Darwin's Blade

8 “H is for Preparation”

Dar and Syd took Highway 78 from Escondido into the wooded mountains, stopping in the little town of Julian for dinner before going on to the cabin. Julian had once been a small mining town and now it was an even smaller tourist town, but the restaurant Dar chose served better than decent food in ample amounts for a decent price and had no large bar, so even on a Friday evening it was not filled with boisterous locals. The owner knew Dar and showed them to a table in a bay window of what had been the main parlor of an old Victorian home. The place served good wine. Syd knew the pros and cons of the vintages, she chose a bottle, and they shared an excellent merlot over conversation.

The conversation itself surprised Dar. Over the years he had become a master at subtly turning the focus on the other person; it was amazing, really, how easily people could be steered into talking about themselves for hours on end. But Chief Investigator Sydney Olson was different. She responded to his questions with a brief summary of her years with the FBI and an even briefer description of her failed marriage—“Kevin was also a special agent, but he hated fieldwork and that was all I wanted to do.” Then she hit the ball back in his court.

“Why did the NASA review board fire you when you told them that some of the Challenger astronauts had survived the initial explosion?” she asked, holding her wineglass in both hands. Her nails, Dar noticed, were short and unpolished.

He gave her what Trudy had once called his “Clint Eastwood smile.” “They didn’t fire me,” he said. “They just replaced me quickly before I could put anything in writing. At any rate, I was just a junior member of the support staff for the real review board.”

“All right, then,” said Syd, “tell me how you knew that some of them had survived the explosion only to die after the fall.”

Dar sighed. He saw no way out of some exposition. “Are you sure you want to talk about this over dinner?”

“Well,” said Syd, “I suppose we could discuss poor Mr. Phong getting rebarred right out of the cab of his Isuzu van, but I’d rather hear about the Challenger investigation.”

Dar did not comment on her use of “rebar” as a verb. He explained briefly about his doctoral work in physics.

“Shaped plasma events?” said Syd. “As in explosions?”

“Precisely as in explosions,” agreed Dar. “They didn’t really understand much about the dynamics of plasma wave fronts in those days because the analytical use of chaos mathematics—what they call ‘complexity theory’ today—was in its infancy.”

“So you became an expert on chaos at the wave end of explosions?” said Syd.

“And other extremely high temperature events, yes,” said Dar.

“Is there much demand for that sort of expertise in the job market?”

Dar sighed and set his wineglass down. “More than you can imagine. Shaped charges was the ‘in’ thing in armaments at the time. Ask the Iraqis in their Russian tanks after the American sabot round penetrated eight inches of armor and detonated in a shaped explosion.”

“I don’t suppose they’re around to ask,” said Syd.

“No.”

“So you joined the National Transportation Safety Board,” she said. “With your Ph.D. it sounds like you were overqualified.”

“Unfortunately,” said Dar, “there are more plasma events in commercial aviation than we like to think about. And it takes some training to work backward in deductive steps because the dynamics of the explosion itself have to be completely understood.”

“Lockerbie,” said Syd. “Or TWA Flight 800.”

“Exactly,” said Dar.

The waiter came by and cleared their plates. When their cups of coffee arrived, Syd said, “So that got you to the higher echelons of the NTSB and that put you on the staff of the Challenger Commission. So how did you know that they survived the explosion?”

“I didn’t know,” said Dar. “At first. It’s just that I was more aware of how resilient the human body is in explosions. Most explosions are like leaps from tall buildings—it’s not the fall that kills you…”

“It’s the sudden stop at the end,” supplied Syd.

Dar nodded. “The actual blast is not necessarily damaging to a human body that is restrained as tightly as the astronauts were in their couches. They’re strapped in tighter than a NASCAR driver, and you see the horrific wrecks those guys walk away from.”

Syd nodded. “So you think the poor teacher and some of the others survived that horrendous main fuel tank explosion?”

“No, not the teacher,” said Dar, and even after all these years he felt the twinge of sadness. “She and another astronaut were on the lower deck, directly in the force of the blast. They probably died very quickly if not instantly.”

“NASA made a point of saying that they all must have died without knowing what hit them,” said Syd.

“Yeah. The whole country was in shock. That’s what we all wanted to hear. But even in the first hours after the explosion, it was apparent from video and radar of the falling debris that the main crew cabin—the upper deck, so to speak—had stayed intact through the whole two-minute-and-forty-five-second fall to the water.”

