“I saw an old acquaintance on the street when I was coming in a few minutes back. A man named Irwin Fairchild. Are you two acquainted?”
Hudgins’s expression didn’t change, but he paused.
“No. I mean, we’ve all heard of Fairchild, but I haven’t talked to him.”
I didn’t ask you that, did I? she thought.
He extended a limp hand, and she ignored it as she left.
She was certain now. Something was going on between Hudgins and Fairchild, and whatever it was, it involved Pan Am!
Tuesday, March 14, 7:45 A.M.
Anacortes, Washington
Adrian Kirsch picked up the McDonald’s coffee cup again before remembering he’d already emptied it. The small-town restaurant he’d parked in front of was already open for business, but he decided to wait for the NTSB man to arrive. Surely he could last a few more minutes without going into caffeine withdrawal. The local NTSB man was due to join him in fifteen minutes. The interview would be critical and clandestine. At the field-investigator level of the NTSB hierarchy, you didn’t talk to the media without risking your career. But with the “go team” already safely back in Washington, Michael Rogers had agreed to take a chance.
Fishing some change out of his pocket, Kirsch walked over to a cigarette machine, stared at it, then put the coins back in his pocket. He was determined to quit without patches or lectures, because he realized the battle was really one of self-control. He unwrapped a sugar-free hard candy and popped it into his mouth instead.
An anonymous caller had rousted him from a deep sleep at 2:00 A.M. “Ask the NTSB about the FBI report on the chromium,” the man had said.
“What are you telling me?” Kirsch had asked him through the mental fog.
“The chromium came from a wrench left inside the engine during the last tear-down in Pan Am’s maintenance shop, okay? You got the picture?”
“How do you know this? Are you an employee?”
“Not now.”
“But you were, weren’t you?”
There was a long silence.
Kirsch tried again. “All right, then let me ask you this—you say someone left a wrench in the engine. Could that someone be you?”
“Hell, no! I just know how bad they are.”
“Why are you calling me? Why do you want a reporter to know this?”
“Because, Mr. Kirsch, Pan Am’s trying to claim they were sabotaged, when it had to be their own sloppy procedures. That’s what happens when you treat people like shit. They make bad mistakes. Then the company tries to cover them up. I don’t want this one covered up.”
“You don’t like this airline much, do you?”
“Pan Am’s gotta pay for what Pan Am’s done.”
A sudden suspicion crossed Kirsch’s mind. “The Pan Am that you worked for—was that the original version, or the new Pan Am?”
But the caller had already disconnected.
Tuesday, March 14
Off the Washington State coast
Bill Conrad gripped the metal railing of the small, tuglike vessel and tried to concentrate on something other than his stomach. He had never felt seasick on small boats and ferries, but the weird, three-axis motion of the powerful, diesel-powered work boat in heavy seas had almost pushed him over the edge of nausea.
“There they are, Mr. Conrad.” The master had materialized beside him now, his index finger pointing the way to the submarine tender holding its position exactly above the remains of Clipper Ten’s number-three engine, the morning sun glinting off its glistening hull. Bill Conrad had chartered the salvage submarine and tender out of Vancouver, British Columbia. They were highly recommended and very expensive.
Conrad pulled his heavy coat a bit tighter around his chest, bracing against the stiff, cold wind, and turned to the captain.
“How’re they doing?”
“I got ’em by radio a few minutes ago,” the captain said. “The sub’s in the water and on its way down to around one hundred forty fathoms, or about eight hundred forty feet. It’s shallow enough for divers, too.”
“I still don’t understand how the Navy found it,” Bill said.
“Side-scan sonar. They can paint a reasonably good picture down to ten thousand feet with that equipment. You were incredibly lucky they were already working out there.”
Bill nodded. The salvage costs were going to hit a hundred thousand dollars, he felt sure, but it would have been much worse if he had been forced to hire a commercial outfit to locate the wreckage first. Discovering a Navy-funded research vessel working for the U.S. Geological Survey within ten miles of the impact point was almost too good to be true.
“What next?” he asked the captain.
“Well, we’ve got the crane. Once the guys in the sub locate the engine, photograph it, and get the rigging in place, we’ll position the line and haul it up. A bit more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the basic procedure.”
“I certainly hope it’s in one big piece.”
The man nodded his agreement. “Yeah, be a shame to have to get divers out here after all this expense. But unless it’s in a thousand pieces and you want every last one of them, the sub should be enough.”
Bill had already faced the possibility of being fired. The corporate firestorm from his foray into the media over the weekend had left him bloodied, threatened, on probation with Jennings and Lamb, and yet determined to see Pan Am’s maintenance vindicated.
He thought of Chad Jennings again and quietly shook his head. The man was about as stable as nitroglycerine, and Bill had grown tired of his immature outbursts. He smiled ruefully at the thought of Jennings having to explain the bill for this salvage mission. Jennings had specifically authorized it, though, and Bill had been thinking clearly enough to get the conversation on tape.
“Anything you want to spend, Bill. Just get that engine and let’s get the evidence,” Jennings had said as he ricocheted down the hall at corporate headquarters, unable to sit still and listen for ten minutes.
