Airframe

ABOARD TPA 545
5:18 a.m.

Emily Jansen sighed in relief. The long flight was nearing an end. Morning sunlight streamed through the windows of the airplane. In her lap, little Sarah squinted in the unaccustomed brightness as she noisily sucked the last of her bottle, and pushed it away with tiny fists. "That was good, wasn't it?" Emily said. "Okay… up we go…"

She raised the infant onto her shoulder, began to pat her back. The baby gave a gurgling belch, and her body relaxed.

In the next seat, Tim Jansen yawned and rubbed his eyes. He had slept through the night, all the way from Hong Kong. Emily never slept on planes; she was too nervous.

"Morning," Tim said, looking at his watch. "Just a couple of hours more, hon. Any sign of breakfast?"

"Not yet," Emily said, shaking her head. They had taken Transpacific Airlines, a charter from Hong Kong. The money they saved would be useful when they set up housekeeping at the University of Colorado, where Tim was going to be an assistant professor. The flight had been pleasant enough-they were in the front of the plane-but the stewardesses seemed disorganized, the meals coming at odd times. Emily had turned down dinner because Tim was asleep, and she couldn't eat with Sarah sleeping in her lap.

And even now, Emily was surprised by the casual behavior of the crew. They left the cockpit door open during the flight. She knew Asian crews often did that, but it still struck her as inappropriate; too informal, too relaxed. The pilots strolled around the plane at night, kibitzing with the stewardesses. One was leaving right now, walking to the back of the plane. Of course, they were probably stretching their legs. Stay alert, all of that And certainly the fact that the crew was Chinese didn't trouble her. After a year in China, she admired the efficiency and attention to detail of the Chinese. But somehow, the whole flight just made her nervous.

Emily put Sarah back down in her lap. The baby stared at Tim and beamed.

"Hey, I should get this," Tim said. Fumbling in the bag under his seat, he brought out a video camera, trained it on his daughter. He waggled his free hand to get her attention. "Sarah… Sar-ah… Smile for Daddy. Smi-le…"

Sarah smiled, and made a gurgling sound.

"How does it feel to be going to America, Sarah? Ready to see where your parents are from?'

Sarah gurgled again. She waved her tiny hands in the air.

"She'd probably think everybody in America looks weird," Emily said. Their daughter had been bom seven months ago in Hunan, where Tim had studied Chinese medicine.

Emily saw the camera lens pointed at her. "And what about you, Mom?" Tim said. "Are you glad to be going home?'

"Oh, Tim," she said. "Please." She must look like hell, she thought All those hours.

"Come on, Em. What are you thinking?"

She needed to comb her hair. She needed to pee.

She said, "Well, what I really want-what I have dreamed about for months-is a cheeseburger."

"With Xu-xiang hot bean sauce?" Tim said.

"God no. A cheeseburger," she said, "with onions and tomatoes and lettuce and pickles and mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, God. And French's mustard."

"You want a cheeseburger too, Sarah?' Tim said, turning the camera back to their daughter.

Sarah was tugging at her toes with one tiny fist. She pulled her foot into her mouth, and looked up at Tim.

'Taste good?" Tim said, laughing. The camera shook as he laughed. "Is that breakfast for you, Sarah? Not waiting for the stewardess on this flight?'

Emily heard a low rumbling sound, almost a vibration, that seemed to come from the wing. She snapped her head around. "What was that?'

'Take it easy, Em," Tim said, still laughing.

Sarah laughed, too, giggling delightfully.

"We're almost home, honey," Tim said.

But even as he spoke, the plane seemed to shudder, the nose of the plane turning down. Suddenly everything tilted at a crazy angle. Emily felt Sarah sliding forward off her lap. She clutched at her daughter, pulling her close. Now it felt like the plane was going straight down, and then suddenly it was going up, and her stomach was pressed into the seat. Her daughter was a lead weight against her.

Tim said, "What the hell?'

Abruptly she was lifted off the seat, her seat belt cutting into her thighs. She felt light and sick to her stomach. She saw Tim bounce out of his seat, his head slamming into the luggage compartments overhead, the camera flying past her face.

From the cockpit, Emily heard buzzing, insistent alarms and a metallic voice that said, "Stall! Stall!" She glimpsed the blue-suited arms of the pilots moving swiftly over the controls; they were shouting in Chinese. All over the aircraft, people were screaming, hysterical. There was the sound of shattering glass.

The plane went into another steep dive. An elderly Chinese woman slid down the aisle on her back, screaming. A teenage boy followed, tumbling head over heels. Emily looked at Tim, but her husband wasn't in his seat any more. Yellow oxygen masks were dropping, one swinging in front of her face, but she could not reach for it because she was clutching her baby.

She was pressed back into her seat as the plane descended steeply, an incredibly loud whining dive. Shoes and purses ricocheted across the cabin, clanging and banging; bodies thumped against seats, the floor.

Tim was gone. Emily turned, looking for him, and suddenly a heavy bag struck her in the head-a sudden jolt, pain, blackness, and stars. She felt dizzy and faint. The alarms continued to sound. The passengers continued to scream. The plane was still in a dive.

Emily lowered her head, clutched her infant daughter to her chest, and for the first time in her life, began to pray.

SOCAL APPROACH CONTROL
5:43 a.m.

"Socal Approach, this is Transpacific 545. We have an emergency."

In the darkened building that housed Southern California Air Traffic Approach Control, senior controller Dave Marshall heard the pilot's call and glanced at his radar screen. Trans-Pacific 545 was inbound from Hong Kong to Denver. The flight had been handed over to him from Oakland ARINC a few minutes earlier: a perfectly normal flight. Marshall touched the microphone at his cheek and said, "Go ahead, 545."

"Request priority clearance for emergency landing in Los Angeles."

The pilot sounded calm. Marshall stared at the shifting green data blocks that identified each aircraft in the air. TPA 545 was approaching the California coastline. Soon it would pass over Marina Del Rey. It was still half an hour out of LAX.

Marshall said, "Okay, 545, understand you request priority clearance to land. Say the nature of your emergency."

"We have a passenger emergency," the pilot said. "We need ambulances on the ground. I would say thirty or forty ambulances. Maybe more."

Marshall was stunned. 'TPA 545, say again. Are you asking for forty ambulances?"

"Affirmative. We encountered severe turbulence during flight. We have injuries of passengers and flight crew."

Marshall thought, Why the hell didn't you tell me this before? He spun in his chair, beckoned to his supervisor, Jane Levine, who picked up the extra headset, punched in, and listened.

Marshall said, 'Transpacific, I copy your ground request for forty ambulances."

"Jesus," Levine said, making a face. "Forty?"

The pilot was still calm as he replied, "Ah, roger, Approach. Forty."

"Do you need medical personnel, too? What is the nature of the injuries you are bringing in?"

"I am not sure."

Levine made a spinning gesture: Keep the pilot talking. Marshall said, "Can you give us an estimate?"

"I am sorry, no. An estimate is not possible."

"Is anyone unconscious?"

"No, I do not think so," the pilot answered. "But two are dead."

"Holy shit," Jane Levine said. "Nice of him to tell us. Who is this guy?"

Marshall hit a key on his panel, opening a data block in the upper corner of the screen. It listed the manifest for TPA 545. "Captain's John Chang. Senior pilot for Transpacific."

"Let's not have any more surprises," Levine said. "Is the aircraft all right?"

Marshall said, 'TPA 545, what is the condition of your aircraft?"

"We have damage to the passenger cabin," the pilot said. "Minor damage only."

"What is the condition of the flight deck?" Marshall said.

"Right deck is operational. FDAU is nominal." That was the Flight Data Acquisition Unit, which tracked faults within the aircraft. If it said the plane was okay, it probably was.

Marshall said, "I copy that, 545. What is the condition of your flight crew?"

"Captain and first officer in good condition."

"Ah, 545, you said there were injuries to the crew."

"Yes. Two stewardesses have been hurt."

"Can you specify the nature of the injuries?"

"I am sorry, no. One is not conscious. The other one, I don't know."

Marshall was shaking his head "He just told us nobody was unconscious."

"I'm not buying any of this," Levine said. She picked up the red phone. "Put a fire crew on level one alert. Get the ambulances. Order neuro and ortho teams to meet the plane and have Medical notify the Westside hospitals." She looked at her watch. "I'll call the LA FSDO. This'll make his damn day."

LAX
5:57 a.m.

Daniel Greene was the duty officer at the FAA Flight Standards District Office on Imperial Highway, half a mile from LAX. The local FSDOs-or Fizdos, as they were called- supervised the flight operations of commercial carriers, checking everything from aircraft maintenance to pilot training. Greene had come in early to clear the paper off his desk; his secretary had quit the week before, and the office manager refused to replace her, citing orders from Washington to absorb attrition. So now Greene went to work, muttering. Congress was slashing the FAA budget, telling them to do more with less, pretending the problem was productivity and not workload. But passenger traffic was up four percent a year, and the commercial fleet wasn't getting younger. The combination made for a lot more work on the ground: Of course, the FSDOs weren't the only ones who were strapped. Even the NTSB was broke; the Safety Board only got a million dollars a year for aircraft accidents, and-

The red phone on his desk rang, the emergency line. He picked it up; it was a woman at traffic control.

"We've just been informed of an incident on an inbound foreign carrier," she said.

"Uh-huh." Greene reached for a notepad. "Incident" had a specific meaning to the FAA, referring to the lower category of flight problems that carriers were required to report. "Accidents" involved deaths or structural damage to the aircraft and were always serious, but with incidents, you never knew. "Go ahead."

"It's Transpacific Flight 545, incoming from Hong Kong to Denver. Pilot's requested emergency landing at LAX. Says they encountered turbulence during flight."

"Is the plane airworthy?'

"They say it is," Levine said. "They've got injuries, and they've requested forty ambulances."

"Forty?"

"They've also got two stiffs."

"Great." Greene got up from his desk. "When's it due in?"

"Eighteen minutes."

"Eighteen minutes-Jeez, why am I getting this so late?"

"Hey, the captain just told us, we're telling you. I've notified EMS and alerted the fire crews."

"Fire crews? I thought you said the plane's okay."

"Who knows?" the woman said. "The pilot is not making much sense. Sounds like he might be in shock. We hand off to the tower in seven minutes."

"Okay," Greene said. "I'm on my way."

He grabbed his badge and his cell phone and went out the door. As he passed Karen, the receptionist, he said, "Have we got anybody at the international terminal?"

"Kevin's there."

"Beep him," Greene said. 'Tell him to get on TPA 545, inbound Hong Kong, landing in fifteen. Tell him to stay at the gate-and don't let the flight crew leave."

"Got it," she said, reaching for the phone.

Greene roared down Sepulveda Boulevard toward the airport. Just before the highway ran beneath the runway, he looked up and saw the big Transpacific Airlines widebody, identifiable by its bright yellow tail insignia, taxiing toward the gate. Transpacific was a Hong Kong-based charter carrier. Most of the problems the FAA had with foreign airlines occurred with charters. Many were low-budget operators that didn't match the rigorous safety standards of the scheduled carriers. But Transpacific had an excellent reputation.

At least the bird was on the ground, Greene thought. And he couldn't see any structural damage to the widebody. The plane was an N-22, built by Norton Aircraft in Burbank. The plane had been in revenue service five years, with an enviable dispatch and safety record.

Greene stepped on the gas and rushed into the tunnel, passing beneath the giant aircraft.

He sprinted through the international building. Through the windows, he saw the Transpacific jet pulled up to the gate, and the ambulances lined up on the concrete below. The first of them was already driving out, its siren whining.

Greene came to the gate, flashed his badge, and ran down the ramp. Passengers were disembarking, pale and frightened. Many limped, their clothes torn and bloody. On each side of die ramp, paramedics clustered around the injured.

As he neared the plane, the nauseating odor of vomit grew stronger. A frightened TransPac stewardess pushed him back at the door, chartering at him rapidly in Chinese. He showed her his badge and said, "FAA! Official business! FAA!" The stewardess stepped back, and Greene slid past a mother clutching an infant and stepped into the plane.

He looked at the interior, and stopped. "Oh my God," he said softly. "What happened to this plane?"

GLENDALE, CALIFORNIA
6:00 a.m.

"Mom? Who do you like better, Mickey Mouse or Minnie Mouse?"

Standing in the kitchen of her bungalow, still wearing her jogging shorts from her five-mile morning run, Casey Singleton finished making a tuna sandwich and put it in her daughter's lunch box. Singleton was thirty-six years old, a vice-president at Norton Aircraft in Burbank. Her daughter sat at the breakfast table, eating cereal.

"Well?" Allison said. "Who do you like better, Mickey Mouse or Minnie Mouse?' She was seven, and she ranked everything.

"I like them both," Casey said.

"I know, Mom," Allison said, exasperated. "But who do you like better?'

"Minnie."

"Me, too," she said, pushing the carton away.

Casey put a banana and a thermos of juice in the lunch box, closed the lid. "Finish eating, Allison, we have to get ready."

"What's quart?"

