Hard Fall Part 8

"Yes."

"Good. If they happen to search that bag something I have never seen done then I will make up some excuse about our needing the fire extinguisher on one of our trucks. Don't you say anything."

"We won't pa.s.s through a metal detector?"

"Here? Heavens, no. I'm telling you, you're overestimating the security. All we care about is that the people coming through our facility are our employees. We're not about to search all their lunch pails. Remember this is a private security subcontractor hired by AmAirXpress. They work for me, not the other way around. I'm a big shot out here the benefits of being a home office executive."

He had studied the layout of the facility on paper. Now he watched it come to life as they left the parked van on foot. From this unsecured, street-side parking lot, they were to pa.s.s through the privately operated security check she had mentioned and into the secured area that housed the facilities and field-side parking lots for In-Flite Foods. Adjacent to the security cheek was a gate that provided vehicle access to the secure area, though this was locked and rarely used. Field-side vehicles were fueled and maintained within the secure compound to avoid the lengthy process of vehicle searches. The food delivery trucks pa.s.sed through one of the three Airport Police checkpoints, where they were randomly subjected to intense scrutiny. For this reason, Monique had elected to walk Kort onto the field through In-Flite.

As planned, they arrived when the parking lot teemed with employees changing shift. To Kort's relief, he saw that nearly everyone carried some kind of backpack, bag, or lunch pail, just as Monique had said they would. He followed a confident Monique toward the long line at the gate, which moved surprisingly quickly. As Monique had reported, the guards were simply making sure each employee wore an ID tag. It appeared they weren't even taking the time to match faces with photos.

They stopped in front of the guards. She said, "Monique Paine," and fingered the ID badge she had clipped to her blouse. "I'm with the Washington office. You have a pa.s.s for my guest."

The guard checked a list, ran a finger across it, and then reached out of sight and came up with the white plastic visitor's tag. "This is Mr. Anthony," she said.

"Yeah, yeah," the guard replied, eyeing the line as it backed up behind them.

Monique handed Kort the tag. He clipped it to his pocket and the two pa.s.sed through. They quickly broke away from the others and walked by themselves, approaching a group of parked vehicles.

"El Al it isn't," he said softly to her. She grinned.

"Over here," she instructed, gesturing toward a green sedan with a white In-Flite logo painted on the driver's door. "Climb in. I'll get the keys."

Kort obeyed her, uncomfortable following orders.

The window frames of the unremarkable building she entered were pitted and corroded brown. The building itself was a large, one-story cake box sided with corrugated steel, painted an old beige. Where the drains emptied from the flat roof, the paint was streaked and stained. The chain link fence that surrounded this inner parking lot looked rusted enough to come apart by just yanking hard on it. His makeup and wig made the already uncomfortable heat nearly unbearable. He did his best to push this discomfort back into an unused compartment and shut it away.

"All set," she said as she climbed into the driver's seat alongside him.

"I was recalling your nickname," he told her in a sentimental tone he didn't recognize. Just looking at her face, the name had popped into his head like spontaneously remembering the words of a song when hearing the melody played.

"Unique," she said. "I liked that. I thought perhaps you had forgotten."

"No, of course not."

She drove onto the field and along the designated traffic corridor. She took the long way around in order to reach the far side of the AmAirXpress maintenance area.

"You know what to do?" he asked.

She didn't answer. Instead she said, "You'll contact me when you've reached Washington?"

He removed the visitor's pa.s.s and clipped Dougherty's badge to his overalls. The magnetic strip on the back was his key to the electronic gate only yards away. He grabbed the flight bag that contained the fire extinguisher. He handed her the visitor's pa.s.s. "You'll take care of returning this?" he asked rhetorically.

"I'll take care of everything, Anthony." Her eyes wished him good luck.

" "Unique,"" he said, opening the door. "It suits you."

SIX.

THE SEARCH TEAM found the tooth on Sunday morning. As Murphy's Law would have it, the trash bag that contained the tooth was one of the last to be checked. But the contents proved to be a lab technician's gold mine: the extracted tooth, bloodied tissues, a spent bottle of Anbesol, and two bars of hotel soap. It had been rushed by special courier to the forerfsics lab in the Hoover Building in Washington.

