“So how do you explain what happened to him?” he asked.
“Well, Mr. Bane, a controller spends all his working hours avoiding crashes and all the rest dreading them. Sleep is the worst. On bad nights you keep seeing the same scene over and over again in your dreams. A midair, takeoff, or landing crash you’re powerless to prevent, so you just sit there behind your console in the dream and watch it happen. Sometimes a controller lapses behind the board and the dream takes over. His greatest fear comes alive right before him, and because he’s right behind the console when he comes out of it, he’s convinced it’s real. It wasn’t real in Jake’s case because Flight 22 landed forty minutes later, almost ninety minutes behind schedule.”
“Why?”
“First the flight was delayed thirty minutes in San Diego because some extra freight had to be loaded and then the pilot reported engine trouble an hour out of Kennedy, leading, he expected, to an additional delay of twenty minutes.”
Bane calculated. “That still leaves forty minutes unaccounted for.”
“The pilot erred.”
“When did you next hear from him?”
“When he was ready to make his approach two hours later. It’s on tape.”
“Nothing in between?”
“By procedure, there wouldn’t have to be. Except for standard communications, channels are used almost exclusively when something’s wrong.”
That made Bane think of something else. “You say Flight 22 was held up in San Diego because of extra freight loading?”
“It arrived late at the airport. Government priority as I recall.”
“Government?”
“It’s nothing out of the ordinary. Strictly routine.”
Cashman was holding nothing back; that much was obvious. There were certainly inconsistencies in his story but nothing to indicate he was part of the cover-up Bane was beginning to strongly believe had taken place. Why else would someone have arranged for Jake Del Gennio to disappear? And now the government had been drawn into the scenario.
They can erase the tapes, Josh, but they can’t erase me.
Wrong, Jake, Bane thought.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Cashman,” he said, rising.
It was time to visit the Center.
The Center was once precisely that: a fulcrum around which important government decisions were based and policies were made. It had existed in virtual secrecy since the Kennedy days when the young president, eager to be aware of what all government-funded organizations were doing with their grants, created a watchdog unit to oversee the spending of the hundreds of billions passed out annually.
In the early days, the Center had occupied three floors of a major Washington office building, under an innocuous cover that proved to be just deep enough to hold. Headquarters had been moved to New York during Watergate when things really heated up in the capital and high-level minds felt the Center could accomplish more from outside Washington than from within. These were the years when the organization enjoyed its finest hours, freely interpreting its somewhat ambiguous charter to make sure in all cases that a group using government funds to get from point A to point B took no detours along the way. Center operatives researched, infiltrated, developed a chain of informants, checked, double-checked, and generally rode herd on the hundreds of organizations who regularly cashed rather large treasury checks.
But the Reagan years brought with them a new direction and a new mandate. The Watergate scare was over and somehow fewer checks seemed to mean better balances. The Center was phased out gradually, reorganized so that its responsibilities were subdivided among a number of more traditional Washington organizations all of which could be found in the blue pages of any phone book. America’s watchdog lost its bark, then its bite, and was finally sent to lie down and linger cursorily in an old brownstone on Eighty-sixth Street. Four full office floors of activity were reduced to twelve Victorian rooms. A staff of fifty in the office and a hundred in the field was reduced to six and twelve respectively. Instead of an investigative unit, the Center became no more than a clearing house where all government grants were inventoried and occasionally spot-checked. Another faceless element in the great bureaucracy.
Strangely, in a technical sense Joshua Bane was part of this element. He may have retired from the Game officially but the government couldn’t let him officially go. When a man knew the kinds of things he knew and had done the kinds of things he’d done, they couldn’t let him slip free from their grasp. There was no such thing as retirement, so on paper Bane worked for the Center and arrived there every other week to pick up a rather hefty check amounting to a premature pension. The government could afford to pay him generously because there was no one else of his kind left on the payroll. The life expectancy of someone in the Winter Man’s position was usually quite brief. Of course, Trench had outlived three decades of pursuit and no one had any idea of how old Scalia was. It came down to a question of luck: when yours ran out, that was it. Except his never had, not really. The same held for Trench and Scalia, though they still played the field while Bane for better or worse had retired to the sidelines.
But Jake Del Gennio claimed he had seen a jet disappear and subsequently he had disappeared too. It was all too neat, too clean, too … professional. And all of it made Bane thirst for the life he’d thought was gone forever, the action and the heightened use of senses he needed now to find out what the hell was going on.
Bane climbed the seven steps leading to the Center’s front entrance, knowing his moves were being followed by a camera which broadcast its picture onto a series of television monitors before the desk of the building’s one, nearsighted security guard. The elaborate security measures were more token than necessary. There was little in the building worth stealing or even worthy of espionage. Bane rang the buzzer. There was a chime, followed by an earsplitting buzz. The door swung open.
“Good morning, Mr. Bane,” greeted Charlie, the nearsighted guard who never loaded his gun.
Bane swung through the alcove into what years before might have been called the sitting room, where a woman who had seen the lighter side of fifty was streaming along on a typewriter.
“Morning, Millie.”
“Morning, Mr. Bane. I’ve got your check right here.” Center employees never questioned the checks he received with no apparent services rendered. They were, after all, government employees first and foremost.
“I’ll grab it on the way out. Tell Janie I’m here.”
“Janie already knows.” The voice came from the foyer.
Bane turned toward the main stairway, into the gaze of Janie Finlaw, chief of Center operations. They had met one day while he was picking up his check and had begun a casual affair which had grown and deepened until there was seldom a night when they didn’t share each other’s company and bed. Bane knew he didn’t love her, not in the traditional sense anyway, but at times he found himself bonded to her by something even stronger since she had pulled him from the emotional depths he’d plunged into following the tragic deaths of his wife and stepson. She had brought warmth back into his life at a time when he had all but rejected any hope of feeling it again.
Looking at her descending the staircase, Bane considered himself most fortunate. She was extremely attractive, if not stunningly so. Her dark hair, auburn really, smothered her shoulders and rested upon the upper part of her firmly muscled back. Her eyes were the lightest shade of brown Bane had ever seen and her smile was captivating, subtle enough to allow for both vulnerability and strength. Janie had stayed single because she’d wanted to, and she’d made a rapid rise through government levels until she was now in charge of all Center activities, however curtailed. The future for her was bright, a cabinet-level position in the offing, even though Janie would have preferred something in intelligence. Secretly, she harbored a dream of being the first woman director of the CIA.