Sole Survivor

9

This Halloween light in August, as orange as pumpkin lanterns but leaping high from pits in the sand, made even the innocent seem like debauched pagans in its glow.

On a stretch of beach where bonfires were permitted, ten blazed. Large families gathered at some, parties of teenagers and college students at others.

Joe walked among them. The beach was one he favored on nights when he came to the ocean for therapy, although usually he kept his distance from the bonfires.

Here the decibels of chatter were off the top of the scale, and barefoot couples danced in place to old tunes by the Beach Boys. But here a dozen listeners sat enthralled as a stocky man with a mane of white hair and a reverberant voice spun a ghost story.

The day’s events had altered Joe’s perception of everything, so it seemed he was looking at the world through a pair of peculiar glasses won in a game of chance on the midway of a mysterious carnival that traveled from venue to venue in whisper-quiet black trains, spectacles with the power not to distort the world but to reveal a secret dimension that was enigmatic, cold, and fearsome.

The dancers in bathing suits, bare limbs molten-bronze from the firelight, shook their shoulders and rolled their hips, dipped and swayed, beat their supple arms like wings or clawed at the radiant air, and to Joe each celebrant seemed to be two entities at the same time. Each was a real person, yes, but each was also a marionette, controlled by an unseen puppet master, string-tugged into postures of jubilation, winking glass eyes and cracking wooden smiles and laughing with the thrown voices of hidden ventriloquists, for the sole purpose of deceiving Joe into believing that this was a benign world that merited delight.

He passed a group of ten or twelve young men in swimming trunks. Their discarded wetsuits glistened like piles of sealskins or flayed eels or some other harvest of the sea. Their upended surfboards cast Stonehenge shadows across the sand. Testosterone levels were so high among them that the air virtually smelled of it, so high that it made them not rowdy but slow and murmurous, almost somnambulant with primal male fantasies.

The dancers, the storyteller and his audience, the surfers, and everyone else whom Joe passed watched him warily. This was not his imagination. Though their glances were mostly surreptitious, he was aware of their attention.

He wouldn’t have been surprised if all of them worked for Teknologik or for whoever funded Teknologik.

On the other hand, although wading deep in paranoia, he was still sane enough to realize that he carried with him the unspeakable things he had seen at the Delmann house — and that these horrors were visible in him. The experience carved his face, painted a dull sheen of desolation in his eyes, and sculpted his body into angles of rage and dread. When he passed, the people on the beach saw a tormented man, and they were all city dwellers who understood the danger of tormented men.

He found a bonfire surrounded by twenty or more utterly silent young men and women with shaved heads. Each of them wore a sapphire-blue robe and white tennis shoes, and each had a gold ring in his or her left ear. The men were beardless. The women were without makeup. Many of both sexes were so strikingly attractive and so stylish in their raiment that he instantly thought of them as the Cult of the Beverly Hills Children.

He stood among them for a few minutes, watching them as they watched their fire in meditative silence. When they returned his attention, they had no fear of what they perceived in him. Their eyes were, without exception, calm pools in which he saw humbling depths of acceptance and a kindness like moonlight on water — but perhaps only because that was what he needed to see.

He was carrying the McDonald’s bag that contained the wrappers of two cheeseburgers, an empty soft drink container, and the Kleenex with which he had scrubbed the blood off his hand. Evidence. He tossed the bag into the bonfire, and he watched the cultists as they watched the bag burst into flame, blacken, and vanish.

When he walked away, he wondered briefly what they believed the purpose of life to be. His fantasy was that in the mad spiral and plummet of modern life, these blue-robed faithful had learned a truth and achieved an enlightened state that gave meaning to existence. He didn’t ask them, for fear their answer would be nothing other than one more version of the same sad longing and wishful thinking on which so many others based their hope.

A hundred yards up the beach from the bonfires, where the night ruled, he hunkered down at the purling edge of the surf and washed his hands in the inch-deep salty water. He picked up wet sand and scrubbed with it, scouring any lingering traces of blood from the creases in his knuckles and from under his fingernails.

After a final rinse of his hands, without bothering to take off his socks and Nikes or to roll up his jeans, he walked into the sea. He moved into the black tide and stopped after he passed the break line of the quiet surf, where the water was above his knees.

The gentle waves wore only thin frayed collars of phosphorescent foam. Curiously, though the night was clear and pierced by a moon, within a hundred yards the sea rolled naked, black, invisible.

Denied the pacifying vista that had drawn him to the shore, Joe found some solace in the surging tide that pressed against his legs and in the low, dumb grumble of the great watery machine. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions, the peace of indifference.

He tried not to think about what had happened at the Delmann house. Those events were incomprehensible. Thinking about them would not lead to understanding.

He was dismayed to feel no grief and so little anguish about the Delmanns’ and Lisa’s deaths. At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had learned that following the loss of a child, parents often reported a disturbing inability to care about the suffering of others. Watching television news of freeway wrecks, apartment-building fires, and heinous murders, one sat numb and unaffected. Music that had once stirred the heart, art that had once touched the soul, now had no effect. Some people overcame this loss of sensitivity in a year or two, others in five years or ten, but others — never.

The Delmanns had seemed like fine people, but he had never really known them.

Lisa was a friend. Now she was dead. So what? Everyone died sooner or later. Your children. The woman who was the love of your life. Everyone.

The hardness of his heart frightened him. He felt loathsome. But he could not force himself to feel the pain of others. Only his own.

From the sea he sought the indifference to his losses that he already felt to the losses of others.

Yet he wondered what manner of beast he would become if even the deaths of Michelle and Chrissie and Nina no longer mattered to him. For the first time, he considered that utter indifference might inspire not inner peace but a limitless capacity for evil.

The busy service station and the adjacent twenty-four-hour convenience store were three blocks from his motel. Two public telephones were outside, near the rest rooms.

A few fat moths, white as snowflakes, circled under the cone-shaped downlights that were mounted along the building eaves. Vastly enlarged and distorted shadows of their wings swooped across the white stucco wall.

Joe had never bothered to cancel his phone-company credit card. With it, he placed several long-distance calls that he dared not make from his motel room if he hoped to remain safe there.

He wanted to speak to Barbara Christman, the IIC–Investigator in Charge — of the probe of Flight 353. It was eleven o’clock here on the West Coast and two o’clock Sunday morning in Washington, D.C. She would not be in her office, of course, and although Joe might be able to reach a duty officer at the National Transportation Safety Board even at this hour, he would never be given Christman’s home number.

Nevertheless, he got the NTSB’s main number from information and placed the call. The Board’s new automated phone system gave him extensive options, including the opportunity to leave voice mail for any Board member, senior crash investigator, or executive-level civil servant. Supposedly, if he entered the first initial and first four letters of the surname of the party for whom he wished to leave a message, he would be connected. Though he carefully entered B-C-H-R-I, he was routed not to voice mail but to a recording that informed him no such extension existed. He tried again, with the same result.

Either Barbara Christman was no longer an employee or the voice-mail system wasn’t functioning properly.

Although the IIC at any crash scene was a senior investigator operating out of the NTSB headquarters in Washington, other members of a Go-Team could be culled from specialists in field offices all over the country: Anchorage, Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Kansas City, New York City, and Seattle. From the computer at the Post, Joe had obtained a list of most if not all of the team members, but he didn’t know where even one of them was based.

Because the crash site was a little more than a hundred miles south of Denver, he assumed at least a few of the team had been drawn from that office. Using his list of eleven names, he sought phone numbers from directory assistance in Denver.

He obtained three listings. The other eight people were either unlisted or not Denver-area residents.

The ceaseless swelling and shrinking and swelling again of moth shadows across the stucco wall of the service station teased at Joe’s memory. They reminded him of something, and increasingly he sensed that the recollection was as important as it was elusive. For a moment he stared intently at the swooping shadows, which were as amorphous as the molten forms in a Lava lamp, but he could not make the connection.

Though it was past midnight in Denver, Joe called all three men whose numbers he’d obtained. The first was the Go-Team meteorologist in charge of considering weather factors pertinent to the crash. His phone was picked up by an answering machine, and Joe didn’t leave a message. The second was the man who had overseen the team division responsible for sifting the wreckage for metallurgical evidence. He was surly, possibly awakened by the phone, and uncooperative. The third man provided the link to Barbara Christman that Joe needed.

His name was Mario Oliveri. He had headed the human-performance division of the team, searching for errors possibly committed by the flight crew or air-traffic controllers.

In spite of the hour and the intrusion on his privacy, Oliveri was cordial, claiming to be a night owl who never went to bed before one o’clock. “But, Mr. Carpenter, I’m sure you’ll understand that I do not speak to reporters about Board business, the details of any investigation. It’s public record anyway.”

“That’s not why I’ve called, Mr. Oliveri. I’m having trouble reaching one of your senior investigators, whom I need to talk with urgently, and I’m hoping you can put me in touch. Something’s wrong with her voice mail at your Washington offices.”

“Her voice mail? We have no current senior investigators who are women. All six are men.”

“Barbara Christman.”

Oliveri said, “That had to be who it was. But she took early retirement months ago.”

“Do you have a phone number for her?”

Oliveri hesitated. Then: “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Maybe you know if she resides in D.C. itself or which suburb. If I knew where she lived, I might be able to get a phone—”

“I heard she came home to Colorado,” Oliveri said. “She started out in the Denver field office a lot of years ago, was transferred out to Washington, and worked her way up to senior investigator.”

“So she’s in Denver now?”

Again Oliveri was silent, as if the very subject of Barbara Christman troubled him. At last he said, “I believe her actual home was Colorado Springs. That’s about seventy miles south of Denver.”

And it was less than forty miles from the meadow where the doomed 747 had come to a thunderous end.

“She’s in Colorado Springs now?” Joe asked.

“I don’t know.”

“If she’s married, the phone might be in a husband’s name.”

“She’s been divorced for many years. Mr. Carpenter…I am wondering if…”

After long seconds during which Oliveri failed to complete his thought, Joe gently prodded: “Sir?”

“Is this related to Nationwide Flight 353?”

“Yes, sir. A year ago tonight.”

Oliveri fell into silence once more.

Finally Joe said, “Is there something about what happened to Flight 353…something unusual?”

“The investigation is public record, as I said.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

The open line was filled with a silence so deep that Joe could half believe that he was connected not to Denver but to the far side of the moon.

“Mr. Oliveri?”

“I don’t really have anything to tell you, Mr. Carpenter. But if I thought of something later…is there a number where I could reach you?”

Rather than explain his current circumstances, Joe said, “Sir, if you’re an honest man, then you might be endangering yourself by calling me. There are some damned nasty people who would suddenly be interested in you if they knew we were in touch.”

“What people?”

Ignoring the question, Joe said, “If something’s on your mind — or on your conscience — take time to think about it. I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”

Joe hung up.

Moths swooped. Swooped. Batted against the flood-lamps above. Clichés on the wing: moths to the flame.

The memory continued to elude Joe.

He called directory assistance in Colorado Springs. The operator provided him with a number for Barbara Christman.

She answered on the second ring. She did not sound as though she had been awakened.

Perhaps some of these investigators, who had walked through the unspeakable carnage of major air disasters, did not always find their way easily into sleep.

Joe told her his name and where his family had been one year ago this night, and he implied that he was still an active reporter with the Post.

Her initial silence had the cold, moon-far quality of Oliveri’s. Then she said, “Are you here?”

“Excuse me?”

“Where are you calling from? Here in Colorado Springs?”

“No. Los Angeles.”

“Oh,” she said, and Joe thought he heard the faintest breath of regret when she exhaled that word.

He said, “Ms. Christman, I have some questions about Flight 353 that I would—”

“I’m sorry,” she interrupted. “I know you’ve suffered terribly, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t even conceive the depth of your anguish, and I know it’s often difficult for family members to accept their losses in these horrible incidents, but there’s nothing I could say to you that would help you find that acceptance or—”

“I’m not trying to learn acceptance, Ms. Christman. I’m trying to find out what really happened to that airliner.”

“It’s not unusual for people in your position to take refuge in conspiracy theories, Mr. Carpenter, because otherwise the loss seems so pointless, so random and inexplicable. Some people think we’re covering up for airline incompetence or that we’ve been bought off by the Airline Pilots Association and that we’ve buried proof the flight crew was drunk or on drugs. This was just an accident, Mr. Carpenter. But if I were to spend a lot of time with you on the phone, trying to persuade you of that, I’d never convince you, and I’d be encouraging you in this denial fantasy. You have my deepest sympathy, you really do, but you need to be talking to a therapist, not to me.”

Before Joe could reply, Barbara Christman hung up.

He called her again. Although he waited while the phone rang forty times, she did not answer it.

For the moment, he had accomplished all that was possible by telephone.

Halfway back to his Honda, he stopped. He turned and studied the side of the service station again, where the exaggerated and weirdly distorted shadows of moths washed across the white stucco, like nightmare phantoms gliding through the pale mists of a dream.

Moths to the flame. Three points of fire in three oil lamps. Tall glass chimneys.

In memory, he saw the three flames leap higher in the chimneys. Yellow lamplight glimmered across Lisa’s somber face, and shadows swooped up the walls of the Delmanns’ kitchen.

At the time, Joe had thought only that a vagrant draft had abruptly drawn the flames higher in the lamps, though the air in the kitchen had been still. Now, in retrospect, the serpentine fire, shimmering several inches upward from the three wicks, impressed him as possessing greater importance than he previously realized.

The incident had significance.

He watched the moths but pondered the oil wicks, standing beside the service station but seeing around him the kitchen with its maple cabinetry and sugar-brown granite counters.

Enlightenment did not rise in him as the flames had briefly risen in those lamps. Strive as he might, he could not identify the significance that he intuited.

He was weary, exhausted, battered from the trauma of the day. Until he was rested, he could not trust either his senses or his hunches.

On his back in the motel bed, head on a foam pillow, heart on a rock of hard memory, Joe ate a chocolate bar that he’d bought at the service station.

Until the final mouthful, he could discern no flavor whatsoever. With the last bite, the taste of blood flooded his mouth, as though he had bitten his tongue.

His tongue was not cut, however, and what plagued him was the familiar taste of guilt. Another day had ended, and he was still alive and unable to justify his survival.

Except for the light of the moon at the open balcony door and the green numerals of the digital alarm clock, the room was dark. He stared at the ceiling light fixture, which was vaguely visible — and only visible at all because the convex disk of glass was lightly frosted with moonglow. It floated like a ghostly visitant above him.

He thought of the luminous Chardonnay in the three glasses on the counter in the Delmanns’ kitchen. No explanation there. Though Charlie might have tasted the wine before pouring it, Georgine and Lisa had never touched their glasses.

Thoughts like agitated moths swooped and fluttered through his mind, seeking light in his darkness.

He wished that he could talk with Beth in Virginia. But they might have her phone tapped and trace his call to find him. Besides, he was concerned that he would be putting Beth and Henry in jeopardy if he told them anything about what had happened to him since he’d found himself under surveillance at the beach.

Lulled by the maternal heart sound of the rhythmic surf, weighed down by weariness, wondering why he had escaped the plague of suicide at the Delmanns’ house, he slipped into sleep with nightmares.

Later, he half woke in darkness, lying on his side, facing the alarm clock on the nightstand. The glowing green numbers reminded him of those on the clock in Charles Delmann’s bloodied bedroom: time flashing backward in ten-minute increments.

Joe had supposed that a stray shotgun pellet must have struck the clock, damaging it. Now, in a swoon of sleep, he perceived that the explanation was different from what he had thought — something more mysterious and more significant than a mere bead of lead.

The clock and the oil lamps.

Numbers flashing, flames leaping.

Connections.

Significance.

Dreams reclaimed him briefly, but the alarm woke him long before dawn. He had been out less than three and a half hours, but after a year of restless nights, he was refreshed even by this much sleep.

Following a quick shower, as Joe dressed, he studied the digital clock. Revelation eluded him now as it had eluded him when he had been sotted with sleep.

Joe drove to LAX while the coast was still waiting for dawn.

He purchased a same-day, round-trip ticket to Denver. The return flight would bring him back to Los Angeles in time to keep the six-o’clock meeting with Demi — she of the sexy-smoky voice — at the coffeehouse in Westwood.

As he was on his way to the gate where his plane was already boarding, he saw two young men in blue robes at the check-in desk for a flight to Houston. Their shaved heads, the gold rings in their left ears, and their white tennis shoes identified them as members of the same cult as the group that he had encountered around the bonfire on the beach only hours earlier.

One of these men was black, the other was white, and both were carrying NEC laptops. The black man checked his wristwatch, which appeared to be a gold Rolex. Whatever their religious beliefs might be, they evidently didn’t take vows of poverty or have much in common with the Hare Krishnas.

Although this was the first time Joe had been aboard an aircraft since receiving the news about Michelle and the girls a year earlier, he was not nervous during the trip to Denver. Initially he worried that he would have an anxiety attack and begin to relive the plunge of Flight 353 as he had so often imagined it, but after just a few minutes, he knew that he would be all right.

He wasn’t apprehensive about dying in another crash. Perversely, if he perished in the same way that his wife and daughters had been taken, he would be calm and without fear on the long ride down into the earth, because such a fate would seem like a welcome return to balance in the universe, an open circle closed, a wrongness made right at last.

Of greater concern to him was what he might learn from Barbara Christman at the far end of his journey.

He was convinced that she didn’t trust the privacy of telephone conversations but would talk with him face-to-face. He didn’t think he had imagined the note of disappointment in her voice when she learned that he was not calling her from Colorado Springs. Likewise, her speech about the dangers of believing in conspiracy theories and the need for grief therapy, although compassionate and well stated, sounded to Joe as though it had been intended less for him than for the ears of eavesdroppers.

If Barbara Christman was carrying a burden that she longed to put down, the solution to the mystery of Flight 353 might be close at hand.

Joe wanted to know the whole truth, needed to know, but dreaded knowing. The peace of indifference would forever be beyond his reach if he learned that men, not fate, had been responsible for taking his family from him. The journey toward this particular truth was not an ascension toward a glorious light but a descent into darkness, chaos, the maelstrom.

He’d brought the printouts of four articles about Teknologik, which he had gotten from Randy Colway’s computer at the Post. The business-section prose was so dry, however — and his attention span so short after only three and a half hours of sleep — that he wasn’t able to concentrate.

He dozed fitfully across the Mojave Desert and the Rockies: two hours and fifteen minutes of half-formed dreams lit by oil lamps and the glow of digital clocks, in which understanding seemed about to wash over him but from which he woke still thirsty for answers.

In Denver, the humidity was unusually high and the sky overcast. To the west, the mountains lay buried under slow avalanches of early-morning fog.

In addition to his driver’s license, he had to use a credit card as ID to obtain a rental car. He put down a cash deposit, however, trying to avoid the actual use of the card, which might leave a trail of plastic for anyone who was tracking him.

Though no one on the plane or in the terminal had seemed to be especially interested in him, Joe parked the car at a shopping center not far from the airport and searched it inside and out, under the hood and in the trunk, for a transponder like the one that he had found on his Honda the previous day. The rental Ford was clean.

From the shopping center, he wove a tangled course along surface streets, checking his rearview mirror for a tail. Convinced that he was not being followed, he finally picked up Interstate 25 and drove south.

Mile by mile, Joe pushed the Ford harder, eventually ignoring the speed limit, because he became increasingly convinced that if he didn’t get to Barbara Christman’s house in time, he would find her dead by her own hand. Eviscerated. Immolated. Or with the back of her head blown out.

