Breaking Point

by Dana Haynes

  She smiled but it was a wan thing and quickly faded away. Renee sat with one hand hovering over the rum, the other shoved into the pocket of her long sweater, as if her hand was chilled. Amy underlined that word in her notepad: patriots.

  She asked a few more questions but didn’t get much. When she thought she had enough for a short, online story, she stopped the recorder and capped her pen. “I guess that’s that. Thank you.”

  Renee said, “No, thank you.”

  Amy took her first sip of the red wine. “Um, The Tempest. The cliché, ‘sea change’? It’s from The Tempest.”

  Renee looked at her—possibly for the first time—and frowned. “I didn’t know that. I thought perhaps it was a reference to how slowly big ships turn in the water.”

  “No. Ariel says it to what’s-his-name, the prince.”

  Renee smiled, the tanned skin around her eyes crinkling. It was a true smile, and now, too, her eyes finally glittered with tears.

  Amy heard a faint snap snap from somewhere near the table. She glanced around, looking for one of those candle-lighting wands that waiters use, but saw nothing.

  “Thank you, Amy. I appreciate knowing that.”

  Amy thought that maybe she was the first person since Thursday to tell Renee Malatesta a single thing that didn’t ache.

  * * *

  Tommy was showering and Kiki picked up the phone when it rang. It was Susan Tanaka.

  Kiki sat on the bed and proceeded to tell Susan the theory that they had brewed up.

  Tommy stepped out, towel around his waist, eyebrows raised.

  “It’s Susan.”

  Tommy smiled and walked back into the bathroom.

  Over the line, Susan said, “I knew it. I knew something was off. Look, don’t tell a soul on the Go-Team, but I’m not in Italy. I’m in L’Enfant Plaza.”

  “But…?”

  “I know. Still. Del has been keeping me posted. Between Peter Kim’s arrogance and Beth’s lack of experience, the investigation is spiraling out of control. Now, with what you just told me.… I’m treading softly here, though. I don’t want to undermine Beth.”

  “Okay. I understand.”

  “Do you know Dmitri Zhirkov, in the tech center? Twenty-something, long, crazy blond hair?”

  Kiki could picture him. “Travels around the NTSB on in-line skates?”

  Susan said, “That’s him. He’s a major-league computer expert. He handles a lot of the computer reconstruction we have to do after a crash. I, ah, I took the liberty of asking him to hack in to the Go-Team’s computers and comm systems.”

  Kiki said, “Susan!”

  “Well, I want to know what’s going on! Please, I have to—”

  Kiki said, “You were about to say, please, I have to help. Susan, I totally understand.”

  Tommy again stepped out of the steamy bathroom, this time clad only in jeans. He had applied shaving cream to the left side of his face. “What?”

  “It’s Susan. She has our backs.”

  Tommy started lathering up the right side. “Course Susan has our backs. Duh.”

  CRASH SITE

  Peter decided he needed to see this stunt for himself. He asked Teresa Santiago and Lakshmi Jain to stay in Twin Pines with the few crew chiefs, monitoring the fire, as he drove to the crash site. Lakshmi agreed quickly, saying something about checking e-mails for information on an injury anomaly. Peter wasn’t really listening.

  Approaching the state forest, the first thing that caught his eye was Casper the Friendly Airship. Roughly the size and shape of a humpback whale, its white belly glowed brightly, reflecting the arc lights below.

  He cocked his head. No one at the NTSB had ever moved a fuselage with an airship before; the trick would never have occurred to him. He thought about that for a moment. The idea was innovative. It was creative.

  The next thought curdled his soul: That bastard Tomzak might have thought of this.

  * * *

  Ginger LaFrance’s remote control was a flat box that hung horizontally from straps over her shoulders, much like a guy hawking beer in a baseball park. She stood between Reuben Chaykin and Beth Mancini. She hit a toggle and three heavy-lift cables began descending from the glowing white blob in the sky.

  * * *

  Jack Goodspeed stood atop the fuselage, his boots between two windows that had, until a few days ago, faced the portside wings. It was dangerous on top of the wreckage like this, but Jack hadn’t wanted to ask any of his airframe crew to do something that he, himself, wasn’t willing to do.

  The smoke was thicker twenty-eight feet off the ground, and Jack wore a fully contained hazmat suit with an air tank and a helmet of soft Tyvek and a Plexiglas face shield. His comm unit’s ear jack and voice wand fit inside the suit.

