Millennium

16 A Night to Remember

Testimony of Bill Smith

There were two cops at the desk as I went through the lobby. They were talking to the manager. I didn't think about it until I got outside and saw two more cops, two police cars, and a tow truck pulling Louise's Italian sports car out of its parking slot.

I started over there. I was going to ask what the hell was going on, but something made me stop. Instead, I found a spectator and asked him what was going on.

"The cop said it was stolen," the man said.

"Stolen?"

"That's what be said. Must have been a kid. Who the hell else would be dumb enough to steal a thing like that? I bet there's no more than six or seven of them in the whole country."

I got out of the elevator and ran down the hall toward my room. I was getting out my key when a strange noise started. l looked around, up and down the hall, but I couldn't locate its source.

We weren't that far from the airport, so I dismissed the noise. l had my key, so I started to put it in the lock.

At least, I tried to.

The door bulged away from me, like it was made of rubber.

I almost fell over; putting out a hand, I caught myself against the wall, which had also distorted. Then, slowly, it eased back into position.

I stood there, sweating. I backed away from the door, studied it and the wall. No paint was cracked. I ran my hand over the door, and around the frame. Nothing was warped, there were no splinters.

Jesus. I'd had bad hangovers before, but nothing like that. I rubbed my hands over my face, and unlocked the door.

For just a second it looked very odd in there. At the far end of the room were sliding glass doors that led to a coffin-sized balcony. The doors were shut, but the drapes were blowing as if in a high wind. I couldn't feel the slightest breeze. And everything in the room seemed to be coated with ice.

Maybe ice isn't the right word. Frost, or powdered sugar.

I blinked, and it was all gone. The curtains were barely stirring, and there was nothing wrong with the walls or the unmade bed.

She was gone.

I did everything I could think of. It didn't bring her back.

The balcony door was locked from the inside. I opened it and stepped out, looked around, couldn't see how she could have gotten out from the fourth floor. There was no rope of knotted bedsheets or anything.

I hadn't been gone that long. I suppose she could have come down one elevator while I was going up the other, or she might have used the stairs, but there was something that made me doubt that. Her clothes were still there. All of them, from the brown shoes to the cotton bra.

Her purse was gone, though. Could she have had some clothes in there? The only other evidence she had ever been there was the stained sheets and the heaping ashtrays.

I stayed in the room for almost half an hour, trying to put it together.

A stolen car. A night to remember. A strange story about a place where everybody died.

A dead or stillborn or heroinaddicted infant.

Oh, yes, and two more clues. In the bathroom trash can I found a Vicks inhaler and an empty package of Clorets breath freshener. I sniffed at the inhaler and wished I hadn't.

Whatever was in the thing, l didn't want any part of it.

Chalk it up to experience, I told myself, only it didn't help. You're supposed to learn something from experience, and all I had was questions.

I decided not to tell the police anything about her, at least not until I'd had a chance to talk to her myself. Maybe she needed help. I didn't think she was dangerous.

I had to call a cab to get to the airport. When I arrived, I went straight to the United desk, and around back to where Sarah Hacker had her office.

She looked like she'd had about as much sleep as I had. Maybe there are worse jobs than personnel and public relations for an airline that's just lost a plane, but I don't know what they are.

"Hi, Sarah," I said. "I'd like to find Louise Ball, if it's not too much trouble."

"No trouble," she said. "What does she do, and in what city?"

"She works right here," I said. "Or she did yesterday. She's a ticket agent."

Sarah was shaking her head and reaching for a book. She flipped through it.

"Not unless she was hired after five o'clock yesterday evening. I know all my people, Bill.

She might have been a temporary. Let me look."

She did, and came up with nothing. She put the name through her computer, and confirmed that no one named Louise Ball worked for United.

It was time to call in the FBI. A harmless kook with an obsession about a dead daughter was one thing; an unauthorized person hanging around an investigation pretending to be something she wasn't was another.

I actually got into a phone booth and had dialed the first couple digits of the number Freddie Powers had given me ... then I hung up. Louise had said she'd be back that evening.

I'd wait, and give her a chance to explain herself.

I remembered I did have something to talk to Frddie Powers about, so I went back into the booth. I found him at the temporary morgue.

"What about those watches?" I asked him. "Did you find anything new?"

