Breaking Point (25 page)

She did not report the statistical anomaly she had discovered in her initial examination of the bodies: she kept finding crushed throats. She would spend the next few hours after dinner on the secure NTSB servers, exploring the autopsies from the crashes of other similar, midsized carriers and looking for the same odd pattern.

TWIN PINES

Twice on Saturday, a crew from the county coroner's office had come to Stan's Meats to retrieve bodies for autopsies. They were taking them three at a time. Each time Calendar hid in an adjacent room, then returned to his task.

He searched every cadaver in the freezing room and found neither Andrew Malatesta's speech nor his sketch pad. He searched the partial-body bags. The same.

If none of the survivors had smuggled out the speech, and if it wasn't with the dead, then that meant it was on the airplane.

He called it a night and snuck out.

*   *   *

After dinner, Lakshmi sent e-mails to her three favorite pathology professors: one was retired in Mumbai, one was working in London, and one was on a one-year sabbatical studying at Johns Hopkins.

She asked each if he had ever seen an anomaly in a major vehicular accident—plane, train, or bus—in which so many people had ended up with crushed throats.

She had counted six such injuries. Six out of eighteen dead. The number seemed extraordinarily high. Didn't it? Perhaps not. The throat is one of the human body's most vulnerable spots. The thoracic organs are protected by the rib cage. Even the stomach—in most cases—is protected by a layer of fat. Okay, that was true in America and Europe, anyway.

The throat offered very little protection.

She went online and scanned
the American Journal of Pathology.
She looked up some ancillary sites. She logged on to the NTSB server with her password and speed-read every report she could find signed “Tomzak, Leonard.”

She did not find the crushed-throat anomaly.

How odd,
she thought, and closed her laptop.

21

I
N THE MORNING, BARRY
Tichnor went directly to the CIA headquarters in Langley and down to Jenna Scott's subbasement office. He punched in the code to let himself in. The place was painted off-white and was sterile: it held computers and chairs and not much else. Barry noted the tiny metal windmill in the ceiling and assumed it was a fire extinguisher. In fact, if triggered, it would spray a corrosive acid in the event that these computers needed to be purged quickly.

Jenna doffed her headset and smiled ruefully at him.

“No luck with the speech or the sketch pad. Calendar reports they're not in the morgue.”

Barry sat. He had anticipated this. “This isn't good news.”

“No,” she agreed. “The speech is inculpatory. The sketchbook is a gold mine of potential weapons and weapon platforms. At this point, we have to consider them the primary objectives of the mission.”

Barry nodded. “I don't know what
inculpatory
means.” He did, but it annoyed him when people used legal jargon in conversation.

“Not important, it just means that having the Go-Team's phones isn't enough. We need their office bugged, their hotel rooms bugged, we need their laptops. Everything. I'm going into the field.”

He could tell she was not happy about this. “I'm sure you'll be fine.”

His tone was patronizing and, given the situation, Jenna let him get away with it. “I've had a call name randomly selected for the situation, and I've uploaded communication protocols to your private account. For the duration of my stay in Montana, my call sign will be Vintner.”

“And if I need to communicate with Calendar?”

“No,” she said, smiling and shaking her head. “He still reports through me.”

“Remind him that we need the prototype and the projectiles back here. Even if he needs to use one of his two men to do it. This is as important as the sketchbook and the speech.”

Jenna nodded.

Barry stood. “Thank you. Good luck, Vintner.”

TWIN PINES

A deputy sheriff arrived at the crash site at dawn and called Chief of Police Paul McKinney. “Hey, I think this fire's bigger.”

McKinney was just getting out of bed and couldn't find his eyeglasses. “Yeah?”

“I volunteer for the fire crews each summer, Chief. I swear she's grown since yesterday.”

“Shit. Okay, thanks. Stand by, I'm going to contact the fire chief.”

CRASH SITE

Jack Goodspeed held the crook of his elbow against his mouth and nose, his eyes watering from the smoke. It was going on 6:00
A.M.
, an hour after Chief McKinney had gotten the word. The chief had raced out to the crash site, only to realize that most of the crashers already were there, along with a half-dozen flatbed trucks and small, agile Caterpillar tractors.

