Sole Survivor (18 page)

“And there was the media,” he said, condemning his own kind so she wouldn’t have to do it.

“Everywhere. Anyway, I’d only slept less than three hours the previous night, before I’d been awakened by the Go-Team call, and there was no chance even to doze on the Gulfstream from National to Pueblo. I was like the walking dead when I hit the sheets a little before midnight—but back there in Washington, Minh Tran was still at it.”

“The electronics engineer who cut open the recorder?”

Staring at the folded white paper that she had taken from her hip pocket, turning it over and over in her hands, Barbara said, “You have to understand about Minh. His family were Vietnamese boat people. Survived the communists after the fall of Saigon and then pirates at sea, even a typhoon. He was ten at the time, so he knew early that life was a struggle. To survive and prosper, he
expected
to give a hundred and ten percent.”

“I have friends…had friends who were Vietnamese immigrants,” Joe said. “Quite a culture. A lot of them have a work ethic that would break a plow horse.”

“Exactly. When everyone else went home from the labs that night at a quarter past seven, they’d put in a long day. People at the Safety Board are pretty dedicated…but Minh more so. He didn’t leave. He made a dinner of whatever he could get out of the vending machines, and he stayed to clean the tape and then to work on the last minute of it. Digitize the sound, load it in a computer, and then try to separate the static and other extraneous noises from the voices of the pilots and from the actual sounds that occurred aboard the aircraft. The layers of static proved to be so specifically patterned that the computer was able to help strip them away fairly quickly. Because the boom mikes had delivered strong signals to the recorder, Minh was able to clarify the pilots’ voices under the junk noise. What he heard was extraordinary. Bizarre.”

She handed the folded white paper to Joe.

He accepted but didn’t open it. He was half afraid to see what it contained.

“At ten minutes till four in the morning Washington time, ten till two in Pueblo, Minh called me,” Barbara said. “I’d told the hotel operator to hold all calls, I needed my sleep, but Minh talked his way through. He played the tape for me…and we discussed it. I always have a cassette recorder with me, because I like to tape all meetings myself and have my own transcripts prepared. So I got my machine and held it to the phone to make my own copy. I didn’t want to wait until Minh got a clean tape to me by courier. After Minh hung up, I sat at the desk in my room and listened to the last exchanges between the pilots maybe ten or twelve times. Then I got out my notebook and made a handwritten transcript of it, because sometimes things appear different to you when you read them than when you listen. Occasionally the eye sees nuances that the ear misses.”

Joe now knew what he held in his hand. He could tell by the thickness that there were three sheets of paper.

Barbara said, “Minh had called me first. He intended to call Bruce Laceroth, then the chairman and the vice chairman of the Board—if not all five Board members—so each of them could hear the tape himself. It wasn’t standard protocol, but this was a strange and unprecedented situation. I’m sure Minh got to at least one of those people—though they all deny hearing from him. We’ll never know for sure, because Minh Tran died in a fire at the labs shortly before six o’clock that same morning, approximately two hours after he called me in Pueblo.”

“Jesus.”

“A very intense fire. An impossibly intense fire.”

Surveying the trees that surrounded the meadow, Joe expected to see the pale faces of watchers in the deep shadows of the woods. When he and Barbara had first arrived, the site had struck him as remote, but now he felt as exposed and vulnerable as if he had been standing in the middle of any intersection in L.A.

He said, “Let me guess—the original tape from the cockpit recorder was destroyed in the lab fire.”

“Supposedly burned to powder, vanished, no trace, gone, good-bye,” Barbara said.

“What about the computer that was processing the digitized version?”

“Scorched garbage. Nothing in it salvageable.”

“But you still have your copy.”

She shook her head. “I left the cassette in my hotel room while I went to a breakfast meeting. The contents of the cockpit tape were so explosive, I didn’t intend to share it right away with everyone on the team. Until we’d had time to think it through, we needed to be careful about when and how we released it.”

“Why?”

“The pilot was dead, but his reputation was at stake. His family would be devastated if he was blamed. We had to be absolutely sure. If the cause was laid in Captain Blane’s lap, then tens of millions—even hundreds of millions—of dollars’ worth of wrongful-death litigation would ensue. We had to act with due diligence. My plan was to bring Mario back to my room after breakfast to hear the tape, just the two of us.”

“Mario Oliveri,” Joe said, referring to the man in Denver who had told him last night that Barbara had retired and moved back to Colorado Springs.

“Yeah. As head of the human-performance group, Mario’s thoughts were more important to me at that moment than anyone’s. But just as we were finishing breakfast, we got word about the fire at the labs—about poor Minh. By the time I got back to my room with Mario, the copy of the tape I’d made over the phone was blank.”

“Stolen and replaced.”

“Or just erased on my own machine. I guess Minh told someone that I’d duped it long-distance.”

“Right then you must have known.”

She nodded. “Something was very wrong. Something stank.”

Her mop of hair was as white as the feathers on the head of the eagle that had overflown them, but until this moment she had seemed younger than fifty. Now she suddenly seemed older.

“Something wrong,” he said, “but you couldn’t quite believe it.”

“My life was the Safety Board. I was proud to be part of it. Still am, Joe. They’re damn good people.”

“Did you tell Mario what was on the tape?”