"Quart? It's a measure of liquid."

"No, Mom, Qua-urt" she said.

Casey looked over and saw that her daughter had picked up her new laminated plant ID badge, which had Casey's picture, and beneath that C. SINGLETON and then in large blue letters, QA/IRT.

"What's Qua-urt

"It's my new job at the plant. I'm the Quality Assurance rep on the Incident Review Team."

"Are you still making airplanes?" Ever since the divorce Allison had been extremely attentive to change. Even a minor alteration in Casey's hairstyle prompted repeated discussions, the subject brought up again and again, over many days. So it wasn't surprising she had noticed the new badge.

"Yes, Allie," she said, "I'm still making airplanes. Everything's the same. I just got a promotion."

"Are you still a BUM?" she said.

Allison had been delighted, the year before, to learn that Casey was a Business Unit Manager, a BUM. "Mom's a bum," she'd tell her friends' parents, to great effect.

"No, Allie. Now get your shoes on. Your dad'll be picking you up any minute."

"No, he won't," Allison said. "Dad's always late. What's your promotion?"

Casey bent over and began pulling on her daughter's sneakers. "Well," she said, "I still work at QA, but I don't check the planes in the factory any more. I check them after they leave the plant."

'To make sure they fly?"

"Yes, honey. We check them and fix any problems."

"They better fly," Allison said, "or else they'll crash!" She began to laugh. "They'll all fall out of the sky! And hit everybody in their houses, right while they're eating their cereal! That wouldn't be too good, would it, Mom?"

Casey laughed with her. "No, that wouldn't be good at all. The people at the plant would be very upset." She finished tying the laces, swung her daughter's feet away. "Now where's your sweatshirt?"

"I don't need it."

"Allison-"

"Mom, it's not even cold!"

"It may be cold later in the week. Get your sweatshirt, please."

She heard a horn honk on the street outside, saw Jim's black Lexus in front of the house. Jim was behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a jacket and tie. Perhaps he had a job interview, she thought.

Allison stomped around her room, banging drawers. She came back looking unhappy, the sweatshirt hanging from the comer of her backpack. "How come you're always so tense when Dad picks me up?"

Casey opened the door, and they walked to the car in the hazy morning sunshine. Allison cried, "Hi, Daddy!" and broke into a run. Jim waved back, with a boozy grin.

Casey walked over to Jim's window. "No smoking with Allison in the car, right?"

Jim stared at her sullenly. "Good morning to you, too." His voice was raspy. He looked hung over, his face puffy and sallow.

"We had an agreement about smoking around our daughter, Jim."

"Do you see me smoking?"

"I'm just saying."

"And you've said it before, Katherine," he said. "I've heard it a million times. For Christ's sake."

Casey sighed. She was determined not to fight in front of Allison. The therapist had said that was the reason Allison had begun stuttering. The stuttering was better now, and Casey always made an effort not to argue with Jim, even though he didn't reciprocate. On the contrary: he seemed to take special pleasure in making every contact as difficult as possible.

"Okay," Casey said, forcing a smile. "See you Sunday."

Their arrangement was that Allison stayed with her father one week a month, leaving Monday and returning the following Sunday.

"Sunday." Jim nodded curtly. "Same as always."

"Sunday at six."

"Oh, Christ."

"I'm just checking, Jim."

"No, you're not. You're controlling, the way you always do - "

"Jim," she said. "Please. Let's not"

"Fine with me," he snapped.

She bent over. "Bye, Allie."

Allison said, "Bye, Mom," but her eyes were already distant, her voice cool; she had transferred her allegiance to her father, even before her seat belt was fastened. Then Jim stepped on the gas, and the Lexus drove away, leaving her standing there on the sidewalk. The car rounded the comer, and was gone.

Down at the end of the street, she saw the hunched figure of her neighbor Amos, taking his snarly dog for a morning walk. Like Casey, Amos worked at die plant. She waved to him, and he waved back.

Casey was turning to go back inside to dress for work, when her eye caught a blue sedan parked across the street There were two men inside. One was reading a newspaper; the other stared out the window. She paused: her neighbor Mrs. Alvarez had been robbed recently. Who were these men? They weren't gang bangers; they were in their twenties with a clean-cut, vaguely military appearance.

Casey was thinking about taking down the license plate when her beeper went off, with an electronic squeal. She undipped it from her shorts and read:

She sighed. Three stars signaled an urgent message: John Marder, who ran the factory, was calling an IRT meeting for 7 a.m. in the War Room. That was a full hour before the regular Morning Call; something was up. The final notation confirmed it, in plant slang-BTOYA. Be There Or It's Your Ass.

BURBANK AIRPORT
6:32 a.m.

Rush hour traffic crept forward in the pale morning light. Casey twisted her rearview mirror, and leaned over to check her makeup. With her short dark hair, she was appealing in a tomboyish sort of way-long limbed and athletic. She played first base on the plant softball team. Men were comfortable around her; they treated her like a kid sister, which served her well at the plant.

In fact, Casey had had few problems there. She had grown up in the suburbs of Detroit, the only daughter of an editor at the Detroit News. Her two older brothers were both engineers at Ford. Her mother died when she was an infant, so she had been raised in a household of men. She had never been what her father used to call "a girly girl."

After she graduated from Southern Illinois in journalism, Casey had followed her brothers to Ford. But she found writing press releases uninteresting, so she took advantage of the company's continuing education program to get an MBA from Wayne State. Along the way, she married Jim, a Ford engineer, and had a child.

But Allison's arrival had ended the marriage: confronted by diapers and feeding schedules, Jim started drinking, staying out late. Eventually they separated. When Jim announced he was moving to the West Coast to work for Toyota, she decided to move out, too. Casey wanted Allison to grow up seeing her father. She was tired of the politics at Ford, and the bleak Detroit winters. California offered a fresh start: she imagined herself driving a convertible, living in a sunny house near the beach, with palm trees outside her window; she imagined her daughter growing up tanned and healthy.

Instead, she lived in Glendale, an hour and a half inland from the beach. Casey had indeed bought a convertible, but she never put the top down. And although the section of Glendale where they lived was charming, gang territories began only a few blocks away. Sometimes at night, while her daughter slept, she heard the faint pop of gunfire. Casey worried about Allison's safety. She worried about her education in a school system where fifty languages were spoken. And she worried about the future, because the California economy was still depressed, jobs scarce. Jim had been out of work for two years now, since Toyota fired him for drinking. And Casey had survived wave after wave of layoffs at Norton, where production had slumped thanks to the global recession.

She had never imagined she would work for an aircraft company, but to her surprise she had found that her plain-spoken, midwestern pragmatism was perfectly suited to the culture of engineers that dominated the company. Jim considered her rigid and "by the book," but her attention to detail had served her well at Norton, where she had for the last year been a vice-president of Quality Assurance.

She liked QA, even though the division had a nearly impossible mission. Norton Aircraft was divided into two great factions-production and engineering-which were perpetually at war. Quality Assurance stood uneasily between the two. QA was involved in all aspects of production; the division signed off every step of fabrication and assembly. When a problem emerged, QA was expected to get to the bottom of it. That rarely endeared them to mechanics on the line, or the engineers.

At the same time, QA was expected to deal with customer support problems. Customers were often unhappy with decisions they themselves had made, blaming Norton if the galleys they had ordered were in the wrong place, or if there were too few toilets on the plane. It took patience and political skill to keep everybody happy and get the problems resolved. Casey, a born peacemaker, was especially good at this.

In return for walking a political tightrope, workers in QA had the run of the plant. As a vice-president, Casey was involved in every aspect of the company's work; she had a lot of freedom and wide-ranging responsibility.

She knew her title was more impressive than the job she held; Norton Aircraft was awash in vice-presidents. Her division alone had four veeps, and competition among them was fierce. But now John Marder had just promoted her to liaison for the IRT. This was a position of considerable visibility- and it put her in line to head the division. Marder didn't make such appointments casually. She knew he had a good reason for doing it.

She turned her Mustang convertible off the Golden State Freeway onto Empire Avenue, following the chain-link fence that marked the south perimeter of Burbank Airport. She headed toward the commercial complexes-Rockwell, Lockheed, and Norton Aircraft. From a distance, she could see the rows of hangars, each with the winged Norton logo painted above-

Her car phone rang.

"Casey? It's Norma. You know about the meeting?"

Norma was her secretary. "I'm on my way," she said. "What's going on?"

"Nobody knows anything," Norma said. "But it must be bad. Marder's been screaming at the engineering heads, and he's pushed up the IRT."

John Marder was the chief operating officer at Norton. Marder had been program manager on the N-22, which meant he supervised the manufacture of that aircraft. He was a ruthless and occasionally reckless man, but he got results. Marder was also married to Charley Norton's only daughter. In recent years, he'd had a lot to say about sales. That made Marder the second most powerful man in the company after the president. It was Marder who had moved Casey up, and it was-

"… do with your assistant?" Norma said.

"My what?"

"Your new assistant. What do you want me to do with him? He's waiting in your office. You haven't forgotten?"

"Oh, right." The truth was, she had forgotten. Some nephew of the Norton family was working his way through the divisions. Marder had assigned the kid to Casey, which meant she'd have to babysit him for the next six weeks. "What's he like, Norma?"

"Well, he's not drooling."

"Norma."

"He's better than the last one."

That wasn't saying much: the last one had fallen off a wing in major join and had nearly electrocuted himself in radio rack. "How much better?"

"I'm looking at his resume," Norma said. "Yale law school and a year at GM. But he's been in Marketing for the last three months, and he doesn't know anything about production. You're going to have to start him from the beginning."

"Right," Casey said, sighing. Marder would expect her to bring him to the meeting. "Have the kid meet me in front of Administration in ten minutes. And make sure he doesn't get lost, okay?"

"You want me to walk him down?"

"Yeah, you better."

Casey hung up and glanced at her watch. Traffic was moving slowly. Still ten minutes to the plant. She drummed her fingers on the dashboard impatiently. What could the meeting be about? There might have been an accident, or a crash.

She turned on the radio to see if it was on the news. She got a talk station, a caller saying, "-not fair to make kids wear uniforms to school. It's elitist and discriminatory-"

Casey pushed a button, changing the station.

"-trying to force their personal morality on the rest of us. I don't believe a fetus is a human being-"

She pushed another button.

"-these media attacks are all coming from people who don't like free speech-"

Where, she thought, is the news? Had an airplane crashed or not?

She had a sudden image of her father, reading a big stack of newspapers from all over the country every Sunday after church, muttering to himself, "That's not the story, that's not the story!" as he dropped the pages in an untidy heap around his living room chair. Of course, her father had been a print journalist, back in the 1960s. It was a different world now. Now, everything was on television. Television, and the mindless chatter on the radio.

Up ahead, she saw the main gate of the Norton plant. She clicked the radio off.

Norton Aircraft was one of the great names of American aviation. The company had been started by aviation pioneer Charley Norton in 1935; during World War II it made the legendary B-22 bomber, the P-27 Skycat fighter, and the C-12 transport for the Air Force. In recent years, Norton had weathered the hard times that had driven Lockheed out of the commercial transport business. Now it was one of just four companies that still built large aircraft for the global market. The others were Boeing in Seattle, McDonnell Douglas in Long Beach, and the European consortium Airbus in Toulouse.

She drove through acres of parking lots to Gate 7, pausing at the barrier while security checked her badge. As always, she felt a lift driving into the plant, with its three-shift energy, the yellow tugs hauling bins of parts. It wasn't a factory so much as a small city, with its own hospital, newspaper, and police force. Sixty thousand people had worked here when she first came to the company. The recession had trimmed that to thirty thousand, but the plant was still huge, covering sixteen square miles. Here they built the N-20, the narrow-body twinjet; the N-22, the widebody; and the KC-22, the Air Force fuel tanker. She could see the principal assembly buildings, each more than a mile in length.

She headed for the glass Administration building, in the center of the plant. Pulling into her parking space, she left the engine running. She saw a young man, looking collegiate in a sport coat and tie, khaki slacks, and penny loafers. The kid waved diffidently as she got out of the car.

BLDG 64
6:45 a.m.

"Bob Richman," he said. "I'm your new assistant." His handshake was polite, reserved. She couldn't remember which side of the Norton family he was from, but she recognized the type. Plenty of money, divorced parents, an indifferent record at good schools, and an unshakable sense of entitlement.

"Casey Singleton," she said. "Get in. We're late."

"Late," Richman said, as he climbed into the car. "It's not even seven."

"First shift starts at six," Casey said. "Most of us in QA work the factory schedule. Don't they do that at GM?"

"I wouldn't know," he said. "I was in Legal."

"Spend any time on the floor?"

"As little as possible."

Casey sighed. It was going to be a long six weeks with this guy, she thought. "You've been over in Marketing so far?"

"Yeah, a few months." He shrugged. "But selling isn't really my thing."

She drove south toward Building 64, the huge structure where the widebody was built. Casey said, "By the way, what do you drive?"

"A BMW," Richman said.

"You might want to trade it in," she said, "for an American car."

