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 twenty 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. Mirth 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.”