Marine One

16

I SHOULD HAVE gone home after spending the entire day at the wreckage hangar, but I hadn't been to my office in ten days. I called Debbie and told her I'd be home after stopping in at the office. I hurried to the second floor of our building and turned on the lights of my office. I could tell by the lights down the hall that a couple of other people were working too. I put my laptop back in its cradle and turned it on while I thumbed through the piles of documents, letters, legal pleadings, magazines, and other papers Tracy had placed on my desk. I was about halfway done when I suddenly realized someone was standing in my door. It was Braden, one of the new contract attorneys. Very good guy. We had received probably two hundred resumes after we put out our ads. Braden's was one of the best and he was clearly the best in the interview. He had graduated from Columbia Law School, something we didn't see often in Annapolis, and had worked at two large defense firms in New York City. He said he was tired of New York and wanted to find a place where he could settle down and raise a family someday. He was the best I had seen. A little too eager sometimes, but overall just trying to please. "Hey, what's up? You're here late," I said.

"Sorry. I didn't want to disturb you, but I heard you knocking around. How was the trip?"

"Good. Come on in. Have a seat. I'm just going through some correspondence. What are you doing here?"

"Working on the memo Rachel asked for on forum non conveniens."

"Yeah, that's pretty hopeless. Not sure we'd even really try to transfer this case to another place if we could, but you may as well finish it."

"Yeah, will do."

I looked at him more closely. "Rachel's impressed with your work. Your memos are quite good."

"Thanks, I appreciate it." He paused. "Oh." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. "Weirdest thing. I was using the copy machine last night and I walked by your office. It was late, like eleven thirty. I heard your phone ring, and then it stopped. Then it rang again and stopped. Someone wanted to talk to you but didn't want to leave a voice mail. It rang again so I answered it."

"Who was it?"

"I don't know." He handed me the piece of paper. "Here's the number."

I took it and looked at it. It was a Washington, D.C., area code.

Braden continued, "It was some guy asking if I'm Mike Nolan. I told him I wasn't and he told me to have you call him. I asked him who he was, and he said it wasn't any of my business. He just said that you needed to call him, personally, and that he 'knew all the answers.' I said, 'What answers?' And he said why Marine One crashed. And then he hangs up. That's it."

I stared at the number, then at Braden. "What do you make of it? What did he sound like?"

"I have no idea what to make of this. What are the chances he knows something? I don't know. I suppose in the no-stone-left-unturned approach somebody ought to call him. He might be a crackpot. He sounded like an older guy, maybe fifties."

"Black or white?"

"Not sure, but sounded white to me."

"Okay, thanks. I'll give him a call tomorrow. Maybe."

Braden began to leave, then remembered, "Oh, and he said to call him at night, he works during the day and that isn't a work number."

"It's not during the day now. No time like the present." I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

Braden returned to his office as the number began to ring. I had the speakerphone on and listened as I continued to sort through the piles on my desk. It rang four times, then five, but no answering machine picked up. It probably rang eight times before somebody picked it up. My eyes darted to the phone to note the connection. I picked up the handset and listened. Nobody said anything. "Hello?"

"Who's this?" a gruff voice asked.

"I'm Mike Nolan. You called me."

"Where you calling from?"

"My office. My associate said you have something to talk to me about. What is it?"

"I've got information that will break your case wide-open."

"What's your name?"

"No way. No names, no numbers, no addresses."

"And why is that?"

"Because I value my life, that's why."

"Meaning?"

"I'm not saying anything until I know I'm safe and we have certain arrangements."

"What arrangements?"

"You're going to hire me a lawyer. A fancy lawyer from Washington. His name is Frank Flannery. I got his name out of a newspaper report of a big case I heard about. He doesn't know me. You're going to hire him for me. If you don't, you'll never hear a word of what I know. I'm gonna call him in forty-eight hours and tell him that I'm the one that he's been hired to represent. After that, all communication will go through him. I'll tell him the things I want you to know, and he'll tell them to you."

"Why are you doing this? What do you want?"

"You'll have to compensate me. You have to make this way worth my while."

"We don't pay witnesses."

"Fine. Don't. I'm going to call Frank in two days."

The line went dead. I stared at the phone. I'd never had a call like that. I'd never had a witness call who claimed to have earth-shattering information and demand money while remaining anonymous. I've had lots of witnesses ask for money. It's right about when they realize you need their testimony that they suddenly smell a market and try to sell. But you can't buy. Against ethics and taints their testimony. They usually pout, then you serve them with a subpoena, which changes things pretty quickly.

I couldn't decide whether to just slough him off as a nut or to at least get some idea of what this guy was talking about. I turned around to my computer and drafted an e-mail to Kathryn.

