Hard Landing (30 page)

He turned to look at me. "Why? Are you looking for something?"

"The passengers' faces." I needed to see them again, to see them as individuals-as men and women, children, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives. I didn't want them to be fused together into an entity that I knew only as "the twenty-one people killed in the crash of flight 1704."

Without a word, Dan qued through the tape and found the beginning of the boarding process. This time as we watched in normal speed, I made sure to look at each one as they passed by in the rain and climbed the boarding stairs.

Seeing their images on tape reminded me of Ellen's video, of how I had felt when I'd heard her voice, when I'd seen her smile, saw doubt on her face and frustration and determination-all the things that make us who we are. Seeing her that way had made real to me someone I'd never met. It had created a void in my life for someone I'd never even known.

As I stared at the screen, I thought about the surviving family and friends of these victims, what it was going to do to them to see the people they had loved, still loved, in their final moments, and the silent black-and-white image started to blur again.

Dan stared at my computer monitor. "Who's H. Jergensen?" he asked.

"I don't know." I was trying to wrangle the papers on the floor in my office into one pile so that Molly wouldn't have a heart attack when she arrived for work on Monday. The heat had finally stopped pouring in, and our offices were now merely sweltering as opposed to life-threatening. "Why?"

"Because you've got an e-mail message from him and it's urgent."

"What's in the subject line?"

"Matt Levesque."

Matt… H. Jergensen… H…
Hazel.
"Hazel. Is it Hazel Jergensen?" I raced over and almost lifted him bodily out of the way so that I could sit at the keyboard. "Move, move, move."

"All right. Jesus Christ. What is it?"

"It's the invoices to Crescent, finally. Or at least a reasonable facsimile." I sat down and clicked into the Majestic electronic mailroom to find the message. "Hazel Jergensen worked for Ellen on the task force and, according to Finance Guy, kept records of everything. He thought she might have a record of who signed the invoices to Crescent. Dammit." I was talking as fast as I could, typing as fast as I could, and missing keys. "We're going to find out once and for all if Ellen was in on this, at least the embezzlement part." After multiple tries I found the message, double-clicked, and waited for it to come up.

Dan hadn't responded, and when I turned to find him, he was as far away from the computer as he could be and still be in the office. "Don't you want to know?"

"To be honest," he said, "I've already found out more than I ever wanted to know."

"What if it wasn't her? We don't know for sure, Dan. This will tell us."

The CPU seemed to labor endlessly, whirring and clicking as I watched the blinking cursor on the screen. The wool fabric on my chair was making the hollows at the backs of my knees sweat right through my jeans. When the message finally appeared, it was in pieces. "Here it comes."

Half a note from Hazel appeared first, saying simply that Matt had asked her to… the rest of the message came up… forward the information. I punched up the attachment. The first section included titles and column headings-vendors, amounts paid, check numbers, and in the far right-hand column "Approved by:" I tried to stay calm, but it was tough. If it was all here, Hazel had sent us exactly what we needed.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," Dan coaxed. I hadn't even noticed, but he was now leaning over my chair, breathing over my shoulder as the report began to appear.

The screen changed hues as the last of the data popped up. The spreadsheet was so big, we could see only the first few columns.

I scrolled down through the A's. There were lots of B's. Lawyers, accountants, auditors, consultants- advisers of every stripe. At one point I got frustrated and went too fast, and we ended up in the H's. Finally I found it. My heart did a little tap dance from just seeing it there. Crescent Consulting-big as life.

I took a deep breath and heard Dan do the same. "Are you ready?" I asked him.

"As I'll ever be. Go ahead."

I shifted the view so that we could see the whole spreadsheet. When we saw the signature, we both sat back at the same time, me in my chair and Dan against the desk. I thought I heard him deflating back there. Or maybe that was me. I scrolled down until we'd seen all of the Crescent entries.

Ellen had signed every one.