"Why? It's made here."

"It's assembled here," she said. "It's not made here. The value’s added overseas. The mechanics in the plant know the difference; they're all UAW. They don't like to see a Beamer in the parking lot."

Richman stared out the window. "What are you saying, something might happen to it?'

"Guaranteed," she said. "These guys don't screw around."

"I'll think about it," Richman said He suppressed a yawn. "Jesus, it's early. What are we rushing to?"

"The IRT. It's been pushed up to seven," she said.

'The Incident Review Team. Every time something happens to one of our planes, the IRT meets to figure out what happened, and what we should do about it"

"How often do you meet?'

"Roughly every two months."

"That often," the kid said.

You 're going to have to start him from the beginning.

"Actually," Casey said, "two months is pretty infrequent. We have three thousand aircraft in revenue service around the world. With that many birds in the air, things happen. And we're serious about customer support. So every morning we hold a conference call with the service reps around the world. They report everything that caused a dispatch delay the day before. Most of it's minor stuff: a lav door jammed; a cockpit light failed. But we track it in QA, do a trend analysis, and pass that on to Product Support."

"Uh-huh…" He sounded bored.

"Then," Casey said, "once in a while, we hit a problem that warrants an IRT. It has to be serious, something that affects flight safety. Apparently we've got one today. If Marder's pushed the meeting up to seven, you can bet it's not a bird strike."

"Marder?"

"John Marder was the program manager for the widebody, before he became chief operating officer. So it's probably an incident involving the N-22."

She pulled over and parked in the shadow of Building 64.

The gray hangar loomed above them, eight stories high and nearly a mile long. The asphalt in front of the building was strewn with disposable earplugs, which the mechanics wore so they wouldn't go deaf from the rivet guns.

They walked through the side doors and entered an interior corridor that ran around the perimeter of the building. The corridor was dotted with food dispensers, in clusters a quarter of a mile apart Richman said, "We got time for a cup of coffee?" She shook her head. "Coffee's not allowed on the floor." "No coffee?" He groaned. "Why not? It's made overseas?" "Coffee's corrosive. Aluminum doesn't like it." Casey led Richman through another door, onto the production floor. "Jesus," Richman said.

The huge, partially assembled widebody jets gleamed under halogen lights. Fifteen aircraft in various stages of construction were arranged in two long rows under the vaulted roof. Directly ahead of them, she saw mechanics installing cargo doors in the fuselage sections. The barrels of the fuselage were surrounded by scaffolding. Beyond the fuselage stood a forest of assembly jigs-immense tools, painted bright blue. Richman walked under one of the jigs and looked up, open-mouthed. It was as wide as a house and six stories tall.

"Amazing," he said. He pointed upward at a broad flat surface. "Is that the wing?"

"The vertical stabilizer," Casey said.

"The what?"

"It's the tail, Bob."

"That's the tail' Richman said.

Casey nodded. "The wing is over there," she said, pointing across the floor. "It's two hundred feet long-almost as long as a football field."

A Klaxon sounded. One of the overhead cranes began to move. Richman turned to look.

"This your first time on the floor?"

"Yeah…" Richman was turning around, looking in all directions. "Awesome," he said.

"They're big," Casey said.

"Why are they all lime green?"

"We coat the structural elements with epoxy to prevent corrosion. And the aluminum skins are covered so they don't get dinged during assembly. The skins are highly polished and very expensive. So we leave that coating on until Paint Shed."

"Sure doesn't look like GM," Richman said, still turning and looking.

"That's right," Casey said. "Compared to these aircraft, cars are a joke."

Richman turned to her, surprised. "A joke!"

"Think about it," she said. "A Pontiac has five thousand parts, and you can build one in two shifts. Sixteen hours. That's nothing. But these things"-she gestured to the aircraft looming high above them-"are a completely different animal. The widebody has one million parts and a span time of seventy-five days. No other manufactured product in the world has the complexity of a commercial aircraft. Nothing even comes close. And nothing is built to be as durable. You take a Pontiac and run it all day every day and see what happens. It'll fall apart in a few months. But we design our jets to fly for twenty years of trouble-free service, and we build them to twice the service life."

"Forty years?" Richman said, incredulous. "You build them to last forty years?"

Casey nodded. "We've still got lots of N-5s in service around the world-and we stopped building them in 1946. We've got planes that have accumulated four times their design life-the equivalent of eighty years of service. Norton planes will do that. Douglas planes will do that. But no one else's birds will do that. You understand what I'm saying?"

"Wow," Richman said, swallowing.

"We call this the bird farm," Casey said. "The planes're so big, it's hard to get a sense of the scale." She pointed to one aircraft to their right, where small clusters of people worked at various positions, with portable lights shining up on the metal. "Doesn't look like many people, right?"

"No, not many."

"There's probably two hundred mechanics working on that plane-enough to run an entire automobile line. But this is just one position on our line-and we have fifteen positions in all. There's five thousand people in this building, right now."

The kid was shaking his head, amazed. "It looks sort of empty."

"Unfortunately," Casey said, "it is sort of empty. The wide-body line's running at sixty percent capacity-and three of those birds are white-tails."

"White-tails?"

"Planes we're building without customers. We build at a minimum rate to keep the line open, and we haven't got all the orders we want. The Pacific Rim's the growth sector but with Japan in recession, that market's not placing orders. And everybody else is flying their planes longer. So business is very competitive. This way."

She started up a flight of metal stairs, walking quickly. Richman followed her, footsteps clanging. They came to a landing, went up another flight. "I'm telling you this," she said, "so you'll understand the meeting we're going into. We build the hell out of these planes. People here are proud of what they do. And they don't like it when something s wrong."

They arrived at a catwalk high above the assembly floor, and walked toward a glass-walled room that seemed to be suspended from the roof. They came to the door. Casey opened it.

"And this," she said, "is the War Room."

WAR ROOM
7:01 a.m.

She saw it freshly, through his eyes: a large conference room with gray indoor-outdoor carpeting, a round Formica table, tubular metal chairs. The walls were covered with bulletin boards, maps, and engineering charts. The far wall was glass, and overlooked the assembly line.

Five men in ties and shirtsleeves were there, a secretary with a notepad, and John Marder, wearing a blue suit. She was surprised he was here; the COO rarely chaired IRTs. In person, Marder was dark, intense, in his mid forties, with slicked-back hair. He looked like a cobra about to strike.

Casey said, 'This is my new assistant, Bob Richman."

Marder stood up and said, "Bob, welcome," and shook the kid's hand. He gave a rare smile. Apparently Marder, with his finely tuned sense of corporate politics, was ready to fawn over any Norton family member, even a nephew on loan. It made Casey wonder if this kid was more important than she thought he was.

Marder introduced Richman to the others at the table. "Doug Doherty, in charge of structure and mechanical…" He gestured to an overweight man of forty-five, with a potbelly, bad complexion, and thick glasses. Doherty lived in a state of perpetual gloom; he spoke in a mournful monotone, and could always be counted on to report that everything was bad, and getting worse. Today he wore a checked shirt and a striped tie; he must have gotten out of the house before his wife saw him. Doherty gave Richman a sad, thoughtful nod.

"Nguyen Van Trung, avionics…" Trung was thirty, trim and quiet, self-contained. Casey liked him. The Vietnamese were the hardest-working people at the plant. The avionics guys were MIS specialists, involved with the aircraft computer programs. They represented the new wave at Norton: younger, better educated, better manners.

"Ken Burne, powerplant…" Kenny was red haired and freckled; his chin thrust forward, ready to fight. Notoriously profane and abusive, he was known in the plant as Easy Burne because of his quick temper.

"Ron Smith, electrical…" Bald and timid, nervously fingering pens in his pocket. Ron was extremely competent; it often seemed he carried the schematics for the aircraft around in his head. But he was painfully shy. He lived with his invalid mother in Pasadena.

"Mike Lee, who represents the carrier…" A well dressed man of fifty, gray hair cropped short, in a blue blazer with a striped tie. Mike was a former Air Force pilot, a retired one-star general. He was TransPacific's rep at the plant.

"And Barbara Ross, with the notepad." The IRT secretary was in her forties, and overweight. She glared at Casey with open hostility. Casey ignored her.

Marder waved the kid to a seat, and Casey sat down beside him. "First item," Marder said "Casey is now liaising QA to the IRT. Considering the way she handled the RTO at DFW, she'll be our press spokesman from now on. Any questions?"

Richman looked bewildered, shaking his head. Marder turned to him, and explained: "Singleton did a good job with the press on a rejected takeoff at Dallas-Fort Worth last month. So she'll handle any press inquiries we get. Okay? We all on the same page? Let's get started. Barbara?" The secretary handed around stapled packets of paper.

'Transpacific Flight 545," Marder said. "An N-22, fuse number 271. Flight originated at Kaitak Hong Kong at 2200 hours yesterday. Uneventful takeoff, uneventful flight until approximately 0500 hours this morning, when the aircraft encountered what the pilot described as severe turbulence-"

There were groans throughout the room. "Turbulence!" The engineers shook their heads.

"-severe turbulence, producing extreme pitch excursions in flight."

"Ah, Christ," Burne said.

"The aircraft," Marder continued, "made an emergency landing at LAX, and medical units were on hand. Our preliminary report indicates fifty-six injured, and three dead."

"Oh that's very bad," Doug Doherty said in a sad monotone, blinking behind his thick glasses. "I suppose this means we've got the NTSB on our backs," he said.

Casey leaned over to Richman and whispered, "National Transportation Safety Board usually gets involved when there are fatalities."

"Not in this case," Marder said. "This is a foreign carrier, and the incident occurred in international airspace. NTSB has its hands full with the Colombia crash. We think they're going to pass on this one."

'Turbulence," Kenny Burne said, snorting. "Is there any confirmation?"

"No," Marder said. "The plane was at thirty-seven thousand feet when the incident took place. No other aircraft at that altitude and position reported weather problems."

"Satellite weather maps?" Casey said.

"Coming."

"What about the passengers?" she said. "Did the captain make an announcement? Was the seat-belt sign on?"

"Nobody's interviewed the passengers yet. But our preliminary information suggests no announcement was made."

Richman was looking bewildered again. Casey scribbled a note on her yellow pad, tilted it so he could read: No Turbulence.

Trung said, "Have we debriefed the pilot?"

"No," Marder said. "The flight crew caught a connecting flight out, and left the country."

"Oh great," Kenny Burne said, throwing his pencil on the table. "Just great. We got a damn hit-and-run."

"Hold on, now," Mike Lee said, in a cool tone. "On behalf of the carrier, I think we have to recognize the flight crew acted responsibly. They have no liability here; but they face possible litigation from the civil aviation authorities in Hong Kong, and they went home to deal with it"

Casey wrote: Flight Crew Unavailable.

"Do, uh, we know who the captain was?' Ron Smith asked timidly.

"We do," Mike Lee said. He consulted a leather notebook. "His name is John Chang. Forty-five years old, resident of Hong Kong, six thousand hours' experience. He's Trans-Pacific's senior pilot for the N-22. Very skilled."

"Oh yeah?" Burne said, leaning forward across the table. "And when was he last recertified?"

"Three months ago."

"Where?"

"Right here," Mike Lee said. "On Norton flight simulators, by Norton instructors."

Burne sat back, snorting unhappily.

"Do we know how he was rated?" Casey asked.

"Outstanding," Lee said. "You can check your records."

Casey wrote: Not Human Error (?)

Marder said to Lee, "Do you think we can get an interview with him, Mike? Will he talk to our service rep at Kaitak?"

"I'm sure the crew will cooperate," Lee said. "Especially if you submit written questions… I'm sure I can get them answered within ten days."

"Hmm," Marder said, distressed. "That long…"

"Unless we get a pilot interview," Van Trung said, "we may have a problem. The incident occurred one hour prior to landing. The cockpit voice recorder only stores the last twenty-five minutes of conversation. So in this case the CVR is useless."

'True. But you still have the FDR."

Casey wrote: Flight Data Recorder.

"Yes, we have the FDR," Trung said. But this clearly didn't assuage his concerns, and Casey knew why. Flight recorders were notoriously unreliable. In the media, they were the mysterious black boxes that revealed all the secrets of a flight. But in reality, they often didn't work.

"I'll do what I can," Mike Lee promised.

Casey said, "What do we know about the aircraft?"

"Aircraft's brand-new," Marder said. "Three years' service. It's got four thousand hours and nine hundred cycles."

Casey wrote: Cycles = Takeoffs and Landings.

"What about inspections?" Doherty asked gloomily. "I suppose we'll have to wait weeks for the records…"

"It had a C check in March."

"Where?'

"LAX."

"So maintenance was probably good," Casey said.

"Correct," Marder said. "As a first cut, we can't attribute this to weather, human factors, or maintenance. So we're in the trenches. Let's run the fault tree. Did anything about this aircraft cause behavior that looks like turbulence? Structural?"

"Oh sure," Doherty said miserably. "A slats deploy would do it. We'll function hydraulics on all the control surfaces."

"Avionics?"

