Breaking Point (27 page)

If
it were loaded. She'd meant
if.

Her cell phone rang. She watched it, unsure how to react.

Snap. Ring. Snap. Ring.

She picked up the phone with her free, left hand. “Hello?”

“Hey. It's Amy. Look, I'm sorry about earlier. I was being so thoughtless, what with—”

Renee appreciated the drag on the trigger, the pressure it took before the hammer fell. “Where are you?”

“I couldn't find a hotel room in Helena. I'm in a b-and-b in Twin Pines. It's where the NTSB press briefings are.”

Renee surprised herself. “Meet me for lunch?”

“Um … really?”

“Please. Lunch.”

“Okay. Where?”

Snap.

*   *   *

An hour later, Amy and Renee sat in a booth in Café Artemis, in the Park Plaza Hotel. Both were surprised by how tony the place was.

Renee ordered a Wray & Nephew white rum, a very strong drink with a hint of sulfur in the smell. Many rum drinkers couldn't handle the aroma but Renee loved it. Amy ordered a pinot noir.

Renee took a sip of rum and sighed. “Did you bring a recorder?”

Amy pulled a digital recorder out of her tote bag. “Sure. Did you want … Is this an interview?”

Renee sipped the strong drink. “Yes.”

“Okay, but, again, can I say—”

“Thank you. Andrew and I always appreciated your accurate reporting. You cover all the angles. You get your facts correct. We appreciated that. I appreciate that.”

Amy nodded and activated the recorder. She also dug out a narrow reporter's notepad and a cheap Pilot pen. Like most reporters, she had a distrust of recording devices. “Andrew told me he was going to make a major announcement at the Tech Expo. Can you tell me about that?”

“Malatesta, Inc., has signed a multiyear agreement with the Pentagon to implement research into offensive and defensive weapons platforms.”

“Wow. That would be a sea change for you. Weapons.”

“Yes,” Renee said. “We have been in negotiations for two years. I came from severe poverty in Haiti. America opened its arms to me, and today I am a successful lawyer and businesswoman. My husband felt much the same way about the opportunities granted to us. This is the direction he had turned the company before he died in the crash.”

Her voice did not quiver. Her eyes did not twinkle with tears. She spoke with no emotion, almost by rote. Amy wondered what kind of medication she was on.

“What sort of weaponry?”

Renee tilted her head to the right.
“Sea change?”

Amy looked up. “Excuse me?”

“You said
sea change.
I wonder where that phrase comes from.”

“Um…”

“Never mind. I'm not at liberty to talk about the work. It's classified. Andrew had been up at all hours, working around the clock, coming up with some of his most innovative ideas yet. Ideas that will keep America safe.”

Amy thinking,
Can't talk about the weapons. Great
. “This contract: can I ask what the impact on company earnings will be?”

“We lost three of our five top engineers, including our president and founder. That will have a larger immediate impact on earnings than the Pentagon contract.”

“Of course. Sorry. Um…”
Couldn't talk about the weapons, couldn't talk about the money.
“You must have had a time line. Their deaths will surely slow that down.”

Renee sipped her drink. “It will. We still have to have memorial services. I need to convene a meeting of the company, talk to our people. Let them know where we go from here. There are steps to grieving. Not just for me. I … I suspect, but I don't know, that the entire company will go through post-traumatic stress disorder for the next year. Or years. But we're good people. We're patriots.”

She smiled but it was a wan thing and quickly faded away. Renee sat with one hand hovering over the rum, the other shoved into the pocket of her long sweater, as if her hand was chilled. Amy underlined that word in her notepad:
patriots.

She asked a few more questions but didn't get much. When she thought she had enough for a short, online story, she stopped the recorder and capped her pen. “I guess that's that. Thank you.”

Renee said, “No, thank you.”

Amy took her first sip of the red wine. “Um,
The Tempest
. The cliché, ‘sea change'? It's from
The Tempest.
”

Renee looked at her—possibly for the first time—and frowned. “I didn't know that. I thought perhaps it was a reference to how slowly big ships turn in the water.”

“No. Ariel says it to what's-his-name, the prince.”

