Hard Fall (36 page)

“It
is
today. Why don't you hop the shuttle and get your butt over here? I've got something interesting to show you.”

The blue shuttle van appeared in front of the Buzzard Point building at twenty after the hour. Six people got out. A green padlocked chest was removed and transferred over to the security people at the front desk. Daggett and three others loaded and bounced around for the fifteen-minute return ride to headquarters. For Daggett, the ride was interminable.

Chaz Meecham was seated behind his generous desk waiting for him. “We could have done this on the phone,” he said, “But I hate phones.”

“You and me both.”

With a flick of the chin, he indicated the file folder in front of Daggett. “There's your report. Your glass bulb.” He rose, shut the office door, and sat down squarely in his high-back leather office chair. He opened a drawer and removed a sealed clear plastic bag containing the remains of the glass bulb. He handed it to Daggett. “If there was mercury in that thing, Michigan, it's long gone. Probably burned up in the fire.” After a few seconds he asked, “You all right?”

“Disappointed is all.”

“Jesus! Give me a minute to explain. It's not
all
bad. The down side of this report is the lack of any evidence of mercury. Not surprising, incidentally. It's a heavy metal. When the glass bulb broke apart, it was history; and the glass itself was too burned to give us any trace amounts.

“But one man's ceiling is another man's floor,” he continued. “The Lord giveth and he taketh away. The fire robbed us of the mercury, but it gave us something better. It adhered to the outside curve of your glass bulb. And we
were
able to identify that as what's left behind when you burn silicon. Silicon, as in what we found in Bernard's hotel room. In fact, the
exact
same chemical composition as the silicon our people lifted from his hotel room carpet. The same stuff. Page three and four, in the file.”

Daggett didn't touch the file. “Translation?”

“The way it works is this: When you build a detonator, you create gates between the power source—a battery—and the explosive. Every time a gate opens, the electricity from the battery gets that much closer to the explosive.” He raised his hand like a teacher. “Let me show you what one of these babies looks like.”

Chaz Meecham left the room. When he returned, he slapped a hard cube into Daggett's hand. “We call them ‘ice cubes.' You can see why.” Daggett was holding a small brick of hardened epoxy with four wires sticking out. It was small and clear, like an ice cube. Two of the wires were attached to a nine-volt battery clip. The other two were bare-ended and tipped with solder. “The ones Bernard built might not look exactly like this. I have a feeling he packed it all into the altimeter, or why else would he have cut down the plastic? I don't know … The point is, he puts all his works inside some kind of ice cube so the operative can't screw it up, can't dink with the electronics. He might leave a way to, say, set the clock, or something like that, but he doesn't want his wiring messed around with. Bernard didn't use epoxy; he used silicon. We know that from the hotel room evidence.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“In bomb-building, there's a reason for everything. Count on it. Silicon dries fast. It's less messy. It flexes easily—might have something to do with the sensitivity of altimeter. Who knows?” Meecham glanced over at Daggett. “He's good, Michigan. Real good.” Daggett felt a tension he had previously missed. This was some sort of competition between Meecham and Bernard. Could Meecham, through a few pieces of microscopic evidence found collectively in a hotel room rug, and the mud of an airplane crash, establish exactly what kind of device Bernard had built and what he intended to use it for?

“That's my job,” Meecham said. Daggett hadn't realized he had asked this aloud. Meecham lectured, “A simple example of a gated detonator is a clock timer—a single gate. Set the clock to a certain time and, blammo, up she goes. Not so easy on a plane. Not if you want the bird aloft and well away from where it took off. So you use a series of gates: pressure switches, blocks, thermometers, humidistats—you name it; each one responds to a different condition, a different requirement—altitude, time, temperature. It can be any number of things.”

“You said he had two altimeters.”

Meecham clearly didn't like being interrupted. “Before a plane takes off, the copilot cranks up the air packs—he pressurizes the cabin. Right? He does it wrong, you feel it in your ears. Know what I mean? If you're Bernard, to make sure the plane is aloft, you use an altimeter—preset to some given altitude—as your first gate. That way you're insured the other gates aren't activated until the cabin is pressurized. If the bomb goes off in the air, the more damage and the less evidence. Lockerbie was a good example of that; Lockerbie was supposed to blow over water. Anyway, the barometer is your first gate.

