Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  He opened this bottle, too, though its safety packaging was more contentious than that of the hydrogen peroxide. He planned the order of events carefully: Anbesol, extraction, peroxide, Anbesol. He repeated the words as a mantra, worried he might not think clearly once the deed was done.

  Once and for all, the pliers rose to his mouth. The metal jaws still felt warm against his tongue. As they entered his mouth, he lost all sight of the beleaguered tooth, and resorted to a tactile exploration, where each wrong guess caused him enormous pain. The aluminum jaws nipped at his swollen gums. He forced his mouth open even wider, the pliers hard against his cheek, and gripped down onto the decay. His knees buckled as the pliers found purchase—he knew he had it now. Of this there was no doubt. His left hand went out to steady him. He pinched the jaws of the pliers tighter, counted quickly to three, and jerked straight up.

  His scream, muffled by a diaphragm spasmodic from pain, and a hand stuffed into his mouth, died before penetrating the room’s walls. The pliers, with their quarry, fell to the counter as he blindly found the hydrogen peroxide and tilted the bottle into his open mouth. This second scream had much more air behind it.

  He spit out the pain into the sink and sagged down to his knees in agony, one hand groping for the Anbesol. He had to focus away from the pain. Away from his mouth.

  The thought at work in his mind was whether or not the president of the company ever read those stupid forms.

  3

  * * *

  Crumbling brick buildings of Washington, D.C.’s black ghetto crowded the potholed streets that ran down past gasworks and an electric substation to the polluted Anacostia River. Set back from the river’s edge, looking like a twelve-story apartment complex, stood a government building, the upper floors of which housed the FBI’s Washington Metropolitan Field Office. It was here, on the tenth floor, that Cam Daggett reported to work each day. Those who worked here called it Buzzard Point—the actual name of this spit of land.

  The Hoover Building, on Pennsylvania Avenue, which the public had come to think of as the FBI, was, in reality, the administrative agency that set policy and oversaw the activities of 55 field offices, each with its own territory. Aside from a few laboratories, its function was almost entirely bureaucratic.

  WMFO—or Buzzard Point—was one such field office. Because its territory included the “District” and surrounding suburbs, its investigations often assumed a national scope.

  Six-foot-high gray-carpeted office baffles separated one squad from another, the contained office areas referred to by the agents as bullpens. C-3’s bullpen contained nine desks—ten, including that of Gloria DeAngelo, secretary and den mother. Behind Gloria, another baffle worked to give privacy to C-3’s squad chief. It was here that Bob Backman’s desk sat empty.

  A thin-boned woman of fifty-two, with straight black hair cut and curled at her shoulders, Gloria labored behind sad brown eyes and a rigid posture that helped knock a dozen years off the truth. She patted her hair self-consciously. At this hour of the morning, she and Daggett owned the place.

  Gloria came over with a cup of coffee. “I can help you pack, if you want.” He recognized the words she had spoken, but they lost form inside his head, the edges of the consonants made round and smooth by his ruptured eardrum. He had learned quickly to answer the phone with his left ear, to try to keep people to his left when he spoke to them, and to consciously avoid talking loudly. Not only was his newfound deafness an annoying and occasionally embarrassing disability, but it was unnerving and disconcerting as well. All sound to his right had died, as if he were suddenly only half a person.

  He hesitated. “I’m not moving, Glo. I turned down the offer.” Before she could object, he added, “Taking a promotion because of Backman’s stupidity is not my idea of earning it. Pullman is next in command—he has to be bumped up. I don’t.” He leafed through a stack of pink memos. “I’m off to Seattle this afternoon. The field office out there invited me to have a look at something.”

  “Be reasonable, dearie.”

  “Reasonable? If I take the promotion, then I lose my field status, and this investigation along with it. I move into Pullman’s old job. They park me permanently behind a desk, Glo. Me? Leather-soled shoes and three-hour meetings? No thanks.”

  “You’re being selfish.”

