Джозеф Хеллер - Maximum Impact

“And how about the beating I took? I was the only reporter in town who connected the two deaths and was writing about them. How does that factor into your odds?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel admitted. He sounded uncomfortable.

“And add this: Why did it take Vernon Lund twenty-four hours to report evidence of a bird strike? His first word on it was at his press briefing Friday evening, more than a day after the accident. The evidence should have been obvious from the get-go. Why didn’t he mention it Thursday?”

“Even if that’s true, I’m not sure I follow the implications,” Gabriel said.

“Seems to me the bird gore should have been spotted right after the accident.”

“Maybe it was.”

“But nobody said anything to the media until Friday? Come on, Mitch.”

“That doesn’t knock me out of my chair, actually,” Gabriel said. “The first hours of an investigation are incredibly busy and confusing. Most of the attention was focused on stabilizing the fuselage. Maybe the engine team didn’t mention it to Lund until Friday, or maybe the team told Lund and he decided not to make it public right away.”

Pace felt the cold chill of logic in Gabriel’s proposition. “Is there some way you could find out for me?”

“I could try. What you want to know is when Lund first learned about the bird remains. Anything else?”

“Not at the moment.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

Pace pulled up to the gated entrance to the Dulles field shortly before three o’clock. An airport police officer approached his car.

“Yes, sir?” the officer said.

Pace flashed his press credentials and asked if there was a way to get a message to someone inside Hangar 3.

“I can send a message in,” the officer said, “but I can’t let you through.”

“I don’t want to go in,” Pace replied. “I want somebody to come out.”

The reporter sent word to Elliott Parkhall that he was outside with some critical information. While he waited for an answer, he got out of his car and leaned against the hood. He expected Parkhall to tell him to go to hell. Pace’s message was a huge bluff.

But it worked.

“Look, I don’t have to talk to you guys. That’s not my job,” Parkhall said as he came through the gate and approached the reporter.

“I know it isn’t, Mr. Parkhall, and I won’t take up any more of your time than I have to, but there are a few important things we need to talk about.”

“I don’t have anything to say. Mr. Lund spoke for the go-team.”

“The official press briefings are over, but I still have some questions.”

“What makes you think I can answer them? Or would if I could?”

“Let’s get in the car. I’ll turn on the air and we can relax.”

“I told you to talk to the press officer,” Parkhall insisted. “I don’t do interviews.”

“Do you do drinks?” Pace asked.

There was a pause. “Not unless I know why.”

“Let’s say, no ulterior motives. Just a talk.”

“Not until I know why.”

“You remember Watergate?” Pace asked.

“Oh, fer… what is this, a pop quiz?” Parkhall sounded and looked flustered. He stood opposite Pace with his feet spread and his arms folded.

“The eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap,” Pace said quickly, pressing his advantage. “A critical meeting in the Oval Office during a major crisis over a political conspiracy, and the President’s secretary admits she accidentally erased eighteen and a half minutes of a tape recording of that meeting. It’s the tape that could have proved the President of the United States was a felon. You must have heard about it. It was in all the papers.”

“What the hell has it got to do with me?” Parkhall demanded.

“Yours is the not-so-famous eighteen-and-a-half-hour gap, the time between your first examination of the Converse engine out there and your first report of seeing sliced and diced bird in it. It’s been bothering me that Vernon Lund didn’t mention anything about a bird at his press briefing the evening of the crash. He didn’t mention it until the next day. So I asked the NTSB this morning to find out why. Seems Lund wasn’t told about it until the next day. By you. Is there some reason you didn’t tell him sooner?”

Pace was getting nasty. But he was on a roll. “And then we could talk about the forty-eight-hour gap, the time between Mark Antravanian’s disappearance and the time his body was identified. A key member of your team disappears without explanation, but you never mention it to anybody. We got more gaps here than the Green Mountains. Now, do you want to have that drink?”

“No,” Parkhall insisted, backing away from Pace, “and don’t bother me again.”

Pace considered the confrontation during the drive back to Washington. He’d given the tree of conspiracy a strong shake. Now it remained to see what fell out.

Pace slammed his fist into the top of the dashboard. “Damn it, what a stupid —” He pulled off on the side of the Dulles access road and reached to the passenger seat for his folder of investigation documents. When he put his hands on the one he wanted, he began thumbing the pages as quickly as he could.

“Air frame, ATC, come on, come on,” he urged, flipping to the last pages. “Power plants!” he said triumphantly. He read the names aloud: Parkhall, Antravanian, Comchech, Teller. The four assigned members of the power-plants group. And he hadn’t even tried talking to two of them. Perhaps they would answer the key questions: When had they first seen the engine? When did they realize a colleague was missing?

He would wait until that evening and call Comchech and Teller at the Dulles Marriott from his apartment. Caught alone in their rooms, they might be more inclined to talk to him… if they weren’t part of the conspiracy, too.

That evening, as he walked home from work with the go-team list in his pocket, Pace spotted the blue Ford van.

It was following him across town on M Street. He looked at it carefully, trying to find new details to describe it, any partial piece of the license plate, even a definite make on the state of registry. But the driver realized he’d been seen and reacted quickly. The truck turned south onto 19th Street and disappeared into the last of the rush-hour traffic. Pace raced across M Street, oblivious to the honking motorists who barely missed him. He pushed off the front of a red Cougar and careened past the bumper of a Yellow Cab. He barely skirted the left fender of a Toyota Tercel and actually ran across the big front bumper of a delivery van that pulled up behind a Lexus so close he couldn’t get between them. Then he raced down 19th, hoping the van would be delayed by the traffic long enough for him to overtake it. But after running two blocks and finding nothing, he stopped, his chest heaving from the exertion and the adrenaline that propelled him. It was gone; where, he had no idea.

Pace didn’t get much of a look at the driver, but he got a good view of the bashed-up right front quarter. There were, among the dents and scrapes, streaks that definitely were yellow paint. When he headed back toward his apartment building, it was with the firm and smug satisfaction of having flushed Elliott Parkhall from the slime pond. Parkhall must have sent the van, perhaps with instructions to let the reporter spot it. A ploy to scare him off, maybe.

He let himself into his apartment, went straight to the refrigerator for one of the Guinness Stouts Glenn left behind, and sat back on the sofa with a thud.

Then, remembering what had happened the last time he’d sicced the dogs on himself, he got up and double-locked his front door. That would keep a mugger out, he figured, if the mugger happened to be eight years old and new to the profession.