  His crews had dug tunnels under the keeled-over jet to pass through the thick mesh belts. They used two narrow, long-reach forklifts that could turn on a dime and dart nimbly between trees. The forklifts were made by a company called Skyjack, which the crashers agreed was as bad-karma-inducing a name as any in the aviation industry. The long-reach lifts gathered the metal mesh belts and lifted them up on Jack’s left and right. He attached them to the first of Casper’s three cables, using two heavy bolts to assemble it all.

  Peter approached the cluster of people around the remote operator, Ginger LaFrance. “Who authorized Goodspeed to get up there? He could fall and break his neck.”

  Beth said, “It was his idea. He’s as athletic as anyone on the Go-Team.”

  Jack attached the belts and cable, then carefully walked a third of the way down the fuselage, stepping on the stylized logo of Polestar Airlines.

  “I hope this works.” Peter turned to Ginger LaFrance. “You’re controlling?”

  She kept her eyes glued to Jack and the cable. “That’s what my ex says.”

  Peter was the wrong audience for droll. “The airship. You’re controlling the airship.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How much weight can it lift?”

  “Pretty much just itself.”

  Peter blinked. “I don’t understand.”

  Ginger glanced his way, then back to Jack’s steeplejack act. “Casper maintains enough buoyancy to keep itself in the air. The downward propellers provide enough lift for the cargo.”

  “So again: how much?”

  She shrugged. “He’s been tested at eighty-six thousand pounds. Just shy of forty tons. So what’s this thing weigh?”

  Peter peered at the ruins of the Claremont and did the math in his head. With the wings and the turboprops, he figured twenty-five thousand, twenty-six thousand kilograms. That’s about fifty-six thousand pounds. Without the wings … Peter said, “I’d say … roughly thirty-five thousand pounds.”

  Ginger LaFrance blew a gum bubble and kept her eyes glued on Jack. “Then this should be a walk in the park.”

  * * *

  Jack got the last of the three cables hooked up. Beth had arranged for Ginger to have an extra headset. Jack set his comm unit for All. “Okay. Let’s try lifting her straight up, about six inches.”

  Peter said, “Get down first.”

  “No. This works, someone’s going to have to play navigator. I’ll hold on to the airship cables and I’m standing on the steel O-ring. I’ll be okay.”

  Beth turned to Peter. “O-ring?”

  “The Claremont is built with two sturdy, solid-state O-rings, one-third and two-thirds of the way back toward the empennage. The fuselage is moved down the assembly line at the manufacturing plant, hoisted at those two rings. Goodspeed’s standing on one of them.”

  Jack said, “Miss LaFrance? Ready?”

  Ginger wore fingerless, weight-lifter’s gloves. She gripped the joystick and said, “Six inches, straight up.”

  The metal-mesh belts grew taut against the fuselage. The crashers and firefighters held their breath. The Claremont let loose a long, low groan, almost like a mortally wounded giant. Something went snap! within. The airframe shudde
red.

  With more low keening and the shriek of rent aluminum somewhere inside, the Claremont VLE lifted off the forest floor. Ginger applied more thrust and the fuselage rose two more inches.

  It didn’t break in half.

  More upthrust brought the Claremont six inches off the forest floor. Things began falling out of the ruptured downward-facing starboard portions of the fuselage: luggage, jackets, pillows, bits of ruined aircraft. A human hand. A Sony laptop. A roll of toilet paper bounced free and rolled toward the crashers, unspooling in its wake. It came to rest against Peter Kim’s shoe.

  Then the noises from the aircraft stopped.

  The Claremont floated. Silent. Peter got down on one knee and looked under it. “Amazing,” he whispered to himself.

  Reuben Chaykin coughed and said, “Oy vey iz mir.”

  Jack, standing atop the levitating airliner, laughed over the communications gear. “I will be a son of a gun. Miss LaFrance? Outstanding.”

  She popped a gum bubble. “It’s just Ginger, boys.”

  “Ginger it is. Now, here’s the tricky part. The Claremont was never designed to be carried while tilted ninety degrees off its axis. We need to put her right-side up.”

  Ginger tried to wave smoke away from her face. “What about you?”

  “Montana girl, I’d think you’d have seen men running on logs in the water before.”

  Ginger laughed. “It’s the twenty-first century. This isn’t Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.”

  “I love that film. Okay, go slow.”

  Ginger adjusted controls on her box, and the hooks beneath Casper began letting out the thick straps, slowly, the strap to the left of the airship slacking and the straps to the right tightening.

  Beneath Jack’s feet, the fuselage slowly rotated a few inches. Holding on to the hooks over his head, he took two steps to his right, staying at the “top” of the steel O-ring.

  “Okay. Little more…”

  Things crash-tumbled inside the Claremont. More items fell out of the holes in the fuselage onto the dry earth below.

  “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

  KIKI 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.”<
br />
  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.