Across the concrete floor, strips of orange tape nearly three hundred feet long marked the interior walls of the Transpacific N-22. Crosswise strips indicated the principal bulkheads; parallel strips were placed for each row of seats. Here and there, white flags stood in wooden blocks, indicating various critical points.
Six feet overhead, still more strips had been pulled taut, demarcating the ceiling and upper luggage compartments of the aircraft. The total effect was a ghostly orange outline of the dimensions of the passenger cabin.
Within this outline, five women, all psychologists and engineers, moved carefully and quietly. The women were placing articles of clothing, carry-on bags, cameras, children’s toys, and other personal objects on the floor. In some cases, thin blue tape ran from the object to some other location, indicating how the object had moved during the accident.
All around them on the hangar walls hung large, blowup photographs of the interior, taken on Monday. The IAA team worked in near silence, thoughtfully, referring to the photos and notes.
Interior Artifact Analysis was rarely done. It was a desperation effort, seldom yielding useful information. In the case of TPA 545, Ringer’s team had been brought in from the start, because the large number of injuries carried with it the threat of litigation. Passengers literally would not know what happened to them; assertions were often wild. IAA attempted to make sense of the movement of people and objects within the cabin. But it was a slow and difficult undertaking.
She saw Mary Ringer, a heavyset, gray-haired woman of fifty, near the aft section of the plane. “Mary,” she said. “Where are we on cameras?”
“I figured you’d want to know.” Mary consulted her notes. “We found nineteen cameras. Thirteen still and six video. Of the thirteen still cameras, five were broken, the film exposed. Two others had no film. The remaining six were developed, and three had shots, all taken before the incident. But we’re using the pictures to try and place passengers, because Transpacific still hasn’t provided a seating chart.”
“And videos?”
“Uh, let’s see …” She consulted her notes, sighing again. “Six video cameras, two with footage on board the aircraft, none during the incident. I heard about the video on television. I don’t know where that came from. Passenger must have carried it off at LAX.”
“Probably.”
“What about the flight data recorder? We really need it to—”
“You and everybody else,” Casey said. “I’m working on it.” She glanced around the aft compartment, laid out by tape. She saw the pilot’s cap lying on the concrete, in the corner. “Wasn’t there a name in that cap?”
“Yeah, on the inside,” Mary said. “It’s Zen Ching, or something like that. We got the label translated.”
“Who translated it?”
“Eileen Han, in Marder’s office. She reads and writes Mandarin, helps us out. Why?”
“I just had a question. Not important.” Casey headed for the door.
“Casey,” Mary said. “We need that flight recorder.” “I know,” Casey said. “I know.”
She called Norma. “Who can translate Chinese for me?”
“You mean, besides Eileen?”
“Right. Besides her.” She felt she should keep this away from Marder’s office.
“Let me see,” Norma said. “How about Ellen Fong, in Accounting? She used to work for the FAA, as a translator.”
“Isn’t her husband in Structure with Doherty?”
“Yeah, but Ellen’s discreet.”
“You sure?”
“I know,” Norma said, in a certain tone.
BLDG 1O2/ACCOUNTING
5:50 p.m.
She went to the accounting department, in the basement of Building 102, arriving just before six. She found Ellen Fong getting ready to go home.
“Ellen,” she said, “I need a favor.”
“Sure.” Ellen was a perpetually cheerful woman of forty, a mother of three.
“Didn’t you used to work for the FAA as a translator?”
“A long time ago,” Ellen said.
“I need something translated.”
“Casey, you can get a much better translator—”
“I’d rather you do it,” she said. “This is confidential.”
She handed Ellen the tape. “I need the voices in the last nine minutes.”
“Okay…”
“And I’d prefer you not mention this to anybody.”
“Including Bill?” That was her husband.
Casey nodded. “Is that a problem?”
“Not at all.” She looked at the tape in her hand. “When?”
‘Tomorrow? Friday at the latest?”
“Done,” Ellen Fong said.
NAIL
5:55 p.m.
Casey took the second copy of the tape to the Norton Audio Interpretation Lab, in the back of Building 24. NAIL was run by a former CIA guy from Omaha, a paranoid electronics genius named Jay Ziegler, who built his own audio filter boards and playback equipment because, he said, he didn’t trust anyone to do it for him.
