The men in Hawaiian shirts. The computer-nerd thug in the Quake T-shirt. The redhead and the brunette in the thong bikinis. Teams of operatives keeping Joe under surveillance, evidently waiting for the woman to contact him. A van packed solid with satellite-assisted tracking gear, directional microphones, computers, high-resolution cameras. Gunmen willing to shoot him in cold blood because.
Why?
Because they thought the black woman at the graves had told him something he wasn’t supposed to know? Because even being aware of her existence made him dangerous to them? Because they thought he might have come out of their van with enough information to learn their identities and intentions?
Of course he knew almost nothing about them, not who they were or what they wanted with the woman. Nevertheless, he could reach one inescapable conclusion: What he thought he knew about the deaths of his wife and daughters was either wrong or incomplete. Something wasn’t kosher about the story of Nationwide Flight 353.
He didn’t even need journalistic instinct to arrive at this chilling insight. On one level, he had known it from the moment that he saw the woman at the graves. Watching her snap photographs of the plot markers, meeting her compelling eyes, hearing the compassion in her soft voice, racked by the mystery of her words—I’m not ready to talk to you yet—he had known, by virtue of sheer common sense, that something was rotten.
Now, driving through placid Burbank, he seethed with a sense of injustice, treachery. There was a hateful wrongness with the world beyond the mere mechanical cruelty of it. Deception. Deceit. Lies. Conspiracy.
He had argued with himself that being angry with Creation was pointless, that only resignation and indifference offered him relief from his anguish. And he had been right. Raging at the imagined occupant of some celestial throne was wasted effort, as ineffective as throwing stones to extinguish the light of a star.
People, however, were a worthy target of his rage. The people who had concealed or distorted the exact circumstances of the crash of Flight 353.
Michelle, Chrissie, and Nina could never be brought back. Joe’s life could never be made whole again. The wounds in his heart could not be healed. Whatever hidden truth waited to be uncovered, learning it would not give him a future. His life was over, and nothing could ever change that, nothing, but he had a right to know precisely how and exactly why Michelle and Chrissie and Nina had died. He had a sacred obligation to them to learn what had really happened to that doomed 747.
His bitterness was a fulcrum and his rage was a long lever with which he would move the world, the whole damn world, to learn the truth, no matter what damage he caused or whom he destroyed in the process.
On a tree-lined residential street, he pulled to the curb. He switched off the engine and got out of the car. He might not have much time before Blick and the others caught up with him.
The queen palms hung dead-limp and whisperless in the heat, which currently seemed to be as effective an embalming medium as a block of fly-trapping amber.
Joe looked under the hood first, but the transponder wasn’t there. He squatted in front of the car and felt along the underside of the bumper. Nothing.
The clatter of a helicopter swelled in the distance, rapidly growing louder.
Groping blindly inside the front wheel well on the passenger side and then along the rocker panel, Joe found only road dirt and grease. Nothing was concealed inside the rear wheel well, either.
The chopper shot out of the north, passing directly overhead at extremely low altitude, no more than fifty feet above the houses. The long graceful fronds of the queen palms shook and whipped in the downdraft.
Joe looked up, alarmed, wondering if the crew of the chopper was looking for him, but his fear was pure paranoia and unjustified. Southbound, the aircraft roared away across the neighbourhood without a pause.
He hadn’t seen any police seal, no lettering or insignia.
The palms shuddered, shivered, then trembled into stillness once more.
Groping again, Joe found the transponder expansion-clamped to the energy absorber behind the Honda’s rear bumper. With batteries, the entire package was the size of a pack of cigarettes. The signal that it sent was inaudible.