10

In Colorado Springs, Joe found Barbara Christman’s address in the telephone book. She lived in a diminutive jewel-box Victorian, Queen Anne style, exuberantly decorated with elaborate millwork.

When she came to the door in answer to the bell, she spoke before Joe had a chance to identify himself. “Even sooner than I expected you.”

“Are you Barbara Christman?”

“Let’s not do this here.”

“I’m not sure you know who I—”

“Yes, I know. But not here.”

“Where?”

“Is that your car at the curb?” she asked.

“The rental Ford.”

“Park it in the next block. Two blocks. Wait there, and I’ll pick you up.”

She closed the door.

Joe stood on the porch a moment longer, considering whether he should ring the bell again. Then he decided that she wasn’t likely to be planning to run out on him.

Two blocks south of Christman’s house, he parked beside a grade-school playground. The swings, seesaws, and jungle gyms were unused on this Sunday morning. Otherwise, he would have parked elsewhere, to be safe from the silvery laughter of children.

He got out of the car and looked north. There was no sign of the woman yet.

Joe consulted his wristwatch. Ten minutes till ten o’clock, Pacific time, an hour later here.

In eight hours, he would have to be back in Westwood to meet Demi — and Rose.

Along the sleepy street came a cat’s paw of warm wind searching the boughs of the pine trees for hidden birds. It rustled the leaves on the branches of a nearby group of paper birches with trunks as luminous white as choirboys’ surplices.

Under a sky gray-white with lowering mist to the west and drear with gunmetal thunderheads to the east, the day seemed to carry a heavy freight of dire portents. The flesh prickled on the nape of Joe’s neck, and he began to feel as exposed as a red bull’s-eye target on a shooting range.

When a Chevy sedan approached from the south and Joe saw three men in it, he moved casually around to the passenger’s side of the rental car, using it for cover in the event that they opened fire on him. They passed without glancing in his direction.

A minute later, Barbara Christman arrived in an emerald-green Ford Explorer. She smelled faintly of bleach and soap, and he suspected she had been doing the laundry when he’d rung her bell.

As they headed south from the grade school, Joe said, “Ms. Christman, I’m wondering — where have you seen a photograph of me?”

“Never have,” she said. “And call me Barbara.”

“So, Barbara…when you opened your door a bit ago, how did you know who I was?”

“Hasn’t been a stranger at my door in ages. Anyway, last night when you called back and I didn’t answer, you let it ring more than thirty times.”

“Forty.”

“Even a persistent man would have given up after twenty. When it kept ringing and ringing, I knew you were more than persistent. Driven. I knew you’d come soon.”

She was about fifty, dressed in Rockports, faded jeans, and a periwinkle-blue chambray shirt. Her thick white hair looked as if it had been cut by a good barber rather than styled by a beautician. Well tanned, with a broad face as open and inviting as a golden field of Kansas wheat, she appeared honest and trustworthy. Her stare was direct, and Joe liked her for the aura of efficiency that she projected and for the crisp self-assurance in her voice.

“Who are you afraid of, Barbara?”

“Don’t know who they are.”

“I’m going to get the answer somewhere,” he warned.

“What I’m telling you is the truth, Joe. Never have known who they are. But they pulled strings I never thought could be pulled.”

“To control the results of a Safety Board investigation?”

“The Board still has integrity, I think. But these people…they were able to make some evidence disappear.”

“What evidence?”

Braking to a halt at a red traffic signal, she said, “What finally made you suspicious, Joe, after all this time? What about the story didn’t ring true?”

“It all rang true — until I met the sole survivor.”

She stared blankly at him, as though he had spoken in a foreign language of which she had no slightest knowledge.

“Rose Tucker,” he said.

There seemed to be no deception in her hazel eyes but genuine puzzlement in her voice when she said, “Who’s she?”

“She was aboard Flight 353. Yesterday she visited the graves of my wife and daughters while I was there.”

“Impossible. No one survived. No one could have survived.”

“She was on the passenger manifest.”

Speechless, Barbara stared at him.

He said, “And some dangerous people are hunting for her — and now for me. Maybe the same people who made that evidence disappear.”

A car horn blared behind them. The traffic signal had changed to green.

While she drove, Barbara reached to the dashboard controls and lowered the fan speed of the air conditioning, as though chilled. “No one could have survived,” she insisted. “This was not your usual hit-and-skip crash, where there’s a greater or lesser chance of any survivors depending on the angle of impact and lots of other factors. This was straight down, head-in, catastrophic.”

“Head-in? I always thought it tumbled, broke apart.”

“Didn’t you read any newspaper accounts?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t. I just imagined…”

“Not a hit-and-skip, like most,” she repeated. “Almost straight into the ground. Sort of similar to Hopewell, September ’94. A USAir 737 went down in Hopewell Township, on its way to Pittsburgh, and was just…obliterated. Being aboard Flight 353 would have been…I’m sorry, Joe, but it would have been like standing in the middle of a bomb blast. A big bomb blast.”

“There were some remains they were never able to identify.”

“So little left to identify. The aftermath of something like this…it’s more gruesome than you can imagine, Joe. Worse than you want to know, believe me.”

He recalled the small caskets in which his family’s remains had been conveyed to him, and the strength of the memory compressed his heart into a small stone.

Eventually, when he could speak again, he said, “My point is that there were a number of passengers for whom the pathologists were unable to find any remains. People who just…ceased to exist in an instant. Disappeared.”

“A large majority of them,” she said, turning onto State Highway 115 and heading south under a sky as hard as an iron kettle.

“Maybe this Rose Tucker didn’t just…didn’t just disintegrate on impact like the others. Maybe she disappeared because she walked away from the scene.”

“Walked?”

“The woman I met wasn’t disfigured or crippled. She appeared to have come through it without a scar.”

Adamantly shaking her head, Barbara said, “She’s lying to you, Joe. Flat out lying. She wasn’t on that plane. She’s playing some sort of sick game.”

“I believe her.”

“Why?”

“Because of things I’ve seen.”

“What things?”

“I don’t think I should tell you. Knowing…that might put you as deep in the hole as I am. I don’t want to endanger you any more than I have to. Just by coming here, I might be causing you trouble.”

After a silence, she said, “You must have seen something pretty extraordinary to make you believe in a survivor.”

“Stranger than you can imagine.”

“Still…I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Good. That’s safer.”

They had driven out of Colorado Springs, through suburbs, into an area of ranches, traveling into increasingly rural territory. To the east, high plains dwindled into an arid flatness. To the west, the land rose gradually through fields and woods toward foothills half screened by gray mist.

He said, “You’re not just driving aimlessly, are you?”

“If you want to fully understand what I’m going to tell you, it’ll help to see.” She glanced away from the road, and her concern for him was evident in her kind eyes. “Do you think you can handle it, Joe?”

“We’re going…there.”

“Yes. If you can handle it.”

Joe closed his eyes and strove to suppress a welling anxiety. In his imagination, he could hear the screaming of the airliner’s engines.

The crash scene was thirty to forty miles south and slightly west of Colorado Springs.

Barbara Christman was taking him to the meadow where the 747 had shattered like a vessel of glass.

“Only if you can handle it,” she said gently.

The substance of his heart seemed to condense even further, until it was like a black hole in his chest.

The Explorer slowed. She was going to pull to the shoulder of the highway.

Joe opened his eyes. Even the thunderhead-filtered light seemed too bright. He willed himself to be deaf to the airplane-engine roar in his mind.

“No,” he said. “Don’t stop. Let’s go. I’ll be all right. I’ve got nothing to lose now.”

They turned off the state highway onto an oiled-gravel road and soon off the gravel onto a dirt lane that led west through tall poplars with vertical branches streaming skyward like green fire. The poplars gave way to tamarack and birches, which surrendered the ground to white pines as the lane narrowed and the woods thickened.

Increasingly pitted and rutted, wandering among the trees as though weary and losing its way, the lane finally pulled a blanket of weeds across itself and curled up to rest under a canopy of evergreen boughs.

Parking and switching off the engine, Barbara said, “We’ll walk from here. It’s no more than half a mile, and the brush isn’t especially thick.”

Although the forest was not as dense and primeval as the vast stands of pine and spruce and fir on the fog-robed mountains looming to the west, civilization was so far removed that the soulful hush was reminiscent of a cathedral between services. Broken only by the snapping of twigs and the soft crunch of dry pine needles underfoot, this prayerful silence was, for Joe, as oppressive as the imagined roar of jet engines that sometimes shook him into an anxiety attack. It was a stillness full of eerie, disturbing expectation.

He trailed Barbara between columns of tall trees, under green vaults. Even in the late morning, the shadows were as deep as those in a monastery cloister.

The air was crisp with the aroma of pine. Musty with the scent of toadstools and natural mulch.

Step by step, a chill as damp as ice melt seeped from his bones and through his flesh, then out of his brow, his scalp, the nape of his neck, the curve of his spine. The day was warm, but he was not.

Eventually he could see an end to the ranks of trees, an open space past the last of the white pines. Though the forest had begun to seem claustrophobic, he was now reluctant to forsake the crowding greenery for the revelation that lay beyond.

Shivering, he followed Barbara through the last trees into the bottom of a gently rising meadow. The clearing was three hundred yards wide from north to south — and twice that long from the east, where they had entered it, to the wooded crest at the west end.

The wreckage was gone, but the meadow felt haunted.

The previous winter’s melting snow and the heavy spring rains had spread a healing poultice of grass across the torn, burnt land. The grass and a scattering of yellow wildflowers, however, could not conceal the most terrible wound in the earth: a ragged-edged, ovate depression approximately ninety yards by sixty yards. This enormous crater lay uphill from them, in the northwest quadrant of the meadow.

“Impact point,” Barbara Christman said.

They set out side by side, walking toward the precise place where three-quarters of a million pounds had come screaming out of the night sky into the earth, but Joe quickly fell behind Barbara and then came to a stop altogether. His soul was as gouged as this field, plowed by pain.

Barbara returned to Joe and, without a word, slipped her hand into his. He held tightly to her, and they set out again.

As they approached the impact point, he saw the fire-blackened trees along the north perimeter of the forest, which had served as backdrop to the crash-scene photograph in the Post. Some pines had been stripped bare of needles by the flames; their branches were charred stubs. A score of seared aspens, as brittle as charcoal, imprinted a stark geometry on the dismal sky.

They stopped at the eroded rim of the crater; the uneven floor below them was as deep as a two-story house in some places. Although patches of grass bristled from the sloping walls, it did not thrive on the bottom of the depression, where shattered slabs of gray stone showed through a thin skim of dirt and brown leaves deposited by the wind.

Barbara said, “It hit with enough force to blast away thousands of years of accumulated soil and still fracture the bedrock beneath.”

Even more shaken by the power of the crash than he had expected to be, Joe turned his attention to the somber sky and struggled to breathe.

An eagle appeared out of the mountain mists to the west, flying eastward on a course as unwaveringly straight as a latitude line on a map. Silhouetted against the gray-white overcast, it was almost as dark as Poe’s raven, but as it passed under that portion of sky that was blue-black with a still-brewing storm, it appeared to grow as pale as a spirit.

Joe turned to watch the bird as it passed overhead and away.

“Flight 353,” Barbara said, “was tight on course and free of problems when it passed the Goodland navigational beacon, which is approximately a hundred and seventy air miles east of Colorado Springs. By the time it ended here, it was twenty-eight miles off course.”

Encouraging Joe to stay with her on a slow walk around the crater rim, Barbara Christman summarized the known details of the doomed 747 from its takeoff until its premature descent.

Out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City, Flight 353, bound for Los Angeles, ordinarily would have followed a more southerly corridor than the one it traveled that August evening. Due to thunderstorms throughout the South and tornado warnings in the southern Midwest, another route was considered. More important, the headwinds on the northerly corridor were considerably less severe than those on the southern; by taking the path of least resistance, flight time and fuel consumption could be substantially reduced. Consequently, the Nationwide flight-route planning manager assigned the aircraft to Jet Route 146.

Departing JFK only four minutes behind schedule, the nonstop to LAX sailed high over northern Pennsylvania, Cleveland, the southern curve of Lake Erie, and southern Michigan. Routed south of Chicago, it crossed the Mississippi River from Illinois to Iowa at the city of Davenport. In Nebraska, passing the Lincoln navigational beacon, Flight 353 adjusted course southwest toward the next major forward beacon, at Goodland in the northwest corner of Kansas.

The battered flight-data recorder, salvaged from the wreckage, eventually revealed that the pilot made the proper course correction from Goodland toward the next major forward beacon, at Blue Mesa, Colorado. But about a hundred and ten miles past Goodland, something went wrong. Although it experienced no loss of altitude or airspeed, the 747 began to veer off its assigned flight path, now traveling west-southwest at a seven-degree deviation from Jet Route 146.

For two minutes, nothing more happened — and then the aircraft made a sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, as if the pilot had begun to recognize that he was off course. But just three seconds later, this was followed by an equally sudden four-degree heading change, nose left.

Analysis of all thirty parameters covered by this particular flight-data recorder seemed to confirm that the heading changes were either yawing of the craft or resulted in yawing. First the tail section had swung to the left — or port — while the nose had gone right — starboard — and then the tail had swung to the right and the nose to the left, skidding in midair almost as a car might fishtail on an icy highway.

Post-crash data analysis also gave rise to the suspicion that the pilot might have used the rudder to execute these abrupt changes of heading — which made no sense. Virtually all yaws result from movements of the rudder, the vertical panel in the tail, but pilots of commercial jets eschew use of the rudder out of consideration for their passengers. A severe yaw creates lateral acceleration, which can throw standing passengers to the floor, spill food and drinks, and induce a general state of alarm.

Captain Delroy Blane and his copilot, Victor Santorelli, were veterans with forty-two years of commercial piloting between them. For all heading changes, they would have used the ailerons — hinged panels on the trailing edge of each wing — which facilitate gentle banking turns. They would have resorted to the rudder only in the event of engine failure on takeoff or when landing in a strong crosswind.

The flight-data recorder had shown that eight seconds after the first yawing incident, Flight 353’s heading again abruptly changed three degrees, nose left, followed two seconds later by a second and even more severe shift of seven degrees to the left. Both engines were at full performance and bore no responsibility for the heading change or the subsequent disaster.

As the front of the plane swung sharply to port, the starboard wing would have been moving faster through the air, rapidly gaining lift. When the starboard wing lifted, it forced the port wing down. During the next fateful twenty-two seconds, the banking angle grew to one hundred forty-six degrees, while the nose-down pitch reached eighty-four degrees.

In that incredibly short span of time, the 747 went from earth-parallel flight to a deadly roll while virtually standing on end.

Pilots with the experience of Blane and Santorelli should have been able to correct the yaw quickly, before it became a roll. Even then, they should have been able to pull the aircraft out of the roll before it became an inevitable plunge. Under any scenario that the human-performance experts could conceive, the captain would have turned the control wheel hard to the right and would have used the ailerons to bring the 747 back to level flight.

Instead, perhaps because of a singular hydraulic-systems failure that defeated the pilots’ efforts, Nationwide Flight 353 rolled into a steep dive. With all jet engines still firing, it rocketed into this meadow, splashing millennia of accumulated soil as if it were water, boring to the bedrock with an impact powerful enough to crack the steel blades of the Pratt and Whitney power plants as though they were made of balsa wood, sufficiently loud to shake all the winged residents out of the trees halfway up the slopes of distant Pikes Peak.

Halfway around the impact crater, Barbara and Joe stopped, now facing east toward beetling thunderheads, less concerned about the pending storm than about the brief thunder of that year-ago night.

Three hours after the crash, the headquarters contingent of the investigating team departed Washington from National Airport. They made the journey in a Gulfstream jet owned by the Federal Aviation Administration.

During the night, Pueblo County fire and police officials had quickly ascertained that there were no survivors. They pulled back so as not to disturb evidence that might help the NTSB arrive at an understanding of the cause of the disaster, and they secured the perimeter of the crash site.

By dawn, the Go-Team arrived in Pueblo, Colorado, which was closer to the incident than Colorado Springs. They were met by regional FAA officials, who were already in possession of the flight-data recorder and cockpit-voice recorder from Nationwide 353. Both devices emitted signals by which they could be located; therefore, swift retrieval from the wreckage had been possible even in darkness and even from the relative remoteness of the site.

“The recorders were put on the Gulfstream and flown back to the Safety Board’s labs in Washington,” Barbara said. “The steel jackets were badly battered, even breached, but we were hopeful the data could be extracted.”

In a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles driven by county emergency-response personnel, the Safety Board team was conveyed to the crash site for its initial survey. The secured perimeter extended to the gravel road that turned off State Highway 115, and gathered along both sides of the paved highway in that vicinity were fire trucks, black-and-whites, ambulances, drab sedans from federal and state agencies, coroners’ vans, as well as scores of cars and pickups belonging to the genuinely concerned, the curious, and the ghoulish.

“It’s always chaos,” Barbara said. “Lots of television vans with satellite dishes. Nearly a hundred and fifty members of the press. They clamored for statements when they saw us arrive, but we didn’t have anything to say yet, and we came directly up here to the site.”

Her voice trailed away. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans.

No wind was at play. No bees moved among the wildflowers. The surrounding woods were full of motionless monk trees, which had taken vows of silence.

Joe lowered his gaze from the silent storm clouds, black with throttled thunder, to the crater where the thunder of Flight 353 was now only a memory held deep in fractured stone.

“I’m okay,” he assured Barbara, though his voice was thick. “Go on. I need to know what it was like.”

After another half minute of silence, during which she gathered her thoughts and decided how much to tell him, Barbara said, “When you arrive with the Go-Team, the first impression is always the same. Always. The smell. You never ever forget the stench. Jet fuel. Smoldering vinyl and plastic — even the new blended thermoplastics and the phenolic plastics burn under extreme conditions. There’s the stink of seared insulation, melted rubber, and…roasted flesh, biological wastes from the ruptured lavatory holding tanks and from the bodies.”

Joe forced himself to continue looking into the pit, because he would need to go away from this place with a new strength that would make it possible for him to seek justice against all odds, regardless of the power of his adversaries.

“Ordinarily,” Barbara said, “in even terribly violent crashes, you see some pieces of wreckage large enough to allow you to envision the aircraft as it once was. A wing. The empennage. A long section of fuselage. Depending on the angle of impact, you sometimes even have the nose and cockpit mostly intact.”

“In the case of Flight 353?”

“The debris was so finely chopped, so gnarled, so compacted, that on first look it was impossible to see that it had been a plane. It seemed to us that a huge portion of the mass must be missing. But it was all here in the meadow and scattered some distance into the trees uphill, west and north. All here…but for the most part there was nothing bigger than a car door. All I saw that I could identify at first glance was a portion of an engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.”

“Was this the worst crash in your experience?” Joe asked.

“Never seen one worse. Only two others to equal it — including the Pennsylvania crash in ’94, Hopewell, USAir Flight 427, en route to Pittsburgh. The one I mentioned earlier. I wasn’t the IIC on that one, but I saw it.”

“The bodies here. How were they when you arrived?”

“Joe…”

“You said no one could have survived. Why are you so sure?”

“You don’t want to know the why.” When he met her eyes, she looked away from him. “These are images that haunt your sleep, Joe. They wear away a part of your soul.”

“The bodies?” he insisted.

With both hands, she pressed her white hair back from her face. She shook her head. She put her hands in her pockets again.

