…17
She stood in front of the whiteboard again, staring at the only thing written on it. XA233 and a question mark, that was all, scribbled at the center top of the board.
Alex paced Tom’s den nervously, sipping her fifth French Vanilla brew of the day and occasionally glaring at the almost completely whiteboard on the wall. Tom sat quietly, slouched in his chair, appearing entirely absorbed in his reading of the latest edition of TIME magazine. He hadn’t spoken a word in almost an hour, nor had he looked at her.
She’d heard about authors having writer’s block in front of a brand new, white, untouched manuscript page, but never in front of a whiteboard. Although the psychology could very well be quite similar.
Argh… damn this fucked-up shit to hell and back! Alex thought. I’m babbling here, wasting time. I need to think. I need to come up with something.
“Tom?” she called. “Can I interrupt your reading for a minute?”
He smiled and put his magazine down. “Absolutely, my dear. What can I do for you?”
“Let’s bounce some ideas around, what do you say?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said with a smile. “I was running out of good stuff to read, you know.”
She chuckled.
“I–I just need to let some steam out, for now. Just for a few seconds.”
“OK, let’s hear it,” Tom replied all serious, but with a parental smile in his eyes.
She paced the room a little more before speaking, then spoke in a high-pitched, machine-gun rhythm, showing how frustrated she was.
“How in the red fucking hell am I gonna find the goddamn plane that no one else can find? This is not a case, or a challenge; this is insane! I can’t be expected to — to deliver on this!” She stood right in front of Tom, with her fisted hands firmly stuck in her jeans pockets.
“Seems to me you’re afraid of failure, and you’re presenting me with a disclaimer, a waiver of liability or something,” Tom replied quietly.
“No… What I meant was… Well, yes, I guess I am. And? What if I am? You find that absurd?” She sounded argumentative, ready to fight, her frustration taking over.
“I never said that, now did I?” Tom said, his voice taking that kind, fatherly tone that always helped her get grounded and be prepared for anything.
“No, you didn’t,” she admitted, aware she was blushing and hating it. Lately, her brain had misfired a lot.
“OK, so consider it signed,” Tom said and winked.
“Consider what signed?”
“The waiver of liability. You are off the hook if you fail. Isn’t that what you wanted to hear?”
Now she was blushing big time, her face burning red and seeding tears of embarrassment at the corners of her eyes. Damn!
“You really see right through me, huh?” she found the courage to ask.
“Like reading an open magazine,” he acknowledged, rapping his fingers humorously on the cover of TIME.
“OK, so I need some improvement in that area,” she admitted and smiled widely.
Tom nodded his approval, then frowned a little and asked, “Why did you take the case, Alex?”
“Huh?”
“Why didn’t you express your regrets to Blake, and send him on his way?”
She bit her lower lip, thinking hard. Great question. Tom was making an interesting point.
“I guess I thought I could help. I thought I should at least try,” she said in a weak, unsure voice. “I thought I had some ideas, but…”
“Then what changed?”
“Nothing, really. I just… well, I’m just having a moment of self-doubt, I guess,” she conceded with a tentative smile, feeling her mind become clear again.
“Is it over, then? Your moment of self-doubt?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, sipping more coffee.
“OK, then, let’s find us that goddamn plane, as you like to call it.” He threw her a blue dry-erase marker.
She caught it and turned toward the whiteboard.
“This is what we know,” she said, and drew a vertical line on the board to create a column, then labeled it “Known.” She added the information in the form of a bulleted list.
• 423 passengers
• 18 crew
• Tokyo to San Fran
• Took off on time
• All communication normal before it disappeared
“These are the coordinates where they think it crashed,” she added, transcribing those from a handwritten note she had in her pocket. Then she added the word manifest in the “Known” column.
“We have the manifest?”
“Yeah. Lou grabbed that yesterday from the airline’s system. He was able to break through their security in less than ten minutes; I was impressed.”
“So, what do you want to do next?”
“Start from the manifest,” she said, her voice firming as she regained her self-confidence. “We looked at it yesterday and this morning, but we need more than human eyes and brains to draw any conclusions.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were able to figure out the passengers’ nationalities and final destinations, their dates of birth and genders, but that’s about it. We need more. Lou is modifying a piece of software he wrote to extract background information on all passengers and crew, and then we can look for commonalities, for anything we can find. It’s pattern recognition software he’s adapted for any type of data,” she added, seeing how confused Tom looked. “It will extract deep background on all passengers, then compare the data and look for things they have in common.”
She paused for a few seconds, seeing how Tom looked at her pensively, creases forming on his forehead, right above his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows.
“I am grasping at straws, I know,” she added.
“No, you’re not. This is the best way to start. Who else is helping you?”
“Steve is helping Blake deal with everything.”
“Good. What do you expect to derive from the manifest analysis?”
“If anything other than a crash has happened to XA233, then it must have been intentional. Even if the plane made an emergency landing due to some failure, someone would have found it by now. We would know. I’m hoping that the manifest will give us a hint as to what, or who, had XA233 in their crosshairs, and why.”
Tom leaned forward, his interest piqued.
“When do you expect that to be completed?”
“The manifest analysis should be done by the end of today. Then we’ll look at commonalities and formulate scenarios. At that point, Lou will run his adapted pattern recognition software and get deeper data, but that might take some time.”
She took the marker and wrote a new column heading, “Scenarios.”
…18
Dr. Theo Adenauer pushed his food around with his spoon, too deep in thought to be aware of how hungry he was, or to register the annoying sounds made by the aluminum spoon scraping against the aluminum plate.
For the third time in as many days, they’ve been served cabbage. Chopped, boiled, and tasteless, with about zero nutritional value. He had to admit that today’s serving tasted better due to the clever Dr. Fortuin, who played in the lab a little and came out with salt, chunks of salty deposits on the bottom of a Petri dish, but edible salt nevertheless.