Breaking Point (29 page)

“What?”

“I don't know! The fucking schmuck didn't tell me!” She felt herself tear up again and willed herself to get a hold.

“Amy?” He had heard it in her voice.

“Ah, he wanted to know if I was going to Seattle for that high-tech expo, but it was Ezra's birthday. Jesus, I've been going psycho, trying to figure out what he was being so mysterious about!” She was about to take a sip of coffee but realized he might hear it. She had just denied being the Clockwork Girl.

“But you know what it was. Right? The wife told you about some multimillion dollar deal to be a Pentagon contractor. This guy was about to become an arms merchant.”

“No. I don't think so. This wasn't about promoting their new contact. He told me it was
life-or-death
serious! He wanted my help in breaking something. If it was a damn press release, he wouldn't have sounded so…”

Big said, “So…?”

“I don't know. I just know—I knew Andrew. He wanted to break huge news. Dangerous news. I just know it.”

Big-Time chuckled. “So earn your keep. Go figure it out.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Dmitri Zhirkov rollerbladed into the main server room. He slowed to a crawl, reached out to type one-handed on a keyboard, then glided to the far end of the room and typed on another. His headset was blasting the Beatles'
White Album
loudly enough that, had anyone else been in the NTSB server room, they could have sung along.

He turned off the vintage Walkman, pulled the headphones down to his scrawny shoulders, and picked up his cell phone. He had learned Susan Tanaka's cell phone number once, three years earlier, and, like every other number in his life, it came to him when he needed it.

“Hello?”

He chomped on a Red Vine. “Is Dmitri. Can you come down? Bring your tablet.”

Susan said, “Ninety seconds.”

It took seventy. She began by hugging the lanky Russian. “Thank you so much for this. What have you got for me?”

“The Montana Go-Team's computers. I wrote a program that will let you snoop around in real time.”

She whistled and he grinned. “You're a criminal genius.”

“Is true. Also, did you know the comm units have GPS trackers? Also their tablets and smartphones.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Boot up your computer.”

She handed over the tablet computer. Dmitri slouched in a rolling chair, his Rollerblades up on a desk, crossed at the ankle. He'd brought a Thermos of hot, sweet Russian tea from home—just like his mom made it—and poured himself a cup. He dipped his Red Vine in the tea and then bit that hunk off.

“I've got it,” Susan said.

“Open up your browser.”

“Ooookay, I'm there.”

“You are seeing a download, yes?”

“Uh-huh.”

He dipped the candy, chewed on it.

“It's complete. And, it's … ah … Oh my gosh!”

He beamed. “You like? You can see where the crashers are. It looks like some are in Helena and others in a small town.” He twisted in the chair to peer at the computer nestled in the crook of Susan's arm. “Twin Pines?”

“Yes. Twin Pines. Dee, you're my hero.”

His smile blended with a blush. “Isaiah Grey was always nice to me. Was good fella, yes?”

TWIN PINES

Ray, Tommy, and Kiki hit town around three and noticed the vague, white haze. They could smell smoke, but just barely.

They found the police station and were rerouted to the real estate office. Kiki climbed out and tried the door, which was locked. She put her hands on the glass, parentheses around her eyes, and peered in.

“It's the right place,” she said. “I see NTSB jackets. They must be out investigating.”

“Wonder when the crew gathers for the daily powwow?” Tommy asked.

“C'mon,” Ray said, checking his watch. “There's a coffee shop around the corner. I'm buying.”

*   *   *

Inside the real estate office, Jenna Scott knelt behind a high-back office chair and exhaled deeply as she watched the FBI agent and two crash survivors walk to the coffee shop. That had been close.

She returned to planting the electronic bugs throughout the building.

HELENA

Back at her hotel, Renee poured three fingers from the bottle of rum she'd bought off the restaurant, then booted up her computer. She did a Google search for
sea change, Tempest,
and
Shakespeare
.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

She sipped the overproofed rum.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
She thought about the body on the floor of the meat market in Twin Pines. There had been no sign of Andrew's soul there. Nothing to indicate the complicated, mercurial man, the inventive lover, the harsh self-critic, the sangfroid-laden pessimist.

Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.

She poured more rum and cried. Andrew was gone, too, but Andrew had changed before he died. He'd changed. Long before Renee made that late-night call to Barry Tichnor, he had begun to fade. He had suffered a sea change.

BOOK THREE

THE TEMPEST

24

TWIN PINES

At 3:30
P.M.
, all the team leaders came together. Tommy, Kiki, and Ray also showed up. They asked to address the Go-Team.

Peter, in a natty pin-striped suit, made a show of checking his watch. “We're a little busy here, so … make it quick.”

By agreement, Ray Calabrese had been designated to tell them what they knew: the sudden loss of power for every system on the plane, including watches and hand-held devices; the silver-haired guy with hiking boots; the strange, postimpact wounds of Captain Cervantes and Isaiah Grey; Tommy's conversation with Isaiah, Kiki, and the black-box recording.

“What we're saying is: the plane was sabotaged, the black boxes switched with fakes, and the guy on the ground was there to make sure nobody could vouch for what really happened.”

The crashers sat, stunned. Except for Peter Kim, who sat back, legs crossed at the knee. “That's good. No, really. Just enough verisimilitude to avoid sounding like the lunatic ravings of a conspiracy nut.”

Tommy said, “Jesus, Peter. We—”

“Look, everyone! The saviors from the Oregon crash have done it again! Protected us poor, dumb engineers from ourselves!”

The crashers exchanged self-conscious glances. Gene Whitney hunkered in the corner, arms crossed over his thick chest. He stared at the floor.

Jack Goodspeed rubbed his neck and smiled weakly at Ray Calabrese. “This story? This is … guys, I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but I mean, hell!”

Hector Villareal leaned forward. “Peter, I gave Kiki a copy of the cockpit voice recording. She really is that good. I thought—”

“You're off the investigation.” Peter stood up and buttoned his suit coat. “Head home. Please file a report with Wildman's office, explaining the breach of protocol.”

No one spoke for a few seconds. Beth was trying to figure a stratagem for changing Peter's mind. Hector just shrugged. “Sure.”

Peter turned back to Ray. “Calabrese, I don't know you. I don't know if you've been suckered in or not. Kiki, I suspect you've actually come to believe your own hype. Tomzak? Go fuck yourself.”

Kiki fired back first. “Why, you idiot! Are you even listening to yourself? Tommy saw the power die!”

“So he says.”

Ray pulled a twice-folded sheet of paper out of his blazer pocket. “Signed statement by Orysya Bronova, the Russian woman who survived the crash. She says the lights went out and the propellers stopped twirling long before the crash.”

Peter turned slowly to Gene Whitney, whose job included debriefing survivors.

Gene kept staring at the floor and gave the room a generic shrug. “She doesn't speak English. I'm meeting a translator from Missoula tomorrow.”

Ray handed the paper to Peter. “I found an orderly who speaks Russian. Here.”

Kiki had built up quite a head of steam. “Did you say
my hype
?”

Peter shrugged. “Yes.”

“Look, you pompous jackass, you immigrated to the United States when you were no older than five. I know this because I know from voices.”

She looked around the room. “How many of you have I ever had conversations with before today? You.” She pointed at Jack. “You grew up in urban Nebraska. Hector, you had a speech impediment when you were a boy, probably a stutter. Reuben, your grandparents never taught you any Yiddish and the little you do speak you picked up from movies and TV, and you're a little embarrassed by that. And as for you,” she pointed at Teresa Santiago, “your family has lived in New Mexico for at least four generations, probably longer. Your people never crossed the border to get into the States. The border crossed you!”

She turned and glared at Peter Kim.

Teresa held up her hand, fingers splayed. “Five generations.”

Jack said, “Lincoln, Nebraska.”

Reuben gave Kiki a what-are-ya-gonna-do shrug.