“If I were building it,” he continued, “I'd use a second gate—a clock timer of some sort—to make sure the bird is well downrange before she blows—”

“Casios? We're pretty sure he bought two Casios.”

“I saw that in the report.” He shrugged. “I don't know. With Bernard, it's possible I suppose. You have to be into microelectronics—chip circuit design—if you're going to pull the guts out of a Casio and make anything happen. It's certainly possible. So the order is: The air packs crank up the cabin pressure; the first gate, the altimeter, opens, which, by providing electricity, turns on the clock timer. Now that would be a command device we might see. But it's not what Bernard did here. This glass bulb on yours changes all the rules. This bulb means Bernard's detonator contained a third gate. That's the only explanation.”

“Meaning?”

Meecham had prepared himself for this meeting. He reached to his right and retrieved a black dial, a glass bulb with two wires, and a small clock. He lined them up in this order. “My guess? Three gates, Michigan: an altimeter switch that opens gate number one after the cabin is pressurized; then a mercury switch as gate number two.” He tipped the switch. “The nose goes up and the second gate opens. Bernard has established two rules: the cabin is pressurized, the plane has taken off.”

“And the Casio?”

“The Casio is the last gate. After the plane is pressurized and the nose has lifted, the clock starts running down.”

“Why the weird face?” Daggett asked.

“I gotta tell you, a guy like Bernard doesn't make a detonator this complicated without damn good reason. So what's the reason?”

“He wants to make sure the plane is airborne before the thing goes off. Isn't that it?”

Meecham shook his head. “It's too complicated for that. The way you do that is set your timer for a good long time. A couple of hours. If the plane is delayed on the ground, then by setting the clock to run late, you cover yourself. No, it's not that.

“Let me demonstrate the problem here, Michigan.” Meecham picked up the glass bulb. It contained a shifting blob of mercury. He tilted it so the mercury held in the end of the bulb without the two electrodes. “This is the off position. No contact between these poles. No juice. The detonator is inactive. The timer is not yet hot. But during takeoff, this mercury runs to this end of the bulb and it is hot,” he said, duplicating the motion. “There is now juice running from the battery to the timer—the first and second gates are both open. The timer starts to run. But here's the catch …” He tilted the bulb back again; the mercury slid away from the twin contacts, breaking the electrical connection. “As soon as the plane levels off, the mercury switch
disconnects
the juice. The timer will stop. No juice means no bomb. The whole fucking thing goes dead.”

“So you've got them in the wrong order,” Daggett said, after a moment of thought.

“No way. No other order to put them in, Michigan. At least not one that fits with what we know about the way flight sixty-four went down. It made it, what, a mile, two miles downrange? Nothing. What this
tells
us,” he said, pointing to his desk, “is that Bernard built this thing to activate at a specific time, during takeoff, while the plane is
still
in a climb. That is the only way to explain this. So you tell me: Now how much fucking sense does
that
make?”

Daggett found himself back with Dr. Barnes from Duhning. The simulator, with Ward at the wheel, had duplicated a dozen takeoffs, all using differing times between takeoff and loss of pilot control. Barnes had wondered the same thing: Why do it?

“Why do it?” Meecham was still talking. Words and faces were mixing around in Daggett's head. “We have
no
evidence of an explosion. No evidence of any explosive material on board. We got squat!”

Daggett said, “You mentioned this mini-detonator last time. You said it burned ‘hot.' Does that mean it would be hot enough to start a fire?”

“Start a fire?” His face lit up. “You kidding me? Does the pope shit in the woods? Is a bear Catholic? It'll melt fuckin' metal!”

Finally, the repetition inside the simulator made sense. Finally he had something to take Mumford. He came around the desk, took Meecham's head between his hands, and kissed the man on the mouth.

Chaz Meecham, wiping his lips, shouted, “You're fucking crazy!”

