Before the Fall(119)

Now, staring at himself in the mirror, he tells himself he was right all along. She was faking. She had been playing him, and now that she was done she’d just thrown him away.

He washes his face, dries his hands on a towel. The plane is vibrating as passengers climb the stairs. He can hear voices, the sound of laughter. He runs his hands through his hair, straightens his tie.

Professional, he thinks. And then, just before he opens the door and reenters the cockpit.

Bitch.





Chapter 44


Flight



Gus hears an automated voice on the tape.

“Autopilot disengaged.”

This is it, he thinks. The beginning of the end.

He hears the sound of the engines, an increase in rpm that he knows from the data recorder was the copilot putting the plane into a turn and powering up.

You like that? he hears Busch mutter. Is that what you want?

It’s just a matter of time now. The plane will impact the water in less than two minutes.

And now he hears pounding on the door, and hears Melody’s voice.

Jesus, let me in. Let me in. What’s going on? Let me in.

But now the copilot is silent. Whatever thoughts he has in the last moments of his life he keeps to himself. All that remains, under the sound of the pilot’s desperation, are the sounds of a plane spiraling to its death.

Gus reaches over and turns up the volume, straining to hear something, anything, over the low mechanical noise and the thrum of the jets. And then—gunshots. He jumps, swerving the car into the left-hand lane. Around him, car horns blare. Swearing, he corrects back into his own lane, losing count of the number of shots in the process. At least six, each like a cannon on the otherwise silent tape. And under them the sound of a whispered mantra.

Shit, shit, shit, shit.

Bang, bang, bang, bang.

And now a surge in rpms as Busch leans on the throttle, the plane spinning like a leaf circling down a drain.

And even though he knows the outcome, Gus finds himself praying that the captain and the Israeli security man will get the door open, that they’ll overcome Busch and the captain will take his seat and find some miracle solution to right the plane. And, as if in sympathy with his own held breath, the gunshots are replaced by the sound of a body slamming into the metal cockpit door. Later, technicians will re-create the sounds, determining which is a shoulder and which is a kick, but for now they are just the urgent sounds of survival.

Please, please, please, thinks Gus, even as the rational part of his brain knows they’re doomed.

And then, in the split second before the crash, a single syllable:

Oh.

Then—impact—a cacophony of such size and finality that Gus closes his eyes. It continues for four seconds, primary and secondary impacts, the sounds of the wing shearing off, the fuselage breaking up. Busch will have been killed immediately. The others may have lasted a second or two, killed not by the impact, but by flying debris. None, thankfully, lived long enough to drown as the plane sank to the bottom. This they know from the autopsies.

And yet somewhere in the chaos, a man and a boy survived. Hearing the crash on tape turns the fact of this into a full-blown miracle.

“Boss?” comes Mayberry’s voice.

“Yeah. I’m—”

“He did it. He just—it was about the girl. The flight attendant.”

Gus doesn’t respond. He is trying to comprehend the tragedy, to kill all those people, a child, for what? A lunatic’s broken heart?

“I want a full analysis of all the mechanics,” he says. “Every sound.”

“Yessir.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Gus hangs up. He wonders how many more years he can do this job, how many more tragedies he can stomach. He is an engineer who is beginning to believe that the world is fundamentally broken.

He sees his exit approaching, moves to the right lane. Life is a series of decisions and reactions. It is the things you do and the things that are done to you.

And then it’s over.

*



The first voice Scott hears on the tape is his.

What’s going on? he asks. In your mind. With us.

The recording quality is distant, a layer of mechanical hiss over the top. It sounds like a phone call, which is what Scott realizes it is, in the instant he recognizes his own voice.

Let’s go to Greece, he hears Layla say. There’s a little house on a cliff I own through, like, six shell companies. Nobody knows a thing. Complete mystery. We could lie in the sun and eat oysters. Dance after dark. Wait till the dust clears. I know I should be coy with you, but I’ve never met anyone whose attention is harder to get. Even when we’re together it’s like we’re in the same place, but different years.

“Where did you—” Scott asks.

Bill looks at him and raises his eyebrows with a kind of triumph.

“You still think we should believe nothing happened?”

Scott stares at him.

“Did you—how did you—”

Bill holds up a finger—Wait for it.

The tape plays again.

How’s the boy?

It’s Gus’s voice. Scott doesn’t have to hear the next voice to know that it will be his.

He’s not—talking, really, but he seems to like that I’m here. So maybe that’s therapeutic. Eleanor’s really—strong.