His tiny pocket recorder had captured the words loud and clear.
The sound of a radio crackled into life from the captain’s communications array as one of the submarine’s crewmembers reported back to the tender’s bridge.
“We’ve got it right in front of us now, one huge piece, at least. I can identify a part of a turbine wheel.”
Bill caught the captain’s attention. “Can he describe the damage?”
Before the captain could respond, the voice came back.
“The basic engine is smashed up rather badly, but the thing that holds it onto the wing—the strut—looks like it was ripped apart by some single-point force. The way the metal’s splayed out, it looks like a bomb went off inside the strut.”
Bill found himself nodding vigorously.
15
Tuesday, March 14
New York City
After leaving Hudgins’s office in a combination of fury and fright, Elizabeth had gone for coffee in some tiny, nameless cafe on Madison Avenue.
It was an old habit, a method of regaining control and bringing the forest back into focus, and it was helping immensely now—though she had no intention of spending an hour or more, as she usually did during such mini-retreats.
She pulled her cellular phone out of her briefcase and entered Eric Knox’s private office number. She was relieved when he answered, and even more relieved when she heard him shift instantly into his mature, professional mode. Eric was brilliant when it came to problem-solving, but sometimes it took a while to get him to focus.
She told him of the Hudgins debacle, the Fairchild connection, and the universal collapse of all the contacts she had made on Monday.
“Elizabeth, grab a cab and get down here. We need to talk. I know the deadline is the twentieth.”
There was something in his voice, something more than a reaction. She knew that sound …
“I can be there in about fifteen minutes.”
“Pleas
e. I’ve got a few calls to make in the meantime. Otherwise, Pan Am’s still our client and I’m clearing the decks to support you.”
Eric was just hanging up from a call when Elizabeth walked in, shutting the door behind her, and noticing the grim look on her former partner’s face.
“We have a big problem here,” he began.
She felt her stomach tighten around a cold void, the old feeling that someone was going to sneer and tell her she was naive, that what she thought she could do was in reality a silly illusion.
“What do you mean?”
Eric was all business.
“Elizabeth, I didn’t want to say anything before when you were headed out here, but this last-minute loan for Pan Am was a tough sell from the beginning.”
“You said that.”
“No …” He had his hand up and his eyes cast downward. “No, it’s more than that. I kept at this yesterday morning. I knew the people you were going to see, of course, but I’ve been working the phones looking for additional prospects, and what I didn’t tell you over the weekend was that I was almost out of ideas and prospects on Friday. Monday I did run out. Elizabeth, there’s someone out there working hard to scare everyone away from lending Pan Am a penny.”
“Who?” His words had dovetailed with her earlier paranoid suspicions.
“I’ll be damned if I know, but seeing Fairchild may provide a clue.”
She shifted slightly on the couch, facing him squarely.
“You mean you’ve talked to friends of the firm who told you someone’s working against Pan Am?”
“No one’s said that directly, no. But I know the signs. You do too, if you’ll think about it.”
She nodded slowly, thinking back over each conversation as he continued.
“Elizabeth, I’ve seen financial interference and sabotage before, but someone, or some entity, has done an incredible job of anticipating our every move and poisoning the waters—and now I know how.”
Eric got up and returned to his desk to pick up a piece of paper that he’d left facedown on the surface. He returned to the couch and sat down again, watching her closely and keeping the front of the paper away from her eyes for the moment.
“Okay, you’re the First National Bank, and I walk in some fifteen minutes before Pan Am’s Elizabeth Sterling has an appointment, and I say, ‘Pan Am’s gonna hit you up for a loan and represent everything’s all right, but before you decide you’d better look at this.’ Then I lay this little number in front of you.”
The paper had been faxed. It was an FAA internal memo sent from the FAA general counsel to the FAA administrator, and it gave a legal opinion on the consequences of terminating the operating certificate of Pan Am. It was, the memo concluded, a drastic step, but it could be done.
Strategically missing was any discussion of what had prompted the memo, or whether the shutdown and utter ruination of Pan Am II was seriously being considered at FAA headquarters.
“This is what I’m fighting?”
Eric nodded. “Apparently. Our old friend at Jones and Hammersby, Lou Higginbotham, gave me a curt ‘not interested’ yesterday afternoon. I saved Lou’s ass when Boesky was trying to seduce him. He owes me big time, and I pinned his ears back.”
“And he sent you this?”
“Yeah. Said it had chattered off his fax machine Monday morning under a cover note indicating that mere possession of it could be a legal problem.”
“Who sent it?”
“He honestly didn’t know. The machine it came from indicated it was government property, but the number had been omitted.”
“And he believed it? Lou believed this piece of trash?”
“Not at first. But he had one of his people in D.C. check it out with a high contact at FAA, and, Elizabeth, that memo is real.”
“Still, that’s little more than a poison-pen letter—a poison-pen fax in this case,” she sputtered. “He’s far more sophisticated than that.”
