"Damn," Ryan breathed in his kitchen at home. Jack was taking a rare Saturday off, eating lunch with his family, looking forward to taking them to evening mass at St. Mary's so that he could also enjoy a Sunday morning at home. His eyes took in the scene, and his hands set the sandwich down on the plate.
Three fire trucks had responded, and four ambulances, two of which, ominously, were still there, their crews just standing around. The truck in the background was largely intact, though its bumper was clearly distorted. It was the foreground that told the story, however. Two piles of metal, blackened and distorted by fire. Open doors into a dark, empty interior. A dozen or so state police officers standing around, their posture stiff, their lips tight, not talking, not trading the jokes that ordinarily went with their perspective on auto accidents. Then Jack saw one of them trade a remark with another. Both heads shook and looked down at the pavement, thirty feet behind the reporter who was droning on the way that they always did, saying the same things for the hundredth time in his short career. Fog. High speed. Both gas tanks. Six people dead, four of them kids. This is Bob Wright, reporting from Interstate 40, outside Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Commercial.
Jack returned to his lunch, stifling another comment on the inequity of daily life. There was no reason yet why he should know or do more.
The cars were dripping water now, three hundred air miles away from the Chesapeake Bay, because the arriving volunteer firemen had felt the need to wet everything down, knowing even then that it was an exercise wasted on the occupants. The forensic photographer shot his three rolls of 200-speed color, catching the open mouths of the victims to prove that they'd died screaming. The senior police officer responding to the scene was Sergeant Thad Nicholson. An experienced highway cop with twenty years of auto accidents behind him, he arrived in time to see the bodies removed. Pierce Denton's service revolver had fallen to the pavement, and that more than anything had identified him as a fellow police officer even before the routine computer check of the tags had made the fact official. Four kids, two little ones and two teens, and two adults. You just never got used to that. It was a personal horror for Sergeant Nicholson. Death was bad enough, but a death such as this, how could God let it happen? Two little children ... well ... He did, and that was that. Then it was time to go to work.
Hollywood to the contrary, it was a highly unusual accident. Automobiles did not routinely turn into fireballs under any circumstances, and this one, his trained eyes saw at once, should not have been all that serious. Okay, there was one unavoidable fatality from the crash itself, the girl in the death seat of the first Cresta, who'd been nearly decapitated. But not the rest, there was no obvious reason for them. The first Cresta had rear-ended the truck at ... forty or fifty miles of differential speed. Both air bags had deployed, and one of them ought to have saved the driver of the first car, he saw. The second car had hit at about a thirty-degree angle to the first. Damned fool of a cop to make a mistake like that, Nicholson thought. But the wife hadn't been belted in ... maybe she'd been attending to the kids in the back and distracted her husband. Such things happened, and nobody could undo it now.
Of the six victims, one had been killed by collision, and the other five by fire. That wasn't supposed to happen. Cars were not supposed to burn, and so Nicholson had his people reactivate a crossover half a mile back on the Interstate so that the three accident vehicles could remain in place for a while. He got on his car radio to order up additional accident investigators from Nashville, and to recommend notifying the local office of the National Transportation Safety Board. As it happened, one of the local employees of that federal agency lived close to Oak Ridge. The engineer, Rebecca Upton, was on the scene thirty minutes after receiving her call. A mechanical engineer and graduate of the nearby University of Tennessee, who'd been studying this morning for her PE exam, she donned her brand-new official coveralls and started crawling around the wreckage while the tow-truck operators waited impatiently, even before the backup police team arrived from Nashville. Twenty-four, petite, and red-haired, she came out from under the once-red Cresta with her freckled skin smudged, and her green eyes teary from the lingering gasoline fumes. Sergeant Nicholson handed over a Styrofoam cup of coffee that he'd gotten from a fireman.
"What do you think, ma'am?" Nicholson asked, wondering if she knew anything. She looked like she did, he thought, and she wasn't afraid to get her clothes dirty, a hopeful sign.
