Before the Fall(107)

The data shows that the flight takes off without incident, banking left, then straightening out, the plane rising to twenty-six thousand feet over a period of six minutes and thirteen seconds, as ordered by ATC. At minute six, the autopilot is switched on and the flight heads southwest along a planned route. Nine minutes later, control of the plane is switched from pilot to copilot, Melody to Busch, for reasons the data can’t project. Course and altitude remain constant. Then, sixteen minutes into the flight, the autopilot is turned off. The plane banks sharply and dives, what started as a slow port turn becoming a steep spiral, like a mad dog chasing its tail.

All systems were normal. There was no mechanical error. The copilot turned off the autopilot and took manual control. He put the plane into a dive, ultimately crashing into the sea. Those are the facts. Now they know the root cause. What they don’t know is (a) why? and (b) what happened next? They know Busch was drunk, high. Was his perception or judgment altered by drugs? Did he think he was flying the plane normally, or did he know he had begun a death spiral?

More important, did the copilot wait for the pilot to go and then deliberately crash the plane? But why would he do that? What possible grounds would lie behind such an action?

Gus sits for a moment. Around him there is a sudden rush of activity, numbers fed into algorithms, double-checked. But Gus is still. He knows for certain now. The crash was no accident. Its origins lie not in the science of tensile strength or joint wear, caused not by computer failure or faulty hydraulics, but in the murky whys of psychology, in the torment and tragedy of the human soul. Why would a handsome, healthy young man put a passenger plane into a steep and irrevocable dive, ignoring the panicked pounding of the captain outside the cockpit and his own shrieking survival instinct? What sort of unsteady foundation had taken root in the gray matter of his brain—what previously undiagnosed mental illness or recent deafening gripe at the injustices of the world—could inspire a senator’s nephew to kill nine people, including himself, by turning a luxury jet into a missile?

And can they conclude then that the shots fired were an attempt to reenter the cockpit and take control of the plane?

The solution to this mystery, in other words, lies outside the purview of engineers, and in the realm of voodoo speculation.

All Gus Franklin can do is grit his teeth and wade into the storm.

He reaches for the phone, then thinks better of it. News like this, in the aftermath of multiple leaks, is best delivered in person. So he grabs his jacket and heads for the car.

“I’m heading in,” he tells his team. “Call me when the techs crack the recorder.”





Chapter 40


Games



They are playing Chutes and Ladders in the living room when the call comes. Doug is on TV. Eleanor comes back from the kitchen, phone shaking. She meets Scott’s eye, pantomimes that they need a way to keep the boy busy so they can talk.

“Hey, buddy,” Scott tells him, “go grab my bag from upstairs, huh? I got a present for you.”

The boy runs upstairs, hair flying behind him, footsteps a sloppy cascade on the stairs. Eleanor watches him go, then turns, her face pale.

“What’s wrong?” Scott asks.

“My mother,” she says, looking for the TV remote.

“What—”

She is pawing through the junk drawer below the TV. “Where’s the remote?”

He spies it on the coffee table, grabs it. She takes it, turns on the TV, pushes buttons. The black screen blinks on, a center star coming to life, becoming sound, birthing an elephant on a savanna looking for water. Eleanor flips channels, searching.

“I don’t understand,” Scott says.

He throws a glance at the stairs. Overhead, he can hear the boy’s feet on the ceiling, the closet door opening in the guest room.

Then there’s a sharp intake of breath from Eleanor, and Scott turns back. Onscreen is a flanneled and bearded Doug, sitting across from the red-suspendered Bill Cunningham. They are on a newsroom set, behind an anchor desk. It is a surreal sight, as if two different programs have been spliced together, side by side. A show about money and a show about trees. Doug’s voice fills the room, mid-sentence. He is talking about Scott and how Eleanor threw her own husband out of the house, and maybe Scott is in it for the money, and Bill Cunningham is nodding and interrupting, and restating Doug’s points—at one point even stepping in to tell the story himself.

—a washed-up painter who beds married women and glorifies disaster scenes.

Scott looks at Eleanor, who is clutching the remote to her chest, her knuckles white. For some reason he thinks of his sister lying in her coffin, a sixteen-year-old girl who drowned on a late-September day, swallowed by the murky deep, air bubbles rising. A virginal body that had to be dried and cleaned, muscled into its best dress by a forty-six-year-old mortician, a stranger who coated her skin with blush and brushed her waterlogged hair until it shone. And how her hands were raised to her chest, a spray of yellow daisies laced between her unfeeling fingers.

And how his sister was allergic to daisies, which upset Scott to no end, until he realized that it didn’t matter anymore.

“I don’t understand,” Eleanor says, then repeats it—more quietly this time, to herself, a mantra.

Scott hears footsteps on the stairs, and turns. He intercepts the boy as he spills down the stairs carrying Scott’s bag, a confused (potentially hurt) look on his face, as if to say I can’t find the present. Scott approaches him at a raking angle, mussing his hair and detouring him smoothly into the kitchen.