Noah Hawley - Before the Fall

“Well, I mean, Eleanor’s not — she’s a good person. Means well. I just — my thought is, she must be — it’s manipulation somehow.”

“By the painter.”

“Or — I don’t know — maybe the money made her — the idea of it — changed her somehow.”

“Because you thought you had a happy marriage.”

“Well, I mean, there’s some struggle, right? We don’t always — but that’s — in your twenties, thirties — it’s hard work — life. Making your mark? And you’re supposed to — stick by each other, not—”

Bill nods, sits back. In his right pant pocket, his phone vibrates. He slips it out and looks at the text message, his eyes narrowing. As he does, a second message comes in, then a third. Namor has been bugging the wife’s home phone, and is writing to say he heard something.

Calls btwn swimmer and heiress last night. Sexy stuff.

And then…

Also swimmer and NTSB. Flight recorder damaged.

Followed by …

Swimmer admits bedding heiress.

Bill pockets his phone, pulls himself up to his full sitting height.

“Doug,” he says, “what if I told you we had confirmation that Scott Burroughs bedded Layla Mueller, the heiress, just hours before driving out to your home?”

“Well, I mean—”

“And that he is talking to her still, calling her from your home?”

Doug feels his mouth go dry.

“Okay. But — does that mean — do you think — is he with my wife, or—”

“What do you think?”

Doug closes his eyes. He’s not equipped for this, for the feelings he’s having, the sense that somehow in the last two weeks he has gone from winner to loser, as if his life is a practical joke the world is playing on him.

In the studio, Bill reaches out and pats Doug’s hand.

“We’ll be right back,” he says.

Who among us really understands how recording works? How an Edison machine, in the old days, laid grooves in a cylinder of vinyl and from those grooves, when played back with a needle, came the exact replica of the sounds recorded. Words or music. But how is that possible, for a needle and a groove to re-create sound? For a scratch in a plastic wheel to capture the exact timbre of life? And then the change to digital, and how the human voice now passes through a microphone into a hard drive and somehow is codified into ones and zeros, translated to data, and then reassembled through wires and speakers to reconstruct the precise pitch and tone of human speech, the sounds of reggae or birds calling to each other on a summer day.

It is just one of a million magic acts we have mastered over the centuries, technologies invented — from anatomical stents to war machines — their origins traced back to the dirty days of the Neanderthal and the creation of fire. Tools for survival and conquest.

And how ten thousand years later, men in skinny jeans and Oliver Peoples eyeglasses can disassemble a black box inside a sterile case and probe it with wiry pentalobes and penlights. How they can replace damaged ports and run diagnostic software, itself created from binary code. Each line simply a version of on or off.

Gus Franklin sits on the back of his chair, feet on the seat. He has been awake for thirty-six hours, wearing yesterday’s clothes, his face unshaved. They’re close. That’s what they tell him. Almost all of the data has been recovered. He’ll have a printout any second, the flight recorder data detailing every move the plane made, every command entered. The voice recorder may take longer, their ability to go back in time — the translation of ones and zeros into voices — hampering their ability to float inside that ghost cockpit and bear witness to the flight’s final moments.

Ballistics shows that the bullet holes are consistent with Gil Baruch’s service weapon. Agent O’Brien — tired of looming over NTSB techs and asking How much longer? — is in the city, trying to find out more about the Batemans’ body man. Because his body is missing, Agent O’Brien has floated a new theory. Maybe Gil turned on his employer, sold his services to another buyer (al-Qaeda? the North Koreans?), then — after the flight was under way — pulled his weapon and somehow crashed the plane, then escaped.

Like a villain in a James Bond movie? Gus asked to no response. He offered O’Brien the more likely theory that Baruch, whom they know wasn’t buckled in, was killed in the crash, his body thrown clear, swallowed by the deep or eaten by sharks. But O’Brien shook his head and said they needed to be thorough.

On a parallel track, the autopsy results on Charles Busch came back about an hour ago. Toxicology was positive for alcohol and cocaine. Now there’s an FBI team digging deeper into the copilot’s history, interviewing friends and family, reviewing work history and school records. There’s no evidence of any mental health issues in his files. Did he have a psychotic episode, like the Germanwings copilot? Had Busch always been a time bomb, and somehow managed to keep it secret?

Gus stares at the art gallery on the far side of the hangar. A train derailed. A tornado approaching. He was a married man once, two toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet. Now he lives alone in a sterile apartment by the Hudson, hermetically sealed inside a glass cube. He owns one toothbrush, drinks from the same glass at every meal, rinsing it afterward and placing it on the rack to dry.

A tech comes over carrying a clutch of papers. The printout. He hands it to Gus, who scans it. His team assembles around him, waiting. Somewhere the same information is being brought up onscreen, a second group gathered around that. Everyone is looking for narrative, a story told in latitude and altitude, the literal rise and fall of Flight 613.

“Cody,” says Gus.

“I see it,” says Cody.

The data is pure numbers. Vectors of thrust and lift. They’re clean. They graph. To trace a journey mathematically, all you need are coordinates. Reading the data, Gus relives the final minutes of the airplane’s journey — data divorced from the lives and personalities of the passengers and crew. This is the story of an airplane, not the people on board. Engine performance records, flap specifics.

Forgotten is the disaster scene around him, the art gallery and its patrons.

The data shows that the flight takes off without incident, banking left, then straightening out, the plane rising to twenty-six thousand feet over a period of six minutes and thirteen seconds, as ordered by ATC. At minute six, the autopilot is switched on and the flight heads southwest along a planned route. Nine minutes later, control of the plane is switched from pilot to copilot, Melody to Busch, for reasons the data can’t project. Course and altitude remain constant. Then, sixteen minutes into the flight, the autopilot is turned off. The plane banks sharply and dives, what started as a slow port turn becoming a steep spiral, like a mad dog chasing its tail.

All systems were normal. There was no mechanical error. The copilot turned off the autopilot and took manual control. He put the plane into a dive, ultimately crashing into the sea. Those are the facts. Now they know the root cause. What they don’t know is (a) why? and (b) what happened next? They know Busch was drunk, high. Was his perception or judgment altered by drugs? Did he think he was flying the plane normally, or did he know he had begun a death spiral?

More important, did the copilot wait for the pilot to go and then deliberately crash the plane? But why would he do that? What possible grounds would lie behind such an action?

Gus sits for a moment. Around him there is a sudden rush of activity, numbers fed into algorithms, double-checked. But Gus is still. He knows for certain now. The crash was no accident. Its origins lie not in the science of tensile strength or joint wear, caused not by computer failure or faulty hydraulics, but in the murky whys of psychology, in the torment and tragedy of the human soul. Why would a handsome, healthy young man put a passenger plane into a steep and irrevocable dive, ignoring the panicked pounding of the captain outside the cockpit and his own shrieking survival instinct? What sort of unsteady foundation had taken root in the gray matter of his brain — what previously undiagnosed mental illness or recent deafening gripe at the injustices of the world — could inspire a senator’s nephew to kill nine people, including himself, by turning a luxury jet into a missile?