Eric was nodding vigorously. “Yes, he is, and he wasn’t convinced until he got an angry call from one of the FAA’s lawyers demanding to know where he got that memo. That’s what convinced him. Even Lou couldn’t loan you money after that.”
Elizabeth sat back and let her body sink into the soft leather, her eyes staring vacantly ahead, somewhere over the desk.
“My God, Eric, we’re dead.”
“Hey”—he sat up suddenly and leaned toward her—“this doesn’t mean they’re going to shut you down, it’s merely an opinion that they could. They’ve announced a fine instead.”
“But as you said, no one here will lend us money, and without the money, we’re in default as of the twenty-first, and without a fleet of airplanes by the twenty-second.”
“That’s the key, Elizabeth.”
She turned to him, her heart pounding. “What? What’s the key?”
“You used the word ‘here.’ You said ‘no one here.’ Well, maybe not here, but New York isn’t the only place to borrow money. We have no reason to believe that whoever did this has poisoned the London market, or Tokyo, for that matter.”
“Tokyo’s impossible to deal with on a tight schedule.”
“Yeah, but London isn’t, and that’s where you should head immediately. But—you’ll have to do it clandestinely, and that means not even your office should know.”
“Why on earth?”
“Elizabeth, you’ve got to realize that someone’s been tracking you.”
That shocked her all over again, and she searched Eric’s eyes for meaning without speaking. He sensed her confusion.
“Someone knew you were headed to New York, Elizabeth.”
Eric got to his feet and began pacing between the couch and the desk.
“Do you really know your new secretary?” he continued. “Do you really know your assistant?”
She shook her head silently.
“Okay, then can you backtrack and figure out who could have overheard us speaking on the phone over the weekend, or who could have handled or seen or intercepted the list I left you of who to call Monday?”
He saw her head begin to move up and down in affirmation, slowly, as her mind raced through the possibilities.
“I think I can do that, but I’ll have to think it through with surgical care,” she told him.
Eric stopped suddenly. “You didn’t fax that list anywhere, did you?”
“No. And I didn’t copy it. I only have the one copy you left for me, next to the champagne bottle. And by the way, thank you. That was sweet.”
Eric’s head snapped up suddenly, his gaze locking onto Elizabeth, and his tone one of amazement.
“Where did you say?”
“On the nightstand, right beside the champagne bottle you left. Why?”
The look on his face alarmed her.
“Beside? Not under the bottle, but beside it? Are you sure?”
“Yes … why?” She was puzzled and slightly irritated. What did it matter where on the nightstand the papers were?
Eric stepped back slightly and balanced himself against the desk as he looked at her with alarm.
“Elizabeth, I didn’t leave those papers beside that champagne bottle. I left them under the bottle, weighted down by it, so you couldn’t miss them.”
The two of them had fallen virtually silent, their eyes meeting in the frightening recognition that someone else had been in the condo.
“Eric, this scares me,” she said at last.
“Me too.”
“I mean, we’ve seen industrial espionage before, but this …”
“That proves it, as far as I’m concerned. Someone’s been tapping your phones and possibly tailing you. Okay.” He leaned against the edge of his desk then. “Here’s what I recommend. You need to get to London. Do you have your passport with you?”
“Yes. Always.”
“Good. First, though, there’s someone I want you to see, someone I know is reliable.”
“Who? Lou Higginbotham?”
She raised one eyebrow, and he raised the palm of his hand. “I know, Lloyd takes a lot of kidding about his name, now that he’s doing underwriting for his namesake. But he was in the investment banking business over there, and can be very helpful in steering you to the right people in short order.”
“Suppose ‘they’ have poisoned him, too?”
“Unless they’re taping this very conversation, no way. You don’t know him, and this is the first time I’ve spoken his name out loud. And”—he held his index finger aloft—“I still have this office swept for bugs every week, an outgrowth of the Eastern Airlines thing a few years back.”
“Then what? I was going to get on the phones and start calling anyone else on my lists here who hadn’t already told me to take a hike.”
“Useless. Whoever we’re fighting is too slick. I doubt there’s a bank or investment house in town that hasn’t received that faxed memo.”
“So now what?”
“We get you out of here without being seen, and on the way to London. I’ll arrange the ticket under another name.”
The meeting with Lloyd White was arranged quickly. They would meet at the Players Club, in Gramercy Park. Elizabeth let herself be driven from the basement garage of the building in the firm’s limousine, the dark windows ensuring that anyone stalking her would have no chance of seeing her go by. On the way, she used the portable phone to make a reservation on United from La Guardia back to Seattle as a smokescreen, while Eric worked on getting her out in the opposite direction.
Lloyd White was waiting for her at a table near the back of the grand old club. His father, he explained, had been a well-known British actor whose American friends had insisted on bringing him to Broadway for a one-month run in the 1930s. The membership in the Players Club had been a part of that welcome. Maintaining it had become a family tradition since—though he had never been professionally involved in the arts himself.
In his early sixties with an angular face set off by a full head of white hair, White had a patrician charm about him and an easy, if tired, smile. Elizabeth found herself liking him instantly.
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