  “Undoubtedly. I’m reminded of that often enough, without hearing it from you as well.” He said it, and then regretted both the content and the tone. Not surprisingly, Gloria ignored the offense; she would not be swayed from her purpose. If Gloria was anything, she was determined. “You can’t change what’s happened.”

  Bitterness boiled over—repetition had a way of doing that to him. “If you put a melody behind that, you and Carrie could sing it in harmony.” He tossed the memos onto his desk, suddenly more angry. Armchair psychology from an aging den mother he didn’t need. The truth, he needed even less. “You’ll be going through Backman’s stuff. He was a secretive son of a bitch. If there’s anything in there I could—”

  “He isn’t even in the ground yet, and you’re picking at his bones.”

  “I’m not picking at his bones. I’m trying to find a detonator Bernard may have built.” He checked his in-box and sorted through his memos. He tried a different subject. “What about Meecham’s report?”

  “There’s a message here for you. He wants to meet with you at his office.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. Right away. He said he would be glad to get you out of his hair.”

  “He, and everyone else.”

  “Aren’t we pleasant.”

  “Pleasant? I stay at home, I get the third degree; I come into work, it’s déjà vu all over again.” He hoped he might get a rise out of her, that a little humor—even borrowed humor—might provide an opportunity for a truce. But his attempt went right over her head, which wasn’t hard, given her diminutive height.

  “It’s safer behind a desk.”

  “Do you and Carrie collaborate on these lines, or am I supposed to put this down to coincidence?”

  “Can I help it if you’re so damned consistent? So pigheaded? You’re supposed to listen. You’re supposed to learn something—not only from your mistakes but from other people’s. Bob Backman didn’t learn. If he had stayed behind that desk he’d still be alive.”

  “Bob Backman was a fool,” he said soberly. Sadness, like the warmth from a strong drink, surged through him.

  “Your son is in a wheelchair, I needn’t remind you.” She was red-faced.

  She shut up then, but her expression acknowledged it came too late. The words hung in the air like fruit flies. There was no getting rid of them. “No, you needn’t,” he said, filling the resulting silence. The fruit flies flew into his eyes. He felt the welling of tears and attempted to fight them off.

  It’s not a dream, it’s a memory, and though it comes down like a heavy curtain, it holds moving images like a projection screen. It’s transparent enough that he can see through it to the boy beyond, the boy coming down the ramp; but substantial enough that he can’t will it away. He knows that it’s triggered by certain things: a smell in the air, a sound; for a while, just touching wool brought it on. But there seems no trick to get rid of it. No cure.

  He’s in the high school gymnasium the Germans have set aside for the identification of personal belongings. Most of it is now in clear plastic garbage bags marked with tags that indicate how far from the point of impact the item was found. The imperfection of the plastic clouds what’s inside. After several minutes his eyes begin to hurt. The quantity of the belongings—the rows of clothes, bags, cameras, briefcases, papers, walking canes, baby strollers, golf clubs, computers—overwhelms him and he begins to cry. He’s been crying off and on for the last three days. Sometimes it is simply the sight of a family that does it to him; sometimes it is something said at one of the briefings. He had seen a deer in a field the day before, and that had made him cry. He’s vulnerable. He’s not sure he’
ll hold up under the pressure. He worries he may start crying and not be able to stop.

  Bag after bag; he pushes the plastic around to get a better view of what’s inside. A doll, its head missing, holds his attention. Driving into town the morning after the disaster he had come across a dead woman in the very top of a tree, hanging by her feet. Her dress ripped off her, arms hanging down like she was diving into the water. Bloodless. It was his first impression of the disaster in an otherwise pastoral and richly German countryside. Now he wondered if the child who had mothered this doll had been mothered by that woman. They would figure it out eventually. But for now, all he can do is wonder.

  Total number of survivors: four. All children, one of whom was his now paralyzed son. Like the three hundred and twenty-seven who had perished, all four children had free-fallen from sixteen thousand feet. All four had hit a bog to the west of the village. Still, it was anyone’s guess how or why they had survived. One, who was in critical condition from a staph infection, had become the focus of the media: to survive a sixteen-thousand-foot fall, only to die from an infection picked up in a hospital.

