It was a little hard to find, but I typed the address into my GPS so I wouldn't miss the turn, an unmarked road that led deep into the woods. I found the turn and kept my bright lights on as I hurried down the dark pavement. It was about a mile from the main road to his lab. It looked unusually bright as I approached the end of the road. My cell phone rang, and I picked it up.
It was Bradley. He sounded panicked. 'Where are you?'
'I'm on the road to your-'
'Stop! Don't go down the road!' The tone of his voice was alarming.
I hit the brakes. 'Why not?'
'My lab is on fire! The flames are fifty feet high. I'm heading back toward the main road. They may be there, Mike. There may be somebody waiting for us there!'
I felt a quick jolt of adrenaline. 'On fire? What happened?'
'I don't know. I was driving down-'
'Is that you driving away?'
'Yes. Stop, that's me right in front of you.'
He stopped his Honda Pilot right next to me. I opened my window. 'What started the fire?'
'Not what, who. They're after us, Mike. They're onto us. I was staying away, trying to use other labs or make due. But I had to go back to get something. They know we're going to blow this thing sky-high, and they're trying to stop us.' He looked in his rearview mirror and around in the darkness.
'We don't know what happened. Maybe somebody left the coffeepot on.'
'No, Mike. We don't leave coffeepots on. It's the safest lab in the country. Somebody thinks we found something and burned the place down. Either to burn the evidence or to warn us. Or to get me.'
I listened to the engines of our idling cars and looked at the glow at the end of the road. 'They know the critical evidence is the tip weight. You still have it?'
Bradley nodded, with his mouth open.
'They wouldn't know that. But they would know it is made of bronze, or some other type of metal that's not likely to burn in a fire. It would make it through a fire, right?'
'Depending on how hot the fire is, but generally.'
'That means they're talking to us. They don't want to kill us-we're too obvious, too much in the public eye. They just want us to shut up and let this case take its course, us losing and them fading into the shadows.'
'You think it's the other attorney?'
'Hackett? He's sinister enough, but I don't know if he'd go that low. Can you show me at WorldCopter what you found?'
Bradley nodded, regaining his composure. 'It would have been better here, but I have a portable in the back here.' He indicated the back of his Pilot.
'Let's go. Stay right behind me. If you see anything suspicious, flash your brights.'
I pulled up in front of the WorldCopter facility and stopped quickly. I was sure we hadn't been followed; of course, I'd thought that before, every day, and now realized I was probably wrong. Rachel and Marcel were waiting in the parking lot. Bradley pulled up right behind me. He got out of his Pilot. He looked disheveled, with his cuffed khakis hanging up on top of old brown leather boots that were two-thirds unlaced, and a large Hawaiian shirt overhanging his portliness. His reading glasses dangled around his neck, and his hair was everywhere.
'So what do you have, Wayne?'
Marcel and Rachel greeted him, but Bradley was all business. He pointed to the back of his Pilot. He opened up the back hatch, and there was what could only be described as a traveling lab. The backseats had either been taken out or laid really flat, and he seemed to have built out the back with snugly fitting cabinets and padded toolboxes. At the very back was what appeared to be a flat bottom; but he reached down, pulled on an invisible handle, and a table came up to his waist level. He reached over to the left, opened a door to one of his fixed cabinets, and pulled out a leather bag, or pouch, the kind of pouch you might expect to hold coins in the eighteenth century. He reached to the right side of the Pilot, which was still running, and pulled up the extension arm of a halogen desk light, which now sat directly over the table in front of him, illuminating the black felt surface. He opened the drawstring of the leather bag and dumped out the contents. It was the tip weight, but it had been further dismantled. I tried to control the panic rising in my chest.
'Shit, Wayne. You've destroyed it! We'll never get this thing into evidence.'
'Bear with me here, Mike.'
'Marcel, Rachel, this is one of the tip weights from Marine One. Marcel, see this serial number here. We can only see four of the six numbers, but they're the last four, and these are among the numbers of one of the tip weights that are missing from your list of known tip weights. We found it embedded in a tree at the accident scene.'
Marcel leaned over, lifted the shattered disk up to his eyes, and examined the tip weight carefully. 'How long have you had this? Why wasn't I told?'
Bradley nodded. 'We weren't sure what it meant. Look at this.' Everyone huddled under the upraised rear hatch of his Pilot with the bright halogen light shining on the tip weight of Marine One. Bradley pulled down a large magnifying glass that was attached to a boom from the ceiling of the Pilot. He pulled it down and held up the tip weight, now brilliantly illuminated behind the lens. He took a small metal instrument like a dentist's pick, although straight, and pointed to a section of the tip weight. 'See this?'
