Hard Fall (37 page)

“Would?” she asked.

“Will,” he corrected, hating himself for his continuing deceit. Could he tell her? Could he possibly risk the truth? The truth? It was nothing but another of the objects in the slowly degenerating circle. “This is the way I will always think of this room,” he said. “Us. Now. This moment.”

“You seem sad.”

“Extremely happy, I assure you. If I could preserve this moment, if I could lock that door over there, the two of us inside … forever. Well, that would be my little piece of heaven.”

“Can't you?”

“Can I?”

“You don't sound convinced,” she said.

“You have another life. I've interfered. Should I sound convinced?”

“I think you should.” She threw the covers off. He looked at her. She had a fine body. It had lost its youth, in places, its shape. But there was no body he would have rather seen at this moment. It was perfect. It was her. “Did I show you the two-headed shower?” she asked in a suggestive, humorous tone. “All European tile. Imported. Pressure sensitive controls. May I show you the shower?” she asked, coming off the bed toward him.

She was magnificent, he thought. He tossed the cigarette out the window and watched as it tumbled, end over end, and the sparks scattered on the brick terrace. She headed straight for him and pressed herself against him, wet and warm, and he felt himself begin to swell. “Or should we just stay here in the chair?” she asked, taking him fully in hand and stroking him against her sex.

“Why not both?” he asked.

“Indeed?” she replied, helping him enter her. She closed her eyes and hung her chin on his shoulder.

He listened gratefully to the singing of the birds. He took her firmly beneath the buttocks and carried her to the chest of drawers where he set her down. He drew her ankles high around his back and found her source of pleasure again. He watched her face squirm with his experiments.

Then she bit his shoulder, and they both came at once.

Following a brief nap and a failed shower because of no hot water, they toweled themselves clean, joking about how they would smell. Slowly, reluctantly, they dressed.

Kort did what he felt he had to do. With the steady, sure voice of a cold-blooded professional he said, “Toss me your keys. I'll steal your car and find us some take-out food.”

“I'll come with you.”

“I wouldn't think of it,” he said. “That will spoil any surprises I cook up.”

“You're an incorrigible romantic. You know that, Carl?”

“I try,” he replied.

“No, you don't try. It's natural. That's what makes you so appealing.”

Natural? he wondered.
Call me by my real name
, he willed.
Call my bluff. Whatever you do, don't hand me those keys!

She fumbled through her purse looking for the keys and, finding them, threw them at him. He caught them effortlessly, a frog's tongue snagging the fly.

He stared at them in the palm of his hands: the keys. A simple little group of keys. A dozen ways he might have obtained them, some easier than others, and yet he had elected this route. Why?

“Carl? Something wrong?”

“Just thinking.”

“I'm starved. Ravenous. Stop thinking.” She pointed toward the door. “Be off with you!”

“Whatever you say,” he said.

Copying the keys was a painless exercise. He pocketed his set, bought them some deli sandwiches and potato salad, and returned to the car. Here, as he was finding a stable location to rest the small bags of hot food, he came across an unexpected bonus: a shopping list written on the back of an envelope addressed to Mr. Cameron Daggett, listing Daggett's street address. This saved him from having to shadow Carrie—or Daggett, God forbid—until being led to the house. It briefly cheered him up. But as he returned to the small cottage, his good spirits waned.

Parked in the driveway, he sat behind the wheel for several long minutes, wondering where life might have taken them if they had found each other under different circumstances. A heavy sadness filled him. Feelings he had suppressed for years bubbled to the surface and spit at him, despite his efforts to contain them. He felt drugged: an unwilling victim of his own conscience. He had violated her, physically, emotionally, and now criminally. He had stolen from her. He had stolen the truth, stolen her trust.

He hated himself.

He slammed the car door hard. He fingered the gate's wrought-iron latch and approached the house solemnly. Angry. Confused.

Oh, yes, he reminded himself sardonically: he had accomplished his goal.
Bravo!
The keys were his.

But what of his soul?