Trung was scribbling notes. "Right now I'm wondering why the autopilot didn't override the pilot. Soon as I get the FDR download, I'll know more."

"Electrical?'

"It's possible we got a slats deploy from a sneak circuit," Ron Smith said, shaking his head. "I mean, it's possible…."

"Powerplant?'

"Yeah, powerplant could be involved," Burne said, running his hand through his red hair. "The thrust reversers could have deployed in flight. That'd make the plane nose over and roll. But if the reversers deployed, there'll be residual damage. We'll check the sleeves."

Casey looked down at her pad. She had written:

Structural - Slats Deploy

Hydraulics - Slats Deploy

Avionics -Autopilot

Electrical - Sneak Circuit

Powerplant - Thrust Reversers

That was basically every system on the aircraft.

"You've got a lot of ground to cover," Marder said, standing and gathering his papers together. "Don't let me keep you."

"Oh hell," Burne said. "We'll nail this in a month, John. I'm not worried."

"I am," Marder said. "Because we don't have a month. We have a week."

Cries around the table. "A week!"

"Jeez, John!"

"Come on, John, you know an IRT always takes a month."

"Not this time," Marder said. "Last Thursday our president, Hal Edgarton, received an LOI from the Beijing government to purchase fifty N-22s, with an option for another thirty. First delivery in eighteen months."

There was stunned silence.

The men all looked at each other. A big China sale had been rumored for months. The deal had been reported as "imminent" in various news accounts. But nobody at Norton really believed it.

"It's true," Marder said. "And I don't need to tell you what it means. It's an eight-billion-dollar order from the fastest-growing airframe market in the world. It's four years of full-capacity production. It'll put this company on solid financial footing into the twenty-first century. It'll fund development for the N-22 stretch and the advanced N-XX widebody. Hal and I agree: this sale means the difference between life and death for the company." Marder placed the papers in his briefcase and snapped it shut.

"I fly to Beijing Sunday, to join Hal and sign the letter of intent with the minister of transport. He's going to want to know what happened to Flight 545. And I better be able to tell him, or he'll turn around and sign with Airbus. In which case I'm in deep shit, this company is in deep shit-and everybody at this table is out of a job. The future of Norton Aircraft is riding on this investigation. So I don't want to hear anything but answers. And I want them inside a week. See you tomorrow."

He turned on his heel and walked out of the room.

WAR ROOM
7:27 a.m.

"What an asshole," Burne said. "This is his idea of motivating the troops? Fuck him."

Trung shrugged. "It's the way he always is."

"What do you think?" Smith said. "I mean, this could be great, great news. Has Edgarton really got an LOI from China?"

"I bet he does," Trung said. "Because the plant's been quietly gearing up. They've made another set of tools to fab the wing; the tools are about to be shipped to Atlanta. I'll bet he's got a deal."

"What he's got," said Burne, "is a major case of cover my ass."

"Meaning?"

"Edgarton might have a tentative from Beijing. But eight billion dollars is a big order from a big gorilla. Boeing, Douglas, and Airbus are all chasing that order. The Chinese could give it to any of them at the last minute. That's their style. They do it all the time. So Edgarton's shitting rivets, worrying he won't close the deal and he'll have to tell the board he lost the big one. So what does he do? He lays it on Marder. And what does Marder do?"

"Makes it our fault," Trung said.

"Right. This TPA flight puts them in perfect position. If they close with Beijing, they're heroes. But if the deal falls apart…"

"It's because we blew it," Trung said.

"Right. We're the reason an eight-billion-dollar deal cratered."

"Well," Trung said, standing, "I think we better look at that plane."

ADMINISTRATION
9:12 a.m.

Harold Edgarton, the newly appointed president of Norton Aircraft, was in his office on the tenth floor, staring out the window overlooking the plant, when John Marder walked in. Edgarton was a big man, an ex-fullback, with a ready smile and cold, watchful eyes. He had previously worked at Boeing, and had been brought in three months earlier to improve Norton's marketing.

Edgarton turned, and frowned at Marder. "This is a hell of a mess," he said. "How many died?"

"Three," Marder said.

"Christ," Edgarton said. He shook his head. "Of all the times for this to happen. Did you brief the investigation team on the LOI? Tell them how urgent this is?"

"I briefed them."

"And you'll clear it up this week?"

"I'm chairing the group myself. I'll get it done," Marder said.

"What about press?" Edgarton was still worried. "I don't want Media Relations handling this one. Benson's a drunk, the reporters all hate him. And the engineers can't do it. They don't speak English, for Christ's sake-"

"I've got it handled, Hal."

"You do? I don't want you talking to the fucking press. You're grounded."

"I understand," Marder said. "I've arranged for Singleton to do the press."

"Singleton? That QA woman?" Edgarton said. "I looked at that tape you gave me, where she talked to the reporters about the Dallas thing. She's pretty enough, but she comes off as a straight arrow."

"Well, that's what we want, isn't it?" Marder said. "We want honest all-American, no-nonsense. And she's good on her feet, Hal."

"She'd better be," Edgarton said. "If the shit hits the fan, she has to perform."

"She will," Marder said.

"I don't want anything to undermine this China deal."

"Nobody does, Hal."

Edgarton looked at Marder thoughtfully for a moment. "You better be real clear about that," he said. "Because I don't give a damn who you're married to-if this deal doesn't close, a lot of people are going to get taken out. Not just me. A lot of other heads will roll."

"I understand," Marder said.

"You picked the woman. She's your call. The Board knows it. If anything goes wrong with her, or the IRT-you're out on your ass."

"Nothing will go wrong," Marder said. "It's under control."

"It damn well better be," Edgarton said, and turned away again to look out the window.

Marder left the room.

LAX MAINTENANCE HANGAR 21
9:48 a.m.

The blue minivan crossed the runway and raced toward the line of maintenance hangars at Los Angeles Airport. From the rear of the nearest hangar, the yellow tail of the Transpacific widebody protruded, its emblem shining in the sun.

The engineers began to talk excitedly as soon as they saw the plane. The minivan rolled into the hangar and came to a stop beneath the wing; the engineers piled out. The RAMS team was already at work, a half-dozen mechanics up on the wing, wearing harnesses, scrabbling on their hands and knees.

"Let's do it!" Burne shouted, as he climbed a ladder to the wing. He made it sound like a battle cry. The other engineers scrambled up after him. Doherty followed last, climbing the ladder with a dejected air.

Casey stepped out of the van with Richman. "They all go right to the wing," Richman said.

"That's right. The wing's the most important part of an aircraft, and the most complicated structure. They'll look at it first, then do a visual inspect on the rest of the exterior. This way."

"Where are we going?"

"Inside."

Casey walked to the nose, and climbed a roll-in staircase to the forward cabin door, just behind the cockpit. As she came to the entrance, she smelled the nauseating odor of vomit.

"Jesus," Richman said, behind her.

Casey went inside.

She knew the forward cabin would have the least damage, but even here some of the seat backs were broken. Armrests had torn free and swung into the aisles. Overhead luggage bins were cracked, the doors hanging open. Oxygen masks dangled from the ceiling, some missing. There was blood on the carpet, blood on the ceiling. Puddles of vomit on the seats.

"My God," Richman said, covering his nose. He looked pale. "This happened because of turbulence?"

"No," she said. "Almost certainly not."

"Then why would the pilot-"

"We don't know yet," she said.

Casey went forward to the flight deck. The cockpit door was latched open, and the flight deck appeared normal. All the logs and paperwork were missing. A tiny infant's shoe was on the floor. Bending to look at it, she noticed a mass of crumpled black metal wedged beneath the cockpit door. A video camera. She pulled it free, and it broke apart in her hands, an untidy heap of circuit boards, silver motors, and loops of tape hanging from a cracked cassette. She gave it to Richman.

"What do I do with this?"

"Keep it."

Casey headed aft, knowing it would be worse in the back. Already she was forming a picture in her mind of what had happened on this flight. "There's no question: this aircraft underwent severe pitch oscillations. That's when the plane noses up and down," she explained.

"How do you know?" Richman said.

"Because that's what makes passengers vomit. They can take yaw and roll. But pitching makes them puke."

"Why are the oxygen masks missing?" Richman said.

"People grabbed them as they fell," she said. It must have happened that way. "And the seat backs are broken-do you know how much force it takes to break an airplane seat? They're designed to withstand an impact of sixteen Gs. People in this cabin bounced around like dice in a cup. And from the damage, it looks like it went on for a while."

"How long?"

"At least two minutes," she said. An eternity for an incident like this, she thought.

Passing a shattered midships galley, they came into the center cabin. Here damage was much worse. Many seats were broken. There was a broad swath of blood across the ceiling. The aisles were cluttered with debris-shoes, torn clothing, children's toys.

A cleanup crew in blue uniforms marked NORTON IRT was collecting the personal belongings, putting them into big plastic bags. Casey turned to a woman. "Have you found any cameras?"

"Five or six, so far," the woman said. "Couple of video cameras. There's all sorts of stuff here." She reached under a seat, came out with a brown rubber diaphragm. "Like I said."

Stepping carefully over the litter in the aisles, Casey moved farther aft. She passed another divider and entered the aft cabin, near the tail.

Richman sucked in his breath.

It looked as if a giant hand had smashed the interior. Seats were crushed flat. Overhead bins hung down, almost touching the floor; ceiling panels had split apart, exposing wiring and silver insulation. There was blood everywhere; some of the seats were soaked deep maroon. The aft lavs were ripped apart, minors shattered, stainless-steel drawers hanging open, twisted.

Casey's attention was drawn to the left of the cabin, where six paramedics were struggling to hold a heavy shape, wrapped in white nylon mesh, that hung near a ceiling bin. The paramedics adjusted their position, the nylon webbing shifted, and suddenly a man's head flopped out of the mesh- the face gray, mouth open, eyes sightless, wisps of hair dangling.

"Oh God," Richman said. He turned and fled.

Casey went over to the paramedics. The corpse was a middle-aged Chinese man. "What's the problem here?" she said.

"Sorry, ma'am," one of the medics said. "But we can't get him out. We found him wedged here, and he's stuck pretty good. His left leg."

One of the paramedics shined a light upward. The left leg was jammed through the overhead bin, into the silver insulation above the window panel. She tried to remember what cabling ran there, whether it was flight critical. "Just be careful getting him out," she said.

From the galley, she heard a cleanup woman say, "Strangest damn thing I ever saw."

Another woman said, "How'd it get here?"

"Damned if I know, honey."

Casey went over to see what they were talking about. The cleaning woman was holding a blue pilot's cap. It had a bloody footprint on the top.

Casey reached for it. "Where'd you find this?"

"Right here," the cleaning woman said. "Outside the aft galley. Long way from the cockpit, isn't it?"

"Yes." Casey turned the cap in her hands. Silver wings on the front, the yellow Transpacific medallion in the center. It was a pilot's cap, with a stripe for a captain, so it probably belonged to one of the backup crew. If this plane carried a backup crew; she didn't know that yet.

"Oh dear me this is awful just awful."

She heard the distinctive monotone, and looked up to see Doug Doherty, the structural engineer, striding into the aft cabin.

"What did they do to my beautiful plane?" he moaned Then he saw Casey. "You know what this is, don't you. It's not turbulence. They were porpoising."

"Maybe," Casey said. "Porpoising" was the term for a series of dives and climbs. Like a porpoise leaping in water.

"Oh yes," Doherty said, gloomily. "That's what happened. They lost control. Terrible, just terrible…"

One of the paramedics said, "Mr. Doherty?"

Doherty looked over. "Oh don't tell me," he said. "This is where the guy got wedged?"

"Yes, sir…"

"Wouldn't you know," he said, gloomily, moving closer. "It had to be the aft bulkhead. Right where every flight-critical system comes together to-okay, let me see. What is it, his foot?"

"Yes, sir." They shone the light for him. Doherty pushed up against the body, which swayed in the harness.

"Can you hold him? Okay… anybody got a knife or something? You probably don't but-"

One of the paramedics gave him a pair of scissors, and Doherty began to cut Bits of silver insulation floated to the ground. Doherty cut again and again, his hand moving quickly. Finally he stopped. "Okay. He missed the A59 cable run. He missed the A47 cable run. He's left of the hydraulic lines, left of the avionics pack… Okay, I can't see he hurt the plane in any way."

The paramedics, holding the dead body, stared at Doherty. One of them said, "Can we cut him out, sir?"

Doherty was still looking intently. "What? Oh yeah sure. Cut him out"

He stepped back, and the paramedics applied the big metal jaws to the upper portion of the plane. They wedged the jaws between the overhead luggage bins and the ceiling, then opened them. There was a loud cracking sound as the plastic broke.

Doherty turned away. "I can't watch," he said. "I can't watch them tear up my beautiful aircraft." He headed back to the nose. The paramedics stared as he left

Richman came back, looking slightly embarrassed. He pointed out the windows. "What're those guys doing on the wing?"

Casey bent down, looked through the windows at the engineers on the wing. "They're inspecting the slats," she said. "Leading edge control surfaces."

