Campbell nodded and moved to the camera, deftly manipulating the controls before turning to Jay.
“What would you like to see?” Campbell asked.
Jay came around the table. “May I?”
“By all means,” Campbell said as he backed away from the screen.
Jay pushed the “play” button and let the picture continue until the last few frames of the alcove and the hallway outside the west door came into view.
He pushed “pause,” then leaned in close to the picture to verify what he thought he’d seen.
“What are we looking at, Mr. Reinhart?” O’Connell asked.
Jay sighed as he turned toward the bench. “Judge O’Connell, it is very important to my client that the world not erroneously believe the implications of this tape. I firmly believed as I came into this court this morning that John Harris was innocent, and that this tape had been tampered with, and that the conversation Mr. Campbell presented was false. I believe we successfully demonstrated how that could be done. But there was something bothering me when I first saw this, and I now know what it is. I wasn’t sure until Mr. Campbell played it a second time. Then I remembered a small, inconsequential item from a recent article in the American press.”
“Mr. Reinhart, get to the point. What do you see on this screen that I do not?”
Jay pointed to the hallway visible through the western wall door of the Oval Office.
“This video clearly shows a long hallway that extends at a ninety-degree angle to the western wall of the office. But in the real White House, there is no such hallway. Merely a small alcove. I can testify to this directly since I’ve been in the office and out that door. Can you see this, Judge?”
O’Connell left the bench and descended the steps to look closely at the screen.
“I do see a hallway, yes. But how am I to know your memory is correct? How long ago were you there, Mr. Reinhart?”
Jay hesitated. “Over ten years ago, I’ll admit. But one does not forget that office.”
The judge walked back around and regained his bench as Jay decided to chance a direct request.
“Your Honor, if I may have a ten-minute recess, the Secretary of State of the United States is on his way here. He is in the Oval Office on a weekly basis and can testify firsthand as to whether this hallway really exists or not.”
The judge sat down, saying nothing. He scratched his face and glanced at Stuart Campbell, who was silent, then leaned forward.
“Ten-minute recess it shall be, Mr. Reinhart.”
Joe Byer took the stand when Mr. Justice O’Connell reconvened the court, making fast work of the confirmation that the hallway shown in the video did not exist in the real White House.
“Thank you Mr. Byer, you may step down,” the judge said, focusing on Jay. “Mr. Reinhart, if not the White House… and I am satisfied about that… then what are we looking at?”
Jay got to his feet. “There are, Judge, a total of five different fully furnished mockups of the Oval Office available for the rental of film makers in the U.S. One of them is a permanent set used in the production of a popular television series about the White House. Others have been used constantly in a long procession of feature films or made-for-TV films. These sets can be shipped by truck anywhere in North America and set up in less than a week, and the interiors are essentially indistinguishable from the real office. What we see on this video are pictures made on an artificial set, a mock-up of the Oval Office.”
The judge looked at Stuart Campbell, who shook his head and raised the palm of one hand to indicate he had nothing to add or object to.
Jay had moved closer to the video screen and toggled the video forward and backward, seemingly absorbed in the picture.
“Mr. Reinhart, if you’re through, sir…”
Jay’s eyes had grown wider as he held an index finger in the air. “Wait… wait just a second, Your Honor…”
“Mr. Reinhart…”
Jay turned to the bench. “Judge O’Connell, would you consider coming down here again? There’s something else I’ve just found that absolutely proves my point.”
Mr. Justice O’Connell shook his head as he got to his feet and moved around to the screen once again.
“Here, sir. On that angled wall, you see that mirror, on the side of the alleged hallway just outside the door?”
“Yes?”
“Look in the mirror.”
“I see some vertical lines, not quite vertical,” he said. “What are they?”
“Those, Judge, are some of the two-by-fours holding up the backside of the set.”
“Ten Twenty, turn right now to a heading of zero nine five degrees. I’m taking you to a closer airport at Connemara. Twenty-one miles closer. There’s one runway, runway two seven, and there’s an ILS for that one. It’s twenty-two hundred meters… ah, over sixty five hundred feet in length.”
“What’s the designator?” Alastair asked quickly, receiving the four-letter code and punching it rapidly into his handheld GPS. “I show sixty-two miles, Galway.”
“Roger. Sixty-one miles now,” the controller said.
“Tell him we can do that, Alastair, but we’ll have only one chance at it. How’s the weather there? If it’s good enough, maybe we can land straight in to the east.”
Alastair passed the question.
“I have the weather for Connemara Regional,” the controller said. “The ceiling is indefinite at one hundred fifty feet, visibility a half mile and fog, winds are two seven zero at twelve knots. The ILS is up for runway two seven. Just tell me what you want.”
Alastair turned to Craig, who was licking his lips and mentally racing through more calculations.
“I think,” Craig said, without turning his head, “that we have no choice but to fly the instrument approach to runway two seven, even though that means we have to fly past the airport and turn around. We’ve got enough altitude to pass the runway a mile and a half to the south as we’re going eastbound, then make a tight left one-hundred-eighty-degree turn back west on instruments and find the localizer for runway two seven, and just… come down to the glide slope.”
“Fly by the airport? Hell, Craig, he can vector us right to it!”
Craig looked at Alastair with a rapid glance. “But we can’t see it! What if we’re displaced a quarter mile to one side of the runway when we break out? We’ll sit down on a building or worse with no chance of going around.”
“We have no go-around potential if we fly by and turn, either!”
“Alastair, we’ve flamed out both engines. We have no go-around capability period! But, if we keep the speed up, we’ll still have the hydraulics for the flight controls and landing gear and maybe flap extension, and we’ll have the ILS on my side to get down the centerline. All we need is enough altitude. Get your flashlight out, just in case.”
“I have it.” Alastair scanned the situation again on his GPS and on the captain’s panel to his left. Fifty miles from Connemara, speed two hundred ten knots, altitude twenty-one thousand feet and descending steadily with the headwind gone and a tailwind beginning to improve their chances of reaching the airport with enough altitude left to maneuver for landing. As long as they kept the airspeed high enough, the wind flowing through the unpowered jet engines would keep them rotating fast enough to keep pumping hydraulic pressure into the aircraft systems. The battery would be good for thirty minutes, and they’d be on the ground long before that. As soon as they slowed under a hundred eighty knots, however, the hydraulic power would die and the only flight controls left would be the standby rudder system, manual pitch trim, and a hard-to-handle system called “manual reversion” for keeping the wings level.