“Look!” Paul stepped up to him. “This is not my jurisdiction and I can't order you around, but if the wind picks up, this fire will be right where you're standing in less than an hour! I strongly recommend you evac, now!”

Jack coughed. “Not without my fuselage.”

“Yeah, well, lift with your legs, not your back.”

“I'm serious, Chief. The clues to this crash are in that tin can. I can't let it burn up.”

A firefighter in yellow turnouts jogged up to them. “Look around, fella! We're in a forest. You can't get your flatbeds close enough. It'd take a week, minimum, to chop down enough trees to get 'em in here. You don't have a week.”

The firefighter said, “You're talking about getting this plane out?”

Jack nodded, coughed.

The firefighter said, “You could fly it out.”

“Yeah, that's a sidesplitter, buddy.”

The firefighter shrugged. “I wasn't kidding. You want that plane? Let's fly it out.”

L'ENFANT PLAZA

Dmitri Stepanovich Zhirkov, a computer-reconstruction expert for the NTSB, arrived at 8:30
A.M.
, went directly to the basement and shoved his aged backpack into his messy cubicle. The garbage can was stuffed with fast-food containers. He shoved a long, wild mop of blond hair away from his eyes, dug an antique Walkman out of his backpack. He chose an Aerosmith cassette tape for this morning's work. Twenty-five, angular, and thin, he owned no fewer than eight Walkman tape players, half older than he was. He felt there was something missing from digital, downloaded music.

He sat on the side of his desk and stuffed his size-twelve feet into in-line skates. He found it easier to glide through the main computer room, which ran the length of the headquarters building. He was lacing them up as the security door to the mainframe room hissed open.

“Go away!” he shouted, eyes on his laces. “I am without caffeine!”

“Dee?”

He turned. “Susan!”

Susan Tanaka stepped forward and hugged him. Standing on the in-line skates, he towered over her and had to bend at the waist for the hug. “What are you doing here? You are supposed to be in Italy.”

“It's this thing in Montana. Delevan—”

Dmitri cut her off. “Isaiah and the others. I know. Is tragedy.” He had lived in the States for a decade but his accent was still marked.

“I have a huge favor to ask.”

Dmitri reached into the old, camouflage backpack and dragged out an energy drink, cracking the lid and glugging the lurid liquid. “Of course!”

“This is just between the two of us, okay? I'm worried about the Go-Team. I'm worried about, well, Peter Kim.”

Dmitri said, “Yes. Is dick.”

“Right. Is dick. But beyond that, I just have this gut feeling that not everything out there is what it appears to be. I'd like to watch over the crashers' backs, make sure they're okay.”

“You have the hunch?”

“Little things,” she said. “On my flight back, I ran through the Go-Team's dailies. Do you know Gene Whitney, the crew-team leader?”

Dmitri shrugged. “Not well.”

“He's accessed his NTSB credit card to head back to D.C., to interview the ground crew. In fact, he did it twice. But he's never bought a ticket back to Montana. How's a guy do that? Plus three or four coincidences left Flight Seven-Eight more than half empty. That could be freakish good luck but…”

“But your famous saying: no coincidences in crash. Okay. But look, you left a beautiful man in beautiful part of Italy. What is the word Tommy Tomzak uses? Mesh…?”

“Meshuga. And yes. I'm doing this
for
Tommy. And Kiki and Isaiah.”

The kid gulped his energy drink. “For you, I do anything. You get me this job, yes? Bring me your iPad. This is not the biggie.”

She grinned. “I thought you were going to tell me this breaks every protocol at the NTSB.”

“Pfffff.” Dmitri made a dismissive wave of his hand. “I spy on your Go-Teams all the time.”

TWIN PINES

Peter Kim stepped out of the rental. He couldn't see smoke but he thought he could smell it. He checked his watch: 8:30
A.M.

The state fire crews had set up shop in the police station to take advantage of the department's high-speed Internet and communications system. The station took up a third of a brick building that looked straight out of the 1920s. It looked like any small-town police station: cluttered, utilitarian, with corkboards up on every available wall for posters and flyers ranging from the feds' “most wanted” to auditions for the Twin Pines Methodist Church Choir. There was no Plexiglas safety partition to protect the staff and no key-card-protected security doors. Nobody had ever entered the police station with malice aforethought.