“An eternity,” muttered Syd, her eyes becoming cloudy. “And you said that you know…”

“PEAPs,” said Dar.

“Peeps?”

“Personal egress air packs. Essentially they’re tiny little oxygen bottles that the astronauts use in case of sudden depressurization. They weren’t wearing space suits, remember…The Challenger Commission made that recommendation after studying the tragedy. That’s why John Glenn and all the others who’ve flown since have gone up in space suits, just like the early astronauts…”

“But these PEAPs…?” Syd’s voice was very small and held none of the voyeuristic thrall that Dar had heard in so many people’s tone when discussing fatal accidents.

“They recovered them from what was left of the main cabin,” said Dar. “Actually, they recovered almost all of the shuttle. They rebuilt it in pieces on wood and wire frames just like we do airliners after the fact…but anyway, yes. Five of the PEAPs had been used…two minutes and forty-five seconds worth. The exact time from the explosion until impact on the ocean.”

Sydney closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, she said, “Couldn’t that have been some sort of automatic thing…”

Dar shook his head. “The PEAPs had to be activated manually. In fact, the command pilot couldn’t turn his own on without help. The astronaut behind him—the other woman aboard—would have had to loosen her harness straps and lean forward to turn his on from behind. And his had been used.”

“My God,” said Sydney.

They drank coffee in silence for a minute.

“Dar…” she began.

Dar could not remember if she had used his first name before, but he suddenly noticed it now. Her tone was different.

“Dar,” said the chief investigator, “all this stuff about me coming to the cabin to protect you. All the eyebrow waggling back at Lawrence and Trudy’s. You need to know that I’m not—”

“I know you’re not,” began Dar, a bit irritated.

Syd held up her hand. “Please, let me finish. I’m telling you up front that I’m not looking for a romantic liaison and I’m certainly not looking for a roll in the hay. I like joking with you because you’ve got a sense of humor drier than the Borrego Desert, but I’m not going to play games.”

“I know—” Dar began again, but again she silenced him with a raised palm.

“I’m almost through,” Syd said very quietly. No one was at the nearby tables, and the waiter was far across the room. “Dickweed really did want to bring you up on vehicular manslaughter charges…”

“You’re shitting me,” said Dar. “Even after seeing the videotape?”

“Because of the tape,” said the chief investigator. “It was the kind of case that even an asshole like Dickweed could win. Obvious road rage…”

“Road rage!” said Dar, angry now. “Those were Russian mafia hit men. They found their automatic weapons in the goddamn wreckage. And besides, this whole ‘road rage’ phenomenon is a load of crap, you know that, Olson. There’s not a higher percentage of traffic-related assaults today than there was two decades ago—”

Syd used both palms now to calm him. “Yes, yes…I know that. Road rage has everything to do with how the news anchors enjoy the alliteration and almost nothing to do with facts. But Dickweed might still have brought charges just because road rage is a popular topic these days and it would have got him TV coverage…”

“Road rage,” muttered Dar, sipping coffee so as not to say what he felt about the assistant district attorney and his political ambitions.

“Anyway,” continued Syd, “I sold them all on using you as…well…as bait in uncovering this larger fraud ring that the state has been after. Dickweed and his boss saw that as an even bigger media plus than a road rage trial. But it meant that you either had to be kept under constant surveillance or protective custody…”

“Or be watched by you,” said Dar.

“Yes,” said Syd. She sat in silence for a long moment. Then she said, “And I know about the Fort Collins crash.”

Dar just looked at her. Part of him was not surprised—she had access to a hell of a lot of background dossiers, and his background would be important for her to check on in her ongoing case, but another part of him curled up in pain at the mention of something he never spoke about to anyone.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Syd said, her voice even softer than before, “but it said in the report that you were actually called to the scene of the crash. How could that be? How could they have done that?”

The muscles around Dar’s mouth twitched an imitation of a smile. “They didn’t know that…that my wife and baby were on that flight when it went down. Bar…my wife had planned to come back from Washington the next day, but her mother had recovered faster than anyone expected. She just wanted to get home a day earlier.”

There was a silence, broken by loud laughter from the bar. A young couple walked by on their way out. They were holding hands.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” said Syd.

“I know,” said Dar. “And I haven’t. Even to Larry and Trudy, although they know the basic facts of it. But I’m answering your question…”

Syd nodded.

