Crashers (10 page)

Tommy sat on the fridge and dangled his legs over the side, into the darkened flight deck. He beamed his flashlight in. Sarah did, too. Tommy said, “I don't see much blood.”

Gingerly, an inch at a time, he lowered himself so that he was standing on the door frame, straddling the dark hole at his feet. He knelt slowly, gripped the edge of the door, and lowered himself like a spelunker into the darkness. Sarah's flash lighted the way for him from above.

Tommy's foot found a bank of computers. He put a little weight on it, then a little more. It held. He lowered himself farther and his other foot came to rest on the back end of the center control console, between the two pilots' seats. He looked up and squinted into Sarah's light. “Okay. I'm all the way down.”

Standing, Tommy freed his flashlight from the sling at the small of his back and flicked it on. The first thing he noticed was the lower half of
Russ Kazmanski. The right-hand seat had snapped off its track and smashed into the console, shearing his body in two. His legs lay on the floor where the seat had been secured, the soles of his shoes facing Tommy.

Tommy turned to the left-hand seat. He knelt and bent over, his head going lower than his feet, poking down past the back of the captain's chair.

The captain had been impaled by the yoke of the jet, her chest caved in. Her eyes were open and staring at Tommy. It was a woman, Tommy noted. African American. She wore her hair very short. She looked athletic and competent. She looked like she'd tried very hard to save the lives of the people entrusted to her.

Tommy almost threw up again.

“Bad?” Sarah knelt on the upward-facing fridge and shone her light down into the flight deck.

Tommy reached through, touched the captain's lapel, turned her gold name tag in his direction. “Meghan Danvers,” he said.

Sarah was quiet for a moment, waiting for Tommy's orders. Tommy sat up straight. “Can you rig a tackle and harness? We gotta get them out of here.”

Susan thought she had time for one more phone call before joining the others at the hotel.

“Hello?”

“Hi. Is this the security desk at the Lloyd Center mall?” Susan rarely knew how her executive assistant came up with these telephone numbers. She just did. Susan suspected her assistant used to be CIA. Or KGB.

“Yes?”

“My name is Susan Tanaka. I'm with the National Transportation Safety Board. We're investigating the downed CascadeAir flight near Salem.”

The voice on the line said, “I heard about that!”

“Yes. Well, we're going to need the mall's help. Can you contact whoever you need to contact? Tell them we're going to need access to your ice rink.”

“The skating rink? I'm sorry, did you say you need our skating rink?”

Susan said, “Yes, please. And time is of the essence. Can you contact whoever it is you need to contact? Now?”

“Uh, sure. Okay. Um, may I ask what you need our ice rink for?”

Susan said, “Cold storage.”

It took twenty minutes to rig a tackle and harness and to free the corpses of Meghan Danvers and Russ Kazmanski from the flight deck. It took six EMTs with three litters—one for Meghan, one each for Russ's two halves.

Tommy watched it all, sipping a stale, cold coffee. The sun rose behind Mount Hood, splashing soft yellow light on the field. It was a stark contrast with the harsh halogen lights he'd been working with since dusk.

He checked his watch. Technically, he checked his wrist, which didn't have a watch. He had no idea where the hell it was.

“Six thirty,” John Roby said and put a hand on Tommy's shoulder and jutted his chin in the general direction of the crash site. “This wasn't half bad, this.”

Kiki stepped up and put a hand on his other shoulder. “No kidding. Well done.”

Tommy smiled at them both. “Thanks. Where is everyone crashing—”

The word caught in his throat, and after a second, Tommy choked out a rude little laugh.

“Shit. Can't believe I said that.”

John smiled. “Susan secured a hotel in Keizer, Oregon. No idea which way that is or how far. I always thought Oregon was in the Midwest.”

“That's Ohio.”

“Nation's too bloody big, you ask me.”

“C'mon. We'll get one of the state police to give us a lift. We'll go get a little shut-eye. Then the team can get started doing its mojo before noon.”