Joe drew a deep breath, exhaled with a shudder, and repeated his question. “The bodies? I need to know everything I can learn. Any detail about this might be helpful. And even if this isn’t much help…it’ll keep my anger high. Right now, Barbara, I need the anger to be able to go on.”

“No bodies intact.”

“None at all?”

“None even close to intact.”

“How many of the three hundred and thirty were the pathologists finally able to identify…to find at least a few teeth from, body parts, something, anything, to tell who they were?”

Her voice was flat, studiedly emotionless, but almost a whisper. “I think slightly more than a hundred.”

“Broken, severed, mangled,” he said, hammering himself with the hard words.

“Far worse. All that immense hurtling energy released in an instant…you don’t even recognize most of the biological debris as being human. The risk of infectious disease was high from blood and tissue contamination, so we had to pull out and revisit the site only in biologically secure gear. Every piece of wreckage had to be carted away and documented by the structural specialists, of course — so to protect them we had to set up four decontamination stations out along the gravel road. Most of the wreckage had to be processed there before it moved on to a hangar at Pueblo Airport.”

Being brutal to prove to himself that his anguish would never again get the better of his anger until this quest was completed, Joe said, “It was pretty much like putting them through one of those tree-grinding machines.”

“Enough, Joe. Knowing more details can’t ever help you.”

The meadow was so utterly soundless that it might have been the ignition point of all Creation, from which God’s energies had long ago flowed toward the farthest ends of the universe, leaving only a mute vacuum.

A few fat bees, enervated by the August heat that was unable to penetrate Joe’s chill, forsook their usual darting urgency and traveled languidly across the meadow from wildflower to wildflower, as though flying in their sleep and acting out a shared dream about collecting nectar. He could hear no buzzing as the torpid gatherers went about their work.

“And the cause,” he asked, “was hydraulic-control failure — that stuff with the rudder, the yawing and then the roll?”

“You really haven’t read about it, have you?”

“Couldn’t.”

She said, “The possibility of a bomb, anomalous weather, the wake vortex from another aircraft, and various other factors were eliminated pretty early. And the structures group, twenty-nine specialists in that division of the investigation alone, studied the wreckage in the hangar in Pueblo for eight months without being able to pin down a probable cause. They suspected lots of different things at one time or another. Malfunctioning yaw dampers, for one. Or an electronics-bay door failure. Engine-mount failure looked good to them for a while. And malfunctioning thrust reversers. But they eliminated each suspicion, and no official probable cause was found.”

“How unusual is that?”

“Unusual. But sometimes we can’t pin it down. Like Hopewell in ’94. And, in fact, another 737 that went down on its approach to Colorado Springs in ’91, killing everyone aboard. So it happens, we get stumped.”

Joe realized there had been a disturbing qualifier in what she had said: no official probable cause.

Then a second realization struck him: “You took early retirement from the Safety Board about seven months ago. That’s what Mario Oliveri told me.”

“Mario. Good man. He headed the human-performance group in this investigation. But it’s been almost nine months since I quit.”

“If the structures group was still sifting the wreckage eight months after the crash…then you didn’t stay to oversee the entire inquiry, even though you were the original IIC on it.”

“Bailed out,” she acknowledged. “When it all turned sour, when evidence disappeared, when I started to make some noise about it…they put the squeeze on me. At first I tried to stay on, but I just couldn’t handle being part of a fraud. Couldn’t do the right thing and spill the beans, either, so I bailed. Not proud of it. But I’ve got a hostage to fortune, Joe.”

“Hostage to fortune. A child?”

“Denny. He’s twenty-three now, not a baby anymore, but if I ever lost him…”

Joe knew too well how she would have finished that sentence. “They threatened your son?”

Although Barbara stared into the crater before her, she was seeing a potential disaster rather than the aftermath of a real one, a personal catastrophe rather than one involving three hundred and thirty deaths.

“It happened two weeks after the crash,” she said. “I was in San Francisco, where Delroy Blane — the captain on Flight 353—had lived, overseeing a pretty intense investigation into his personal history, trying to discover any signs of psychological problems.”

“Finding anything?”

“No. He seemed like a rock-solid guy. This was also at the time when I was pressing the hardest to go public with what had happened to certain evidence. I was staying in a hotel. I’m a reasonably sound sleeper. At two-thirty in the morning, someone switched on my nightstand lamp and put a gun in my face.”

After years of waiting for Go-Team calls, Barbara had long ago overcome a tendency to shed sleep slowly. She woke to the click of the lamp switch and the flood of light as she would have awakened to the ringing telephone: instantly alert and clearheaded.

She might have cried out at the sight of the intruder, except that her shock pinched off her voice and her breath.

The gunman, about forty, had large sad eyes, hound-dog eyes, a nose bashed red by the slow blows of two decades of drink, and a sensuous mouth. His thick lips never quite closed, as though waiting for the next treat that couldn’t be resisted — cigarette, whiskey, pastry, or breast.

His voice was as soft and sympathetic as a mortician’s but with no unctuousness. He indicated that the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and he assured her that if she tried to call for help, he would blow her brains out with no concern that anyone beyond the room would hear the shot.

She tried to ask who he was, what he wanted.

Hushing her, he sat on the edge of her bed.

He had nothing against her personally, he said, and it would depress him to have to kill her. Besides, if the IIC of the probe of Flight 353 were to be found murdered, inconvenient questions might be asked.

The sensualist’s bosses, whoever they might be, could not afford inconvenient questions at this time, on this issue.

Barbara realized that a second man was in the room. He had been standing in the corner near the bathroom door, on the other side of the bed from the gunman.

This one was ten years younger than the first. His smooth pink face and choirboy eyes gave him an innocent demeanor that was belied by a disquietingly eager smile that came and went like the flickering of a serpent’s tongue.

The older man pulled the covers off Barbara and politely asked her to get out of bed. They had a few things to explain to her, he said. And they wanted to be certain that she was alert and attentive throughout, because lives depended on her understanding and believing what they had come to tell her.

In her pajamas, she stood obediently while the younger man, with a flurry of brief smiles, went to the desk, withdrew the chair from the kneehole, and stood it opposite the foot of the bed. She sat as instructed.

She had been wondering how they had gotten in, as she’d engaged both the deadbolt and the security chain on the door to the corridor. Now she saw that both of the doors between this hotel room and the next — which could be connected to form a suite for those guests who required more space — stood open. The mystery remained, however, for she was certain that the door on this side had been securely locked with a deadbolt when she had gone to bed.

At the direction of the older man, the younger produced a roll of strapping tape and a pair of scissors. He secured Barbara’s wrists tightly to the arms of the straight-back chair, wrapping the tape several times.

Frightened of being restrained and helpless, Barbara nonetheless submitted because she believed that the sad-eyed man would deliver on his threat to shoot her point-blank in the head if she resisted. With his sensuous mouth, as though sampling the contents of a bonbon box, he had savored the words blow your brains out.

When the younger man cut a six-inch length of tape and pressed it firmly across Barbara’s mouth, then secured that piece by winding a continuous length of tape twice around her head, she panicked for a moment but then regained control of herself. They were not going to pinch her nose shut and smother her. If they had come here to kill her, she would be dead already.

As the younger man retreated with his tremulous smiles to a shadowy corner, the sensualist sat on the foot of the bed, opposite Barbara. Their knees were no more than a few inches apart.

Putting his pistol aside on the rumpled sheets, he took a knife from a jacket pocket. A switchblade. He flicked it open.

Her fear soaring again, Barbara could manage to draw only quick, shallow breaths. The resultant whistling in her nose amused the man sitting with her.

From another jacket pocket, he withdrew a snack-size round of Gouda cheese. Using the knife, he removed the cellophane wrapper and then peeled off the red wax skin that prevented the Gouda from developing mold.

Carefully eating thin slivers of cheese off the wickedly sharp blade, he told Barbara that he knew where her son, Denny, lived and worked. He recited the addresses.

He also knew that Denny had been married to Rebekah for thirteen months, nine days, and — he consulted his watch, calculated — fifteen hours. He knew that Rebekah was six months pregnant with their first child, a girl, whom they were going to name Felicia.

To prevent harm from befalling Denny and his bride, Barbara was expected to accept the official story about what had happened to the tape from the cockpit-voice recorder on Flight 353—a story that she had rejected in discussions with her colleagues and that she had set out to disprove. She was also expected to forget what she had heard on the enhanced version of that tape.

If she continued to seek the truth of the situation or attempted to express her concerns to either the press or the public, Denny and Rebekah would disappear. In the deep basement of a private redoubt soundproofed and equipped for prolonged and difficult interrogations, the sensualist and his associates would shackle Denny, tape open his eyes, and force him to watch while they killed Rebekah and the unborn child.

Then they would surgically remove one of his fingers every day for ten days — taking elaborate measures to control bleeding, shock, and infection. They would keep him alive and alert, though steadily less whole. On the eleventh and twelfth days, they would remove his ears.

They had a full month of imaginative surgery planned.

Every day, as they took another piece of him, they would tell Denny that they would release him to his mother without further harm if she would only agree to cooperate with them in a conspiracy of silence that was, after all, in the national interest. Vitally important defense matters were involved here.

This would not be entirely true. The part about the national interest was true, from their point of view, at least, even though they could not, of course, explain to Barbara how the knowledge she possessed was a threat to her country. The part about her being able to earn Denny’s release by cooperation would not be true, however, because once she failed to honor a pledge of silence, she would not be given a second chance, and her son would be forever lost to her. They would deceive Denny solely to ensure that he would spend the last month of his life desperately wondering why his mother had so stubbornly condemned him to such excruciating pain and horrible disfigurement. By the end, half mad or worse, in deep spiritual misery, he would curse her vehemently and beg God to let her rot in Hell.

As he continued to carve the tiny wheel of Gouda and serve himself off the dangerous point of the blade, the sensualist assured Barbara that no one — not the police, not the admittedly clever FBI, not the mighty United States Army — could keep Denny and Rebekah safe forever. He claimed to be employed by an organization with such bottomless resources and extensive connections that it was capable of compromising and subverting any institution or agency of the federal or state governments.

He asked her to nod if she believed him.

She did believe him. Implicitly. Without reservation. His seductive voice, which seemed to lick each of his hideous threats to savor the texture and astringency of it, was filled with the quiet confidence and smug superiority of a megalomaniac who carries the badge of a secret authority, receives a comfortable salary with numerous fringe benefits, and knows that in his old age he will be able to rely upon the cushion of a generous civil-service pension.

He then asked her if she intended to cooperate.

With guilt and humiliation but also with utter sincerity, she nodded again. Yes. She would cooperate. Yes.

Studying a pale oval of cheese like a tiny filleted fish on the point of the blade, he said that he wanted her to be deeply impressed with his determination to ensure her cooperation, so impressed that she would be in no danger of forsaking the pledge she had just made to him. Therefore, on their way out of the hotel, he and his partner would select, at random, an employee or perhaps a guest — someone who just happened to cross their path — and would kill that person on the spot. Three shots: two in the chest, one in the head.

Stunned, Barbara protested from behind the gag, contorting her face in an effort to twist the tape and free her mouth. But it was pulled cruelly tight, and her lips were stuck firmly to the adhesive, and the only argument that she could get out was a pained, muffled, wordless pleading. She didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. She was going to cooperate. There was no reason to impress her with their seriousness. No reason. She already believed in their seriousness.

Never taking his great sad eyes from her, without saying another word, he slowly finished his cheese.

His unwavering stare seemed to cause a power backflow, draining her of energy. Yet she could not look away.

When he had consumed the final morsel, he wiped the blade of his knife on the sheets. Then he folded it into the handle and returned the weapon to his pocket.

Sucking on his teeth and rolling his tongue slowly around his mouth, he gathered up the shredded cellophane and the peels of red wax. He rose from the bed and deposited the trash in the waste basket beside the desk.

The younger man stepped out of the shadowy corner. His thin but eager smile no longer fluttered uncertainly; it was fixed.

From behind the strapping tape, Barbara was still attempting to protest the murder of an innocent person when the older man returned to her and, with the edge of his right hand, chopped hard at the side of her neck.

As a scintillant darkness sprayed across her field of vision, she started to slump forward. She felt the chair tipping sideways. She was unconscious before her head hit the carpet.

For perhaps twenty minutes she dreamed of severed fingers in preserving sheaths of red wax. In shrimp-pink faces, fragile smiles broke like strings of pearls, the bright teeth bouncing and rolling across the floor, but in the black crescent between the curved pink lips, new pearls formed, and a choirboy eye blinked blue. There were hound-dog eyes too, as black and shiny as leeches, in which she saw not her reflection but images of Denny’s screaming, earless face.

When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.

Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.

She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.

Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.

There was no point in warning the hotel’s night manager that one of his employees or guests was in danger. If the gunman had kept his threat to impress her with a senseless, random killing, he had pulled the trigger already. He and his companion would have left the hotel at least half an hour ago.

Wincing at the throbbing pain in her neck, she went to the door that connected her room with theirs. She opened it and checked the inner face. Her privacy deadbolt latch was backed by a removable brass plate fixed in place with screws, which allowed access to the mechanism of her lock from the other side. The other room’s door featured no such access plate.

The shiny brass looked new. She was certain that it had been installed shortly before she checked into the hotel — by the gunman and his companion acting either clandestinely or with the assistance of a hotel engineer. A clerk at the front desk was paid or coerced to put her in this room rather than any other.

Barbara was not much of a drinker, but she raided the honor bar for a two-shot miniature of vodka and a cold bottle of orange juice. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely pour the ingredients into a glass. She drank the screwdriver straight down, opened another miniature, mixed a second drink, took a swallow of it — then went into the bathroom and threw up.

She felt unclean. With dawn less than an hour away, she took a long shower, scrubbing herself so hard and standing in water so hot that her skin grew red and stung unbearably.

Although she knew that it was pointless to change hotels, that they could find her again if they wanted her, she couldn’t stay any longer in this place. She packed and, an hour after first light, went down to the front desk to pay her bill.

The ornate lobby was full of San Francisco policemen — uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives.

From the wide-eyed cashier, Barbara learned that sometime after three o’clock in the morning, a young room-service waiter had been shot to death in a service corridor near the kitchen. Twice in the chest and once in the head.

The body had not been discovered immediately because, curiously, no one had heard gunfire.

Harried by fear that seemed to push her forward like a rude hand in the back, she checked out. She took a taxi to another hotel.

The day was high and blue. The city’s famous fog was already pulling back across the bay into a towering palisade beyond the Golden Gate, of which she had a limited view from her new room.

She was an aeronautical engineer. A pilot. She held a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia University. She had worked hard to become the only current female IIC working air crashes for the National Transportation Safety Board. When her husband had walked out on her seventeen years ago, she had raised Denny alone and raised him well. Now all that she had achieved seemed to have been gathered into the hand of the sad-eyed sensualist, wadded with the cellophane and the peels of red wax, and thrown into the trash can.

After canceling her appointments for the day, Barbara hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. She closed the draperies and curled on the bed in her new room.

Quaking fear became quaking grief. She wept uncontrollably for the dead room-service waiter whose name she didn’t know, for Denny and Rebekah and unborn Felicia whose lives now seemed perpetually suspended on a slender thread, for her own loss of innocence and self-respect, for the three hundred and thirty people aboard Flight 353, for justice thwarted and hope lost.

A sudden wind groaned across the meadow, playing with old dry aspen leaves, like the devil counting souls and casting them away.

“I can’t let you do this,” Joe said. “I can’t let you tell me what was on the cockpit-voice recorder if there’s any chance it’s going to put your son and his family in the hands of people like that.”

“It’s not for you to decide, Joe.”

“The hell it’s not.”

“When you called from Los Angeles, I played dumb because I’ve got to assume my phone is permanently tapped, every word recorded. Actually, I don’t think it is. I don’t think they feel any need to tap it, because they know by now that they’ve got me muzzled.”

“If there’s even a chance—”

“And I know for certain I’m not being watched. My house isn’t under observation. I’d have picked up on that long ago. When I walked out on the investigation, took early retirement, sold the house in Bethesda, and came back to Colorado Springs, they wrote me off, Joe. I was broken, and they knew it.”

“You don’t seem broken to me.”

She patted his shoulder, grateful for the compliment. “I’ve rebuilt myself some. Anyway, if you weren’t followed—”

“I wasn’t. I lost them yesterday. No one could have followed me to LAX this morning.”

“Then I figure there’s no one to know we’re here or to know what I tell you. All I ask is you never say you got it from me.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you. But there’s still such a risk you’ll be taking,” he worried.

“I’ve had months to think about it, to live with it, and the way it seems to me is…They probably think I told Denny some of it, so he would know what danger he’s in, so he’d be careful, watchful.”

“Did you?”

“Not a word. What kind of a life could they have, knowing?”

“Not a normal one.”

“But now Denny, Rebekah, Felicia, and I are going to be hanging by a thread as long as this cover-up continues. Our only hope is for someone else to blow it wide open, so then what little I know about it won’t matter any more.”

The storm clouds were not only in the east now. Like an armada of incoming starships in a film about futuristic warfare, ominous black thunderheads slowly resolved out of the white mists overhead.

“Otherwise,” Barbara continued, “a year from now or two years from now, even though I’ve kept my mouth shut, they’ll decide to tie up all the loose ends. Flight 353 will be such old news that no one will connect my death or Denny’s or a handful of others to it. No suspicions will be raised if something happens to those of us with incriminating bits of information. These people, whoever the hell they are…they’ll buy insurance with a car accident here, a fire there. A faked robbery to cover a murder. A suicide.”

Through Joe’s mind passed the waking-nightmare images of Lisa burning, Georgine dead on the kitchen floor, Charlie in the blood-tinted light.

He couldn’t argue with Barbara’s assessment. She probably had it figured right.

In a sky waiting to snarl and crackle, menacing faces formed in the clouds, blind and open-mouthed, choked with anger.

Taking her first fateful step toward revelation, Barbara said, “The flight-data recorder and the cockpit-voice recorder arrived in Washington on the Gulfstream and were in the labs by three o’clock Eastern Time the day after the crash.”

“You were still just getting into the investigation here.”

“That’s right. Minh Tran — he’s an electronics engineer with the Safety Board — and a few colleagues opened the Fairchild recorder. It’s almost as large as a shoe box, jacketed in three-eighths of an inch of stainless steel. They cut it carefully, with a special saw. This particular unit had endured such violent impact that it was compressed four inches end to end — the steel just crunched up like cardboard — and one corner had been crushed, resulting in a small breach.”

“And it still functioned?”

“No. The recorder was completely destroyed. But inside the larger box is the steel memory module. It contains the tape. It was also breached. A small amount of moisture had penetrated all the way into the memory module, but the tape wasn’t entirely ruined. It had to be dried, processed, but that didn’t take long, and then Minh and a few others gathered in a soundproof listening room to run it from the beginning. There were almost three hours of cockpit conversation leading up to the crash—”

Joe said, “They don’t just run it fast forward to the last few minutes?”

“No. Something earlier in the flight, something that seemed to be of no importance to the pilots at the time, might provide clues that help us understand what we’re hearing in the moments immediately before the plane went down.”

Steadily rising, the warm wind was brisk enough now to foil the lethargic bees on their lazy quest from bloom to bloom. Surrendering the field to the oncoming storm, they departed for secret nests in the woods.

“Sometimes we get a cockpit tape that’s all but useless to us,” Barbara continued. “The recording quality’s lousy for one reason or another. Maybe the tape’s old and abraded. Maybe the microphone is the hand-held type or isn’t functioning as well as it should, too much vibration. Maybe the recording head is worn and causing distortion.”