____________________

Kathryn was intrigued by what this might mean and much to my surprise authorized retaining Flannery to represent him. I called Flannery, introduced myself, and told him the story. He thought it was odd but agreed to talk to the guy when he called. So we would wait to see what came of that.

The time had arrived though for me to take the depositions of the widows, and in particular the first lady. She was the lead plaintiff, the lead name on the lawsuit, now of course the former first lady, but everyone in the media seemed to want to call her the first widow. She had moved out of the White House when Cunningham had moved in to take over as president and was now living in a penthouse apartment at the Watergate. She didn't make many public appearances now, but when she did, she was appropriately mournful and quiet. A sympathetic figure, she was loved by the public. But the public wasn't seeing inside her lawsuit, Adams et al. v. WorldCopter. They weren't in the room when her attorney yelled at the WorldCopter employees to get them to say things he could use against them in trial. She was able to maintain her pose of wounded innocent as her hired rottweiler tried to tear up witnesses on her behalf.

I wanted Rachel to take the depositions of several of the widows. She had taken numerous depositions in the past, but these would be important and it would be good for her and good for the case. When I told her that I wanted her to take four of the eight depositions, including that of Mrs. Collins, she was excited. I told her I wouldn't even be there, and that she would run them. She prepared an outline, which I reviewed, and it was perfect. But what had my focus was the first lady.

The notices I had given Hackett asked the widows to bring all kinds of personal documents with them. Their husbands' income statements, files, letters, medical records, anything they had that pertained to their husbands. They would be annoyed by that and would balk. I wanted to get that whole process under way immediately.

The day before those depositions were to start, I got a call from Karl Will. He had been thinking about the accident and wanted to go back out to the scene. He said he wanted to just sit there. He said I should bring a stool or chair, and that we were going to sit there, in the middle of where the helicopter crashed, and let the crash scene talk to us. He and I agreed on many things, but certainly on this. You couldn't go to an accident scene too many times. You would see things differently every time. You might notice how certain flight paths-or crash paths, more accurately-to the site that were theoretically possible under some theories are actually impossible. A certain hill was too high, or the ravine too steep. Things would be struck by airplane parts or rotor blades that you hadn't seen before. Unless it was in a flat desert, the accident scene spoke to you eloquently. Every time.

The location of the fire road was now listed as one of my personal destinations in my Volvo navigation system. I punched it and headed to the scene. I turned off onto the fire road and was stopped at the same place we had been stopped on the morning of our first visit by an FBI agent.

When I got to the scene, Karl was already there. He was in the dead center of the crash site sitting on a blue canvas camp stool, the kind that folded up into a handled walking stick. He was drinking coffee from a large metal travel mug. He had watched me walk all the way in to the site. Will said, "Where's your chair?"

"In the car."

"Go get it. I told you to bring it."

I shook my head. "I can stand, it's okay."

"You can only look around after you've sat. You have to feel it."

I went back to the car and pulled out my lawn chair, the same one that I always carried to my kids' soccer games. I unfolded it and sat next to him. "Anything you wanted to bring up? Or are we just going to sit here quietly?"

"Either way," he said, drinking slowly. "You've got to hear the helicopter straining, fighting to stay aloft, falling down through the storm, the rain, and finally the trees. If we'd been here, could we have heard the tree branches break or would the noise from the helicopter have been too loud? Which parts of it could we have heard? If we had a huge spotlight pointed up to the sky from this point, what would we have seen? Was it on fire as it fell through the darkness? I want to hear you think while you look at where this happened. I want to hear what you really believe. I've heard you hinting about all kinds of shit, but based on everything you know, as a Marine, as a pilot, as an attorney, as someone who's looked into all the pieces of this accident that we have so far, I want to hear what you think happened."

I wasn't sure how much to say. When his deposition was taken in this case, everything that he reviewed or relied on would be admissible, including conversations with me.

I looked at the ashes around us, the charred leaves, branches, and grass. The little pieces of metal and plastic that had burned and dripped leaving patterns like disturbed spiderwebs lying in the dirt. I said, "A couple of things just continue to bother me. First, I don't think that there's any way in hell that rotor blade came off in midair and then just happened to land next to all the wreckage. I think that's certainly possible under the laws of physics, but if you bring statistics and probability into it, I think it becomes so unlikely as to be considered impossible. But I've also learned that catastrophic accidents are sometimes caused by the ridiculously unlikely."

"Go on."

"I find the fact that the flight data recorder stopped before the crash suspicious. I find the fact that he maybe had a hydraulic light suspicious. I find the conversation between the pilot and the president suspicious. I find the meeting the president was going to that we know nothing about really suspicious."

Karl nodded and finished his coffee. He tossed the cup into an open backpack. "And what about here? What do you see here?"

