So here she was. Kristin Marie Stewart.
Feeling he was on a roll, Davis turned toward the aisle and regarded seat 7C. He slipped his hand into that pocket, and scooped out an old bag of peanuts and a plastic stir stick. Then something else caught his eye.
A crashed aircraft, if nothing else, is a study in contrast. Debris will range in condition from soiled to pristine, from ruined to unblemished. All the same, this was something he should have noticed. Amid the chaos all around, the aftermath of a frenzy of Newtonian mechanics, Davis saw one detail that didn’t fit. On the back of seat 7C, square in the center, were two small holes no larger than a dime. He tested one with his little finger, and then the other. Both went clean through. There was a subtle stain on the upholstery below the holes, a discoloration that didn’t catch the eye because something had spackled the remainder of the seatback, presumably mud from the crash sequence later flecked by rain.
But there was a stain. One that was dark and familiar.
Davis checked behind the seat, but there was nothing to see. The bulkhead was gone, and two feet farther back the shell of the shattered hull simply ended, presenting the forest like a jagged oval picture frame. He was staring intently, deep in thought, when someone shouted his name.
Davis was on the Huey three minutes later, rising into the fading orange twilight. Looking out over the scene, he saw a pair of dim lights to the east sweeping back and forth. At least one crew was still searching the wetlands for the last two bodies. Still searching. That was good, because it meant they hadn’t found anything yet. An optimist’s view, to be sure, and an outlook of which he’d rarely been accused of keeping. The chopper spun mercifully to a new heading, and the scene became more pleasant. Green forest under a painted sky, the sun playing its palette on a high deck of stratus clouds.
He pulled the two passports from his pocket and flipped open Jen’s. Davis ran his thumb over the page with her photograph, the embossments and security strips rough under his touch, but strangely comforting. So tactile and true.
“I’ll find you, baby,” he whispered. “Wherever you are, I’ll find you.”
Davis arrived back at the Bogotá airport at eight that evening. He was told that Marquez had arranged a room for him at a hotel within walking distance of the headquarters building — probably a place that kept a running contract with the military — and the duty officer at El Centro provided an initial vector.
It was a ten-minute walk to the Hotel de Aeropuerto, a solidly two-star affair. He was given a room on the second floor that had a bed, a tiny table with one chair, and a painting on the wall of a bearded conquistador on a horse. The smell of cheap cleanser chafed his respiratory system, but the place met his most immediate needs — the sheets looked clean, and there was a restaurant directly across the street. Until Jen was found, little else mattered.
After ten hours in the field — enduring three thunderstorms, one landslide, and a near lightning strike — Davis looked more like a survivor of a plane crash than an investigator. There was algae and moss in his hair, his fingernails were black with topsoil, and the crusted mud on his pants and shirt would clog anything less than a commercial-grade washing machine. He took everything off, rinsed his boots in the tub, and threw the rest in the trash. He took great care with his best finds of the day — Jen’s iPod and the two passports. The passports he would surrender to Marquez, as per procedure. The colonel already knew he had the iPod, and hadn’t asked for it, so Davis reasoned that was his to keep.
He pulled a clean hand towel from the rack in the bathroom, got it damp under the faucet, and wiped the iPod clean as best he could. He removed the device from its case, pressed the power button and got a flicker, the screen only lighting long enough to blink a red battery symbol before going dark. Davis stared for a long moment, then set the iPod on the nightstand next to the bed.
He returned to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and was met by a weary stranger. He’d been riding an emotional rocket, and spending last night on the floor of a prison cell, a minor concussion for company, had done nothing to brighten his mood. There had been little good news today, but all the same, he’d made it to sunset without hearing the worst news.
To the positive, his head felt better, and after a hot shower he put on fresh clothes, which meant his other khaki pants and a different drab cotton shirt. Like most former military men, he kept a detached sense of fashion, bordering on none at all. The clock by the bed showed eight thirty, and feeling revitalized, Davis knew what he had to do.
At the restaurant across the street he ordered the dinner special, which turned out to be a mountain of steak, chorizo, rice, and beans. In fractured Spanish, Davis tried to ask for it to go, and a bartender who’d studied accounting for two years at the University of Toledo laughed at him, and said, “No problem, buddy.”
On the way to El Centro he came across a store that sold pirated DVDs and cheap electronic gear, and in a discount bin he found a knock-off charger for Jen’s iPod Touch. The clerk asked for ten thousand Colombian pesos, which Davis didn’t have, so he charged it to his MasterCard having no idea how much he was paying for a few feet of wire and a connecting plug that was made in China.
He walked into headquarters at five minutes before nine. Two newly installed window-unit air conditioners were battling hard, sponging moisture from the viscous air and cutting the heat that clung fast into the late evening. He took a seat at a vacant computer, pulled out his sat-phone, and checked for messages. There were none. Pulling in a long breath, he set the phone down next to the keyboard, and was soon spooning rice and beans from a cup as he caught up with the day’s findings on the tragedy of TAC-Air Flight 223. He ate in the same deliberate manner in which he read, a physical manifestation of both thoughtfulness and fear. Davis didn’t want to miss anything, but sensed that he already had. It was a confining process, to be sure, yet a straightjacket from which he made no attempt to escape.
Page by tedious page, he forged ahead.
The small room was in a nondescript building on G Street in Washington, D.C. Two analysts, a man and a woman, blinked simultaneously when one of their computers chirped an alarm.
“What is it?” the man asked.
The two sat facing one another at opposing desks, and it was the woman’s machine that had alerted. “He just bought something with his MasterCard in Bogotá.”
“What?”
“It looks like… a charging cable for an iPhone.”
“An iPhone?” The man performed a quick cross-check. “He doesn’t own one. Davis is strictly an Android guy, and the sat-phone he was issued Sunday is a standard Iridium platform potted with our special variant of the operating system.”
The woman gave him a suffering look.
“Okay, okay — you knew that. Hang on.”
As he typed, the woman shrugged a sweater over her shoulders. The room was dimly-lit and windowless, and the thermostat kept, strictly under lock and key, at a chilly sixty-eight degrees. Even at the end of August.
“December 15 last year. He bought an iPod Touch at the Best Buy in Manassas, Virginia.”
“A Christmas gift?” the woman mused. “Or could he have bought it for himself?”
Thirty seconds later he had the answer. “During the last week of December someone downloaded nearly a thousand songs through his home computer.”