The rest of the squat, square building included city hall and related city offices.

Mac Pritchert, the state fire chief, shook Peter's hand. “Mr. Kim, was it?”

“Yes. I spoke to the hospital. There's a possibility that we have a missing survivor. He could still be in there.”

“Let's hope not,” Pritchert said. “That bitch of a fire just turned our way.”

HELENA

Ray Calabrese was bored. He'd packed so quickly in Los Angeles, he'd forgotten to grab a novel. There was nothing to watch on television, and Peter Kim had made it clear that he didn't want Ray hanging out at the crash site or
bothering
the crashers. He'd found a
Time
and an
Economist
at the grocery story, plus a book of crossword puzzles. It was going on 9:00
A.M.
Sunday. He was wondering what the hell he was doing in Montana when his cell phone beeped.

“Calabrese.”

Kiki Duvall's voice came back over the line, but higher-pitched than usual and clipped. “Oh, thank God I got you!”

Ray found himself standing. “Are you okay? Did you open your wounds or—?”

“The cockpit voice recorder!” she cut him off. “Ray, I don't know who those men are, but they weren't our pilots!”

*   *   *

Fifteen minutes later, Ray barged his way up to Tommy Tomzak's room. “Get dressed, Texas. Kiki needs us.”

Tommy stood and moved to the room's closet without asking why. A duty nurse frowned. “He can't just leave, he—”

Ray flashed his tin. “FBI business, ma'am.”

*   *   *

Ray explained en route to the hotel. They stopped at a Radio Shack and bought a small, portable speaker designed to work with an iPod.

Kiki, barefoot in cuffed khaki shorts and a white T-shirt, opened her hotel-room door and hurried them in. Ray made a valiant effort not to notice her flat stomach or the concave curves where her hip bones disappeared into her shorts.

“You are
not
going to believe this!” she said, grabbing the electronic gadget from Tommy's hand.

She hooked up the Nano and the speaker. Kiki hit Play.

Holley: We're at, ah, a thousand feet. Passing outer marker for Helena Regional.

Cervantes: A thousand?

Holley: Ah … yeah.

(beat)

Cervantes: I don't think so. I think we're lower.

Holley: I got a confirm on the altimeter, now reading nine five zero feet … mark.

Cervantes: Ah, Helena Regional, this is Polestar Seven-Eight, what elevation do you have for us?

(beat)

Cervantes: Helena Regional, Polestar Seven-Eight.

(beat)

This feels way low, Jed. We're lower than we think. Helena Regional, Pole—

Holley: Trees!

Kiki hit Pause.

“I'm not one hundred percent certain about the pilot. He could be our guy, although I don't think he is. The copilot? Definitely not ours. Ours was born and raised in New York City. This guy is from Boston.”

Ray said, “Standard operating procedure, the CVR goes from the crash site into the custody of NTSB. From there, a U.S. Marshal's deputy takes—”

She brushed her hair from her face with an angry swoop of one open palm. “I know the SOP, Ray! I wrote the SOP!”

Ray raised both hands. “Hey. Not doubting you here. What I'm saying is: I've got to get to the Marshal's Service, get confirmation that the hand-off went according to Hoyle. I'll call the Portland field office, get someone over to the recording studio. If this is a fake, we should be able to track down where it was switched.”

Tommy cut in: “Does the Go-Team have a cause yet?”

“Short circuit somewhere in the cockpit, is all I know. Took out the, what do you call it, the altimeter. Plus the radio. Some of the guys recall that another airplane, same make and model, um…”

Kiki said, “Claremont VLE.”

“Right. What's VLE stand for?”

Tommy said, “Very Little Elbow room.”

Kiki said, “Initials of the three engineers who started the company, back in the thirties.”

Tommy stood up to pace and immediately his vertigo flared. He lost his balance, sliding back down onto the bed beside Kiki. “Whoa. Sorry about that. Look, we got us another problem, gang. Short circuit on the flight deck? No altimeter? Fine, but I was awake when we lost power. Cabin lights, engines. Even the reading-thingie I bought. Boom. Nada. A massive and complete power loss. Not only are those guys bogus,” and he jammed a pugnacious finger at the iPod, “but they lay out a scenario that don't match the facts.”