"I don't know. I don't understand this scene. It just doesn't make sense to me at all." I kicked at the ashes at my feet. "It does feel strange sitting here, where a helicopter crashed killing seven people. Feels like we're desecrating it, sitting here and drinking coffee." Karl didn't respond. I got up and walked around the wreckage site while Karl watched me move uneasily through the silence. I looked down at a pile of ash that had been raked into an area to clear it from something else. The pile was simply charred burned matter, which looked like burned foliage. Something caught my eye. "Check this out," I said. He came over from his stool and peered down. It was American currency. Bills folded in half, charred on the top so it just looked like a random piece of charred paper. But you could just make out a corner of the paper and tell that it was a bill. I picked them up. I turned them over, and on the bottom were four clean $100 bills, which were underneath the charred bill on top of it. "How about that?" I said, and handed Karl the charred bills. I glanced down to the now clean spot on the ground where the bills had been lying and noticed something metal. I bent down and picked up a heavy brass key. It was one of those brass hotel keys that were more common before most hotels went to electronic access. But it was different. It was flat on the top and flat on the bottom with three groves that would be inserted into the door. It looked to me as if the key was brass but electronic as well. I wasn't really sure, but I did notice the name of the hotel. I handed it to Karl. "The Virginian." He took it, examined it, turned it over, and pondered.

I asked, "Why didn't the NTSB find this?"

He glanced at me. "You ever been to a wreckage site where you didn't find something they missed?"

"No. But I've never been to the crash site of a president's helicopter either."

"That just makes it less likely they'd miss something. Doesn't guarantee it. Just looked like ashes. Think the investigators missed anything in the Kennedy investigation in Dallas?" Karl looked at it one last time and handed it to me. "We'd better give it to them."

"I don't work for the NTSB. I'm here to protect my client. The NTSB has already issued a preliminary finding that hammers my client. Why should I help them?"

"Because this is their accident."

"They've released the scene."

"Mike, do you really think that if somebody comes here and finds something relevant, they don't need to turn it over to the NTSB?"

"I don't know. I guess I just don't want to give this to them. It's not a piece of the helicopter."

I slipped the key into my pocket. "I'll give it to them after a friend checks it out. Who on this helicopter had a key to the ritziest hotel in Washington, D.C.? A five-star hotel. They all lived in Washington. Why would they need a hotel room?"

I thought about who was on the helicopter. Three crew, Adams, two Secret Service agents, and the White House director of operations. Would Collins have a key like this? Was he seeing someone? Having an affair? Who else? Tinny would find out.

Will wasn't that interested in the human side. He wanted to know about the helicopter. "Well, let's do some other looking while we're out here. I didn't come out here to find a hotel key. Maybe we'll find something else just as interesting that I won't want to give to the NTSB."

He wandered toward the hill as I stood in the middle of the impact point. I looked like a bird-watcher looking up in the trees. It was completely quiet but there was a notable absence of birds. I couldn't hear anything except the occasional breeze that passed through the treetops. I watched one particularly beautiful oak sway far above the ground. It had to be seventy-five feet tall. As I watched it move, I noticed a divot out of the top. I focused my binoculars and could see that several large branches in the top of the tree were hanging, clearly broken. I didn't have quite the right angle and took a few steps closer. I looked at the impact spot and then those trees around it. I called to Karl. "Hey." He turned. "Take a look at this."

He wandered over, stepping around a few still muddy spots. "What?"

I handed him the binoculars and pointed to the top of the oak tree. "Look at the branches up there. Those are fairly substantial. They've been knocked to the side."

He took the binoculars and studied the branches. "Any other branches like this around here?"

"Not that I've seen."

"Could it be something else?"

"Don't think so."

"Could a piece of the helicopter fall and hit that branch? Like the blade that might have come off?"

"I don't think so. That would have broken it downward. This is broken to the side."

"So you think that's it? The first point of impact with anything touching the ground?"

"I think so. But look at the direction of the break."

He focused the binoculars and leaned forward as if the extra couple of inches would make the difference.

I said, "They're broken left to right. See that?"

"Yes."

"WorldCopters are different. When you're sitting in the cockpit of the helicopter and look up at the blades, they're coming around clockwise. Over your head, as you look up, from left to right. American helicopters go the other way. If you're an American investigator who hasn't looked at French helicopters much before-or Russian for that matter, they go the same way as the French-you might forget that. So if you look at those branches, they are broken in the direction you'd expect from an American helicopter. But for a French helicopter crashing down through the trees, it's all wrong."

He continued to look up, considering what it meant. "So this is the opposite of what you'd expect if you knew the direction of rotation of Marine One's rotors."

"Right."

"Meaning…"

I took the binoculars and put them in the case. "Meaning Marine One was upside down when it came through the trees."

"Holy shit. Then it sure wasn't an autorotation that hit too hard. They were out of control long before they came close to the ground."