Being brutal to prove to himself that his anguish would never again get the better of his anger until this quest was completed, Joe said, “It was pretty much like putting them through one of those tree-grinding machines.”
“Enough, Joe. Knowing more details can’t ever help you.”
The meadow was so utterly soundless that it might have been the ignition point of all Creation, from which God’s energies had long ago flowed toward the farthest ends of the universe, leaving only a mute vacuum.
A few fat bees, enervated by the August heat that was unable to penetrate Joe’s chill, forsook their usual darting urgency and traveled languidly across the meadow from wildflower to wildflower, as though flying in their sleep and acting out a shared dream about collecting nectar. He could hear no buzzing as the torpid gatherers went about their work.
“And the cause,” he asked, “was hydraulic-control failure — that stuff with the rudder, the yawing and then the roll?”
“You really haven’t read about it, have you?”
“Couldn’t.”
She said, “The possibility of a bomb, anomalous weather, the wake vortex from another aircraft, and various other factors were eliminated pretty early. And the structures group, twenty-nine specialists in that division of the investigation alone, studied the wreckage in the hangar in Pueblo for eight months without being able to pin down a probable cause. They suspected lots of different things at one time or another. Malfunctioning yaw dampers, for one. Or an electronics-bay door failure. Engine-mount failure looked good to them for a while. And malfunctioning thrust reversers. But they eliminated each suspicion, and no official probable cause was found.”
“How unusual is that?”
“Unusual. But sometimes we can’t pin it down. Like Hopewell in ’94. And, in fact, another 737 that went down on its approach to Colorado Springs in ’91, killing everyone aboard. So it happens, we get stumped.”
Joe realized there had been a disturbing qualifier in what she had said: no official probable cause.
Then a second realization struck him: “You took early retirement from the Safety Board about seven months ago. That’s what Mario Oliveri told me.”
“Mario. Good man. He headed the human-performance group in this investigation. But it’s been almost nine months since I quit.”
“If the structures group was still sifting the wreckage eight months after the crash…then you didn’t stay to oversee the entire inquiry, even though you were the original IIC on it.”
“Bailed out,” she acknowledged. “When it all turned sour, when evidence disappeared, when I started to make some noise about it…they put the squeeze on me. At first I tried to stay on, but I just couldn’t handle being part of a fraud. Couldn’t do the right thing and spill the beans, either, so I bailed. Not proud of it. But I’ve got a hostage to fortune, Joe.”
“Hostage to fortune. A child?”
“Denny. He’s twenty-three now, not a baby anymore, but if I ever lost him…”
Joe knew too well how she would have finished that sentence. “They threatened your son?”
Although Barbara stared into the crater before her, she was seeing a potential disaster rather than the aftermath of a real one, a personal catastrophe rather than one involving three hundred and thirty deaths.
“It happened two weeks after the crash,” she said. “I was in San Francisco, where Delroy Blane — the captain on Flight 353—had lived, overseeing a pretty intense investigation into his personal history, trying to discover any signs of psychological problems.”
“Finding anything?”
“No. He seemed like a rock-solid guy. This was also at the time when I was pressing the hardest to go public with what had happened to certain evidence. I was staying in a hotel. I’m a reasonably sound sleeper. At two-thirty in the morning, someone switched on my nightstand lamp and put a gun in my face.”
After years of waiting for Go-Team calls, Barbara had long ago overcome a tendency to shed sleep slowly. She woke to the click of the lamp switch and the flood of light as she would have awakened to the ringing telephone: instantly alert and clearheaded.
She might have cried out at the sight of the intruder, except that her shock pinched off her voice and her breath.
The gunman, about forty, had large sad eyes, hound-dog eyes, a nose bashed red by the slow blows of two decades of drink, and a sensuous mouth. His thick lips never quite closed, as though waiting for the next treat that couldn’t be resisted — cigarette, whiskey, pastry, or breast.
His voice was as soft and sympathetic as a mortician’s but with no unctuousness. He indicated that the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and he assured her that if she tried to call for help, he would blow her brains out with no concern that anyone beyond the room would hear the shot.
She tried to ask who he was, what he wanted.
Hushing her, he sat on the edge of her bed.
He had nothing against her personally, he said, and it would depress him to have to kill her. Besides, if the IIC of the probe of Flight 353 were to be found murdered, inconvenient questions might be asked.
The sensualist’s bosses, whoever they might be, could not afford inconvenient questions at this time, on this issue.
Barbara realized that a second man was in the room. He had been standing in the corner near the bathroom door, on the other side of the bed from the gunman.
This one was ten years younger than the first. His smooth pink face and choirboy eyes gave him an innocent demeanor that was belied by a disquietingly eager smile that came and went like the flickering of a serpent’s tongue.
The older man pulled the covers off Barbara and politely asked her to get out of bed. They had a few things to explain to her, he said. And they wanted to be certain that she was alert and attentive throughout, because lives depended on her understanding and believing what they had come to tell her.
In her pajamas, she stood obediently while the younger man, with a flurry of brief smiles, went to the desk, withdrew the chair from the kneehole, and stood it opposite the foot of the bed. She sat as instructed.
She had been wondering how they had gotten in, as she’d engaged both the deadbolt and the security chain on the door to the corridor. Now she saw that both of the doors between this hotel room and the next — which could be connected to form a suite for those guests who required more space — stood open. The mystery remained, however, for she was certain that the door on this side had been securely locked with a deadbolt when she had gone to bed.
At the direction of the older man, the younger produced a roll of strapping tape and a pair of scissors. He secured Barbara’s wrists tightly to the arms of the straight-back chair, wrapping the tape several times.
Frightened of being restrained and helpless, Barbara nonetheless submitted because she believed that the sad-eyed man would deliver on his threat to shoot her point-blank in the head if she resisted. With his sensuous mouth, as though sampling the contents of a bonbon box, he had savored the words blow your brains out.
When the younger man cut a six-inch length of tape and pressed it firmly across Barbara’s mouth, then secured that piece by winding a continuous length of tape twice around her head, she panicked for a moment but then regained control of herself. They were not going to pinch her nose shut and smother her. If they had come here to kill her, she would be dead already.