Hard Fall (21 page)

“I'm convinced the murder at Duhning and flight sixty-four are connected, although I have yet to prove it. I can't even prove sixty-four was sabotaged. We have our work cut out for us. Pullman—and Mumford above him—requires more than coincidence. To make matters worse, he's under some intense pressure to sideline me long enough to write a comprehensive report on Backman's killing. All I've given him so far is a one-pager. That kind of report would take me a couple weeks—some in-house review, maybe even testimony on the Hill. You get started on something like that and suddenly it's a couple months later.”

“Tell me about it. Same thing in Miami.”

“I've been on the Bernard case a long time. The only way I'm going to stay on it is to deliver something of substance. I figure I've got two chances: one, I come up with hard evidence that puts Bernard's device on board flight sixty-four; two, I link a threat to a major chemical company with my suspicion that whoever's behind this is now in Washington.”

“And which do I get?”

“Number two.” Daggett turned in his chair to face his good ear toward Levin. With them both talking softly, he was having trouble hearing.

“Your assignment is to find their next target.”

“Oh, is that all?” The oily skin between his dark eyebrows knitted with intensity. He squinted across the desk at Daggett like a nearsighted man without glasses. “Who says there
is
a next target?”

“The lab believes Bernard built
two
detonators. I think the first was on flight sixty-four, though I'm not sure we'll ever prove it. They're both barometric, so it's got to involve an aircraft. Commercial? Cargo? Who knows? You've read the file: the only real lead we have is that a woman who rented the van that was parked out front of the AmAirXpress mechanic's house in L.A. boarded a plane bound for here. That much we
can
prove. Bernard built the detonators in L.A.—sixty-four goes down in L.A. Next time we caught up with him, he was here in Washington. This woman flies to Washington. Coincidence?”

“So we play the odds,” Levin said.

“I don't know what else to do. We could, and should, try asking the various chemical giants about recent threats to their operations, but the sad truth is, they get way too many of those, and they handle them themselves. They don't like the publicity that often comes with our involvement.” Daggett leaned back, “You look a little overwhelmed. Too much?”

“Not at all. Just trying to see the various angles. In Miami you have the drugs and you have the money. This has a lot more angles to it, that's all. I don't want to miss any.”

“Mind you, it's all hypothetical. Maybe it's not
Der Grund
, maybe there isn't a second target.”

“Okay, I'm buying. So what's next?”

“
Der Grund
targets chemical companies. Often, the executives. Flight sixty-four fits with that—there were chemicals on board. It seems to me the first place we start.

“I think we explore every avenue we can think of,” Daggett continued. “They've targeted chemical company executives in the past. So the first thing we do is get the travel itineraries for the executives—say from VP up—in every major chemical company. We see who, if anyone, is coming to town in the near future. Just to cover our bases, we should request notification of any recent threats received. If we turn up any, these should be compared by Linguistics to earlier
Der Grund
threats for overlaps.”

“Will they give out itineraries that easily?”

“One thing you'll find in this squad that may be different than Drugs. All you do is mention the word
terrorism
, and people will give you damn near anything you want.”

Thirty minutes later, Gloria entered the bullpen carefully balancing a plastic bowl of lentil soup along with a tuna sandwich and a large OJ. She treated him better than she treated Pullman. “You don't look so good,” she told him. She placed the food squarely before him. “You should marry that girl of yours. You need someone to look after you.” She attempted to straighten the papers on his desk.

Daggett playfully tapped her on the hand. “I'm not through with those.”

“Even
you
can't read six files at once, dearie.” She continued her cleanup, undaunted, creating space for his food. “Be nice to me, Cam Daggett, or I won't tell you that Duhning called while you were downstairs.”

Daggett reached for his pink message slips.

“Fifth one down,” she said, isolating it, extracting it from the others and dangling it out of his reach. “If you would remember to put your extension on voice-mail, then little old ladies wouldn't have to answer the phone for you.” Then she handed it to him.