"Both gas tanks." She pointed. "That one was sheared clean off. The other one was crumpled by the impact and failed. How fast was it?"
"The collision, you mean?" Nicholson shook his head. "Not that fast. Ballpark guess, forty to fifty."
"I think you're right. The gas tanks have structural-integrity standards, and this crash shouldn't have exceeded them." She took the proffered handkerchief and wiped her face. "Thanks, Sergeant." She sipped her coffee and looked back at the wrecks, wondering.
"What are you thinking?"
Ms. Upton turned back. "I'm thinking that six people--"
"Five," Nicholson corrected. "The trucker got one kid out."
"Oh--I didn't know. Shouldn't have happened. No good reason for it. It was an under-sixty impact, nothing really unusual about the physical factors. Smart money is there's something wrong with the car design. Where are you taking them?" she asked, feeling very professional now.
"The cars? Nashville. I can hold them at headquarters if you want, ma'am."
She nodded. "Okay, I'll call my boss. We're probably going to make this a federal investigation. Will your people have any problem with that?" She'd never done that before, but knew from her manual that she had the authority to initiate a full NTSB inquiry. Most often known for handling the analysis of aircraft accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board also looked into unusual train and vehicle mishaps and had the authority to require cooperation of every federal agency in the pursuit of hard data.
Nicholson had participated in one similar investigation. He shook his head. "Ma'am, my captain will give you all the cooperation you can handle."
"Thank you." Rebecca Upton almost smiled, but this wasn't the place for it. "Where are the survivors? We'll have to interview them."
"Ambulance took them back to Knoxville. Just a guess, but they probably air-lifted them to Shriners'." That hospital, he knew, had a superb burn unit. "You need anything else, ma'am? We have a highway to clear."
"Please be careful with the cars, we--"
"We'll treat it like criminal evidence, ma'am," Sergeant Nicholson assured the bright little girl, with a fatherly smile.
All in all, Ms. Upton thought, not a bad day. Tough luck for the occupants of the cars--that went without saying, and the reality and horror of their deaths were not lost on her--but this was her job, and her first really worthwhile assignment since joining the Department of Transportation. She walked back to her car, a Nissan hatchback, and stripped off her coveralls, donning in their place her NTSB windbreaker. It wasn't especially warm, but for the first time in her government career, she felt as though she were really part of an important team, doing an important job, and she wanted the whole world to know who she was and what she was doing.
"Hi." Upton turned to see the smiling face of a TV reporter.
"What do you want?" she asked briskly, having decided to act very businesslike and official.
"Anything you can tell us?" He held the microphone low, and his cameraman, while nearby, wasn't turning tape at the moment.
"Only off the record," Becky Upton said after a second's reflection.
"Fair enough."
"Both gas tanks failed. That's what killed those people."
"Is that unusual?"
"Very." She paused. "There's going to be an NTSB investigation. There's no good reason for this to have happened. Okay?"
"You bet." Wright checked his watch. In another ten minutes he'd be live on satellite again, and this time he'd have something new to say, which was always good. The reporter walked
away, head down, composing his new remarks for his global audience. What a great development: the National Transportation Safety Board was going to investigate the Motor Trend Car of the Year for a potentially lethal safety defect. No good reason for these people to have died. He wondered if his cameraman could get close enough now to see the charred, empty child seats in the back of the other car. Good stuff.
Ed and Mary Patricia Foley were in their top-floor office at CIA headquarters. Their unusual status had made for some architectural and organizational problems at the Agency. Mary Pat was the one with the title of Deputy Director (Operations), the first female to make that rank in America's lead spy agency. An experienced field officer who had worked her country's best and longest-lived agent-in-place, she was the cowboy half of the best husband-wife team CIA had ever fielded. Her husband, Ed, was less flashy but more careful as a planner. Their respective talents in tactics and strategy were highly complementary, and though Mary Pat had won the top job, she'd immediately done away with her need for an executive assistant, putting Ed in that office and making him her equal in real terms, if not bureaucratic ones. A new doorway had been cut in the wall so that he could stroll in without passing the executive secretary in the anteroom, and together they managed CIA's diminished collection of case officers. The working relationship was as close as their marriage, with all the compromises that attended the latter, and the result was the smoothest leadership of the Directorate of Operations in years.