The three of them trudged toward Interstate 5, past the troopers who stood on the sidelines, staring with awe at the scene of devastation. One of the troopers agreed to drive them to the hotel. Kiki asked the remaining units to guard the site until later that morning, when the NTSB would take over.

A cop with a bushy mustache said, “Take over? You guys are the NTSB.”

Tommy shook his head. His neck made a snapping noise. He couldn't remember being this tired since he'd gotten out of the army. “Nah,” he said. “This was just the rescue ops. NTSB isn't in the business of rescuing victims, it's in the business of solving crashes. This here? This was the overture. The curtain goes up now.”

DARIA GIBRON WAS UP by six with just the slightest bit of a hangover. She slipped into vibrant blue biking shorts and a matching sports bra, a stretched-out Avia T-shirt faded to a ghostly gray, and sturdy cross-trainers. She wrapped a Velcro strap with a waterproof plastic pouch around her upper arm.

She started jogging south through Los Angeles, down North Broadway, into the heart of the city. She cut into La Puebla de Los Angeles, past the trucks delivering fresh tomatoes and peppers and freshly baked tortillas. The air was heavy with promised rain. Warmed up, Daria turned the jog into a near sprint, pumping her legs like pistons, breathing through her mouth, and feeling the constant tension in the back of her brain begin to ebb, if ever so slightly. She was going at full clip, sprinting due west along First Street, past the L.A. County Courthouse and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. She was breathing with difficulty, her ribs protesting, her legs really feeling it, as she cut around Bunker Hill toward Figueroa. Her lungs gave out and she almost collapsed against an apartment building. She walked two blocks, arms raised, fingers laced in her sweat-plastered hair, opening up her aching lungs. The long muscles in her browned legs felt spongy and untrustworthy.

She found the coffee shop on Fifth, on the fringe of the financial
district. It had outdoor tables under a striped awning and a vendor selling biscotti and bagels. Ray Calabrese sat at a table with a cappuccino and
The Times.
The way he held the paper open in both hands, Daria could see the front page. The top story was about an airliner crash up north in Oregon.

Daria took a few crumpled dollar bills out of the plastic pouch strapped to her upper arm and bought a bottled water. She collapsed into the seat opposite Ray, gulped water, then poured some into her other hand and splashed it on her beet-red face. The coffee shop catered to a business-class crowd, lots of lightweight London Fog raincoats and attaché cases and day planners. At 7
A.M.
, most of the tables were empty. Daria had no sooner sat down than her sweat began to drip onto the iron chair.

“Hi,” Ray said. “Chased by pit bulls?”

His tone was as usual: a blend of formal and friendly. The voice of a colleague. She'd met him once a week, more or less, for three years, and his tone had rarely changed. Only his eyes lit up whenever she entered the room. But that was a reaction Daria was used to from men and women alike.

Still breathing deeply, she smiled at him. “Hallo, Ray. What's the good word?” She'd been practicing her American vernacular.

Ray Calabrese sipped his foamy coffee. “Things are good. How're you?”

She shrugged, then pulled up the tail of her T-shirt to wipe her face, exposing the electric-blue sports bra. Ray was aware that every eye was on the exotic creature sitting opposite him.

“Things are okay,” she said. “How's the business?”

“The business is busy,” he said. “The L.A. field office is one of the biggest in the bureau. We've got so many guys, we're tripping over each other, and still we can't get it all done. You know how it is.”

She smiled. “Yeah. I know. Or I used to.”

Ray was a big man, six-two and still muscular at forty-four. He wore his suit coat well under the raincoat, the gun clipped to the small of his back invisible. He was a twenty-year man for the FBI and a senior special agent in the Los Angeles field office. He also was Daria's handler, and had been since she'd been smuggled into the States.

Sitting there now, across from her, Ray fought down an impulse to check his wristwatch again. He had an in-basket filled to the brim awaiting him at the office and probably thirty while-you-were-out messages. A typical Tuesday for a guy who usually ate a cold bagel and sipped coffee from a Starbucks cup in his car, rather than waste time on breakfast.
Sitting with a beautiful if bedraggled woman and sipping a cappuccino was an unparalleled luxury in the life of Ray Calabrese.