“I would think there’d be daily maintenance, weekly replacement, when it’s something as important as this.”

“Remember, as a percentage of flights, planes rarely go down. There are costs and flight-time delays to be considered. Anyway, commercial aviation is a human enterprise, Joe. And what human enterprise ever operates to ideal standards?”

“Point taken.”

“This time there was good and bad,” she said. “Both Delroy Blane and Santorelli were wearing headsets with boom microphones, which is real damn good, much better than a hand-held. Those along with the overhead cockpit mike gave us three channels to study. On the bad side, the tape wasn’t new. It had been recorded over a lot of times and was more deteriorated than we would have liked. Worse, whatever the nature of the moisture that reached the tape, it had caused some patchy corrosion to the recording surface.”

From a back pocket of her jeans, she took a folded paper but didn’t immediately hand it to Joe.

She said, “When Minh Tran and the others listened, they found that some portions of the tape were clearly audible and others were so full of scratchy static, so garbled, they could only discern one out of four or five words.”

“What about the last minute?”

“That was one of the worst segments. It was decided that the tape would have to be cleaned and rehabilitated. Then the recording would be electronically enhanced to whatever extent possible. Bruce Laceroth, head of the Major Investigations Division, had been there to listen to the whole tape, and he called me in Pueblo, at a quarter past seven, Eastern Time, to tell me the status of the recording. They were stowing it for the night, going to start work with it again in the morning. It was depressing.”

High above them, the eagle returned from the east, pale against the pregnant bellies of the clouds, still flying straight and true with the weight of the pending storm on its wings.

“Of course, that whole day had been depressing,” Barbara said. “We’d brought in refrigerated trucks from Denver to collect all the human remains from the site, which had to be completed before we could begin to deal with the pieces of the plane itself. There was the usual organizational meeting, which is always exhausting, because so many interest groups — the airline, the manufacturer of the plane, the supplier of the power plants, the Airline Pilots Association, lots of others — all want to bend the proceedings to serve their interests as much as possible. Human nature — and not the prettier part of it. So you have to be reasonably diplomatic but also damn tough to keep the process truly impartial.”

“And there was the media,” he said, condemning his own kind so she wouldn’t have to do it.

“Everywhere. Anyway, I’d only slept less than three hours the previous night, before I’d been awakened by the Go-Team call, and there was no chance even to doze on the Gulfstream from National to Pueblo. I was like the walking dead when I hit the sheets a little before midnight — but back there in Washington, Minh Tran was still at it.”

“The electronics engineer who cut open the recorder?”

Staring at the folded white paper that she had taken from her hip pocket, turning it over and over in her hands, Barbara said, “You have to understand about Minh. His family were Vietnamese boat people. Survived the communists after the fall of Saigon and then pirates at sea, even a typhoon. He was ten at the time, so he knew early that life was a struggle. To survive and prosper, he expected to give a hundred and ten percent.”

“I have friends…had friends who were Vietnamese immigrants,” Joe said. “Quite a culture. A lot of them have a work ethic that would break a plow horse.”

“Exactly. When everyone else went home from the labs that night at a quarter past seven, they’d put in a long day. People at the Safety Board are pretty dedicated…but Minh more so. He didn’t leave. He made a dinner of whatever he could get out of the vending machines, and he stayed to clean the tape and then to work on the last minute of it. Digitize the sound, load it in a computer, and then try to separate the static and other extraneous noises from the voices of the pilots and from the actual sounds that occurred aboard the aircraft. The layers of static proved to be so specifically patterned that the computer was able to help strip them away fairly quickly. Because the boom mikes had delivered strong signals to the recorder, Minh was able to clarify the pilots’ voices under the junk noise. What he heard was extraordinary. Bizarre.”

She handed the folded white paper to Joe.

He accepted but didn’t open it. He was half afraid to see what it contained.

“At ten minutes till four in the morning Washington time, ten till two in Pueblo, Minh called me,” Barbara said. “I’d told the hotel operator to hold all calls, I needed my sleep, but Minh talked his way through. He played the tape for me…and we discussed it. I always have a cassette recorder with me, because I like to tape all meetings myself and have my own transcripts prepared. So I got my machine and held it to the phone to make my own copy. I didn’t want to wait until Minh got a clean tape to me by courier. After Minh hung up, I sat at the desk in my room and listened to the last exchanges between the pilots maybe ten or twelve times. Then I got out my notebook and made a handwritten transcript of it, because sometimes things appear different to you when you read them than when you listen. Occasionally the eye sees nuances that the ear misses.”

Joe now knew what he held in his hand. He could tell by the thickness that there were three sheets of paper.

Barbara said, “Minh had called me first. He intended to call Bruce Laceroth, then the chairman and the vice chairman of the Board — if not all five Board members — so each of them could hear the tape himself. It wasn’t standard protocol, but this was a strange and unprecedented situation. I’m sure Minh got to at least one of those people — though they all deny hearing from him. We’ll never know for sure, because Minh Tran died in a fire at the labs shortly before six o’clock that same morning, approximately two hours after he called me in Pueblo.”

“Jesus.”

“A very intense fire. An impossibly intense fire.”

Surveying the trees that surrounded the meadow, Joe expected to see the pale faces of watchers in the deep shadows of the woods. When he and Barbara had first arrived, the site had struck him as remote, but now he felt as exposed and vulnerable as if he had been standing in the middle of any intersection in L.A.

He said, “Let me guess — the original tape from the cockpit recorder was destroyed in the lab fire.”

“Supposedly burned to powder, vanished, no trace, gone, good-bye,” Barbara said.

“What about the computer that was processing the digitized version?”

“Scorched garbage. Nothing in it salvageable.”

“But you still have your copy.”

She shook her head. “I left the cassette in my hotel room while I went to a breakfast meeting. The contents of the cockpit tape were so explosive, I didn’t intend to share it right away with everyone on the team. Until we’d had time to think it through, we needed to be careful about when and how we released it.”

“Why?”

“The pilot was dead, but his reputation was at stake. His family would be devastated if he was blamed. We had to be absolutely sure. If the cause was laid in Captain Blane’s lap, then tens of millions — even hundreds of millions — of dollars’ worth of wrongful-death litigation would ensue. We had to act with due diligence. My plan was to bring Mario back to my room after breakfast to hear the tape, just the two of us.”

“Mario Oliveri,” Joe said, referring to the man in Denver who had told him last night that Barbara had retired and moved back to Colorado Springs.

“Yeah. As head of the human-performance group, Mario’s thoughts were more important to me at that moment than anyone’s. But just as we were finishing breakfast, we got word about the fire at the labs — about poor Minh. By the time I got back to my room with Mario, the copy of the tape I’d made over the phone was blank.”

“Stolen and replaced.”

“Or just erased on my own machine. I guess Minh told someone that I’d duped it long-distance.”

“Right then you must have known.”

She nodded. “Something was very wrong. Something stank.”

Her mop of hair was as white as the feathers on the head of the eagle that had overflown them, but until this moment she had seemed younger than fifty. Now she suddenly seemed older.

“Something wrong,” he said, “but you couldn’t quite believe it.”

“My life was the Safety Board. I was proud to be part of it. Still am, Joe. They’re damn good people.”

“Did you tell Mario what was on the tape?”

“Yeah.”

“What was his reaction?”

“Amazement. Disbelief, I think.”

“Did you show him the transcript you’d made?”

She was silent a moment. Then: “No.”

“Why not?”

“My hackles were up.”

“You didn’t trust anyone.”

“A fire that intense…there must have been an accelerant.”

“Arson,” Joe said.

“But no one ever raised the possibility. Except me. I don’t have faith in the integrity of their investigation of that lab fire at all. Not at all.”

“What did the autopsy on Minh reveal? If he was murdered and the fire set to cover it—”

“If he was, they couldn’t prove it by what was left of the body. He was virtually cremated. The thing is…he was a really nice guy, Joe. He was sweet. He loved his job because he believed what he did would save lives, help to prevent other crashes. I hate these people, whoever they are.”

Among the white pines at the foot of the meadow, near where Joe and Barbara had first entered the clearing, something moved: a shadow gliding through deeper shadows, dun against purple.

Joe held his breath. He squinted but could not identify what he had briefly glimpsed.

Barbara said, “I think it was just a deer.”

“If it wasn’t?”

“Then we’re dead whether we finish this talk or not,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone that revealed the bleak and paranoid new world order in which she lived following Flight 353.

He said, “The fact that your tape was erased — didn’t that raise anyone’s suspicions?”

“The consensus was that I’d been tired. Three hours’ sleep the night of the crash — then only a few hours the next night before Minh called and woke me. Poor bleary-eyed Barbara. I’d sat listening to the tape over and over, over and over, and at the end I must have pressed the wrong button — you know? — and erased it without realizing what I’d done.” Her face twisted with sarcasm. “You can see how it must have happened.”

“Any chance of that?”

“None whatsoever.”

Though Joe unfolded the three sheets of paper, he didn’t yet begin to read them.

He said, “Why didn’t they believe you when you told them what you’d heard on the tape? They were your colleagues. They knew you to be a responsible person.”

“Maybe some of them did believe it — and didn’t want to. Maybe some of them just chalked it up to my fatigue. I’d been fighting an ear infection for weeks, and it had worn me down even before Pueblo. Maybe they took that into account. I don’t know. And there’s one or two who just plain don’t like me. Who among us is universally loved? Not me. Too pushy. Too opinionated. Anyway, it was all moot — because without a tape, there was no proof of the exchanges between Blane and Santorelli.”

“When did you finally tell someone you’d made a transcript word for word?”

“I was saving that. I was trying to figure the right moment, the right context in which to mention it — preferably once the investigation turned up some detail that would support what I said had been on the tape.”

“Because by itself your transcript isn’t real proof.”

“Exactly. Sure, it’s better than nothing, better than memory alone, but I needed to augment it with something. Then those two creeps woke me in the hotel in San Francisco, and after that…Well, I just wasn’t much of a crusader any more.”

Out of the eastern forest, two deer leaped in tandem into the bottom of the meadow, a buck and a doe. They raced across the corner of the clearing, quickly disappearing into the trees on the northern perimeter.

Under the skin on the back of Joe’s neck, ticks of apprehension still burrowed and twitched.

The movement he had glimpsed earlier must have been the two deer. From their volatile entrance into the meadow, however, he inferred that they had been flushed from the trees by something — or someone — that had frightened them.

He wondered if any corner of the world would ever feel safe to him again. But he knew the answer even as the question passed through his mind: no.

No corner. Not anywhere.

Not ever.

He said, “Who do you suspect — inside the Safety Board? Who did Minh call next after you? Because that person is probably the one who told him not to pass the word any further — and then arranged to have him killed and the evidence burned.”

“It could have been any of them he was intending to call. They were all his superiors, and he would have obeyed their instructions. I’d like to think it can’t be Bruce Laceroth, because he’s a bedrock guy. He started out a grunt like the rest of us did, worked his way up. The five Board members, on the other hand, are presidential appointees, approved by the Senate for five-year terms.”

“Political hacks.”

“No, actually, the great majority of the board members over the years have been straight shooters, trying to do their best. Most of them are a credit to the agency, and others we just endure. Once in a while, yeah, one of them is slime in a suit.”

“What about the current chairman and vice chairman? You said Minh Tran was going to call them — supposing he wasn’t able to reach Laceroth first.”

“They’re not your ideal public servants. Maxine Wulce is the chairman. An attorney, young and politically ambitious, looking out for number one, a real piece of work. Wouldn’t give you two cents for her.”

“Vice chairman?”

“Hunter Parkman. Pure political patronage. He’s old money, so he doesn’t need the job, but he likes being a presidential appointee and talking crash lore at parties. Give you fifteen cents for him.”

Although he had continued to study the woods at the foot of the meadow, Joe had seen no further movement among those trees.

Far to the east, a vein of lightning pulsed briefly through the dark muscle of the storm.

He counted the seconds between the silver flash and the rumble of thunder, translating time to distance, and judged that the rain was five or six miles from them.

Barbara said, “I’ve given you only a Xerox of the transcript I wrote down that night. I’ve hidden the original away. God knows why, since I’ll never use it.”

Joe was torn between a rage to know and a fear of knowing. He sensed that in the exchanges between Captain Blane and First Officer Santorelli, he would discover new dimensions to the terror that his wife and daughters had endured.

Finally Joe focused his attention on the first page, and Barbara watched over his shoulder as he followed the text with one finger to allow her to see where he was reading.

Sounds of First Officer Santorelli returning to his seat from the lavatory. His initial comments are captured by the overhead cockpit microphone before he puts on his headset with the boom mike.

SANTORELLI: Get to L.A. (unintelligible), I’m going to chow down on so much (unintelligible), hummus, tabbouleh, lebne with string cheese, big plateful of kibby till I bust. There’s this Armenian place, it’s the best. You like Middle East food?

Three seconds of silence.

SANTORELLI: Roy? Somethin’ up?

Two seconds of silence.

SANTORELLI: What’s this? What’re we…Roy, you off the autopilot?

BLANE: One of their names is Dr. Louis Blom.

SANTORELLI: What?

BLANE: One of their names is Dr. Keith Ramlock.

SANTORELLI: (with audible concern) What’s this on the McDoo? You been in the FMC, Roy?

When Joe inquired, Barbara said, “The 747-400s use digitized avionics. The instrument panel is dominated by six of the largest cathode-ray tubes made, for the display of data. And the McDoo means MCDU, the multifunction control and display unit. There’s one beside each pilot’s seat, and they’re interconnected, so anything one pilot enters is updated on the other’s unit. They control the Honeywell/Sperry FMC, the flight management computer. The pilots input the flight plan and the load sheet through the MCDU keyboards, and all en route flight-plan changes are also actuated with the McDoos.”

“So Santorelli comes back from the john and sees that Blane has made changes to the flight plan. Is that unusual?”

“Depends on weather, turbulence, unexpected traffic, holding patterns because of airport problems at the destination…”

“But at this point in a coast-to-coast flight — little past the midpoint — in pretty good weather, with everything apparently ticking along routinely?”

Barbara nodded. “Yeah, Santorelli would wonder why they were making flight-plan changes under the circumstances. But I think the concern in his voice results more from Blane’s unresponsiveness and from something unusual he saw on the McDoo, some plan change that didn’t make sense.”

“Which would be?”

“As I said earlier, they were seven degrees off course.”

“Santorelli wouldn’t have felt that happening when he was in the lavatory?”

“It started soon after he was off the flight deck, and it was a gradual, really gentle bank. He might have sensed something, but there’s no reason he would have realized the change was so big.”

“Who are these doctors — Blom and Ramlock?”

“I don’t have a clue. But read on. It gets weirder.”

BLANE: They’re doing bad things to me.

SANTORELLI: Captain, what’s wrong here?

BLANE: They’re mean to me.

SANTORELLI: Hey, are you with me here?

BLANE: Make them stop.

Barbara said, “Blane’s voice changes there. It’s sort of odd all the way through this, but when he says, ‘Make them stop,’ there’s a tremor in it, a fragility, as if he’s actually in…not pain so much but emotional distress.”

SANTORELLI: Captain…Roy, I’m taking over here now.

BLANE: Are we recording?

SANTORELLI: What?

BLANE: Make them stop hurting me.

SANTORELLI: (worriedly) Gonna be—

BLANE: Are we recording?

SANTORELLI: Gonna be all right now—

A hard sound like a punch. A grunt, apparently from Santorelli. Another punch. Santorelli falls silent.

BLANE: Are we recording?

As a timpani of thunder drummed an overture in the east, Joe said, “He sucker-punched his copilot?”

“Or hit him with some blunt object, maybe something he’d taken out of his flight bag and hidden beside his seat while Santorelli was in the lav, something he was ready with.”

“Premeditation. What the hell?”

“Probably hit him in the face, because Santorelli went right out. He’s silent for ten or twelve seconds, and then”—she pointed to the transcript—“we hear him groaning.”

“Dear God.”

“On the tape, Blane’s voice now loses the tremor, the fragility. There’s a bitterness that makes your skin crawl.”

BLANE: Make them stop or when I get the chance…when I get the chance, I’ll kill everybody. Everybody. I will. I’ll do it. I’ll kill everybody, and I’ll like it.

The transcript rattled in Joe’s hands.

He thought of the passengers on 353: some dozing in their seats, others reading books, working on laptops, leafing through magazines, knitting, watching a movie, having a drink, making plans for the future, all of them complacent, none aware of the terrifying events occurring in the cockpit.

Maybe Nina was at the window, gazing out at the stars or down at the top of the cloud cover below them; she liked the window seat. Michelle and Chrissie might have been playing a game of Go Fish or Old Maid; they traveled with decks for various games.

He was torturing himself. He was good at it because a part of him believed that he deserved to be tortured.

Forcing those thoughts out of his mind, Joe said, “What was going on with Blane, for God’s sake? Drugs? Was his brain fried on something?”

“No. That was ruled out.”

“How?”

“It’s always a priority to find something of the pilots’ remains to test for drugs and alcohol. It took some time in this case,” she said, as with a sweep of one hand she indicated the scorched pines and aspens uphill, “because a lot of the organic debris was scattered as much as a hundred yards into the trees west and north of the impact.”

An internal darkness encroached on Joe’s field of vision, until he seemed to be looking at the world through a tunnel. He bit his tongue almost hard enough to draw blood, breathed slowly and deeply, and tried not to let Barbara see how shaken he was by these details.

She put her hands in her pockets. She kicked a stone into the crater. “Really need this stuff, Joe?”

“Yes.”

She sighed. “We found a portion of a hand we suspected was Blane’s because of a half-melted wedding band that was fused to the ring finger, a relatively unique gold band. There was some other tissue as well. With that we identified—”

“Fingerprints?”

“No, those were burned off. But his father’s still alive, so the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory was able to confirm it was Blane’s tissue through a DNA match with a blood sample that his dad supplied.”

“Reliable?”

“A hundred percent. Then the remains went to the toxicologists. There were minute amounts of ethanol in both Blane and Santorelli, but that was just the consequence of putrefaction. Blane’s partial hand was in those woods more than seventy-two hours before we found it. Santorelli’s remains — four days. Some ethanol related to tissue decay was to be expected. But otherwise, they both passed all the toxicologicals. They were clean and sober.”

Joe tried to reconcile the words on the transcript with the toxicological findings. He couldn’t.

He said, “What’re the other possibilities? A stroke?”

“No, it just didn’t sound that way on the tape I listened to,” Barbara said. “Blane speaks clearly, with no slurring of the voice whatsoever. And although what he’s saying is damn bizarre, it’s nevertheless coherent — no transposition of words, no substitution of inappropriate words.”

Frustrated, Joe said, “Then what the hell? A nervous breakdown, psychotic episode?”

Barbara’s frustration was no less than Joe’s: “But where the hell did it come from? Captain Delroy Michael Blane was the most rock-solid psychological specimen you’d ever want to meet. Totally stable guy.”

“Not totally.”

“Totally stable guy,” she insisted. “Passed all the company psychological exams. Loyal family man. Faithful husband. A Mormon, active in his church. No drinking, no drugs, no gambling. Joe, you can’t find one person out there who ever saw him in a single moment of aberrant behavior. By all accounts he wasn’t just a good man, not just a solid man — but a happy man.”

Lightning glimmered. Wheels of rolling thunder clattered along steel rails in the high east.

