Passenger 19

TWENTY-FOUR

It was nearly ten o’clock when Davis got back to his room. He arrived to find a note from Delacorte taped to his door:

Davis climbed one flight of stairs, rounded the building and found 302 on the back side. The door was open and he found Delacorte sitting on a chair near the window. The room was much like his own, except the painting on the wall was of a mission-style church instead of a conquistador.

“I thought they put flankers up at the Ritz,” said Davis.

“I would prefer anywhere but this room. My air conditioner has stopped working.”

Davis saw a window-mounted air conditioner. The control panel had been removed, and wires dangled free like so much overcooked spaghetti. “Looks like you’ve already tried to fix it.”

“The fan motor has seized — there is no hope.” Delacorte fanned himself with a tourist brochure. “It does not get so hot in Paris.”

“If you want to drag your mattress around the corner you can bunk with me.”

“No, but thank you for offering.”

“I got your note. What’s the interesting information?”

“What you said earlier about landing on an unimproved field,” he raised a finger to imply a revelation, “it caused me to think of other possibilities.”

“Such as?”

“You have suggested that Flight 223 made an interim landing, after taking off from Bogotá but before the crash. We also have a dead copilot to consider, and another man dressed in a TAC-Air captain’s uniform, but who has not been identified.”

Davis nodded. “Not to mention the pastry chef who ended up as pilot-in-command.”

“It will be a challenge, I think, to construct a scenario that brings all these things together.”

“To say the least.”

“I’m afraid I have — what is the term in America? — one more wrench to throw in your machine.”

“By all means, toss away.”

Delacorte pulled out a tablet computer and kept talking as he typed. “In studying the hull I have discovered that certain parts remain missing. Of course, this is not at all unusual in such a devastating crash. There was, however, one absence I thought strange.” He turned the screen to show Davis a photograph of the forward side fuselage. “The main entry door is nowhere to be found.”

Davis studied the picture. He had seen the opening before, even stepped through it once, yet he’d attached no particular significance to the missing door. “Nobody mentioned that it hadn’t been found. I assumed it had broken off and was probably retrieved from the undergrowth.”

“A reasonable assumption. You and I often encounter missing doors. It is usually the result of an evacuation, or sometimes they are removed and discarded in haste by firefighting crews.”

Delacorte was right — doors were often absent. Such a normal occurrence, in fact, that he hadn’t seen it as relevant.

Delacorte continued, “The cabin of an ARJ-35 has four access doors. At the front you have a port-side entry door, the one we are missing, and an opposing starboard service door that was undisturbed in the crash sequence. Aft of these are two small emergency exit hatches, one above each wing. In our mishap the evacuation hatches remained in place — they were never opened. The two forward doors, of course, double as emergency evacuation points, although there are no emergency escape slides as you would find on a larger airliner.”

“So the missing entry door — are you going to tell me somebody survived the crash and opened the door as an emergency exit?”

“Actually, quite the opposite. That door will likely never be found.”

Davis looked at him quizzically.

Delacorte tapped the screen. “As you see, the door is a clamshell design, upper and lower halves hinged to the entryway frame. The bottom half contains an integral set of stairs, used at remote airports where no jetways or airstairs are available.” Delacorte switched to another image. “I took photographs of the hinges — these are from the bottom half of the door.”

Davis looked closely. Two heavy steel fittings had clearly failed, both twisted severely to the breaking point.

“I inspected them very closely,” said the engineer, “and I can tell you that they failed very clearly in torsion.”

“Torsion.”

“A terrific force twisted the door and ripped it off the airframe quite cleanly. The top hinge is nearly identical. I also discovered two dents on the leading edge of the inboard port wing, and another on the number one engine cowling. All of this supports my theory.”

Davis finally understood. “You’re saying this door opened in flight… that it was ripped off its hinges.”

A satisfied Delacorte said, “Almost certainly.”