“Take my car,” Schaeffer said. “It’s got one of those cellular phones in it. I hate it. Only damn time it rings is when something’s gone wrong here or when Cornelia needs me to pick up a bunch of parsley for dinner. I’ll call the garage and tell them to bring it up. Leave word with the switchboard that if anybody calls you, they’re to be referred to the phone in the car.” He scribbled the number down on a piece of paper and started to hand it across the desk when his phone buzzed.
“Schaeffer… yes, he is.” He handed the phone across to Pace. “It’s your man.”
“Pace. Hey, Mike, our state police friend called and—”
“I know,” McGill interrupted. “The word got around here this morning.”
“You knew him?”
“Not well, but I’ve been involved with him off and on for a number of years. He was a good guy. Remember I told you there was something familiar about the voice, the slight accent? I don’t know why I didn’t recognize it. If he was our mysterious caller, and he was the one who believed there was a cover-up in progress, I think we have to take it seriously.”
“I’m with you. Where do we start?”
“I’ve already started. I just finished a profane exchange with Lund.”
“Over what?”
“Over the fact that an investigator disappeared and nobody reported him missing.”
“You braced Lund with that?”
“You bet I did.”
“What did he say?”
“He was defensive about it at first. But he said he’d take it up with Elliott Parkhall.”
“Did you just alert the chief suspects?”
“I don’t give a damn. Mark was too good a man to let his death pass without an explanation. Besides, if he was my caller, I owe him.”
“We need to talk.”
“Why don’t you meet me in two hours at the Marriott?”
“Can you get away?”
“Absolutely. This is now a legitimate part of my investigation.”
“I’ll be there. Meanwhile, keep a low profile.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Clay Helm thinks this could get dangerous.”
“I’m sure it could.”
Schaeffer, Wister, and Pace spent another forty-five minutes going over options for the Chronicle. If other papers tied Mark Antravanian to the Sexton crash, his role in the investigation would be the second paragraph in a six-paragraph story about a car wreck. They were confident they alone knew of the possibility Antravanian was on a special mission on the night of his death. There was no need to rush into anything. They could take all the time and care they needed.
But for what?
What were they getting into, getting the Chronicle into?
It was Wister who put their concerns into words.
“We have to find evidence that supports a cover-up theory,” he said. “We have to see the evidence and get expert analysis of it. But who do we trust? What’s left of the power-plants group is suspect. Vernon Lund is suspect. So we go higher. But how high? How far do we have to climb to get out of the conspiracy, assuming there is one?” He looked to Pace.
“I suspect it’s limited to people at Dulles,” the reporter said.
“I’ll tell you what we do: we start pushing,” said Schaeffer. “We ask questions. We press for answers. We play it like a boxer looking for an opening in the opponent. We jab and step back, jab and step back. We press and irritate, and sooner or later someone will take a wild punch and give us the opening we need.”
“No,” Wister said emphatically. “If this thing is happening, it cost one man his life already. Sometimes a wild punch has a way of hitting the mark. We’d be risking too much.”
“There are 335 people dead now,” Schaeffer said emphatically. “Doing nothing is risking too much.”
“I’ll ask Mike,” Pace suggested. “He knows the players. He’ll know the right moves.”
“I don’t want you out of touch at any time,” Schaeffer reminded him.
Pace got up to leave. Wister put a hand on his arm. “Steve, I owe you an apology.” He extended his hand. Pace accepted it gratefully. The pieces of his life were falling back into the right places. “Thanks.”
Wister smiled. “Sometimes when we tilt at windmills, there’s something there.”
“If it’s out there,” Pace replied, “we’ll find it.”
Pace and McGill sat and talked in Schaeffer’s Mercedes in the far corner of the hotel parking lot, away from potential eavesdroppers.
The spring breeze was chilly, but it carried overtones of the humidity that would spread a summer blanket over the region. The weather was the last thing on their minds.
“A cover-up would be horribly risky,” McGill was saying. “And I’m not sure how you’d prove it. All things being equal, it looks like the NTSB came up with a competent and plausible explanation for the crash. I don’t see any holes in it. If you and I weren’t sitting here talking about it, there’d be nobody around asking questions because there wouldn’t be any reason to.”
“Then why do you say it’s so risky?”
“The number of people you’d have to involve. Let’s say you’re the villain, and the problem you’re trying to cover up is in the engine. That’s the logical target since it’s central to the accident. All the members of the power-plants group would have to be involved, as well as anyone else who poked around the engine. It would be a massive conspiracy. I don’t think it could be done.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would you have to involve everybody concerned with the engine?”
“Because they’re all going to examine the sucker. You can’t get an engineer to say the accident was caused by X when his own eyeballs tell him it was caused by Y.”
“So how many people are we talking about here?”
“The four we talked about before. Parkhall, Antravanian, Comchech, and Teller.”
“Anyone else likely to look at the engine?”
“Well, certainly the Converse engineers on the scene. They’d be all over it.”
Pace nodded.
“Padgett and Lund would see it, of course. The Sexton people would nose around it, too. How many is that?”
“Too many,” Pace said glumly. “It won’t wash.”
“It won’t,” McGill agreed.
“So what have we got?” Pace asked.
McGill shook his head, a pained expression masking his face. “A very nice and able man who lost his life trying to bring me a message of warning. And now that I’ve got it, I can’t make sense of it.” He shook his head and pounded the window frame with his fist. “And there’s another element, maybe the toughest of all. Let’s say you could involve everybody you needed to pull off a cover-up. That’s a ridiculous assumption, but let’s make it. Since members of the go-team rotate weekly, and since our villain wouldn’t have any idea when or where the major accident would be, how would he know who to bribe, or muscle, or hypnotize, or whatever he did?”
“Unless he had exhaustive computer files on all the people in the country qualified for go-team duty. But to have that he’d almost have to be inside the NTSB.”
“Jesus.” McGill sighed. “I don’t even like to think about that.”
“You got any better place to start?”
McGill was forced to make a silent admission that Pace had logic on his side.
Pace, who’d slumped in the driver’s seat, pushed himself erect. “Mike, we need help from somebody inside the agency. We’re going nowhere on our own. We could come up with a thousand different scenarios, and we could miss the one that’s right. We need somebody high up.”