Pointing to the transcript, Barbara showed Joe where the 747 made the first sudden three-degree heading change, nose right, which precipitated a yaw. “At that point, Santorelli was groaning but not fully conscious yet. And just before the maneuver, Captain Blane said, ‘This is fun.’ There are these other sounds on the tape — here, the rattle and clink of small loose objects being flung around by the sudden lateral acceleration.”

This is fun.

Joe couldn’t take his eyes off those words.

Barbara turned the page for him. “Three seconds later, the aircraft made another violent heading change, of four degrees, nose left. In addition to the previous clatter, there were now sounds from the aircraft — a thump and a low shuddery noise. And Captain Blane is laughing.”

“Laughing,” Joe said with incomprehension. “He was going to go down with them, and he was laughing?”

“It wasn’t anything you’d think of as a mad laugh, either. It was…a pleasant laugh, as if he were genuinely enjoying himself.”

This is fun.

Eight seconds after the first yawing incident, there was another abrupt heading change of three degrees, nose left, followed just two seconds later by a severe shift of seven degrees, nose right. Blane laughed as he executed the first maneuver and, with the second, said, Oh, wow!

“This is where the starboard wing lifted, forcing the port wing down,” Barbara said. “In twenty-two seconds the craft was banking at a hundred and forty-six degrees, with a downward nose pitch of eighty-four degrees.”

“They were finished.”

“It was deep trouble but not hopeless. There was still a chance they might have pulled out of it. Remember, they were above twenty thousand feet. Room for recovery.”

Because he had never read about the crash or watched television reports of it, Joe had always pictured fire in the aircraft and smoke filling the cabin. A short while ago, when he had realized that the passengers were spared that particular terror, he’d hoped that the long journey down had been less terrifying than the imaginary plunge that he experienced in some of his anxiety attacks. Now, however, he wondered which would have been worse: the gush of smoke and the instant recognition of impending doom that would have come with it — or clean air and the hideously attenuated false hope of a last-minute correction, salvation.

The transcript indicated the sounding of alarms in the cockpit. An altitude alert tone. A recorded voice repeatedly warning Traffic! because they were descending through air corridors assigned to other craft.

Joe asked, “What’s this reference to the ‘stick-shaker alarm’?”

“It makes a loud rattling, a scary sound nobody’s going to overlook, warning the pilots that the plane has lost lift. They’re going into a stall.”

Gripped in the fist of fate punching toward the earth, First Officer Victor Santorelli abruptly stopped mumbling. He regained consciousness. Perhaps he saw clouds whipping past the windshield. Or perhaps the 747 was already below the high overcast, affording him a ghostly panorama of onrushing Colorado landscape, faintly luminous in shades of gray from dusty pearl to charcoal, with the golden glow of Pueblo scintillant to the south. Or maybe the cacophony of alarms and the radical data flashing on the six big display screens told him in an instant all that he needed to know. He had said, Oh, Jesus.

“His voice was wet and nasal,” Barbara said, “which might have meant that Blane broke his nose.”

Even reading the transcript, Joe could hear Santorelli’s terror and his frantic determination to survive.

SANTORELLI: Oh, Jesus. No, Jesus, no.

BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaa. Here we go, Dr. Ramlock. Dr. Blom, here we go.

SANTORELLI: Pull!

BLANE: (laughter) Whoooaaa. (laughter) Are we recording?

SANTORELLI: Pull up!

Santorelli is breathing rapidly, wheezing. He’s grunting, struggling with something, maybe with Blane, but it sounds more like he’s fighting the control wheel. If Blane’s respiration rate is elevated at all, it’s not registering on the tape.

SANTORELLI: Shit, shit!

BLANE: Are we recording?

Baffled, Joe said, “Why does he keep asking about it being recorded?”

Barbara shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“He’s a pilot for how long?”

“Over twenty years.”

“He’d know the cockpit-voice recorder is always working. Right?”

“He should know. Yeah. But he’s not exactly in his right mind, is he?”

Joe read the final words of the two men.

SANTORELLI: Pull!

BLANE: Oh, wow.

SANTORELLI: Mother of God…

BLANE: Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI: No.

BLANE: (child-like excitement) Oh, yeah.

SANTORELLI: Susan.

BLANE: Now. Look.

Santorelli begins to scream.

BLANE: Cool.

Santorelli’s scream is three and a half seconds long, lasting to the end of the recording, which is terminated by impact.

Wind swept the meadow grass. The sky was swollen with a waiting deluge. Nature was in a cleansing mood.

Joe folded the three sheets of paper. He tucked them into a jacket pocket.

For a while he couldn’t speak.

Distant lightning. Thunder. Clouds in motion.

Finally, gazing into the crater, Joe said, “Santorelli’s last word was a name.”

“Susan.”

“Who is she?”

“His wife.”

“I thought so.”

At the end, no more entreaties to God, no more pleas for divine mercy. At the end, a bleak acceptance. A name said lovingly, with regret and terrible longing but perhaps also with a measure of hope. And in the mind’s eye not the cruel earth hurtling nearer or the darkness after, but a cherished face.

Again, for a while, Joe could not speak.

11

From the impact crater, Barbara Christman led Joe farther up the sloping meadow and to the north, to a spot no more than twenty yards from the cluster of dead, charred aspens.

“Here somewhere, in this general area, if I remember right,” she said. “But what does it matter?”

When Barbara first arrived in the meadow on the morning after the crash, the shredded and scattered debris of the 747–400 had not resembled the wreckage of an airliner. Only two pieces had been immediately recognizable: a portion of one engine and a three-unit passenger-seat module.

He said, “Three seats, side by side?”

“Yes.”

“Upright?”

“Yes. What’s your point?”

“Could you identify what part of the plane the seats were from?”

“Joe—”

“From what part of the plane?” he repeated patiently.

“Couldn’t have been from first class, and not from business class on either the main deck or the upper, because those are all two-seat modules. The center rows in economy class have four seats, so it had to come from the port or starboard rows in economy.”

“Damaged?”

“Of course.”

“Badly?”

“Not as badly as you’d expect.”

“Burned?”

“Not entirely.”

“Burned at all?”

“As I remember…there were just a few small scorch marks, a little soot.”

“In fact, wasn’t the upholstery virtually intact?”

Her broad, clear face now clouded with concern. “Joe, no one survived this crash.”

“Was the upholstery intact?” he pressed.

“As I remember…it was slightly torn. Nothing serious.”

“Blood on the upholstery?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Any bodies in the seats?”

“No.”

“Body parts?”

“No.”

“Lap belts still attached?”

“I don’t remember. I suppose so.”

“If the lap belts were attached—”

“No, it’s ridiculous to think—”

“Michelle and the girls were in economy,” he said.

Barbara chewed on her lip, looked away from him, and stared toward the oncoming storm. “Joe, your family wasn’t in those seats.”

“I know that,” he assured her. “I know.”

But how he wished.

She met his eyes again.

He said, “They’re dead. They’re gone. I’m not in denial here, Barbara.”

“So you’re back to this Rose Tucker.”

“If I can find out where she was sitting on the plane, and if it was either the port or starboard side in economy — that’s at least some small corroboration.”

“Of what?”

“Her story.”

“Corroboration,” Barbara said disbelievingly.

“That she survived.”

Barbara shook her head.

“You didn’t meet Rose,” he said. “She’s not a flake. I don’t think she’s a liar. She has such…power, presence.”

On the wind came the ozone smell of the eastern lightning, that theater-curtain scent which always rises immediately before the rain makes its entrance.

In a tone of tender exasperation, Barbara said, “They came down four miles, straight in, nose in, no hit-and-skip, the whole damn plane shattering around Rose Tucker, unbelievable explosive force—”

“I understand that.”

“God knows, I really don’t mean to be cruel, Joe — but do you understand? After all you’ve heard, do you? Tremendous explosive force all around this Rose. Impact force great enough to pulverize stone. Other passengers and crew…in most cases the flesh is literally stripped off their bones in an instant, stripped away as clean as if boiled off. Shredded. Dissolved. Disintegrated. And the bones themselves splintered and crushed like bread-sticks. Then in the second instant, even as the plane is still hammering into the meadow, a spray of jet fuel — a spray as fine as an aerosol mist — explodes. Everywhere fire. Geysers of fire, rivers of fire, rolling tides of inescapable fire. Rose Tucker didn’t float down in her seat like a bit of dandelion fluff and just stroll away through the inferno.”

Joe looked at the sky, and he looked at the land at his feet, and the land was the brighter of the two.

He said, “You’ve seen pictures, news film, of a town hit by a tornado, everything smashed flat and reduced to rubble so small that you could almost sift it through a colander — and right in the middle of the destruction is one house, untouched or nearly so.”

“That’s a weather phenomenon, a caprice of the wind. But this is simple physics, Joe. Laws of matter and motion. Caprice doesn’t play a role in physics. If that whole damn town had been dropped four miles, then the one surviving house would have been rubble too.”

“Some of the families of survivors…Rose has shown them something that lifts them up.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, Barbara. I want to see. I want her to show me too. But the point is…they believe her when she says she was aboard that airplane. It’s more than mere belief.” He remembered Georgine Delmann’s shining eyes. “It’s a profound conviction.”

“Then she’s a con artist without equal.”

Joe only shrugged.

A few miles away, a tuning fork of lightning vibrated and broke the storm clouds. Shatters of gray rain fell to the east.

“For some reason,” Barbara said, “you don’t strike me as a devoutly religious man.”

“I’m not. Michelle took the kids to Sunday school and church every week, but I didn’t go. It was the one thing I didn’t share with them.”

“Hostile to religion?”

“No. Just no passion for it, no interest. I was always as indifferent to God as He seemed to be to me. After the crash…I took the one step left in my ‘spiritual journey’ from disinterest to disbelief. There’s no way to reconcile the idea of a benign God with what happened to everyone on that plane…and to those of us who’re going to spend the rest of our lives missing them.”

“Then if you’re such an atheist, why do you insist on believing in this miracle?”

“I’m not saying Rose Tucker’s survival was a miracle.”

“Damned if I can see what else it would be. Nothing but God Himself and a rescue team of angels could have pulled her out of that in one piece,” Barbara insisted with a note of sarcasm.

“No divine intervention. There’s another explanation, something amazing but logical.”

“Impossible,” she said stubbornly.

“Impossible? Yeah, well…so was everything that happened in the cockpit with Captain Blane.”

She held his gaze while she searched for an answer in the deep and orderly files of her mind. She was not able to find one.

Instead, she said, “If you don’t believe in anything — then what is it that you expect Rose to tell you? You say that what she tells them ‘lifts them up.’ Don’t you imagine it’s got to be something of a spiritual nature?”

“Not necessarily.”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know.”

Repeating Joe’s own words heavily colored with exasperation, she said, “‘Something amazing but logical.’”

He looked away from her, toward the trees along the northern edge of the field, and he realized that in the fire-blasted aspen cluster was a sole survivor, reclothed in foliage. Instead of the characteristic smooth pale trunk, it had scaly black bark, which would provide a dazzling contrast when its leaves turned brilliant yellow in the autumn.

“Something amazing but logical,” he agreed.

Closer than ever, lightning laddered down the sky, and the boom of thunder descended rung to rung.

“We better go,” Barbara said. “There’s nothing more here anyway.”

Joe followed her down through the meadow, but he paused again at the rim of the impact crater.

The few times that he had gone to meetings of The Compassionate Friends, he had heard other grieving parents speak of the Zero Point. The Zero Point was the instant of the child’s death, from which every future event would be dated, the eye blink during which crushing loss reset your internal gauges to zero. It was the moment at which your shabby box of hopes and wants — which had once seemed to be such a fabulous chest of bright dreams — was turned on end and emptied into an abyss, leaving you with zero expectations. In a clock tick, the future was no longer a kingdom of possibility and wonder, but a yoke of obligation — and only the unattainable past offered a hospitable place to live.

He had existed at the Zero Point for more than a year, with time receding from him in both directions, belonging to neither the days ahead nor those behind. It was as though he had been suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen and lay deep in cryogenic slumber.

Now he stood at another Zero Point, the physical one, where his wife and daughters had perished. He wanted so badly to have them back that the wanting tore like eagle’s claws at his viscera. But at last he wanted something else as well: justice for them, justice which could not give meaning to their deaths but which might give meaning to his.

He had to get all the way up from his cryogenic bed, shake the ice out of his bones and veins, and not lie down again until he had dug the truth out of the grave in which it had been buried. For his lost women, he would burn palaces, pull down empires, and waste the world if necessary for the truth to be found.

And now he understood the difference between justice and mere vengeance: genuine justice would bring him no relief of his pain, no sense of triumph; it would only allow him to step out of the Zero Point and, with his task completed, die in peace.

Down through the vaulted conifers came fluttering white wings of storm light, and again, and still more, as if the cracking sky were casting out a radiant multitude. Thunder and the rush of wind beat like pinions at Joe’s ears, and by the many thousands, feathered shadows swooped and shuddered between the tree trunks and across the forest floor.

Just as he and Barbara reached her Ford Explorer, at the weedy end of the narrow dirt lane, a great fall of rain hissed and roared through the pines. They piled inside, their hair and faces jeweled, and her periwinkle-blue blouse was spattered with spots as dark as plum skin.

They didn’t encounter whatever had frightened the deer from cover, but Joe was pretty sure now that the culprit had been another animal. In the run to beat the rain, he had sensed only wild things crouching — not the far deadlier threat of men.

Nevertheless, the crowding conifers seemed to provide ideal architecture for assassins. Secret bowers, blinds, ambushments, green-dark lairs.

As Barbara started the Explorer and drove back the way they had come, Joe was tense. Surveying the woods. Waiting for the bullet.

When they reached the gravel road, he said, “The two men that Blane named on the cockpit tape…”

“Dr. Blom and Dr. Ramlock.”

“Have you tried to find out who they are, launched a search for them?”

“When I was in San Francisco, I was prying into Delroy Blane’s background. Looking for any personal problems that might have put him in a precarious psychological condition. I asked his family and friends if they’d heard those names. No one had.”

“You checked Blane’s personal records, appointment calendars, his checkbook?”

“Yeah. Nothing. And Blane’s family physician says he never referred his patient to any specialists with those names. There’s no physician, psychiatrist, or psychologist in the San Francisco area by those names. That’s as far as I carried it. Because then I was awakened by those bastards in my hotel room, a pistol in my face, and told to butt out.”

To the end of the gravel road and onto the paved state route, where sizzling silver rain danced in a froth on the blacktop, Barbara fell into a troubled silence. Her brow was creased, but not — Joe sensed — because the inclement weather required that she concentrate on her driving.

The lightning and thunder had passed. Now the storm threw all its energy into wind and rain.

Joe listened to the monotonous thump of the windshield wipers.

He listened as well to the hard-driven drops snapping against the glass, which seemed at first to be a meaningless random rattle; but gradually he began to think that he perceived hidden patterns even in the rhythms of the rain.

Barbara found perhaps not a pattern but an intriguing puzzle piece that she had overlooked. “I’m remembering something peculiar, but…”

Joe waited.

“…but I don’t want to encourage you in this weird delusion of yours.”

“Delusion?”

She glanced at him. “This idea that there might have been a survivor.”

He said, “Encourage me. Encouragement isn’t something I’ve had much of in the past year.”

She hesitated but then sighed. “There was a rancher not far from here who was already asleep when Flight 353 went down. People who work the land go to bed early in these parts. The explosion woke him. And then someone came to his door.”

“Who?”

“The next day, he called the county sheriff, and the sheriff’s office put him in touch with the investigation command center. But it didn’t seem to amount to much.”

“Who came to his door in the middle of the night?”

“A witness,” Barbara said.

“To the crash?”

“Supposedly.”

She looked at him but then quickly returned her attention to the rain-swept highway.

In the context of what Joe had told her, this recollection seemed by the moment to grow more disturbing to Barbara. Her eyes pinched at the corners, as if she were straining to see not through the downpour but more clearly into the past, and her lips pressed together as she debated whether to say more.

“A witness to the crash,” Joe prompted.

“I can’t remember why, of all places, she went to this ranch house or what she wanted there.”

“She?”

“The woman who claimed to have seen the plane go down.”

“There’s something more,” Joe said.

“Yeah. As I recall…she was a black woman.”

His breath went stale in his lungs, but at last he exhaled and said, “Did she give this rancher her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“If she did, I wonder if he’d remember it.”

At the turnoff from the state route, the entrance road to the ranch was flanked by tall white posts that supported an overhead sign bearing graceful green letters on a white background: LOOSE CHANGE RANCH. Under those three words, in smaller letters and in script: Jeff and Mercy Ealing. The gate stood open.

The oiled-gravel lane was flanked by white ranch fencing that divided the fields into smaller pastures. They passed a big riding ring, exercise yards, and numerous white stables trimmed in green.

Barbara said, “I wasn’t here last year, but one of my people gave me a report on it. Coming back to me now…It’s a horse ranch. They breed and race quarter horses. Also breed and sell some show horses like Arabians, I think.”

The pasture grass, alternately churned by wind and flattened by the pounding rain, was not currently home to any horses. The riding ring and the exercise yards were deserted.

In some of the stables, the top of the Dutch door at each stall was open. Here and there, from the safety of their quarters, horses peered out at the storm. Some were nearly as dark as the spaces in which they stood, but others were pale or dappled.

The large and handsome ranch house, white clapboard with green shutters, framed by groupings of aspens, had the deepest front porch that Joe had ever seen. Under the heavy cape of gloom thrown down by the thunderheads, a yellow glow as welcoming as hearth light filled some of the windows.

Barbara parked in the driveway turnaround. She and Joe ran through the rain — previously as warm as bath water but now cooler — to the screened porch. The door swung inward with a creak of hinges and the singing of a worn tension spring, sounds so rounded in tone that they were curiously pleasing; they spoke of time passed at a gentle pace, of gracious neglect rather than dilapidation.

The porch furniture was white wicker with green cushions, and ferns cascaded from wrought-iron stands.

The house door stood open, and a man of about sixty, in a black rain slicker, waited to one side on the porch. The weather-thickened skin of his sun-darkened face was well creased and patinaed like the leather of a long-used saddlebag. His blue eyes were as quick and friendly as his smile. He raised his voice to be heard above the drumming of the rain on the roof. “Mornin’. Good day for ducks.”

“Are you Mr. Ealing?” Barbara asked.

“That would be me,” said another man in a black slicker as he appeared in the open doorway.

He was six inches taller and twenty years younger than the man who had commented on the weather. But a life on horseback, in hot sun and dry wind and the nip of winter, had already begun to abrade the smooth, hard planes of youth and bless him with a pleasantly worn and appealing face that spoke of deep experience and rural wisdom.

Barbara introduced herself and Joe, implying that she still worked for the Safety Board and that Joe was her associate.

“You poking into that after a whole year?” Ealing asked.

“We weren’t able to settle on a cause,” Barbara said. “Never like to close a file until we know what happened. Why we’re here is to ask about the woman who knocked on your door that night.”

“Sure, I remember.”

“Could you describe her?” Joe asked.

“Petite lady. About forty or so. Pretty.”

“Black?”

“She was, yes. But also a touch of something else. Mexican maybe. Or more likely Chinese. Maybe Vietnamese.”

Joe remembered the Asian quality of Rose Tucker’s eyes. “Did she tell you her name?”

“Probably did,” Ealing said. “But I don’t recall it.”

“How long after the crash did she show up here?” Barbara asked.

