Sole Survivor

Page 20

There was no point in warning the hotel’s night manager that one of his employees or guests was in danger. If the gunman had kept his threat to impress her with a senseless, random killing, he had pulled the trigger already. He and his companion would have left the hotel at least half an hour ago.
Wincing at the throbbing pain in her neck, she went to the door that connected her room with theirs. She opened it and checked the inner lace. Her privacy deadbolt latch was backed by a removable
brass plate fixed in place with screws, which allowed access to the mechanism of her lock from the other side. The other room’s door featured no such access plate.
The shiny brass looked new. She was certain that it had been installed shortly before she checked into the hotel — by the gun­man and his companion acting either clandestinely or with the assistance of a hotel engineer. A clerk at the front desk was paid or coerced to put her in this room rather than any other.
Barbara was not much of a drinker, but she raided the honour bar for a two-shot miniature of vodka and a cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it - then went into the bathroom and threw up.
She felt unclean. Withdrawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.
Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn’t stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.
The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen — uni­formed officers and plainclothes detectives.
From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o’clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.
The body had not been discovered immediately because, curi­ously, no one had heard gunfire.
Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.
The day was high and blue. The city’s famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.
She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the
sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.
After cancelling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.
Quaking fear became quaking grief. She wept uncontrollably for the dead room-service waiter whose name she didn’t know, for Denny and Rebekah and unborn Felicia whose lives now seemed perpetually suspended on a slender thread, for her own loss of innocence and self-respect, for the three hundred and twenty people aboard Flight 353, for justice thwarted and hope lost.
A sudden wind groaned across the meadow, playing with old dry aspen leaves, like the devil counting souls and casting them away.
‘I can’t let you do this,’ Joe said. ‘I can’t let you tell me what was on the cockpit voice recorder if there’s any chance it’s going to put your son and his family in the hands of people like that.’
‘It’s not for you to decide, Joe.’
‘The hell it’s not.’
‘When you called from Los Angeles, I played dumb because I’ve got to assume my phone is permanently tapped, every word recorded. Actually, I don’t think it is. I don’t think they feel any need to tap it, because they know by now that they’ve got me muzzled.’
‘If there’s even a chance—’
‘And I know for certain I’m not being watched. My house isn’t under observation. I’d have picked up on that long ago. When I walked out on the investigation, took early retirement, sold the house in Bethesda, and came back to Colorado Springs, they wrote me off, Joe. I was broken, and they knew it.’
‘You don’t seem broken to me.’
She patted his shoulder, grateful for the compliment. ‘I’ve rebuilt myself some. Anyway, if you weren’t followed—’
‘I wasn’t. I lost them yesterday. No one could have followed me to LAX this morning.’
‘Then I figure there’s no one to know we’re here or to know what I tell you. All I ask is you never say you got it from me.’
‘I wouldn’t do that to you. But there’s still such a risk you’ll be taking,’ he worried.
‘I’ve had months to think about it, to live with it, and the way it seems to me is . . . They probably think I told Denny some of it, so he would know what danger he’s in, so he’d be careful, watchful.’
‘Did you?’
‘Not a word. What kind of a life could they have, knowing?’
‘Not a normal one.’
‘But now Denny, Rebekah, Felicia, and I are going to be hanging by a thread as long as this cover-up continues. Our only hope is for someone else to blow it wide open, so then what little I know about it won’t matter any more.’
The storm clouds were not only in the east now. Like an armada of incoming starships in a film about futuristic warfare, ominous black thunderheads slowly resolved out of the white mists overhead.
‘Otherwise,’ Barbara continued, ‘a year from now or two years from now, even though I’ve kept my mouth shut, they’ll decide to tie up all the loose ends. Flight 353 will be such old news that no one will connect my death or Denny’s or a handful of others to it. No suspicions will be raised if something happens to those of us with incriminating bits of information. These people, whoever the hell they are . . . they’ll buy insurance with a car accident here, a fire there. A faked robbery to cover a murder. A suicide.’
Through Joe’s mind passed the waking-nightmare images of Lisa burning, Georgine dead on the kitchen floor, Charlie in the blood-tinted light.
He couldn’t argue with Barbara’s assessment. She probably had it figured right.
In a sky waiting to snarl and crackle, menacing faces formed in the clouds, blind and open-mouthed, choked with anger.
