Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

The secretary, who recognized Pace immediately since his beat brought him to her desk often, was taken aback by McGill’s tone. But she reckoned him not a man to challenge.

“Mr. Sachs, a Captain McGill and Steven Pace to see you,” she said into the intercom on her telephone console. “Yes, sir.” She replaced the receiver and looked, pointedly, Pace thought, at him alone. “Mr. Sachs says he’ll be with you shortly.”

And shortly it was. She no sooner finished the sentence than his office door opened and the NTSB chairman stood there, obviously uncertain of what he was getting into, regarding the two visitors with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.

“Come in,” he said finally.

Sachs was a man who wouldn’t draw a second glance in a crowd of two. He looked Mediterranean, with the olive complexion, dark-brown eyes and prominent nose, yet his name indicated Germanic ancestry. Sachs was relatively young, in his mid-forties, but his thick dark-brown hair was receding. One day he would wind up with no more than a fringe.

Pace liked the NTSB chairman and accepted Mike’s assessment that Sachs was a man to be trusted. But he came out of an airline background—as a vice-president of something for United—and Pace wasn’t certain how that would affect his attitude about the story he was about to hear.

They hadn’t started off on the right foot, that was certain. Sachs wasn’t pleased by McGill’s push for the late-afternoon appointment, and he said so.

“I have a lot of respect for you, but I don’t like being bullied, and I don’t like pulling end-arounds on the other board members,” he said. “Vernon Lund is absolutely trustworthy, and he’s the board’s rep. If something’s wrong, he’s the man you should be talking to. I’m also annoyed that Steve is here, although it’s nothing personal, Steve. But the press has no place in an NTSB investigation until we’re ready to announce our findings.”

“Steve isn’t here because he pushed his way in, Ken. He’s here because circumstances dragged him into a situation no one could possibly have foreseen. Before you make judgments about what this is or isn’t about, you should hear him out.”

Sachs turned to the reporter. “What’s the bottom line?” he demanded.

Pace wished again he felt more certain about Sachs’s loyalties.

“That somebody’s trying to cover up the real reason for the ConPac crash, and members of your highly respected go-team are up to their armpits in the conspiracy,” the reporter said bluntly.

The chairman blinked in disbelief. “That’s preposterous,” he said. “I’ve never heard such drivel in my life. A conspiracy? Cover-up? Jesus, what have you guys been smoking?”

“Maybe you’d better hear the whole story, Ken,” McGill suggested.

“It’d better be a damn sight more substantial than what you’ve given me so far.”

They started with Pace’s chance meeting with George Ridley. Each told the part of the story with which he was most familiar. Sachs’s expression alternated between disbelief and horror. He didn’t interrupt, but he never lost interest. His eyes shifted from one to the other as they took turns speaking. When Pace came to the end, to the identification of Antravanian, Sachs fell back in his leather chair as though he’d been hit in the face. He hadn’t heard earlier of the engineer’s death. Pace thought he saw a hint of glistening in the chairman’s eyes.

“I knew Mark well,” Sachs said, barely above a whisper. “My God, this is unbelievable.” He swallowed hard. “I wonder why somebody, didn’t call…” His voice trailed off.

“Even though his death appears as a cause-unknown accident on police records, off the record, the Virginia cops are treating the case as a possible homicide,” Pace said.

“And you suspect Lund’s involved?”

“That’s no more than a concern at the moment,” McGill said. “I braced him this morning about how a key member of the key group on this investigation could disappear on a Saturday night and on the next Wednesday morning still not be reported missing. He was more defensive than concerned, and that bothered me. Call it a hunch. I didn’t want to take this to him.”

Sachs drew some meaningless lines on a memo pad and sat in silence for nearly a minute, shaking his head.

“This is very hard for me, very hard,” he said. “Elliott Parkhall can be a bit of a jerk—a lot of a jerk, actually—but he’s a solid scientist. I know the other members of this go-team by reputation. Everything I know is acceptable. They wouldn’t have been appointed otherwise.” He glanced from McGill to Pace and back again, his face a mask of incalculable pain. “To think so many of them, and maybe Vern Lund, could be… tell me again why you suspect Lund.”

“It’s totally circumstantial,” Pace repeated, “based solely on the fact that Harold Marshall sent somebody to meet with him early in the investigation. The message carried an implied threat.”

“But your source told you Lund was angry about the message,” Sachs added.

“Yes, but a conspiracy theorist would suggest that was for show.”

Sachs shook his head again. “And you think somebody sabotaged the Sexton, and that’s the reason for the cover-up?”

“That’s only one possibility,” said McGill.

There was silence for a long moment. Sachs gazed at a blank spot on his desk blotter. “How can I deal with something like this?” he asked dismally.

“Let somebody independent of this go-team look at the evidence,” McGill suggested.

“What?”

“The conspiracy, if it exists, lives or dies on the assumption that a lot of people are overlooking, ignoring, or altering evidence,” the pilot explained. “Get the evidence in the hands of somebody you trust implicitly and start at square one. Hell, Ken, you’re the administrator. You can do anything you want.”

“Not really. But I’ll take the night to think out the best way to approach this,” Sachs said. “In fact, I’ll probably have to take several days. I’m on a very early military flight tomorrow to mend some political fences in Illinois for the President. I’ll keep in touch with one or both of you while I’m out of town, and when I get back next Monday, we’ll meet again and decide how to proceed. I don’t think the delay will hurt. Nothing will be set in cement between now and then.”

“NTSB people always say they have to get to an accident in a hurry because so much of the evidence is so fragile,” Pace reminded him.

“If this conspiracy exists, we’ve already lost evidence to tampering, but that deed’s done,” Sachs said. “The NTSB has full control of the remaining evidence, and a few days won’t exacerbate the damage. In the meantime, I’ll have Susan expunge any record of this meeting so there’s no chance of anyone finding out you brought this to me.”

He regarded his visitors for a moment. “I don’t know whether to hate you or thank you,” he said. “I want to get to the bottom of this accident. That’s part of my job. And if somebody’s standing in my way, I want him, too. The integrity of the Safety Board has never been questioned before. But this conspiracy, if it exists, could destroy us.”

“It isn’t the integrity of the Safety Board in question, it’s the integrity of a few people working for the Safety Board,” Pace reassured him. “Even if our worst suspicions are true, a prompt and complete reaction from you would go a long way toward mitigating the damage. Hell, the NTSB has been around for more than twenty years. Maybe something like this was inevitable.”

“But why?” the administrator demanded.

Pace shrugged. “It could be anything. Money. Power. Both. Who knows?”