Razing Beijing: A Thriller (10 page)

Emily placed one stockinged foot on the chair by her desk
and sat down. While scrolling through the bank statement it occurred to her
that the sum would represent different things to different people. The
individuals to whom she would hand over her money were criminals—unscrupulous
cheats who often as not stole from the fugitives of oppression rather than
deliver them from it. For this she blamed not the unsavory scum who exploited
the desperate, but the elitists in Beijing who fostered their desperation. She
had grown up the daughter of a prominent scientist and money was never
portrayed as the solution to any of their needs; a powerful ministry ran the
corporation that employed her father. The
danwei
provided their modest
home and all of her schooling, coupons to subsidize the cost of their food,
clothing, electricity, even hot water, and a doctor for every illness—except,
apparently, for her mother’s condition.

Tonight the question was whether she would complete
preparations in time to save her mother’s life. She was several thousand
dollars shy of the amount demanded by the Democracy Underground, the smuggling
ring ‘snakeheads’ with whom her relatives had put her in touch. Money for
beginning her mother’s treatments in Pittsburgh would also have to be found.

Weeks had passed since the latest word of her mother’s
condition. Typing into the keyboard and logging off the Internet, Emily hoped
with a sigh that no news meant good news.

THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON
Emily Chang sat primly straight, hands clasped on the small table inside of her
cubicle, her ears literally ringing from the shouted acrimony and frayed nerves
of today’s meeting. Stuart’s lingering obsession, as to what had caused the
total loss of electronics in the back of the aircraft in the seconds
before
the explosion, remained unaddressed. Arm waving vagaries on the part of Morton
Hackett, the chief engineer, had been met by Stuart’s impassioned demand for a
sound calculation, ‘One that inspires confidence that we understand the problem—a
chimpanzee can throw a dart! I’d expect a little more precision from
this
organization!’
And so, seated opposite her was a young and gifted
engineer by the name of Sean Thompson, who slouched in his chair, arms folded
over his chest, his legs sprawled out underneath the table. Thompson was
unquestionably one of the best electrical engineers in her group, as adept at
writing software as he was designing the integrated circuitry for which it was
written.

Privately, Emily Chang wanted nothing to do with what she
viewed as Stuart’s effort to score political points in his perpetual clash with
the chief engineer. She had become profoundly disillusioned by Stuart’s cowardice
in not having stood up for own his decision to cancel the test flight. Personal
feelings aside, she had no choice but to conduct this ridiculous calculation of
his. As did Thompson, although his uncharacteristic reluctance to embrace the
task suggested that he held out hope to the contrary.

“That’s a hard calculation to make,” Thompson observed for
the third time.

Emily considered Sean’s assessment. “I’m so sorry.”

Sean withdrew his gaze from the cubicle wall and looked at
her. “What?”

“I’m very sorry that this is going to be so hard for you.”

Thompson looked at her uncertainly. Finally, he snatched
the page of instructions up from the table. “When do you need it?”

“When can you have it?”

Thompson stood up from the table. “By the end of the day.”

Wednesday, April 22

FOR EMILY, THE NOISY
distractions of telephones ringing, voices rising over partitions, a fax being
sent, all disappeared. Sean Thompson was supposed to be briefing her on the
calculation summary he had left for her this morning, but he was nowhere to be
found. She scanned the trembling sheet of paper in her hands a second time in
an attempt to spot the source of what had to be her own misunderstanding. Her
chest moved in tight, shallow breaths as her mind raced with the words,
Oh
God, what have we done what have we done...?

Her secretary hailed from over the cubicle wall to remind
her of the 8:00 meeting in Stuart’s office. Emily noted by the time stamp on
the bottom of the paper that Thompson had run the print at 3:47
A.M.
“Did Sean call to say what time he’d be
in?” Emily asked.

“No,” came the empty reply.

“ALREADY?” STUART ASKED
minutes
later, cocking an eyebrow. “After all that melodrama?”

