Millennium (26 page)

A stolen car. A night to remember. A strange story about a place where everybody died. A dead or stillborn or heroin-addicted infant.

Oh, yes, and two more clues. In the bathroom trash can I found a Vicks inhaler and an empty package of Clorets breath freshener. I sniffed at the inhaler and wished I hadn’t. Whatever was in the thing, I didn’t want any part of it.

Chalk it up to experience, I told myself, only it didn’t help. You’re supposed to
learn
something from experience, and all I had was questions.

*    *    *

I decided not to tell the police anything about her, at least not until I’d had a chance to talk to her myself. Maybe she needed help. I didn’t think she was dangerous.

I had to call a cab to get to the airport. When I arrived, I went straight to the United desk, and around back to where Sarah Hacker had her office.

She looked like she’d had about as much sleep as I had. Maybe there are worse jobs than personnel and public relations for an airline that’s just lost a plane, but I don’t know what they are.

“Hi, Sarah,” I said. “I’d like to find Louise Ball, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble,” she said. “What does she do, and in what city?”

“She works right here,” I said. “Or she did yesterday. She’s a ticket agent.”

Sarah was shaking her head and reaching for a book. She flipped through it.

“Not unless she was hired after five o’clock yesterday evening. I know all my people, Bill. She might have been a temporary. Let me look.”

She did, and came up with nothing. She put the name through her computer, and confirmed that no one named Louise Ball worked for United.

*    *    *

It was time to call in the FBI. A harmless kook with an obsession about a dead daughter was one thing; an unauthorized person hanging around an investigation pretending to be something she wasn’t was another.

I actually got into a phone booth and had dialed the first couple digits of the number Freddie Powers had given me…then I hung up. Louise had said she’d be back that evening. I’d wait, and give her a chance to explain herself.

I remembered I did have something to talk to Freddie Powers about, so I went back into the booth. I found him at the temporary morgue.

“What about those watches?” I asked him. “Did you find anything new?”

“One thing,” he said. “You remember the digitals that were running backwards? They’re all running forwards again.”

“Did you bring somebody in on it?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said it couldn’t have happened.”

I thought about that.

“How many people actually saw them? I mean, while they were running backwards?”

There was a pause. “You and me, Stanley, and that doctor, Brindle. Maybe a couple people who were helping him take watches off the corpses…but I don’t think so. He’s the one who noticed it.”

“Did you get any films, videotapes…anything like that?”

“No. Nothing. All we’ve got is the testimony of the three of us.”

“Three?”

Another pause. “I’m not sure Brindle wants to swear to anything.”

“Why don’t we wait on this? We’ve still got the watches that are forty-five minutes off.”

“Right.”

“With the digitals, all we’ve got is that you and I and Tom saw it.”

There was a long pause. I assumed he was thinking over his position, how his career was going and how a story like this would affect his advancement in the Bureau—which has always liked things neat.

“I saw it,” he said, slowly, “but that doesn’t mean I think it’s important.”

“Right. Sit on it for a while, okay? I’ll decide if it’s important.”

“You’ve got it, Bill.”

One anomaly dealt with.

*    *    *

The day went like that: pretty well, except I kept looking over my shoulder expecting Louise to drop into my lap.

She didn’t.

We started off with Norman Tyson, from the company who built the air traffic control computers.

He took the position that the firm’s equipment was not at fault, as it had been functioning at data-loads beyond what it had been designed to handle. I let Tom work on him, hoping to see a chink in his armor of certainty. They knew they were vulnerable, but they also knew the real story of this crash could be the FAA’s failure to replace obsolete hardware.

And the agency would pass that ball along to Congress, who didn’t provide the money. By then the guilt was already spread out enough, but you could go further, if you wanted to, and blame the electorate who put the Congress into office.

I knew the Board was in the clear. At least on paper. We had reports and recommendations by the carload. We’d been warning them about the old computers. We’d told them they had to be replaced.

