 people fidgeting in their seats in the Burton K. Wheeler Memorial Conference Center. “Peter! The All-Thing was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago!”

He said, “It hasn't started yet?”

“I'm waiting on you and the others!”

“Oh. Well, don't. Those things are useless. I told everyone to stay away. Get on with it.”

She made eye contact with some of the people in the crowd and smiled. Whispering, she said, “The Investigator in Charge introduces the All-Thing. That's the way it works.”

“Beth? Reciting to me
the way it works
generally won't get you very far. A lot of things work poorly. I think the All-Thing is a stupid idea and I've told Delevan Wildman that to his face.”

“But you're the one who insists we work
by the book.”

“Not when it's a stupid waste of time. The All-Thing is a waste of time. It's a political carnival and you are our intergovernmental liaison. Have them introduce themselves, have them get business cards from your assistants, then tell them that if and when I call, to have their teams ready, double-quick, to do exactly what I tell them to do. Out.”