Free Fall (18 page)

Thirty-Seven

San Francisco, California

V
eyda Hyde and Seth Hagen worked on their laptops at San Francisco International Airport while awaiting their return flight to Washington National.

Veyda suddenly seized her computer because their seats had shaken violently. Her first thought was:
Earthquake
. Wrong. The force was a boy who'd slammed his body into the seat beside her.

“Here! Mom! I wanna sit right here!” He smashed his fists repeatedly into the seat, causing Veyda's to bounce.

“We made it just in time.” The boy's mother sighed as she arrived, struggling with their bags. The preboarding area for Washington, DC, passengers was next to the gate for an Atlanta-bound flight. The mother was either oblivious or indifferent to her son's behavior.

“Give me a cookie, now!” The boy jumped up and down, knocking over Veyda's take-out coffee cup, which emptied around her feet. Aware of his crime, the boy met Veyda's ice-cold glare, considered his situation, then pointed at her and said, “You made a mess!”

“No,
you
made a mess. Now, what do you say for being so rude?”

The boy's eyes narrowed in defiance.

“Mom! That strange lady's talking to me!”

“Oh, just look away, Billy. We'll be leaving in a minute.”

The boy stuck out his tongue at Veyda, who glared back with such intensity the boy recoiled, retreating under his mother's arm.

“Mom! That lady's scaring me!”

The mother turned to Veyda, assessed her then pulled her son closer.

“Excuse me,” the woman said, “do you have a problem with my child?”

“Was your son deprived of oxygen at birth?”

The mother's jaw dropped and Veyda stared at her for an uneasy moment, until the Atlanta flight was called.

“That's us, Billy.” The mother stood. “Let's get away from here.”

“I'll pray for you,” Veyda said.

“What?” The mother stopped. “What did you say?”

“I'll pray.” Veyda smiled. “That your plane doesn't crash.”

Puzzled and unable to discern the full meaning of Veyda's comment, the woman scowled and left with her cookie-eating offspring. Veyda shot the woman and her spawn a parting glare.

Some people shouldn't be permitted to breed.

Veyda resumed her work, pleased that Seth had possessed the wisdom not to intervene. They'd come to the Bay Area to pick up a critical component they needed to complete the next phase of their operation, a highly advanced integrated circuit that was in the final stages of development. Seth knew people in Mountain View with access to one and had arranged to buy it. He'd concealed it in a small case that resembled a USB key, which he was now admiring.

“This will guarantee our success, babe,” he said before he zipped the key into a pocket of his carrying case.

Their return flight had been delayed, and they'd found a quiet corner in which to work. Seth was studying commercial air routes when Veyda nudged him to look at the TV suspended from the ceiling. It was tuned to CTNB's
Beyond the Headlines
with Reese Baker.

“Look, it's our reporter.” Veyda moved closer to the TV, but kept her distance from other people. “This could be it. Kate Page could make the revelation now, live on network news.”

Seth joined Veyda in watching, and the show began with footage of the Shikra and EastCloud incidents, after which Reese Baker introduced the subject and her panelists.

So this is Kate Page,
Veyda thought.
She's pretty and she seems intelligent. She'd better do what's expected of her.

Veyda and Seth focused on the panelists as they debated airline security, betraying a rudimentary understanding of what was and wasn't reality.

They know so little.

The minutes rolled by and Veyda's frustration evolved into anger.

When? When is she going to announce it? We selected her.

It soon became clear that Kate Page had missed every opportunity to acknowledge Zarathustra's triumphant work.

Look at her, prattling on. Why does she refuse to recognize our achievements in the name of Zarathustra? We selected her. We communicated with her specifically because she was the best reporter. We handed her the story of a lifetime. Now she's hogging the glory for herself.

Then Kate Page made her closing remarks.

“While there are many conspiracy theories, claims and debates, there has yet to be a single confirmed case of a commercial aircraft being cyber hacked.”

Zarathustra! Zarathustra! We gave you confirmation!
Veyda gritted her teeth. “This is insulting!”

Seth hushed her.

“Who does she think she is, Seth? She's done nothing extraordinary. We selected her to be part of history.”

He took her back to the corner out of earshot of other passengers.