  He moves beyond the doll, beyond the Samsonites, the Larks, the Land’s Ends. Beyond the toilet kits with their exploded cans of shaving cream, beyond the blow dryers and the hair curlers, the cassette tapes and the magazines. It looks like a sanitary landfill.

  He stops cold. He reaches out, but his right hand is shaking so badly he stuffs it back into his pocket. It’s not in a plastic bag. Not yet. It will be as soon as he identifies it. Someone will tag it and scrawl a name onto the tag. It will be placed on a list, the list fed into a computer as it is every night. Eventually, the various, seemingly random items in the database will be connected with a particular passenger, and bit by bit a story will unfold.

  It’s Duncan’s shoe, completely covered in caked mud and grass from the bog. A single shoe. A shoe that belongs on a foot that will never walk again. A shoe amid a pile of someone else’s clothing: some bras, some panties, a bloodied blouse. Duncan’s shoe. His boy.

  He signals one of the men wearing a camouflage uniform and jump boots, a man who looks as tired as Daggett feels. Some of these men have gone without sleep for seventy-two hours now. Daggett sees the man approaching, tag in hand, and he begins to weep. Not because of the shoe. Not for Duncan. Not for himself. But because he feels so deeply moved by the efforts of everyone involved, this exhausted uniformed boy among them, aware that none of the people here on the outskirts of this village, not one, will ever be the same again.

  The LAFO explosives lab, located in the downtown Hoover Building, was cluttered with cardboard boxes, microscopes, and display cases housing every conceivable kind of explosive device. He wasn’t comfortable around explosives.

  Two technicians wearing white lab jackets continued working without looking up as Daggett entered the lab and crossed into Meecham’s office.

  Chaz Meecham had dark hair, intense blue eyes, and a thin, knowing smile. He talked fast. “Listen, we finally know a little something about what Bernard was up to in his hotel room. But with Backman getting it, the Bernard stuff is going to be moved down the list for a while. I thought you might want to hear some of this before it gets buried. Don’t look at me like that, Michigan. It’s just the way it is.”

  Daggett bit his tongue.

  “Almost all of this stuff was caught by the vacuum filters, which shows you the tiny sizes we’re dealing with. It’s bits and pieces—microscopic, mostly—that fell from his working surface and were caught in the carpet. Bernard was thorough in his cleanup. We can tell that by how small the pieces are. But no one can clean up everything—not even a guy like Bernard.

  “First, and of special interest, we’ve got some solder clippings with real high silver content. Quality stuff. That means one thing: He was building a sophisticated device, or devices. The biggest of what we’ve got,” he continued, “are some plastic fragments.” He slid a photograph in front of Daggett. The plastic fragments were set alongside a ruler in order to size them. To Daggett’s untrained eye, they looked like nothing. “You see those when you’re in my business, your pecker twitches. The surveillance schedule had Bernard going into an auto parts store, right? Our boys never did find out what he bought in there, but now I can tell you exactly what he bought. At least some of it. Dashboard altimeters. Barometric devices. Two of them, on account of the fact we’ve got six of these plastic nubs.” He handed Daggett some graphs. Daggett glanced at them, not understanding a thing about them. These guys lived in another world.

  “Two?”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “There’s the point of all of this: two. That’s what makes all this so interesting.” As Meecham continued his explanation, Daggett was imagining Bernard leaning over a hotel room table, constructing his detonator device in infinite detail, a soldering gun smoking at his side. “We’ve also got some platinum-plated silver wire. That’s not good. It means he got hold of some mini-dets—miniature detonators. They’re less than an inch long and pack one hell of a punch. They won’t trip a metal detector, and they’re very tough to pick up in X ray—a terrorist’s dream. Hot enough to light any plastic explosive you can name. Hot enough to melt aluminum, bronze—any of your soft metals. Regular detonators are much more bulky and nowhere near as hot. What it means to us is that his devices are very, very small, or very complicated, or both. A mini-det is a lot more versatile than your standard detonator. You also have to go out of your way to obtain one, and that means he had a reason for wanting them.”

