Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Lanier wasn’t at all reticent about explaining his presence, although he looked embarrassed. “Well, obviously, we, ah…” He paused and cleared his throat. “In light of the paper’s story this morning, we are, how should I say, in a position to reopen the investigation of Captain McGill’s death. If there was a conspiracy to cover up the reason for the ConPac crash, that lends some credence to Mr. Pace’s belief that Captain McGill was killed to protect the deception.”

Pace smiled. It’s Mr. Pace now. No more Rodney Dangerfield.

Clay Helm followed up. “The Virginia State Police take the same position,” he said. “What I am here for is to gather anything that will move along my investigation.”

“Right,” Lanier agreed.

“I don’t know if information of that nature exists,” Schaeffer replied. “And I would very strongly oppose any request for reporters’ notes.”

“I know that’s off-limits,” Helm said. “I guess I just want to talk it all through.”

“I don’t know if we can add much,” Schaeffer said.

“Ah, Avery, I think maybe there is something, although I don’t know how you want to handle it,” Pace said. “Just before the call from Cleveland, I got a call from Jill Hughes.” He turned to Lanier and Helm. “She covers the Senate for us. On her way to Senator Helmutsen’s office this morning, she spotted a blue Ford van parked on First Street, next to the Dirksen Building.” Now everyone leaned forward perceptibly, concentrating on what Pace was saying. “She told me she didn’t know why it struck her. Lord knows there are millions of blue Ford vans around, as some of you gentlemen have been telling me for weeks. But she walked over to look at it. It had a bashed-in right front—” his gaze shifted to Helm “—and it had streaks of yellow paint in the torn metal.”

“License plate?” Helm asked tensely, seeming to hold his breath.

“Maryland. She wrote it down.”

“Al-l-l right!” Schaeffer erupted, his right hand slapping the cherry table. “The pendulum has swung back to the good guys.”

“There’s more,” Pace said, shifting in his chair. “She got paint samples.”

“What!” Helm’s mouth dropped open. “How?”

“Said she scraped ’em off with her fingernail, and she said I owe her for polish. She got some of the yellow and some of the blue wrapped in separate tissues, and she’s on her way in here now. She would have called sooner, but she’s been cooling her heels in Helmutsen’s office for a couple of hours and didn’t want to risk using a phone there.”

“Good decision,” Helm said.

“I think somebody’d better bring me up to date on this paint thing,” Schaeffer said.

Pace realized Schaeffer didn’t know of the results from the police lab.

When Jill arrived, Schaeffer introduced her around, offered her a cup of coffee, which she accepted gratefully and used as a hand warmer. She repeated what they had heard from Pace, with a few additional details.

“All the while I was scraping the little shavings off the van, I kept expecting somebody to come up behind me and grab me, the way they do it in horror films,” she said a little sheepishly. “I guess in real life, you don’t get caught that way.”

“Not necessarily,” Helm said. “What you did was invaluable, but it was dangerous. As much as I appreciate the evidence, we don’t need two reporters to worry about. In the future, call us and we’ll take the samples.” Then he smiled at her.

Hughes laughed, embarrassed. “Actually,” she confessed, “I wanted to stay and stake it out, the van I mean. But it was so damned cold, and I didn’t have a coat, and there wasn’t any inside office overlooking the street right there. I guess I’m not as tough as Spenser.”

“Spenser?” Wister asked.

“You don’t know Spenser?” Hughes asked, amazed. “Do you read detective stories?”

“Oh, is that it?” Wister said derisively. “I don’t read fiction.”

Hughes sighed. “Actually,” she said, “I guess I knew that.”

Ken Sachs called shortly after 3:30.

“This is still on a ‘sources’ basis, right?” he asked.

Pace promised any information he used would be attributed to “sources who asked not to be identified.”

“It’s to your advantage, Steve. We’ve decided not to say anything publicly until Monday morning, at the very earliest. So you’ve got the big exclusive alone for a couple more days. I don’t want it that way, but there are too many unanswered questions for a news briefing.”

“So I’m out on the limb alone for the whole weekend?”

“Unless your competitors have sources we haven’t muzzled, that’s the way it is. Hey, I promised you a day. I didn’t think you’d bitch about five.”

“Ken, there are some stories you don’t want to be alone with too long. People begin to think maybe you got it wrong.”

“You don’t have it wrong. You were the only one who had it right. Let me tell you quickly what’s going on because I’ve got a meeting coming up. We sent two technicians we know we can trust into the engine this afternoon. They’re charting every single place where the bird remains can be found and estimating to within as close as they can come the volume and weight of the material in each spot. Obviously, some volume and weight were lost because the flesh and feathers were torched somehow, and more has been lost since due to evaporation and removal for identification, but—”

“Where is this leading?”

“We’re coming up with a series of computer simulations showing what would happen to a red-tailed hawk that flew into a Converse Fan operating within the parameters this one was. We got that data from the FDR.”

“The flight data recorder can’t tell how an engine would spray bird gore around.”

“No, but a computer can. The FDR tells us how the engine was operating—rpms, vibrations, that sort of thing. We feed the data into the computers, then factor in a bird strike, and the simulations should give us a pretty good picture. If we’re right, we’ll see if the remains in the engine are in the quantities and locations the computer projects. If they aren’t, we’ll be able to make a pretty fair case that something ain’t kosher.”

“That’s kind of tough, isn’t it?” Pace asked. “Wouldn’t it depend on whether the bird flew in headfirst or was sucked in sideways or backwards, or obliquely, or whatever?”

“There are a lot of variables, yes, including the weight of the bird. Males weigh more than females, older birds more than young,” Sachs confirmed. “All that could affect the simulations, but that’s the reason to do multiple runs. We’ll look at all the variables.”

“What kind of time frame are you looking at? It sounds like a huge job.”

“It is a huge job, and it would be utterly impossible without computers. Even with computers, we’ll be working in teams, twenty-four hours a day. I don’t know how long it’ll take, but we’re in for the duration.”

“Oh, man. Good luck,” Pace said.

“By the way, you’ll be interested to know we pulled Parkhall in. The son of a bitch is jumpy as a mayfly in heat, but that could be nothing more than just the way he is. I guess I’d be jumpy, too, if somebody suggested I covered up the cause of a major aviation disaster.”

Pace felt his face flush. “I think somebody did accuse you of that recently,” he said. “If drunken recollection is correct, you didn’t get jumpy at all. You got mean.”

“Yeah, well, that’s behind us,” Sachs said. There was a pause. “I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself tell you this,” he continued, “but looking back, under the circumstances, if I’d been you, I would have suspected the same thing. Drunk and devastated by the death of a friend, I might even have made the visit you made.”