Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  “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.”

  Ray turned to Kiki, eyebrows rising.

  “Sorry. I was asleep. Tommy had me down between seats and was on me before … Wow.” She blushed and put a hand over her lips. “That came out so much naughtier than I was going for.”

  Ray smiled at her. “No worries. I got where you were going with that. But I need another witness. The other six surviv—”

  Tommy said, “You got a witness. Get Peter on the horn.”

  Ray shook his head. “Can’t. You’re a crappy witness, Doc.”

  Tommy’s face clouded over. “Says who?”

  “Says your concussion, jackass. You got your clock cleaned out there.”

  Kiki put a hand on Tommy’s forearm. “At one point, after you blacked out, you said to me, ‘Don’t tell Mom.’”

  “I did? Crap. Okay, I hear you. Petey is never gonna buy me alone. But he’s got to believe Kiki’s ears.” He turned his hand over, took her hand, looked lovingly into her eyes. “When it comes to sound, my gal is Wolfgang Amadeus Motherfucking Mozart.”

  “Sweetie? Later, when this is all over? We’re going to work on your compliments.”

  “Anything for you, babe. But, guys, there’s more. The Indian chick—”

  “Dr. Jain,” Ray provided.

  “Right. She has the pilot getting up and waltzin’ around the flight deck with a C4 tear in his spinal cord. Ain’t happening. She’s got Isaiah with a crushed larynx and I know—I know—he spoke to me. I’ve been denying it, last coupla days. But, dammit, I remember you evacing the survivors and me field-dressing their wounds. Isaiah said he’d tried to save the flight attendant. Said he was stuck. I knelt and ran my hands over his legs and torso, looking for blood. He was jammed down, lying between four seats, like—”

  “Oh my god!” The men turned to Kiki. “Isaiah wasn’t lying between the seats when he died. He was sitting up when I found him! He was sitting in one of the seats!”

  “Well, shit, hon. There you go. What I’m saying. Oh, and hey: remember the teenage girl with the brachial bleeder? Name’s Ann. She remembers the silver-haired guy, too. That’s three of us.”

  Ray pulled out his ubiquitous sealskin notebook. “Describe him.”

  Tommy and Kiki looked at each other. She said, “Um, six feet, six-one. Late forties, early fifties. Looked pretty athletic. Silver hair, cut short … Um…”

  “Ah, navy sweater,” Tommy cut in, “jeans, um, boots—”

  “Good boots. Thick rubber soles, lace-up. They looked new.”

  Ray said, “Military boots?”

  Kiki nodded. “The perfect boots for stomping around in a forest.”

  Ray blinked at her.

  Tommy said, “What?”

  “Lots of my work takes good, sturdy boots. But I always pack them in my checked luggage. Since nine/eleven, I fly in loafers. Gets me through TSA quicker.”

  Kiki nodded. “I do the same. Top-Siders for the flight, boots for once I land.”

  Ray checked earlier notes in his pad. “There were twenty-six people on that plane. Twenty-six souls, as you crashers put it. Two pilots, two flight crew. Accounted for. Eight survivors, that’s twelve. Fourteen passengers dead: that’s twenty-six. Everyone’s accounted for. So who’s Silver Hair?

  Tommy and Kiki shrugged.

  “Do either of you remember seeing this guy at the airport or on the plane?”

  They both shook their heads. Kiki gave a little shudder. “Are you saying he wasn’t on the plane? He was on the ground? Waiting for us?”

  Tommy waved her off. “No, wait. That makes no sense. For the guy to be waiting for us, he’d have to know where the plane was crashing.”

  He glanced at Ray and Kiki, realized they were staring at him. Kiki’s eyes were wide with fright.

  “What?”

  Ray repeated Tommy’s words at half-speed. “He’d have to know…”

  And Tommy suddenly got it. “… Where the goddamn plane was crashing? Holy shit! I do not goddamn believe this. Only way that works is: he brought that bird down!”

  Ray shook his head. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Did either of you talk to him?”

