Breaking Point (28 page)

“Good…” Jack chanted, stepping gingerly as the O-ring turned beneath his boots. “That's it.… Nice and easy…”

More groaning from the cadaverous aircraft. Things knocked against one another.

Peter Kim dashed forward to watch it all from the perspective of the nose of the plane. It slowly turned counterclockwise, Jack riding it, walking the curved surface.

Jack, chanting, “Good … uh-huh … that's it…”

Peter raised his arms over his head, palms open.

“… Steady … Good…”

Ginger LaFrance's eyes danced from the rotating fuselage to Peter's raised hands.

“… That's it…”

Peter made fists. “Stop!”

Ginger released the controls.

Jack laughed out loud. “Not bad!”

The Claremont hung in the air, right-side up.

Jack's grin could light up a small city. “Damn. Never done that before. Alrighty then, Ginger, want to try forward movement?”

She popped a gum bubble. “I'm game if you are.”

“First, we've got to turn to about one o'clock. There's a more or less straight path out of the forest.”

Ginger made minute adjustments to the remote controls. With another loud moan, the Claremont turned clockwise, five degrees. Casper did, too, but with the cadaver of the airliner off the ground, nobody's eyes were anywhere else. “Good. Okay, try moving her forward,” Jack called out

Another adjustment from Ginger and the ruined fuselage floated to the left a couple of inches. Then a foot.

The crashers took two steps in the same direction, keeping pace with the eerie, floating apparition.

For reasons that she could not explain, Beth Mancini felt compelled to reach out and touch the aluminum skin of the devastated craft. As if she'd stumbled into a beached whale.

Peter snapped his fingers. He motioned to Jack's airframe group. “You guys. Hey, guys! Anything falls out of the aircraft, pick it up and bring it along. Anything at all! We—”

He jumped as,
thud,
a deer carcass fell out of the cockpit.

“Okay,” he said. “Not that.”

*   *   *

The forklifts led the way, breaking off branches where necessary. Jack, riding the aluminum leviathan, called out minor changes in vector. “Little to the left. Little more. Okay, good.”

Peter, Beth, Chief McKinney, and Ginger LaFrance walked slowly out of the forest, keeping up with the floating wreckage. From time to time it groaned, and, again, Beth kept imagining a beached whale.

Beth's team started dismantling the floodlights but she shouted back, “Leave 'em! Help Jack's guys pick up debris!”

At almost exactly 2:00
P.M.
on Sunday, Polestar Flight 78 left the Helena State Forest and began floating its way to the town of Twin Pines.

23

K
IKI HELPED TOMMY GET
discharged from the hospital and checked in to her hotel room around two that Sunday. He needed toiletries and Kiki needed what she called
girl stuff
—Tommy didn't ask—so they hit a PayLess Drug Store in Helena. Kiki had wound her hair into twin pigtails because it was easier to manage.

Susan Tanaka would have been horrified. Tommy thought the pigtails looked cute.

They were walking out, hand in hand, when Tommy pulled away and said, “Hey!”

A big man, twenty paces away, was lighting a cigarette with a disposable lighter. He glanced their way.

Tommy marched over to him. Kiki thinking,
Oh, hell …
Susan Tanaka had informed them that Gene Whitney had faked his interviews with the Reagan National ground crew.

The bear of a man loomed over Tommy. “Yeah?”

“Tomzak. We met at a thing in D.C. You're Gene Whitney.”

Gene blinked. “Don't remember you.”

“The fuck are you doing, faking interviews with the ground crews at Reagan?”

Gene took a drag from his Camel. If he was surprised by the question, or by Tommy's knowledge, he didn't show it. “What'd you say your name was again?”

Kiki had caught up to Tommy. “This isn't the right time or place for—”

“It's all right,” Gene said, his voice gray and sullen. “I was fucking with your boy Tomzak here.”

He turned to Tommy again. “You need something?”

“I need to know why you're screwing with Peter Kim's Go-Team. I need to know why you're half-assing your way through this investigation.”