"One thing," he said. "You remember the digitals that were running backwards? They're all running forwards again."

"Did you bring somebody in on it?"

"Yeah."

"What"d he say?"

"He said it couldn't have happened."

I thought about that.

"How many people actually saw them? I mean, while they were running backwards?"

There was a pause. "You and me, Stanley, and that doctor, Brindle. Maybe a couple people who were helping him take watches off the corpses ... but I don't think so. He's the one who noticed it."

"Did you get any films, videotapes ... anything like that?"

"No. Nothing. All we've got is the testimony of the three of us."

"Three?"

Another pause. "I'm not sure Brindle wants to swear to anything."

"Why don't we wait on this? We've still got the watches that are forty-five minutes off."

"Right."

With the digitals, all we've got is that you and I and Tom saw it."

There was a long pause. I assumed he was thinking over his position, how his career was going and how a story like this would affect his advancement in the Bureau -- which has always liked things neat.

"I saw it," he said, slowly, "but that doesn't mean I think it's important."

"Right. Sit on it for a while, okay? I'll decide if it's important."

"You've got it, Bill."

One anomaly dealt with.

The day went like that: pretty well, except I kept looking over my shoulder expecting Louise to drop into my lap.

She didn't.

We started off with Norman Tyson, from the company who built the air traffic control computers.

He took the position that the firm's equipment was not at fault, as it had been functioning at data-loads beyond what it had been designed to handle. I let Tom work on him, hoping to see a chink in his armor of certainty. They knew they were vulnerable, but that also knew the real story of this crash could be the FAA's failure to replace obsolete hardware.

And the agency would pass that ball along to Congress, who didn't provide the money. By then the guilt was already spread out enough, but you could go further, if you wanted to, and blame the electorate who put the Congress into office.

I knew the Board was in the clear. At least on paper. We had reports and recommendations by the carload. We'd been warning them about the old computers. We'd told them they had to be replaced.

But had we told them hard enough? Who could tell? These were budget-conscious times. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember any time when people weren't howling about cutting government spending, and everybody who ever got cut thought it was the worst case of bad judgement ever seen in Washington. And we never said the new computers would be cheap: we were talking about half a billion dollars.

Look on the brightside, I told myself. I'll bet we buy them now.

Just after lunch I got a call from Doctor Harlan Prentice, who was in charge of the autopsy team. He wanted me to come over, but there are things I'd just as soon skip after a meal, and that was one of them.

"It has to do with the contents of the stomachs," he said. "I guess you know the rate of identification in this crash is going to be low."

"I've been in the morgue, Doctor," I told him. "I've seen the big baggies."

"Yes. Well, with the 747, we've examined seventy-three body fragments containing stomachs. I have before me a menu from that flight, and it lists a choice of chicken crepes, beef a la bercy, and a diet plate in tourist. I haven't seen a menu for first-class: I swallowed queasily, tasting the steak I'd just eaten. I mean, I'm hardened to this sort of thing, but doctors are incredible.

"What's the significance, Doctor?"

"They all had the chicken," he said.

That stopped me for a moment.

"Rather unlikely, wouldn't you say?" He was still waiting for a comment.

I was suddenly angry. Not at him. But why wouldn't this case follow a decent, reasonable line? "Unlikely," I conceded. "Not impossible."

"It's stretching the laws of chance. I have about a hundred stomachs to look at yet "

" and the next one might be beef."

"Or the diet plate," he said, helpfully.

Then I had it.

"There must have been a mix-up in New York," I said. "They loaded too many of the chicken dinners. They didn't find out till they took off. So everybody who was hungry ate the chicken, and if they'd landed Pan Am would have heard a lot of bitching."

"What about first class?"

Screw first class. "I don't know. I do know there's always a reasonable explanation." I swallowed again, wondering what in hell I really knew. "I'll have somebody check it out with Pan Am catering in New York. They'll straighten it out."

I hung up on him.

Then I stood there, thinking it over, knowing I was going to need an Alka-Seltzer for dessert. I seemed to have this compulsion to throw dirt over the problems and pretend they weren't there. The thing was, they were such crazy problems. Seventy-three stomachs full of airline chicken. Watches that were fortyfive minutes fast. Watches that ran backwards when I was looking, and reversed when I turned my back. A beautiful imposter dressed up like an airline employee.