"We need to pick a name, honey."
"How about FIREMAN?"
"Not FIREFIGHTER?"
A smile. "They're both men."
"Well, Lyalin says they're doing fine on linguistics."
"Good enough to order lunch and find the bathroom." Mastering the Japanese language was not a trivial intellectual challenge. "How much you want to bet they're speaking it with a Russian accent?"
A light bulb went off in both their minds at about the same time. "Cover identities?"
"Yeah ..." Mary Pat almost laughed. "Do you suppose anyone will mind?"
It was illegal for CIA officers to adopt the cover identity of journalists. American journalists, that is. The rule had recently been redrafted, at Ed's urging, to point out that quite a few of the agents his officers recruited were third-world journalists. Since both the officers assigned to the operation spoke excellent Russian, they could easily be covered as Russian journalists, couldn't they? It was a violation of the spirit of the rule, but not the letter; Ed Foley had his cowboy moments too.
"Oh, yeah," said Mary Pat. "Clark wants to know if we would like him to take a swing at reactivating THISTLE."
"We need to talk to Ryan or the President about that," Ed pointed out, turning conservative again.
But not his wife. "No, we don't. We need to get approval to make use of the network, not to see if it's still there." Her ice-blue eyes twinkled, as they usually did when she was being clever.
"Honey, that's calling it a little close," Ed warned. But that was one of the reasons he loved her. "But I like it. Okay, as long as we're just seeing that the network still exists."
"I was afraid 1 was going to have to pull rank on you, dear." For which transgressions her husband exacted a wonderful toll.
"Just so you have dinner ready on time, Mary. The orders' ll go out Monday."
"Have to stop at the Giant on the way home. We're out of bread."
Congressman Alan Trent of Massachusetts was in Hartford, Connecticut, taking a Saturday off to catch a basketball game between U-Mass and U-Conn, both of whom looked like contenders for the regional championship this year. That didn't absolve him from the need to work, however, and so two staffers were with him, while a third was due in with work. It was more comfortable in the Sheraton hotel adjacent to the Hartford Civic Arena than in his office, and he was lying on the bed with the papers spread around him--rather like Winston Churchill, he thought, but without the champagne nearby. The phone next to his bed rang. He didn't reach for it. He had a staffer for that, and Trent had taught himself to ignore the sound of a ringing phone.
"Al, it's George Wylie, from Deerfield Auto." Wylie was a major contributor to Trent's political campaigns, and the owner of a large business in his district. For both of those reasons, he was able to demand Trent's attention whenever he desired it.
"How the hell did he track me down here?" Trent asked the ceiling as he reached for the phone. "Hey, George, how are you today?"
Trent's two aides watched their boss set his soda down and reach for a pad. The congressman always had a pen in his hand, and a nearby pad of Post-it notes. Seeing him scribble a note to himself wasn't unusual, though the angry look on his face was. Their boss pointed to the TV and said, "CNN!"
The timing turned out to be almost perfect. After the top-of-the-hour commercial and a brief intro, Trent was the next player to see the face of Bob Wright. This time he was on tape, which had been edited. It now showed Rebecca Upton in her NTSB windbreaker and the two crumbled Crestas being hauled aboard the wreckers.
"Shit," Trent's senior staffer observed.
"The gas tanks, eh?" Trent asked over the phone, then listened for a minute or so. "Those motherfuckers," the congressman snarled next. "Thanks for the heads-up, George. I'm on it." He set the phone receiver back in the cradle and sat up straighter in the bed. His right hand pointed to his senior aide.
