Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘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 Mirth. 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 plough 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 Mirth 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. Digitise 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, Mirth 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, Mirth called me,’ Barbara said. ‘I’d told the hotel operator to hold all calls, I needed my sleep, but Mirth 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 Mirth got a clean tape to me by courier. After Mirth 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, ‘Mirth 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 Mirth got to at least one of those people — though they all deny hearing from him. We’ll never know for sure, because Mirth 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 arid 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, goodbye,’ Barbara said.

‘What about the computer that was processing the digitised 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 Blanc’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 Mirth. 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 Mirth 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 Mirth 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 Mirth 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.’