  “Where’s it leave us?” Daggett asked. The room didn’t have any windows. He felt claustrophobic.

  “Now listen to me. Sometimes you put a pair of baro-switches in a row. Set them for different altitudes. That gives you a double-dipper. First time the air packs are charged, the first baro-switch opens. The plane takes off, goes higher, and the second baro-switch opens. That plane is guaranteed to be hell and gone from the ground. Depends what effect you’re going for.”

  “But …” Daggett could hear it coming.

  “But my instincts tell me differently. You get a feel for this kind of thing, Michigan. Probably the same in your line of work. What do I know? A guy like Bernard—he’s a pro. He’s efficient. Careful. He didn’t leave a lot behind, but he left enough. Too much, in my opinion.

  “We’ve got too many wire clippings for a single construction. Too much silicon, two altimeters. It all adds up.” He flipped through a pile of black-and-white photographs shot through a microscope. “Too much for a guy as careful as Bernard,” he repeated. “If I had to guess—and I’m only guessing—I’d say he built two detonators, Michigan. We know he had enough for two baro-switches, and as you just said, we know he bought two Casio watches. I’d say that makes the detonators nearly identical to one another as far as I can tell.” Meecham paused, allowing it to sink in.

  “Maybe he screwed the first one up, had to build another,” Daggett suggested hopefully.

  “Maybe. But then why did he buy two of everything up front? That doesn’t jibe.”

  “So he made two bombs. Is that it?”

  “Two identical detonators. Yeah. That’s what I think the evidence tells us.”

  “And these baro-switches—”

  “Mean they’re both intended for planes,” Meecham said, interrupting. “There’s little doubt about that, I’m afraid. Whoever your operative is, he has enough hardware to drop two birds.”

  Daggett waited in the backyard for Duncan. The boy braked the wheelchair and rolled down the plywood ramp and came to a stop without a sound. A jay laughed from a nearby crabapple tree. The grass needed mowing. The ramp needed painting. The windows needed cleaning. Mrs. Kiyak poked her head out the door, looked at father and son, and smiled. She went back into the house, presumably to fix the boy some supper. Daggett worried the boy didn’t spend enough time with kids his own age. There had to be something he could do about it.

  Duncan was pouting. Daggett had promised long ago t
hat, along with Carrie, they would rent a cottage on the Maryland shore and spend the upcoming weekend canoeing. A promise he was about to break because of Seattle and a plane he had to catch in ninety minutes.

  Carrie was on her way over. He cringed at the thought. As much as he wanted to see her, as much as he loved her, and missed her, he didn’t need a lecture. His devotion to the investigation—she called it worse than that—had caused them many a heated “discussion.”

  Here was a woman who had literally walked into his life, in the form of a property management representative, and had rescued him and Duncan from the difficult early days of starting over. A woman of tireless energies, she had taken immediately to Duncan. By the time the sexual relationship developed, Carrie had already been running their household and working with Duncan—easing him through the difficulties and obstacles that he faced daily. It only seemed to make sense that she would eventually become Daggett’s lover. But now, looking back on it, it all seemed more of an arrangement, a convenience, than a relationship. With each passing week, Carrie assumed more control over their lives. By nature she was both fiery and domineering; the qualities that had initially made her so invaluable, and so attractive, now threatened to undo all that she had created.

  He walked behind the chair to push the boy over to the chin-up bar, but Duncan didn’t want his help, and hurriedly palmed the wheels, pulling away from Daggett, glancing furtively over his shoulder to assure his lead—his separation. He reached the low chin-up bar his father had built out of some old pipe and a pair of four-by-fours, slapped his small hands around the smooth metal, and struggled to lift the limp weight of his body.

  “I’ll help,” Daggett said, walking more quickly to reach him.

  “I can do it,” the boy said. But he couldn’t. He struggled, arms quivering, barely able to lift himself. He pulled, his face red from the effort, and shook his head violently as his father stepped forward. “No,” he grunted, “let me.” He tried again and then slowly sank from the minor success he had obtained and slumped back into the wheelchair.