Marine One

He sat across from me and said, 'So I've been thinking about this.' He suddenly stood again and began pacing. 'How are we going to do this? If you do the criminal investigation, represent WorldCopter in the international inquiry, it might take three or four lawyers to staff it full-time. And if you keep going on this accident investigation, and some civil case comes out of it, one of the Secret Service widows wakes up and realizes there's a pot of gold waiting if this helicopter truly failed, you'll need five or ten people. We don't have anything close to that. If it's not properly staffed, it could go completely off track, and the case could be lost.'

'I'll take care of it.'

He sat again and forced himself to fold his hands on his knees to look calm. 'If we lose this, it will ruin us. Financially. Our reputation will be shot and we could be sued for malpractice, for not preparing properly. We don't have the experience, or the depth.'

I stared at him in disbelief. I'd never seen him crack. He was absolutely unmovable in business negotiations and contracts, which is what he did. Now he was flipping out about what I was doing? I didn't need it. 'What have you been smoking, Rick? I can handle this. If we need more people, I'll get more. And if it gets lost one way or another, it won't be because of me, I promise. Relax. And how could it ruin us financially? We're going to get paid whether we win or lose. Our regular hourly rate. Don't worry about it.'

'You think if you lose a case this big, they won't look for a scapegoat? They'll sue us for malpractice.'

'We have malpractice insurance, Rick.'

'Yeah, twenty million dollars. That won't cover a tenth of this case. Remember I wanted to get one hundred million dollars in coverage?'

'Shit, Rick. That cost ten times as much. And if we make somebody lose a hundred mil, we deserve to go bankrupt.' He was starting to bother me. 'You've got to settle down. What's gotten into you?'

He rubbed his tired, stubbled face. 'One of the legal reporters was going on about how outmatched you were going to be, no matter what you ended up doing. He said it was like starting a Single A pitcher in the World Series. He said you were going to get shelled, and you and your whole firm would come down around your head.'

'Nice. And who was that?'

'I don't know. I'd never heard of him.'

'And rather than shrug it off because you know me, because we started a firm together, starved together, you jump on that bandwagon and start pissing all over me? Damn, Rick!' I tried to control my anger.

He shook his head. 'I don't know, Mike. It's just such a huge deal. Big firms in New York or Washington handle huge cases like this, not a small shop in Annapolis with two partners. It's a lot of weight to carry, that's all.'

'No, it's an opportunity.'

He stared out the dark window without saying anything for an awkwardly long time. He put his hands in his back pockets and turned again toward me. His face was lined with stress. 'You ever do any reading into the Kennedy assassination?'

'Not much. Seemed like a UFO kind of thing to me.'

'Some of it. I take it that you don't think the helicopter failed.'

'Not sure, really. But I find it hard to believe it did.'

'Well, then, where does that lead?'

'Meaning?'

'Presidents don't die that often, Mike.'

'And?' I said, concerned with the look that was forming on his face.

'And you're saying it wasn't from a mechanical thing.'

'I said I don't know, but I doubt it.'

'Then that means somebody wanted him dead. Right? Am I missing something? If it wasn't an accident, somebody was trying to kill him.'

'I didn't say that. Could have been the weather.'

'You don't believe that.'

'No, I don't, but it's possible.'

He waved his arm. 'I'm talking about what you think. You say I should trust you? Well, I do. And I think that what you think is that someone wanted the president dead.'

'I'm not ready to jump to any conclusion. Can't do that at the start of an investigation. Colors your thinking.'

'But if you're right that it wasn't the helicopter's fault, then somebody else did it. That means somebody else killed him. As in on purpose.'

'Is that what this is all about?'

'I'm just trying to think this stuff through, Mike. Is my thinking wrong?'

'It's pretty far-fetched. I'm not convinced of that at all.'

'If somebody killed him, and you're out there trying to prove it wasn't WorldCopter, then your only way out will be to find out who it was. Am I right?'

'Sort of.'

'You ever think about that maybe they won't want you to find them? And that they probably already know who you are?'

'What, you think somebody's going to come after us?'

'I've read enough history to know that when the emperor dies, you don't want to be anywhere near it.'