“So that’s it—my wife and the baby were supposed to arrive the next day…but they boarded this earlier flight—a 737 that went nose first into a park on the outskirts of Fort Collins.”

“And you were called,” said Syd.

“I was on the NTSB GO-team that staged out of Denver,” said Dar, his voice without emotion. “We covered any crash in a six-state region. Fort Collins is only about seventy miles from Denver.”

“But…” Syd began, and stopped. She looked down at her coffee cup.

Dar shook his head. “That was my job…looking at plane wrecks. Luckily, someone in the Denver office got a first look at the flight manifest and noticed my wife’s name. They notified my team’s supervisor only about half an hour after I got to the scene. But there wasn’t much to see anyway. The 737 went in nose-first. The crater was almost twenty feet deep and sixty feet across. There was a lot of the usual crash detritus—shoes, always many shoes, a burned teddy bear here and there, a green purse—but most of the human remains had to be retrieved by archaeologists.”

Syd looked up. “And it’s one of the few accidents that the NTSB didn’t solve…didn’t find a clear cause for.”

“One of four, counting TWA 800,” said Dar softly. “Wind shear was suspected…and the FAA recommended changing certain control connections to the rudder of the Boeing 737s after that…but nothing seemed to explain such a sudden and complete loss of control. When they came to get me, I was actually interviewing a teenaged girl who lived in the apartment building right next to the park—a hundred feet shorter and the casualty list would have been doubled—and this girl said that when she looked out her fourth-floor window, she could see the faces of the people in the plane…upside down as the 737 augered in. The faces were quite clear because it was just after dark and the people had their reading lights on…”

“Stop, please,” said Syd. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I brought it up.”

Dar was quiet for a moment. He felt as if he were returning from somewhere far away. He looked at the chief investigator and realized with a shock that she was crying. “It’s all right,” he said, stifling the impulse to pat her hand where it lay on the white tablecloth. “It’s all right. It was a long time ago.”

“Ten years isn’t a long time,” whispered Syd. “Not for something like that.” She turned toward the window and wiped away the tears with two angry swipes of her hand.

“No,” agreed Dar.

Syd looked back at him and her blue eyes seemed infinitely deep. “May I ask one thing?”

Dar nodded.

“You didn’t resign from the NTSB and move out to California until almost two years after that crash,” she said. “How could you…stay? Continue doing that work?”

“It was my job,” said Dar. “I was good at it.”

Sydney Olson smiled very slightly. “I’ve read your whole file, Dr. Minor. You’re still the best accident reconstruction person in the business. So then why do you work primarily with Stewart Investigations? I know you’re fairly well off and don’t need a huge salary…but why Lawrence and Trudy?”

“I like them,” Dar said. “Larry makes me laugh.”

They arrived at Dar’s cabin just after sunset, twilight hanging in the soft summer evening air like a muted tapestry. The cabin sat by itself up a half mile of gravel road, south and east of the town of Julian, on the very edge of the Cleveland National Forest. Its view looked down broad meadows and across great valleys of grass to the south. Above and behind the cabin, the ponderosa pines and Douglas fir grew thicker, ending in a rocky ridgetop.

Syd stared in admiration. “Wow,” she said. “You say ‘cabin’ and I picture caulked logs and mice scurrying around.”

Dar glanced at his trim stone-and-redwood structure with its long porch looking south. “Nope,” he said. “It’s only six years old. I bought the property when I first came out here; lived in the sheep wagon before this place.”

“Sheep wagon?” said Syd.

Dar nodded. “You’ll see.”

“And I bet you built this all by yourself.”

“Hardly,” said Dar with a chuckle. “I’m incompetent with a hammer and saw. A local builder—seventy years old—named Burt McNamara did most of the work.”

“My God,” said Syd as she came around to the front of the building along the open porch, “a hot tub.”

“It has a nice view. On a cold winter’s night you can sit in the tub and see the few lights out on the Capitan Grande Indian Reservation way across the valley there.” Dar unlocked the front door and stood aside to let Syd enter first.

“I see why you don’t have…ah…guests too often,” said Syd softly.

