"To this point, we are pursuing no particular causal factor. However, there have been two anomalies identified." Bastien paused as the room fell still.
Jammer Davis fell still.
Bastien picked up, "The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, or black boxes as you in the press so dramatically refer to them, both seem to have suffered interruptions during the incident."
The word "incident" did not escape Davis. "Accident" was more typical, but this implied randomness. An absence of fault.
"The cockpit voice recorder fell offline at the midpoint of the aircraft's severe dive. The reason for this has yet to be determined. The flight data recorder, which would have been supremely useful in our investigation, became inoperative just before the start of the final descent. We expect little useful data to be retrieved relating to the accident sequence. Of course, we are investigating the cause of this malfunction. Early evidence suggests that the data recorder may have been disabled at some point."
Davis stiffened in his seat.
A reporter near the front caught it too. "Disabled?" the woman said. "What do you mean by that? Did someone deliberately turn it off?"
Bastien replied, "The data recorder ceased functioning at an unusually critical moment, just before initiation of the aircraft's nearly vertical dive."
"How could this happen?" someone prodded.
"The data recorder does not have an on-off switch like most instruments on the aircraft. It can, however, be deactivated by pulling a circuit breaker on the electrical panel behind the captain's seat. Indeed, our initial examination of the wreckage has found this breaker to be in the open position."
Davis went rigid. He wondered why Bastien hadn't shared this news with him. He suddenly knew why everyone was so interested in his seventy-two-hour report on Earl Moore.
The reporter smelled blood in the water. "Are you saying that the captain might have turned it off? Why would a pilot do such a thing?"
Bastien said, "I should not speculate as to how this circuit breaker came to be deactivated." Then, after a momentary pause, he speculated. "Yet there is one precedent. SilkAir, December 1997."
Davis jumped to his feet. His chair scraped back hard over the floor and the noise drew everyone's attention, including that of Bastien. Davis canvassed the "experts" lined up on stage. None looked worried. None raised a finger to take exception. Had they known what was coming? Or were they just so many lemmings following the front man over a cliff?
Davis locked eyes with Bastien, the message written in stone on his face — not another word.
Bastien raised his chin defiantly, but then he guided the briefing to more routine topics. It didn't matter. Davis knew the damage was done. SilkAir. The press pool had no idea what it meant. Not yet. But give them ten minutes on the Internet, and they'd all have their headline.
Davis stormed out of the room and headed down the hallway, his long strides eating up ground. Halfway down the corridor he turned, burst through a door, and ended up in an outdoor courtyard. He came to a stop in front of a three-tiered fountain. Davis stood stockstill with his hands on his hips, staring intently but divided from his surroundings. He felt warmth at the collar of his polo shirt and tugged it away, hoping the cool air would lower his boiling point. He could not believe what the investigator-in-charge had just done.
Footsteps clacked over the cobblestone path behind him.
"Jammer?"
He turned and saw Sorensen.
"What was that all about?" she asked.
Davis turned back and stared at the fountain. Four cherubs were pissing in all directions. He said, "Bastien just told the world what caused the crash of World Express 801."
"What?"
"He accused Captain Earl Moore of committing suicide."
Chapter ELEVEN
"SilkAir Flight 185," Davis said, "December 1997"
They had found a bench on one side of the courtyard. Stone steps, wet and mildewed, connected to the main path. Cigarette butts littered the ground around the bench, and a nearby trash can was full of old newspapers and take-out coffee cups rimmed with lipstick. Sorensen sat very still, listening intently.
"It was a Boeing 737, just over a hundred people on board. Without warning, it fell straight out of a blue sky and crashed into the Musi River in Sumatra. You've never heard of it?"
"No," she said, then added, "that was a little before my time in the business."
"It was overseas, the kind of thing that usually starts out on page eight in our newspapers. After two days, it probably disappeared completely. The investigation took three years. In the end, the Indonesian authorities claimed the evidence was inconclusive — no cause could be determined. But our own NTSB was very involved from the beginning."
"And they thought differently?"
Davis nodded. "They had a strong case. Just before the airplane went into its dive, the voice and data recorders stopped streaming data. Evidence suggested that at least one recorder had been disabled by pulling a circuit breaker."
"Exactly what Bastien just said happened here."
"Yes. But in the SilkAir case, the captain of the flight did have some serious issues. He'd recently been disciplined by management. He was in a big financial hole and had just bought a life insurance policy." Davis paused. "And years before, during his time in the Indonesian Air Force, he had lost four squadron buddies in an accident— all on one day. The very same calendar day that SilkAir 185 went down."
She said, "So that crash really was suicide?"
He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees. "Very possibly. But who can say for sure? Who can look into a dead mans soul?"
"Could this accident be the same?"
Davis thought about what he'd seen in the field, what he'd seen in Earl Moore's apartment. "Right now there are a hundred possible causes," he said, his evasion clear.
"But why would Bastien even bring this up?"
"A very good question."
"It sounds so…" Sorensen struggled for the word, "I don't know — alarmist."
"Alarmist? Hell, everyone involved in this investigation is alarmist. They all want to find the secret to the crash — but only as long as it points blame away from their own organization and toward somebody else. This whole thing is a bunch of goddamn government and corporate Boy Scouts trying to earn their whistle-blower badges." Davis paused, dug his heel into a loose stone and pried it from the mud. "Blaming a dead pilot is the easy way out. To some degree it happens in every investigation, but you're usually talking about bad decisions, maybe carelessness."
"And sometimes it's true," she suggested.
"Yes, sometimes it is." He jerked a thumb hard toward the main building. "But what was implied in there, an intentional act — that's way out of bounds for this stage of an inquiry. Not to mention the way Bastien did it. There is one inviolate rule for investigators. Whatever you say, you say it in private. Especially if you're the guy running the show. You don't just toss a grenade in the outhouse like that and run."
Sorensen looked away. She said, "That's a great visual, Jammer."
Finally starting to cool, he shrugged. "I'm a visual guy."
"So what now?"
As Davis turned the same question, he looked up at a darkening sky, hard gray against the fading day. In the official terminology of aviation weather reports, it would have been given the code X — sky obscured. It meant there was no ceiling, no definable level where the clear air ended and the clouds began. In strict reporting terms, it was central to that weather observation no pilot ever wanted to see. Weather, ceiling 0, obscured, visibility 0, fog. WOXOF. When you saw that, you weren't going anywhere.
Davis checked his watch. There was less than an hour of daylight left. He looked at her and said, "Now? Now we get to work."