"Get in touch with the NTSB watch team in Washington. I want to talk to that girl right away. Name, phone, where she is, track her down fast! Next, get the Sec-Trans on the phone." His head went back down to his working correspondence while his staffers got on the phones. Like most members of Congress, Trent essentially time-shared his brain, and he'd long since learned to compartmentalize his time and his passion. He was soon grumbling about an amendment to the Department of the Interior's authorization for the National Forest Service, and making a few marginal notes with a green pen. That was his second-highest expression of outrage, though his staff saw his red pen poised near a fresh page on a legal pad. The combination of foolscap and a red pen meant that Trent was really exercised about something.
Rebecca Upton was in her Nissan, following the wreckers to Nashville, where she would first supervise the initial storage of the burned-out Crestas and then meet with the head of the local office to begin the procedures for a formal investigation--lots of paperwork, she was sure, and the engineer found it odd that she was not upset at her wrecked weekend. Along with her job came a cellular phone, which she assiduously used only for official business and only when absolutely necessary--she'd been in federal employ for just ten months--which meant in her case that she'd never even reached the basic monthly fee which the company charged the government. The phone had never rung in her car before, and she was startled by the sound when it started warbling next to her.
"Hello?" she said, picking it up, wondering if it were a wrong number.
"Rebecca Upton?"
"That's right. Who is this?"
"Please hold for Congressman Trent," a male voice told her.
"Huh? Who?"
"Hello?" a new voice said.
"Who's this?"
"Are you Rebecca Upton?"
"Yes, I am. Who are you?"
"I'm Alan Trent, Member of Congress from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." Massachusetts, as any elected official from that state would announce at the drop of a hat, was not a mere "state." "I tracked you down through the NTSB watch center. Your supervisor is Michael Zimmer, and his number in Nashville is--"
"Okay, I believe you, sir. What can 1 do for you?"
"You're investigating a crash on 1-40, correct?"
"Yes, sir."
"I want you to fill me in on what you know."
"Sir," Upton said, slowing her car down so that she could think, "we haven't even really started it yet, and I'm not really in a position to--"
"Young lady, I'm not asking you for conclusions, just for the reason why you are initiating an investigation. I am in a position to hel
p. If you cooperate, I promise you that the Secretary of Transportation will know what a fine young engineer you are. She's a friend of mine, you see. We worked together in Congress for ten or twelve years."
Oh, Rebecca Upton thought. It was improper, unethical, probably against the rules, and maybe even fattening to reveal information from an ongoing NTSB accident investigation. On the other hand, the investigation hadn't started yet, had it? And Upton wanted to be noticed and promoted as much as the next person. She didn't know that her brief silence was as good as mind-reading to the other person on the cellular circuit, and couldn't see the smile in the Hartford hotel room in any case.
"Sir, it appears to me and to the police who responded to the accident that both gas tanks on both cars failed, causing a fatal fire. There appears on first inspection to be no obvious mechanical reason for the tanks to have done so. Therefore I am going to recommend to my supervisor that we initiate an investigation to determine the cause of the incident."
"Both gas tanks leaked?" the voice asked.
"Yes, sir, but it was worse than a leak. Both failed rather badly."
"Anything else you can tell me?"
"Not really at this time, no." Upton paused. Would this guy really mention her name to the Secretary? If so ... "Something is not right about this, Mr. Trent. Look, I have a degree in engineering, and I minored in materials science. The speed of the impact does not justify two catastrophic structural failures. There are federal safety standards for the structural integrity of automobiles and their components, and those parameters far exceed the conditions I saw at the accident scene. The police officers I spoke with agree. We need to do some tests to be sure, but that's my gut-call for the moment. I'm sorry, I can't tell you any more for a while."
This kid is going far, Trent told himself in his room at the Hartford Sheraton. "Thank you, Miss Upton. I left my number with your office in Nashville. Please call me when you get in." Trent hung up the phone and thought for a minute or so. To his junior staffer: "Call Sec-Trans and tell her that this Upton kid is very good--no, get her for me, and I'll tell her. Paul, how good is the NTSB lab for doing scientific testing?" he asked, looking and feeling more and more like Churchill, planning the invasion of Europe. Well, Trent told himself, not quite that.
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