“Sounds like it,” Pace agreed.
“I wish I could say the same for the traveling public.”
“What do you mean?”
Sachs looked positively grim. “In addition to having a conspiracy on our hands, we’re back to square one in this hangar. If there was no bird strike, we don’t know what caused this crash, and we don’t know it won’t happen again.”
BOOK THREE
36
The floor of the United States Senate chamber was placid. Clerks and pages stood in place because the Senate was in session, though only in an official sense. The junior senator from Florida sat in the presiding officer’s chair, a duty he assumed because it was a trivial job at this hour, and when the job was trivial, those lowest in seniority were expected to assume it. Presiding over the Senate during the period called Morning Business involved recognizing members who wished to have the floor and helping rule on questions of parliamentary procedure. The questions of parliamentary procedure arising during Morning Business were never of any consequence. A high-school student-body president could have handled it.
In the rear corners of the chamber and at the doors to the cloakrooms, Senate aides with the heady prerogative to be on the Senate floor clustered to bask in the reflected glow of each other’s power and privilege. They might have been discussing matters as important as appropriations bills, but more likely it was one of the three S subjects: sports, scandals, or sex. Sharp eyes could pick out seven senators, each awaiting his or her turn to read into the official Senate record a speech carefully crafted to stroke the sensibilities of the folks back home. Since no specific issue was before the Senate at the moment, there were no constraints on the subject matter the senators chose to address. A visitor could come away with the impression the Senate heard nothing but occasional lectures on the value of farm subsidies, or the dangers of nuclear space garbage, or the progress of trans-Arctic dogsled treks, or the virtues of Billy Bob Keckaman, who had been selling electric widgets from exactly the same electric widget stand in Thumbsucker, Alabama, for sixty-four years without a dissatisfied customer.
If there was any substance at all, a speech might draw a reporter from a home-state newspaper. If the home-state newspapers didn’t have Washington correspondents, the duty to chronicle the oratory fell to a junior wire-service reporter, as the job of presiding over these speeches fell to a junior senator.
The Senate chamber occupies the second floor of the Capitol. Above it, on the third level, are balconies, called galleries, reserved for the media, visitors, and senators’ families. There was a time when a senator could see if he or she was being chronicled by glancing up at the press gallery and counting noses, but that was no longer the case. Many reporters preferred to sit in the comfortable third-floor press room behind the gallery and monitor the floor action via closed-circuit television, called C-Span II. And since C-Span was on cable television, reporters without other business at the Capitol could sit in their offices, or even at home, and report on the day in Congress.
But this day was one of the rarities. On this morning, the media and visitors’ galleries were filled. None of the business on the Senate floor appeared unusual, but Senator Harold Marshall had asked for five minutes during Morning Business. His appearance was gleefully anticipated. He was well known as the product of and the able spokesman for the Converse Corporation. After the long story in the morning’s Chronicle, it was almost inevitable that Marshall would have something to say and that his legendary temper would be on high burn.
Marshall had not yet taken the floor, and in the media galleries, reporters were studying copies of the Chronicle, trying to digest every nuance of Steve Pace’s story. It was bannered across the top of page one and was as astounding as some of the old Watergate stories.
The story disclosed that the NTSB’s laboratory found no trace of flesh, feathers, or blood on any of the fan blades broken in the accident and recovered away from the main body of the engine. Nonetheless, the engine was filled with bird remains. Investigators speculated that the evidence was planted. The story quoted one investigator, who was not named, as telling the NTSB he looked at the engine on the afternoon of the crash and saw no evidence of a bird strike. The story also disclosed that the leaders of the investigation were not informed until the day after the accident of a substance, believed to be the remains of a large bird, found inside the engine. That information was made public the same afternoon. The sudden new interest in the accident was another in a series of strange occurrences surrounding the crash.
In a sidebar, Pace retold the story of the deaths of Mark Antravanian and Mike McGill, bringing up to date the police investigation of both cases. He also wrote of Justin Smith’s death, reported as a murder earlier in the week by all the Washington media. But for the first time, the killing was linked directly to Smith’s suspicions that a cover-up clouded the investigation of the ConPac crash.
Officially, the NTSB, the Sexton Aircraft Corporation, and the Converse Corporation were declining comment. It was, all in all, a compelling read.
Steve Pace was not in the press gallery to cover Harold Marshall’s speech. He could have appropriated the story, but he and Paul Wister agreed he could accomplish more by staying in touch with the NTSB and the police. Julian Hughes was in the gallery for the Chronicle. She was fielding all sorts of questions from her dumbfounded colleagues, but she was able to add nothing to what her newspaper printed because she knew nothing more. She had no idea where Pace’s information came from or where he was going with it. Other reporters told her the NTSB was declining all comment on the Chronicle story. They were frustrated, and she understood. But she could offer no help and would not have done so in any event.
A murmur of “There he is” rolled along the gallery desks as Marshall strode onto the floor from the Republican cloakroom. Hughes knew Glenn Brennan, probably along with a few dozen other reporters, was stationed in the cloakroom to catch the Ohio senator both before and after his speech. She wondered if they got anything but bluster.
No one had the floor, so Marshall marched to his desk amid the other mismatched desks. With one exception, that of the senior senator from Delaware, all the desks were the originals that had come to the Senate chamber as each new state was admitted to the Union. Marshall’s dated back to the early nineteenth century. The old furniture was nonutilitarian at best, but that didn’t matter. Senators spent very little time at them and did no work there. Marshall clipped a small microphone to the breast pocket of his suit coat and asked to be recognized. The junior senator from Florida acknowledged the request and recognized Marshall for the standard five minutes. Had the Ohioan chanced to glance up, he would have seen that this was to be the best-covered piece of Morning Business of this Congress. But Marshall had no use for the media, not on this day.
“Thank you, Madam President. I rise this morning in a sense of outrage at the scurrilous accusations made in a newspaper I refuse to name. It deserves no publicity for its mendacious conduct in ignoring all relevant facts in order to score a cheap exclusive that bears no resemblance to the truth as we know it.” Marshall’s face was pinched in the same fury reflected in his voice.