“Yeah.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Amazement. Disbelief, I think.”

“Did you show him the transcript you’d made?”

She was silent a moment. Then: “No.”

“Why not?”

“My hackles were up.”

“You didn’t trust anyone.”

“A fire that intense…there must have been an accelerant.”

“Arson,” Joe said.

“But no one ever raised the possibility. Except me. I don’t have faith in the integrity of their investigation of that lab fire at all. Not at all.”

“What did the autopsy on Minh reveal? If he was murdered and the fire set to cover it—”

“If he was, they couldn’t prove it by what was left of the body. He was virtually cremated. The thing is…he was a really nice guy, Joe. He was sweet. He loved his job because he believed what he did would save lives, help to prevent other crashes. I hate these people, whoever they are.”

Among the white pines at the foot of the meadow, near where Joe and Barbara had first entered the clearing, something moved: a shadow gliding through deeper shadows, dun against purple.

Joe held his breath. He squinted but could not identify what he had briefly glimpsed.

Barbara said, “I think it was just a deer.”

“If it wasn’t?”

“Then we’re dead whether we finish this talk or not,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone that revealed the bleak and paranoid new world order in which she lived following Flight 353.

He said, “The fact that your tape was erased—didn’t that raise anyone’s suspicions?”

“The consensus was that I’d been tired. Three hours’ sleep the night of the crash—then only a few hours the next night before Minh called and woke me. Poor bleary-eyed Barbara. I’d sat listening to the tape over and over, over and over, and at the end I must have pressed the wrong button—you know?—and erased it without realizing what I’d done.” Her face twisted with sarcasm. “You can see how it must have happened.”

“Any chance of that?”

“None whatsoever.”

Though Joe unfolded the three sheets of paper, he didn’t yet begin to read them.

He said, “Why didn’t they believe you when you told them what you’d heard on the tape? They were your colleagues. They knew you to be a responsible person.”

“Maybe some of them did believe it—and didn’t want to. Maybe some of them just chalked it up to my fatigue. I’d been fighting an ear infection for weeks, and it had worn me down even before Pueblo. Maybe they took that into account. I don’t know. And there’s one or two who just plain don’t like me. Who among us is universally loved? Not me. Too pushy. Too opinionated. Anyway, it was all moot—because without a tape, there was no proof of the exchanges between Blane and Santorelli.”

“When did you finally tell someone you’d made a transcript word for word?”

“I was saving that. I was trying to figure the right moment, the right context in which to mention it—preferably once the investigation turned up some detail that would support what I said had been on the tape.”

“Because by itself your transcript isn’t real proof.”

“Exactly. Sure, it’s better than nothing, better than memory alone, but I needed to augment it with something. Then those two creeps woke me in the hotel in San Francisco, and after that…Well, I just wasn’t much of a crusader any more.”

Out of the eastern forest, two deer leaped in tandem into the bottom of the meadow, a buck and a doe. They raced across the corner of the clearing, quickly disappearing into the trees on the northern perimeter.

Under the skin on the back of Joe’s neck, ticks of apprehension still burrowed and twitched.

The movement he had glimpsed earlier must have been the two deer. From their volatile entrance into the meadow, however, he inferred that they had been flushed from the trees by something—or someone—that had frightened them.

He wondered if any corner of the world would ever feel safe to him again. But he knew the answer even as the question passed through his mind: no.

No corner. Not anywhere.

Not ever.

He said, “Who do you suspect—inside the Safety Board? Who did Minh call next after you? Because that person is probably the one who told him not to pass the word any further—and then arranged to have him killed and the evidence burned.”

“It could have been any of them he was intending to call. They were all his superiors, and he would have obeyed their instructions. I’d like to think it can’t be Bruce Laceroth, because he’s a bedrock guy. He started out a grunt like the rest of us did, worked his way up. The five Board members, on the other hand, are presidential appointees, approved by the Senate for five-year terms.”

“Political hacks.”

“No, actually, the great majority of the board members over the years have been straight shooters, trying to do their best. Most of them are a credit to the agency, and others we just endure. Once in a while, yeah, one of them is slime in a suit.”

“What about the current chairman and vice chairman? You said Minh Tran was going to call them—supposing he wasn’t able to reach Laceroth first.”

“They’re not your ideal public servants. Maxine Wulce is the chairman. An attorney, young and politically ambitious, looking out for number one, a real piece of work. Wouldn’t give you two cents for her.”

“Vice chairman?”

“Hunter Parkman. Pure political patronage. He’s old money, so he doesn’t need the job, but he likes being a presidential appointee and talking crash lore at parties. Give you fifteen cents for him.”

Although he had continued to study the woods at the foot of the meadow, Joe had seen no further movement among those trees.

Far to the east, a vein of lightning pulsed briefly through the dark muscle of the storm.

He counted the seconds between the silver flash and the rumble of thunder, translating time to distance, and judged that the rain was five or six miles from them.

Barbara said, “I’ve given you only a Xerox of the transcript I wrote down that night. I’ve hidden the original away. God knows why, since I’ll never use it.”

Joe was torn between a rage to know and a fear of knowing. He sensed that in the exchanges between Captain Blane and First Officer Santorelli, he would discover new dimensions to the terror that his wife and daughters had endured.