I felt sad. That was the best way to say it. Disappointed and sad. Dan had drifted away again. "Dan, I'm sorry. But isn't it better to know than not to know?"

He turned around, started to say something, and his beeper went off. Before he could respond, mine went off and they beeped together, making for an eerie, syncopated stereo alarm.

"Operations," I said, silencing the tone on mine.

"Both of us," he said quietly. "It must be something big."

"Yeah, Kevin… uh-huh… in my office…" Dan held the phone to his ear. "No, I've had the phones rolled over… What? When?" He hesitated, glancing at me. "I'll get in touch with her. Okay, I'll be right down."

"We haven't dispatched an aircraft in over an hour," he said after he'd hung up. "We've got one on every gate, at least two on the ground trying to get in, more on the way, and visibility is for shit. Kevin says everything just stopped."

"Weather?"

"It's not the weather."

Even in the overheated, overcharged atmosphere I felt a deep, deep chill as he dashed into his office.

I followed him. "Then what is it?"

"All the rampers have disappeared." He snatched a hand-held radio from the charger. "Kevin can't find anyone."

There was a current running through Dan. I could feel it. The high-voltage kind that's always marked dangerous. His engines were revving. I took a wild guess. "Are the Dwyers on shift?"

"Little Pete is. He must have swapped with someone."

I clamped onto his right elbow, afraid that he might be out the door and into the operation before I knew he was gone. "What are you planning to do?"

"I'm going to see if I can get some airplanes off the ground."

"Don't bullshit me. You're going down there to find Little Pete."

"I'm not going down there to find Little Pete, but if that cocksucker happens to be around, I won't walk away from him."

"There's something not right here, Dan. An entire shift doesn't just disappear. Someone's trying to get us down there. Don't be stupid."

"No one ever accused me of being smart."

He was standing still. He wasn't doing anything but looking at me, yet I could still feel his momentum pulling us both toward the door. I was panicked that if I let go, he was going to slip away, and this time I'd never see him again.

"Let me go, boss."

I looked at him closely. He was tired, disheveled, unshaven-and completely still. I'd never seen him so still, and I knew I had no chance of stopping him. I let go, but only to reach for the second radio still nested in the charger. Before I had it clipped in place, the door to the concourse opened and slammed shut. We stared at each other. "Dickie's package," I said.

"What did you do with it?" he whispered.

"Did I have it last?"

The footsteps were approaching, albeit slowly.

I bolted next door to my office and found the envelope on the desk, right where I'd left it. We'd never replaced the ceiling tile, and as Dan jumped onto the file cabinet, I handed the package up to him. The footsteps grew louder, but the pace was downright leisurely, out of place in an airport operation, especially in this one on this night. I thought I even heard… yes, he was whistling. Hurry, Dan, hurry
up.
As he maneuvered the tile back into place, he ducked and I flinched as something fell from the opening, bounced off the side of his shoe, and landed on the floor. I could see it back there between the wall and the cabinet. It was a small, plastic object, clear plastic.

Dan jumped down with a thud. "What the hell was that?"

"I don't know." It was just beyond my reach, and as I stretched for it, I had to turn my head flat to the wall and couldn't see what it was. I could almost reach it with my fingertips. It was so close… so close…
got it.

"Yoo-hoo."

I didn't have time to look at it, but I could feel what it was by its shape, and I knew immediately that we had found the missing cassette tape from Ellen's answering machine. I didn't even have time to stuff it into my pocket. I closed my fist around it, put my hands behind my back, and turned around to see Lenny coming through the reception area straight toward us.

"Anybody home?"

He was looking sharp tonight in camel-colored slacks pleated at his narrow waist, an ivory shirt, and what appeared to be a very fine matching camel sweater. A pullover. He stood in the doorway leaning against the jamb, as calm as I was frazzled. "And what a stroke of good fortune to find the both of you together like this. I can't believe my luck."