The last of the evening light illuminated the large, single room. Dar had not partitioned the cabin except for the bathroom area, and only groupings of furniture and carpet delineated one area from another. Most of the walls were lined with bookshelves, but there were several huge French original posters—one advertising a fishing line and showing a woman catching a trout from a canoe, the art stylized in wonderful 1920s negative-space blacks and bold lines. The southeast corner held a large L-shaped desk under twelve-over-twelve paned windows. The view from that area was amazing. A huge fireplace took up much of the west wall, the windows on either side were soft with twilight, there was a scattering of comfortable leather chairs and couches near it, and the single bed, covered in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, was just behind the long couch.

“I like to watch the fire from bed,” said Dar.

“Uh-huh,” said Syd.

Dar dropped his own bags. He picked two lanterns off hooks on the wall. “Come on, I’ll get you set up in the sheep wagon.”

Dar led her back out onto the porch in the fading twilight and about a hundred feet along a well-maintained trail. Japanese snow lanterns made of stone lined the path at twenty-foot intervals. After walking through a small stand of birch, they entered a grassy clearing, and the wagon came into sight.

The old Basque sheepherder’s wagon had been completely renovated with ancient wood and glass. Now the wheeled structure had a small porch, a screen door, and a canvas awning on the south side. Near it, several Adirondack chairs had been set facing a view even more incredible than the cabin’s.

Dar gestured and Syd walked up the four steps, opened the unlocked doors, and stepped into the small space.

“This may be the coziest room I’ve ever seen in my life,” Syd said softly.

The sheep wagon was only eighteen feet long and seven feet wide, but the space was used with great ingenuity. There was a tiny bathroom to the right as one entered, a small sink under a window on the north side, a tiny eating booth on the south side, and the entire west end was comprised of a built-in bed under a hemisphere of old windowpanes. The barrel-vaulted ceiling was low, but it gleamed with slats of honey-colored old wood. Various pegs and hooks lined the walls, and Dar hung the lanterns on two of them. The high bed looked impossibly comfortable with a homemade patchwork quilt on it and several huge pillows at either end. Drawers were built into the wainscoting under the mattress area.

“There’s no electricity,” said Dar, “but the plumbing works…We ran a line down from the same cistern that serves the cabin. No shower or tub, I’m afraid…there just wasn’t room, but there’s no charge for using the big shower in the cabin.”

“Did your Mr. McNamara build this as well?” asked Syd, sliding into the wooden booth and looking through the small panes at the last of the sunset. The tiny space gave the impression of being below decks in a very tiny but cozy boat.

Dar shook his head. “We…my wife and I had this built the summer before the crash. In a magazine—Architectural Digest—we read about an interior designer and an old rancher and builder up in Montana who were buying up old Basque sheep wagons and converting them into…well, this. They built the thing according to our plans and then disassembled it, shipped it to Colorado, and put it together again. I did the same thing when I moved it out here.”

Syd looked up at him. “Did the three of you ever use it?”

Dar shook his head again. “We’d bought some property in the Rockies, not too far from Denver, but that was the winter that David was born, and then…well, we never got to spend time in it.”

“But you did,” said Syd. “Out here. Alone.”

Dar nodded. “But I had to do more and more work on the weekends,” he said. “Mostly on the computer. So I had the cabin built rather than electrify the sheep wagon.”

“Good choice,” said the chief investigator.

“Fresh sheets and pillowcases in those drawers under the bed,” said Dar. “Also clean towels. And no mice. I was up here last weekend and checked.”

“I wouldn’t care if there were mice,” said Syd.

Dar opened a drawer, removed a box of kitchen matches, and lit the lanterns. Instantly the old wood everywhere and especially in the vaulted ceiling began to glow with a honeyed warmth.

“The little two-burner stove is propane,” he said. “Like a camp stove, really. There’s no fridge, so perishable things I keep in the cabin. You can leave the lanterns on when you leave—they’re safe—but bring this to find your way back.” He opened another drawer and pulled out a flashlight.

Dar went to the door. “You’re welcome to just settle in here or to come over to the cabin for some hot tea or something.”

“We’ve still got a lot of files to go through,” said Syd.

Dar made a face.

“You go on,” said Syd. “I’m going to settle in—as you say—and just enjoy this perfect little place for a while before I come down.”

Dar took some matches. “I’ll light the snow lanterns so the path will be illuminated.”

Syd just smiled.

She came down the trail to the cabin about an hour later. She had changed out of her professional-looking suit into jeans, a flannel shirt, and cross-trainer sneakers. Her ninemillimeter pistol was holstered to her belt.

