Airframe (32 page)

Casey folded up the printout, and put it away.

Zero, she thought, was the perfect default value. Because that was what she was coming up with, on this particular night’s work.

A big zero.

Nothing.

“A big fat zero,” she said aloud. “Means nothing on the line.”

She didn’t want to think what it meant—that time was running out, that her plan to push the investigation had failed, and that she was going to end up in front of a television camera tomorrow afternoon, with the famous Marty Reardon asking her questions, and she would have no good answers to give him. Except the answers that John Marder wanted her to give.

Just lie. Hell with it
.

Maybe that was how it was going to turn out.

You’re old enough to know how it works
.

Casey turned out her desk light, and started for the door.

She said good night to Esther, the cleaning woman, and went out into the hallway. She got into the elevator, and pushed the button to go down to the ground floor.

The button lit up when she touched it.

Glowing “1.”

She yawned as the doors started to close. She was really very tired. It was silly to work this late. She’d make foolish mistakes, overlook things.

She looked at the glowing button.

And then it hit her.

“Forget something?” Esther said, as Casey came back into the office.

“No,” Casey said.

She rifled through the sheets on her desk. Fast, searching. Tossing papers in all directions. Letting them flutter to the floor.

Ron had said the default was zero, and therefore when you got a zero you didn’t know if the line was used or not. But if there was a 1 … then that would mean … She found the listing, ran her finger down the columns of numbers:

There was a numeral 1! AUX COA had registered a fault, on the second leg of the flight. That meant the AUX COA line
was
being used by the aircraft.

But what was it used for?

She sucked in her breath.

She hardly dared to hope.

Ron said that AUX COA was a line for Customer Optional Additions. The customer used it for add-ons, like a QAR.

The QAR was the Quick Access Recorder, another flight data recorder installed to help the maintenance crews. It recorded many of the same parameters as a regular DFDR. If a QAR was on this aircraft, it could solve all her problems.

But Ron insisted this plane didn’t have a QAR.

He said he’d looked in the tail, which was where it was usually installed on an N-22. And it wasn’t there.

Had he ever looked anywhere else?

Had he really searched the plane?

Because Casey knew an optional item like the QAR was not subject to FAA regulation. It could be anyplace in the aircraft the operator wanted it—in the aft accessory compartment, or the cargo hold, or the radio rack beneath the cockpit … It could be just about anywhere.

Had Ron really looked?

She decided to check for herself.

She spent the next ten minutes thumbing through thick Service Repair Manuals for the N-22, without any success. The manuals didn’t mention the QAR at all, or at least she couldn’t find any reference. But the manuals she kept in her office were her personal copies; Casey wasn’t directly involved in maintenance, and she didn’t have the latest versions. Most of the manuals dated back to her own arrival at the company; they were five years old.

That was when she noticed the Heads-Up Display, sitting on her desk.

Wait a minute, she thought. She grabbed the goggles, slipped them on. She plugged them into the CD player. She pressed the power switch.

Nothing happened.

She fiddled with the equipment for a few moments, until she realized there was no CD-ROM in the machine. She looked in the cardboard box, found a silver platter, and slid it into the player. She pressed the power button again.

The goggles glowed. She was staring at a page from the first maintenance manual, projected onto the inside of the goggles. She wasn’t quite sure how the system worked, because the goggles were just an inch from her eyes, but the projected page appeared to float in space, two feet in front of
her. The page was almost transparent; she could see right through it.

Korman liked to say that virtual reality was virtually useless, except for a few specialized applications. One was maintenance. Busy people working in technical environments, people who had their hands full, or covered in grease, didn’t have the time or inclination to look through a thick manual. If you were thirty feet up in the air trying to repair a jet engine, you couldn’t carry a stack of five-pound manuals around with you. So virtual displays were perfect for those situations. And Korman had built one.

By pressing buttons on the CD player, Casey found that she could scroll through the manuals. There was also a search function, that flashed up a keyboard hanging in space; she had to repeatedly press another button to move a pointer to the letter
Q
, then
A
, then
R.
It was clumsy.

But it worked.

After a moment of whirring, a page hung in the air before her:

Pressing more buttons, she scrolled through a sequence of diagrams, showing in detail all the places where the QAR could be located on the N-22 aircraft.

There were about thirty places in all.

Casey clipped the player onto her belt, and headed for the door.

Marty Reardon was still in Seattle.

His interview with Gates had run long, and he’d missed his plane. Now he was coming down in the morning. Jennifer had to revise the schedule.

It was going to be a difficult day, she realized. She’d hoped to start at nine. Now she couldn’t begin until ten at the earliest. She sat in the hotel room with her laptop, figuring it out.

Too tight. No time for lunch, for traffic delays, for normal production screwups. And tomorrow was Friday; Marty would want to make the six o’clock plane back to New York. Marty had a new girlfriend, and he liked to spend the weekend with her. Marty would be very pissy if he missed the flight.

And he was definitely going to miss it.

