Passenger 19

NINE

They call it rain forest for a reason. Moments after Marquez departed in the Huey the sky began to darken, and in a matter of minutes, the great slabs of cumulonimbus overhead reached their saturation point. It wasn’t as much a rain shower as a regional waterfall. The treetops were barely visible, and gusts whipped foliage into undulating emerald curtains.

Rather too late, Davis took shelter under an open-sided tent. Thick raindrops peppered the roof, a thousand tiny explosions meshing into a low-frequency white noise, the overhanging canvas flaps snapping wildly in the wind. Davis was more wet than dry, and in the pulsing gusts he had the peculiar sensation of being hot and cold at the same time. He stood alongside a dozen Colombians, a mix of army enlisted men and the colonel’s field technicians. There was also an exhausted powerplant expert from Pratt & Whitney, a man who’d flown in overnight from Miami and caught the first available chopper. Davis doubted the engines had anything to do with this crash — one of the few points he and Marquez agreed upon — but the big manufacturers always liked to have an ear to the ground while blame remained an open question.

There were three folding tables, and all had been turned into seating. Someone opened a cooler full of food and soft drinks, music began playing, and a spontaneous midday siesta began in earnest. Attacking a sandwich that might have been beef and cheese, Davis struck up a chat with the soldier standing next to him.

“How long is your duty out here?” he asked the cabo primero, or first corporal.

The young man smiled amiably. “We come last Friday. Stay three, maybe four days. More if our jefe say.”

“It was lucky you were so close to the crash site.”

“Two other squads were near, but we were closest.”

“Sounds like a big exercise. What kind of training were you doing?”

“Training? I don’t know about training.”

Davis foraged in the cooler for a second sandwich. “So what… you were just out here waiting for an airplane to crash?” Davis’ stab at humor was lost, the corporal only giving him an odd look.

“Sorry,” said the soldier. “English no so good.” He walked to the other side of the tent and began talking to a captain.

The rain began sweeping sideways, marginalizing the tent’s usefulness. Nobody seemed to care, least of all Davis who had far more pressing things on his mind. Raindrops pelted his face as he downed his second sandwich, ham and avocado on thick-sliced bread. He was determined not to waste a moment. If field work was impractical, he’d use the time for sustenance and to organize his thoughts.

Davis tried to tear apart the hijacking theory, but to shoot down such a circumstantial premise was like firing an air-to-air missile at a ghost. Moving on, he rehashed the rest, and one detail tugged at him again and again. The jet had ended up well off course. What at first had seemed an oddity now appeared vital. Hijacking or not, someone had been at the controls of Flight 223, and they’d brought it here. But who had been flying, and what was their intention? He was virtually certain Marquez would find that their pastry chef, Umbriz, had no flying experience. If that was the case, there were only two scenarios in which the man would have killed the pilots and taken over the jet. One was a suicide mission, perhaps with a political agenda. The second was that he was flat out deranged. Neither seemed likely.

But what then?

He checked his watch to note the exact time of each clap of thunder that seemed near. On reaching the first ten-minute interval of silence, Davis headed outside. His example was not followed — the party kept going strong. It was undeniably irritating, yet he decided to let it play out. Davis knew his level of commitment was unique, and could not be expected of the others. The rain tapered quickly, falling to a steady drizzle, and the jungle acquired a new heaviness. He stepped over streams of fresh runoff, forded through puddles of muck, and soon his clothes were riding his skin like a suit of wet rags.

He circled the fuselage, ending near the tip of the aircraft’s nose. An engineer would refer to it as station zero, the baseline longitudinal location. From that point, moving aft, the numbers increased, serving as reference units by which to gauge modifications, repairs, and weight and balance measurements. Davis would use station zero as his own starting point, thinking it the most methodical way to proceed.

He poked and prodded the radome, and under the cracked fiberglass housing he noted a damaged weather radar antenna. Climbing briefly onto the spine two feet farther aft, he saw nothing of interest. An unidentifiable piece of debris jutted from the ground along the port side, and Davis went down on his knees. With bare hands he dug through dirt and peat, and soon identified the part as a valve connected to a pencil-thin hydraulic line, almost certainly part of the nose gear assembly underneath. Not a noteworthy find, but one more thing to be logged and accounted for. That was how 99 percent of an investigator’s time was spent — documenting what wasn’t important in order to find what was.

An hour later he stopped for a water break.

After two, Davis stole a glance at his watch.

It was noon on Monday.

The second worst day of his life.

Which meant things were getting better.

