Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

Bonaro’s instincts were correct. Pace drove directly to his New Hampshire Avenue apartment building, entered its underground garage, and disappeared.

Bonaro headed up New Hampshire to Dupont Circle and a public phone. At Dulles, Elliott Parkhall answered on the second ring.

“We got a problem,” Bonaro said. “The subject knows. I overheard him tell a friend.”

“How much does he know?” Parkhall asked.

“That the engineer’s accident was no accident. And the pilot was a charade. He believes the same people did both killings, and he suspects they’re tied to the crash.”

“Goddamn it!” Parkhall exploded. “I was afraid of that after his story this morning. Where is he now?”

“I put him to bed. I think he’s down for the night.”

“Where can I find you later?”

“My answering machine. Like always.”

“Where the hell is that machine? Where do you stay?”

“That’s my business. If you need me, you’ll reach me.”

Bonaro slammed the receiver back, his contempt for the man on the other end growing with every contact. If the job didn’t pay so well, he would have dumped it, just to be rid of the jerk.

Normally he didn’t care where his fee came from, but he had some curiosity about the people who ran Parkhall. He wondered if they knew how squirrelly the little shit was. Bonaro never told clients where to find him; he surely wouldn’t tell a squirrel. The phone line to his recorder wasn’t in his name, and the recording said simply, “Leave a message.” There was nothing to tie him to this operation but Parkhall’s word, and Parkhall didn’t even know his full name. If things went wrong, he would drive back to Baltimore with his partner and disappear into the camouflage of the waterfront. Parkhall could take the fall. The shit deserved it.

But Bonaro didn’t want things to go wrong. His sense was there was too much cash yet to be made. If Parkhall screwed this up, Bonaro vowed, his last act before heading north would be to off the sucker. If Parkhall let somebody chop down the money tree before the harvest was in, he’d by God pay for it. Bonaro started toward his van, then detoured into the Dupont Circle Hotel. The place had a nice bar, and he owed himself a drink.

Elliott Parkhall stared at the dead telephone receiver for several seconds before replacing it in its cradle. What the hell had he said to make the guy mad? He’d simply asked him where he lived, for chrissake. Screw him, anyway. Who did he think he was? Hell, muscle was easy to find. If the guy got out of line again, he would demand new help. That black guy, Davis, must know all kinds of people in the ghetto with guns and an urge to make some easy money. That was another thing Parkhall resented. He didn’t like working for blacks. He never met one he trusted. It was a one of them who’d stolen his promotion at Warner Woolcott and left him to dicker with the NTSB.

The thought of the agency brought Parkhall back to the present and the problem at hand. If Pace was onto the murders, how long until he identified the cover-up? The engineer’s heart began to race, and he felt dampness on his palms and through the hairs at the back of his neck. He tried to remember how he’d gotten himself mixed up in this scheme anyway, but the chain of events was muddled in the quagmire of his confused mind. At the moment, the most important thing was to reach Davis and tell him about Pace. Parkhall hoped there wouldn’t be another killing. Already he was in way over his head and drowning fast in his own terror.

He let Davis’s phone at the Senate Transportation Committee ring eight times before giving up and trying his home. Davis answered in mid-ring.

Parkhall relayed the report from the muscleman who called himself Sly. As he talked, he realized with some alarm he didn’t know the big man’s last name. If the operation blew up, he wouldn’t know who to finger for the killings. Nobody would believe he was taking orders from a high-ranking Senate aide, the way the executives at Warner Woolcott didn’t believe him when he warned they wouldn’t be able to depend on the man who stole the job that should have been his.

“Calm down, Elliott. There’s nothing for you to worry about.” Davis’s deep voice was smooth and reassuring.

“Whadda you mean?” Parkhall fretted. “The goddamn newspaper people know the two murders are connected and tied to the Sexton somehow.”

“They don’t know anything. They only suspect,” Davis said. “That was evident this morning if you read Pace’s story carefully. Suspecting and proving are two different things, and they aren’t anywhere close to proving. They’re not going to get close, either, unless somebody loses his cool. Understand?”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Then we’ll handle it. We’ll handle Pace. I’ll make some calls. But it’s not your affair. You’ve reported. Your responsibility is covered. Your most important job is in Hangar Three. Keep at it and you’ll be fine. I’ve got it covered, okay?”

“Yeah, okay,” Parkhall said. But he didn’t believe it.

David hung up gingerly, as though to do otherwise could upset the delicate balance of Parkhall’s psyche. Pace was getting to be a pain in the ass, there was no question about it. But Davis didn’t want to deal with the problem this night. He was still trying to dope out the results of his afternoon meeting with Vernon Lund. It definitely didn’t start well. Lund made it clear he resented the implications of George Ridley’s visit the previous week. Davis made excuses for it, saying Ridley and Marshall didn’t get along, and Ridley could have been trying to make the Ohio senator look bad. Or maybe George didn’t understand the message the senator wanted to convey.

There had been no intention, at least not on the senator’s part, to imply that the investigation should be skewed in any way. Harold Marshall would be the last man to suggest the probe stop short of the real cause of the accident. But Lund could understand, couldn’t he, that Senator Marshall was deeply concerned about Converse? The nation should be very concerned, too. After all, the aviation industry was one of the few in which the United States still led the world, and the future of all components of that industry was vitally important to the country. So if there was any doubt at all about the cause of the crash, it would be terrible to finger Converse simply to have a scapegoat. Lund could understand that, couldn’t he?

Lund appeared skeptical, but if doubts about Marshall remained in his mind, they didn’t come through in his words.

“Tell the senator we understand his concern,” Lund had said. “Tell him we will not point a finger unless there is absolute certainty. The NTSB has never done otherwise.”

Davis broached the idea of a final press briefing to nail down the bird strike as the cause of the accident and put to rest fulminating theories about imaginary conspiracies.

He was amazed when Lund responded positively to the idea. “I hate what the Chronicle is trying to do,” Lund said. “Let me think about it.”

The Dulles situation, like Elliott Parkhall’s psyche, was in delicate balance. Davis knew he couldn’t afford a mistake. He couldn’t afford to be distracted by Pace’s bar talk. And that’s pretty much what it was, he decided, just bar talk. He believed what he’d told Parkhall. Suspecting and proving are two different things.

He would worry about Steven Pace later.

While Chapman Davis spent the evening wrestling with the specter of Vernon Lund, Steve Pace wrestled with the specter of himself.

He entered his apartment angry and confused, frustrated as much by his own behavior as by the mystery of Flight 1117. It wasn’t like him to lose control, even over a shock like Mike McGill’s death. People died senselessly every day. Pace’s own parents and younger brother had died while flying home with a friend in the friend’s private airplane from an Indiana University basketball game. The accident was as senseless as they come. The pilot had a commercial license, an instrument rating, more than 2,000 hours of experience, and a normally level head. But he’d allowed himself a drink or two after the game. For that reason, or for others perhaps, he became disoriented while trying to land at the little airport outside Pace’s hometown. Instead of flying his Beechcraft onto the 3,000-foot airstrip, he’d flown it into the side of a barn.