Only minutes earlier, Emily would have resented being drawn
into what until then she viewed as nothing more than Stuart’s petty turf battle
with the chief engineer. “It’s only a first cut,” she said. “As you suggested,
we made several simplifying assumptions. But judging from the results, I doubt
a more refined approach will be necessary.”

“Really?”

Emily averted her eyes from the paper she had just placed
on his desk. “We extrapolated to the conditions immediately preceding engine
burst. Based on this approach, it would appear that a great deal more power
would have to be introduced to the engine than what some of the other teams have
asserted.”

“That’s sort of surprising. How much more?”

Emily reminded herself to breathe. “Three to four times the
amount attributed to the oil pooling damage scenario.”

Stuart studied her with a frown. “That’s not even close. Seems
like the pilot would had to have slammed the throttles all the way forward.”

“And even that would not be enough. There is still the
possibility that the actuation system somehow slued the propeller blades in the
wrong direction. A fine blade pitch would reduce the—”

“An actuator failure on top of everything else that went
wrong?”

Emily felt tears slowly welling up in her eyes.

Stuart looked away. “Just the same, it would really be
good—”

“To have the video,” she said with a nod, completing his
thought, “and we could see for certain.”

Stuart’s eyes continued to roam, until finally he held her
gaze. “I need to make sure I understand. Either the pilot for some reason chose
to ignore the fly-by procedure and pushed the throttles all the way forward, or
the actuators failed, or some combination of both. Do you think the pilot would
have done that?” Stuart knew the answer as well as she did.

“The aircraft data recorder clearly shows that he set
throttles at seventy percent, just like Sandy requested.”

“Then, assuming propeller blade pitch was nominal, and the
pilot set the proper throttle, how could that much extra fuel be delivered to
the engine?”

Emily shook her head in denial, even as tears flowed freely
down her cheeks, the awesome responsibility falling squarely on the shoulders
of her and her staff. “All of the electronic circuitry double-checked out. I
don’t see how our control could have so horribly malfunctioned. But it’s the
only explanation.”

PAUL DEVINN CAREFULLY
returned
the telephone to its cradle on his desk. He stared at it with an anger powerful
enough to kill. He reminded himself how anger had never played a role in any of
his killings in the past. The bullets he had delivered to the heads of the
Iranian spy and the president’s promiscuous envoy, and the disinformation he had
skillfully introduced to the Rivergate apartment, had not been the consummate
act of an animal urge, but something performed in the execution of a meticulous
plan.

Channeling his instincts was one of his great personal
strengths, necessarily so. Devinn dismissed from his mind the frantic telephone
call which was the source of his angst. He walked calmly from his office,
returned his secretary’s smile, and headed for lunch.

Arriving back at the Thanatechnology plant afterward,
Devinn noticed the small scrap of paper wedged beneath the corner of the handicapped
parking block. He swore under his breath.

Later that afternoon, he found himself sitting alone in a
secluded booth at the Perambulate Inn. He was bitter for several reasons, not
least being the need to reschedule dinner that evening with an attractive woman
whom he’d recently met. The longer he waited the angrier he became. He ordered
another iced tea from the waiter, this time with a small salad.

His accomplice finally entered the restaurant, sat down and
slid to the middle of the opposite bench. Sean Thompson looked nervous as he
brushed his strawberry blond hair back from his eyeglasses.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Why are we even here?” Devinn waved down the waiter. Thompson
ordered a Coke and a cheeseburger. The waiter disappeared through a set of swinging
doors and Devinn resumed eating his salad.

Thompson began to pick at his fingernails. “We may have a
problem.”

“That’s very good, Sean. We
may
have a problem. I
thought we agreed the remedy was to lay low.”

“I don’t want to wind up in prison.” Thompson’s eyes darted
around the dining room.

Devinn was taken aback. They might indeed have a problem,
he realized, though probably not the one his accomplice had just alluded to. He
dabbed Caesar dressing from his chin. “Nobody’s going to prison. What makes you
so sure we’re actually responsible for the crash? From what I gather, everyone
seems to suspect some sort of mechanical malfunction.”