It was full dark now and a mountain chill had set in. Dar had started a small fire in the huge fireplace and his old reel-to-reel tape player was playing classical music—he had not thought about the selection, merely flipped on the player as he usually did when alone in the cabin—but the music was an assortment of lovely pieces—the Adagietto fourth movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, the second movement from Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, the second movement from Beethoven’s Seventh, the third and fourth movements from Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, Kyoko Takezawa playing Mendelssohn’s andante movement from the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 64, Kyrie Eleisons from both Beethoven’s Mass in Solemnis and Mozart’s Requiem, some Mitsuko Uchida and Horowitz piano solos (including Dar’s favorite, the Scriabin Etude in C sharp minor, op. 2, no. 1 from the extraordinary Horowitz in Moscow album), Ying Huang singing opera arias with the London Symphony Orchestra, and lighter pieces with Heinz Holliger on oboe with orchestra.

At the last second, Dar was afraid that the chief investigator would think that he was trying to set a romantic mood, but he saw at once from her expression that she simply liked the music.

“Mozart,” she said, listening to the amazing voices in the Requiem. She nodded and came over to join him by the fire, sitting in the other leather club chair across from his.

“Would you like some hot tea?” Dar had said. “Green, mint, Grey’s breakfast, regular Lipton’s…”

Syd’s gaze had moved to the antique “hoosier” by the kitchen counter. “Is that a bottle of Macallan?” she said.

“It is indeed,” said Dar. “Pure single-malt.”

“It’s almost full,” she said.

“I don’t like to drink alone.”

“I’d love a whiskey,” she said.

Dar went over to the counter, retrieved two crystal whiskey glasses from the cupboard, and poured.

“Ice?” he said.

“In good single-malt?” said the chief investigator. “You go near an ice cube and I’ll draw down on you.”

Dar nodded. The glasses of amber liquid glowed as he came back close to the fire. They savored the Scotch in silence for several comfortable minutes.

Dar was shocked to realize that he was taking great pleasure in this woman’s company and that there was a slight but growing physical tension—awareness might be a better word—between the two of them. It shocked Dar, who had always known he was different from most men. The sight of a nude woman could arouse him, did arouse him still in his dreams. But beyond mere physical arousal, Dar linked true, deep desire with specificity. Even before he had met his wife, Barbara, he had never understood desiring a person not known, not understood, not…central.

And then he had loved Barbara. He had desired Barbara. It was Barbara’s face and voice and red hair and small breasts and pink nipples and red pubic hair and pale, white skin that became and remained the source of his love, attention, and desire. In the past decade since her death, he had seemed to move further and further away from finding or being able to feel such specific desire toward any other person. But now Dar Minor found himself sipping Scotch and looking at Chief Investigator Sydney Olson as she sat comfortably in the club chair, the red Indian blanket behind her head and the firelight soft on her. He noticed the weight of her breasts against the fabric of her shirt, and the brilliance of her eyes above the sparkling crystal of the Scotch glass, and…

“…reminds me of?” Syd was saying.

Dar shook his head—literally—to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

Syd looked around the glowing room. Small halogen spots illuminated bookcases and works of art. The firelight was reflected in the many windowpanes. A single swing lamp put a circle of light on Dar’s worktable at the far end of the long room.

“I said, do you know what all this reminds me of?”

“No,” Dar said softly. Still feeling the tides of the sexual and emotional tension between them, he had the overwhelming feeling that Syd was about to make a personal comment that would bring them a step closer, would change both of their lives forever, whether he wanted it to or not. “What does all this remind you of?”

“It reminds me of one of those stupid action movies where a cop is put in charge of guarding the life of some witness, so they head far off to the woods, far from any backup. They set up camp in a house full of huge picture windows, to make it easy for a sniper,” said Syd. “And then the cop is totally surprised when someone takes a shot at them. Did you ever see Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard?”

“No,” said Dar.

Syd shook her head. “It was silly. The script was originally written for Steve McQueen and Diana Ross…that might have been better. At least McQueen seemed to be thinking when he was on screen.”

Dar swallowed some Scotch and said nothing.

She paused for a second; she seemed far away. Then she shrugged. “Do you keep any weapons in the cabin?”

“You mean firearms?”

“Yes.”

“No,” said Dar, stating the literal truth, but lying just the same.

“I take it from your earlier comments that you frown on handguns.”