Monday noon, Daggett was in the offices of the Seattle Field Office, in the midst of sending a secure fax to Paul Pullman, when someone called him to the phone. He hoped it might be the antic.i.p.ated lab report. Below, on Puget Sound, one of many huge white ferries cut a wide wake away from sh.o.r.e. Sea gulls followed at its stern. Traffic moved sluggishly on the elevated section of roadway paralleling the sh.o.r.e. The pulse of the city continued indifferent to his concerns.

When he heard LaMoia's voice, he immediately knew what this call was about. The Mayflower Hotel had provided them with a license plate number for the car belonging to the guest in Room 311. Motor Vehicle had been able to trace the license number to a leasing company; through the leasing company, they had then traced the car to an obscure off-airport car rental agency that did most of its paperwork by hand. It was typical of this kind of police work that the deck often seemed stacked against you for every step forward, two steps back. Now, finally, another step forward.

"The rental agency has a client for us," LaMoia said. "I thought you would want to talk to them." "I'm on my way."

Mrs. Lori Slaughter, the rental company's second in command, had walnut colored skin, straightened hair pulled back tightly and held in a ponytail by a metallic band. Her silver earrings, in the shape of flying geese, reflected the overhead fluorescent light, distracting Daggett. Her jawline ran into her neck, and she wore loose clothing, giving her a square figure. She wormed her tongue nervously inside her upper lip with its soft brown lipstick. People had a way of coming undone when being questioned by the FBI. Daggett had thought the letter jacket might remove some of this pressure, but it didn't seem to help.

She was reading a computer screen. "Mr. Antony" she didn't p.r.o.nounce a th "rented from our downtown agency, which is actually a parking garage, 'cross from the Westin. The reservation for the car was made on the seventh of July for an August twenty-first rental. A mid sized four-door. We upgraded that to our premium line because of availability. He declined insurance. He held the reservation with a Visa "

"A credit card!" Daggett interrupted enthusiastically. "A valid credit card?"

"That's what's interesting about this, Mr. Daggett. When he failed to return the car on the twenty-second, we notified the police the car had been stolen, which is customary. They asked us the same thing. Now usually when a car is stolen, the credit card turns out to also be stolen. But not this one. It's a perfectly valid card."

"I'll need that number," Daggett said anxiously.

"It's right on the form."

Daggett wrote it down in his notebook. "And I'd like to interview the person who rented him the vehicle, if that's possible."

She raised a finger, placed a brief phone call, and then hung up. Her faux fingernails, long enough to be claws, were painted an iridescent pink. To Daggett she said, "James Channing is the boy you want. And he's presently on duty. Goes off at four. He's expecting you."

"Fine."

"But I must caution you that these boys see dozens and dozens of customers per week. That he'll remember Mr. Antony is highly unlikely."

He didn't appreciate the pessimism. "We'll see," he said.

Two hours later, he was forced to admit she was right: The young man who had rented the car remembered nothing about the man. He remained invisible wherever he went, and Daggett's frustration built with each dead end. Now that Visa card meant everything a credit trail was often as valuable as a "smoking gun."

Shoswitz picked him up at the hotel a half hour before the ball game. The lieutenant had not changed clothes. "I like the letter jacket," he said immediately.

"First base," Daggett said proudly. "Lettered my last two years." It stirred up memories he would just as soon have forgotten. Different people. Different dreams. He glanced out at a sky confused between cloudy and clear. Partly sunny, they called it. Partly cloudy. Depended on what percentages you saw when you looked up there. A judgment call.

"You should be happy," Shoswitz said. "Right? You made some good headway today."

Another judgment call, Daggett thought. The man saw blue instead of clouds. "Should I?"

"We've got a valid Visa card and they've flagged it for us. This guy uses that card again, we'll know it within minutes. I'd say that's some major headway." Shoswitz bunched his thin, colorless lips and nodded in self agreement "That's a h.e.l.l of a starting point. A lot of cases wouldn't get that far."

"We lost a possible witness. That hurts." Another day, another investigation, Daggett might have felt okay about how the day had turned out. No day went without some setbacks. As it was, Pullman was anxious to get his report on the Backman bombing. That could take a week or two. If that happened, then all the Bernard work would end up in a file somewhere going yellow. The thought of that infuriated him.

The Kingdome, looking like an enormous flying saucer perched in a sea of blacktop, lay ahead of them. Thousands of people poured into it. Balloons. Pins. Caps. Daggett wasn't thinking in terms of baseball or the ball game. He was thinking: So many people, so many eyes in a city this size. How many of these people saw him and never knew it? How many of these people could help if they only knew what they had seen?