But had we told them hard enough?

Who could tell? These were budget-conscious times. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember
any
time when people weren’t howling about cutting government spending, and everybody
who ever got cut thought it was the worst case of bad judgement ever seen in Washington. And we never said the new computers would be cheap: we were talking about half a billion dollars.

Look on the bright side
, I told myself.
I’ll bet we buy them now.

*    *    *

Just after lunch I got a call from Doctor Harlan Prentice, who was in charge of the autopsy team. He wanted me to come over, but there are things I’d just as soon skip after a meal, and that was one of them.

“It has to do with the contents of the stomachs,” he said. “I guess you know the rate of identification in this crash is going to be low.”

“I’ve been in the morgue, Doctor,” I told him. “I’ve seen the big baggies.”

“Yes. Well, with the 747, we’ve examined seventy-three body fragments containing stomachs. I have before me a menu from that flight, and it lists a choice of chicken crepes, beef à la bercy, and a diet plate in tourist. I haven’t seen a menu for first-class.”

I swallowed queasily, tasting the steak I’d just eaten. I mean, I’m hardened to this sort of thing, but doctors are incredible.

“What’s the significance, Doctor?”

“They all had the chicken,” he said.

That stopped me for a moment.

“Rather unlikely, wouldn’t you say?” He was still waiting for a comment.

I was suddenly angry. Not at him. But why wouldn’t this case follow a decent, reasonable line?

“Unlikely,” I conceded. “Not impossible.”

“It’s stretching the laws of chance. I have about a hundred stomachs to look at yet—”

“—and the next one might be the beef.”

“Or the diet plate,” he said, helpfully.

Then I had it.

“There must have been a mix-up in New York,” I said. “They loaded too many of the chicken dinners. They didn’t find out
till they took off. So everybody who was hungry ate the chicken, and if they’d landed Pan Am would have heard a lot of bitching.”

“What about first class?”

Screw first class. “I don’t know. I do know there’s always a reasonable explanation.” I swallowed again, wondering what in hell I really knew. “I’ll have somebody check it out with Pan Am catering in New York. They’ll straighten it out.”

I hung up on him.

Then I stood there, thinking it over, knowing I was going to need an Alka-Seltzer for dessert. I seemed to have this compulsion to throw dirt over the problems and pretend they weren’t there. The thing was, they were such crazy problems. Seventy-three stomachs full of airline chicken. Watches that were forty-five minutes fast. Watches that ran backwards when I was looking, and reversed when I turned my back. A beautiful imposter dressed up like an airline employee.

And a voice on a tape.
They’re all dead. They’re all dead and burned.

*    *    *

It was about that time Gordy Petcher arrived. I sent him off with my team leaders so they could fill him in. At the moment, I had no use for him at all. The bastard couldn’t come when the rest of us were walking around in the mud and gore; now here he was to take credit for the findings. At least he could handle the press conferences.

We had another, slightly more informative one, after the nightly meeting. Gordy wanted to give the media something to chew on, so Tom and Eli and I worked out the short list of the things we were pretty sure of, cautioning Gordy to preface them all with words like “There are indications that—” or “We are now looking into—” or “The possibility has arisen—”

Hell, he was good at it, I’ll give him that. He was a lot better than I was. He knew how to hedge his statements, how to avoid libel. The only thing that worried me was his tendency to grab for a headline, but he didn’t this time. The press seemed satisfied with what it had, and gradually everyone began to file out.

Before long I was the only one left in the large conference room. It’s amazing how empty a place like that can look.

She hadn’t really said where she’d meet me.

The hotel, I thought. She’d be at the hotel, or leave a message.

*    *    *

There was no message at the desk.

I went up to my room. The maid had picked up Louise’s clothes and put them in the closet. I was thankful for the clothes. Without them, I would have started to wonder if she’d really existed.