“Not too long.” Ealing was carrying a leather satchel similar to a physician’s bag. He shifted it from his right hand to his left. “The sound of the plane coming down woke me and Mercy before it hit. Louder than you ever hear a plane in these parts, but we knew what it had to be. I got out of bed, and Mercy turned on the light. I said, ‘Oh, Lordy,’ and then we heard it, like a big far-off quarry blast. The house even shook a little.”

The older man was shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

Ealing said, “How is she, Ned?”

“Not good,” Ned said. “Not good at all.”

Looking out at the long driveway that dwindled through the lashing rain, Jeff Ealing said, “Where the hell’s Doc Sheely?” He wiped one hand down his long face, which seemed to make it longer.

Barbara said, “If we’ve come at a bad time—”

“We’ve got a sick mare, but I can give you a minute,” Ealing said. He returned to the night of the crash. “Mercy called Pueblo County Emergency Rescue, and I quick got dressed and drove the pickup out to the main road, headed south, trying to figure where it went down and could I help. You could see the fire in the sky — not direct but the glow. By the time I got oriented and into the vicinity, there was already a sheriff’s car blocking the turnoff from the state route. Another pulled up behind me. They were setting up a barrier, waiting for the search-and-rescue teams, and they made it clear this wasn’t a job for untrained do-gooders. So I came home.”

“How long were you gone?” Joe asked.

“Couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes. Then I was in the kitchen here with Mercy for maybe half an hour, having some decaf with a shot of Bailey’s, wide awake and listening to the news on the radio and wondering was it worth trying to get back to sleep, when we heard the knocking at the front door.”

Joe said, “So she showed up an hour and fifteen minutes after the crash.”

“Thereabouts.”

Its engine noise masked by the heavy downpour and by the shivery chorus of wind-shaken aspens, the approaching vehicle didn’t attract their attention until it was almost upon them. A Jeep Cherokee. As it swung into the turnaround in front of the house, its headlights, like silver swords, slashed at the chain-mail rain.

“Thank God!” Ned exclaimed, pulling up the hood on his slicker. The screen door sang as he pushed through it and into the storm.

“Doc Sheely’s here,” Jeff Ealing said. “Got to help him with the mare. But Mercy knows more about that woman than I do anyway. You go ahead and talk to her.”

Mercy Ealing’s graying blond hair was for the most part held away from her face and off her neck by three butterfly barrettes. She had been busy baking cookies, however, and a few curling locks had slipped loose, hanging in spirals along her flushed cheeks.

Wiping her hands on her apron and then, more thoroughly, on a dish towel, she insisted that Barbara and Joe sit at the breakfast table in the roomy kitchen while she poured coffee for them. She provided a plate heaped with freshly baked cookies.

The back door was ajar. An unscreened rear porch lay beyond. The cadenced rain was muffled here, like the drumming for a funeral cortege passing out on the highway.

The air was warm and redolent of oatmeal batter, chocolate, and roasting walnuts.

The coffee was good, and the cookies were better.

On the wall was a pictorial calendar with a Christian theme. The painting for August showed Jesus on the seashore, speaking to a pair of fishermen brothers, Peter and Andrew, who would cast aside their nets and follow Him to become fishers of men.

Joe felt as if he had fallen through a trapdoor into a different reality from the one in which he’d been living for a year, out of a cold strange place into the normal world with its little day-to-day crises, pleasantly routine tasks, and simple faith in the rightness of all things.

As she checked the cookies in the two ovens, Mercy recalled the night of the crash. “No, not Rose. Her name was Rachel Thomas.”

Same initials, Joe realized. Maybe Rose walked out of the crash suspecting that somehow the plane had been brought down because she was aboard. She might be anxious to let her enemies think that she was dead. Keeping the same initials probably helped her remember the false name that she had given.

“She’d been driving from Colorado Springs to Pueblo when she saw the plane coming down, right over her,” Mercy said. “The poor thing was so frightened, she jammed on the brakes, and the car spun out of control. Thank God for the seat belts. Went off the road, down an embankment, and turned over.”

Barbara said, “She was injured?”

Spooning lumps of thick dough on greased baking sheets, Mercy said, “No, both fine and dandy, just shaken up some. It was only a little embankment. Rachel, she had dirt on her clothes, bits of grass and weeds stuck to her, but she was okay. Oh, shaky as a leaf in a gale but okay. She was such a sweet thing, I felt so sorry for her.”

To Joe, Barbara said meaningfully, “So back then she was claiming to be a witness.”

“Oh, I don’t think she was making it up,” Mercy said. “She was a witness, for sure. Very rattled by what she saw.”

A timer buzzed. Diverted, Mercy slipped one hand into a baker’s quilted mitten. From the oven, she withdrew a sheet filled with fragrant brown cookies.

“The woman came here that night for help?” Barbara asked.

Putting the hot aluminum tray on a wire cooling rack, Mercy said, “She wanted to call a taxi service in Pueblo, but I told her they never in a million years come way out here.”

“She didn’t want to get a tow truck for her car?” Joe asked.

“She didn’t figure to be able to get it done at that hour of the night, all the way from Pueblo. She expected to come back the next day with the tow-truck driver.”

Barbara said, “What did she do when you told her there was no way to get taxi service from out here?”

Sliding a sheet of raw dough drops into the oven, Mercy said, “Oh, then I drove them into Pueblo myself.”

“All the way to Pueblo?” Barbara asked.

“Well, Jeff had to be up earlier than me. Rachel didn’t want to stay over here, and it wasn’t but an hour to get there, with my heavy foot on the pedal,” Mercy said, closing the oven door.

“That was extraordinarily kind of you,” Joe said.

“Was it? No, not really. The Lord wants us to be Samaritans. It’s what we’re here for. You see folks in trouble like this, you have to help them. And this was a real nice lady. All the way to Pueblo, she couldn’t stop talking about the poor people on that plane. She was all torn up about it. Almost like it was her fault, what happened to them, just because she saw it a few seconds before it hit. Anyway, it was no big deal going to Pueblo…though coming back home that night was the devil’s own trip, because there was so much traffic going to the crash site. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks. Lots of lookie-loos too. Standing along the side of the road by their cars and pickups, hoping to see blood, I guess. Give me the creeps. Tragedy can bring out the best in people, but it also brings out the worst.”

“On the way to Pueblo, did she show you where her car had gone off the highway?” Joe asked.

“She was too rattled to recognize the exact spot in the darkness and all. And we couldn’t be stopping every half mile or whatever to see if maybe this was the right embankment, or then we’d never get the poor girl home to bed.”

Another timer buzzed.

Putting on the quilted mitten again and opening the door on the second oven, Mercy said, “She was so pooped, all sleepy-eyed. She didn’t care about tow trucks, just about getting home to bed.”

Joe felt certain that there had been no car. Rose walked out of the burning meadow, into the woods, all but blind as she left the blaze for the dark, but desperately determined to get away before anyone discovered that she was alive, somehow sure that the 747 had been brought down because of her. Terrified, in a state of shock, horrified by the carnage, lost in the wilds, she had preferred to risk death from starvation and exposure rather than be found by a rescue team and perhaps fall into the hands of her eerily powerful enemies. Soon, by great good luck, she reached a ridge from which she was able to see, through the trees, the distant lights of the Loose Change Ranch.

Pushing aside her empty coffee cup, Barbara said, “Mercy, where did you take this woman in Pueblo? Do you remember the address?”

Holding the baking sheet half out of the oven to examine the cookies, Mercy said, “She never told me an address, just directed me street to street until we got to the house.”

No doubt it was one that Rose had chosen at random, as it was unlikely that she knew anyone in Pueblo.

“Did you see her go inside?” Joe asked.

“I was going to wait until she unlocked the door and was inside. But she thanked me, said God bless, and I should scoot back home.”

“Could you find the place again?” Barbara asked.

Deciding that the cookies needed an additional minute, Mercy slid the tray back into the oven, pulled off the mitten, and said, “Sure. Nice big house in a real nice neighborhood. But it wasn’t Rachel’s. It belonged to her partner in the medical practice. Did I say she was a doctor down in Pueblo?”

“But you didn’t actually see her go into this place?” Joe asked. He assumed that Rose waited until Mercy was out of sight, then walked away from the house and found transportation out of Pueblo.

Mercy’s face was red and dewy from the oven heat. Plucking two paper towels off a roll and blotting the sweat from her brow, she said, “No. Like I said, I dropped them off in front, and they went up the walk.”

“Them?”

“The poor sleepy little thing. Such a dear. She was the daughter of Rachel’s partner.”

Startled, Barbara glanced at Joe, then leaned forward in her chair toward Mercy. “There was a child?”

“Such a little angel, sleepy but not cranky at all.”

Joe flashed back to Mercy’s mention of “seat belts,” plural, and to other things she had said that suddenly required a more literal interpretation than he had given them. “You mean Rose…Rachel had a child with her?”

“Well, didn’t I say?” Mercy looked puzzled, tossing the damp paper towel into a waste can.

“We didn’t realize there was a child,” Barbara said.

“I told you,” Mercy said, perplexed by their confusion. “Back a year ago, when the fella came around from your Board, I told him all about Rachel and the little girl, about Rachel being a witness.”

Looking at Joe, Barbara said, “I didn’t remember that. I guess I did well even to remember this place at all.”

Joe’s heart turned over, turned like a wheel long stilled on a rusted axle.

Unaware of the tremendous impact that her revelation had on Joe, Mercy opened the oven door to check the cookies once more.

“How old was the girl?” he asked.

“Oh, about four or five,” Mercy said.

Premonition weighed on Joe’s eyes, and when he closed them, the darkness behind his lids swarmed with possibilities that he was terrified to consider.

“Can you…can you describe her?”

Mercy said, “She was just a little slip of a doll of a thing. Cute as a button — but then they’re all pretty darn cute at that age, aren’t they?”

When Joe opened his eyes, Barbara was staring at him, and her eyes brimmed with pity for him. She said, “Careful, Joe. It can’t lead where you hope.”

Mercy placed the hot baking sheet full of finished cookies on a second wire rack.

Joe said, “What color was her hair?”

“She was a little blonde.”

He was moving around the table before he realized that he had risen from his chair.

Having picked up a spatula, Mercy was scooping the cookies off the cooler of the two baking sheets, transferring them to a large platter.

Joe went to her side. “Mercy, what color were this little girl’s eyes?”

“Can’t say I remember.”

“Try.”

“Blue, I guess,” she said, sliding the spatula under another cookie.

“You guess?”

“Well, she was blond.”

He surprised her by taking the spatula from her and putting it aside on the counter. “Look at me, Mercy. This is important.”

From the table, Barbara warned him again. “Easy, Joe. Easy.”

He knew that he should heed her warning. Indifference was his only defense. Indifference was his friend and his consolation. Hope is a bird that always flies, the light that always dies, a stone that crushes when it can’t be carried any farther. Yet with a recklessness that frightened him, he felt himself shouldering that stone, stepping into the light, reaching toward those white wings.

“Mercy,” he said, “not all blondes have blue eyes, do they?”

Face-to-face with him, captured by his intensity, Mercy Ealing said, “Well…I guess they don’t.”

“Some have green eyes, don’t they?”

“Yes.”

“If you think about it, I’m sure you’ve even seen blondes with brown eyes.”

“Not many.”

“But some,” he said.

Premonition swelled in him again. His heart was a bucking horse now, iron-shod hooves kicking the stall boards of his ribs.

“This little girl,” he said, “are you sure she had blue eyes?”

“No. Not sure at all.”

“Could her eyes have been gray?”

“I don’t know.”

“Think. Try to remember.”

Mercy’s eyes swam out of focus as memory pulled her vision to the past, but after a moment, she shook her head. “I can’t say they were gray, either.”

“Look at my eyes, Mercy.”

She was looking.

He said, “They’re gray.”

“Yes.”

“An unusual shade of gray.”

“Yes.”

“With just the faintest touch of violet to them.”

“I see it,” she said.

“Could this girl…Mercy, could this child have had eyes like mine?”

She appeared to know what answer he needed to hear, even if she could not guess why. Being a goodhearted woman, she wanted to please him. At last, however, she said, “I don’t really know. I can’t say for sure.”

A sinking sensation overcame Joe, but his heart continued to knock hard enough to shake him.

Keeping his voice calm, he said, “Picture the girl’s face.” He put his hands on Mercy’s shoulders. “Close your eyes and try to see her again.”

She closed her eyes.

“On her left cheek,” Joe said. “Beside her earlobe. Only an inch in from her earlobe. A small mole.”

Mercy’s eyes twitched behind her smooth lids as she struggled to burnish her memory.

“It’s more of a beauty mark than a mole,” Joe said. “Not raised but flat. Roughly the shape of a crescent moon.”

After a long hesitation, she said, “She might have had a mark like that, but I can’t remember.”

“Her smile. A little lopsided, a little crooked, turned up at the left corner of her mouth.”

“She didn’t smile that I remember. She was so sleepy…and a little dazed. Sweet but withdrawn.”

Joe could not think of another distinguishing feature that might jar Mercy Ealing’s memory. He could have regaled her for hours with stories about his daughter’s grace, about her charm, about her humor and the musical quality of her laughter. He could have spoken at length of her beauty: the smooth sweep of her forehead, the coppery gold of her eyebrows and lashes, the pertness of her nose, her shell-like ears, the combination of fragility and stubborn strength in her face that sometimes made his heart ache when he watched her sleeping, the inquisitiveness and unmistakable intelligence that informed her every expression. Those were subjective impressions, however, and no matter how detailed such descriptions were, they could not lead Mercy to the answers that he had hoped to get from her.

He took his hands from her shoulders.

She opened her eyes.

Joe picked up the spatula he had taken from her. He put it down again. He didn’t know what he was doing.

She said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I was hoping…I thought…I don’t know. I’m not sure what I was thinking.”

Self-deceit was a suit that didn’t fit him well, and even as he lied to Mercy Ealing, he stood naked to himself, excruciatingly aware of what he had been hoping, thinking. He’d been in a fit of searching behavior again, not chasing anyone into a convenience store this time, not stalking an imagined Michelle through a mall or department store, not rushing to a schoolyard fence for a closer glimpse of a Chrissie who was not Chrissie after all, but heart-deep in searching behavior nonetheless. The coincidence of this mystery child sharing his lost daughter’s age and hair color had been all that he needed to send him racing pell-mell once more in pursuit of false hope.

“I’m sorry,” Mercy said, clearly sensing the precipitous downward spiral of his mood. “Her eyes, the mole, the smile…just don’t ring a bell. But I remember her name. Rachel called her Nina.”

Behind Joe, at the table, Barbara got up so fast that she knocked over her chair.

12

At the corner of the back porch, the water falling through the downspout produced a gargle of phantom voices, eager and quarrelsome, guttural and whispery, spitting out questions in unknown tongues.

Joe’s legs felt rubbery. He leaned with both hands on the wet railing. Rain blew under the porch eaves, spattering his face.

In answer to his question, Barbara pointed toward the low hills and the woods to the southwest. “The crash site was that way.”

“How far?”

Mercy stood in the open kitchen door. “Maybe half a mile as the crow flies. Maybe a little farther.”

Out of the torn meadow, into the forest where the fire died quickly because it had been a wet summer that year, farther into the darkness of the trees, thrashing through the thin underbrush, eyes adjusting grudgingly to the gloom, perhaps onto a deer trail that allowed easy passage, perhaps across another meadow, to the hilltop from which the ranch lights could be seen, Rose might have led — or mostly carried — the child. Half a mile as the crow flies, but twice or three times as far when one followed the contours of the land and the way of the deer.

“One and a half miles on foot,” Joe said.

“Impossible,” Barbara said.

“Very possible. She could have done it.”

“I’m not talking about the hike.” She turned to Mercy and said, “Mrs. Ealing, you have been an enormous help to us already, a really enormous help, but we’ve got a confidential matter to discuss here for a minute or two.”

“Oh, of course, I understand. You just take all the time you want,” said Mercy, hugely curious but still too polite to intrude. She backed off the threshold and closed the kitchen door.

“Only a mile and a half,” Joe repeated.

“On the horizontal,” Barbara said, moving close to him, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Only a mile and a half on the horizontal, but more than four miles on the vertical, straight down, sky to ground. That’s the part I can’t accept, Joe.”

He was struggling with it himself. To believe in survivors required faith or something very like it, and he was without faith by choice and by necessity. To put faith in a God would require him to see meaning in the suffering that was the weft of human experience, and he could see no meaning to it. On the other hand, to believe that this miracle of survival resulted somehow from the scientific research in which Rose was engaged, to contemplate that humankind could reach successfully for god-like power — Shadrach saving Shadrach from the furnace, Lazarus raising Lazarus from the grave — required him to have faith in the transcendent spirit of humankind. Its goodness. Its beneficent genius. After fourteen years as a crime reporter, he knew men too well to bend his knee before the altar in the First Church of Humanity the Divine. Men had a genius for arranging their damnation, but few if any were capable of their own salvation.

With her hand still on Joe’s shoulder, being tough with him but in the spirit of sisterly counseling, she said, “First you want me to believe there was one survivor of that holocaust. Now it’s two. I stood in the smoking ruins, in the slaughterhouse, and I know that the odds against anyone walking out of there on her own two feet are billions to one.”

“Granted.”

“No — greater than billions to one. Astronomical, immeasurable.”

“All right.”

“So there simply are no odds whatsoever that two could have come through it, none, not even an infinitesimal chance.”

He said, “There’s a lot I haven’t told you, and most of it I’m not going to tell you now, because you’re probably safer not knowing. But one thing…this Rose Tucker is a scientist who’s been working on something big for years, government or military financing behind it, something secret and very damn big.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But before she boarded the flight in New York, she called a reporter out in Los Angeles, an old friend of hers, and set up an interview, with trusted witnesses, at the arrival gate at LAX. She said she was bringing something with her that would change the world forever.”

Barbara searched his eyes, obviously seeking some sign that he was not serious about this change-the-world-overnight fantasy. She was a woman of logic and reason, impressed by facts and details, and experience had shown her that solutions were found at an inchworm’s pace, in a journey of countless small steps. As an investigator, for years she’d dealt with puzzles that presented her with literally millions of pieces and that were hugely more complex than virtually any homicide case to which any police detective was ever assigned, mysteries of human action and machine failure that were solved not with miracles but with drudgery.

Joe understood the look in her eyes, because investigative journalism was not unlike her own work.

“Just what are you saying?” she pressed. “That when the plane rolls and plummets, Rose Tucker takes a squeeze bottle out of her purse, some fabulous new topical lotion that confers temporary invulnerability on the user, sort of like a sunscreen, and quickly coats herself?”

Joe almost laughed. This was the first time he’d felt like laughing in ages. “No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“Sounds like a big nothing.”

“Something,” he insisted.

With the forge fire of lightning now gone and with the crack of thunder silenced, the churning clouds had an iron-dark beauty.

In the distance the low, wooded hills were veiled in mists of enigma — the hills across which she had come that night, untouched out of fire and destruction.

Skirling wind made cottonwoods and aspens dance, and across the fields, billows of rain whirled like skirts in a tarantella.

He had hope again. It felt good. Exhilarating. Of course, that was why hope was dangerous. The glorious lifting up, the sweet sense of soaring, always too brief, and then the terrible fall that was more devastating because of the sublime heights from which it began.

But maybe it was worse never to hope at all.

He was filled with wonder and quickening expectation.

He was scared too.

“Something,” he insisted.

He took his hands off the railing. His legs were sturdy again. He blotted his wet hands on his jeans. He wiped his rain-spattered face on the sleeve of his sportcoat.