Nodding vigorously, Daggett grabbed the file. “Would you repeat all this for Mumford if I asked?”

“If you promise not to do that again.”

“I promise.”

He LED her into the bedroom.

Since he needed a furnished house, he used a complaint about the furnishings as his pretense for getting her upstairs. But she knew better. The sexuality had grown so intense on the drive over that neither had said much. As she climbed the stairs, she felt her knees weaken.

Carl opened the window. Midmorning light streamed in, followed by a slight breeze and the distant, melodious accompaniment of songbirds. In the relative silence, he directed her to the edge of the bed and ran his hands in her hair. She closed her eyes. “That's delicious,” she said. He kissed her mouth and she welcomed it.

Carl scooped an arm under her knees, lifted her off her feet and set her down gently on the bed. He opened her blouse and his shirt and he pressed himself against her. Tears fell from her eyes. He asked, in a voice she could hardly hear, if he should stop. She shook her head no.

He gently stole the remainder of her clothes, lost his own onto the floor somewhere, and sat alongside her. Tenderly, carefully, he browsed every inch of her with fingertips that felt like feathers. The breeze ruffled the curtain and the sound of the birds grew even louder. A bold sparrow dared to observe them from the windowsill.

This felt dangerous. Her fears drove her pleasures higher, wind to her fire. Carl refused to have it over with quickly. This stranger milked every sensation he could from her, stretched every experience as if to test her tenacity. To challenge her. Twice she called out for him to enter her. Twice he whispered back, “No.” And twice she let herself go.

Perhaps that was the real thrill: the surrender. She turned herself over to him. Her skin, her nerves, her innermost privacies, her
self
. This skillful man owned her for these long minutes. He drew imaginary patterns on her skin, finger-painted her thighs, drew her willingly open until she was fully offered to him. He kissed her there for ages, played with her, toyed with her, drove her to the edge of frenzy, only to retreat and settle her again. “My God,” she heard herself cry in a shuddering whimper. He kissed and tongued his way from her navel to her breasts, and back again. There was no end to his patience. He indulged himself with her, drove her clear to the edge and then past it, until she flooded with an intense heat that soothed her and carried her off so far that she neither heard him nor felt him. She reached down and pulled for him, but he would not give her this. He generously refused.

Minutes, hours, weeks later? their mouths suddenly met, hot and wet, and he penetrated her at this instant. She cried out with joy. She felt him swell inside her. Deeper and deeper. Was there no end to him? She felt his rhythms. A connection so full and sweet, so tender and yet so filled with authority. Yes, he owned her.

He pulled back and withdrew. “No,” she murmured, wanting him. He teased her entrance. Toyed with her. She opened her eyes and tried to focus on his face, but found it impossible. He was smiling. She knew that much. She could
feel
it from him. Dreamy and distant, she retired to a place so full of joy and pleasure that she wanted to die. “Please,” she said, feeling her lips curl into a sleepy smile.

He delivered himself slowly. Smoothly. Further and further. Totally. She arched her back to accommodate him. His hot tongue found her breasts and she felt herself explode. Never anything like this. Never anything close.

She felt a complete and total whole with him. No longer two halves. No names. No faces. No identities. The same. Equals. His pleasure was hers. Her movement was his. Their moment was this.

He went rigid, from toe to head, and erupted inside her. She saw flames. They cried out together. The bird took flight in a soft sputtering of wing. The two lovers convulsed and trembled, cried out and laughed, collapsed in a tangle of sweat and heartbeats.

Naked, he smoked a cigarette by the window. He needed those keys. He needed to clear his head and get back on track. It wasn't easy. She lay peacefully wrapped in the blankets, half asleep. He could feel her staring at him. He studied the backyard. “I would love it here,” he said in a distant voice that he hadn't intended. What was happening to him? He felt unable to focus. There was much work to be done and he had no desire to do it. Emotions flooded him, so foreign that before he could prevent it, he became a victim to them. He felt like the juggler who took on one too many items and now found the task before him impossible—watched before his eyes as the circling objects defied his attempts to control them.