“She's nothing more than a lower-caste human,” Veyda said. “Straight out of
Brave New World
. A lowly Gamma girl. Who does she think she is? Does she know how dangerous it is to defy us?”

Veyda burned to take action against Kate Page. Seth began working on his laptop, digging fast into her life, softly reciting to Veyda Kate Page's address, her Social Security number, her height, weight, her income, her shoe size, and he went on.

“I'll find out whatever you want,” he said.

“Good. She needs to be taught a lesson. She needs to be punished!”

Thirty-Eight

Clear River, North Dakota

S
cotch, bourbon and then Canadian whiskey gurgled down Robert Cole's kitchen drain as he emptied bottle after bottle.

Pungent alcoholic waves wafted from the sink, filling his nostrils. He licked his dry lips, contending with the powerful urge to keep one bottle.

Just one,
a voice called from his well of sorrow.
One. Please
.

No, get rid of them all. It has to be done.

He needed a clear, strong mind because he had to do more than alert the NTSB to the fatal flaw of Richlon-Titan's system, and more than just providing them with the solution. Cole's supreme challenge would be convincing them that he was sober and sane enough to be believed.

And I've got to do this before more people are killed.

After he took the bottles to the trash outside his house, he made scrambled eggs, shaved and showered. Needles of hot water pricked his skin and his thoughts pulled him back across a wasteland of pain to his work on the system before the crash that took Elizabeth from him.

We'd discovered the vulnerability in RT's fly-by-wire system and we developed a solution. They rejected our findings, retested and said the existing system was secure. But did they make any changes to the system that I'm not aware of?

That was the critical question.

He dressed then stood in his dining room surveying the files he'd recovered from the second-hand dealer in Bismarck, relieved that he'd plucked them from destruction. He had folders with printed data, manuals, schematic drawings, equations and flash drives. He'd worked late the night before, painstakingly organizing the material by subject into neat stacks.

Bittersweet memories washed over him when he discovered that some of Elizabeth's and Veyda's papers, books and pictures had gotten mixed up with his work. There was one of him holding Veyda when she was three weeks old, another of him helping Veyda learn to ride a bike, and another of her with her first car. Cole missed them both, ached for them both.

Where are you, Veyda? Is it too late to repair our lives?

He didn't have time to dwell on the answers. He shifted his focus to the task before him. He read the reports arising from the Manila security conference and the claim that cyber infiltration of the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System and the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast System was possible, affording a hacker the capability to land, or crash, any plane in flight.

Official aviation bodies around the world had dismissed the claim as only a theoretical possibility but it had prompted Cole's team to review RT's system. That's when they'd discovered an unsecured back door at a connection between the aircraft's computing systems. It was vulnerable to attack. A skilled hacker could gain access to critical flight systems.

Cole spread a number of schematic drawings on the large table in the dining room. Here was his proposed remedy, the one he'd submitted that had been rejected. They'd said his analysis had been incorrect, that they'd retested the system in Europe.

But they'd been wrong.

He consulted a pile of reports concerning the European tests. Cole knew that they were inaccurate, that the results couldn't be trusted. He knew the issue for RT, especially Hub Wolfeson, was money. The retrofit needed to make the system secure would cost nine million dollars per aircraft. Wolfeson didn't think the risk was worth the expenditure and had persuaded the board to support him.

Cole studied other reports that a colleague at RT had sent him in the weeks after Elizabeth was killed.

“Cole—for when you're in shape to care. These are the changes Wolfeson approved. They cost nothing and they're a quick fix that fails to rectify the situation,” read the note affixed to the reports.

Cole had never read the reports or looked at the schematic drawings showing the changes. He placed the drawings on the table and pored over them. As time passed, realization dawned on him. The system had been altered. It remained vulnerable but it also meant the solution he'd originally designed was now ineffective.

I have to design an entirely new solution
.

A knot tightened in his gut. He'd have to do it without the help of his team, without the airline's resources.

I'm completely alone.

Cole stared at the schematics, seeing challenges at every turn.

The difficulties began swirling before him on the table.

This is too much for me.

Overwhelmed, he dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, feeling a craving coming to life like a wild force awakening in a cage, thrashing, roaring, demanding to be satisfied.

