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—”