Mumford's corner office held them all easily, with room left over for a volleyball game. The pathologist, a Dr. Ben-David; Chaz Meecham from Explosives; and Lynn Greene occupied one of the two leather couches. Ben-David was a small man with pinpoint eyes and dark skin. Meecham looked his usual all-American, and today, a little younger than his forty-odd years. Lynn looked not a penny less than a million bucks.

Daggett took one of the two leather chairs, leaving Pullman isolated on the opposing couch. Mumford appeared comfortable sitting in his leather high-back chair, enthroned behind his expansive walnut desk.

Daggett could no longer act alone. Without Mumford's blessing, he could not raise the manpower necessary to stop Kort from whatever it was he had planned, and so, two years of investigation came down to this one meeting. If Daggett failed to convince Mumford that the crash of flight 64 was not an accident, but sabotage, then he was to begin his lengthy report on the Backman bombing. With three days to go until the Pentagon meeting—which he still believed was directly related to Kort's target—everything came down to his performance over the next twenty minutes.

He felt well prepared for this meeting. He had phoned each person individually so they might know exactly what was expected of them. He was to become a conductor now, and like a conductor he tapped his pencil against the edge of folders piled high on the coffee table in front of him. As with music miraculously coming off the written page, he hoped that from this ensemble, a wealth of fact and supposition might develop into a convincing explanation for the behavior of AmAirXpress flight 64. An
explanation
was all he hoped for.

He pulled out his list and raised his voice, hoping, against the odds, he might sound confident. Public speaking was not his gift. “First off, I'd like to run around the room with a few questions. I think that will give us a look at some of the background, some of the groundwork involved.” He looked around for a glass of water. Seeing none, he continued.

“My first question is to Dr. Ben-David. He's both reviewed the autopsy protocols and has had direct discussions with the medical examiners in California who performed the autopsies. Specifically, the topic has been blood toxicology. What I wanted to ask you, Doctor, is whether or not you have any way of knowing if a person was unconscious prior to death?”

Ben-David had an unusually high voice, and the annoying habit of pulling at his ear. “What's interesting about this, is that just such a question came up about four years ago. In the medical examiner community …” he added. “And then, as now, it involved a plane crash. The concern was that the pilot may have blacked out only moments before impact. Critical moments, I'm afraid. Leading pathologists were pulled together to research the possibility of proving or disproving the pilot's consciousness at the moment of death. The speculation was that by measuring the levels of lactic acid in the blood, we could determine the level of stress just prior to death. High levels might indicate the pilot was struggling to control the aircraft. Low levels might indicate the pilot had died before he was even aware of a problem. But it never really worked out. The tests were inconclusive. That's a roundabout way of saying, no, we can't tell—not yet, anyway.”

He had Mumford's interest. That was a good sign. Daggett asked, “And the cause of death to the flight crew of AmAirXpress flight sixty-four? It's listed as a result of impact. ‘Body fragmentation,' is the term, I think. Do you go along with that?”

“No. And neither do the authors of that report. Not any longer. The reports are being rewritten.”

Mumford barked out, “Is that right?”

“Absolutely,” Ben-David answered.

“Well, Jesus Christ! Why didn't
I
hear about this?” Mumford huffed for a few long moments. No one interrupted. No one answered him. The answer was obvious: He was hearing about it right now. “What exactly
was
the cause of death, Dr. Ben-David?”

Ben-David looked to Daggett.

Mumford corrected, “You don't need Daggett's permission to talk. You need mine.” He tapped his chest. “This is
my
office. This is my fucking field office!”