  “Yes.” Kiki nodded. “He helped me carry out a survivor from the cabin. He asked me what happened to the aircraft, why it crashed. I said I didn’t know, I’d been asleep.”

  Tommy said, “You know, he asked me that, too. And he asked Ann, the girl.”

  Ray said, “What did you tell him?”

  “I said, ‘Damned if I know.’”

  Ray sat, thinking, his eyes darting randomly to different spots on the room’s carpet. Tommy opened his mouth but Kiki squeezed his hand. She could practically hear the gears churning in Ray Calabrese’s head.

  Ray’s eyes narrowed. “You wear a watch, Texas?”

  “Yeah, but it’s busted.” Tommy reached into his trouser pocket and withdrew his battered Timex. He showed the LED face to Ray. “Bupkes.”

  Kiki said, “My watch broke, too.”

  “Was it a winder or digital?”

  “Digital.”

  Tommy thought he caught a glimmer of where the agent was going. He turned to Kiki. “You said my penlight didn’t work that night?”

  She nodded.

  Ray stood. “All right. You make an airliner fall out of the sky by destroying every electronic circuit on board. That includes watches, and penlights, and reading devices. You fake two black boxes to cover your tracks. You’ve got enough juice to pull in guys with fake Marshal’s creds—and I’m just spitballing there, we’ve got no evidence of that. The plane hits the ground. There are survivors. What do you do next?”

  Tommy lifted Kiki’s hand and kissed her knuckles. He looked more grim than ever. “You get a guy dressed for working in a forest to ask the survivors: what happened? If they don’t know, you leave ’em alone.”

  Kiki gasped, getting there. “Oh my god. Oh my god! If they do know. If they know about the power loss, if they can contradict the black boxes…” Her eyes glittered with tears.

  Tommy’s voice dropped a half octave out of pure rage. “We got two instances of fatal injuries occurring after the crash. Pilot, for sure he don’t get to walk out.”

  Kiki was crying for real now. Her shoulders hunched and her knees rose, contracting her body into a tight ball of pain. “Isaiah.”

  “I woke him up. I called out to him. A pilot, veteran crasher, no way he didn’t realize how quiet the plane got with no engines. Even during the fall, he’d’ve diagnosed the situation.”

  He hugged Kiki. “Jesus. I got Isaiah killed. This is my fault.”

  Ray sat again and let them drown in their grief. They needed the time. And Ray needed to write a whole new playbook.

  CRASH SITE

  The firefighter with the bright idea of flying the Claremont out borrowed an NTSB–issued tablet computer and showed Jack and Reuben what he had in mind. “See? We can fly the plane out.”

  Reuben let his glasses hang from their lanyard and craned his neck to see the tablet, nestled in the firefighter’s forearm. “With a zeppelin?”

  “An airship. We’ve been using ’em for more than a decade in the logging industry. Cut down a big tree, no way to get a Cat in those tight spaces, so you rig heavy-lift cables, attach them to the airship, and float them out.”

  Jack said,
“What’s the lift capacity?”

  “Forty tons. Skyhook and Boeing collaborated on this bad boy.”

  “And it’s nearby?”

  “Logging camp, three miles north. I work there when it isn’t fire season.”

  Jack adjusted his comm unit. “What the heck. Go get it. I’ll call the boss.”

  Reuben jogged toward the nose of the fuselage. When he was done, Jack called his number-two guy on the airframe team and got the word that the team was on its way with the supplies they’d need.

  Reuben Chaykin hurried back, a handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth, bandit-style. “There’s a path, about eight or nine degrees clockwise from the nose. If we can get the fuselage off the ground and turn it just a little, I think we can snake it between the trees. Eighty, maybe a hundred feet straight west, and we’re out of the woods.”

  Jack said, “As it were.” He slapped Reuben on the back. “Sorry we couldn’t get at my wings or your engines.”

  Reuben sighed forlornly.

  Chief Paul McKinney hurried up to them, coughing. “We can try this crazy stunt, and if it works, great. But I just talked to the guy running the fire crews. He gave me authority to make the call and evacuate your people.”

  Reuben said, “Fair enough. Just let us take a shot.”