“I think they’re the bane and shame of America,” said Dar. “Our worst sin since slavery.”

Syd nodded. “But you aren’t offended with me keeping my weapon handy?”

“You’re an officer of the law,” said Dar. “You’re required to.”

Syd nodded again. “But you have no shotguns, hunting rifles?”

Dar shook his head. “Not in the cabin. I have some old weapons stored away.”

“You know what the best home-defense weapon is?” asked Syd. She took a drink of whiskey and held the glass in both hands.

“A pit bull?” ventured Dar.

“Nope. A pump-action shotgun. Doesn’t matter what gauge.”

“I guess it wouldn’t require much target practice to hit someone with a shotgun,” agreed Dar.

“More than that,” said Syd. “The sound of a pump shotgun being racked in a dark house is absolutely unmistakable. You’d be amazed the deterrent effect it can have on burglars and ne’er-do-wells.”

“Ne’er-do-wells,” repeated Dar, savoring the word. “Well, if the sound of the shotgun being racked is the important thing, one wouldn’t have to have shells for it, would one?”

Syd said nothing, but her expression showed her opinion of keeping weapons around with no ammunition.

“Actually,” said Dar, “all I’d need would be a tape recording of a shotgun being racked, wouldn’t I?”

Syd set her glass down and wandered over to Dar’s main worktable. There were few loose papers there but several paperweights—a small piston head, a small carnivore’s skull, a Disneyland paperweight with Goofy in a snowstorm, and a single, green shotgun shell.

Syd lifted the shell. “Four-ten gauge. Significance?”

Dar shrugged. “I used to have a Savage .410 over-and-under,” he said quietly. “A gift from my father right before he died. It was an antique. I left it behind in storage in Colorado.”

Syd turned the shell over and looked at the brass end. “This hasn’t been fired, but the hammer’s fallen on it. The firing pin missed the center.”

“It happened the last time I tried to fire the gun,” said Dar even more quietly. “The only time that weapon ever misfired.”

Syd stood holding the shell and looking at Dar for a long moment before setting it down under the windowsill. “That shell is still dangerous, you know.”

Dar raised his eyebrows.

“I know from your file that you were in the Marines…in Vietnam. You must have been very young.”

“Not so young,” said Dar. “I’d already graduated from college by the time I enlisted and was sent over there in 1974. Besides, there wasn’t much for us to do that last year except listen to bits of the Watergate hearings on armed forces radio and go around the countryside picking up the M-16s and other weapons that the ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, our team—were dropping as they ran away from the North Vietnamese regulars.”

“You graduated from college when you were eighteen,” said Syd. “What were you…a prodigy?”

“An overachiever,” said Dar.

“Why the Marines?” asked Syd.

“Would you believe it was out of sentiment?” asked Dar. “Because my father had been a Marine in the real war…World War II?”

“I believe that he was a Marine,” said Syd, “but I don’t believe that’s the reason you enlisted in that service.”

Correct, thought Dar. Aloud he said, “Actually, it was partially to get my service out of the way and get back to the States for graduate school, and partially out of sheer perversity.”

“How so?” said Syd. She had finished her Scotch. Dar poured her another two fingers.

Dar hesitated and then realized that he was going to tell her the truth…sort of. “As a kid, I was obsessed with the Greeks,” said Dar. “The obsession lasted through college, even while I was pursuing a degree in physics. All of the liberal arts majors were studying ancient Athens—you know, sculpture, democracy, Socrates—while I was always obsessed with Sparta.”

Syd looked quizzical. “War?”

Dar shook his head. “Not war, although that’s all the Spartans are remembered for. The Spartans were the only society I knew of that made a science out of the study of fear—they called it phobologia. Their training—which began at a young age—was all geared at recognizing fear, phobos, and defeating it. They even taught of parts of the body that were phobosynakteres—places where fear accumulated—and trained their young men, their warriors, to be able to put their minds and bodies in a state of aphobia.”

“Fearlessness,” translated Syd.

Dar frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “There are different forms of fearlessness. A berserker warrior or a Japanese samurai caught up in mindless rage, or, for that matter, a Palestinian terrorist on a bus with a bomb, they’re all fearless—that is, they don’t fear their own deaths. But the Spartans wanted something more.”

“What could be better for a warrior than fearlessness?” asked Syd.