And a voice on a tape. They're all dead. They're all dead and burned.

It was about that time Gordy Petcher arrived. I sent him off with my team leaders so they could fill him in. At the moment, I had no use for him at all. The bastard couldn't come when the rest of us were walking around in the mud and gore; now here he was to take credit for the findings. At least he could handle the press conferences.

We had another, slightly more informative one, after the nightly meeting. Gordy wanted to give the media something to chew on, so Tom and Eli and I worked out the short list of the things we were pretty sure of, cautioning Gordy to preface them all with words like "There are indications that " or "We are now looking into " or "The possibility has arisen "

Hell, he was good at it, I'll give him that. He was a lot better than I was. He knew how to hedge his statements, how to avoid libel. The only thing that worried me was his tendency to grab for a headline, but he didn't this time. The press seemed satisfied with what it had, and gradually everyone began to file out.

Before long I was the only one left in the large conference room. It's amazing how empty a place like that can look.

She hadn't really said where she'd meet me.

The hotel, I thought. She'd be at the hotel, or leave a message.

There was no message at the desk.

I went up to my room. The maid had picked up Louise's clothes and put them in the closet. I was thankful for the clothes. Without them, I would have started to wonder if she'd really existed.

I'd had an hour's sleep one night, and about four hours the night before. I'd slept two hours on the plane getting to California. I was stone sober and I didn't feel the least bit like sleeping.

I paced the room for a while, then I went down to the bar, but it depressed me. I got in my car and drove back to the airport, out onto the field, up to the big doors of the hangar that held the remains of the two jumbo jets.

There was a human-size door set over at the side. It had a glass window, with wire mesh in it. I knocked on the door, pressed my face up to the glass, and looked inside.

"Hey, what are you doing here?"

The guard was outside, coming up behind me. I turned slowly, not wanting to make him nervous there in the dark. He was probably a retired cop. There was the name of some security agency on his shoulder, and a .38 on his hip.

I got out my I.D. and showed it to him. He looked at it, and at my face, and relaxed.

"I saw you on television the other night," he said.

"How come you're here?" I asked him.

He shrugged.

"The company pays me to watch this hangar. Usually they've got real planes in there, you know. They don't want no monkey business Funny thing, tonight I got an extra guy with me.

He's on the other side, on the other door. Hard to figure, ain't it?"

"What do you mean?"

He looked through the glass.

"I mean there ain't much left to steal."

"No, I guess not."

"It's an awful thing, ain't it?"

"Yeah. It's awful." I pointed to the big padlock on the door. "You have the keys to that?"

"Sure do. You want in?"

"Yeah. You can call your employer if you want to, but I can tell you what they'll say. Let him do whatever he wants. Until I write my report, those planes belong to me."

He looked me over, and nodded.

"I expect you're right. Though I don't know what you'd want with them."

He unlocked the door, let me through, and locked it behind me. He told me to knock again when I wanted to be let out.

I wandered around without the slightest idea of what I was looking for. All I had was the memory of that first time I saw her. She had been here, in this big barn, and she'd been looking for something.

I stopped by a massive shaft from a General Electric fanjet. All the blades were snapped off, but the heat of the fires had done nothing to it..Compared to the temperatures that shaft had been designed to take, crashing and burning was nothing at all.

I went over to where the bags of debris had been. She'd been looking at those bags. I could see it clearly now. I'd called to her, she'd looked at me, and she'd run.

The bags were gone. In their place was a series of folding tables with twisted metal piled on them. I walked along the endless rows, sometimes recognizing something, mostly having no idea what I was looking at. There's a lot of metal in a plane.

Farther along were tables holding the remains of luggage. Suitcases in pieces no bigger than your hand. Mounds of shredded and burned clothing. Squashed cameras, splintered skis, lumps of plastic that had been calculators. Even an unbroken bottle of perfume.

A red light caught my eye. It was very faint, buried under a lot of other stuff. I reached for it, and unidentifiable flotsam clattered on the floor.

First impression: a child's toy. A ray-gun. It had a plastic case that was half-melted, blackened on the outside, cracked open. The red light seeped through the crack.

Like so many things on this case, this toy didn't add up. I peered into the crack. It looked like coherent light to me: laser light. I'd never heard of a child's toy that used a laser.