“It’s simple,” Thompson leaned forward to explain. “The
engine explosion was caused by an overspeed
exactly
as I intended,
except, well, obviously it didn’t trigger before the plane left the ground like
it was supposed to.” He downcast his eyes. “No one would have been hurt. You’d
still have gotten your rotten publicity.”

“Then...what exactly seems to be the problem?”

Thompson described the pressure that investigators were
under while simultaneously running out of leads. Stuart wielded enough
influence to keep active his own pet theories surrounding the crash—including
those which the committee had already reviewed and dismissed from the list of
possibilities. One such team that Stuart had assembled would be headed by
Thompson’s boss. Emily Chang yesterday afternoon collected him and several of
his colleagues to begin laying out plans for rebuilding the engine’s electronic
control unit recovered from the crash. “The goal is to rebuild it—piece by
piece, if necessary,” Thompson explained, turning pale. “They’re actually
trying to restore full operation.” All of the electronic component
investigations had so far been an intense search for quality deficiencies. Stuart’s
latest initiative represented an altogether different and, from Thompson’s
point of view, much more dangerous approach.

The two men waited for the waiter to leave after delivering
Thompson’s order.

“Stuart’s gotten agreement from the airframer to look into
a similar approach on the whole friggin’ flight management system.”

“Huh. What is it they expect to find?”

“You know exactly what they’ll find!”

“I said, What do they
expect
to find?”

“Evidence of an anomaly, I guess.”

“Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean.”

“You know goddamn well what it means!”

Devinn as usual became quickly impatient with Thompson’s
technical ramblings. “Sounds like they’re trying to put Humpty-Dumpty together
again. To me, all this stuff looks like it was recovered from inside a volcano.
Why should this concern us? You assured me the virus would disappear.”

“It’s called a Trojan Horse. After corrupting the master
code it was supposed to evaporate—actually, the friggin’ box was supposed to be
toasted. It was also supposed to trigger during the pilot’s take-off
ground-roll inputs, and since it didn’t, then how do we know—”

“Why didn’t it?” Devinn asked with a curious frown.

Thompson’s face flushed beneath the green shade of the
table lamp. “What the
fuck
difference does
that make!”

Devinn stared while suppressing an urge that would quickly
get out of hand.

Thompson let out a deep breath, and the misery returned to
his face. “I didn’t exactly have the opportunity to test it. The point is I
have zero confidence that it ‘evaporated,’ which means there’s a chance Chang’s
task team is going to find it.”

Devinn contemplated that point as diners on the other side
of the room glanced to see what all the commotion was about. “I thought without
electrical power, these programs simply disappeared.”

“The ECU has a back-up battery, like any computer. Looks
like it survived the impact. Remember we’re talking about a relatively
low-speed impact, so if the memory modules are also intact...” Thompson’s
expression passed from agitation through realization to dread. “So what do we
do?”

Whether out of a cooler assessment of the situation or
simple ignorance, Devinn thought the bigger issue was the ease with which
Thompson had whipped himself into frenzy. He fished into the pocket of his
shirt and took out a mint, removed the wrapper and popped it into his mouth. He
offered one to Thompson. “This computer box is in the secured area, with the
rest of the crash junk?”

“Yes.”

“Then we don’t do anything. Stay put, young man, and try to
relax. Odds are in a few weeks time this all will have blown over. If you want
something to worry about, then worry about how to spend some of that newfound
wealth.”

Thompson looked at him, rapidly blinking his eyes.

Devinn folded his hands calmly on the table. “Realize this
scenario you fear is borne of knowledge that you alone possess. Stuart and
these engineers don’t suspect foul play; you only
think
they do, which
means we’re probably not as vulnerable as you think. And wouldn’t this virus or
Trojan Horse you wrote be hard to detect even if it is still lurking inside?”