"And what do slats do?"

You'II have to start him from the beginning.

Casey said, "You know anything about aerodynamics? No? Well, an aircraft flies because of the shape of the wing." The wing looked simple, she explained, but it was actually the most complicated physical component of the aircraft, and it took the longest to build. By comparison, the fuse-the fuselage-was simple, just a lot of round barrels riveted together. And the tail was just a fixed vertical vane, with control surfaces. But a wing was a work of art. Nearly two hundred feet long, it was incredibly strong, capable of bearing the weight of the plane. But at the same time, precisely shaped to within a hundredth of an inch.

"The shape," Casey said, "is what's crucial: it's curved on top, flat on the bottom. That means air going across the top of the wing has to move faster, and because of Bernoulli's principle-"

"I went to law school," he reminded her.

"Bernoulli's principle says the faster a gas moves, the lower its pressure. So the pressure within a moving stream is less than the air surrounding it" she said. "Since air moves faster across the top of the wing, it creates a vacuum which sucks the wing upward. The wing is strong enough to support the fuselage, so the whole plane is lifted up. That's what makes a plane fly."

"Okay…"

"Now. Two factors determine how much lift is created- the speed the wing moves through the air, and the amount of curvature. The greater the curvature, the greater the lift."

"Okay."

"When the wing is moving fast, during flight, going maybe point eight Mach, it doesn't need much curvature. It actually wants to be almost flat. But when the aircraft is moving slower, during takeoff and landing, the wing needs greater curvature to maintain lift. So, at those times we increase the curvature, by extending sections in the front and back-flaps at the back, and slats at the leading edge."

"Slats are like flaps, but in the front?"

"Right."

"I never noticed them before," Richman said, looking out the window.

"Smaller planes don't have them," Casey said. "But this aircraft weighs close to three-quarters of a million pounds, fully loaded. You've got to have slats on a plane this size."

As they watched, the first of the slats moved outward, then tilted down. The men on the wing stuck their hands in their pockets and watched.

Richman said, "Why are the slats so important?"

"Because," Casey said, "one possible cause of 'turbulence' is slat extension in mid flight. Remember at cruise speed, the wing should be almost flat. If the slats extend, the plane may become unstable."

"And what would make the slats extend?"

"Pilot error," Casey said. "That's the usual cause."

"But supposedly this plane had a very good pilot."

"Right. Supposedly."

"And if it wasn't pilot error?"

She hesitated. "There is a condition called uncommanded slats deployment. It means the slats extend without warning, all by themselves."

Richman frowned. "Can that happen?'

"It's been known to occur," she said. "But we don't think it's possible on this aircraft." She wasn't going to get into the details with this kid. Not now.

Richman still frowned. "If it's not possible, why are they checking?'

"Because it might have happened, and our job is to check everything. Maybe there's a problem with this particular aircraft. Maybe the control cables aren't properly rigged. Maybe there's an electrical fault in the hydraulics actuators. Maybe the proximity sensors failed. Maybe the avionics code is buggy. We'll check every system, until we find out what happened, and why. And right now, we haven't got a clue."

Four men were squeezed into the cockpit, hunched over the controls. Van Trung, who was certified for the aircraft, sat in the captain's seat; Kenny Bume was in the first officer's seat on the right. Trung was functioning the control surfaces, one after another-flaps, slats, elevators, rudder. With each test, the flight deck instrumentation was verified visually.

Casey stood outside the cockpit with Richman. She said, "You got anything, Van?"

"Nothing yet," Trung said.

"We've got diddly-squat," Kenny Burne said. "This bird is cherry. There's nothing wrong with this plane."

Richman said, "Then maybe turbulence caused it, after all."

'Turbulence my ass," Burne said. "Who said that? Is that the kid?"

"Yes," Richman said.

"Straighten the kid out, Casey," Burne said, glancing over his shoulder.

'Turbulence," Casey said to Richman, "is a famous catchall for anything that goes wrong on the flight deck. Turbulence certainly occurs, and in the old days, planes had some rough times. But these days turbulence bad enough to cause injuries is unusual."

"Because?"

"Radar, pal," Burne snapped. "Commercial aircraft are all equipped with weather radar. Pilots can see weather formations ahead and avoid them. They've also got much better communications between aircraft. If a plane hits rough weather at your flight level two hundred miles ahead of you, you'll hear about the sigmet, and get a course change. So the days of serious turbulence are over."

Richman was annoyed by Burne's tone. "I don't know," he said "I've been on planes where turbulence got pretty rough-"

"Ever see anybody get killed on one of those planes?"

"Well, no…"

"Seen people thrown from their seats?"

"No…"

"Seen injuries of any kind?"

"No," Richman said, "I haven't"

"That's right," Burne said.

"But surely it is possible that-"

"Possible?" Bume said. "You mean like in court, where anything is possible?'

"No, but-"

"You're a lawyer, right?"

"Yes, I am, but-"

"Well you better get one thing straight, right now. We're not doing law, here. Law is a bunch of bullshit. This is an aircraft. It's a machine. And either something happened to this machine, or it didn't. It's not a matter of opinion. So why don't you shut the fuck up and let us work?"

Richman winced, but didn't back down. "Fine," he said, "but if it wasn't turbulence, there'll be evidence-"

"That's right," Burne said, "the seat-belt sign. Pilot hits turbulence, the first thing he does is flash the seat-belt sign, and make an announcement. Everybody buckles up, and nobody gets hurt. This guy never made an announcement"

"Maybe the sign doesn't work."

"Look up." With a ping, the seat-belt sign came on above their heads.

"Maybe the announcement doesn't-"

Burne's amplified voice said, "Working, working, you better believe it's working." The PA clicked off.

Dan Greene, the chubby operations inspector from the IFSDO, came on board, puffing from the climb up the metal stairs. "Hey, guys, I got your certificate to ferry the plane to Burbank. I figured you want to take the bird to the plant."

"Yeah, we do," Casey said.

"Hey, Dan," Kenny Burne called. "Nice job keeping the flight crew here."

"Fuck you," Greene said. "I had my guy at the gate a minute after the plane arrived. The crew was already gone." He turned to Casey. "They get the stiff out?"

"Not yet, Dan. He's wedged in pretty tight."

"We got the other dead bodies off, and sent the seriously injured to Westside hospitals. Here's the list." He handed a sheet of paper to Casey. "Only a few are still at the 'port infirmary."

Casey said, "How many are still here?"

"Six or seven. Including a couple of stewardesses."

Casey said, "Can I talk to them?"

"Don't see why not," Greene said.

Casey said, "Van? How much longer?"

"Figure an hour, minimum."

"Okay," she said. "I'm going to take the car."

"And take fucking Clarence Darrow with you," Bume said.

LAX
10:42 a.m.

Driving in the van, Richman gave a long exhale. "Jeez," he said. "Are they always so friendly?"

Casey shrugged. "They're engineers," she said. She was thinking, What did he expect? He must have dealt with engineers at GM. "Emotionally, they're all thirteen years old, stuck at the age just before boys stop playing with toys, because they've discovered girls. They're all still playing with toys. They have poor social skills, dress badly-but they're extremely intelligent and well trained, and they are very arrogant in their way. Outsiders are definitely not allowed to play."

"Especially lawyers…"

"Anybody. They're like chess masters. They don't waste time with amateurs. And they're under a lot of pressure now."

"You're not an engineer?"

"Me? No. And I'm a woman. And I'm from QA. Three reasons why I don't count Now Marder's made me IRT liaison to the press, which is another strike. The engineers all hate the press."

"Will there be press on this?"

"Probably not," she said. "It's a foreign carrier, foreigners died, the incident didn't occur in the United States. And they don't have visuals. They won't pay any attention."

"But it seems so serious…"

"Serious isn't a criterion," she said. "Last year, there were twenty-five accidents involving substantial airframe damage. Twenty-three occurred overseas. Which ones do you remember?"

Richman frowned.

"The crash in Abu Dhabi that killed fifty-six people?" Casey said. "The crash in Indonesia that killed two hundred? Bogota, that killed a hundred and fifty-three? You remember any of those?"

"No," Richman said, "but wasn't there something in Atlanta?"

"That's right," she said. "A DC-9 in Atlanta. How many people were killed? None. How many were injured? None. Why do you remember it? Because there was film at eleven."

The van left the runway, went through the chain-link gate, and out onto the street. They turned onto Sepulveda, and headed toward the rounded blue contours of the Centinela Hospital.

"Anyway," Casey said. "We have other things to worry about now." She handed Richman a tape recorder, clipped a microphone to his lapel, and told him what they were going to do.

CENTINELA HOSPITAL
12:06 p.m.

"You want to know what happened?" the bearded man said, in an irritable voice. His name was Bennett; he was forty years old, a distributor for Guess jeans; he had gone to Hong Kong to visit the factory; he went four times a year, and always flew Transpacific. Now he was sitting up in bed, in one of the curtained-off infirmary cubicles. His head and right arm were bandaged. "The plane almost crashed, that's what happened."

"I see," Casey said. "I was wondering if-"

"Who the hell are you people, anyway?' he said.

She handed him her card, introduced herself again.

"Norton Aircraft? What do you have to do with it?"

"We build the airplane, Mr. Bennett."

"That piece of shit? Fuck you, lady." He threw the card back at her. "Get the fuck out of here, both of you."

"Mr. Bennett-"

"Go on, get out! Get out!"

Outside the curtained cubicle, Casey looked at Richman. "I have a way with people," she said ruefully.

Casey went to the next cubicle, and paused. Behind the curtain, she heard Chinese being spoken rapidly, first a woman's voice, and then a man's voice responding.

She decided to move on to the next bed. She opened the curtains and saw a sleeping Chinese woman in a plaster neck brace. A nurse in the room looked up, held her finger to her lips. Casey went on to the next cubicle.

It was one of the flight attendants, a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Kay Liang. She had a large abrasion on her face and neck, the skin raw and red. She sat in a chair by the empty bed, thumbing through a six-month-old issue of Vogue. She explained that she had remained in the hospital to stay with Sha-Yan Hao, another stewardess, who was in the next cubicle.

"She is my cousin," she said. "I'm afraid she was hurt badly. They will not let me be in the room with her." She spoke English well, with a British accent.

When Casey introduced herself, Kay Liang looked confused. "You're from the manufacturer?" she said. "But a man was just here…"

"What man?"

"A Chinese man. He was here a few minutes ago."

"I don't know about that," Casey said, frowning. "But we'd like to ask you some questions."

"Of course." She put the magazine aside, folded her hands in her lap, composed.

"How long have you been with Transpacific?" Casey asked.

Three years, Kay Liang answered. And before that, three years with Cathay Pacific. She always flew international routes, she explained, because she had languages, English and French, as well as Chinese.

"And where were you when this incident occurred?"

"In the midcabin galley. Just behind business class." The flight attendants were preparing breakfast, she explained. It was about five a.m., perhaps a few minutes later.

"And what happened?"

"The plane began to climb," she said. "I know that, because I was setting out drinks, and they started to slide off the trolley. Then almost immediately, there was a very steep descent"

"What did you do?"

She could do nothing, she explained, except hold on. The descent was steep. All the food and drinks fell. She thought the descent lasted about ten seconds, but she wasn't sure. Then there was another climb, extremely steep, and then another steep descent. On the second descent, she struck her head against the bulkhead.

"Did you lose consciousness?"

"No. But that was when I scraped my face." She gestured to her injury.

"And what happened next?"

She was not sure, she said. She was confused because the second stewardess in the galley, Miss Jiao, fell against her, and they were both knocked to the floor. "We could hear the cries of the passengers," she said. "And of course we saw them in the aisles."

Afterward, she said, the plane became level again. She was able to get up and help the passengers. The situation was very bad, she said, particularly aft. "Many injured and many bleeding, in pain. The flight attendants were overwhelmed. Also, Miss Hao, my cousin, was not conscious. She had been in the aft galley. This upset the other stewardesses. And three passengers were dead. The situation was very distressing."

"What did you do?"

"I got the emergency medical kits to care for the passengers. Then I went to the cockpit." She wanted to see if the flight crew was all right. "And I wanted to tell them the first officer had been injured in the aft galley."

"The first officer was in the aft galley when the incident occurred?" Casey said

Kay Liang blinked. "Of the relief crew, yes."

"Not the flight crew?"

"No. The first officer of the relief crew."

"You had two crews on board?"

"Yes."

"When did the crews change?"

"Perhaps three hours earlier. During the night."

"What was the name of the injured first officer?" Casey asked.

Again, she hesitated. "I… I am not sure. I had not flown with the relief crew before."

"I see. And when you went to the cockpit?"

"Captain Chang had the plane in control. The crew was shaken, but not injured. Captain Chang told me that he had requested an emergency landing at Los Angeles."

"You've flown with Captain Chang before?"

"Yes. He is a very good captain. Excellent captain. I like him very much."

Protesting too much, Casey thought. The stewardess, previously calm, now appeared uneasy. Liang glanced at Casey, then looked away.