Kiki touched his shoulder. “Hey, come on…”

Gene sucked smoke into his lungs, held it, wincing. His eyes roamed the Helena cityscape. “Your official title in this Go-Team is
crash victim
. You been Investigator in Charge twice and one was Kentucky, which you clusterfucked nicely, I'm told. I need to tell you shit, why?”

“Because one of our best people died in this crash. And he deserves your A-game.”

Gene nodded, as if to an inner dialogue. He said, “You went and got yourself a concussion, Doctor. You wanna watch your temper. You don't want to … what's the word I'm looking for?”

Tommy ground his teeth. “I'm serious as—”

“Exacerbate,”
Gene said. “You don't want to exacerbate your concussion.”

Kiki stepped forward. “Tommy, come on.”

Tommy had eyes only for Gene Whitney. “You don't know me, bub. You don't have any reason to listen to me, but I'm telling you, you run the risk of screwin' up this investigation. You're falsifying official reports and lying to your team leader. Petey ain't my favorite guy on Earth, but what the hell, man?”

The big man flicked his cigarette butt to the sidewalk. “And you don't know me, so you don't know that I don't give a flying fuck about either of you or the Reagan ground crew. Me flying there and asking them a bunch of stupid questions that they could lie about? That's masturbation.” He scanned the buildings again. “Guy could go blind doing that.”

Tommy was livid. “Jesus Harold Angel Christ! Where do you—”

“You don't know me, Doc. So you figure I wouldn't deck you 'cause I got a hundred pounds on you and six inches and you got a boo-boo on your cortex and you got an M.D. and this long, cool drink of water here protecting you.” He reached up to pick a flake of tobacco off his tongue. “Which means: you don't know shit.”

Gene Whitney turned and ambled away.

Tommy tensed and Kiki grabbed his arm. “He isn't wrong,” she whispered. “About the concussion, I mean.”

Whitney was almost a block away before Tommy dragged his eyes off the man's slumped shoulders, hands the size of fryer chickens jammed into his pants pocket, his head bowed.

Tommy shook his head. “What a jackass. I should call Del and—”

“No.” Kiki kissed his cheek. “Love, he's not inept. Or stupid. Or lazy. He's drunk.”

“You're kidding!”

“It's in his voice. He's been on a serious binge.”

TWIN PINES

Calendar sat in a booth at Tina's Diner. He'd ordered coffee and apple pie with vanilla ice cream. There were flecks of actual vanilla in the ice cream and the golden, flaky piecrust had been pinched by hand.

A very blond, very tall woman, midthirties, walked in. She wore a sweater, jeans, flats, and sunglasses. All perfectly nondescript. She slid into the other end of the C-shaped booth. She carried a large tote bag, sealed, which she slid around the C to Calendar's side. He slid it closer to his hip. “Hi.”

The waitress came by and the woman ordered coffee. When they were alone, she leaned over the table and spoke in a whisper. “I'm Vintner. We have their communications frequencies. I'll be setting up both passive and aggressive wiretap protocols for—”

Calendar said, “Vintner? Why are you doing that?”

She blinked at him. “Excuse me?”

“Leaning in. Whispering. You look suspicious. You're the most suspicious-looking person in the room. Also, ditch the sunglasses indoors. And order some pie. It's really good.”

The blond woman leaned back. Her coffee came but she made no eye contact with the waitress. She removed her sunglasses.

“Their computers?”

The woman said, “Not yet,” and Calendar could tell she was hurt by his critique of her field skills. “We're working on that. Normally, I'd piggyback onto their hotel's telephone circuit boards, but they're split up all over the city. Once they set up a headquarters near the crash—and it's SOP to do just that—I'll have to bug that site as well. No problem there.”

Calendar said, “Do you want some pie? It's really good.”

Vintner stared at him. Then she slid her glasses over her eyes, stood, and left the diner.

When the waitress refilled his cup, Calendar smiled up at her. “This is really good.”

ANNAPOLIS

Terri Loew rapped on the door to the Malatesta, Inc., break room. Antal Borsa came here to play air hockey, often all by himself, just slapping the puck around as his brain processed data.

He looked up. She entered and noticed that they had the break room to themselves.

“Did you go online, see the
Post
article?”