The hangar. There's still a few bottles of bourbon at the hangar. I could drive out there and... No!

Cole gripped his head with his hands.

Images of Shikra Airlines Flight 418 burning at Heathrow, of screaming passengers tossed about EastCloud Flight 4990, streaked through his brain.

I've got to do this before it happens again!

Thirty-Nine

Manhattan, New York

“T
here she is, crackerjack investigative reporter and celebrity panelist!”

Mark Reston, Kate's newsroom neighbor, ducked when she threw a crumpled news release at him as she settled in at her desk.

“Knock it off, Reston.”

“Seriously, you done us proud there, Ms. Kate. I'm sure you riled up the crazies who'll want some of your stardust.”

“Leave me alone—” her keyboard clicked “—I've got work to do.”

“I'm grabbing a coffee.” He stood. “Want one?”

“Sure, if you're buying.”

Kate shook her head at Reston and at the whole CTNB thing.
My teacher said she saw you on TV, Mom,
Grace had said at breakfast that morning.
So did my friends at work,
Vanessa had added, forcing Kate to acknowledge the reach network news still held in the digital age.

After scanning the competition online, Kate determined that no one had hit on any new developments with the London or New York incidents. She was annoyed that no new leads had emerged for her in the wake of her CTNB panel—other than messages from friends and former colleagues across the country and around the globe who'd seen it.

Kate checked her public email box for the address tag that was affixed at the end of the story she wrote. The email count following the show was one hundred and ten. Thankfully, much of the spam had been filtered but, as usual, the crazies and idiots had weighed in.

“Nice job yesterday on the show.” Chuck stopped at her desk.

“Thanks.”

“It went well. You got anything new in the way of a concrete lead?”

She shook her head. When her phone rang, she looked at Chuck.

“Go ahead, take it. We'll talk some more later,” he said, leaving her to answer her call. The number was blocked.

“Newslead, Kate Page.”

“Hi, it's Erich.”

“Hey, what's up? Got anything?”

“Not at the moment, but I wanted you to know that your TV panel has generated some chatter on the Darknet.”

“Really? What kind of chatter?”

“Let's call it freestyle debate on myths, conspiratorial beliefs and the president's statement.”

“Sounds weird.”

“Listen, Kate, I've got to leave the country again. But I've reached out to a guy I know who may be intimate with some classified initiatives in this area.”

“Really? What's his code name?”

“Very funny. This guy's extremely sensitive about the press, but I've urged him to talk to you and he'll deny knowing me. That's our thing.”

“I'll take any help I can get.”

“I gotta go.”

After hanging up, Kate found herself gazing across the newsroom at the empty workstation where Sloane F. Parkman used to sit.

“Chuck sure is cleaning house.” Reston placed a coffee on Kate's desk.

“Thanks. Yeah, well, Sloane was no great loss.”

“You heard the latest on Reeka?”

“That she's taking time off.”

“Word is she's been told not to come back.”

“Are you serious?”

“I heard they're working out terms of her departure and keeping it low-key. I'm telling you, little by little, step by step, Chuck Laneer is restoring the integrity of this place.”

Reston's phone rang and he answered with “Be right there.”

“Gotta go,” he said to Kate.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

It didn't take long before Kate had disposed of half the emails in her inbox. She'd flagged two to consider later. Before resuming, she reached for her coffee and locked onto the subject line of one email:

YOU FAILED ZARATHUSTRA—A TOLL WILL BE EXACTED

She opened it and read:

We offered you a place in history. We selected you because we regarded only you and your work worthy of the honor. We chose you to announce our triumph with Flight 4990 but you failed. The cost was 15 innocents from Flight 418. Then you insulted our victory with your televised lies. Why did you deny that we have taken control of the skies? Why did you lie? Like Peter's denial of Christ, it was preordained. We warn you now to tell the ordinary masses that we are extraordinary people destined to soon achieve a monumental victory on a colossal scale, the likes of which the world has never seen. We will take civilization to unprecedented heights, lighting the way forward for all of human existence. We are Zarathustra, Lord of the Heavens.

Kate felt the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand up as she read the postscript:

Do not doubt the seriousness of our intentions. We know you live with your daughter and sister in Morningside Heights.