Turning to Barbara, he said, “Somehow safe to the meadow, then a mile and a half to the ranch. A mile and a half in an hour and fifteen minutes, which might be just about right in the darkness, with a small child to carry or help along.”

“I hate to be always the pin in the balloon—”

“Then don’t be.”

“—but there’s one thing you have to consider.”

“I’m listening.”

Barbara hesitated. Then: “Just for the sake of argument, let’s accept that there were survivors. That this woman was on the plane. Her name is Rose Tucker…but she told Mercy and Jeff that she was Rachel Thomas.”

“So?”

“If she doesn’t give them her real name, why does she give them Nina’s real name?”

“These people who’re after Rose…they’re not after Nina, they don’t care about Nina.”

“If they find out Rose somehow saved the girl, and if she saved the girl because of this strange, radical news-truth-thing-whatever that she was bringing with her to the press interview in Los Angeles, then maybe somehow that makes the girl as big a danger to them as Rose herself seems to be.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t care right now.”

“My point is — she’d use another name for Nina.”

“Not necessarily.”

“She would,” Barbara insisted.

“So what’s the difference?”

“So maybe Nina is a false name.”

He felt slapped. He didn’t reply.

“Maybe the child who came to this house that night is really named Sarah or Mary or Jennifer…”

“No,” Joe said firmly.

“Just like Rachel Thomas is a false name.”

“If the child wasn’t Nina, what an amazing coincidence it would be for Rose to pluck my daughter’s name out of thin air. Talk about billion-to-one odds!”

“That plane could have been carrying more than one little blond girl going on five.”

“Both of them named Nina? Jesus, Barbara.”

“If there were survivors, and if one of them was a little blond girl,” Barbara said, “you’ve at least got to prepare yourself for the possibility that she wasn’t Nina.”

“I know,” he said, but he was angry with her for forcing him to say it. “I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I’m worried for you, Joe.”

“Thank you,” he said sarcastically.

“Your soul’s broken.”

“I’m okay.”

“You could fall apart so easy.”

He shrugged.

“No,” she said. “Look at yourself.”

“I’m better than I was.”

“She might not be Nina.”

“She might not be Nina,” he admitted, hating Barbara for this relentless insistence, even though he knew that she was genuinely concerned for him, that she was prescribing this pill of reality as a vaccine against the total collapse that he might experience if his hopes, in the end, were not realized. “I’m ready to face that she might turn out not to be Nina. Okay? Feel better? I can handle it if that’s the case.”

“You say it, but it’s not true.”

He glared at her. “It is true.”

“Maybe a tiny piece of your heart knows she might not be Nina, a thin fiber, but the rest of your heart is right now pounding, racing with the conviction that she is.”

He could feel his own eyes shining with — stinging with — the delirious expectation of a miraculous reunion.

Her eyes, however, were full of a sadness that infuriated him so much he was nearly capable of striking her.

Mercy making peanut-butter dough balls. A new curiosity — and wariness — in her eyes. Having seen, through the window, the emotional quality of the discussion on the porch. Perhaps catching a few words through the glass, even without attempting to eavesdrop.

Nevertheless, she was a Samaritan, with Jesus and Andrew and Simon Peter marking the month of August as a reminder for her, and she still wanted to do her best to help.

“No, actually, the girl never said her name. Rachel introduced her. The poor child never spoke two words. She was so tired, you see, so sleepy. And maybe in shock a little from the car rolling over. Not hurt, mind you. Not a mark on her. But her little face was as white and shiny as candle wax. Heavy-eyed and not really with us. Half in a sort of trance. I worried about her, but Rachel said she was okay, and Rachel was a doctor, after all, so then I didn’t worry about it that much. The little doll slept in the car all the way to Pueblo.”

Mercy rolled a ball of dough between her palms. She put the pale sphere on a baking sheet and flattened it slightly with the gentle pressure of her thumb.

“Rachel had been to Colorado Springs to visit family for the weekend, and she’d taken Nina with her because Nina’s dad and mom were on an anniversary cruise. At least that’s how I understood it.” Mercy began to fill a brown paper lunch bag with the cooled cookies that were stacked on the platter.

“Not the usual thing — I mean, a black doctor and a white doctor in practice together in these parts, and not usual, either, to see a black woman with a white child around here. But I take all that to mean the world’s getting to be a better place at last, more tolerant, more loving.”

She folded the top of the bag twice and handed it to Barbara.

“Thank you, Mercy.”

To Joe, Mercy Ealing said, “I’m sure sorry I couldn’t be more help to you.”

“You’ve been a lot of help,” he assured her. He smiled. “And there’s cookies.”

She looked toward the kitchen window that was on the side of the house rather than on the back of it. One of the stables was visible through the pall of rain.

She said, “A good cookie does lift the spirit, doesn’t it? But I sure wish I could do more than make cookies for Jeff today. He dearly loves that mare.”

Glancing at the calendar with the religious theme, Joe said, “How do you hold on to your faith, Mercy? How in a world with so much death, planes falling out of the sky and favorite mares being taken for no reason?”

She didn’t seem surprised or offended by the question. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it? I used to be so angry that we couldn’t have kids. I was working at some record for miscarriages, and then I just gave up. You want to scream at the sky sometimes. And there’s nights you lie awake. But then I think…well, this life has its joys too. And, anyway, it’s nothing but a place we have to pass through on our way to somewhere better. If we live forever, it doesn’t matter so much what happens to us here.”

Joe had been hoping for a more interesting answer. Insightful. Penetrating. Homespun wisdom. Something he could believe.

He said, “The mare will matter to Jeff. And it matters to you because it matters so much to him.”

Picking up another lump of dough, rolling it into a pale moon, a tiny planet, she smiled and said, “Oh, if I understood it, Joe, then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be God. And that’s a job I sure wouldn’t want.”

“How so?”

“It’s got to be even sadder than our end of things, don’t you think? He knows our potential but has to watch us forever falling short, all the cruel things we do to one another, the hatred and the lies, the envy and greed and the endless coveting. We see only the ugliness people do to those around us, but He sees it all. The seat He’s in has a sadder view than ours.”

She put the ball of dough on the cookie sheet and impressed upon it the mark of her thumb: a moment of pleasure waiting to be baked, to be eaten, to lift the spirit.

The veterinarian’s Jeep station wagon was still in the driveway, parked in front of the Explorer. A Weimaraner was lying in the back of the vehicle. As Joe and Barbara climbed into the Ford and slammed the doors, the dog raised its noble silver-gray head and stared at them through the rear window of the Jeep.

By the time that Barbara slipped the key into the ignition and started the Explorer, the humid air was filled with the aromas of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies and damp denim. The windshield quickly clouded with the condensation of their breath.

“If it’s Nina, your Nina,” Barbara said, waiting for the air conditioner to clear the glass, “then where has she been for this whole year?”

“With Rose Tucker somewhere.”

“And why would Rose keep your daughter from you? Why such awful cruelty?”

“It’s not cruelty. You hit on the answer yourself, out there on the back porch.”

“Why do I suspect the only time you listen to me is when I’m full of shit?”

Joe said, “Somehow, since Nina survived with Rose, survived because of Rose, now Rose’s enemies will want Nina too. If Nina had been sent home to me, she’d have been a target. Rose is just keeping her safe.”

The pearly condensation retreated toward the edges of the windshield.

Barbara switched on the wipers.

From the rear window of the Jeep Cherokee, the Weimaraner still watched them without getting to its feet. Its eyes were luminous amber.

“Rose is keeping her safe,” he repeated. “That’s why I’ve got to learn everything I can about Flight 353 and stay alive long enough to find a way to break the story wide open. When it’s exposed, when the bastards behind all of this are ruined and on their way to prison or the gas chamber, then Rose will be safe and Nina can…she can come back to me.”

“If this Nina is your Nina,” she reminded him.

“If she is, yes.”

Under the somber yellow gaze of the dog, they swung past the Cherokee and circled the oval bed of blue and purple delphiniums around which the terminus of the driveway turned.

“You think we should have asked Mercy to help us find the house in Pueblo where she dropped Rose and the girl that night?” Barbara wondered.

“No point. Nothing there for us. They never went inside that house. As soon as Mercy drove out of sight, they moved on. Rose was just using Mercy to reach the nearest sizable town, where she could get transportation, maybe call a trusted friend in Los Angeles or somewhere. How large is Pueblo?”

“About a hundred thousand people.”

“That’s large enough. Plenty of ways in and out of a city that size. Bus, maybe train, rental car, even by air.”

As they headed down the gravel driveway toward the paved road, Joe saw three men in hooded rain slickers exiting a stable stall beyond an exercise yard. Jeff Ealing, Ned, and the veterinarian.

They left both the lower and the upper halves of the Dutch door standing open. No horse followed them.

Huddled against the downpour, heads bowed as if they were a procession of monks, they moved toward the house. No clairvoyance was required to know that their shoulders were slumped not only under the weight of the storm but under the weight of defeat.

Now a call to the knackery. A beloved mare to be transported and rendered. Another summer afternoon on the Loose Change Ranch — never to be forgotten.

Joe hoped that the years, the toil, and the miscarriages had not caused any distance to open between Jeff and Mercy Ealing. He hoped that in the night they still held each other.

The gray storm light was so dim that Barbara switched on the headlights. In those twin beams, as they reached the paved highway, the silvery rain glittered like flensing knives.

In Colorado Springs, a network of shallow lakes had formed on the grammar-school playground next to which Joe had parked his rental car. In the gray-rinsed light, rising from the rain-dimpled water, the jungle gyms and the seesaws and the elaborate swing sets appeared strange to Joe, not at all like what they were, but like a steel-pipe Stonehenge more mysterious even than the ancient rock megaliths and trilithons on England’s Salisbury Plain.

Everywhere he turned his eyes now, this world was different from the one that he had inhabited all his life. The change had begun the previous day, when he’d gone to the cemetery. Ever since, a shift seemed to be progressing with gathering power and speed, as though the world of Einsteinian laws had intersected with a universe where the rules of energy and matter were so different as to baffle the wisest mathematicians and the proudest physicists.

This new reality was both more piercingly beautiful and more fearsome than the one that it replaced. He knew the change was subjective and would never reverse itself. Nothing this side of death would ever again seem simple to him; the smoothest surface hid unknowable depths and complexities.

Barbara stopped in the street beside his rental car, two blocks from her house. “Well. I guess this is as far as we go.”

“Thank you, Barbara. You’ve taken such risks—”

“I don’t want you to worry about that. You hear me? It was my decision.”

“If not for your kindness and your courage, I’d never have had a hope of getting to the bottom of this. Today you’ve opened a door for me.”

“But a door to what?” she worried.

“Maybe to Nina.”

Barbara looked weary and frightened and sad. She wiped one hand across her face, and then she looked only frightened and sad.

“Joe, you keep my voice in your head. Wherever you go from here, you remember to listen for me at the back of your mind. I’ll be an old nag, telling you that even if two people somehow came out of that crash alive, it’s damn unlikely that one of them is your Nina. Don’t swing the sword on yourself, don’t you be the one to cut yourself off at the knees.”

He nodded.

“Promise me,” she said.

“Promise.”

“She’s gone, Joe.”

“Maybe.”

“Armor your heart.”

“We’ll see.”

“Better go,” she said.

He opened the door and got out into the rain.

“Good luck,” Barbara said.

“Thanks.”

He slammed the door, and she drove away.

As he unlocked his rental car, Joe heard the Explorer’s brakes bark less than half a block away. When he looked up, the Ford was reversing toward him, its red taillights shimmering on the slick blacktop.

She got out of the Explorer, came to him, put her arms around him, and held him tight. “You’re a dear man, Joe Carpenter.”

He embraced her too, but no words came to him. He remembered how badly he had wanted to strike her when she had pressed him to forsake the idea that Nina might be alive. He was ashamed by the hatred that he had felt for her then, ashamed and confused — but he was also touched by her friendship, which meant more to him now than he could have imagined when he first rang her doorbell.

“How can I have known you only a few short hours,” she wondered, “and feel as if you’re my son?”

She left him for the second time.

He got into his car as she drove away.

He watched the dwindling Explorer in the rearview mirror until it turned left into Barbara’s driveway, two blocks behind him, and disappeared into her garage.

Across the street, the white trunks of the paper birches glowed like painted doorjambs, the deep moody shadows between like open doors to futures best left unvisited.

Soaked, he drove back to Denver with no regard for the speed limit, alternately using the heater and the air conditioner, trying to dry out his clothes.

He was electrified by the prospect of finding Nina.

In spite of what he had said to Barbara, in spite of what he had promised her, he knew that Nina was alive. One thing in this eerily altered world seemed absolutely right again at last: Nina alive, Nina out there somewhere. She was a warm light upon his skin, a spectrum of light beyond the ability of his eyes to detect, as were infrared and ultraviolet, but though he could not see her, he could feel her shining in the world.

This wasn’t at all similar to the portentous feeling that had so often sent him spiraling into searching behavior, chasing after ghosts. This hope was rock under his hand, not mist.

He was as close to happiness as he had been in more than a year, but each time that his heart swelled too full with excitement, his mood was dampened by a pang of guilt. Even if he found Nina—when he found Nina — he would not also regain Michelle and Chrissie. They were gone forever, and it seemed callous of him to be too happy about reclaiming only one of three.

Nevertheless, the desire to learn the truth, which had motivated him to come to Colorado, was the tiniest fraction as powerful as the wrenching need to find his younger daughter, which now raged in him to a degree beyond the measurements used to define mere compulsion or obsession.

At Denver International Airport, he returned the car to the agency, paid the bill in cash, and retrieved his signed credit-card form. He was in the terminal again fifty minutes before his flight was scheduled to depart.

He was starving. But for two cookies in Mercy’s kitchen, he had eaten nothing since the two cheeseburgers the previous evening on his way to the Vadance house and later a chocolate bar.

He found the nearest restaurant in the terminal. He ordered a club sandwich with french fries and a bottle of Heineken.

Bacon had never tasted half as good as it did now. He licked mayonnaise from his fingertips. The fries had a satisfying crunch, and the crisp dill pickle snapped with a spray of sour juice. For the first time since another August, he not only consumed his food but relished it.

On his way to the boarding gate, with twenty minutes to spare, he suddenly took a detour to the men’s room. He thought he was going to be sick.

By the time he got into a stall and latched the door, his nausea passed. Instead of throwing up, he leaned his back against the door and wept.

He hadn’t cried in many months, and he didn’t know why he was crying now. Maybe because he was on the trembling edge of happiness with the thought of seeing Nina again. Or maybe because he was scared of never finding her or of losing her a second time. Maybe he was grieving anew for Michelle and Chrissie. Maybe he had learned too many dreadful details about what had happened to Flight 353 and to the people on it.

Maybe it was all those things.

He was on a runaway rocket of emotion, and he needed to regain control of himself. He wasn’t going to be effective in his search for Rose and Nina if he swung wildly between euphoria and despair.

Red-eyed but recovered, he boarded the plane for Los Angeles as they issued the final call.

As the 737 took off, to Joe’s surprise his heart made a hollow racket in his ears, like running footsteps descending stairs. He clutched the arms of his seat as though he might tumble forward and fall headlong.

He hadn’t been afraid on the flight to Denver, but now he was in the lap of terror. Coming eastward, he would have welcomed death, for the wrongness of outliving his family had been heavy on his mind — but now, westward bound, he had a reason to live.

Even when they had reached cruising altitude and leveled off, he remained edgy. He could too easily imagine one of the pilots turning to the other and saying, Are we recording?

Since Joe could not get Captain Delroy Blane out of his mind anyway, he withdrew the three folded pages of the transcript from an inner jacket pocket. Reviewing it, he might see something that he had missed before — and he needed to keep his mind occupied, even if with this.

The flight wasn’t heavily booked, a third of the seats empty. He had a window seat with no immediate neighbor, so he was afforded the privacy he needed.

In response to his request, a flight attendant brought a pen and note pad.

As he read through the transcript, he extracted Blane’s dialogue and printed it on the note pad. Standing apart from First Officer Victor Santorelli’s increasingly frantic statements and shorn of Barbara’s descriptions of sounds and pauses, the captain’s words might allow for the discovery of nuances otherwise not easy to spot.

When he was done, Joe folded the transcript and returned it to his coat pocket. Then he read from the note pad:

Joe didn’t see anything new in the material, but something he had noticed before was more obvious when Blane’s dialogue was read in this extracted format. Although the captain was speaking in the voice of an adult, some of the things he was saying had a distinct childlike quality.

They’re doing bad things to me. They’re mean to me. Make them stop. Make them stop hurting me.

This was neither the phrasing nor the word choice most adults would use to accuse tormentors or to ask for help.

His longest speech, a threat to kill everybody and like it, was petulant and childish as well — especially when immediately followed by the observation This is fun.

Whoooaaa. Here we go…Whoooaaa. Oh, wow. Oh, yeah.

Blane’s reaction to the roll and plunge of the 747 was like that of a boy thrilling to the arrival of a roller coaster at the crown of the first hill on the track and, then, to the first stomach-rolling drop. According to Barbara, the captain had sounded unafraid; and there was no more terror in his words than in his tone of voice.

Now. Look.

Those words were spoken three and a half seconds before impact, as Blane watched the nightscape bloom like a black rose beyond the windscreen. He seemed gripped not by fear but by a sense of wonder.

Cool.

Joe stared at that final word for a long time, until the shiver it caused had passed, until he could consider all the implications of it with a measure of detachment.

Cool.

To the end, Blane reacted like a boy on an amusement-park ride. He had exhibited no more concern for his passengers and crew than a thoughtless and arrogant child might exhibit for the insects that he tortured with matches.

Cool.

Even a thoughtless child, as selfish as only the very young and the incurably immature can be, would nonetheless have shown some fear for himself. Even a determinedly suicidal man, having leaped off a high ledge, would cry out in mortal fear if not regret as he hurtled toward the pavement. Yet this captain, in whatever altered state he occupied, watched oblivion approach with no apparent concern, even with delight, as though he recognized no physical threat to himself.

Cool.

Delroy Blane. Family man. Faithful husband. Devout Mormon. Stable, loving, kind, compassionate. Successful, happy, healthy. Everything to live for. Cleared by the toxicological tests.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Cool.

A useless anger rose in Joe. It was not aimed at Blane, who surely was a victim too — though he didn’t initially appear to be one. This was the simmering anger of his childhood and adolescence, undirected and therefore likely to swell like the ever-hotter steam in a boiler with no pressure-release valve.

He tucked the note pad into his jacket pocket.

His hands curled into fists. Unclenching them was difficult. He wanted to strike something. Anything. Until he broke it. Until his knuckles split and bled.

This blind anger always reminded Joe of his father.

Frank Carpenter had not been an angry person. The opposite. He never raised his voice in other than amusement and surprise and happy exclamation. He was a good man — inexplicably good and oddly optimistic, considering the suffering with which fate saddled him.

Joe, however, had been perpetually angry for him.

He could not remember his dad with two legs. Frank had lost the left one when his car was broadsided by a pickup truck driven by a nineteen-year-old drunk with lapsed insurance. Joe was not yet three years old at the time.

Frank and Donna, Joe’s mother, had been married with little more than two paychecks and their work clothes. To save money, they carried only liability coverage with their car. The drunk driver had no assets, and they received no compensation from any insurance company for the loss of the limb.

The leg was amputated halfway between knee and hip. In those days there were no highly effective prostheses. Besides, a false leg with any sort of functioning knee was expensive. Frank became so agile and quick with one leg and a crutch that he joked about entering a marathon.