I’d had an hour’s sleep one night, and about four hours the night before. I’d slept two hours on the plane getting to California. I was stone sober and I didn’t feel the least bit like sleeping. I paced the room for a while, then I went down to the bar, but it depressed me. I got in my car and drove back to the airport, out onto the field, up to the big doors of the hangar that held the remains of the two jumbo jets.

There was a human-sized door set over at the side. It had a glass window, with wire mesh in it. I knocked on the door, pressed my face up to the glass, and looked inside.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

The guard was outside, coming up behind me. I turned slowly, not wanting to make him nervous there in the dark. He was probably a retired cop. There was the name of some security agency on his shoulder, and a .38 on his hip.

I got out my I.D. and showed it to him. He looked at it, and at my face, and relaxed.

“I saw you on television the other night,” he said.

“How come you’re here?” I asked him.

He shrugged.

“The company pays me to watch this hangar. Usually they’ve got
real
planes in there, you know. They don’t want no monkey business. Funny thing, tonight I got an extra guy with me. He’s on the other side, on the other door. Hard to figure, ain’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

He looked through the glass.

“I mean there ain’t much left to steal.”

“No, I guess not.”

“It’s an awful thing, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s awful.” I pointed to the big padlock on the door. “You have the keys to that?”

“Sure do. You want in?”

“Yeah. You can call your employer if you want to, but I can tell you what they’ll say. Let him do whatever he wants. Until I write my report, those planes belong to me.”

He looked me over, and nodded.

“I expect you’re right. Though I don’t know what you’d want with them.”

He unlocked the door, let me through, and locked it behind me. He told me to knock again when I wanted to be let out.

I wandered around without the slightest idea of what I was looking for. All I had was the memory of that first time I saw her. She had been here, in this big barn, and she’d been looking for something.

I stopped by a massive shaft from a General Electric fanjet. All the blades were snapped off, but the heat of the fires had done nothing to it. Compared to the temperatures that shaft had been designed to take, crashing and burning was nothing at all.

I went over to where the bags of debris had been. She’d been looking at those bags. I could see it clearly now. I’d called to her, she’d looked at me, and she’d run.

The bags were gone. In their place was a series of folding tables with twisted metal piled on them. I walked along the endless rows, sometimes recognizing something, mostly having no idea what I was looking at. There’s a lot of metal in a plane.

Farther along were tables holding the remains of luggage. Suitcases in pieces no bigger than your hand. Mounds of shredded and burned clothing. Squashed cameras, splintered skis, lumps of plastic that had been calculators. Even an unbroken bottle of perfume.

A red light caught my eye. It was very faint, buried under a
lot of other stuff. I reached for it, and unidentifiable flotsam clattered on the floor.

First impression: a child’s toy. A ray-gun. It had a plastic case that was half-melted, blackened on the outside, cracked open. The red light seeped through the crack.

Like so many things on this case, this toy didn’t add up. I peered into the crack. It looked like coherent light to me: laser light. I’d never heard of a child’s toy that used a laser.

There was a Swiss Army knife in my pocket. I pried out the longest blade, and stuck it in the crack. I twisted, and the plastic case popped open. I took a long look at the insides of the thing. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it wasn’t a goddam toy.

Okay. Finally I had something concrete. It made me sadder than I can say to have found it, but there it was. This was some sort of weapon. It had come from the place Louise had been so interested in yesterday morning. All I could do was assume she’d known it was there, that she’d been looking for it. It was time to call Special Agent Powers. Weapons were out of my jurisdiction.

There was a phone on the wall about twenty feet away from me. I was going to call, I really intended to, but the red light was still hidden from me. It came from beneath what might have been a circuit board. I started to pry it up with my knife. I wanted to know what was making that light.

*    *    *

I was flat on my back on the floor. I couldn’t move. I was very cold, and the back of my head hurt.

There had been a flash of light, an odd sound, starting low and going beyond the limits of my hearing, shaking the building. And suddenly I had lost all muscle control.