Sole Survivor (17 page)

As a scintillant darkness sprayed across her field of vision, she started to slump forward. She felt the chair tipping sideways. She was unconscious before her head hit the carpet.

For perhaps twenty minutes she dreamed of severed fingers in preserving sheaths of red wax. In shrimp-pink faces, fragile smiles broke like strings of pearls, the bright teeth bouncing and rolling across the floor, but in the black crescent between the curved pink lips, new pearls formed, and a choirboy eye blinked blue. There were hound-dog eyes too, as black and shiny as leeches, in which she saw not her reflection but images of Denny’s screaming, earless face.

When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.

Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.

She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.

Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.

There was no point in warning the hotel’s night manager that one of his employees or guests was in danger. If the gunman had kept his threat to impress her with a senseless, random killing, he had pulled the trigger already. He and his companion would have left the hotel at least half an hour ago.

Wincing at the throbbing pain in her neck, she went to the door that connected her room with theirs. She opened it and checked the inner face. Her privacy deadbolt latch was backed by a removable brass plate fixed in place with screws, which allowed access to the mechanism of her lock from the other side. The other room’s door featured no such access plate.

The shiny brass looked new. She was certain that it had been installed shortly before she checked into the hotel—by the gunman and his companion acting either clandestinely or with the assistance of a hotel engineer. A clerk at the front desk was paid or coerced to put her in this room rather than any other.

Barbara was not much of a drinker, but she raided the honor bar for a two-shot miniature of vodka and a cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it—then went into the bathroom and threw up.

She felt unclean. With dawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.

Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn’t stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.

The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen—uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives.

From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o’clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.

The body had not been discovered immediately because, curiously, no one had heard gunfire.

Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.

The day was high and blue. The city’s famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.

She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.

After canceling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.

Quaking fear became quaking grief. She wept uncontrollably for the dead room-service waiter whose name she didn’t know, for Denny and Rebekah and unborn Felicia whose lives now seemed perpetually suspended on a slender thread, for her own loss of innocence and self-respect, for the three hundred and thirty people aboard Flight 353, for justice thwarted and hope lost.

A sudden wind groaned across the meadow, playing with old dry aspen leaves, like the devil counting souls and casting them away.

“I can’t let you do this,” Joe said. “I can’t let you tell me what was on the cockpit-voice recorder if there’s any chance it’s going to put your son and his family in the hands of people like that.”

“It’s not for you to decide, Joe.”

“The hell it’s not.”

“When you called from Los Angeles, I played dumb because I’ve got to assume my phone is permanently tapped, every word recorded. Actually, I don’t think it is. I don’t think they feel any
need
to tap it, because they know by now that they’ve got me muzzled.”

“If there’s even a chance—”

“And I know for certain I’m not being watched. My house isn’t under observation. I’d have picked up on that long ago. When I walked out on the investigation, took early retirement, sold the house in Bethesda, and came back to Colorado Springs, they wrote me off, Joe. I was broken, and they knew it.”

“You don’t seem broken to me.”

She patted his shoulder, grateful for the compliment. “I’ve rebuilt myself some. Anyway, if you weren’t followed—”

“I wasn’t. I lost them yesterday. No one could have followed me to LAX this morning.”

“Then I figure there’s no one to know we’re here or to know what I tell you. All I ask is you never say you got it from me.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you. But there’s still such a risk you’ll be taking,” he worried.

“I’ve had months to think about it, to live with it, and the way it seems to me is…They probably think I told Denny some of it, so he would know what danger he’s in, so he’d be careful, watchful.”

“Did you?”

“Not a word. What kind of a life could they have, knowing?”

“Not a normal one.”

“But now Denny, Rebekah, Felicia, and I are going to be hanging by a thread as long as this cover-up continues. Our only hope is for someone else to blow it wide open, so then what little I know about it won’t matter any more.”

The storm clouds were not only in the east now. Like an armada of incoming starships in a film about futuristic warfare, ominous black thunderheads slowly resolved out of the white mists overhead.

“Otherwise,” Barbara continued, “a year from now or two years from now, even though I’ve kept my mouth shut, they’ll decide to tie up all the loose ends. Flight 353 will be such old news that no one will connect my death or Denny’s or a handful of others to it. No suspicions will be raised if something happens to those of us with incriminating bits of information. These people, whoever the hell they are…they’ll buy insurance with a car accident here, a fire there. A faked robbery to cover a murder. A suicide.”

