by Dana Haynes
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.”
BOOK TWO
THE CRASHERS
12
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 it
s 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?”
“You’re just supposed to get on with your life.”
“My life ended when I betrayed my government,” she said and stood. She reached for his cappuccino and drained it, leaving a foamy mustache on her upper lip. She leaned over the table and kissed Ray on the lips, then wiped her lips clean. “My life ended and I have the bullet wounds to prove it, Agent Calabrese,” she said, her eyes still very close to his. “Get on with my life? What life?”
She headed back out toward the rain-slick sidewalk. Ray called after her, “Do you want to share a cab back to . . . ?”
But Daria waved a hand over her shoulder without turning around. She broke into an easy jog, already thoroughly soaked, catching the eye of every man on the street.
Ray Calabrese sat there for a while, feeling guilty and frustrated and not knowing why. His meetings with Daria always left him feeling off-kilter.
KEIZER, OREGON
The Go-Team leadership had ordered wake-up calls for 8 A.M. That meant that Tommy Tomzak got about an hour of sleep before the phone in his room shrieked like a Harrier jet.
Why do they make hotel-room phones so freaking loud? he wondered.
“Good morning, Dr. Tomzak?” The voice on the phone was way too chipper. “This is your wake-up call. Mrs. Tanaka asked me to tell you there will be a van waiting in front of the hotel at eight thirty A.M., and that breakfast will be served when you get there.”
Tommy said. “There? Where there?”
The chipper voice didn’t say, and Tommy hung up. He got up, stood under the hot-hot shower until his brain kicked into first gear. He didn’t bother to shave, just threw on jeans and his boots and an Austin City Limits sweatshirt. Somehow, during the night, Susan Tanaka had had his things moved from his hotel in Portland to this one in Keizer. Tommy wasn’t sure why; maybe she wanted him to be debriefed by the Investigator In Charge, first thing this morning. He couldn’t find his sports coat or his raincoat, so he threw on the NTSB windbreaker. What the hell, he thought. For old times’ sake.
. . .
The van was waiting for him in front of the Chemeketa Inn. In it sat Isaiah Grey, John Roby, and Kiki Duvall. Tommy and Isaiah exchanged handshakes; they had not met before.
“I hear good things about the crash site,” Isaiah said. “I can’t believe you were on the scene so fast.”
Tommy said, “It’s good to be good but better to be lucky. We got fucking lucky. Hey, where we headed?”
John Roby, who sat in the back, drawled, “Del Wildman’s famous Allthing.”
“Yeah?” Tommy said, facing forward and thinking, What do they need me there for?
Kiki frowned. “All the craziness, I forgot to ask, do we have a head count?”
Tommy shrugged. “I was in the field all night.”
John grimaced a little. “I asked Susan, first thing this morning. Thirty-five survivors, a hundred and eleven dead.”
Kiki shivered. “A hundred and eleven dead on a Vermeer One Eleven. That’s eerie.”
13
SUSAN TANAKA CHECKED HER watch. Ten minutes until 9 A.M. The Vermeer 111 had been on the ground about twelve hours.
The setting was McNary High School in Salem. Susan stood in the middle of the set for South Pacific, watching people arrive. Most wore suits. Some were more casual. The place was filling up.
She glanced to the side stage and saw Walter Mulroney and Peter Kim. Walter was on his cell phone. Peter watched Susan.
The high school had a traditional proscenium stage facing six hundred seats curved like a fan, the seats elevated the farther back you went. About 250 of the seats were occupied. It was an Allthing, as Del Wildman, director of the NTSB, called them: the first meeting of all relevant parties to the crash. The first meeting could be long and annoying, but it also set some important ground rules. Most of the crashers hated them, but most also realized the wisdom of getting this meeting over with as quickly as possible.
L’ENFANT PLAZA, WASHINGTON, D.C.
It was 8:50 A.M. Pacific Time, 11:50 A.M. Eastern, when the secretary in Director Wildman’s office got the call from a Go-Team in the field. Everybody in the building had heard about the Oregon crash on the morning TV talk shows or drive-time radio news broadcasts. The secretary knew rule number one: time is more precious than gold after a plane goes down, and any call from an active Go-Team gets top priority.
She buzzed Delevan Abraham Wildman in his office and relayed the call.
Wildman, sixty-three, was the number-one man at the NTSB. He’d been a TWA pilot in the seventies—when being an African American pilot had been rare indeed—and an American Airlines executive in the eighties before joining the agency. He’d been on a record seven major crashes in his eighteen years before getting kicked up to the top echelons of administration.
When the call came, he snatched up the phone. “Wildman.”
“It’s Walter Mulroney.”
“Walt?” he drawled. “You’re in Oregon?”
“Yes, sir. Peter Kim, power plant, is with me. We’re about ten minutes from one of your Allthing meetings.”
“Give me good news, son.” Wildman had been born and raised in Tennessee and he’d never made any effort to lose the accent.
“We’ll know more in about an hour, after the meeting. But we’ve got a potential crisis. Someone made Leonard Tomzak Investigator in Charge.”
Wildman said, “Tommy?” It was Del Wildman himself to whom Tomzak had given his resignation, only a few months earlier. Wildman
wondered for a split second, but then the obvious answer hit him: silver-tongued Susan Tanaka had talked him into this. He wondered why Tomzak had agreed.
Walter was still talking. “Sir, he’s a pathologist: he’s never taken an engineering course, never flown an airplane. This guy’s going to fold when the real media gets here. Imagine what he’s going to be like when officials from Vermeer Aircraft and CascadeAir show up, not to mention the engine manufacturer and the danged lawyers. Sir, I don’t know who dropped the ball here, but I’m offering to take control as IIC before this situation gets out of control.”
“Walt? Where’s Susan?”
“She’s out onstage, getting people to take their seats.”
“Stage?”
“We’re in a high-school auditorium.”
Wildman said, “Well, put her on.”
“It’s just, I think we need a more professional IIC than we saw in Kentucky. I think we need to—”
“Walter.” Wildman let his voice dip an octave. “Put ’er on. Now.”
At McNary High School, Walter Mulroney walked half the width of the stage and handed Susan a cell phone.
“It’s Del.”
Susan stepped well away from the microphone, covered her left ear with her other palm. “Hello?”
“Susan. Del. Did you get Tomzak to rescind his resignation and make him IIC?”
Susan glowered daggers at Walter Mulroney’s retreating back.
“He was on the scene before anyone,” she said. “I watched his work in Kentucky. He’s brilliant and tenacious, and he gets amazing work from his crashers.”
“Kentucky was—”
“A fluke,” she cut in. “Nobody could have gotten to the bottom of that one. No one. I want Tommy.”
“How ’bout going with a more traditional IIC. An engineer. You’ve got Mulroney. He’s an experienced leader. Put him in—”