“The Greeks, the Spartans, called such fearlessness brought on by rage or anger katalepsis,” said Dar. “Literally, being possessed by a daemon—a loss of control by the mind. They spurned that completely. Their hoped-for aphobia was a completely…well, controlled, minded thing—a refusal to become absorbed and possessed, even in the midst of battle.”

“And did you learn aphobia in the Marines…in Vietnam?” said Syd.

“Nope. I was scared shitless every second I was in Vietnam.”

“Did you see much action there?” asked Syd, her eyes intent. “Your Marine Corps files are still classified. That must mean something.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” he lied. “For example, if I was a clerk typist and typed a lot of classified material, you wouldn’t be able to get access to my files.”

“Were you a clerk typist?”

Dar held his Scotch glass in both hands. “Not all of the time.”

“So you saw combat?”

“Enough to know that I never wanted to see any again,” said Dar truthfully.

“But you’re comfortable around weapons,” said Syd, getting to the point.

Dar made a face and sipped his whiskey.

“What kind of weapon were you issued in the Marines?” asked Syd.

“Some sort of rifle,” said Dar. He did not enjoy discussing firearms.

“Then an M-sixteen,” said Syd.

“Which all have a tendency to jam if not kept perfectly clean,” said Dar, a bit disingenuously. He had not been issued an M-16. His spotter had carried an accurized M-14—an older weapon, but one that shared the same 7.62 millimeter ammunition as the bolt-action Remington 700 M40 that Dar had trained with. And train he had—120 rounds a day, six days a week, until he was able to hit a man-sized moving target at five hundred yards and a stationary one at one thousand.

He finished his Scotch. “If you’re trying to palm a handgun off on me, forget it, Chief Investigator. I hate the goddamn things.”

“Even when the Russian mafia’s trying to kill you?”

“They tried to kill me,” corrected Dar. “And I still think it may have been a case of mistaken identity.”

Syd nodded. “But you’ve handled weapons,” she persisted. “You were taught what to do if a shell misfired…”

Dar looked up at her. “Aim your weapon at a safe, neutral target and wait. It may still fire without warning.”

Syd pointed to the. 410 shell. “Should we throw that away?”

“No,” said Dar.

They each had a final glass of Scotch and watched the fire. The bit of smoke that stayed in the room was aromatic, mixing with the smoky peat taste of the whiskey.

The tension of the earlier conversation had almost disappeared. They were talking shop.

“Did you hear about the directive from the last political appointee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency?” asked Syd.

Dar chuckled. “Absolutely. The word accident is never to be used in any official reports, correspondence, and/or memos.”

“Doesn’t that seem a little odd?”

“Not at all,” said Dar. A log broke and crumbled into embers and he glanced at it for a second before looking back at his guest. Syd’s face appeared younger and softer in the firelight, her eyes as alive and intelligent as always. “You have to follow their chain of logic,” he said. “All accidents are avoidable. Therefore they shouldn’t happen. Therefore the agency can’t use the word accident—they don’t exist. They have to circumlocute and say crash or incident or whatever.”

“Do you agree that all accidents are avoidable?” asked Syd.

Dar laughed heartily. “Anyone who’s ever investigated an accident…whether it’s the space shuttle or some poor schmuck who runs a yellow light and gets broadsided…knows that they’re not only not avoidable, they’re inevitable.”

“How so?” said Syd.

Dar looked at her. “They happened. The probability of the series of events that led up to the accident may each be a thousand to one, or a million to one, but once those events occur in the right sequence, the accident is one hundred percent inevitable.”

Syd nodded but did not look convinced.

“All right,” said Dar, “take the Challenger accident. NASA had become the careless driver who runs yellow lights. You get away with it once—five times—twenty times—and pretty soon you assume it’s a natural and safe behavior. But if you keep driving, the odds of being hit by some other sonofabitch with the same intersection philosophy become almost one hundred percent.”

“How was NASA taking extra risks?”

Dar shrugged. “The Commission documented it pretty well. They knew about the O-ring problem—even the Crit-One severity of it—but didn’t fix it. They knew that cold weather made the O-ring problem much worse, but launched anyway. They violated at least twenty of their own no-go guidelines because that teacher was on board, and they were feeling political pressure to get her launched into orbit so President Reagan could mention it in his State of the Union Address that evening. The odds caught up to them.”

“You believe in odds, then?” said Syd. “Do you believe in anything else?”