The last helicopter to Bogotá from the crash site was set to leave at 6:45 that evening. Davis was given a ten-minute warning to be ready. He’d spent the entire day combing through wreckage, from nose to tail — or at least where the tail used to be. He’d found little to inspire him, and nothing to counter Marquez’ theory that they were looking at a hijacking. But then, there was also nothing to support it. Bent metal gave little inference as to what might have distilled in one man’s mind.

He reached the final row of seats shortly before the chopper was to arrive, and for the last time that day Davis stared at seat 7B. He’d been avoiding it, of course, like an elderly passerby might pretend to ignore a graveyard, yet he couldn’t return to Bogotá without one last look.

The seat appeared much the same, unblemished upholstery and cushions over an unbent frame. He realized that after finding Jen’s iPod he’d ventured no further into the seatback pocket. Davis slipped his hand in again, forcing the pocket wide, and behind an emergency evacuation card he saw something else. It was instantly recognizable — a dark-blue passport issued by the United States of America.

Davis made sure there was nothing more, then pulled the passport clear. It had to be Jen’s, and on the second page he found her picture. The document was four years old, the photo taken in her early high school years. Davis saw a passport smile less muted than most, captured before her spirit had been flattened by the death of her mother, and long before she would leave home for college at that double-edged age of independence.

The sound of the Huey rattling overhead brought Davis back to the present. It was time to go, but on a sudden impulse he checked the pocket in front of the window seat, 7A. There was no iPod, but to his surprise he found a second passport. This too was an American-issued item, and inside he found a picture of a girl Jen’s age. She had the same color hair and similar features. They could have passed for sisters. He remembered the final message Jen had left on his phone. She’d been at the airport in Bogotá and had already made a friend.

So here she was. Kristin Marie Stewart.

Feeling he was on a roll, Davis turned toward the aisle and regarded seat 7C. He slipped his hand into that pocket, and scooped out an old bag of peanuts and a plastic stir stick. Then something else caught his eye.

A crashed aircraft, if nothing else, is a study in contrast. Debris will range in condition from soiled to pristine, from ruined to unblemished. All the same, this was something he should have noticed. Amid the chaos all around, the aftermath of a frenzy of Newtonian mechanics, Davis saw one detail that didn’t fit. On the back of seat 7C, square in the center, were two small holes no larger than a dime. He tested one with his little finger, and then the other. Both went clean through. There was a subtle stain on the upholstery below the holes, a discoloration that didn’t catch the eye because something had spackled the remainder of the seatback, presumably mud from the crash sequence later flecked by rain.

But there was a stain. One that was dark and familiar.

Davis checked behind the seat, but there was nothing to see. The bulkhead was gone, and two feet farther back the shell of the shattered hull simply ended, presenting the forest like a jagged oval picture frame. He was staring intently, deep in thought, when someone shouted his name.

Davis was on the Huey three minutes later, rising into the fading orange twilight. Looking out over the scene, he saw a pair of dim lights to the east sweeping back and forth. At least one crew was still searching the wetlands for the last two bodies. Still searching. That was good, because it meant they hadn’t found anything yet. An optimist’s view, to be sure, and an outlook of which he’d rarely been accused of keeping. The chopper spun mercifully to a new heading, and the scene became more pleasant. Green forest under a painted sky, the sun playing its palette on a high deck of stratus clouds.

He pulled the two passports from his pocket and flipped open Jen’s. Davis ran his thumb over the page with her photograph, the embossments and security strips rough under his touch, but strangely comforting. So tactile and true.

“I’ll find you, baby,” he whispered. “Wherever you are, I’ll find you.”

Davis arrived back at the Bogotá airport at eight that evening. He was told that Marquez had arranged a room for him at a hotel within walking distance of the headquarters building — probably a place that kept a running contract with the military — and the duty officer at El Centro provided an initial vector.

It was a ten-minute walk to the Hotel de Aeropuerto, a solidly two-star affair. He was given a room on the second floor that had a bed, a tiny table with one chair, and a painting on the wall of a bearded conquistador on a horse. The smell of cheap cleanser chafed his respiratory system, but the place met his most immediate needs — the sheets looked clean, and there was a restaurant directly across the street. Until Jen was found, little else mattered.

After ten hours in the field — enduring three thunderstorms, one landslide, and a near lightning strike — Davis looked more like a survivor of a plane crash than an investigator. There was algae and moss in his hair, his fingernails were black with topsoil, and the crusted mud on his pants and shirt would clog anything less than a commercial-grade washing machine. He took everything off, rinsed his boots in the tub, and threw the rest in the trash. He took great care with his best finds of the day — Jen’s iPod and the two passports. The passports he would surrender to Marquez, as per procedure. The colonel already knew he had the iPod, and hadn’t asked for it, so Davis reasoned that was his to keep.

