“Oh, we should definitely ask them again,” Jack said. “You have them here?”
Nina shook her head. “We’re not set up for it yet. They’re over at the county jail. Want to go for a visit?”
Jack smiled.
Diana Christie sat in her X-Terra, her fingers gripping the steering wheel. “I won’t take no for an answer,” she said out loud. “They are going to listen this time.”
She jerked on the door handle and pushed the door open. A moment later she marched determinedly toward the doors. The glass was dark, and she saw the reflection of a thin woman with dirty-blond hair, in a blue pantsuit, moving double-time. As she reached the glass doors, her image morphed into that of a tall blond man. He was on the far side of the door and he pushed it open, exiting just in front of a thin, short-haired woman with a determined look on her face. He held the door open long enough for Diana to pass through. She smiled and nodded her thanks, then she was inside.
The offices had improved since her last visit. The phones worked now. There was some furniture. There was still no receptionist or security, so she walked into the main room and looked around until she spotted the ferret-faced man in charge.
“Director Chappelle,” she said firmly. “Diana Christie, National Transportation Safety Board.”
Chappelle looked away from his conversation with a square-jawed man. “National Transpo— oh, right, Agent Christie. Was that today?”
She nodded and held up a manila folder. Chappelle shrugged and led her into the conference room. There was a table in it surrounded by chairs. The chairs themselves were covered in plastic. Chappelle tore the plastic off two of them and offered one to Diana. “Okay, Ms. Christie, I assume this is still about the Alaska flight?”
She opened the folder and spread out several reports and diagrams. “Yes. I’m still convinced it was bombed.”
Chappelle pointed at one of the reports in Diana’s folder. “The official FAA reports decided that it was a malfunction in the fuel tank. Some kind of faulty wiring. You were on the team that wrote the report.”
“I didn’t write it,” she reminded him. “I didn’t agree with it. The fuel tank explosion was secondary. The first blast was in the cabin. The rest of my team thought the tank blew first, and sent a fire line up into the cabin. One of the oxygen tanks then blew up. I think it went the opposite way. I think something inside the cabin blew up, igniting the tank, and sending a line down to the fuel supply.”
She handed a sheaf of papers to Chappelle, who tried to make sense of them. There were several columns of numbers — something about pounds of pressure per square centimeter, and comparisons of the expanding volume of several gases based on several temperatures. There was also a diagram of the Boeing 737 that had flown from Alaska on its way to Los Angeles, but had burst into flames over the Pacific.
“Isn’t this the same data as before?” Chappelle queried impatiently.
“No, no it’s not. Look at the schematic of the wiring system. It’s—”
“To be honest, it’s outside my field of expertise. I don’t know enough about avionics and airplane design to know—”
“I do. I do, and I’m telling you that plane was brought down by an explosion inside the cabin, and that means someone set off a bomb.”
“And the rest of the Federal Aviation Administration disagrees with you—”
“I’m with the NTSB, Director Chappelle. We have autonomy.”
“And the NTSB isn’t backing you,” he pointed out. “You’re off the reservation on this one. We’re the Counter Terrorist Unit, Ms. Christie. We’re professionals. We don’t act on the impulse of one maverick agent.”
Sheik Abdul al-Hassan stood at the wide restaurant window, watching the waves curl and crash on the shore. Light from the restaurant cast a huge rhomboid of light out onto the ocean. Beyond its borders, all was pitch-black.
“Beautiful,” said the man next to him.
Abdul glanced over at Father Collins. He hadn’t realized the priest was standing there. That was how much of an impression Collins made.
“I was just thinking,” Abdul said, more to himself than to the priest, “that this frame of light is a metaphor for our work.”
“How do you mean?”
“The tide keeps rolling, never changing, like generations and generations of people. We are the light, casting ourselves out over them, trying to illuminate.”
Father Collins smiled. He had a round, almost obese face under a shock of red hair that stood out starkly from his black shirt. “I have to say I always took you for kind of a cynic. I didn’t know you were a poet.”
Abdul shrugged. “I meant to be cynical. The light only reaches a tiny patch of the ocean. And the water never changes anyway.”
Father Collins frowned at this. Abdul was afraid he would say something, but instead the priest lifted his frown up to a weak smile and turned away. Abdul watched him waddle gingerly through the crowd of clerics, protecting his left arm, which was in a sling.
“There goes the face of the interfaith Unity Conference,” said a new arrival. Rabbi Dan Bender moved his considerable girth into the spot vacated by Father Collins. Bender was a big man, certainly overweight, and yet somehow able to move with a nimbleness that eluded thinner men. Abdul knew him to have run marathons.
“You are speaking metaphorically,” said Abdul, who was no Father Collins. “He is a gentle, harmless man without teeth. Without toughness. I suppose that is a good summation of the conference as a whole.”
Bender dabbed a kerchief on his cheek and neck, then dabbed around the rim of the yarmulke that somehow managed to keep its place on his bald head. “The conference will never have muscle as long as Collins is running it. I don’t care that it has the backing of the Pope. It is a local event, and that means Cardinal Mulrooney is in charge. He is no great fan of his Pope’s policy.”
Abdul raised an eyebrow. “You sound like you disapprove of Mulrooney. But isn’t he more like you and me?”
Bender looked offended. “You don’t believe that, Sheik. You and I are realists. We know that the problems that divide us aren’t just about making religions coexist. But we can respect one another. Mulrooney is cut from a different cloth. Pardon the pun.”
Abdul said wryly, “Well, I’m in a whimsical mood now, so I guess I’ll suggest that maybe it is the Pope’s way that is the best. In the face of our cynicism and Mulrooney’s isolationism, maybe hope and prayer are the best third option.”
Bender shook his head. “What’s the old Arab saying? Trust God, but tether your camel.”
A dark cloud settled over Abdul’s face. His cheeks seemed to sink under the line of his black beard.
“I said something?” Bender said, noting the change.
“No. No, it’s just… the last person to use that expression with me was my brother.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you had—”
“A twin, actually,” Abdul said. “He used that same phrase with me the last time I saw him.”
“I get the feeling you two are not close.”
“He’s a fundamentalist,” Abdul said.
Bender looked around the restaurant at the collection of clerics from so many faiths. “A fundamentalist? What would he think of this, then? What would he call it?”
Abdul considered. “An opportunity for martyrdom.”
A phone call and the words Federal anti-terrorist unit had oiled the machinery of the jail system, and Jack and Nina were inside in no time. Sheriff’s deputies brought the three suspects to three separate holding cells at the bottom level of the Twin Towers on Bauchet Street.