Dar looked at her quizzically. “Are you asking me a philosophical question, Chief Investigator?”

“I’m just curious,” said Syd, swallowing the last of her whiskey. “You see so many accidents, so much carnage. I wonder what philosophical framework you apply to it.”

Dar thought a moment. “The Stoics, I guess,” he said.

“Epictetus. Marcus Aurelius and his ilk.” He chuckled. “The one time I ever felt political enough to drive to Washington and throw a brick at the White House was when Bill Clinton was asked what the most important book was that he’d read recently—and he said Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations.” He chuckled again. “That love-handled mass of appetites…quoting Marcus Aurelius.”

“But what do you believe?” pressed Syd. “Other than a Stoic point of view.” She paused a moment and recited quietly, “‘To the rational creature, only the irrational is unbearable; the rational he can always bear. Blows are not by nature intolerable.’”

Dar stared at her. “You can quote Epictetus.”

“So would you say that’s your philosophy?” repeated Syd.

Dar set his empty glass down and steepled his fingers, tapping his lower lip. The dying fire crumbled again and the embers glowed in their final brightness. “Larry’s older brother, a writer who lived in Montana until his marriage broke up, came to visit several years ago; I got to know him a bit. Later I saw him interviewed on TV and he was asked about his philosophy; his novel was about the Catholic Church, and the interviewer kept pressing him on his own beliefs.”

Syd waited.

“Larry’s brother—Dale’s his name—was going through a rough patch then. In response to the question, he quoted John Updike. The quote went something like—‘I am neither musical nor religious; each time I set my fingers down it is without confidence of hearing a chord.’”

“That’s sad,” said Syd at last.

Dar smiled. “It was Larry’s brother quoting another writer—I didn’t say it’s what I believe. I subscribe to Occam’s Razor.”

“William of Occam,” said Syd. “What…fifteenth century?”

“Fourteenth,” said Dar.

“Maxim,” continued Syd. “The assumptions introduced to explain a thing must not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

“Or,” said Dar, “all other things being equal, the simplest answer is usually the right one.”

“Rules out alien abduction,” laughed Syd.

“Area Fifty-one, kaput,” said Dar.

“Kennedy conspiracy shit…adios,” said Syd, her smile very wide.

“Oliver Stone, bye-bye,” agreed Dar.

Syd paused. “Did you know you’re famous for Darwin’s Blade?”

“For what?” said Dar, blinking in surprise.

“Some statement you made a few years ago—I think it was at the meeting of the National Association of Insurance Investigators.”

“Oh, Christ,” said Dar, putting his hand over his eyes.

“You had a corollary to Occam’s Razor,” persisted Syd. “I think it went—‘All other things being equal, the simplest solution is usually stupidity.’”

“Which is stupidly obvious,” muttered Dar.

Syd nodded slowly. “No, I know what you were saying. It’s like those guys in the pickup trying to crash that rock concert…”

Dar suddenly looked over at the box of files and stacks of Zip drives and floppy disks that still awaited them. “Maybe we’ve been looking for the wrong thing in our files,” he said.

Syd cocked her head.

“Maybe it’s not my investigation of stupid accidents—even fatal ones—that drew someone’s attention to me,” he said. “Maybe it’s murder.”

“Have you solved a murder recently?” said Syd. “Other than the Phong swoop-and-squat, I mean.”

Dar nodded.

“And are you going to share it?” said Syd.

Dar glanced at his watch. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

“You bastard,” said Chief Investigator Olson, but she said it with a smile. “Thanks for the Scotch.”

Dar walked her to the door.

Syd paused. Dar had the sudden, wild thought that she was going to kiss him.

“Sleeping up in my wonderful sheep wagon,” she said, “how will I know if the bad guys have come and you’re in deep shit?”

Dar reached under a heavy coat on a wall hook and pulled down a bright orange whistle on a string. “It’s for hiking, in case you get lost in the woods. You can hear this damned whistle two miles away.”

“Like a rape whistle,” said Syd.

“Yeah.”

“Well, if the murderers show up tonight, just whistle.” She paused and Dar could see a glint of mischief in her blue eyes. “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?”

Dar grinned. The nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall had said the line to Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. He loved that movie.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just put my lips together and blow.”

Syd nodded and went up the path with her flashlight, blowing out each lantern as she passed.

Dar watched until she was out of sight.