“Want something to eat?” he asked.

“No. I got a message on the special phone yesterday at noon,” she said. Ray leaned forward. The special phone had been set up by the ATF guys. “I was to meet an Irishman in a specific bar. He was on time.”

“Yeah?”

“This is him.” She reached into the pouch on her arm and withdrew a single photo. It had been taken by the hidden camera that could catch whoever knelt next to her at the in-the-floor gun safe. She tossed it down onto the white iron table with its glass top. “He calls himself Jack.”

Ray turned the photo, looked at it. It was a head-to-belt shot, straight on, of a blond man put together like a soldier. His sleeves were rolled up to show complicated tattoos on both forearms.

She put the heel of one shoe up on her seat, knee in the air, and gulped bottled water.

“He said he's from Dublin, but he met three other Irishmen at a bar and they all said
yez
for
you
.”

She waited.

Ray said,
“Yez?”

Daria said, “Yes,
yez.
”

They both waited. He gave in first. “And that means . . . ?”

“
Yez
is a Belfast accent for the plural of
you,
” she explained, frowning slightly. “Don't they teach you people things like that?”

“I'm not an Ireland watcher,” he said. “We have people who do that, but I'm not one of them. So you're saying this guy's from Belfast but claims to be from Dublin.”

“Right.”

He waited again. She gulped more water. The color in her face had returned to normal, which was good, because she'd looked like she was about to have an aneurysm when she arrived.

“And you know about the Good Friday Accord,” Ray said gently.

“Yes; but you should watch this fellow anyway. He's in the States and claiming to be someone he's not. There's something else: he has scars on his fingertips. They obscure his prints. He's from a part of the world that, just a few years ago, was rated as a top hot spot for terrorist activity.”

“A lotta years ago,” Ray said. “Northern Ireland has been downgraded since the peace agreement. The IRA has put its weapons beyond reach,
Sinn Fein has taken its seat at the table. Things are as calm there as they've ever been.”

She shrugged and said, “Still. You have the saying about knowing and not knowing devils, yes?”

Ray nodded and pocketed the photo. “Yeah, I know that saying. I know some guys who used to be in the Ireland shop, back in New York. I'll show this around. Did ATF get a copy of this?”

“Hmm.” She nodded.

“Good.” He sipped more coffee, watched businesspeople scurry past.

The first raindrops were beginning to drum on the awning over their heads. Ray hadn't been happy when ATF first came to him with this scheme. But it seemed that Daria—in her past life—had built quite a legend as a gunrunner. And apparently she'd offered to pick up her old “bad” habits for the feds.

Ray didn't like the setup, but he didn't have the juice to stop it. The boys from Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms figured, Hey, the scumbags of L.A. would get guns one way or another. This way, they'd be toting guns that already had been test fired and could be easily matched.

While he thought about all that, Daria told him what she knew about Jack and the three Irishmen; about the bar where they'd met and that Jack seemed to be in charge, and he moved like a trained soldier. When she was done, Ray just nodded. Daria said, “What?”

Ray leaned forward, both arms on the round glass tabletop, and spoke softly, for her ears only. “You're not a spy. Not anymore. And not ever, for this government. You don't have to be watching for bad guys.”

“I know. But I owe you.” She'd lost very little of her accent during her time in the States and something about her voice always reminded Ray of Mediterranean spices.

He shook his head. “No. We owe you. You did a good thing for your country and for ours. You saved a lot of lives and you were injured in the process. I know the transition hasn't been . . . easy for you.”

Daria looked away. She shrugged off the comment. It was a proper rain out there now, the noise on the awning almost a match for the traffic.

“It's just, I don't want you having any false expectations,” Ray said. “You were on our payroll when you first got here, but just to provide you with some funds because it was the least we owed you. It wasn't a paycheck and you're not on the job. Anyway, these days you make as much as I do with your translating. You're not supposed to be spying on people and telling us who to watch.”

“What am I supposed to do, Ray?” she asked, leveling those dark chocolate-brown eyes at him. “Hmm?”