  * * *

  Jack Goodspeed’s airframe team broke land-speed records getting to the site in a massive truck and trailer. In the back were metal mesh straps, five feet wide and one hundred feet long, capable of lifting a Boeing or an Airbus wide-body off the ground; more than strong enough to lift a midsize carrier like a Claremont.

  If … of course. If the structural integrity of the fuselage was stable enough. If not, it would crack into pieces as soon as it left the ground.

  Although the Go-Team now had a pretty good idea of what had caused the crash—a short in the avionics suite—there was still much to learn by examining the aircraft. What had broken and what had not would be invaluable information and could help the designers of the next generation of aircraft to build them to be even safer.

  Jack’s crews took shovels and pickaxes and started looking for places on the forest floor where they could create tunnels under the fuselage for the straps.

  Another truck arrived, this one with Beth Mancini. She oversaw a crew that brought food and bottled water, plus arc lights for working in the shade of the forest. Plus hazmat turnouts that, by adding a self-contained breathing apparatus, could serve as rudimentary firefighter suits.

  “That won’t help you if the fire line gets here,” Chief McKinney warned Beth, as she climbed into the one-piece suit.

  “Understood. They might buy us some time, though.”

  McKinney had to admit that the crashers were brave enough. Just a little foolhardy.

  Reuben stepped into one of the moon suits. “Did you find out why the plane was so light?”

  “Polestar Airlines is working on it. A computer glitch wouldn’t let any of the airplane-ticket Web sites mesh with that particular flight. Also, a connector that was supposed to land at Reagan got diverted to Dulles. No one seems sure why.”

  Reuben said. “Wow. Lucky break.”

  It was. But it still nagged at Beth. She said “Tanaka’s Law of Coincidence,” and Reuben nodded.

  “Got you. In a crash: no such damn thing.”

  One of the airframe team finished digging a tunnel under the midsection of the ship and stood. “Okay, straps are gonna work. What the devil are we going to lift this bitch with?”

  Jack pointed westward and upward. “That.”

  Casper the Friendly Airship floated into view. Fifty feet long, and fat, the bright white airship was powered by downward- and rearward-facing propellers.

  Casper’s controller, Ginger LaFrance, knew that her name made her sound more like an exotic dancer than a civil engineer with a pilot’s license, but that’s what she was. Now, she sat in the passenger seat of a firefighter’s Ford F-150, the remote control for Casper in her lap, pacing the giant airship that floated directly parallel with the truck. There was no space for a crew on board; Ginger ran the ship from the box on her lap with toggles and two joysticks.

  22

  AMY DREYFUS FILED HER story for the Post, sitting on the floor of her bed-and-breakfast room in Twin Pines, her Compaq Presario balanced on her upturned knees. She wore one of Ezra’s casual cotton shirts and her favorite fluffy socks. The shirt smelled like her husband and helped center her when she traveled.

  The Post had sent her to Helena because a handful of microelectronics firms’ executives had been on board that plane, en route to the Northwest Tech Expo.

  She interviewed a number of the mourners, talked about their loved ones’ lives. It was a human-interest piece, and business reporters don’t get that many opportunities to do human interest.

  She closed the lid on the computer, leaned against the wall for a while, rubbing a kink in her neck. She felt guilty about her aborted dinner with Renee Malatesta, about the way Renee had bolted down her drink and fled.

  She reopened the computer and checked her Sources file. She scrolled to the Ms.

  * * *

  Renee Malatesta sat on the edge of her freshly made hotel-room bed. She was naked, still-wet hair brushed straight back. She felt occasional rivulets of shower water run from her hair down the hollow of her spine.

  She cradled the Colt .25 in both hands. Such a small and seemingly delicate weapon. She stared at it for some time.

  Andrew had picked out the weapon for her. It fit her hand perfectly.

  Renee removed the magazine, set it on her bare, tanned thigh. She ratcheted the slide to confirm there was no round in the two-inch barrel.

  She tried pulling the trigger a few times, to see how it felt. She measured the tension against her forefinger. Snap. Snap. Snap.