We all squinted and looked hard. I thought I saw what he was pointing at. He continued, 'See this?' Bradley waited for recognition to hit us. A small window was cut half the depth into the tip weight, showing a small wire.
I was suddenly thunderstruck by the implications. 'Bradley, is that what I think it is?'
He smiled and nodded. 'It is. I tested it.'
I closed my eyes in disbelief. 'Are you
'I shit you not.'
I put my hands to my head as my thoughts raced to help me understand what I was looking at. 'What does this mean? What do we do with this?'
Bradley put the pieces back in the leather pouch, placed it in his pocket, turned off the halogen light, put the magnifying glass back up where it belonged, stowed the shelf, and said, 'You need to get me in to see the helicopter sitting behind that Plexiglas wall inside. If my theory is right, we can confirm it right now.'
I wasn't following him. 'How?'
'This tip weight didn't end up on Marine One by accident. There have to be more just like it. Probably many.'
Bradley turned toward Marcel. 'Have you looked into this helicopter?'
Marcel said, 'In what regard?'
'Any of the blades replaced in the last three months?'
'I don't know. Probably. They replace blades all the time. The slightest nick and they replace a blade on Marine One.'
Bradley nodded. 'What I'm thinking may be true even if it was more than three months. But if less than three months, I think we could be almost sure. You've got to get us in there, Marcel. We've got to get access to that helicopter, and I need to take the end cap off of the blade that's been put on most recently.'
'They'll never let us touch it. It's a Marine One helicopter. We don't have clearances.'
I shook my head. 'Make it happen, Marcel. Call Jean Claude if you have to.'
Marcel shrugged and threw out his chin. 'Let us try.'
We closed the Pilot, walked into WorldCopter headquarters, and persuaded the guard to let us go back to the hangar area. Then we were confronted with the Plexiglas wall and a humorless guard. Marcel pleaded with him and begged for access to the helicopter. Not a chance. Marcel got the head of the Marine One maintenance program out of bed and begged for access. No. To allow anyone to even touch the helicopter without a Yankee White clearance would ground it forever unless they completely dismantled it and reassembled it. No way. Marcel wasn't giving up.
He continued up the chain of command, to the president of WorldCopter U.S. He was persuaded, but said it wasn't his call. He said we needed to get a hold of Jean Claude. Jean Claude was staying in a private home that had been rented in the hills of Annapolis for $10,000 a week. The mansion was owned by some mysterious businessman who had some indirect relationship to a shipping line that no one seemed to know the name of. Jean Claude's phone was off. Marcel grew more frustrated. He called everyone he knew, including Jean Claude's personal secretary in France. She was sound asleep when he called and was annoyed when he awoke her. When he explained the importance of what he was doing, she happily agreed to contact Jean Claude and seemed to have some other secret number for him. We waited and stared at the brightly lit Marine One helicopter sitting behind the Plexiglas wall, hoping against hope that we'd be able to test Bradley's theory.
Marcel's phone rang. He spoke in French and seemed pleased. He handed his phone to the head of security, who stood as he listened to the president of WorldCopter SA tell him to allow access to this group even though it would mean losing the use of this helicopter as Marine One. The guard threw the bolt electronically and pulled the heavy Plexiglas door toward him. We walked inside the restricted area, very aware of the intense lights and scrutiny that were on us. The security guard had called one of the other security guards, who had brought a video camera and was filming everything we did. Fine with me.
Bradley quickly grabbed a ladder and pulled it over to the helicopter. He turned to Marcel. 'Which blade was put on more recently?'
Marcel said, 'I will check. Do you want to take off the end cap?'
'The end cap and the tip weights.'
'I'll check the maintenance records and bring the tools.'
Marcel disappeared toward the back of the hangar, reviewed the maintenance records, and came back with two hand tools. 'The blue blade was replaced forty days before the crash.' Marcel looked at the rotor hub, saw the blue marking on one of the blades, and put the ladder underneath the end of it. He labored up the ladder and removed the Allen screws that held on the end cap. He pulled it off, handed it down to me. I set it on the floor, well out of the way. I looked up and saw the tip weights properly placed with a large nut holding them onto a bolt. Marcel loosened the nut, pulled it off, and removed the four tip weights that had been attached to the blade when it had been balanced in France. Marcel handed the tip weights to Bradley and climbed down from the ladder. Marcel asked, 'Is that all we need?'
'That's it,' Bradley said excitedly. 'Let's go back to my car.'
We exited the sterile environments of the hangared Marine One and waved to the security guards as we hurried outside to the Pilot. Bradley set up his portable lab and put a small block of metal on the tray. He put the tip weight on top of it and picked up a chisel and a hammer.
Marcel was horrified. 'You're not going to destroy it, are you?'