"You always so cheery?" Shoswitz asked.

"Sorry. Tired, I guess," Daggett admitted.

Shoswitz parked the car. Seemed like they walked for ten minutes before reaching the Dome. The game hadn't started, but the fans had. They were wound up.

"You gonna be okay?" Shoswitz asked as they sat down in seats a mile from nowhere.

"Yeah, fine thanks."

Daggett hated the lying most of all.

The rain struck the hotel room windows like handfuls of pebbles. Special Agent Macalister's deep voice sounded even more forced over a phone line: "Visa's mainframe went down or we would have had it sooner," the man began, apparently recognizing Daggett's voice and not bothering with any sort of greeting. "David Anthony bought a oneway Amtrak ticket from Portland to Los Angeles. He paid cash for the actual ticket, but according to reservations records, he phoned in a last-minute request for a sleeper. The sleepers require a credit card to hold a reservation, so his card had to be preapproved for the total amount. We got the flag because of the authorization request. He was on that train, Daggett. It arrived in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon. If he took a hotel room in L.A." he didn't pay for it by credit card."

Daggett dragged the phone off the nightstand as he headed to the closet to start packing. The pounding in his chest had nothing to do with blood pressure, nothing to do with moving quickly; it was the drumming of excitement.

As Macalister continued talking, Daggett was thinking: Just like a European to order a sleeper compartment they hate the coaches on our trains.

".. . which means we may have lost him," Macalister concluded.

"Lost him?" Daggett asked, struggled with the b.u.t.tons on yesterday's shirt. "Reissue the warning to all commercial carriers at LAX: All Duhning 959s should be triple-checked for possible bombs. Luggage and carry-ons should follow El Al international rules. Fax the L.A. office anything we have. Mention the tooth; that may still be giving him trouble." When Macalister failed to say anything, Daggett asked, "You still there?"

"Still here. I'm writing it all down."

"And do me a favor," Daggett said, his arm finding its way down the sleeve of his letter jacket.

"Go ahead."

"Have someone book me a seat on the next flight to LAX."

From five thousand feet, the coiling black tendril of smoke looked to Daggett at first like the unwarranted emission from a factory so typical of the urban sprawl. Or maybe, on closer inspection, it was an entire city block afire. Only its proximity to LAX and the steady stream of fire trucks racing toward it toylike trucks from this alt.i.tude gave it away.

He didn't know for certain until his pager began beeping from his belt. He was carrying a special pager capable of reaching him anywhere in the continental United States, Europe, and a limited section of Asia. Its twelve-character alpha-numeric readout enabled the Bureau to pa.s.s field agents cryptic messages as well as phone numbers.

Daggett moved his coat out of the way and silenced the pager. He read its message, though the smoke below had already told him what had happened.

A plane was down.

He knew it was a Duhning 959; he even knew something about the man who had caused it. His throat constricted and his eyes stung. An elderly woman in the seat next to him demanded in a grating voice, "Lean back so I can see.. .. What is it? What is it?"

Daggett leaned back, and she stretched herself across him, pressing her pale face against the gla.s.s. "I can't see. I can't see," she said. "Was it an aeroplane?" she asked, close enough to kiss him.

But Daggett didn't answer. Thought of another crash drew him back.

The Christmas tree is nice: no tinsel, lots of handmade ornaments. It reminds him of Christmas with his grandparents outside of Bend, Oregon, snow over his head and ice so thick, you have to saw through it to fish. He remembers. He feels awkward being here and being single, but it's the holidays, and despite Peggy's abandonment, despite Duncan's being overseas with his parents, he feels a need to be with people. Friends. It's not terribly Christmasy. Rain. Wind. Carols on the stereo, but it doesn't seem right. Nothing seems right. Except the tree. The tree is right.

He is still drying out from being caught in the rain as he is dragged to circulate the crowd. He is looking for someone to attach himself to. He is looking to get drunk. Tonight is no night to be alone. His first Christmas without Peggy in recent memory, a hollow, empty feeling, and the pain is as immeasurable as his love. The trouble with Bureau parties, he realizes, is that agents, by nature, are a sarcastic bunch; they hide their emotions beneath an impenetrable veneer of bravado. There is no sentimentality. No one singing. It's shop talk and bawdy jokes everywhere he turns.