"Did there appear to be any damage to the flight deck?" Casey asked.

The stewardess frowned, thinking. "No," she said. "The flight deck appeared normal in every respect."

"Did Captain Chang say anything else?"

"Yes. He said they had an uncommanded slats deployment," she said. "He said that had caused the upset, and the situation was now under control."

Uh-oh, Casey thought. This was not going to make the engineers happy. But Casey was troubled by the stewardess's technical phrasing. She thought it unlikely that a flight attendant would know about uncommanded slats deployment. But perhaps she was just repeating what the captain had said.

"Did Captain Chang say why the slats deployed?"

"He just said, uncommanded slats deployment."

"I see," Casey said. "And do you know where the slats control is located?"

Kay Liang nodded. "It is a lever in the center pillar, between the chairs."

That was correct, Casey thought.

"Did you notice the lever at that time? While you were in the cockpit?"

"Yes. It was in the up and locked position."

Again, Casey noted the terminology. A pilot would say, Up and locked. Would a flight attendant?

"Did he say anything else?"

"He was concerned about the autopilot. He said the autopilot kept trying to cut in, to take over the plane. He said 'I had to fight the autopilot for control.'"

"I see. And what was Captain Chang's manner at this time?"

"He was calm, as always. He is a very good captain."

The girl's eyes flickered nervously. She twisted her hands in her lap. Casey decided to wait for a moment. It was an old interrogator's trick: let the subject break the silence.

"Captain Chang comes from a distinguished family of pilots," Kay Liang said, swallowing. "His father was a pilot during the war, and his son is a pilot as well."

"I see…"

The flight attendant lapsed into silence again. There was a pause. She looked down at her hands, then back up. "So. Is there anything else I can tell you?"

Outside the cubicle, Richman said, "Isn't this the thing you said couldn't happen? Uncommanded slats deployment?"

"I didn't say it couldn't happen. I said I didn't believe it was possible on this aircraft. And if it did, it raises more questions than it answers."

"And what about the autopilot-"

'Too early to tell," she said, and went into the next cubicle.

"It must have been around six o'clock," Emily Jansen said, shaking her head. She was a slender woman of thirty, with a purple bruise on her cheek. An infant slept on her lap. Her husband lay in the bed behind her; a metal brace ran from his shoulders to his chin. She said his jaw was broken.

"I had just fed the baby. I was talking to my husband. And then I heard a sound."

"What sort of a sound?"

"A rumbling or a grinding sound. I thought it came from the wing."

Not good, Casey thought.

"So I looked out the window. At the wing."

"Did you see anything unusual?"

"No. It all looked normal. I thought the sound might be coming from the engine, but the engine looked normal, too."

"Where was the sun that morning?"

"On my side. Shining in on my side."

"So was there sunlight on the wing?"

"Yes."

"Reflecting back at you?"

Emily Jansen shook her head. "I don't really remember."

"Was the seat-belt sign on?'

"No. Never."

"Did the captain make an announcement?"

"No."

"Going back to this sound-you described it as a rumble?"

"Something like that. I don't know if I heard it, or felt it. It was almost like a vibration."

Like a vibration.

"How long did this vibration last?"

"Several seconds."

"Five seconds?"

"Longer. I would say ten or twelve seconds."

A classic description of a slats deployment in flight, Casey thought.

"Okay," she said. "And then?"

"The plane started going down." Jansen gestured with the flat of her hand. "Like that."

Casey continued to make notes, but she no longer really listened. She was trying to put together the sequence of events, trying to decide how the engineers should proceed. There was no question that both witnesses were telling a story consistent with slats deployment. First, rumbling for twelve seconds- exactly the time it took the slats to extend. Then a slight nose up, which would occur next. And then porpoising, as the crew tried to stabilize the aircraft.

What a mess, she thought.

Emily Jansen was saying, "Since the cockpit door was open, I could hear all the alarms. There were warning sounds-and voices in English that sounded recorded."

"Do you remember what they said?"

"It sounded like 'Fall… fall.' Something like that."

It was the stall alarm, Casey thought. And the audio reminder was saying, "Stall, stall."

Damn.

She stayed with Emily Jansen a few minutes more and then went back outside.

In the corridor, Richman said, "Does that rumbling sound mean the slats deployed?"

"It might," she said. She was tense, edgy. She wanted to get back to the aircraft, and talk to the engineers.

From one of the curtained cubicles farther down.the corridor, she saw a stocky gray-haired figure emerge. She was surprised to see it was Mike Lee. She felt a burst of irritation: What the hell was the carrier rep doing talking to passengers? It was very inappropriate. Lee had no business being here.

She remembered what Kay Liang had said: A Chinese man was just here.

Lee came up toward them, shaking his head.

"Mike," she said. "I'm surprised to see you here."

"Why? You should give me a medal," he said "A couple of the passengers were considering lawsuits. I talked them out of it."

"But Mike," she said. "You talked to crew members before we did. That's not right."

"What do you think, I fed them a story? Hell, they gave me the story. And there's not much doubt about what happened." Lee stared at her. "I'm sorry, Casey, but Flight 545 had an uncommanded slats deploy, and that means you've still got problems on the N-22."

Walking back to the van, Richman said, "What did he mean, you've still got problems?"

Casey sighed. No point in holding back now. She said, "We've had some incidents of slats deployment on the N-22."

"Wait a minute," Richman said. "You mean this has happened before?"

"Not like this," she said. "We've never had serious injuries. But yes, we've had problems with slats."

EN ROUTE
1:05 p.m.

"The first episode occurred four years ago, on a flight to San Juan," Casey said, as they drove back. "Slats extended in mid-flight. At first, we thought it was an anomaly, but then there were two additional incidents within a couple of months. When we investigated, we found that in every case the slats had deployed during a period of flight deck activity: right after a crew change, or when they punched in coordinates for the next leg of the flight, or something like that. We finally realized the slats lever was getting knocked loose by the crews, banged by clipboards, caught on uniform sleeves-"

"You're kidding," Richman said.

"No," she said. "We'd built a locking slot for the lever, like 'park' on an automobile transmission. But despite the slot, the lever was still being accidentally dislodged."

Richman was staring at her with the skeptical expression of a prosecuting attorney. "So the N-22 does have problems."

"It was a new aircraft," she said, "and all aircraft have problems when they're first introduced. You can't build a machine with a million parts and not have snags. We do everything we can to avoid them. First we design, then we test the design. Then we build, then we flight test. But there are always going to be problems. The question is how to resolve them."

"How do you resolve them?"

"Whenever we discover a problem, we send the operators a heads-up, called a Service Bulletin, which describes our recommended fix. But we don't have the authority to mandate compliance. Some carriers implement, some don't If the problem persists, the FAA gets into the act and issues an Airworthiness Directive to the carriers, requiring them to fix the planes in service within a specified time. But there are always ADs, for every model aircraft. We're proud of the fact that Norton has fewer than anyone else."

"So you say."

"Go look it up. They're all on file at Oak City."

"At what?"

"Every AD that's ever been issued is on file at the FAA's Technical Center in Oklahoma City."

"So you had one of these ADs on the N-22? Is that what you're telling me?"

"We issued a Service Bulletin recommending the carriers install a hinged metal cover that sits over the lever. That meant the captain had to flip up the cover before he could deploy the slats, but it solved the problem. As usual, some carriers made the fix, others didn't. So the FAA issued an AD making it mandatory. That was four years ago. There's been only one incident since then, but that involved an Indonesian carrier who didn't install the cover. In this country, the FAA requires carriers to comply, but abroad…" She shrugged. "The carriers do what they want."

"That's it? That's the whole history?"

"That's the whole history. The IRT investigated, the metal covers were installed on the fleet, and there haven't been any more slats problems on the N-22."

"Until now," Richman said.

"That's right. Until now."

LAX MAINTENANCE HANGAR
1:22 pm.

"A what?" Kenny Burne said, shouting from the cockpit of Transpacific 545. "They said it was what!"

"Uncommanded slats deployment," Richman said.

"Aw, blow me," Burne said. He started climbing out of the seat. "What a crock of shit. Hey! Clarence, come in here. See that seat? That's the first officer's seat. Sit down there."

Richman was hesitant.

"Come on, Clarence, get in the damn seat."

Awkwardly, Richman squeezed between the other men in the cockpit, and got into the first officer's chair on the right.

"Okay," Burne said. "You comfy in there, Clarence? You're not a pilot, by any chance?"

"No," Richman said.

"Okay, good. So, here you are, all set to fly the plane. Now, you see straight ahead"-he pointed to the control panel directly in front of Richman, which consisted of three video screens, each four inches square-"you got your three color CRTs showing your primary flight display, navigation display, and on the left, systems display. All those little semicircles represent a different system. All green, meaning everything's fine. Now, on the roof above your head, that's your overhead instrument panel. All the lights are out, which means everything is fine. It's dark unless there's a problem. Now, to your left is what we call the pedestal."

Burne pointed to a boxy structure that protruded between the two seats. There were a half-dozen levers in slots on the pedestal. "Now, from right to left, flaps-slats, two throttles for the engines, spoilers, brakes, thrusters. Slats and flaps are controlled by that lever nearest you, the one with the little metal cover over it. See it?"

"I see it," Richman said.

"Good. Flip up the cover, and engage the slats."

"Engage the…"

"Pull the slats lever down," Burne said.

Richman flicked up the cover, and struggled for a moment to move the lever.

"No, no. Grab it firmly, pull it up, then right, then down," Burne said. "Just like a gearshift on a car."

Richman closed his fingers around the handle. He pulled the lever up, across, and down. There was a distant hum.

"Good," Burne said. "Now, look at your display. See that amber SLATS EXTD indicator? It's telling you the slats are coming out of the leading edge. Okay? Takes twelve seconds to fully extend. Now they're out, and the indicator is white and says SLATS."

"I see," Richman said.

"Okay. Now retract the slats."

Richman reversed his actions, pushing the lever up, sliding it left and down to locked position, then closing the cover over the handle.

"That," Bume said, "is a commanded slats extension."

"Okay," Richman said.

"Now, let's perform an uncommanded slats extension."

"How do I do that?"

"Any way you can, pal. For starters, hit it with the side of 'your hand."

Richman reached across the pedestal, brushing the lever with his left hand. But the cover protected it. Nothing happened.

"Come on, hit that sucker."

Richman swung his hand laterally back and forth, banging against the metal. He hit it harder and harder each time, but nothing happened. The cover protected the handle; the slats lever remained up and locked.

"Maybe you could knock it with your elbow," Burne said. "Or tell you what, try this clipboard here," he said, pulling a clipboard from between the seats, and giving it to Richman. "Go on, give it a good whack. I'm looking for an accident here."

Richman struck the lever with the clipboard. It clanged against the metal. He turned the clipboard and pushed the lever with one edge. Nothing happened.

"You want to keep trying?" Burne said. "Or are you starting to get the point? It can't be done, Clarence. Not with that cover in place."

"Maybe the cover wasn't in place," Richman said.

"Hey," Burne said, "that's good thinking. Maybe you can knock the cover up, by accident. Try that with your clipboard, Clarence."

Richman swung the clipboard at the edge of the cover. But the surface was smoothly curved, and the clipboard just slid off. The cover remained closed.

"No way to do it," Burne said. "Not by accident. So. What's the next thought?"

"Maybe the cover was already up."

"Good idea," Burne said. "They're not supposed to be flying with the cover up, but who the hell knows what they did. Go ahead and lift die cover up."

Richman lifted the cover up on its hinge. The handle was now exposed.

"Okay, Clarence. Go to it."

Richman swung his clipboard at the handle, banging it hard, but with most lateral movements, the raised cover still acted as a protection. The clipboard hit die cover before it struck the handle. Several times on impact, the cover dropped back down again. Richman had to keep stopping to lift the cover up again before he could proceed.

"Maybe if you used your hand," Burne suggested.

Richman tried swiping at the handle with his palm. In a few moments, the side of his hand was red, and the lever remained firmly up and locked.

"Okay," he said, sitting back in the seat. "I get the point."

"It can't be done," Bume said. "It simply can't be done. An uncommanded slats deploy is impossible on this aircraft. Period."

From outside the cockpit, Doherty said, "Are you guys finished screwing around? Because I want to pull the recorders and go home."

As they came out of the cockpit, Burne touched Casey on the shoulder and said, "See you a minute?"

"Sure," she said.

He led her back in the plane, out of earshot of the others. He leaned close to her and said, "What do you know about that kid?"

Casey shrugged. "He's a Norton relative."

"What else?"

"Marder assigned him to me."

"You check him out?"

"No," Casey said. "If Marder sent him, I assume he's fine."

"Well, I talked to my friends in Marketing," Burne said. "They say he's a weasel. They say, don't turn your back on him."

"Kenny…"

"I'm telling you, something's wrong with that kid, Casey. Check him out."

With a metallic whir from the power screwdrivers, the floor panels came away, revealing a maze of cables and boxes under the cockpit.

"Jesus," Richman said, staring.