Renee smiled, the tanned skin around her eyes crinkling. It was a true smile, and now, too, her eyes finally glittered with tears.

Amy heard a faint
snap snap
from somewhere near the table. She glanced around, looking for one of those candle-lighting wands that waiters use, but saw nothing.

“Thank you, Amy. I appreciate knowing that.”

Amy thought that maybe she was the first person since Thursday to tell Renee Malatesta a single thing that didn't ache.

*   *   *

Tommy was showering and Kiki picked up the phone when it rang. It was Susan Tanaka.

Kiki sat on the bed and proceeded to tell Susan the theory that they had brewed up.

Tommy stepped out, towel around his waist, eyebrows raised.

“It's Susan.”

Tommy smiled and walked back into the bathroom.

Over the line, Susan said, “I knew it. I knew something was off. Look, don't tell a soul on the Go-Team, but I'm not in Italy. I'm in L'Enfant Plaza.”

“But…?”

“I know. Still. Del has been keeping me posted. Between Peter Kim's arrogance and Beth's lack of experience, the investigation is spiraling out of control. Now, with what you just told me.… I'm treading softly here, though. I don't want to undermine Beth.”

“Okay. I understand.”

“Do you know Dmitri Zhirkov, in the tech center? Twenty-something, long, crazy blond hair?”

Kiki could picture him. “Travels around the NTSB on in-line skates?”

Susan said, “That's him. He's a major-league computer expert. He handles a lot of the computer reconstruction we have to do after a crash. I, ah, I took the liberty of asking him to hack in to the Go-Team's computers and comm systems.”

Kiki said, “Susan!”

“Well, I want to know what's going on! Please, I have to—”

Kiki said, “You were about to say,
please, I have to help
. Susan, I totally understand.”

Tommy again stepped out of the steamy bathroom, this time clad only in jeans. He had applied shaving cream to the left side of his face. “What?”

“It's Susan. She has our backs.”

Tommy started lathering up the right side. “Course Susan has our backs. Duh.”

CRASH SITE

Peter decided he needed to see this stunt for himself. He asked Teresa Santiago and Lakshmi Jain to stay in Twin Pines with the few crew chiefs, monitoring the fire, as he drove to the crash site. Lakshmi agreed quickly, saying something about checking e-mails for information on an injury anomaly. Peter wasn't really listening.

Approaching the state forest, the first thing that caught his eye was Casper the Friendly Airship. Roughly the size and shape of a humpback whale, its white belly glowed brightly, reflecting the arc lights below.

He cocked his head. No one at the NTSB had ever moved a fuselage with an airship before; the trick would never have occurred to him. He thought about that for a moment. The idea was innovative. It was creative.

The next thought curdled his soul:
That bastard Tomzak might have thought of this.

*   *   *

Ginger LaFrance's remote control was a flat box that hung horizontally from straps over her shoulders, much like a guy hawking beer in a baseball park. She stood between Reuben Chaykin and Beth Mancini. She hit a toggle and three heavy-lift cables began descending from the glowing white blob in the sky.

*   *   *

Jack Goodspeed stood atop the fuselage, his boots between two windows that had, until a few days ago, faced the portside wings. It was dangerous on top of the wreckage like this, but Jack hadn't wanted to ask any of his airframe crew to do something that he, himself, wasn't willing to do.

The smoke was thicker twenty-eight feet off the ground, and Jack wore a fully contained hazmat suit with an air tank and a helmet of soft Tyvek and a Plexiglas face shield. His comm unit's ear jack and voice wand fit inside the suit.

His crews had dug tunnels under the keeled-over jet to pass through the thick mesh belts. They used two narrow, long-reach forklifts that could turn on a dime and dart nimbly between trees. The forklifts were made by a company called Skyjack, which the crashers agreed was as bad-karma-inducing a name as any in the aviation industry. The long-reach lifts gathered the metal mesh belts and lifted them up on Jack's left and right. He attached them to the first of Casper's three cables, using two heavy bolts to assemble it all.

Peter approached the cluster of people around the remote operator, Ginger LaFrance. “Who authorized Goodspeed to get up there? He could fall and break his neck.”