  Words were etched into the metal near the trigger. She turned and swiveled the gun, letting light bounce off the tiny tip. MADE IN SPAIN. How odd. The Colt sounded like such an all-American creation.

  She tugged on the trigger, thinking of the plaza mayor in Segovia, the pink-lit cathedral, the bandstand, the glasses of good, golden cava she and Andrew had shared.

  Snap. Snap. Snap.

  She liked the heft of the weapon. It felt right in her hands. She pressed the short barrel against her right thigh. Snap.

  She felt the sting, even without any bullets. She moved the barrel to her abdomen, right under her rib cage. Snap.

  She imagined how different it would be when it was loaded.

  If it were loaded. She’d meant if.

  Her cell phone rang. She watched it, unsure how to react.

  Snap. Ring. Snap. Ring.

  She picked up the phone with her free, left hand. “Hello?”

  “Hey. It’s Amy. Look, I’m sorry about earlier. I was being so thoughtless, what with—”

  Renee appreciated the drag on the trigger, the pressure it took before the hammer fell. “Where are you?”

  “I couldn’t find a hotel room in Helena. I’m in a b-and-b in Twin Pines. It’s where the NTSB press briefings are.”

  Renee surprised herself. “Meet me for lunch?”

  “Um … really?”

  “Please. Lunch.”

  “Okay. Where?”

  Snap.

  * * *

  An hour later, Amy and Renee sat in a booth in Café Artemis, in the Park Plaza Hotel. Both were surprised by how tony the place was.

  Renee ordered a Wray & Nephew white rum, a very strong drink with a hint of sulfur in the smell. Many rum drinkers couldn’t handle the aroma but Renee loved it. Amy ordered a pinot noir.

  Renee took a sip of rum and sighed. “Did you bring a recorder?”

  Amy pulled a digital recorder out of her tote bag. “Sure. Did you want … Is this an interview?”

  Renee sipped the strong drink. “Yes.”

  “Okay, but, again, can I say—”

  “Thank you. Andrew and I always appreciated your accur
ate reporting. You cover all the angles. You get your facts correct. We appreciated that. I appreciate that.”

  Amy nodded and activated the recorder. She also dug out a narrow reporter’s notepad and a cheap Pilot pen. Like most reporters, she had a distrust of recording devices. “Andrew told me he was going to make a major announcement at the Tech Expo. Can you tell me about that?”

  “Malatesta, Inc., has signed a multiyear agreement with the Pentagon to implement research into offensive and defensive weapons platforms.”

  “Wow. That would be a sea change for you. Weapons.”

  “Yes,” Renee said. “We have been in negotiations for two years. I came from severe poverty in Haiti. America opened its arms to me, and today I am a successful lawyer and businesswoman. My husband felt much the same way about the opportunities granted to us. This is the direction he had turned the company before he died in the crash.”

  Her voice did not quiver. Her eyes did not twinkle with tears. She spoke with no emotion, almost by rote. Amy wondered what kind of medication she was on.

  “What sort of weaponry?”

  Renee tilted her head to the right. “Sea change?”

  Amy looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “You said sea change. I wonder where that phrase comes from.”

  “Um…”

  “Never mind. I’m not at liberty to talk about the work. It’s classified. Andrew had been up at all hours, working around the clock, coming up with some of his most innovative ideas yet. Ideas that will keep America safe.”

  Amy thinking, Can’t talk about the weapons. Great. “This contract: can I ask what the impact on company earnings will be?”

  “We lost three of our five top engineers, including our president and founder. That will have a larger immediate impact on earnings than the Pentagon contract.”

  “Of course. Sorry. Um…” Couldn’t talk about the weapons, couldn’t talk about the money. “You must have had a time line. Their deaths will surely slow that down.”

  Renee sipped her drink. “It will. We still have to have memorial services. I need to convene a meeting of the company, talk to our people. Let them know where we go from here. There are steps to grieving. Not just for me. I … I suspect, but I don’t know, that the entire company will go through post-traumatic stress disorder for the next year. Or years. But we’re good people. We’re patriots.”