Ron Smith was directing the operation, running his hand over his bald head nervously. "That's fine," he said. "Now get the panel to the left."

"How many boxes we got on this bird, Ron?" Doherty said.

"A hundred and fifty-two," Smith said. Anybody else, Casey knew, would have to thumb through a thick sheaf of schematics before he answered. But Smith knew the electrical system by heart.

"What're we pulling?" Doherty said.

"Pull the CVR, the DFDR, and the QAR if they got one," Smith said.

"You don't know if there's a QAR?" Doherty said, teasing him.

"Optional," Smith said. "It's a customer install. I don't think they put one in. Usually on the N-22 it's in the tail, but I looked, and didn't find one."

Richman turned to Casey; he was looking puzzled again. "I thought they were getting the black boxes."

"We are," Smith said.

"There's a hundred and fifty-two black boxes?"

"Oh hell," Smith said, "they're all over the aircraft. But we're only after the main ones now-the ten or twelve NVMs that count."

"NVMs," Richman repeated.

"You got it," Smith said, and he turned away, bending over the panels.

It was left to Casey to explain. The public perception of an aircraft was that it was a big mechanical device, with pulleys and levers that moved control surfaces up and down. In the midst of this machinery were two magic black boxes, recording events in the flight. These were the black boxes that were always talked about on news programs. The CVR, the cockpit voice recorder, was essentially a very sturdy tape deck; it recorded the last half hour of cockpit conversation on a continuous loop of magnetic tape. Then there was the DFDR, the digital flight data recorder, which stored details of the behavior of the airplane, so that investigators could discover what had happened after an accident

But this image of an aircraft, Casey explained, was inaccurate for a large commercial transport. Commercial jets had very few pulleys and levers-indeed, few mechanical systems of any sort. Nearly everything was hydraulic and electrical. The pilot in the cockpit didn't move the ailerons or flaps by force of muscle. Instead, the arrangement was like power steering on an automobile: when the pilot moved the control stick and pedals, he sent electrical impulses to actuate hydraulic systems, which in turn moved the control surfaces.

The truth was that a commercial airliner was controlled by a network of extraordinarily sophisticated electronics-dozens of computer systems, linked together by hundreds of miles of wiring. There were computers for flight management, for navigation, for communication. Computers regulated the engines, the control surfaces, the cabin environment.

Each major computer system controlled a whole array of sub-systems. Thus the navigation system ran the ILS for instrument landing; the DME for distance measuring; the ATC for air traffic control; the TCAS for collision avoidance; the GPWS for ground proximity warning.

In this complex electronic environment, it was relatively easy to install a digital flight data recorder. Since all the commands were already electronic, they were simply routed through the DFDR and stored on magnetic media. "A modern DFDR records eighty separate flight parameters every second of the flight."

"Every second? How big is this thing?" Richman said.

"It's right there," Casey said, pointing. Ron was pulling an orange-and-black striped box from the radio rack. It was the size of a large shoe box. He set it on the floor, and replaced it with a new box, for the ferry flight back to Burbank.

Richman bent over, and lifted the DFDR by one stainless-steel handle. "Heavy."

That's the crash-resistant housing," Ron said. "The actual doohickey weighs maybe six ounces."

"And the other boxes? What about them?"

The other boxes existed, Casey said, to facilitate maintenance. Because the electronic systems of the aircraft were so complicated, it was necessary to monitor' the behavior of each system in case of errors, or faults, during flight. Each system tracked its own performance, in what was called Non Volatile Memory. "That's NVM "

They would download eight NVM systems today: the Flight Management Computer, which stored data on the flight plan and the pilot-entered waypoints; the Digital Engine Controller, which managed fuel bum and powerplant; the Digital Air Data Computer, which recorded airspeed, altitude, and overspeed warnings…

"Okay," Richman said. "I think I get the point."

"None of this would be necessary," Ron Smith said, "if we had the QAR."

"QAR?"

"It's another maintenance item," Casey said. "Maintenance crews need to come on board after the plane lands, and get a fast readout of anything that went wrong on the last leg."

"Don't they ask the pilots?"

"Pilots will report problems, but with a complex aircraft, there may be faults that never come to their attention, particularly since these aircraft are built with redundant systems. For any important system like hydraulics, there's always a backup-and usually a third as well. A fault in the second or third backup may not show in the cockpit So the maintenance crews come on board, and go to the Quick Access Recorder, which spits out data from the previous flight They get a fast profile, and do the repairs on the spot"

"But there's no Quick Access Recorder on this plane?"

"Apparently not" she said. "It's not required. FAA regulations require a CVR and a DFDR. The Quick Access Recorder is optional. Looks like the carrier didn't put one on this plane."

"At least I can't find it" Ron said. "But it could be anywhere."

He was down on his hands and knees, bent over a laptopcomputer plugged into the electrical panels. Data scrolled down the screen.

???? A/S PWR TEST 00000010000

???? AIL SERVO COMP 00001001000

???? ADA INV 10200010001

???? CFDS SENS FAIL 00000010000

???? CRZ CMD MON INV 10000020100

???? EL SERVO COMP 00000000010

???? EPR/N1 TRA-1 00000010000

???? FMS SPEED INV 00000040000

???? PRESS ALT INV 00000030000

???? G/S SPEED ANG 00000010000

???? SLAT XSIT T/0 00000000000

???? G/S DEV INV 00100050001

???? GND SPD INV 00000021000

???? TAS INV 00001010000

"This looks like data from the flight control computer," Casey said. "Most of the faults occurred on one leg, when the incident occurred."

"But how do you interpret this?" Richman said.

"Not our problem," Ron Smith said. "We just offload it and bring it back to Norton. The kids in Digital feed it to mainframes, and convert it to a video of the flight."

"We hope," Casey said. She straightened. "How much longer, Ron?"

'Ten minutes, max," Smith said.

"Oh sure," Doherty said, from inside the cockpit. 'Ten minutes max, oh sure. Not that it matters. I wanted to beat rush hour traffic but now I guess I can't. It's my kid's birthday, and I won't be home for the party. My wife's going to give me hell."

Ron Smith was starting to laugh. "Can you think of anything else that might go wrong, Doug?"

"Oh sure. Lots of things. Salmonella in the cake. All the kids poisoned," Doherty said.

Casey looked out the door. The maintenance people had all climbed off the wing. Burne was finishing up his inspection of the engines. Trung was loading the DFDR into the van.

It was time to go home.

As she started down the stairs, she noticed three Norton Security vans parked in a corner of the hangar. There were about twenty security guards standing around the plane, and in various parts of the hangar.

Richman noticed, too. "What's this about?" he said, gesturing to the guards.

"We always put security on the plane, until it's ferried to the plant," she said.

"That's a lot of security."

"Yeah, well." Casey shrugged. "It's an important plane."

But she noticed that the guards all wore sidearms. Casey couldn't remember seeing armed guards before. A hangar at LAX was a secure facility. There wasn't any need for the guards to be armed.

Was there?

BLDG 64
4:30 P.M.

Casey was walking through the northeast corner of Building 64, past the huge tools on which the wing was built. The tools were crisscrossed blue steel scaffolding, rising twenty feet above the ground. Although they were the size of a small apartment building, the tools were precisely aligned to within a thousandth of an inch. Up on the platform formed by the tools, eighty people were walking around, putting the wing together.

To the right, she saw groups of men packing tools into large wooden crates. "What's all that?" Richman said.

"Looks like rotables," Casey said.

"Rotables?"

"Spare tooling that we rotate into the line if something goes wrong with the first set We built them to gear up for the China sale. The wing's the most time-consuming part to build; so the plan is to build the wings in our facility in Atlanta, and ship them back here."

She noticed a figure in a shirt and tie, shirtsleeves rolled up, standing among the men working on the crates. It was Don Brull, the president of the UAW local. He saw Casey, called to her, and started toward her. He made a flicking gesture with his hand; she knew what he wanted.

Casey said to Richman, "Give me a minute. I'll see you back at the office."

"Who is that?" Richman said.

"I'll meet you back at the office."

Richman remained standing there, as Brull came closer. "Maybe you want me to stay and - "

"Bob," she said. "Get lost."

Reluctantly, Richman headed back toward the office. He kept glancing over his shoulder as he walked away.

Brull shook her hand. The UAW president was a short and solidly built man, an ex-boxer with a broken nose. He spoke in a soft voice. "You know, Casey, I always liked you."

"Thanks, Don," she said. "Feeling's mutual."

"Those years when you were on the floor, I always kept my eye on you. Kept you out of trouble."

"I know that, Don." She waited. Brull was notorious for long windups.

"I always thought, Casey isn't like the others."

"What's going on, Don?" she said.

"We got some problems with this China sale," Brull said.

"What kind of problems?"

"Problems with the offset."

"What about it?" she said, shrugging. "You know there's always offset with a big sale." In recent years, airframe manufacturers had been obliged to send portions of the fabrication overseas, to the countries ordering planes. A country that ordered fifty planes expected to get a piece of the action. It was standard procedure.

"I know," Brull said. "But in the past, you guys sent part of the tail, maybe the nose, maybe some interior fab. Just parts."

"That's right."

"But these tools we're crating up," he said, "are for the wing. And the Teamsters on the loading dock are telling us these crates aren't going to Atlanta - they're going to Shanghai. The company's going to give the wing to China."

"I don't know the details of the agreement," she said. "But I doubt that-"

"The wing, Casey," he said. "That's core technology. Nobody ever gives away the wing. Not Boeing, nobody. You give the Chinese the wing, you give away the store. They don't need us any more. They can build the next generation of planes on their own. Ten years from now, nobody here has a job."

"Don," she said, "I'll check into this, but I can't believe the wing is part of the offset agreement."

Brull spread his hands. "I'm telling you it is."

"Don. I'll check for you. But right now I'm pretty busy with this 545 incident, and-"

"You're not listening, Casey. The local's got a problem with the China sale."

"I understand that, but-"

"A big problem" He paused, looked at her. "Understand?'

She did. The UAW workers on the floor had absolute control over production. They could slow down, sick out, break tooling, and create hundreds of other intractable problems. "I'll talk to Marder," she said. "I'm sure he doesn't want a problem on the line."

"Marder is the problem."

Casey sighed. Typical union misinformation, she thought. The China sale had been made by Hal Edgarton and the Marketing team. Marder was just the COO. He ran the plant. He didn't have anything to do with sales.

"I'll get back to you tomorrow, Don."

"That's fine," Brull said. "But I'm telling you, Casey. Personally. I'd hate to see anything happen."

"Don," she said. "Are you threatening me?"

"No, no," Brull said quickly, with a pained expression. "Don't misunderstand. But 1 hear that if the 545 thing isn't cleared up fast, it could kill the China sale."

"That's true."

"And you're speaking for the IRT."

"That's true, too."

Brull shrugged. "So, I'm telling you. Feelings are strong against the sale. Some of the guys are pretty hot about it. I was you, I'd take a week off."

"I can't do that. I'm right in the middle of the investigation."

Brull looked at her.

"Don. I'll talk to Marder about the wing," she said. "But I have to do my job."

"In that case," Brull said, putting his hand on her arm, "you take real good care, honey."

ADMINISTRATION
4:40 p.m.

"No, no," Marder said, pacing in his office. "This is nonsense, Casey. There's no way we'd send the wing to Shanghai. What do they think, we're crazy? That'd be the end of the company."

"But Brull said-"

"The Teamsters are screwing with the UAW, that's all. You know how rumors run through the plant. Remember when they all decided composites made you sterile? Damn guys wouldn't come to work for a month. But it wasn't true. And this one's not true, either. Those tools are going to Atlanta," he said. "And for one very good reason. We're fabbing the wing in Atlanta so that the senator from Georgia will stop messing with us every time we go to the Ex-Im Bank for a big loan. It's a jobs program for the senior senator from Georgia. Got it?"

"Then somebody better get the word out," Casey said.

"Christ," Marder said. "They know this. The union reps sit in on all the management meetings. It's usually Brull himself."

"But he didn't sit in on the China negotiations."

"I'll speak to him," Marder said.

Casey said, "I'd like to see the offset agreement."

"And you will, as soon as it's final."

"What are we giving them?"

"Part of the nose, and the empennage," Marder said. 75

"Same as we did for France. Hell, we can't give them anything else, they're not competent to build it."

"Brull was talking about interfering with the IRT. To stop the China sale."

"Interfering how?" Marder said, frowning at her. "Did he threaten you?"

Casey shrugged.

"What did he say?"

"He recommended a week's vacation."

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Marder said, throwing up his hands. "This is ridiculous. I'll talk to him tonight, straighten him out. Don't worry about this. Just stay focused on the job. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Thanks for the heads-up. I'll take care of this for you."

NORTON QA
4:53 P.M.

Casey rode the elevator from the ninth floor down to her own offices, on the fourth floor. She replayed the meeting with Marder, and decided he wasn't lying. His exasperation had been genuine. And it was true what Marder said-rumors flew through the plant, all the time. A couple of years back, there was a week when the UAW guys had all come up to her, asking solicitously, "How do you feel?' It was days before she learned there was a rumor she had cancer.