Through Joe’s mind passed the waking-nightmare images of Lisa burning, Georgine dead on the kitchen floor, Charlie in the blood-tinted light.

He couldn’t argue with Barbara’s assessment. She probably had it figured right.

In a sky waiting to snarl and crackle, menacing faces formed in the clouds, blind and open-mouthed, choked with anger.

Taking her first fateful step toward revelation, Barbara said, “The flight-data recorder and the cockpit-voice recorder arrived in Washington on the Gulfstream and were in the labs by three o’clock Eastern Time the day after the crash.”

“You were still just getting into the investigation here.”

“That’s right. Minh Tran—he’s an electronics engineer with the Safety Board—and a few colleagues opened the Fairchild recorder. It’s almost as large as a shoe box, jacketed in three-eighths of an inch of stainless steel. They cut it carefully, with a special saw. This particular unit had endured such violent impact that it was compressed four inches end to end—the steel just crunched up like cardboard—and one corner had been crushed, resulting in a small breach.”

“And it still functioned?”

“No. The recorder was completely destroyed. But inside the larger box is the steel memory module. It contains the tape. It was also breached. A small amount of moisture had penetrated all the way into the memory module, but the tape wasn’t entirely ruined. It had to be dried, processed, but that didn’t take long, and then Minh and a few others gathered in a soundproof listening room to run it from the beginning. There were almost three hours of cockpit conversation leading up to the crash—”

Joe said, “They don’t just run it fast forward to the last few minutes?”

“No. Something earlier in the flight, something that seemed to be of no importance to the pilots at the time, might provide clues that help us understand what we’re hearing in the moments immediately before the plane went down.”

Steadily rising, the warm wind was brisk enough now to foil the lethargic bees on their lazy quest from bloom to bloom. Surrendering the field to the oncoming storm, they departed for secret nests in the woods.

“Sometimes we get a cockpit tape that’s all but useless to us,” Barbara continued. “The recording quality’s lousy for one reason or another. Maybe the tape’s old and abraded. Maybe the microphone is the hand-held type or isn’t functioning as well as it should, too much vibration. Maybe the recording head is worn and causing distortion.”

“I would think there’d be daily maintenance, weekly replacement, when it’s something as important as this.”

“Remember, as a percentage of flights, planes rarely go down. There are costs and flight-time delays to be considered. Anyway, commercial aviation is a human enterprise, Joe. And what human enterprise ever operates to ideal standards?”

“Point taken.”

“This time there was good and bad,” she said. “Both Delroy Blane and Santorelli were wearing headsets with boom microphones, which is real damn good, much better than a hand-held. Those along with the overhead cockpit mike gave us three channels to study. On the bad side, the tape wasn’t new. It had been recorded over a lot of times and was more deteriorated than we would have liked. Worse, whatever the nature of the moisture that reached the tape, it had caused some patchy corrosion to the recording surface.”

From a back pocket of her jeans, she took a folded paper but didn’t immediately hand it to Joe.

She said, “When Minh Tran and the others listened, they found that some portions of the tape were clearly audible and others were so full of scratchy static, so garbled, they could only discern one out of four or five words.”

“What about the last minute?”

“That was one of the worst segments. It was decided that the tape would have to be cleaned and rehabilitated. Then the recording would be electronically enhanced to whatever extent possible. Bruce Laceroth, head of the Major Investigations Division, had been there to listen to the whole tape, and he called me in Pueblo, at a quarter past seven, Eastern Time, to tell me the status of the recording. They were stowing it for the night, going to start work with it again in the morning. It was depressing.”

High above them, the eagle returned from the east, pale against the pregnant bellies of the clouds, still flying straight and true with the weight of the pending storm on its wings.

“Of course, that whole day had been depressing,” Barbara said. “We’d brought in refrigerated trucks from Denver to collect all the human remains from the site, which had to be completed before we could begin to deal with the pieces of the plane itself. There was the usual organizational meeting, which is always exhausting, because so many interest groups—the airline, the manufacturer of the plane, the supplier of the power plants, the Airline Pilots Association, lots of others—all want to bend the proceedings to serve their interests as much as possible. Human nature—and not the prettier part of it. So you have to be reasonably diplomatic but also damn tough to keep the process truly impartial.”