Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘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.’

‘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 Mirth 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 Mirth 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 powerplants, 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, Mirth Tran was still at it.’