Hector said, “Stutter.”

Beth, repressing a smile, stood and patted Peter on the shoulder. “And I've read your bio. You were three.”

Peter glowered back at Kiki. “Nice carnival act. But—”

She barreled right over him. “At Reagan, the copilot said he was
having
a catch with a little boy, not
playing catch
. Then he asked us to stand
on line
with our boarding passes. Not
in line.
There's only one city in America where people use those colloquialisms: New York City. The copilot on the CVR is from Boston. The recording's a fake, jackass.”

Tommy shook his head, grinning. There were maybe twenty people in the world who knew exactly how good the Sonar Witch was. That list had just grown.

Peter smiled indulgently. “I concede the point, Kiki. You're the Jascha Heifetz of voices. Brava. But it still doesn't mean Tomzak's theory isn't full of holes. This total-power-loss thing? There is, in fact, a technology that could cut power to the plane as well as personal electronics. It's called a nuclear bomb. The electromagnetic pulse of a nuke would do what you've hypothesized. But I'm thinking someone would have noticed that.”

Ray shrugged. “So maybe there's another way to generate this pulse.”

“Well, there's not.”

“Easy way to prove you're right, Petey.” Tommy, oddly enough, had remained the calmest of the bunch. “Dr. Jain? Check all the bodies. Whitney, check the survivors. Find out if any of them have an MP3 player, a digital watch, a camera, a cell phone, what-the-fuck-ever. Who's got the airframe?”

Jack raised his hand.

“Check the luggage. Same thing. If you find one electronic device that's working, then we're all zebra-shit crazy. But, you do a survey and they all are broken, then we got us a ball game.”

Ray said to Peter, “I'm already rolling on the black boxes and chain of evidence. I'll report what I find directly to you. You're the Investigator in Charge. For now.”

The threat was implicit: by federal law, the NTSB is the chief investigative agency in the event of a plane crash. Right up to the moment that a crime could be proved. If that happened, the FBI would take over. And Peter would be answering to Ray Calabrese.

Peter nodded. “Jack, Gene, Lakshmi: please check all of the electronic equipment on the Claremont, the survivors, the bodies. In the meantime,” he turned to the interlopers, “you three stay away from the fuselage and stay away from the other survivors. You are interfering with a federal investigation. Meeting adjourned.”

Tommy shrugged. “Fair enough. But work quick. You're wasting clock.”

Kiki took a step forward, into Peter's personal space. “And the next time you disrespect me in public, I will knock you to the ground.”

They glared at each other.

Tommy nudged Ray, cocked a thumb at Kiki. “I'm nuts about her.”

*   *   *

When they were gone, Peter checked his watch. “Look, it's Sunday. Everyone has done a great job. Go back to your hotels, get some rest. Get some food. Call your families. First thing in the morning, I want, in my hand, one working cell phone from that plane. I just want one, and that smirking son of a bitch is done.”

L'ENFANT PLAZA

Susan called Dmitri Zhirkov from her office. “Dee, it's me. Am I catching you at a bad time?”

She heard the Russian laugh. “Am using a three-point-four million dollar mainframe computer, paid for by taxpayers, to playing Dragon Age. God, I love America.”

She smiled. He really was incorrigible. “I have a question about the program you loaded, to let me monitor the Go-Team's computers.”

“Shoot.”

She sat and frowned at her tablet computer. “In the left-hand column, there are blue dots under the heading ‘Nodes.'”

She heard a vaguely positive grunt over the line.

“That represents the people with access to the server here in D.C. The one designated for the Montana crash, right?”

“Bingo.” He pronounced it “bean go.”

“Okay, so there are eleven blue dots. One of them is me and I assume one of them is you. There are eight team leaders. That's ten. Who else is monitoring this investigation?”

The Russian said, “Hold on,” and she heard a hiss. It took her a second to realize that it was the sound of his in-line skates crossing the floor of the server room. Susan waited. She could hear the Russian muttering to himself.