He whacked at the puck a few times, watched it bounce off felt and float back home. Antal's shirt was finely starched and his tie was an original designed by a small, family-owned business back home in Hungary. He owned twenty of their ties and no others. “I did.”

Terri sat on the break-room table, brought her Nike cross-trainers up onto one of the chairs, hugged her knees. “It says Andrew was excited about working with the military. Making weapons.”

Whack!
The puck zoomed out and back. An open bottle of San Pelegrino stood by his elbow. He did not respond.

She let a full minute slip by.

Terri finally shrugged. “If it was a typo, a—”

“Amy Dreyfus? You've been interviewed by her.”

She said, “I haven't, actually, but I know. She's good.”

“She is. She was Andrew's roommate at Stanford. They were good friends. The quotes are accurate. They came from Renee.”

“But they're not true.”

Antal stopped playing, sipped his water. Terri got off the table, started making herself a cup of tea. Or at least fiddling with the kettle and cups, to give her fingers something to do.

Antal said, “This is what I wanted. This is what you wanted. This is what Renee wanted. Wants. And we're left.”

“But Andrew never said—”

“Terri. She just lost the love of her life, and that would send anyone over the edge. But she also just lost the sheer genius of Andrew Malatesta. You know … you
know
that every million-dollar contract we've ever had started with an idea in his head.”

“We've contributed plenty.” She glared over her shoulder. “You gave us the—”

“Yes, but they all started with Andrew. All our designs. We're good. We're extremely good. But, to use a baseball metaphor, we were born on third base. We've never hit a triple in our lives.”

She stopped playing with the accoutrements, turned off the burner.

“Think about it. Renee lost her husband, yes, but she lost the goose that laid the golden egg. She lost three-fifths of her senior designers. She's got mouths to feed, and a new building about to break ground in Maryland, and she's scared.”

Terri turned. They both stared at the floor. A receptionist entered. “I'm sorry. Are you…?”

Neither of them had noticed her. “No,” Terri said. “We're good.”

TWIN PINES

The police station was jammed to the gills, playing host to the first of the state fire crews and expecting two more crews later that day.

Peter Kim and Beth Mancini, with the help of Mayor Art Tibbits, trolled slowly through town and found many abandoned businesses, including a recently closed real estate office that would do nicely as a temporary headquarters.

Casper the Friendly Airship hovered in the distance, a little obscured by a scrim of white forest-fire smoke.

“Where are we storing the Claremont?” Peter asked.

“An auto-parts shop. It has high fences, barbed wire. It should be secure enough.” Beth wrote down the address on a notepad, ripped out the page, and handed it to him.

Peter surprised her by saying, “That'll do. You did well. What's our status with the media?”

“It's funny, but the forest fire flaring up is distracting the media from the cause du jour. This morning's press conference, not a single person asked me about al Qaeda.”

Peter actually laughed.

HELENA

Amy Dreyfus was in the Firetower Coffee House on Last Chance Gulch. She'd had to check twice before believing that, yes, they'd named the street “Last Chance Gulch.” It sounded like the kind of place Uncle Donald took Huey, Dewey, and Louie for an adventure.

Amy was simultaneously pouring creamer into a coffee go-cup with two shots of espresso, stirring, paying, and calling the
Washington Post
, phone cradled between ear and her shoulder.

“It's Amy. Is Big-Time in? Thank you.” She got her receipt and mouthed a thank-you to the clerk.

“Ames! You just bought a coffee with two shots of espresso and you just poured in half-and-half.”

She licked the stir stick. “I did not! I'm not anywhere nearly that predictable!”

The editor laughed. “What's happening?”

Amy shoved her cherry-red hair away from her eyebrows. “It's the Malatesta, Inc., thing I filed.”

“The widow? How is she?”

She moved to the front window of the coffee shop for some privacy. “We had drinks the other night and I thought she was made of spun glass. I tap her, she'd shatter.”

“Grief. What do you expect?”

“Look, it's about her husband, Andrew. We've been friends since college. I bought him his first boilermaker. He called me a couple of days before the crash. He said he wanted to break something big to the media and he wanted my help.”