“Take a look at this,” Horvath said. “I didn’t notice it until just now.”
He pushed on the head of the carburetor drain plug with the tip of his index finger. The plug jiggled in its socket like a loose screw.
“Whoever put this plug back the last time didn’t tighten it down with a wrench. They just hand-tightened it. Engine vibration would’ve shaken it loose, I’d say no more than fifteen or twenty minutes after takeoff, and there goes your fuel supply. Not only that: now you’ve got flammable gas splashing on a crankcase operating at near 400 degrees centigrade. Gasoline ignites at 257 degrees. You literally would’ve gone down in flames.”
First the engine’s breather line. Now, the carburetor drain plug.
“One way or the other,” Horvath said, “somebody meant to bring this airplane down.”
“Somebody who knows planes.”
The FAA man nodded and asked me if I had any enemies.
“How much time you got?”
Horvath smiled and snapped another photo, his eye twitching. He said he’d spoken with airport administrators and was frustrated to learn that surveillance cameras covered only about half of the gated entrances to Montgomery’s flight line — and that of the cameras in use, many didn’t capture images well after dark. No camera, he said, had been angled in the direction of my airplane the night it was sabotaged. Officials planned to go through what videotape there was, but it would likely take months. As for security gates, only about half were equipped with computerized keypads that recorded the comings and goings of authorized users whom airport officials had assigned individual pass codes. The other gates relied on old-fashioned, three-digit mechanical punch codes that rarely changed.
“The bottom line,” Horvath said, “is that security at most small airports, including this one, leaks like a sieve.”
Should I have shared with him the information that Dutch Holland had conveyed to me, about Al Demaerschalk having witnessed a man cloaked in coveralls and a baseball cap getting out of a pickup truck to open the Duck’s cowling? Probably. But, as with Detective Rosario, my desires did not revolve so much around seeing justice served as they did retaliation.
“How long before I get my plane back?”
“Not for awhile.”
“Can you be any more specific?”
“Wish I could, Mr. Logan. It’s not up to me.”
Horvath said he would turn over a final report to his supervisors, detailing his findings on the accident, probably within two weeks. His supervisors would then review the report before kicking it upstairs to FAA headquarters in Washington, D.C. It would be up to the aviation bigwigs there to decide when to release the Duck back to my care. The good news, Horvath said, was that his report would indicate the crash was in no way the result of pilot error. It was unavoidable, the apparent consequence of a criminal act.
“If anything, Mr. Logan, you probably deserve a commendation. That was a fine piece of airmanship, getting back down without incurring any injuries to your passengers or anyone on the ground. You should be proud of yourself.”
“I just want my plane back, Mr. Horvath.”
He nodded like he understood what was in my head.
Defense attorney Charles Dowd said he had an urgent need to speak with me. About what he wouldn’t reveal over the phone, but the anxiety in his voice was palpable as I walked from the hangar housing the Ruptured Duck to my rental car.
“Is there somewhere we can meet? I’d prefer it be away from my office.”
“I’m at Montgomery Airport,” I said “There’s a Mexican restaurant inside the terminal, upstairs. We could meet there if you want.”
Dowd paused. “I’m not too familiar with that part of town.”
Not familiar with that part of town? San Diego may be a large city, but it’s not exactly Beijing. Hadn’t Dowd mentioned when we first met that he’d been practicing law locally for more than twenty-five years? How could he claim not to know his way around a community after living and working in it a quarter-century? Either he didn’t get out much or he was lying. But why be evasive? Had Dowd been involved in what happened to my airplane and now wanted to throw me off whatever trail might lead me back to him? For his own safety, I hoped not.
“We can meet wherever you want,” I said.
The attorney suggested a bar in Imperial Beach that was located, curiously enough, less than three blocks from the late Janet Bollinger’s apartment. I told him I was on my way.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
I had no idea what Dowd wanted to discuss, or whether he posed a legitimate threat. Still, if I learned anything toiling for Uncle Sugar, it’s that the quickest way to end up on the wrong side of the grass is to assume that anyone is innocent. That includes attorneys. Especially attorneys.
Driving from the airport eastbound toward the 805 freeway, I spotted a small scuba diving supply shop and pulled in. The manager was about my age. He looked like he’d spent about twenty years too long in the sun.
“Help you find something?”
I told him I needed a knife. He asked me with a grin if I was worried about sharks.
“You could say that.”
He unlocked the back of a display case, unsheathed a knife, and laid it on the glass countertop.
“Top-of-the-line. Pure titanium for durability, sharpness, hardness, strength and abrasion resistance. One hundred percent corrosion resistant and guaranteed not to rust. That’s why it’s the official knife of Delta and the Green Berets.”
Spoken like a true chair-borne commando. Anyone familiar with Special Forces knows that when it comes to knives, nothing is official. Operators carry whatever feels best in their hands. I counted among my friends any number of hard-chargers who never even packed a knife. Why get yourself all bloody, they reasoned, when the government issues you unlimited bullets and silencer-equipped firearms?
“How much?” I asked, hefting the blade.
“With tax, you’re looking at about $115.”
I peered into the display case and pointed to a virtually identical knife.
“What about that one?”
“No self-respecting operator would ever be caught dead using that knife.”
“Humor me.”
“It’s on sale. Twenty-two bucks and change.”
“Music to my ears. I’ll take it.”
I slid in behind the wheel of the Escalade, lifted the left leg of my jeans, and lashed the knife still in its sheath to my calf, then tugged the jeans back down. My phone rang.
“I got your good news and your bad news,” Buzz said.
“What’s the good news?”
“I talked to a cryptologist I know over at NCC.”
“And the bad news?”
“He told me he couldn’t run your RFI.”
Had my request for information come in through official channels, Buzz’s code-breaking friend at the National Counterterrorism Center would’ve fed “CAPCAFLR” into the NSA’s supercomputer at Fort Meade. The computer would’ve assigned each letter a numerical value correlating to its respective position in the alphabet, then played with more than 180,000 possible combinations. The numbers would’ve been fed through a dozen code-breaking software packages, reconverted back to letters, and the letters to potentially relevant words. But, because my request was for nongovernment purposes, the only assistance Buzz’s buddy was willing to render was wild speculation that the “PCA” in CAPCAFLR possibly stood for “principal component analysis,” a procedure that relies on something called an “orthogonal transformation” to convert correlated variables into linearly uncorrelated variables.