“Special Agent Daggett directed my attention to—and I subsequently challenged my colleagues to examine—the level of carbon monoxide in the blood. The toxicology report.” He paused, uncomfortable. He seemed to be thinking—looking for layman's terms? “There was a fire on board. We know that.” He looked to Lynn Greene, who nodded her agreement. “One good indication of fire is carbon monoxide in the blood. It's often the killer, which is exactly what was believed to be the case here. In fact,” he said, tapping the folder in front of him, “the toxicologist believed the two crew members had been overcome by carbon monoxide and had then died upon impact. Body fragmentation, as Mr. Daggett has just said. A plane crash is difficult for pathologists because you have body fragmentation and fire. Special Agent Daggett directed my attention to something in the report that the medical examiners had missed, which was the
high level
of carbon monoxide, and the
lack
of any other chemical toxicant in the blood. Plastic burns to a vapor; it gets into your lungs and into your blood. In a fire, soot gets lodged in your trachea. In the case of flight sixty-four, there is no record of soot in the trachea of either man. Even given a very few seconds, as was the case here, we should have seen
something
in the trachea. Lung tissue samples from both crew members has since been examined in the California DOJ toxicology lab in Sacramento. They found not only an extremely high concentration of carbon monoxide but the presence of white phosphorus.” He paused again. “We checked with the gentlemen now on the other end of that telephone,” he said, pointing. “There is no source of white phosphorus on a Duhning 959-600. Not on any Duhning aircraft, for that matter. We then checked the cargo manifest. None there either.”

“I'm not sure I follow you,” Mumford said. “Where's this leave the actual cause of death?”

“If I may,” Daggett said, interrupting. “We're coming right to that.”

Mumford didn't like it. Nonetheless, Daggett continued. “Chaz, you and I talked about this detonator. The mini-det.”

“Right. Sure thing, Michigan.” He faced Mumford. “The long and the short of it, Dick,” he said, emphasizing his friendship with Mumford, “is that we have pretty good evidence a
very
sophisticated detonator was aboard sixty-four. Nothing to take to the courts—but fuck the courts. This guy intended to detonate at a specific moment, almost immediately after takeoff. Weird, I know, but it's the only explanation I can come up with. Furthermore, we have
zero
evidence of any explosive on board. Zero. So what the fuck, Chuck? Go to all that trouble and have nothing to detonate?”

Daggett said, “The mini-det, Chaz.”

“Yeah, right. Evidence found in Bernard's hotel room suggests the presence of a mini-det. A miniaturized detonator. Pretty high-tech shit, but not impossible for a guy like Bernard to get his hands on. A mini-det flashes hot—real hot. You score the outer casing just right and instead of popping it flares. Flares hot enough to melt some metals. Plenty hot enough to start a cockpit fire. One of the chemical residues we look for in crash debris, something to indicate the presence of a mini-det, is
white phosphorus
.” He was nodding to emphasize his point. He pointed at Ben-David. “Sounds like he found the white phosphorus.” He nodded some more, looked over at Daggett, took his cue nicely, and sat back.

“Which leads us to Lynn Greene with the FAA,” Daggett said.

Lynn squared her shoulders. It was a case of nerves for her, but it had a great effect: She had Mumford's attention. Lynn, who had sided with Daggett all along. Lynn, who had brought him the glass bulb that—as far as he was concerned—had turned the case. “We hear two distinct sounds on the Cockpit Voice Recorder just before impact. One is a soft pop … the second is a hissing. Within two seconds, the bodies
of both men
collapse onto the controls. This is confirmed by the Flight Data Recorder. Several switches were thrown that, upon reconstruction, could only be caused by”—she lifted her arms out—“a body falling forward like this.” She collapsed forward to dramatize it. Daggett noted with pleasure that everyone was fully focused on her. She sat back up. “The hissing continues. Because the copilot mentions the fire extinguisher, we decided to take a closer look, wondering if it might be the source of the hissing. This morning we received the results of a lab test conducted on the cockpit fire-extinguisher. Evidence suggests that the end of the fire extinguisher was subjected to extremely high temperatures. It's possible, even likely, that the detonator itself was part of the fire extinguisher. Inside the pressure gauge perhaps. There is further evidence of white phosphorus, again indicating the detonator to which Mr. Meecham referred. My guess is that the mini-det not only started a fire but melted the pressure gauge, releasing whatever gas was contained inside that cylinder. Examination of the fire extinguisher itself revealed it was not filled with fire retardants, but instead an extremely high concentration of carbon monoxide. A potentially lethal concentration.”