Sachs drew some meaningless lines on a memo pad and sat in silence for nearly a minute, shaking his head.
“This is very hard for me, very hard,” he said. “Elliott Parkhall can be a bit of a jerk—a lot of a jerk, actually—but he’s a solid scientist. I know the other members of this go-team by reputation. Everything I know is acceptable. They wouldn’t have been appointed otherwise.” He glanced from McGill to Pace and back again, his face a mask of incalculable pain. “To think so many of them, and maybe Vern Lund, could be… tell me again why you suspect Lund.”
“It’s totally circumstantial,” Pace repeated, “based solely on the fact that Harold Marshall sent somebody to meet with him early in the investigation. The message carried an implied threat.”
“But your source told you Lund was angry about the message,” Sachs added.
“Yes, but a conspiracy theorist would suggest that was for show.”
Sachs shook his head again. “And you think somebody sabotaged the Sexton, and that’s the reason for the cover-up?”
“That’s only one possibility,” said McGill.
There was silence for a long moment. Sachs gazed at a blank spot on his desk blotter. “How can I deal with something like this?” he asked dismally.
“Let somebody independent of this go-team look at the evidence,” McGill suggested.
“What?”
“The conspiracy, if it exists, lives or dies on the assumption that a lot of people are overlooking, ignoring, or altering evidence,” the pilot explained. “Get the evidence in the hands of somebody you trust implicitly and start at square one. Hell, Ken, you’re the administrator. You can do anything you want.”
“Not really. But I’ll take the night to think out the best way to approach this,” Sachs said. “In fact, I’ll probably have to take several days. I’m on a very early military flight tomorrow to mend some political fences in Illinois for the President. I’ll keep in touch with one or both of you while I’m out of town, and when I get back next Monday, we’ll meet again and decide how to proceed. I don’t think the delay will hurt. Nothing will be set in cement between now and then.”
“NTSB people always say they have to get to an accident in a hurry because so much of the evidence is so fragile,” Pace reminded him.
“If this conspiracy exists, we’ve already lost evidence to tampering, but that deed’s done,” Sachs said. “The NTSB has full control of the remaining evidence, and a few days won’t exacerbate the damage. In the meantime, I’ll have Susan expunge any record of this meeting so there’s no chance of anyone finding out you brought this to me.”
He regarded his visitors for a moment. “I don’t know whether to hate you or thank you,” he said. “I want to get to the bottom of this accident. That’s part of my job. And if somebody’s standing in my way, I want him, too. The integrity of the Safety Board has never been questioned before. But this conspiracy, if it exists, could destroy us.”
“It isn’t the integrity of the Safety Board in question, it’s the integrity of a few people working for the Safety Board,” Pace reassured him. “Even if our worst suspicions are true, a prompt and complete reaction from you would go a long way toward mitigating the damage. Hell, the NTSB has been around for more than twenty years. Maybe something like this was inevitable.”
“But why?” the administrator demanded.
Pace shrugged. “It could be anything. Money. Power. Both. Who knows?”
“Well, some Godfuckingdamnbody knows,” Sachs suddenly thundered. “And when I find him, he’d better give his soul to God, because his ass belongs to me!”
14
At the Chronicle office, Pace turned over his desk and telephone to McGill, who needed to check in with his systems analysts at Dulles. Pace was chatting with Paul Wister when the pilot finished, and the three of them went to Schaeffer’s office. After exchanging introductions, Pace and McGill took opposite ends of Schaeffer’s sofa.
“Okay, you two cowboys, suppose you bring the foremen up to date,” the editor said.
They took turns in the telling, and when they finished, Schaeffer regarded them gravely. His question sounded bizarre in the context. “Why,” he asked, “should we do this? Why shouldn’t we drop it right here?”
Pace was stunned. “Drop it? Why?”
McGill frowned, and even Wister looked puzzled.
Schaeffer explained. “We have an intriguing mystery before us. We have a high-level Senate aide who’s furious about carrying water for a member he despises. We have a couple of anonymous phone calls alleging some sort of cover-up, and a horrible death that appears to be related. But does it mean anything? The aide’s allegations are far from definitive. He might have read something into the situation Marshall didn’t intend. We have nothing to corroborate the allegations of Captain McGill’s tipster except, unfortunately, his death, and that isn’t proof of anything, really. It could have been a coincidental accident.”
Pace, deeply frustrated, interrupted. “But the state police—”
Schaeffer held up a hand. “Let me finish, Steve.” He picked up the thread of his argument. “We have no hard evidence to argue for continuing. We have a series of events that lead nowhere. And we know nothing about the NTSB that would suggest the agency or anyone in it would ever be party to a cover-up. In short, we’ve got nothing.”
“And what do we tell Ken Sachs?” Pace asked with a harder edge in his voice than he wanted his supervisors to hear.
Schaeffer shrugged. “The truth… we went over the evidence and came up short.”
Pace was desperate. “You were so excited this morning. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I’m not saying I want out. I’m asking why we should stay in. I don’t want to treat this project any differently than I’d treat an item on the AP daybook. You look at the potential for a good story, evaluate it in terms of the needs and interests of your readers, plus the time and resources it will take to cover it, and then you make a decision to go or to pass. That’s all I’m trying to do here: make a cold decision.”
“Leaving George Ridley and Harold Marshall out of it for the moment, don’t we have sufficient reason to try to explain what happened to Mark Antravanian?” Pace asked.
McGill had a thought. “I’m probably out of line in suggesting what you should do, but Mark was a man who, in the normal course of things, you would be predisposed to believe,” he said. “Since we don’t know anything that would cast doubt on his credibility, you have to assume he stumbled onto something worthy of concern.”
“I’d have to agree, Avery,” said Wister.
“If he was your mysterious caller,” said Schaeffer. “We don’t know that, do we?”
“I think I do,” McGill said. “I told Steve at the time there was something about his accent I recognized. When I heard the crash victim was Mark Antravanian, the voice and the identity matched perfectly.”
“That’s the key, then,” the editor said, nodding. He smacked his open right hand down on the desktop. “We go.”
“You had me worried there for a second,” Pace said with a smile.
“Good,” said Schaeffer. “I’m probably going to worry you a few more times as this investigation goes along. We’re going to take careful stock of where we are and where we’re going each step of the way. And I have to warn you, there could come the day when I tell you it’s time to pass. If that day comes, you’re going to have to accept it and walk away.”