Taking her first fateful step toward revelation, Barbara said, ‘The flight-data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder arrived in Washington on the Gulfstream and were in the labs by three o’clock Eastern time the day after the crash.’
‘You were still just getting into the investigation here.’
‘That’s right. Mirth Tran — he’s an electronics engineer with the Safety Board — and a few colleagues opened the Fairchild recorder. it’s almost as large as a shoe box, jacketed in three-eighths of an inch of stainless steel. They cut it carefully, with a special saw.
This particular unit had endured such violent impact that it was compressed four inches end to end — the steel just crunched up like cardboard — and one corner had been crushed, resulting in a small breach.’
‘And it still functioned?’
‘No. The recorder was completely destroyed. But inside the larger box is the steel memory module. It contains the tape. It was also breached. A small amount of moisture had penetrated all the way into the memory module, but the tape wasn’t entirely ruined. It had to be dried, processed, but that didn’t take long, and then Mirth and a few others gathered in a soundproof listening room to run it from the beginning. There were almost three hours of cockpit conversation leading up to the crash—’
Joe said, ‘They don’t just run it fast forward to the last few minutes?’
‘No. Something earlier in the flight, something that seemed to be of no importance to the pilots at the time, might provide clues that help us understand what we’re hearing in the moments immediately before the plane went down.’
Steadily rising, the warm wind was brisk enough now to foil the lethargic bees on their lazy quest from bloom to bloom. Surrendering the field to the oncoming storm, they departed for secret nests in the woods.
‘Sometimes we get a cockpit tape that’s all but useless to us,’ Barbara continued. ‘The recording quality’s lousy for one reason or another. Maybe the tape’s old and abraded. Maybe the microphone is the hand-held type or isn’t functioning as well as it should, too much vibration. Maybe the recording head is worn and causing distortion.’
‘I would think there’d be daily maintenance, weekly replace­ment, when it’s something as important as this.’
‘Remember, as a percentage of flights, planes rarely go down. There are costs and flight-time delays to be considered. Anyway, commercial aviation is a human enterprise, Joe. And what human enterprise ever operates to ideal standards?’
‘Point taken.’
‘This time there was good and bad,’ she said. ‘Both Delroy Blane and Santorelli were wearing headsets with boom microphones, which is real damn good, much better than a hand-held. Those along with the overhead cockpit mike gave us three channels to study. On the bad side, the tape wasn’t new. It had been recorded over a lot of times and was more deteriorated than we would have
liked. Worse, whatever the nature of the moisture that reached the tape, it had caused some patchy corrosion to the recording surface.’
From a back pocket of her jeans, she took a folded paper but didn’t immediately hand it to Joe.
She said, ‘When Mirth Tran and the others listened, they found that some portions of the tape were clearly audible and others were so full of scratchy static, so garbled, they could only discern one out of four or five words.’
‘What about the last minute?’
‘That was one of the worst segments. It was decided that the tape would have to be cleaned and rehabilitated. Then the recording would be electronically enhanced to whatever extent possible. Bruce Laceroth, head of the Major Investigations Division, had been there to listen to the whole tape, and he called me in Pueblo, at a quarter past seven, Eastern time, to tell me the status of the recording. They were stowing it for the night, going to start work with it again in the morning. It was depressing.’
High above them, the eagle returned from the east, pale against the pregnant bellies of the clouds, still flying straight and true with the weight of the pending storm on its wings.
‘Of course that whole day had been depressing,’ Barbara said. ‘We’d brought in refrigerated trucks from Denver to collect all the human remains from the site, which had to be completed before we could begin to deal with the pieces of the plane itself. There was the usual organizational meeting, which is always exhausting, because so many interest groups — the airline, the manufacturer of the plane, the supplier of the powerplants, the Airline Pilots’ Association, lots of others — all want to bend the proceedings to serve their interests as much as possible. Human nature — and not the prettier part of it. So you have to be reasonably diplomatic but also damn tough to keep the process truly impartial.’
‘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, Mirth 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 Mirth. 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 plough 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 Mirth 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. Digitise 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, Mirth 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, Mirth called me,’ Barbara said. ‘I’d told the hotel operator to hold all calls, I needed my sleep, but Mirth 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 Mirth got a clean tape to me by courier. After Mirth 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, ‘Mirth 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 Mirth got to at least one of those people — though they all deny hearing from him. We’ll never know for sure, because Mirth 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.’