We must have looked totally caught in the act. I was standing stiffly in front of my desk with both hands behind my back. Dan was behind the desk, and I hoped to hell he'd stay back there. It was only a few hours ago he'd been talking about tearing Lenny's throat out with his bare hands. I swallowed hard, leaned back awkwardly against the desk edge, and reached for a calm voice. "It's kind of late in the day for you, isn't it, Lenny? Especially on a Friday."

He stared at us for a long time, looking from my face to Dan's and back again. He was sneaky enough to recognize sneaky when he saw it. "Is it?" He slipped a pack of gum out of his pocket and offered me a piece.

"No, thanks." He didn't offer any to Dan.

"In light of the disaster that is unfolding outside in your operation at this very moment, I would say if it's too late for anyone, that would be you. I must say, I've never seen passengers quite as angry as the ones out on your concourse at this very moment." The Louisiana drawl was extra-thick and creamy tonight, almost dripping. "What's keeping you all so busy in here tonight?"

"We were just on our way out," I said, casually stuffing my hands into the front pockets of my jeans, depositing the tiny cassette there.

"Good," he said, strolling into my office, taking his time, letting his gaze linger here and there. My heart sank when it lingered a little longer on the file cabinet, on the sprinkling of acoustic tile scrapings that were still there, probably because they still had Dan's footprints in them. He didn't go so far as to look up at the ceiling, but he knew. Dammit. He'd worked in Boston a long time. He knew.

I glanced back at Dan. "Maybe one of us should stay in here and monitor the phone," I said. That was a stretch, but the best I could come up with under the circumstances. I was mainly trying to get Dan's reaction, and I did.

"You can stay if you want," he said quickly, "but I'm going downstairs."

That was my choice. Stay with the tape and let Dan go take on Little Pete by himself, or go with him and leave the tape for Lenny to find.

Lenny was delighted. "Come on back in here when you all have got things under control."

"If it's as bad as you say out there," I said, "we could use your help."

"I was on my way to offer my assistance, but since you're both here, I'm very comfortable leaving things in your capable hands. Especially with Mr. Fallacaro here, one of the best operating men around. Isn't that right, Danny boy?"

I could almost taste the tension as something passed silently between them, something I could see but could not understand. What I knew was that these two men hated each other. It was for all kinds of reasons, but mostly for the secrets they knew about each other. I slipped around to the side of the desk so that I could be closer to Dan.

"I know what you did," Dan said to Lenny.

Lenny chewed his gum and smiled. "Don't know what you'd be referring to, Danny boy, but whatever it is, wouldn't you have to include yourself? In for a penny, in for a pound, my friend. And how is sweet Michelle? How is she going to like visiting her daddy in a federal penitentiary?"

Dan almost came over the desk. It took all my strength to stay in front of him as he screamed over my shoulder and jabbed his finger at Lenny. "You ever say my daughter's name again, cocksucker, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to rip your balls off and shove them down your lying throat, you filthy bastard."

Not surprisingly, Lenny was moving back and not forward. He stayed clear as I maneuvered Dan out the door and into the corridor. When he couldn't get past me to get to Lenny, he pounded the wall. "I
hate
that motherfucker."

"Stay out here, Dan."

"He's going to find it."

"Be quiet."

He lowered his already hoarse voice. "He's going to get the video and we won't have anything."

"There's nothing we can do. It's a surveillance video taped on company-owned surveillance equipment. It belongs to the company. Everything in there is company property. We'll think of something else. Don't come back in."

I went back to get our jackets. I also wanted my backpack, which still had my cell phone in it. Lenny, looking smug, was lounging in my doorway. "You all better skedaddle," he said, winking at me, "while you still have an operation left to save."

I was dripping wet again, but in the whole melee Lenny had never even broken a sweat. I guess reptiles don't sweat.

"And by the way," he said, easing into my desk chair, "when you get downstairs to the ramp, say hello to Angelo for me."