'There will be a rational explanation of this accident, Rick.'

He wasn't satisfied. 'What I'm saying is, I want you to-how do you always put it? Keep your head on a swivel.' He jerked on the handle of my office door and walked out.

He was right about one thing. If someone killed the president, the last thing they would want was for me to find out what really happened. Fair enough to tell me to keep that in mind. We didn't know what was behind the curtain.

____________________

I headed to the WorldCopter offices in Maryland outside D.C. the next morning before the sun was up. I told Rachel to stay at the office and do some quick research on federal security clearances for foreign corporations, and background research on the WorldCopter helicopter involved in this accident. I needed to know every other incident it had been involved in, the cause of every accident, and the helicopter's reputation. Now that I had stuck my neck out at Justice on how there had never been a fatal accident in this helicopter, something I was pretty sure about, I needed to know about every incident Justice might cite back to me.

Tripp was waiting for me in the lobby of the sprawling WorldCopter building. It looked like a factory but was really more of an assembly plant. WorldCopter made everything in France and shipped it to the United States for assembly. This allowed them to claim that it was an American helicopter. It was all about appearances. Everyone knew it was a French helicopter, or rather a helicopter made in France by a European consortium known as WorldCopter.

Tripp gave me a badge and hustled me through security. 'They've got it set up in the computer room.'

'You watch it?'

'Not yet. Here we are,' he said, opening a heavy steel door.

I was surprised at the number of people in the room. This was to be the first playing of the combined animation of the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder that anyone other than a technician would actually see. Even Marcel hadn't seen the entire thing; he'd just sampled it to make sure it looked right. Several technicians and engineers were standing around the computer console where the FDR had been loaded up. Others, including Tripp, stood against the wall trying to stay out of the way.

Marcel nodded his head to one of the technicians standing at the door, who dimmed the lights. Another one turned up the speakers connected to the computer. Everyone focused on the large, flatscreen monitor that had been connected to the computer and hung on the wall. I was anxious to see what movements of the helicopter coincided with the various noises I'd heard on the cockpit voice recorder. The background was dark blue for the sky and green for the land. There was no attempt by the computer to put any terrain into the images. The flight data recorder had no terrain information.

The colors were simply background to help discern the horizon. The voices could be heard exactly where in the flight they were talking. Marcel had had the CVR transcribed too, so the subtitles went across the bottom of the screen as quickly as they were spoken.

Collins's voice was now familiar as the helicopter approached its landing at the White House. We stood silently and listened again to Collins's conversations with his copilot and the head of the Secret Service detail as they prepared to take off, then President Adams's approach to Collins and his shocking comments. None of that was on the FDR-it showed a motionless helicopter sitting on the lawn with the rotor blades turning.

Marine One took off and flew through what we knew to be the night. The turbulence was obvious in the bouncing helicopter in spite of Collins's attempts to keep it straight and level. He fought the storm and the turbulence the entire way, shifting altitudes in a vain attempt to avoid the worst. As he approached the final minute of flight, the room became deathly quiet. We looked at every movement and listened to every sound now correlated to movement as Collins searched for clear air. We heard his exclamations and watched him fighting the helicopter, cursing, then the flight data recorder information stopped. So did the helicopter in the animation, but the voices continued as we listened through to the end of the tape.

As the voices stopped, the screen went blank. Nobody said anything. We all had new thoughts, some things that confirmed what we had thought, others that conflicted. But not only was the puzzle not solved, the animation raised more questions than it answered.

The question foremost on my mind, though, was why the flight data recorder had stopped. I looked at Marcel. 'You find the circuit-breaker panels?'

'Yes. But they're burned.'

'Can you tell what circuit breakers are out?'

'Maybe. They have the pieces of plastic, and they're going to have to reconstruct the board. Some of the circuit breakers are still there intact, but most have been burned off.'

I thought about where the circuit-breaker panels were near the pilot and what circuit breakers were on them. 'Is there a circuit breaker for the flight data recorder?'

Everybody turned to me at once. The implications of the question were self-evident.

Marcel answered, 'Yes.'