'Jesus,' Dave Seaton said over the intercom. 'Did anybody get out of there alive?'
Robby took his time before responding. 'I wonder where Jack was when it happened….' He remembered a British Army toast—'Here's to bloody wars and sickly seasons!' — which referred to a couple of sure ways for officers to be promoted into vacant slots. Surely quite a few people would fleet up from this incident, but none really wanted advancement this way, least of all his closest friend, somewhere down there in the wounded city.
THE MARINES LOOKED very twitchy, Inspector O'Day saw. He parked his truck on Eighth Street, S.E. The Marine Barracks were thoroughly barricaded. The curbs were fully blocked with parked cars, the gaps in the buildings doubly so. He dismounted his truck and walked toward an NCO; he was wearing his FBI windbreaker, and carrying his ID in his right hand.
'I have business inside, Sergeant.'
'Who with, sir?' the Marine asked, checking the photo against the face.
'Mr. Murray.'
'You mind leaving your side arm here with us, sir? Orders,' the sergeant explained.
'Sure.' O'Day handed over his fanny pack, inside of which was his Smith & Wesson 1076 and two spare magazines. He didn't bother with a backup piece on headquarters duty. 'How many people you have around now?'
'Two companies, near enough. There's another one setting up at the White House.'
There was no better time to lock the barn door than after the horse got out, Pat knew. It was all the more grim since he was delivering the news that it was all unnecessary, but nobody would really care about that. The sergeant waved to a lieutenant who had nothing better to do—the NCOs ran things like this—than to conduct visitors across the quad. The lieutenant saluted for no more reason than being a Marine.
'Here to see Daniel Murray. He's expecting me.'
'Please follow me, sir.'
The inner corners of the buildings on the quad had yet another line of Marines, with a third on the quad itself, complete with a heavy machine gun. Two companies amounted to upwards of three hundred rifles. Yeah, President Ryan was fairly safe here, Inspector O'Day thought, unless some other maniac driving an airplane was around. Along the way, a captain wanted to compare the photo on his ID with the face again. It was being overdone. Somebody had to point that out before they started parking tanks on the street.
Murray came out to meet him on the porch. 'How good is it?'
'Pretty good,' the inspector replied.
'Come on.' Murray waved him in, and led his friend into the breakfast room. 'This is Inspector O'Day. Pat, I think you know who these people are.'
'Good morning. I've been on the Hill, and we found something a little while ago that you need to know,' he began, going on for another couple of minutes.
'How solid is it?' Andrea Price asked.
'You know how this works,' O'Day responded. 'It's preliminary, but it looks pretty solid to me, and we'll have good test data after lunch. The ID's already being run. That may be a little shaky, because we don't have a head to work with, and the hands are all ripped up. We're not saying that we've closed the case. We're saying that we have a preliminary indication that supports other data.'
'Can I mention this on TV?' Ryan asked everyone around the table.
'Definitely not,' van Damm said. 'First, it's not confirmed. Second, it's too soon for anyone to believe it.'
Murray and O'Day traded a look. Neither of them was a politician. Arnie van Damm was. For them, information control was about protecting evidence so that a jury saw it clean. For Arnie, information control was about protecting people from things he didn't think they could understand until it was spin-controlled and spoon-fed, one little gulp at a time. Both wondered if Arnie had ever been a father, and if his infant had starved to death waiting for his strained carrots. Both noted next that Ryan gave his chief of staff a long look.
The well known black box really wasn't much more than a tape recorder whose leads trailed off to the cockpit. There they collected data from engine and other flight controls, plus, in this case, the microphones for the flight crew. Japan Airlines was a government-run carrier, and its aircraft had the latest of everything. The flight-data recorder was fully digitized. That made for rapid and clear transcription of the data. First of all, a senior technician made a clean, high-speed copy of the original metallic tape, which was then removed to a vault while he worked on the copy. Someone had thought to have a Japanese speaker standing by.
'This flight data looks like pure vanilla on first inspection. Nothing was broken on the aircraft,' an analyst reported, scanning the data on a computer screen. 'Nice easy turns, steady on the engines. Textbook flight profile… until here' — he tapped the screen— 'here he made a radical turn from zero-six-seven to one-niner-six… and settles right back down again until his penetration.'
'No chatter in the cockpit at all.' Another tech ran the voice segment of the tape back and forth, finding only routine traffic between the aircraft and various ground-control stations. 'I'm going to back it up to the beginning.' The tape didn't really have a beginning. Rather it ran on a continuous loop, on this machine, because the 747 routinely engaged in long, over-water flights, forty hours long. It took several minutes for him to locate the end of the immediately preceding flight, and here he found the normal exchange of information and commands between two crewmen, and also between the aircraft and the ground, the former in Japanese and the latter in English, the language of international aviation.
That stopped soon after the aircraft had halted at its assigned jetway. There was a full two minutes of blank tape, and then the recording cycle began again when the flight-deck instruments were powered up during the preflight procedures. The Japanese speaker—an Army officer in civilian clothes—was from the National Security Agency.
The sound pickup was excellent. They could hear the clicks of switches being thrown, and the background whirs of various instruments, but the loudest sound was the breathing of the co-pilot, whose identity was specified by the track on the recording tape.
'Stop,' the Army officer said. 'Back it up a little. There's another voice, can't quite… Oh, okay. 'All ready, question mark. Must be the pilot. Yeah, that was a door closing, pilot just came in. 'Preflight checklist complete… standing by for before-start checklist…. Oh… oh, God. He killed him. Back it up again.' The officer, a major, didn't see the FBI agent don a second pair of headphones.
It was a first for both of them. The FBI agent had seen a murder on a bank video system, but neither he nor the intelligence officer had ever heard one, a grunt from an impact, a gasp of breath that conveyed surprise and pain, a gurgle, maybe an attempt at speech, followed by another voice.
'What's that?' the agent asked.
'Run it again.' The officer's face stared at the wall. ' 'I am very sorry to do this. ' That was followed by a few more labored breaths, then a long sigh. 'Jesus.' The second voice came on a different vox channel less than a minute later, to notify the tower that the 747 was starting its engines.
'That's the pilot, Sato,' the NTSB analyst said. 'The other voice must be the co-pilot.'
'Not anymore.' The only remaining noise over the copilot's channel was spill-over and background sounds.
'Killed him,' the FBI agent agreed. They'd have to run the tape a hundred more times, for themselves and for others, but the conclusion would be the same. Even though the formal investigation would last for several months, the case was effectively closed less than nine hours after it had begun.
THE STREETS OF Washington were eerily empty. Normally at this time of day, Ryan knew all too well from his own experience, the nation's capital was gridlocked with the automobiles of federal employees, lobbyists, members of Congress and their staffers, fifty thousand lawyers and their secretaries, and all the private-industry service workers who supported them all. Not today. With every intersection manned by a radio car of the Metropolitan Police or a camouflage-painted National Guard vehicle, it was more like a holiday weekend, and there was actually more traffic heading away from the Hill than toward it, the curious turned away from their place of interest ten blocks from their intended destination.
The presidential procession headed up Pennsylvania. Jack was back in the Chevy Suburban, and there were still Marines leading and following the collection of Secret Service vehicles. The sun was up now. The sky was mainly clear, and it took a moment to realize that the skyline was wrong.
The 747 hadn't even harmed the trees, Ryan saw. It hadn't wasted its energy on anything but the target. Half a dozen cranes were working now, lifting stone blocks from the crater that had been the House chamber, depositing