Joe had never been ashamed of his father’s difference. He knew his dad not as a one-legged man with a peculiar lurching gait, but as a bedtime storyteller, an indefatigable player of Uncle Wiggly and other games, a patient softball coach.

The first serious fight he’d gotten into was when he was six, in first grade. A kid named Les Olner had referred to Frank as a “stupid cripple.” Although Olner was a bully and bigger than Joe, his superior size was an insufficient advantage against the savage animal fury with which he was confronted. Joe beat the shit out of him. His intention was to put out Olner’s right eye, so he would know what it was like to live with one of two, but a teacher pulled him off the battered kid before he could half blind him.

Afterward, he felt no remorse. He still felt none. He was not proud of this. It was just the way he felt.

Donna knew that her husband’s heart would break a little if he learned his boy had gotten into trouble over him. She devised and enforced Joe’s punishment herself, and together they concealed the incident from Frank.

That was the beginning of Joe’s secret life of quiet rage and periodic violence. He grew up looking for a fight and usually finding one, but he chose the moment and the venue to ensure that his dad was unlikely to learn of it.

Frank was a roofer, but there was no scrambling up ladders and hustling from eaves to ridgeline with one leg. He was loath to take disability from the government, but he accepted it for a while, until he found a way to turn a talent for woodworking into an occupation.

He made jewelry boxes, lamp bases, and other items inlaid with exotic woods in intricate patterns, and he found shops that would carry his creations. For a while he cleared a few dollars more than the disability payments, which he relinquished.

A seamstress in a combination tailor’s shop and dry cleaner, Donna came home from work every day with hair curled from the steam-press humidity and smelling of benzine and other liquid solvents. To this day, when Joe entered a dry-cleaning establishment, his first breath brought vividly to mind his mother’s hair and her honey-brown eyes, which as a child he’d thought were faded from a darker brown by steam and chemicals.

Three years after losing the leg, Frank began suffering pain in his knuckles and then his wrists. The diagnosis was rheumatoid arthritis.

A vicious thing, this disease. And in Frank, it progressed with uncommon speed, a fire spreading through him: the spinal joints in his neck, his shoulders, hips, his one remaining knee.

He shut down his woodworking business. There were government programs providing assistance, though never enough and always with the measure of humiliation that bureaucrats dished out with a hateful — and often unconscious — generosity.

The Church helped too, and charity from the local parish was more compassionately provided and less humbling to receive. Frank and Donna were Catholics. Joe went to Mass with them faithfully but without faith.

In two years, already hampered by the loss of one leg, Frank was in a wheelchair.

Medical knowledge has advanced dramatically in thirty years, but in those days, treatments were less effective than they are now — especially in cases as severe as Frank’s. Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, injections of gold salts, and then much later penicillamine. Still the osteoporosis progressed. More cartilage and tendon tissue were lost from the chronic inflammation. Muscles continued to atrophy. Joints ached and swelled. The immunosuppressant corticosteroids available at the time somewhat slowed but did not halt the deformation of joints, the frightening loss of function.

By the time Joe was thirteen, his daily routine included helping his dad dress and bathe when his mother was at work. From the first, he never resented any tasks that fell to him; to his surprise, he found within himself a tenderness that was a counterweight to the omnipresent anger that he directed at God but that he inadequately relieved on those unlucky boys with whom he periodically picked fights. For a long time Frank was mortified to have to rely on his son for such private matters, but eventually the shared challenge of bathing, grooming, and toilet brought them closer, deepened their feelings for each other.

By the time Joe was sixteen, Frank was suffering with fibrousankylosis. Huge rheumatoid nodules had formed at several joints, including one the size of a golf ball on his right wrist. His left elbow was deformed by a nodule almost as large as the softball that he had thrown so many hundreds of times in backyard practices when Joe had been six years old and getting into Little League.

His dad lived now for Joe’s achievements, so Joe was an honor student in spite of a part-time job at McDonald’s. He was a star quarterback on the high-school football team. Frank never put any pressure on him to excel. Love motivated Joe.

In the summer of that year, he joined the YMCA Youth Athletics Program: the boxing league. He was quick to learn, and the coach liked him, said he had talent. But in his first two practice matches, he continued hammering punches into opponents after they were sagging on the ropes, beaten and defenseless. He’d had to be pulled off. To them, boxing was recreation and self-defense, but to Joe it was savage therapy. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, not any specific individual, but he did hurt people; consequently, he was not permitted to compete in the league.

Frank’s chronic pericarditis, arising from the rheumatoid arthritis, led to a virulent infection of the pericardium, which ultimately led to heart failure. Frank died two days before Joe’s eighteenth birthday.

The week following the funeral Mass, Joe visited the church after midnight, when it was deserted. He’d had too many beers. He sprayed black paint on all the stations of the cross. He overturned a cast-stone statue of Our Lady and smashed a score of the ruby-red glasses from the votive-candle rack.

He might have done considerably more damage if he had not quickly been overcome by a sense of futility. He could not teach remorse to God. He could not express his pain with sufficient power to penetrate the steel veil between this world and the next — if there was a next.

Slumping in the front pew, he wept.

He sat there less than a minute, however, because suddenly he felt that weeping in the church might seem to be an admission of his powerlessness. Ludicrously, he thought it important that his tears not be misconstrued as an acceptance of the cruelty with which the universe was ruled.

He left the church and was never apprehended for the vandalism. He felt no guilt about what he’d done — and, again, no pride.

For a while he was crazy, and then he went to college, where he fit in because half of the student body was crazy too, with youth, and the faculty with tenure.

His mother died just three years later, at the age of forty-seven. Lung cancer, spreading to the lymphatic system. She had never been a smoker. Neither had his father. Maybe it was the fumes of the benzine and other solvents in the dry cleaner’s shop. Maybe it was weariness, loneliness, and a way out.

The night she died, Joe sat at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand, putting cold compresses on her brow, and slipping slivers of ice into her parched mouth when she asked for them, while she spoke sporadically, half coherently, about a Knights of Columbus dinner dance to which Frank had taken her when Joe was only two, the year before the accident and amputation. There was a big band with eighteen fine musicians, playing genuine dance music, not just shake-in-place rock-’n’-roll. She and Frank were self-taught in the fox-trot, swing, and the cha-cha, but they weren’t bad. They knew each other’s moves. How they laughed. There were balloons, oh, hundreds of balloons, suspended in a net from the ceiling. The centerpiece on each table was a white plastic swan holding a fat candle surrounded by red chrysanthemums. Dessert was ice cream in a sugar swan. It was a night of swans. The balloons were red and white, hundreds of them. Holding her close in a slow dance, he whispered in her ear that she was the most beautiful woman in the room, and oh, how he loved her. A revolving ballroom chandelier cast off splinters of colored light, the balloons came down, red and white, and the sugar swan tasted of almonds when it crunched between the teeth. She was twenty-nine years old the night of the dance, and she relished this memory and no other through the final hour of her life, as though it had been the last good time she could recall.

Joe buried her from the same church that he had vandalized three years earlier. The stations of the cross had been restored. A new statue of the Holy Mother watched over a full complement of votive glasses on the tiered rack.

Later, he expressed his grief in a bar fight. His nose was broken, but he did worse damage to the other guy.

He stayed crazy until he met Michelle.

On their first date, as he had returned her to her apartment, she had told him that he had a wild streak a foot wide. When he’d taken that as a compliment, she had told him that only a moron, a hormone-crazed pubescent boy, or an ape in the zoo would be witless enough to take pride in it.

Thereafter, by her example, she taught him everything that was to shape his future. That love was worth the risk of loss. That anger harms no one more than he who harbors it. That both bitterness and true happiness are choices that we make, not conditions that fall upon us from the hands of fate. That peace is to be found in the acceptance of things that we are unable to change. That friends and family are the blood of life, and that the purpose of existence is caring, commitment.

Six days before their wedding, in the evening, Joe went alone to the church from which he’d buried his parents. Having calculated the cost of the damage he’d done years before, he stuffed a wad of hundred-dollar bills into the poor box.

He made the contribution neither because of guilt nor because his faith was regained. He did it for Michelle, though she would never know of the vandalism or of this act of restitution.

Thereafter, his life had begun.

And then ended one year ago.

Now Nina was in the world again, waiting to be found, waiting to be brought home.

With the hope of finding Nina as balm, Joe was able to take the heat out of his anger. To recover Nina, he must be totally in control of himself.

Anger harms no one more than he who harbors it.

He was ashamed by how quickly and absolutely he had turned away from all the lessons that Michelle had taught him. With the fall of Flight 353, he too had fallen, had plummeted out of the sky into which Michelle had lifted him with her love, and had returned to the mud of bitterness. His collapse was a dishonor to her, and now he felt a sting of guilt as sharp as he might have felt if he’d betrayed her with another woman.

Nina, mirror of her mother, offered him the reason and the chance to rebuild himself into a reflection of the person he had been before the crash. He could become again a man worthy of being her father.

Nine-ah, Neen-ah, have you seen her?

He leafed slowly through his treasure trove of mental images of Nina, and the effect was soothing. Gradually, his clenched hands relaxed.

He began the last hour of the flight by reading two of the four printouts of articles about Teknologik that he had retrieved from the Post computer the previous afternoon.

In the second, he came upon a piece of information that stunned him. Thirty-nine percent of Teknologik’s stock, the largest single block, was owned by Nellor et Fils, a Swiss holding company with extensive and diverse interests in drug research, medical research, medical publishing, general publishing, and the film and broadcasting industries.

Nellor et Fils was the principal vehicle by which Horton Nellor and his son, Andrew, invested the family fortune, which was thought to be in excess of four billion dollars. Nellor was not Swiss, of course, but American. He had taken his base of operations offshore a long time ago. And more than twenty years ago, Horton Nellor had founded the Los Angeles Post. He still owned it.

For a while, Joe fingered his astonishment as though he were a whittler with an intriguingly shaped piece of driftwood, trying to decide how best to carve it. As in raw wood, something waited here to be discovered by the craftsman’s hand; his knives were his mind and his journalistic instinct.

Horton Nellor’s investments were widespread, so it might mean nothing whatsoever that he owned pieces of both Teknologik and the Post. Probably pure coincidence.

He owned the Post outright and was not an absentee publisher concerned only about profit; through his son, he exerted control over the editorial philosophy and the reportorial policies of the newspaper. He might not be so intimately involved, however, with Teknologik, Inc. His stake in that corporation was large but not in itself a controlling interest, so perhaps he was not engaged in the day-to-day operations, treating it only as a stock investment.

In that case, he was not necessarily personally aware of the top-secret research Rose Tucker and her associates had undertaken. And he was not necessarily carrying any degree of responsibility for the destruction of Flight 353.

Joe recalled his encounter the previous afternoon with Dan Shavers, the business-page columnist at the Post. Shavers pungently characterized the Teknologik executives: infamous self-aggrandizers, think of themselves as some kind of business royalty, but they are no better than us. They, too, answer to He Who Must Be Obeyed.

He Who Must Be Obeyed. Horton Nellor. Reviewing the rest of the brief conversation, Joe realized that Shavers had assumed that Joe knew of Nellor’s interest in Teknologik. And the columnist seemed to have been implying that Nellor asserted his will at Teknologik no less than he did at the Post.

Joe also flashed back to something Lisa Peccatone had said in the kitchen at the Delmann house when the relationship between Rose Tucker and Teknologik was mentioned: You and me and Rosie all connected. Small world, huh?

At the time, he had thought she was referring to the fact that Flight 353 had become a spring point in the arcs of all their lives. Maybe what she really meant was that all of them worked for the same man.

Joe had never met Horton Nellor, who had become something of a recluse over the years. He’d seen photographs, of course. The billionaire, now in his late sixties, was silver-haired and round-faced, with pleasing if somewhat blurred features. He looked like a muffin on which, with icing, a baker had painted a grandfather face.

He did not appear to be a killer. He was known as a generous philanthropist. His reputation was not that of a man who would hire assassins or condone murder in the maintenance or expansion of his empire.

Human beings, however, were different from apples and oranges: The flavor of the peel did not reliably predict the taste of the pulp.

The fact remained that Joe and Michelle had worked for the same man as those who now wanted to kill Rose Tucker and who — in some as yet incomprehensible manner — had evidently destroyed Nationwide 353. The money that had long supported his family was the same money that had financed their murders.

His response to this revelation was so complexly tangled that he could not quickly unknot it, so dark that he could not easily see the entire shape of it.

Greasy fingers of nausea seined his guts.

Although he stared out the window for perhaps half an hour, he was not aware of the desert surrendering to the suburbs or the suburbs to the city. He was surprised when he realized that they were descending toward LAX.

On the ground, as they taxied to the assigned gate and as the telescoping mobile corridor was linked like an umbilical between the 737 and the terminal, Joe checked his wristwatch, considered the distance to Westwood, and calculated that he would be at least half an hour early for his meeting with Demi. Perfect. He wanted enough time to scope the meeting place from across the street and a block away before committing himself to it.

Demi should be reliable. She was Rose’s friend. He had gotten her number from the message that Rose had left for him at the Post. But he wasn’t in the mood to trust anyone.

After all, even if Rose Tucker’s motives had been pure, even if she had kept Nina with her to prevent Teknologik from killing or kidnapping the girl, she had nevertheless withheld Joe’s daughter from him for a year. Worse, she had allowed him to go on thinking that Nina — like Michelle and Chrissie — was dead. For reasons that he could not yet know, perhaps Rose would never want to return his little girl to him.

Trust no one.

As he got up from his seat and started forward toward the exit, he noticed a man in white slacks, white shirt, and white Panama hat rise from a seat farther forward in the cabin and glance back at him. The guy was about fifty, stockily built, with a thick mane of white hair that made him look like an aging rock star, especially under that hat.

This was no stranger.

For an instant, Joe thought that perhaps the man was, in fact, a lowercase celebrity — a musician in a famous band or a character actor from television. Then he was certain that he had seen him not on screen or stage but elsewhere, recently, and in significant circumstances.

Mr. Panama looked away from him after a fraction of a second of eye contact, stepped into the aisle, and moved forward. Like Joe, he was not burdened by any carry-on luggage, as though he had been on a day trip.

Eight or ten passengers were between the day-tripper and Joe. He was afraid he would lose track of his quarry before he figured out where he had previously seen him. He couldn’t push along the narrow aisle past the intervening passengers without causing a commotion, however, and he preferred not to let Mr. Panama know that he had been spotted.

When Joe tried to use the distinctive hat as a prod to memory, he came up blank, but when he pictured the man without the hat and focused on the flowing white hair, he thought of the blue-robed cult members with the shaven heads. The connection eluded him, seemed absurd.

Then he thought of the bonfire around which the cultists had been standing last night on the beach, where he had disposed of the McDonald’s bag that contained the Kleenex damp with Charlie Delmann’s blood. And the lithe dancers in bathing suits around another bonfire. A third fire and the gathering of surfers inside the totemic ring of their upended boards. And still another fire, around which sat a dozen enthralled listeners as a stocky man with a broad charismatic face and a mane of white hair narrated a ghost story in a reverberant voice.

This man. The storyteller.

Joe had no doubt that they were one and the same.

He also knew there was no chance whatsoever that he had crossed this man’s path on the beach last night and again here sheerly by chance. All is intimately interwoven in this most conspiratorial of all worlds.

They must have been conducting surveillance on him for weeks or months, waiting for Rose to contact him, when he had finally become aware of them on Santa Monica Beach, Saturday morning. During that time they had learned all his haunts, which were not numerous: the apartment, a couple of coffee shops, the cemetery, and a few favorite beaches where he went to learn indifference from the sea.

After he had disabled Wallace Blick, invaded their van, and then fled the cemetery, they had lost him. He had found the transponder on his car and thrown it into the passing gardener’s truck, and they had lost him. They’d almost caught up with him again at the Post, but he’d slipped away minutes ahead of them.

So they had staked out his apartment, the coffee shops, the beaches — waiting for him to show up somewhere. The group being entertained by the ghost story had been ordinary civilians, but the storyteller who had insinuated himself into their gathering was not in the least ordinary.

They had picked Joe up once more the past night on the beach. He knew the correct surveillance jargon: They had reacquired him on the beach. Followed him to the convenience store from which he had telephoned Mario Oliveri in Denver and Barbara in Colorado Springs. Followed him to his motel.

They could have killed him there. Quietly. While he slept or after waking him with a gun to his head. They could have made it look like a drug overdose — or like suicide.

In the heat of the moment, they had been eager to shoot him down at the cemetery, but they were no longer in a hurry to see him dead. Because maybe, just maybe, he would lead them again to Rose Marie Tucker.

Evidently they weren’t aware that he had been at the Delmann house, among other places, during the hours when they had lost contact with him. If they knew he’d seen what had happened to the Delmanns and to Lisa — even though he could not understand it — they probably would terminate him. Take no chances. Terminate him “with extreme prejudice,” as their kind phrased it.

During the night, they had placed another tracking device on his car. In the hour before dawn, they followed him to LAX, always at a distance where they were in no danger of being spotted. Then to Denver and perhaps beyond.

Jesus.

What had frightened the deer in the woods?

Joe felt stupid and careless, although he knew that he was not either. He couldn’t expect to be as good at this game as they were; he’d never played it before, but they played it every day.

He was getting better, though. He was getting better.

Farther up the aisle, the storyteller reached the exit door and disappeared into the debarkation umbilical.

Joe was afraid of losing his stalker, but it was imperative that they continue to believe that he was unaware of them.

Barbara Christman was in terrible danger. First thing, he had to find a phone and warn her.

Faking patience and boredom, he shuffled forward with the other passengers. In the umbilical, which was much wider than the aisle in the airplane, he finally slipped past them without appearing to be alarmed or in a hurry. He didn’t realize that he was holding his breath until he exhaled hard with relief when he spotted his quarry ahead of him.

The huge terminal was busy. At the gates, the ranks of chairs were filled with passengers waiting to catch a late-afternoon flight in the fast-fading hours of the weekend. Chattering, laughing, arguing, brooding in silence, shuffling-striding-strolling-limping-ambling, arriving passengers poured out of other gates and along the concourse. There were singles, couples, entire families, blacks and whites and Asians and Latinos and four towering Samoan men, all with black porkpie hats, beautiful sloe-eyed women, willow graceful in their turquoise or ruby or sapphire saris, others in chadors and others in jeans, men in business suits, men in shorts and bright polo shirts, four young Hasidic Jews arguing (but joyfully) over the most mystical of all documents (a Los Angeles freeway map), uniformed soldiers, giggling children and shrieking children and two placid octogenarians in wheelchairs, a pair of tall Arab princes in akals and kaffiyehs and flowing djellabas, preceded by fierce bodyguards and trailed by retinues, beacon-red tourists drifting homeward on the astringent fumes of medicated sunburn lotion, pale tourists arriving with the dampish smell of cloudy country clinging to them — and, like a white boat strangely serene in a typhoon, the man in the Panama hat, sailing imperiously through the polygenic sea.

As far as Joe was concerned, they might all be stage dressing, every one of them an agent of Teknologik or of institutions unknown, all watching him surreptitiously, snapping photographs of him with trick cameras concealed in their purses and attaché cases and tote bags, all conferring by hidden microphones as to whether he should be permitted to proceed or be gunned down on the spot.

He had never before felt so alone in a crowd.

Dreading what might happen — might even now be happening — to Barbara, he tried to keep the storyteller in sight while also searching for a telephone.