Always the jokes. Too often racial. Always the pasted-on smiles and slaps on the back. The winks. Within a few minutes he longs to be elsewhere, anywhere, but the die is cast: he's stuck. Clay Primrose spots him and waves him over to talk to some redhead in a green sweater and a short skirt. Doesn't know her that well. Feels nervous. Knows it's not what he wants, but he wants even less to make a scene.

The television is an annoyance in the adjoining room where some of the kids are focused on an animated special involving the Grinch. It's something completely out of place at a Christmas party, he thinks. As the introduction to the redhead is made, as he's watching her lips but suddenly picturing her in bed with him, the news breaks in on the Grinch.

The eggnog is carefully balanced, tightly gripped, for this group tends to gesticulate wildly while reconstructing stories, fabricating stories; he's not about to let his fly. Daggett misses her name. His mind is in a knot of moist lips and this woman this body with its wild red hair spread out before him, when he loses her completely. Loses Primrose too. His head jerks toward the door, toward the whining kids whose show has been interrupted, toward the television with the talking head and the flashing graphics announcing a Live News Update.

It's the number that grabs him, that slams into him with such a force, it knocks all the wind from him. He teeters. He's going to go down.

The number.

He wills his knees to support him. Locks them.

"Ten twenty-three," the talking head says in a dreadful, unemotional monotone. "EuroTours flight ten twenty-three."

Eggnog sloshes across his fingers. He's spilling his drink. The video that fills the screen is shot at night. Ugly orange flames spread across an entire town. "Frankfurt to Heathrow," the man says, repeating the number. Daggett knows the itinerary; a photocopy is presently folded in his breast pocket. Flames. Bright orange flames. The remains of the plane scattered in little bonfires for miles.

Miles.

Duncan .. . His parents.

There's no more sound, like someone turned everything and everyone off. Nothing. A blank hole where he had been standing.

The plastic gla.s.s of eggnog slips to the floor, its contents spilled. "All those aboard the commercial jetliner are presently presumed dead," the anchorman says, almost straining to make reference to Lockerbie. He's comparing numbers as if it's a contest. Daggett hears, "It's not as bad as Lockerbie."

At the piano, a group of vodka drinkers unaware of the television, of the children, of Daggett's spilled drink, of the redhead form a group. A department accountant, a good-looking woman named Suzie, begins to sing along with the stereo in a surprisingly beautiful voice. The sound turns Daggett's head, it seems so incongruous, given the sight on the television. Suzie is looking right at him.

Silent night, holy night All is calm, all is bright The scene on the television is anything but silent, anything but holy. The panic in the face of the talking head, the beads of sweat on his forehead as he vamps to keep his station on the air with a live report: anything but calm. And the only brightness is from the leaping orange flames and the pulsing incendiary flashes from the blue lights atop the rescue vehicles.

Daggett slumps and kneels into the puddle of eggnog, his attention fixed on the television. One of the kids. .h.i.ts the remote hoping to lose this guy, but he is replaced by a dozen others, all with the same message, nearly the same words, all apparently reading from the same script.

Primrose calls out to him, "No great loss." He is referring to the spilled drink, but that's not the way Daggett hears it.

On the darkened, flickering screen the roaming camera surveys the images of the tragedy. Daggett crawls toward the television, Suzie still singing.

There, not six inches from his face, beamed via satellite in living color dying color he sees and then thinks he recognizes his very own light gray Samsonite suitcase he had loaned Duncan. It lies there in the field among similar personal belongings and crash debris.

His suitcase.

His only child.

His parents.

Dead? Or crying out somewhere in the flames?

Silent night, holy night, she begins again.

Twenty-two minutes, four phone calls, and a one-mile taxi ride later, Daggett stood on the outskirts of the wreckage.

A hundred yards off, black, oily smoke rose in towering pillars. The carca.s.s of the disemboweled jet lay broken and twisted. The plane had crashed in the back half of Hollywood Park, home to a horse track and a hotel, an enormous expanse of land, a half-mile square cut out of suburbia. Like so much of Southern California, Hollywood Park had been drilled for oil. Several of the behemoth pumps had been sheared off at ground level by the plane and were now burning out of control. With the fuselage and the half-dozen wellheads all flaring orange plumes into a thick black sky, it looked to Daggett like an image of h.e.l.l. The rising smoke blocked out the sun.