There was a Swiss Army knife in my pocket. I pried out the longest blade, and stuck it in the crack. I twisted, and the plastic case popped open. I took a long look at the insides of the thing. I didn't know what the hell it was, but it wasn't a goddam toy.

Okay. Finally I had something concrete. It made me sadder than I can say to have found it, but there it was. This was some sort of weapon. It had come from the place Louise had been so interested in yesterday morning. All I could do was assume she'd known it was there, that she'd been looking for it. It was time to call Special Agent Powers. Weapons were out of my jurisdiction.

There was a phone on the wall about twenty feet away from me. I was going to call, I really intended to, but the red light was still hidden from me. It came from beneath what might have been a circuit board. I started to pry it up with my knife. I wanted to know what was making that light.

I was flat on my back on the floor. I couldn't move. I was very cold, and the back of my head hurt.

There had been a flash of light, an odd sound, starting low and going beyond the limits of my hearing, shaking the building. And suddenly I had lost all muscle control.

I had passed out, but I wasn't sure if it was from the weapon. I think I whacked my head on the corner of the table as I went down, and again on the floor.

My eyes hurt, too. I couldn't move them. I couldn't even blink. They were drying out.

For a second I thought I was dead, that this was what death was like. Then I discovered I was still breathing. I could feel the cold concrete floor under me, the cold air over me, and my chest rising and falling. I could see the lattice of steel roof girders and a couple dim lights.

That was my universe.

Broken neck, I thought. Quadraplegic. Catheters and iron lungs and feces bags and no sex life ...

But it didn't add up to a broken neck. I could feel my legs. One was bent slightly under me, and it was going to sleep. I knew when I moved -- if I ever moved again -- it would be pins and needles.

I don't remember a lot of the next few minutes. I was scared, I don't mind admitting it.

Something had happened I didn't understand. All I could do was lie there. I couldn't even look away from the ceiling.

"Then I found there was something else I could do. I could hear.

It was nothing loud, but it was the only sound in the hangar, so I heard it. I decided it was two people walking, trying to do it quietly. I never would have heard them if I wasn't listening so hard.

After a long time of that, I decided it was three people. Later, I was sure it was four. It was amazing how much I could hear if it was all I had to do.

I waited. One of them would come close soon enough, and they'd decide what to do with me.

One of them did. I saw him looming into my field of vision. He was looking down at me.

He turned, and whistled softly. I heard the others converging. They gathered around me. They made a circle and looked down at me. They were wearing what looked like scuba suits: all black rubber, covering everything but their faces.

"Who is it?" one of them asked.

"Who do you think?"

I knew that voice.

Well, she had said she'd see me tonight.

They debated whether or not I was alive. Then they moved out of my hearing; at least, though I could tell they were whispering about me, I couldn't hear the words. I had the impression some of them were not in English.

They came a little closer and took another look. This time I heard a few words here and there.

" ... shorted something out."

" ... stun beam ... focused ... "

"Damn lucky ... dead man ... "

"What the hell is he doing here now?" That was Louise .

" ... take the stunner?"

" ... Gate's due in twenty minutes ... hell out of here."

"He's sure sweating a lot."

That didn't surprise me. I didn't expect to sweat much longer, though. I knew I was a dead man. I'd stumbled into something I wasn't supposed to see, some kind of stun weapon. Since I couldn't move my eyes I hadn't gotten a good look at them, but I remembered vague shapes dangling from their belts, and everything about them shrieked commando. They weren't here to play games.

So I'd surely be killed.

About all I didn't understand -- at least in the tactical sense was why Louise had revealed herself to me so many times before now. Had she been trying to enlist my help in some way? I remembered how badly she'd wanted me to stay away from work today. Okay, so she was trying to keep me from being here when they made their search ... except that I hadn't even known I was going to be here until an hour ago. Normally, I wouldn't have been in this hangar at this hour.

Something had screwed up badly for them and I had no idea what it was, but l was sure the easiest solution for their present problem was for me to die.

I couldn't believe it when I heard them going away.

Then Louise was back. She loomed over me so suddenly that if I could have moved, I'd have jumped a foot. I could feel my heart hammering, and the drops of sweat flowing down the side of my face.

"Smith," she said. "You don't know me. I can't tell you who am. But you're going to be all right."