Free Fall

Forty-Nine

Washington, DC

The faces of the dead haunted Jake Hooper as he and Pax rounded the corner at the east end of the pool at the National Mall.

It had been two days since he’d returned from London.

During his time there the Daily Mail had run a front-page gallery of photos of the Heathrow crash victims, six children and nine adults, inlayed over the wreckage.

The images were seared into Hooper’s memory and weighed heavily on him as he tried to resume his routine. His early-morning runs with Pax at the Mall helped him organize his thoughts about his work and his life.

The night before, at their anniversary dinner, he’d given his wife, Gwen, the pearl necklace and earrings he’d bought in London. She’d given him a watch he’d liked and good news.

The vet says they’re going to put Pax on an experimental drug therapy. It’ll give him three to four more pain-free years. Isn’t that great?

It was more than that.

Now, as Hooper finished his run, Pax’s spirits seemed lifted. He panted happily as Hooper bent down and nuzzled him.

“Now we have hope, buddy. Now we have hope.”

That was not the case with Hooper’s work on the Shikra and EastCloud flights. The investigations were progressing slowly, though that was expected because they were always meticulous and exhaustive.

They had to be.

But recent developments had deepened Hooper’s concerns about a possible cause.

When he got to his desk in NTSB headquarters at L’Enfant Plaza, he took out his copy of the Daily Mail and spread it across his desk. He stared into the faces of those who’d been killed and vowed to find the answers their families deserved.

Shikra, British, American and Kuwaiti investigators had examined a range of potential causes. Was it an irregularity in the computers controlling the engine systems? Was it an electronic malfunction? They’d studied weather systems and the possibility of a bird strike and they’d looked at radio interference.

All were ruled out.

But there were still hundreds of other aspects of the aircraft that they needed to study, and the investigation continued with plans for Hooper and other members of the team to return to the UK at the end of the month.

As for EastCloud Flight 4990, Hooper reviewed the latest examination of the fault logs of the Electrical Load Management System. So far their review had gone back thirty flights. No anomalies had emerged. They would go back another thirty flights. And they were still studying the quick access recorder. Meanwhile weather systems had found no indication of turbulence, nothing on radar. Bill Cashill and Irene Zimm were still pointing to human performance and crew behavior as the likely cause behind the trouble of the Buffalo-to-New York flight.

Hooper disagreed.

He believed the source of the cause in both incidents would be found in Richlon-Titan’s fly-by-wire system, which was present in both planes. Underscoring his view was the increasingly disturbing aspect with the emails, the so-called Zarathustra messages, claiming responsibility.

The FBI had advised the NTSB that it was investigating and working on tracking the sender, which included the public appeal for help identifying the person behind them. Yes, investigators received crackpot claims of all sorts with high-profile incidents, Hooper thought, but they were rarely published. But the recent news story on Zarathustra and the FBI’s approach took matters to a troubling level.

When Hooper went to the kitchen for a fresh coffee, investigators Jayden Kennett and Vernon Nall were having a heated discussion.

“What’s up, fellas?” Hooper asked.

“Did you see Cal Marshall and Stuart Shore on CTNB last week?” Kennett asked.

“Yeah, I caught it online after it aired.”

“We think Shore came close to identifying the technology with Project Overlord,” Kennett said.

“Could be,” Hooper said. “I don’t know a lot about Overlord. I was never part of it. It was a long time ago and classified. You guys ever touch it?”

“No, I didn’t have the clearance. It was beyond us,” Kennett said.

“But you’re thinking it’s something we need to look into?” Hooper asked.

“I think so,” Nall said. “Last night I went to the game with Cal Marshall.”

“You know Marshall?”

“Our wives are cousins,” Nall said. “Anyway, he told me he’s hearing rumors on the grapevine about Overlord. Something’s buzzing about it.”

The lunchroom door closed behind Bill Cashill, who’d been standing in the doorway.

“Overlord was abandoned. It never happened,” Cashill said. “So let’s just kill any cockamamie ideas about it having any bearing on EastCloud and Shikra.”

“Were you on the project, Bill?” Nall asked.

“No. It was a very select group back then, people from the military, industry, systems, FAA. There were two NTSB people on it-Elwood King, who died a few years ago of cancer, and John Carmody, who fell off a cliff last summer while hiking in New Zealand.”

“Hang on, hang on.” Hooper snapped his fingers at a memory. “I think a guy I worked with a few times from the industry had mentioned once that he’d worked on Overlord.”

“Who was that?” Cashill asked.

“Robert Cole.”

“Robert Cole? The guy who became a drunk and lost his marbles? The guy who calls us on every investigation with his wild-ass theories?”

“You know he worked with Richlon-Titan on their fly-by-wire system.”

“So?” Cashill’s face tightened. “Where’re you headed here, Jacob?”

“I just don’t think, given the current context, the FBI, the emails, that we can categorically rule out a cyber breach of the system in both planes.”

“A cyber hack?” Cashill began shaking his head bitterly. “We’ve been down this road a dozen times. We know the systems. It can’t happen. What you’re suggesting is a distraction.”

“It’s our duty to be open-minded and investigate all scenarios.”

“We have no real evidence!” Cashill raised his voice.

“But the emails,” Nall said.

“The emails came out after the fact! They’re post-incident claims!” Cashill said. “They’re nothing but typing from a disturbed mind! The FBI’s searching for the sender to charge them for making threatening claims, not interfering with flights, because that’s impossible.”

“Is it, Bill?” Hooper asked. “Do you know this conclusively?”

“Are you challenging me, Jacob?”

Hooper said nothing.

“Listen to me.” Cashill held a finger near Hooper’s face. “With EastCloud, everything points to pilot error, and with Shikra, everything points to errors in maintenance. I’m ordering you to stop this bullshit search for ghosts in the machine and to focus on reality. Is that clear?”

Cashill looked at his three investigators one by one.

“Now get back to work,” he said before leaving.

At his desk, Hooper dragged his hands over his face.

He could not and would not let go of the real fear that someone had discovered a back door into the system or a wireless jump point-that they’d somehow found a way to override the plane’s security software and gain access to the flight-critical system.

The faces of the Heathrow tragedy stared at him.

Then he noticed his discarded phone messages from Robert Cole.