Norton had constructed NAIL to help the government agencies interpret cockpit voice recorder tapes. After an accident, the government took CVRs and analyzed them in Washington. This was done to prevent them from being leaked to the press before an investigation was completed. But although the agencies had experienced staff to transcribe the tapes, they were less skilled at interpreting sounds inside the cockpit—the alarms and audio reminders that often went off. These sounds represented proprietary Norton systems, so Norton had built a facility to analyze them.
The heavy soundproof door, as always, was locked. Casey pounded on it, and after a while a voice on the speaker said, “Give the password.”
“It’s Casey Singleton, Jay.”
“Give the password.”
“Jay, for Christ’s sake. Open the door.”
There was a click, and silence. She waited. The thick door pushed open a crack. She saw Jay Ziegler, hair down to his shoulders, wearing dark sunglasses. He said, “Oh. All right. Come ahead, Singleton. You’re cleared for this station.”
He opened the door a fraction wider, and she squeezed past him into a darkened room. Ziegler immediately slammed the door shut, threw three bolts in succession.
“Better if you call first, Singleton. We have a secure line in. Four-level scramble encoded.”
“I’m sorry, Jay, but something’s come up.”
“Security’s everybody’s business.”
She handed him the spool of magnetic tape. He glanced at it. “This is one-inch mag, Singleton.”
“We don’t often see this, at this station.”
“Can you read it?”
Ziegler nodded. “Can read anything, Singleton. Anything you throw at us.” He put the tape on a horizontal drum and threaded it. Then he glanced over his shoulder. “Are you cleared for the contents of this?”
“It’s my tape, Jay.”
“Just asking.”
She said, “I should tell you that this tape is—”
“Don’t tell me anything, Singleton. Better that way.”
On all the monitors in the room, she saw oscilloscope squiggles, green lines jumping against black, as the tape began to play. “Uh … okay,” Ziegler said. “We got high-eight audio track, Dolby D encoded, got to be a home video camera …” Over the speaker, she heard a rhythmic crunching sound.
Ziegler stared at his monitors. Some of them were now generating fancy data, building three-dimensional models of the sound, which looked like shimmering multicolored beads on a string. The programs were also generating slices at various hertz.
“Footsteps,” Ziegler announced “Rubber-soled feet on grass or dirt. Countryside, no urban signature. Footsteps probably male. And, uh, slight dysrhythmic, he’s probably carrying something. Not too heavy. But consistently off-balance.”
Casey remembered the first image on the videotape: a man walking up the path, away from a Chinese village, with the child on his shoulder.
“You’re right,” she said, impressed.
Now there was a tweeting sound—some sort of birdcall. “Hold on, hold on,” Ziegler said, punching buttons. The tweet replayed, again and again, the beads jumping on the string. “Huh,” Ziegler said finally. “Not in the database. Foreign locale?”
“China.”
“Oh well. I can’t do everything.”
The footsteps continued. There was the sound of wind. On the tape, a male voice said, “She’s fallen asleep…”
Ziegler said, “American, height five-nine to six-two, mid thirties.”
She nodded, impressed again.
He pushed a button, and one of the monitors showed the video image, the man walking up the path. The tape froze. “Okay,” Ziegler said. “So what am I doing here?”
Casey said, “The last nine minutes of tape were shot on Flight 545. This camera recorded the whole incident.”
“Really,” Ziegler said, rubbing his hands together. “That should be interesting.”
“I want to know what you can tell me about unusual sounds in the moments just prior to the event. I have a question about—”
“Don’t tell me,” he said, holding up his hand. “I don’t want to know. I want to take a clean look.”
“When can you have something?”
‘Twenty hours.” Ziegler looked at his watch. ‘Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Okay. And Jay? I’d appreciate if you’d keep this tape to yourself.”
Ziegler looked at her blankly. “What tape?” he said.
QA
6:10 P.M.
Casey was back at her desk a little after 6 p.m. There were more telexes waiting for her.
FROM: S. NIETO, FSR VANC TO: C. SINGLETON, QA/IRT
F/O ZAN PING AT VANC GEN HOSPITAL FOLLOWING COMPLICATIONS FROM SURGERY REPORTED UNCONSCIOUS BUT STABLE. CARRIER REP MIKE LEE WAS AT THE HOSPITAL TODAY. I WILL TRY TO SEE F/O TOMORROW TO VERIFY HIS CONDITION AND INTERVIEW HIM IF POSSIBLE.