With the environmental-control system in the terminal gone haywire and all the moist, overheating bodies crammed together, the atmosphere was suffocating. The odor of sweating scalps and ripe underarms hung in the air like a damp mist. The angry determination on Dan's face made me nervous.

"We're looking for Angelo, right? Nobody else."

His distracted nod gave me no confidence. "I'll take the north end to the firehouse," he said, zipping his jacket, "and you take the south. And let me know what you find out in Operations."

He pulled on his gloves. Made for skiing, they were heavy-duty, but to me they looked like boxing gloves. He was so pumped up by the encounter with Lenny, I knew that no matter what I said, he was a heat-seeking missile headed straight for Little Pete. And there was no way he was going to win that fight.

"Stay in radio contact with me," I said into his ear, then pulled back so that I could see his eyes. "Please, Dan."

He could do no better than a grim-faced nod, and I watched him disappear into the crush of angry passengers. He'd been walking away from me like that since the day we'd met.

If the departing crowd that first night of my arrival had been hostile, these people were homicidal. My destination was Operations, but I couldn't take one step without someone stopping me to ask something I didn't know. Or to yell at me.

The quickest way to move was around the crowd. I worked my way over to the windows and what I saw there, rather what I couldn't see, stopped me cold. A DC-10, a very large aircraft, was parked just outside the window at the gate, but it was snowing and blowing so hard, it was barely visible. With my hands cupped around my eyes to block out the overhead light and my nose pushed up against the window, I could see more. Ground equipment was scattered everywhere, the bellies of the aircraft were open, and the cabin was lit, making for a ghostly line of blurry portholes that disappeared into the blowing snow. But as far as I could tell, the ramp was deserted. I couldn't find a single soul moving down there.

I felt a shove from behind and a sharp elbow to the kidney that flattened me up against the glass. I whipped around, but it was just a passenger who had himself been pushed. Someone else grabbed my arm and I jerked it back.

"Miss Shanahan." It was an agent, but it took a moment for me to register that it was JoAnn. She'd been working the night I'd arrived, and here she was again in the middle of another disaster, this one even worse. "I heard you were over here," she said, quickly. "I've got about a hundred people wanting to talk to the manager. Will you help us?"

The scene, I swore, was getting more chaotic as I stood there. The noise level was rising with the tension, and her dark eyes pleaded for me to take charge again. And I wanted to. I wished more than anything that straightening out the operation was the biggest thing I had to worry about tonight. When I didn't respond immediately, the look on her face turned from desperate hope to cold cynicism. When I took off my Majestic badge and slipped it into the pocket of my jeans, she started to walk away.

"Wait a second." I put my hand on her shoulder. "Lenny Caseaux is in my office right now. Call him and ask him to come down. If he won't, start queuing up passengers to go see him in the administration offices. All right?"

As the idea sank in, she nodded with a sly smile. She could have fun with that one. More power to her.

The chaos upstairs had been almost unbearable, but the silence downstairs was worse. Somewhere at the far end of the long, deserted corridor, a door not properly latched slammed open and shut, and as I passed by open doorways and empty offices, I could hear the storm outside, the wind bellowing and the grit and debris raining against the windows.

Kevin was as beleaguered and overwhelmed as I'd ever seen him.

"Why did you send everyone home?" he asked without even looking up.

"What?"

His curly hair was limp from repeated comb-throughs with nervous fingers, and when he did make eye contact, he could barely focus on me. "Tell me what's going on, Kevin."

I waited as he answered a radio call from the irate captain on Gate forty-three who demanded to know the same thing. Kevin calmed him down the best he could, telling him to sit tight.

"The assignment crew chief came in half an hour ago," he said, turning back to me, "to drop off his radio. He said he had authority from you to send everyone home immediately. He said you declared a weather emergency."

"I didn't do that, Kevin. It had to be Lenny." He answered the radio again, this time responding to JoAnn. I wanted to grab the mike from his hand and make him pay attention to me. Instead, I went to the closed-circuit TV monitors and checked every screen, but there was nothing to see in the near-whiteout conditions. By the time he'd finished his call, I'd projected all kinds of horrible scenes onto the white screens, and my temples were pounding with more possibilities.

