Breaking Point
Authors: Dana Haynes
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To my editor, Keith Kahla, who made this book possible.
To my agent, Janet Reid, who made Keith possible.
To Katy King, who makes all the rest of the universe possible.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: THE CRASH
D
R. LEONARD TOMZAK WAS
a modern American male. He knew it was considered inappropriate to stare openly at a pretty girl with long legs as she approached. Especially in public.
He decided to throw caution to the wind. Tomzakâ“Tommy” to his friendsâgave a wolf whistle as Kiki Duvall stalked down the corridor toward the waiting area of gate A15 at Reagan National, two lidded coffee cups in her hands.
“You're too kind, sir,” she said, bending at the waist and kissing him on the lips.
“I'm a pathologist. Nobody pays me to be kind. They pay me to be accurate. And I accurately find you to be hot.”
She wound herself into the thermoformed chair like a shoestring being lowered into a tight pile. A tall, athletic woman with hair the color of pennies, it was her lithe grace that had first attracted Tommy to her. Her pianist's hands were large enough to carry two creamer packets along with the coffee cups. She handed him one of the packets and a stir stick. As she sat, she glanced around the waiting area, which was all but empty.
“Oooooh,” she purred. “Leg room!”
“Leg room?”
She waved the other coffee cup to encompass the gate. “It's not a full flight.”
“Cool. Wanna make out?” Tommy asked, the Texan in his voice ramping up a bit.
“When do I not?”
He opened his cup and blew on the surface. As he did, a curved hank of black hair fell across his left eyebrow. Kiki brushed it back.
“D'you even know what kinda plane we're flying in? Could be this is full up.”
“Claremont VLE, twin turboprop.” She snapped a bubble with her gum. “Seats sixty-five with four crew. State-of-the-art avionics courtesy of Leveque Aéronautique Limited out of Quebec. Twin Bembenek engines. Came off the line fifteen months ago and is due for a checkup in five cycles.”
A cycle is one trip: takeoff, flight, and landing.
Before Tommy could razz her nerdiness, an appreciative, two-tone whistle sounded to their left. A man in the familiar brown-and-gold uniform of Polestar Airlines had been using a Nerf football to play catch with an eight-year-old passenger. He smiled at Kiki. “Even I didn't know all that, and I'm the copilot. You an aircraft lover, ma'am?”
Kiki smiled. “Something like that.”
Neither Kiki nor Tommy felt a burning need to identify themselves as crash investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board. Pilots often were squeamish about flying with “crashers” on board. It felt like tempting fate.
“Pilot's flirting with you,” Tommy said for her ears only.
“That's because, as you pointed out, I'm so hot.”
Tommy lifted his coffee cup and tapped it silently against hers in agreement. He checked his battered, digital Timex. It was going on 8:00
P.M.
“So where the hell's Grey?”
“He'll be here. Probably checking his luggage.”
Tommy blinked at her. “We're only staying over one night.”
“Have you ever known Isaiah to pass up a golf course? In fact, if he even shows up for our panel discussion, I'll be surprised.”
Tommy laughed and pointed to the right. Isaiah Grey, a wiry, African American pilot, rounded the corner and waved to the couple. He was wearing flying clothes: comfortable chinos with loafers and a polo shirt under a denim jacket.
Isaiah shook his head and peered out the terminal's window at the Claremont aircraft, which was being readied by both a fuel truck and a food-services truck. “Somebody wanna remind me why we're taking a freaking red-eye
and
a damned prop-job three-quarters of the way across the continent?”
“I booked the flight,” Tommy said brightly. “You should see how much I saved.”
Isaiah glanced at him. “It's not your money!”
Tommy said, “It's the taxpayers' money.”
Isaiah sat and shook his head at Kiki. “He's your man, you explain it to him.”
Kiki said, “Love, we're federal bureaucrats. We don't actually like the taxpayers.”
As they bantered, Tommy noted a dark-skinned man with wild hair and a Roman noseâperhaps Middle Easternâsitting with two others, one Caucasian and the other from somewhere around the Indian Subcontinent. As Tommy watched, the three men leaned forward in their chairs and began whispering.
It was completely wrong and indefensible to suspect fellow airplane passengers just because they look Middle Eastern. Tommy knew this. He would never mention his suspicions out loud. Not even to Kiki. He took extra pains to smile pleasantly at Middle Eastern passengers, if only to assuage his silent guilt. But, since September 11, 2001, Tommy had harbored those precise suspicions and he was secretly aghast at himself.
Tommy looked up as a second man in the brown-and-gold Polestar uniform walked into the waiting area, wheeling luggage in his wake. The newcomer pretended to be shocked to find his copilot tossing around a ball with an eight-year-old. “What's this?” The newcomer turned to the young boy. “Okay, that means you have to fly the plane.”
“Nuh-huh!” the kid reeled back.
“Just having a catch, boss.” The copilot grinned, then turned to the boy's parents. “But your son can come look at the flight deck before we take off, if that's all right with you.” His parents beamed.
