Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

DODDS: EPR’s nominal.

PECK: It’s Number Three. Abort!

PECK: Dulles tower, this is ConPac heavy—

DODDS: Past the point. Not enough room.

PECK (to Dulles tower): Stand by, we’ve got a problem.

PECK: Shutting down Number Three. Full power to One and Two!

PECK: What was that?

DODDS: No clue.

PECK: Go-Go-Go!

DODDS: It’s shaking us apart! Breaking up! Must a sucked in something. A bird.

PECK: Haul it up. Get her nose up! Get it up!

DODDS: It’s gone!

(Unintelligible.)

UNIDENTIFIABLE VOICE: Gonna need help.

DODDS: More than help. My God, she’s going over!

PECK: No! Dammit, NO!

DODDS: Starboard wing—cracking. We’re killing—

UNIDENTIFIABLE VOICE: We’re dead!

DODDS: —everyone.

PECK: Who the hell is that? Move it, man. Get it outta there!

CARSON: Oh, shit!

UNIDENTIFIABLE VOICE: Good-bye, honey.

There was an unearthly roar, and then there was silence.

Mitch Gabriel reached over and clicked off the tape deck. Except for someone’s soft sobbing, it was the only sound in the room. For a full minute, no one spoke, no papers rattled, no pens scratched. Except for a few who were openly emotional, no one moved.

Then, from somewhere in the middle of the room, a man’s voice spoke an epitaph: “God rest their souls.”

“Amen,” said Gabriel, his voice quavering. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll take your questions now.”

“And they bought it?”

George Thomas Greenwood, CEO of the Converse Corporation, sounded at once amazed and angry. “I don’t believe they bought it like that,” he said.

“It sure looked that way to me, G.T.,” Chapman Davis replied, his voice sounding as though it were coming from a deep well. He was on a speakerphone in Harold Marshall’s office with Marshall. If he could outlaw one thing in the world besides the free press, Greenwood thought it would be speakerphones. Davis was elaborating. “Sachs’s denial was believable. And the damned tape had them all so shook up they didn’t have the energy to go for his jugular.”

Davis had invited himself to the NTSB news conference and stood behind some cameramen in the back of the room so he wouldn’t be noticed. He slipped out as soon as Mitch Gabriel cut off questions and was long gone before any journalists left. He came back and briefed Marshall, who placed the call to Greenwood.

“Is that Chronicle reporter behind the new investigation?” Greenwood asked.

“I don’t know,” Davis said. “His first story came out of the blue.”

“I saw it,” Greenwood said.

“I didn’t get any feeling from it or from what followed what started all this up again.”

“Nor did I, G.T.,” Marshall added.

“Didn’t anybody ask at the press conference?”

Davis nodded at the blind phone. “Yes, as a matter of fact, somebody did ask what prompted the computer runs—” he began flipping through some pages of his notebook “—and, uh… oh, here it is… Sachs said it was, uh, he said—quote—in the process of analyzing the performance of the engine, it came to our attention there was something irregular in the quantity and dispersal of the bird remains throughout the engine—unquote.”

They heard Greenwood exhale heavily at the other end of the line. No one said anything for a long moment, and then Marshall asked the question that was on Davis’s mind, too.

“G.T., I went out on a pretty slim limb when I called those newspaper editors this morning and accused Sachs of a conflict of interest. When you asked me to do it, I took you at your word that you had evidence to support the charge. But now, with the media buying Sachs’s denial, I feel like somebody sawed off the limb behind me.”

“Your damned limb isn’t going to give way, Harold. Do you take me for an idiot?”

“Can you tell me what your information is?” Marshall persisted.

“I can, if I have to, produce testimony that MacPhearson-Paige promised Sachs a large retainer and a good deal of lucrative business after he left the NTSB if he looked out for the company’s interests while he was in Washington. Good enough?”

“Good enough, yes,” Marshall said, relief showing on his face and in his voice.

“Thank you,” Greenwood said sarcastically. “I’ve got some business to attend to.”

The line went dead.

In Youngstown, Greenwood set his phone down and glanced across his desk at Cullen Ferguson, just back from a relatively unsuccessful fence-mending trek to D.C.

“I swear to God, these Washington types would never make it in the corporate world,” Greenwood said derisively. “They’re all a bunch of fucking pansies.” He nodded toward the phone. “Did you see those two while you were there?”

“I saw Marshall several times. Davis just once, as I recall. The senator fidgets a lot, and he’s been having some attacks of dizziness. I don’t know what that’s about, maybe stress. Davis struck me as pretty solid. What were they asking about this time?”

“They want to know what evidence I have to support the allegations against Sachs.”

Ferguson cleared his throat and pushed himself straighter in his chair. “Frankly, G.T., I intended to ask you the same thing. The press release we put out this morning has my name on it, and I’m getting a lot of calls from reporters who want more information.”

“What are you telling them?”

“We’re not prepared to elaborate at this time. What else can I say?”

“Tell them this: During your final weeks with the news magazine, you were researching an article on the aerospace industry. In the course of the interviews, you were told by sources at M-P that they were counting on Sachs to look out for them in Washington and, in return, they were prepared to make him a wealthy man when he went back to his consulting firm.”

Ferguson’s eyes went wide and his mouth dropped. Then his lips started moving, but no sound emerged.

“What is it?” Greenwood asked, laughing. “You look like a guppy trying to swallow something too big for its gullet.”

“That… that’s not true,” Ferguson managed to stammer.

“What’s not? That you swallowed something too big for your gullet?”

“No! I never had any information like that! Where’d you get that idea?”

“It came to me in a flash of inspiration.”

“What?” Ferguson rose, somewhat unsteadily, to his feet. “You made it up? God, I… Jesus. Why?” He put his hands on the edge of Greenwood’s desk to steady himself and leaned slightly toward the CEO. “Why would you do a thing like that?” Abruptly he turned from the desk and started pacing. “What if this goes to court? What if I’m called to testify? I can’t get up on the witness stand and say what you just said. It would be a lie!” He turned back to Greenwood. “Perjury, George. It would be perjury. They could send me to prison, for God’s sake.”

Greenwood rose slowly and moved around his desk toward his private bar. Ferguson’s eyes followed his every step.

“Sit down, Cullen,” he ordered sharply. “Have a drink. Think this over. If this went to court—and the odds are long against it because I don’t think Sachs has the stomach for a court fight—the only thing you could go to jail for would be contempt, and then only if the judge ordered you to disclose your sources and you refused. Most judges won’t get into that kind of hassle. It makes them look bad when reporters—or former reporters—sit in jail cells for heroically protecting whistle-blowers. The most you’d get is a fine, and the company would take care of it.”