Reading the slip, he reached for the phone and she said, “No, sir. You eat this food first. Doctor's orders. And I'm standing right here until you do.”

“Glo.”

“Eat.”

She continued fussing with his desktop while he ate, making order out of the chaos. She rambled, as Gloria tended to do, lecturing him on a variety of personal subjects ranging from an observation that Carrie wouldn't “hang around forever,” to the fact that “all work and no play makes Jake a dull boy.” She never quoted perfectly.

Daggett was reaching for the phone when Levin strode into the bullpen with an ebullient expression on his face. Daggett replaced the receiver, not wanting to quash the younger man's enthusiasm.

Levin pulled over a chair and, at Daggett's invitation, accepted half the sandwich.

With a mouthful of food, Levin said, “This may be the only time you'll be happy to know that one of your co-workers—namely, me—is the proud son of a dental hygienist.”

Daggett looked at him peculiarly.

“I came across the lab report on that tooth we turned up in the hotel trash.”

He handed Daggett a photograph Daggett would have preferred not to see a second time. Especially not while eating. Daggett pushed it back at him.

“It's the
way
the tooth fragmented,” Levin explained, interpreting the gesture as an invitation to illustrate his point. “Right here,” he said, pointing. “See? Just one root showing. Our man
may
have the other left in his jaw. If he does, the thing will probably go south on him and he'll need some serious attention in a hurry.”

Daggett felt a wave of excitement shoot through him. “How certain is this?”

“If that root is in there, he's in trouble. He can't fix
that
himself. So I thought we should alert all the dentists both in L.A., to see if it was done there, and here in Washington too. We'll put the word out to watch for an out-of-towner who needs work on that particular tooth. Number seventeen.”

“We can't bust Kort for having a tooth repaired,” Daggett pointed out, “but we can put him under surveillance. The dentist could keep a blood sample; we might even get a DNA match.”

“
Two
major metropolitan areas. It's going to mean a hell of a lot of phone calls,” Levin said.

“It can be done by computer. We have a phone system all set up for this kind of thing—like the phone solicitations you get. You record the verbal message, scan the numbers you want called right out of the phone book, and the computer does the rest. It dials the various numbers until a line is answered and the query responded to. The query can be as complicated or as simple as you like. Talk to Tech Services; they'll set it up.”

Levin left in a hurry, taking the photograph of the tooth with him.

Daggett returned the call to Duhning and spoke to a woman named Fedorko. She had a slight midwestern accent and chose her words carefully. “We have had our work cut out for ourselves, Mr. Daggett, but we are a diligent bunch here at Duhning, as I am sure you will appreciate when you speak to Dr. Barnes tomorrow. He's an engineer on our investigation team.”

“Tomorrow?” Daggett asked.

“He's on his way to Washington as we speak. I'm to set up a meeting with you or one of your associates at your earliest convenience. My understanding is that it's a matter of the utmost urgency. The message is that the simulator session with Dr. Ward was backed up to disk. Dr. Barnes will explain it further when he arrives.”

For Daggett, his imagination running away with him, the next twelve hours passed slowly.

His meeting with Barnes began precisely at three o'clock, Wednesday afternoon, with Brad Levin in attendance. With the permission of Barnes, it was tape-recorded. Barnes, a narrow-faced man with a brush moustache and long, wispy hair, reminded Daggett of a college professor from the sixties. He knew his stuff when it came to simulators and computers, but had trouble communicating. His accent was either German or Swedish. Each time he explained a point, Daggett felt compelled to repeat his impression of what had been said to make sure he had it all straight. This consumed a lot of extra time and created extra strain. By the two-hour break, the back of his shirt was soaking wet. He kept the letter jacket on to hide it.

“I think I'm confused by all of this,” he admitted when Barnes seemed to be running down.

“Go ahead,” Barnes suggested.

As Levin sat quietly, Daggett said, “You said that the one thing all the simulations had in common was that they involved lack of pilot control?”