Beth said, “It was his idea. He's as athletic as anyone on the Go-Team.”

Jack attached the belts and cable, then carefully walked a third of the way down the fuselage, stepping on the stylized logo of Polestar Airlines.

“I hope this works.” Peter turned to Ginger LaFrance. “You're controlling?”

She kept her eyes glued to Jack and the cable. “That's what my ex says.”

Peter was the wrong audience for droll. “The airship. You're controlling the airship.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How much weight can it lift?”

“Pretty much just itself.”

Peter blinked. “I don't understand.”

Ginger glanced his way, then back to Jack's steeplejack act. “Casper maintains enough buoyancy to keep itself in the air. The downward propellers provide enough lift for the cargo.”

“So again: how much?”

She shrugged. “He's been tested at eighty-six thousand pounds. Just shy of forty tons. So what's this thing weigh?”

Peter peered at the ruins of the Claremont and did the math in his head. With the wings and the turboprops, he figured twenty-five thousand, twenty-six thousand kilograms. That's about fifty-six thousand pounds. Without the wings … Peter said, “I'd say … roughly thirty-five thousand pounds.”

Ginger LaFrance blew a gum bubble and kept her eyes glued on Jack. “Then this should be a walk in the park.”

*   *   *

Jack got the last of the three cables hooked up. Beth had arranged for Ginger to have an extra headset. Jack set his comm unit for All. “Okay. Let's try lifting her straight up, about six inches.”

Peter said, “Get down first.”

“No. This works, someone's going to have to play navigator. I'll hold on to the airship cables and I'm standing on the steel O-ring. I'll be okay.”

Beth turned to Peter. “O-ring?”

“The Claremont is built with two sturdy, solid-state O-rings, one-third and two-thirds of the way back toward the empennage. The fuselage is moved down the assembly line at the manufacturing plant, hoisted at those two rings. Goodspeed's standing on one of them.”

Jack said, “Miss LaFrance? Ready?”

Ginger wore fingerless, weight-lifter's gloves. She gripped the joystick and said, “Six inches, straight up.”

The metal-mesh belts grew taut against the fuselage. The crashers and firefighters held their breath. The Claremont let loose a long, low groan, almost like a mortally wounded giant. Something went
snap!
within. The airframe shuddered.

With more low keening and the shriek of rent aluminum somewhere inside, the Claremont VLE lifted off the forest floor. Ginger applied more thrust and the fuselage rose two more inches.

It didn't break in half.

More upthrust brought the Claremont six inches off the forest floor. Things began falling out of the ruptured downward-facing starboard portions of the fuselage: luggage, jackets, pillows, bits of ruined aircraft. A human hand. A Sony laptop. A roll of toilet paper bounced free and rolled toward the crashers, unspooling in its wake. It came to rest against Peter Kim's shoe.

Then the noises from the aircraft stopped.

The Claremont floated. Silent. Peter got down on one knee and looked under it. “Amazing,” he whispered to himself.

Reuben Chaykin coughed and said,
“Oy vey iz mir.”

Jack, standing atop the levitating airliner, laughed over the communications gear. “I will be a son of a gun. Miss LaFrance? Outstanding.”

She popped a gum bubble. “It's just Ginger, boys.”

“Ginger it is. Now, here's the tricky part. The Claremont was never designed to be carried while tilted ninety degrees off its axis. We need to put her right-side up.”

Ginger tried to wave smoke away from her face. “What about you?”

“Montana girl, I'd think you'd have seen men running on logs in the water before.”

Ginger laughed. “It's the twenty-first century. This isn't
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
”

“I love that film. Okay, go slow.”

Ginger adjusted controls on her box, and the hooks beneath Casper began letting out the thick straps, slowly, the strap to the left of the airship slacking and the straps to the right tightening.

Beneath Jack's feet, the fuselage slowly rotated a few inches. Holding on to the hooks over his head, he took two steps to his right, staying at the “top” of the steel O-ring.

“Okay. Little more…”

Things crash-tumbled inside the Claremont. More items fell out of the holes in the fuselage onto the dry earth below.