“Sure beats a Crown Vic,” McCready replied. “Took me eight hours to get home last night. Took me forty-five minutes to get back here this morning. This thing climbs four thousand feet a minute. Has a five-thousand-mile range. Top speed of nearly six hundred miles an hour.”
“No offense,” I said, “but since when does the FBI have such a need for speed?”
“Since 9/11. Gives us quick-response capability to terrorist threats anywhere in the world.”
I nodded reflexively, then — when his words sank in — I narrowed my eyes and stared at him. “Wait. Are you saying Richard Janus’s plane was brought down by terrorists?”
“God, no,” he replied, then hedged, “I’m not saying it wasn’t, either. All I’m saying is, when the G5 isn’t needed for a national security mission, we can deploy it for other high-priority investigations.”
“And an accident involving a private plane is a high-priority investigation because…?” He didn’t answer, so after a moment’s thought, I answered my own question: “… because the accident wasn’t actually an accident?”
He shrugged. “Too soon to know.”
“But you have reason to think Richard Janus was murdered?”
He shrugged again.
I’d worked on enough FBI cases over the years to know that the Bureau liked to hold its investigative cards close to the vest. So I wasn’t surprised that McCready didn’t seem inclined to show his hand. Nor was I surprised, a moment later, when he pulled a laptop from the briefcase beneath his seat, mumbled something about catching up on paperwork, and busied himself with the computer.
I opened the outer compartment of my bag and took out a fat three-ring binder, which Kathleen had handed me on my way out the door. It was a collection of monthly newsletters and annual fund-raising appeals from Airlift Relief International, Richard Janus’s nonprofit organization. Kathleen had first learned about Airlift Relief three years before, when she’d decided to create a nonprofit organization of her own. At the time, she was teaching a course on nutrition in developing countries, and she’d been astonished and appalled to learn that five hundred thousand children a year go blind simply from vitamin A deficiency — a deficiency that can be remedied for less than a dollar per child. Never one to sit idly by, Kathleen had created the Food for Sight Foundation — and she had modeled her newsletters and fund-raising appeals on materials from Janus’s agency, Airlift Relief International. Janus had built an organization that was lean and agile; virtually every dollar he raised went toward direct services; his mission was clear and compelling; and his agency’s communications were informative and inspiring. Kathleen’s binder on Airlift Relief was thick — four inches, at least — and contained newsletters dating back five years, all the way to the organization’s founding. The inaugural issue featured a large photo of Janus and Jimmy Carter and a slew of other dignitaries lined up on the tarmac of an airport in Georgia. Above them loomed a battered DC-3 cargo plane, given by an anonymous donor. The caption proclaimed, “Airlift Relief is ready for takeoff!”
As I began leafing through the binder, I found myself captivated anew by the newsletters, which recounted dreadful disasters and daring relief missions. When a pair of powerful earthquakes killed more than twelve hundred people in El Salvador in 2001, for instance, Janus made a dozen flights to devastated villages, delivering food, antibiotics, water purifiers, volunteer doctors and nurses, even portable field hospitals. By the time the bigger relief agencies got into gear, Janus had already delivered tons of supplies — and had also survived two minor crashes: one when his landing gear collapsed, another when a child had darted onto the airstrip, forcing Janus to veer into the bush. Luckily, neither mishap was serious, and he and a mechanic had managed to make temporary repairs in the field. The series of photographs documenting the landing-gear collapse and repair was remarkable: First, the crippled plane sat lopsided and askew on the ground, beside a deep furrow plowed by the broken gear leg. Next, dozens of villagers pitched in to hoist one of the DC-3’s wings up onto a makeshift scaffold of crisscrossed tree trunks. Then Janus and his mechanic wrestled and welded the mangled gear leg, their labors lit by a pyrotechnic shower of sparks. In the final photo, the villagers all sat perched atop the airplane’s wing, their faces grimy, greasy, and grinning with pride. No one grinned more broadly than the pilot at the center of the crowd.
I was only halfway through the newsletters when I felt my ears popping from the Gulfstream’s swift descent. As I tucked the binder back in my bag, I felt the plane bank sharply. Looking out my window, I saw a rocky peak below the right wingtip, and for one brief, disorienting moment — perhaps because of my immersion in accounts of cataclysms — I had the startling impression that we were circling an active volcano, one that had just erupted and sent a plume of smoke roiling skyward. Not until I saw the emergency vehicles clustered along the ridgeline of the peak did my brain register the fact that I was looking down on a plane crash — the crash I had just flown across the country to work. From the television footage I’d seen, I’d expected the entire mountainside to be ablaze, but luckily — or thanks to the trucks spraying water around the margins of the site — the fire had been confined to a narrow section of slope, at the blackened center of which now smoldered a tangle of wreckage. A line from a James Taylor song popped into my head: Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.
Soon I would sift through those smoldering pieces, seeking the shattered remains of a man whose dreams I had long supported — and whose actions I had deeply admired.
Chapter 5
The Gulfstream straightened and leveled off, leaving the crash scene behind. A minute later we streaked low over the coastline, then made a U-turn back toward the east, back toward Brown Field, the airport from which Janus had taken off just nine hours before. A thousand feet below us, the Pacific glittered in the morning sun like polished pewter. When the waves reached shore — a pristine stretch of sand and grass — they curled into a white line of surf, broken only, at a single point, by a high, blank wall, dividing one featureless stretch of sand from another, splitting wave after wave of the ceaseless surf. I was puzzled for a moment, then I realized that the wall must be the border fence separating the United States from Mexico.
A few hundred yards inland, on the Tijuana side of the fence, I noticed a large, circular structure, like a high-sided bowl — it appeared to be a stadium of some sort, but it was proportioned more like Rome’s Colosseum than Knoxville’s Neyland Stadium. Encircled by the steep grandstands was a small patch of bare, brown dirt, barely a hundred feet across. “Hey, Mac,” I called across the aisle to McCready, “what’s this stadium-looking thing? Looks way too small for soccer, and I know that’s not a football field.”
“That would be the Plaza de Toros,” he said, without even looking. “The ‘Bullring by the Sea.’ Holds twenty thousand people. If it’s a big festival, every seat will be filled, and more people hanging over the railings. We should go, once we finish working this crash scene.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it. I’m no animal-rights crusader, but a bullfight seems just plain cruel.”