"When's the last time you saw Little Pete?" I blurted.

"Little Pete was in here earlier," he said. "He was looking for Angelo, and that's another thing-"

"Angelo's still on the field?" He looked at me as if my eyes had popped out of my head, which they might have.

"He called about an hour ago from the mail dock. Why the devil did no one think to mention to me that Angelo was coming back?"

"Angelo has a radio, then."

"No. They were all out when he got here. He called on the phone, and I told him to go home. He said he'd just gotten here and he was staying. It's probably a good night for him to raid the freight house."

"Did you tell Little Pete where he was?"

"Of course I did. He's a crew chief. He was looking for a crew."

My hand went automatically to my radio. "Dan Fallacaro from Alex Shanahan, do you read me?
Dan,
do you read?"

"He was looking for you, too."

"Who, Dan?

"No, Danny called in about twenty-five minutes ago. Little Pete was looking for you."

I felt cold, frigid, as if the wall had disappeared and the storm had come inside, inside my body. "What- what did he say?"

"Danny? He said not to use the radios, that Little Pete has one, whatever the hell that means." The desk unit cackled with the angry voice of another captain. Kevin reached for the microphone to respond. Before he could, the captain spewed out a stream of expletives that would have made Dan blush. This time I did grab the microphone, told the captain to can it, then turned the radio off. Kevin stared at me, aghast.

"What did Little Pete say about me?"

"He said that he knew you were on the field and that he wanted to discuss his grievance with you. A few grievances, I think he said. And what do you think you're doing turning that radio down?"

I tried to stay calm by using the perspiration glinting off his high forehead as a focal point. "This is not going to make any sense, Kevin, but I need you to do something for me and it has to be right now and I don't have time for questions. Just listen."

His eyes drifted over to the now silent radio. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"Get your phone book out. I need you to make some calls for me."

"Dan Fallacaro from Alex Shanahan, do you read me?" The ready room was abandoned, just as the locker room had been. A desktop radio in the crew chiefs' office was on, blasting my calls, feeding back the heavy strain that was turning my voice hoarse. I knew Little Pete might be listening, but I needed to know how Dan knew that Little Pete had a radio.

"Dan, please respond. Over."

"This is McTavish to Shanahan. Do you read?"

"John McTavish? Is that you?" I suddenly felt a little better. John's solid presence had that effect on me, and I hoped that he was close by. "Where are you?"

"I just came up from Freight and I'm down at Gate Forty-five with my crew." I could barely hear him over the wind. "We're trying to get this 'ten out of here. What the hell is going on?"

"Have you seen Dan?"

"He's-"

The whine of an engine drowned him out completely.

"Say again, John. I didn't hear you."

"My brother saw Danny heading toward the bag room."

"Inbound or outbound?"

"Outbound, I think. Terry says he was in a hurry. You want me to find him for you?"

I stood at the window looking out and trying to decide. "John, I need you to find Angelo."

I waited and got back nothing but static.

"Do you copy, John?"

"What about this airplane?"

"Forget about it. Take your crew and when you find him, don't let him out of your sight. Do you understand?"

"If that's what you want. McTavish out."

I went back through the locker room and swapped my lightweight jacket for a company-issued winter coat. Bulky and long, it enveloped me in the pungent odor of the owner's exertion. I put my cell phone and my beeper into the pockets, and my radio, too. I wasn't going to be able to hear it anyway. Then I zipped up, found the nearest door, and stepped outside.

All I could do for the first few seconds was huddle facing the building with my back to the wind. The cold went right through all my layers. I might as well have been standing there in a bathing suit. When I turned into the wind, a brutal blast blew my hood back, and I was sure that my hair had frozen in that instant. But I couldn't feel a thing because even though I was wearing gloves, my fingers were already numb. I could barely make them work to pull the hood back up, and then I had to keep one hand out to hold it in place. My eyes were watering. Ground equipment was everywhere. Vehicles were parked as if each driver had screeched to a halt and leapt out. Some of the bag carts sprouted wings when the wind lifted their plastic curtains out and up. It wouldn't have been surprising to see one of them take off.