“Yes. Dr. Ward simulated release of pilot control of the aircraft at a number of different altitudes, all quite low, and
immediately
after takeoff.”

“And you also said that this agrees with what we know about the AmAirXpress crash?”

“Precisely so. Yes. Loss of pilot control would help explain the behavior of flight sixty-four. We need the voice information from the Cockpit Voice Recorder to know for sure.”

“We still don't have that?” Daggett turned to ask Levin.

Levin answered, “They don't want to ship it back here for examination until all the repairs are complete.”

“I thought those things were indestructible,” Daggett said.

Barnes corrected, “
Nothing
is indestructible. But it may not matter. The audiotape recorded by flight control supports a cockpit fire, as I'm sure you're aware.”

Daggett felt frustrated. He hadn't heard
anything
about flight control tapes. He didn't want Barnes to know that. “What would that prove?”

“It might explain the loss of pilot control. Toxic fumes perhaps.”

Daggett made a note of it. Toxic fumes would show up in the autopsy report. He asked, “Why wouldn't the autopilot be on?”

“A general misconception, I am afraid. Autopilot—auto-thrust, it's called at takeoff—is available but rarely used because it takes the plane entirely out of the pilot's control. Disengagement, if needed, requires several seconds, and even a single second during takeoff is an eternity. Autopilot
is
used, but would not typically be engaged until, say, eighteen thousand feet or so—quite a few minutes into flight.”

“It's available, but they don't use it?”

“Most accidents occur during, or just after, takeoff. You'll find ninety-nine percent of pilots prefer to have manual control over the bird during this period.”

“So you're saying—your theory is—that there was no one at the controls? Essentially there was no pilot flying the plane?”

“Theory?” Barnes responded. “It is physics, sir. Plain and simple physics.” He referred Daggett to his notebook and pointed to a diagram of 64's projected flight route in the few short minutes it was airborne. “Flight sixty-four left the runway at this point. It crashed … here,” he said, pointing to Hollywood Park. “Well, you see—as I've already shown you—it's the same with the simulation.” He unrolled a map obviously drawn by a computer. “If you remove all control of the aircraft here,” he said, pointing to his map, “forty-seven seconds into flight, then given the appropriate data, the simulated 959 impacts here,” he said, punching his computerized map. “If you scaled it correctly and overlaid this map onto a map of the L.A. area, you would see that the area of impact is also Hollywood Park.”

Breaking a long silence that followed, Daggett, still very much confused, asked, “What about wind speed, ground temperature, that sort of thing? It can't be an
exact
science, can it?”

“With smaller aircraft, the light winds we're talking about would certainly have made a difference. Not so with something this size. It all comes down to thrust, gravity, ground speed, and flaps. It's entirely predictable. Avionics
is
an exact science—that's what I'm telling you. If we can land an unmanned space probe on the dark side of Mars—a project Duhning was proud to be part of—we had better be able to predict the flight pattern of a commercial carrier one minute into flight!”

“But why?” Daggett asked. Barnes stared at him. How was he going to sell Pullman—and worse, Mumford—something like this? This was the type of thing you kept to yourself until you understood it. He broke his silence. “What about Ward? I know he was in Simulation—I understand that much. But what end of things? With a new aircraft like the 959, someone would have to train the new pilots, wouldn't they?”

“That's correct. The pilots have to be recertified for the 959 before they fly it. It's the same with any new aircraft.”

“And if they all learn from the same guy, then essentially, during takeoff let's say, they're all going to perform about the same way as whoever taught them, aren't they?”

“That follows logically, yes. I can see that.”

“And Ward—I know he was trained an engineer, but the pictures on his office walls—he was a pilot, too, wasn't he?”

“Many of us are pilots.”

“But he flew jets.”

“That's not unusual either. Jets are what Duhning builds.”

“But my point is: There have only been what, twenty, twenty-five pilots through the program so far—I read that in one of the reports. You haven't sold all that many planes yet.”