The pilot nodded to Tommy and his two cohorts, then headed toward the ramp.
The copilot gathered the passengers' attention. “Folks? If we could get you to stand on line and punch your tickets, we'll get everybody seated on board. No need to wait for your row to be called. We've got a light load today.”
With that, the pilot and copilot exited through the door onto the jetway leading to their plane. Tommy returned the lid to his coffee, stood, and gathered his battered leather portmanteau.
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Flight attendants Andi Garner and Jolene Solomon studied the computer screen behind the counter as the last of the Flight 78 passengers trudged down the gangway toward the amidships door.
“When was the last time you saw a half-empty plane?” Andi asked.
“Pre-nine/eleven,” her partner Jolene replied. “Pre-Travelocity and the other sites. This is weird.”
The petite blonde, Joleneâin her twentieth year as a flight attendantâpicked up the phone behind the counter and hit three numbers.
“Central.” The voice came from Polestar Airlines' headquarters in Cincinnati.
“Hi. Jolene Solomon, FA-7, calling from Reagan. Hey, can someone check the computers forâ”
The Cincinnati voice said, “Flight Seven-Eight to Sea-Tac?”
Jolene looked at her younger cohort, both eyebrows rising. “Yes.”
“Yeah, we figured you might call. We got hit by some sort of computer virus. Nobody's been able to book that flight for the past day and a half. They just get kicked out of the system. And some of your ticket-holders got rerouted to Dulles. We got 'em booked on the three ten to Sea-Tac.”
Jolene winked at her friend. “We're not complaining! This'll be the easiest flight we've had all year.”
She started to say her thanks and hang up, when another thought flickered. “Hey. How many other flights are affected?”
“None,” Cincinnati said. “Just you guys.”
*Â Â Â *Â Â Â *
Tommy, Kiki, and Isaiah lined up with the others, boarding passes out.
The flight from Reagan National to Sea-Tac takes eight hours, more or less. Less, if there's a tailwind. This particular flight was scheduled to stop in Helena, Montana. And Kiki had guessed right: only twenty-two of the sixty-five seats were filled. After a boxed snack had been servedâonce free, Polestar charged nine bucks for it these daysâseveral people shifted their seats to have rows to themselves.
Halfway over southern Montana, Pilot-in-Charge Miguel Cervantes handed the stick over to Second Pilot Jed Holley. It was past ten o'clock mountain time. Cervantes had absolutely no qualms about giving up the stick: he would trust any aircraft to Holley. Both men had served in the navy, where they'd studied to be aviators. Both had gotten out with the rank of captain. They were a year apart, age-wise, and both enjoyed playing touch football. Even their wives knew each other. Cervantes had been named PICâ
Pilot-in-Charge
and
Second Pilot
being the terms used at Polestar Airlines for captain and copilotâa year earlier. Holley would take the test in five months.
Cervantes used the lavatory and washed his hands. He flirted with both flight attendants, good-naturedly, and they flirted right back. He returned to the flight deck and struck the door with the knuckle of his middle finger:
tap, tap ⦠tap.
Inside, Holley flipped the toggle on the center control panel, unlocking the steel-reinforced door. “I changed course for Vegas. Hope that's okay.”
Cervantes sat, adjusted his two-strap safety harness. “Fine by me. I lost five bucks on the Mariners last night. To heck with Seattle.”
The Claremont VLE was in the mountain time zone, 105 degrees west of the prime meridian: 1330 hours Zulu time in the air, 10:30
P.M.
on the ground.
They were forty-three minutes out of Helena.
Sitting in an aisle seat, Tommy studied his notes for the Helena lecture, using the next-to largest font size available on his e-reader. Public speaking was one of the highlights of his job as a pathologist. He always prepped rigorously to be able to rattle off a frightening array of statistics without glancing at his notes. “It's how I pick up chicks,” he'd once explained to Kiki Duvall.
“Yes.” She had patted his arm. “That's usually what does it for us.”
A few minutes earlier, the pilot had announced that they would be descending into Helena, Montana. Tommy glanced to his left. Kiki slept in the window seat, wearing the earbuds of her iPod, Vivaldi softly canceling out the susurrus of the twin Bembenek Company engines. She was two inches taller than Tommy but, by sitting at an angle, she could stretch her legs out under Tommy's seat, ankles crossed, barefoot. Claremont aircraft were configured in a two-seats-on-the-left, two-on-the-right formation. Tommy studied her for a moment: the freckles across her nose, the swell of her breasts under her sweater. He smiled, feeling like the luckiest guy on earth.
He turned to his right. Isaiah Grey slept across both seats on the starboard side, back against a window, knees up, feet on the aisle seat. He'd fallen asleep with reading glasses perched low on his nose, a novel open on his lap. That wouldn't last long: attendants had just started making their way down the aisle, waking people up and urging them to push their seat backs to their upright position.