He pulled a clean hand towel from the rack in the bathroom, got it damp under the faucet, and wiped the iPod clean as best he could. He removed the device from its case, pressed the power button and got a flicker, the screen only lighting long enough to blink a red battery symbol before going dark. Davis stared for a long moment, then set the iPod on the nightstand next to the bed.

He returned to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and was met by a weary stranger. He’d been riding an emotional rocket, and spending last night on the floor of a prison cell, a minor concussion for company, had done nothing to brighten his mood. There had been little good news today, but all the same, he’d made it to sunset without hearing the worst news.

To the positive, his head felt better, and after a hot shower he put on fresh clothes, which meant his other khaki pants and a different drab cotton shirt. Like most former military men, he kept a detached sense of fashion, bordering on none at all. The clock by the bed showed eight thirty, and feeling revitalized, Davis knew what he had to do.

At the restaurant across the street he ordered the dinner special, which turned out to be a mountain of steak, chorizo, rice, and beans. In fractured Spanish, Davis tried to ask for it to go, and a bartender who’d studied accounting for two years at the University of Toledo laughed at him, and said, “No problem, buddy.”

On the way to El Centro he came across a store that sold pirated DVDs and cheap electronic gear, and in a discount bin he found a knock-off charger for Jen’s iPod Touch. The clerk asked for ten thousand Colombian pesos, which Davis didn’t have, so he charged it to his MasterCard having no idea how much he was paying for a few feet of wire and a connecting plug that was made in China.

He walked into headquarters at five minutes before nine. Two newly installed window-unit air conditioners were battling hard, sponging moisture from the viscous air and cutting the heat that clung fast into the late evening. He took a seat at a vacant computer, pulled out his sat-phone, and checked for messages. There were none. Pulling in a long breath, he set the phone down next to the keyboard, and was soon spooning rice and beans from a cup as he caught up with the day’s findings on the tragedy of TAC-Air Flight 223. He ate in the same deliberate manner in which he read, a physical manifestation of both thoughtfulness and fear. Davis didn’t want to miss anything, but sensed that he already had. It was a confining process, to be sure, yet a straightjacket from which he made no attempt to escape.

Page by tedious page, he forged ahead.

The small room was in a nondescript building on G Street in Washington, D.C. Two analysts, a man and a woman, blinked simultaneously when one of their computers chirped an alarm.

“What is it?” the man asked.

The two sat facing one another at opposing desks, and it was the woman’s machine that had alerted. “He just bought something with his MasterCard in Bogotá.”

“What?”

“It looks like… a charging cable for an iPhone.”

“An iPhone?” The man performed a quick cross-check. “He doesn’t own one. Davis is strictly an Android guy, and the sat-phone he was issued Sunday is a standard Iridium platform potted with our special variant of the operating system.”

The woman gave him a suffering look.

“Okay, okay — you knew that. Hang on.”

As he typed, the woman shrugged a sweater over her shoulders. The room was dimly-lit and windowless, and the thermostat kept, strictly under lock and key, at a chilly sixty-eight degrees. Even at the end of August.

“December 15 last year. He bought an iPod Touch at the Best Buy in Manassas, Virginia.”

“A Christmas gift?” the woman mused. “Or could he have bought it for himself?”

Thirty seconds later he had the answer. “During the last week of December someone downloaded nearly a thousand songs through his home computer.”

“Paid or pirated?”

It was his turn to frown. “A thousand songs? Who pays for that much music these days?”

“Sorry.”

“Hang on,” he said, “let’s be sure — I’ve got the playlist right here.” After less than a minute, “No, this doesn’t match the music on Davis’ Spotify account… not even close. It’s got to be the daughter’s, a Christmas present. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Okay. But why would he take his daughter’s iPod, full of her music, to Colombia?”

“And then forget the cable?”

Silence as they both pondered it.

“I don’t get it,” he said weakly.

“Me neither, let’s move on.”

“What’s he doing now?”

She looked at her screen. “We’re getting every keystroke through his phone — he must have set it down right next to the damned keyboard. He’s searching for performance data on ARJ-35s.”

“Okay, at least that makes sense.”

“What should we do about the iPod?” she asked.

“You know the orders.” An extended silence ran. “Where is Stuyvesant?”

The woman had to check. “He’s on another bus. Florida this time.”

“They might reach out to him there — the South Americans are all over Florida.”

“Maybe. But that’s out of our hands. And you didn’t answer my question. Are you going to send this little tidbit up?”

The man sighed. “Where is Strand now?”

She checked the schedule and told him.

“We can only use a landline there — even he has to turn his cell off.”

“The number is listed right here on the schedule. He put it there for a reason.”

The man relented, picking up a phone and placing the call. After two rings it was picked up across town in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

Right next door to the White House.