I followed the most direct path to the bag room straight across the ramp and past the commuter gate, the same gate that Dan and I had seen on the videotape. When was that? I'd lost all sense of time. Another Beechcraft was parked there, and I wondered why no one had taxied it to a more sheltered spot. We'd be lucky if it was still in one piece tomorrow.

What was normally a two-minute walk seemed to take forever as I put my head down and trudged into wind. I stopped now and then to look around for Dan and to make sure I was still alone out there. Someone could have been right behind me and I wouldn't have heard him.

Stepping into the outbound bag room and out of the shrieking wind brought relative calm and deep silence. I stood inside the doorway, searching for my radio and trying to get some feeling back.

"Kevin, come in. Kevin Corrigan, come in please." It was hard to talk with frozen lips.

Bags were everywhere-on the piers, on the floor around the piers, and at the ends where they'd dumped off into huge, uneven piles that clogged the driveway all the way to the ramp-side wall. The bag belt had apparently run for a while before someone had figured out the crew had abandoned ship.

"This is Kevin. Go ahead."

"Do you have an update?"

"Partial."

"Call me on my cell phone."

"Roger."

It took seconds for him to call. "The troopers are busy," he said.

"Busy?"

"Everyone's occupied at the moment by an aircraft excursion."

"Whose?"

"TWA had one slide off the runway, so there's a bunch of them down there. Apparently the roads coming in and out of this place are a nightmare, so all the rest of them are on traffic control."

"Traffic
control? Did you tell them what's going on?"

"I told them, but it's a pretty wild story, you have to admit."

I pushed a clump of half-frozen hair out of my eyes and would have gone to Plan B if I'd had one. I'd been counting on help from the troopers.

"They said they'd respond as soon as they could break a unit away. I'll keep calling them."

"What about Big Pete?"

"His wife doesn't know where he is, but she says he's got a beeper. She doesn't have the number, but Victor does, if you can believe that. I'm waiting for Vic to call me back."

"You haven't heard from anyone, have you?"

"Does Lenny count? He's upstairs hyperventilating. He sounds like he's going to have a heart attack."

"Good. Nothing from Dan?"

"No, but Johnny Mac called for you. Did you hear?"

"What did he say?"

"He talked to Terry and he says you should go to the other bag room-inbound."

"Goddammit." I was in the wrong bag room. I hung up, put up my hood, and went back out into the storm.

The door to the inbound bag room was a heavy steel slab, but it might as well have been balsa wood the way it whipsawed back and forth in the storm. I found the brick doorstop and used it. I wasn't sure that it would hold, but it was dark in there and dim light from the ramp was better than no light at all.

The heavy air trapped within the four concrete walls had smelled of plaster and paint and turpentine when I'd met Big Pete there. As I stepped through the doorway and around the drop cloth, the same one that had blocked my way last night, I couldn't smell anything. Hoping not to go any farther, I cleared away the anxiety that had lumped in my throat and called out, "Dan?"

The only response was the swishing of the tarps as the wind pushed in through the open door behind me.

To turn on the lights I had to find the fuse box, the one Big Pete had showed me. I wasn't sure I could remember where it was. I was sure that it was farther in than I wanted to go. I called again for Dan and listened. Nothing.

Damn.

I pushed the hood off my head-the better to sense someone coming at me from the side-then took a few edgy steps. I tried to feel left and right with my hands, but my fingers were numb from the cold. I used my palms to guide me, brushing them along the heavy drop cloths as I moved, trying to visualize the narrow corridor that they made. I could almost feel the darkness thickening around me as I moved deeper into the silence.

"Dan,
are you
in
here?"