The problem was that by the time Marty finished with Singleton in Burbank, it would be rush hour. He’d never make
his plane. He really should leave Burbank by two-thirty. Which meant pushing Singleton up, and holding off the lawyer. She was afraid she’d lose the FAA guy if she changed him at the last minute. But the lawyer would be flexible. He’d wait until midnight if they asked him to.

She’d talked with the lawyer earlier. King was a blowhard, but he was plausible in short bites. Five, ten seconds. Punchy. Worth doing.

That would work. In her mind, she reviewed her pullouts. If the FAA guy was good (Jennifer hadn’t met him yet, just talked on the phone), then Marty might run over with him. If it took too long to transfer to Burbank, she’d blow off Rogers, who was weak anyway, and go right to Marty’s stand-up. Singleton would be fast—Jennifer wanted to keep Marty moving there, so he didn’t attack the woman too much. A tight schedule would help.

Back to LAX, finish with King, Marty’d leave at six, and Jennifer would have her tape. She’d go to an editing bay at the O and O, cut the segment, and uplink to New York that night. She’d call in and get Dick’s comments Saturday morning, revise it, and uplink it again about noon. That was plenty of time to make air.

She made a note to call Norton in the morning and tell them she needed to move Singleton up two hours.

Finally she turned to the stack of faxed background documents Norton had sent her office, for Deborah’s research. Jennifer had never bothered to look at these, and she wouldn’t bother now, except she had nothing better to do. She thumbed through them quickly. It was what she expected—self-justifying papers that said the N-22 was safe, that it had an excellent record …

Flipping from page to page, she suddenly stopped.

She stared.

“They’ve got to be kidding,” she said.

And she closed the file.

At night, the Norton plant appeared deserted, the parking lots nearly empty, the perimeter buildings silent. But it was brightly lit. Security kept floodlights on all night. And there were video monitors mounted on the corners of all the buildings. As she crossed from Administration to Hangar 5, she heard her footsteps clicking on the asphalt.

The big doors to Hangar 5 were pulled down and locked. She saw Teddy Rawley, standing outside, talking to one of the electrical team. A wisp of cigarette smoke rose up toward the floodlights. She went over to the side door.

“Hey, babe,” Teddy said. “Still here, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said.

She started through the door. The electrical guy said, “The building’s closed. Nobody’s allowed in. We’re doing the CET now.”

“It’s okay,” she said.

“I’m sorry, you can’t,” the guy said. “Ron Smith gave strict orders. Nobody’s to go inside. If you touch anything on the airplane—”

“I’ll be careful,” she said.

Teddy looked at her, walked over. “I know you will,” he said, “but you’re going to need this.” He handed her a heavy flashlight, three feet long. “It’s dark in there, remember?”

The electrical guy said, “And you can’t turn the lights on, we can’t have change in the ambient flux—”

“I understand,” she said. The test equipment was sensitive; turning on the overhead fluorescents might change readings.

The electrician was still fretting. “Maybe I better call Ron and tell him you’re going in.”

“Call whoever you want,” Casey said.

“And don’t touch the handrails, because—”

“I won’t,” she said. “For Christ’s sake, I know what I’m doing.”

She went into the hangar.

Teddy was right; it was dark inside. She felt, rather than saw, the large space around her. She could barely discern the outlines of the plane, looming above her; all its doors and compartments were open, cabling hanging down everywhere. Beneath the tail, the test box sat in a pool of faint blue light. The CRT screen flickered, as systems were activated in sequence. She saw the cockpit lights go on, then off. Then the forward cabin lights, brightly lit, thirty feet above her. Then darkness again. A moment later, the beacon lights on the wing tips and the tail came on, sending hot white strobe flashes through the room. Then darkness again.

The front headlights suddenly glared brightly from the wing, and the landing gear began to retract. Because the plane was mounted above the ground, the landing gear was free to retract and extend. It would happen a dozen times that night.

Outside the hangar, she heard the electrician, still talking in a worried tone. Teddy laughed, and the electrician said something else.

Casey turned on her flashlight and moved forward. The flashlight cast a powerful glow. She twisted the rim, spreading the beam wider.

Now the landing gear was fully raised. Then the gear doors opened, and the landing gear began to extend, the big rubber wheels coming down flat, then turning with a hydraulic whine. A moment later, the insignia light shone up at the rudder, illuminating the tail. Then it went off again.

She headed for the aft accessory compartment in the tail.
She knew Ron had said the QAR wasn’t there, but she felt she had to check again. She climbed the broad stairs rolled up to the back of the plane, being careful not to touch the handrails. Electrical test cables were taped to the handrails; she didn’t want to disturb them, or to cause field fluctuation from the presence of her hand.

The aft accessory compartment, built into the upward slope of the tail, was directly above her head. The compartment doors were open. She shone her light in. The upper surface of the compartment was taken up by the underside of the APU, the turbine generator that served as the auxiliary power unit: a maze of semicircular pipes and white couplings wrapped around the main unit. Below was a cramped series of readout meters, rack slots, and black FCS boxes, each with the milled vanes for heat transfer. If there was a QAR in here as well, she might easily miss it; the QARs were only about eight inches square.