Just a rumor. Another rumor.

She walked down the corridor, past the photographs of famous Norton aircraft from the past, with a celebrity posed in front: Franklin Delano Roosevelt beside the B-22 that carried him to Yalta; Errol Flynn, with smiling girls in the tropics, in front of an N-5; Henry Kissinger, on the N-12 that had taken him to China in 1972. The photographs were sepia-toned, to convey a sense of age, and the stability of the company.

She opened the doors to her offices: frosted glass, with raised lettering: "Quality Assurance Division." She came into a large open room. The secretaries sat in the bullpen; executive offices lined the walls.

Norma sat by the door, a heavyset woman of indeterminate age, with blue-rinse hair, and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. It was against regulations to smoke in the building, but Norma did as she pleased. She had been with the company as long as anyone could remember; it was rumored that she had been one of the girls in the picture with Errol Flynn, and that she had had a hot affair with Charley Norton back in the fifties. Whether any of that was true or not, she certainly knew where all the bodies were buried. Within the company, she was treated with a deference bordering on fear. Even Marder was cautious around her.

Casey said, "What've we got, Norma?"

"The usual panic," Norma said. 'Telexes are flying." She handed a stack to Casey. "The Fizer in Hong Kong phoned three times for you, but he's gone home now. Fizer in Vancouver was on the horn half an hour ago. You can probably still get him."

Casey nodded. It was not surprising that the Flight Service Representatives in the major hubs would be checking in. The FSRs were Norton employees assigned to the carriers, and the carriers would be worried about the incident.

"And, let's see," Norma said. "The Washington office is all atwitter, they've heard the JAA is going to exploit this on Airbus's behalf. What a surprise. Fizer in Dusseldorf wants a confirm it was pilot error. Fizer in Milan wants information. Fizer in Abu Dhabi wants a week in Milan. Fizer in Bombay heard engine failure. I straightened him out. And your daughter said to tell you she did not need her sweatshirt."

"Great."

Casey took the faxes back to her office. She found Richman sitting at her desk. He looked up in surprise, and rose quickly from her chair. "Sorry."

Casey said, "Didn't Norma find you an office?"

"Yes, I have one," Richman said, walking around the desk. "I was just, ah, just wondering what you wanted me to do with this." He held up a plastic bag with the video camera they had found on the plane.

"I'll take it."

He gave it to her. "So. What happens now?"

She dropped the stack of telexes on her desk. "I'd say you're through for the day," she said. "Be here tomorrow at seven."

He left, and she sat down in her chair. Everything seemed to be as she had left it. But she noticed that the second drawer on the desk was not quite closed. Had Richman been going through her desk?

Casey pulled the drawer open, revealing boxes of computer disks, stationery, a pair of scissors, some felt-tip pens in a tray. It all looked undisturbed. But still…

She heard Richman leave, then went back down the hall to Norma's desk. "That kid," she said, "was sitting behind my desk."

'Tell me," Norma said. "The little twerp asked me to get him coffee."

"I'm surprised Marketing didn't straighten him out," Casey said. "They had him a couple of months."

"As a matter of fact," Norma said, "I was talking to Jean over there, and she says they hardly ever saw him. He was always on the road."

"On the road? A new kid, a Norton relative? Marketing would never send him on the road. Where'd he go?"

Norma shook her head. "Jean didn't know. You want me to call Travel, and find out?"

"Yeah," Casey said. "I do."

Back in her office, she turned to the plastic bag on the desk, opened it, and pulled the videotape from the shattered camera. She set the tape to one side. Then she dialled Jim's number, hoping to talk to Allison, but she got the answering machine. She hung up without leaving a message.

She thumbed through the telexes. The only one that interested her was from the FSR in Hong Kong. As always, he was way behind the curve.

FROM: RICK RAKOSKI, FSR HK TO: CASEY SINGLETON, QA/IRT NORTON BBK

TRANSPACIFIC AIRLINES TODAY REPORTS FLIGHT 545, AN N-22, FUSE 271, FOREIGN REGISTRY 098/443/HB09, FLYING FROM HK TO DENVER EXPERIENCED A TURBULENCE UPSET DURING CRUISE FL370 APPROXIMATELY 0524 UTC POSITION 39 NORTH/170 EAST. SOME PASSENGERS AND CREW SUFFERED MINOR INJURIES. AIRCRAFT MADE EMERGENCY LANDING LAX.

FLIGHT PLAN, PASSENGER AND CREW MANIFEST ATTACHED. PLS ADVISE SOONEST.

The telex was followed by four pages of passenger manifest and crew list. She glanced at the crew list:

JOHN ZHEN CHANG, CAPTAIN 5/7/51

LEU ZAN PING, FIRST OFFICER 3/11/59

RICHARD YONG, FIRST OFFICER 9/9/61

GERHARD REIMANN, FIRST OFFICER 7/23/49

HENRI MARCHAND, ENGINEER 4/25/69

THOMAS CHANG, ENGINEER 6/29/70

ROBERT SHENG, ENGINEER 6/13/62

HARRIET CHANG, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 5/12/77

LINDA CHING, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 5/18/76

NANCY MORLEY, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 7/19/75

KAY LIANG, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 6/4/67

JOHN WHITE, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 1/30/70

M. V. CHANG, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 4/1/77

SHA YAN HAO, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 3/13/73

YEE JIAO, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 11/18/76

HARRIET KING, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 10/10/75

B. CHOI, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 11/18/76

YEE CHANG, FLIGHT ATTENDANT 1/8/74

It was an international crew, of the kind that often flew for charter companies. Hong Kong crews had often flown for the Royal Air Force and were extremely well trained.

She counted the names: eighteen in all, including seven flight crew. Such a large flight crew was not strictly necessary. The N-22 was designed to be flown by a two-man crew, just a captain and first officer. But all the Asian carriers were expanding rapidly, and they generally carried larger crews for extra training hours.

Casey went on. The next telex was from the FSR in Vancouver.

FROM: S. NIETO, FSR VANC TO: C. SINGLETON, QA/IRT

FYI FLIGHT CREW TPA 545 DEADHEAD ON TPA 832, FROM LAX TO VANCOUVER, FIRST OFFICER LU ZAN PING TAKEN OFF THE AIRCRAFT AT VANCOUVER MEDICAL EMERGENCY DUE TO PREVIOUSLY UNRECOGNIZED HEAD INJURY. F/0 COMATOSE IN VANC GEN HOSP, DETAILS TF. REMAINING CREW OF TPA 545 TRANSIT BACK TO HONG KONG TODAY.

So the first officer had been seriously injured, after all. He must have been in the tail when the incident occurred. The man whose cap they had found.

Casey dictated a telex to the FSR in Vancouver, asking him to interview the first officer as soon as possible. She dictated another to the FSR in Hong Kong, suggesting an interview with Captain Chang on his return.

Norma buzzed her. "No luck on the kid," she said.

"Why not?"

"I talked to Maria in Travel. They didn't make Richman's arrangements. His trips were charged to a special company account, a set-aside for foreign, off-budget stuff. But she heard the kid ran up a hell of a big charge."

"How big?" Casey said.

"She didn't know." Norma sighed. "But I'm having lunch tomorrow with Evelyn in Accounting. She'll give me everything."

"Okay. Thanks, Norma."

Casey turned back to the telexes on her desk. They were all other business:

Steve Young, from the FAA's Certification office, asking about fire-retardant test results on seat cushions the previous December.

A query from Mitsubishi about burnouts of then- five-inch displays in the first-class section of American N-22 widebodies.

A list of revisions to the N-20 Aircraft Maintenance Manual (MR 06-62-02).

A revision of the prototype Virtual Heads-Up Display units, to be delivered in the next two days.

A memo from Honeywell advising replacement of die D-2 electrical bus on all FDAU units numbered A-505/9 through A-609/8.

Casey sighed, and went to work.

GLENDALE
7:40 p.m.

She was tired when she got home. The house seemed empty without Allison's lively chatter. Too tired to cook, Casey went into the kitchen and ate a cup of yogurt. Allison's colorful drawings were taped on the refrigerator door. Casey considered calling her; but it was right around her bedtime, and she didn't want to interrupt if Jim was putting her to sleep.

She also didn't want Jim to think she was checking up on him. That was a sore point between them. He always felt she was checking.

Casey went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She heard the phone ring, and went back into the kitchen to answer it. It was probably Jim. She picked up the receiver. "Hello, Jim-"

"Don't be stupid, bitch," a voice said. "You want trouble, you'll get it. Accidents happen. We're watching you right now."

Click.

She stood in the kitchen, holding the phone in her hand. Casey had always thought of herself as levelheaded, but her heart was pounding. She forced herself to take a deep breath as she hung up the receiver. She knew these calls happened sometimes. She'd heard of other vice-presidents getting threatening calls at night. But it had never happened to her, and she was surprised at how frightened she felt. She took another deep breath, tried to shrug it off. She picked up her yogurt, stared at it, put it down. She was suddenly aware that she was alone in a house with all the blinds open.

She went around the living room, closing the blinds. When she came to the front window, she looked out at the street. In the light of the overhead street lamps, she saw a blue sedan parked a few yards up from her house.

There were two men inside.

She could see their faces clearly, through the windshield. The men stared at her as she stood at the window.

Shit.

She went to the front door, bolted it, locked the security chain. She set the burglar alarm, her ringers trembling and clumsy as she punched in the code. Then she flicked off the living room lights, pressed her body to the wall, and peered out the window.

The men were still in the car. They were talking now. As she watched, one of them pointed toward her house.

She went back to the kitchen, fumbled in her purse, found her pepper spray. She clicked off the safety. With her other hand she grabbed the phone, and pulled it on the long cord back to the dining room. Still watching the men, she called the police.

"Glendale police."

She gave her name and address. "There are men parked outside my house. They've been here since this morning. I've just gotten a threatening call."

"Okay, ma'am. Is anybody in the house with you now?"

"No. I'm alone."

"Okay, ma'am. Lock your door and set the alarm if you have one. A car is on the way."

"Hurry," she said.

On the street, the men were getting out of the car.

And walking toward her house.

They were dressed casually, in polo shirts and slacks, but they looked grim and tough. As they came forward they split up, one walking onto the lawn, the other heading toward the back of the house. Casey felt her heart thump in her chest. Had she locked the back door? Gripping the pepper spray, she moved back to the kitchen, turning off the light there, then past the bedroom to the back door. Looking through the window in the door, she saw one of the men standing in the back alley. He was looking around cautiously. Then his gaze turned toward the back door. She crouched down, slipped the chain across the door.

She heard the sound of soft footsteps, coming closer to the house. She looked up at the wall, just above her head. There was a keypad for the alarm, and a big red button marked EMERGENCY. If she hit that button, a screeching alarm would sound. Would that scare him away? She wasn't sure. Where were the damned police, anyway? How long had it been?

She realized she could not hear the footsteps any more. Cautiously, she raised her head until she could peer out the bottom corner of the window.

The man was walking down the alley away from her now. Then he turned, circling the house. Heading back to the street.

Staying low, Casey ran back to the front of the bungalow, to the dining room. The first man was no longer on her lawn. She felt panic: Where was he? The second man appeared on the lawn, squinted at the front of her house, then headed back toward the car. She saw the first man was already in the car, sitting in the passenger seat. The second man opened the door and got in behind the wheel. Moments later, a black-and-white squad car pulled up behind the blue sedan. The men in the car seemed surprised, but they didn't do anything. The squad car turned on its spotlight, and one officer got out, moving cautiously forward. He talked to the men in the sedan for a moment. Then the two men got out. They all walked up the steps to her front door-the policeman and the two men from the car.

She heard the doorbell ring, and answered it.

A young police officer said, "Ma'am, is your name Singleton?" "Yes," she said.

"You work for Norton Aircraft?" "Yes, I do…" "These gentlemen are Norton Security. They say they're guarding you."

Casey said, "What?"

"Would you like to see their credentials?"

"Yes," she said. "I would."

The policeman shone a flashlight while the two men each held out their wallets for her. She recognized credentials for Norton Security Services.

"We're sorry, ma'am," one of the guards said. "We thought you knew. We've been told to check the house every hour. Is that all right with you?"

"Yes," she said. "It's fine."

The policeman said to her, "Is there anything else?"

She felt embarrassed; she mumbled thanks, and went back inside.

"Make sure you lock that door, ma'am," the guards said politely.

"Yeah, I got 'em parked in front of my house, too," Kenny Burne said. "Scared the hell out of Mary. What's going on, anyway? Labor negotiations aren't for another two years." "I'll call Marder," she said.

"Everybody gets guards," Marder said, on the phone. "The union threatens one of our team, we detail guards. Don't worry about it."

"Did you talk to Brull?" she said.

"Yeah, I straightened him out. But it'll take a while for the word to filter down to the rank and file. Until it does, everybody gets guards."

"Okay," she said.

"This is a precaution," Marder said. "Nothing more."

"Okay," she said.

"Get some sleep," Marder said, and hung up.