CRISIS IN THE SKIES

Pilots with no control…

High above the Adirondack Mountains, a commuter flight to New York City turns into a rolling, twisting nightmare, plunging from the sky before the crew regains control. Then, in London, a jetliner crashes into the runway, killing fifteen people.

Investigators with no answers…

Reporter Kate Page believes something beyond mechanical—or human—error is behind the incidents that have air investigators baffled. But the mystery deepens as teams scramble to pinpoint a link between the tragedies, and Kate receives an untraceable message from someone boasting responsibility and threatening another event.

A looming disaster…

As Kate, the FBI and the NTSB race to find answers, the shadow figures behind the operation launch their most devastating plan yet, and time ticks down on one of the greatest tragedies the world has ever known.

Praise for the novels of Rick Mofina

“Six Seconds should be Rick Mofina’s breakout thriller. It moves like a tornado.”

—James Patterson, New York Times bestselling author

“Six Seconds is a great read. Echoing Ludlum and Forsythe, author Mofina has penned a big, solid international thriller that grabs your gut—and your heart—in the opening scenes and never lets go.”

—Jeffery Deaver, New York Times bestselling author

“The Panic Zone is a headlong rush toward Armageddon. Its brisk pace and tight focus remind me of early Michael Crichton.”

—Dean Koontz, #1 New York Times bestselling author, on The Panic Zone

“Rick Mofina’s tense, taut writing makes every thriller he writes an adrenaline-packed ride.”

—New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen

“Mofina’s clipped prose reads like short bursts of gunfire.”

—Publishers Weekly on No Way Back

“Mofina is one of the best thriller writers in the business.”

—Library Journal (starred review) on They Disappeared

“Vengeance Road is a thriller with no speed limit!

It’s a great read!”

—Michael Connelly, New York Times bestselling author

Free Fall

Rick Mofina

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is for Barbara

Contents

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Fifty-Six

Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Eight

Fifty-Nine

Sixty

Sixty-One

Sixty-Two

Sixty-Three

Sixty-Four

Sixty-Five

Sixty-Six

Sixty-Seven

Sixty-Eight

Sixty-Nine

Seventy

Seventy-One

Seventy-Two

Seventy-Three

Seventy-Four

Seventy-Five

Seventy-Six

Seventy-Seven

Seventy-Eight

Seventy-Nine

Eighty

Eighty-One

Eighty-Two

Eighty-Three

Eighty-Four

Eighty-Five

Epilogue

Acknowledgments & A Personal Note

Extract

Copyright

One

Buffalo, New York

You’re not going to die today.

Kayla repeated her prayer as the boarding call for her flight at Buffalo Niagara International Airport was announced. Her thoughts raced as she clutched her boarding pass and ID while inching through the line to Gate 20. After the gate agent had cleared her, Kayla felt Logan’s reassuring hand on her shoulder as they walked along the jetway to their plane.

“You’re gonna be fine,” he said.

She offered him a weak smile. Drawing on the advice she’d absorbed from her motivational books and recordings, she fought her fear of flying by repeating her mantra.

I can do this. I’ve faced worse.

The jet was a new-model regional aircraft with eighty-six passenger seats, and today’s flight was full. Their seats were in the fourteenth row on the left side. Logan took the aisle. Kayla took the window.

After they’d stowed their bags overhead Kayla buckled her belt and continued battling her anxiety by attacking her scariest thoughts.

This plane is not going to crash. I’m safe. My boyfriend’s with me.

Logan took her hand in his and tried to calm her.

“Remember how important this trip is? Just think about that.”

Kayla nodded, concentrating on the reason why she had to get on this plane: because her dream was within her grasp. Tomorrow morning in New York City, she’d be interviewed for a position with a rising new fashion designer, Maly Kriz-Janda. The house had offices in London, Paris and Milan. It had recently opened a Manhattan office and was hiring new designers.

The jet’s door was shut and locked. An inboard chime sounded followed by an announcement.

“Flight attendants, prepare for departure.”

The attendants ensured the overhead bin doors were closed and seats and trays were up as the plane pushed back from the gate. The cabin lights flickered as the engines came on and the plane taxied out.

“Logan, the wings are bouncing.”

“It’s okay. They’re built to flex like that. It’s normal.”

As the attendants gave safety demonstrations about seat belts, flotation devices and emergency exits, for use “in the unlikely event...” Kayla heard the hydraulic moan of the flaps as they were adjusted by the pilot. The plane turned then stopped for several moments. As the engines whined louder another chime sounded.

“Attendants, prepare for takeoff.”

The knot in Kayla’s stomach tightened as the plane began rolling down the runway, slowly at first, gaining speed then accelerating faster, the ground blurring beneath them. Kayla struggled to control her breathing as the jet’s nose rose before she heard a thud when the weight lifted from the landing gear and the plane left the ground.

The thrust was overwhelming as the force of the climb pushed her into her seat. Kayla heard the groan and bump of the landing gear’s retraction. She squeezed Logan’s hand, shutting her eyes for a moment. Somehow, she found the strength to peek down at the earth, the expressways, buildings and suburbs rapidly shrinking below.

I can do this. I can do this.

As the plane leveled off, Kayla took a deep breath to calm herself, and the flight attendant made a series of announcements about keeping seat belts fastened, using electronic devices and the upcoming in-flight refreshment service.

“How’re you doing?” Logan asked.

Kayla nodded stiffly, smiling, still gripping his hand as he lowered his tray with his other hand.

“I’m getting some tomato juice,” he said. “What about you?”

“A diet cola, whatever they have.”

Not long after they’d received their drinks there was another announcement.

“This is Captain Raymond Matson with First Officer Roger Anderson. On behalf of our entire crew, welcome aboard EastCloud Flight Forty-nine Ninety. Very shortly we’ll reach our cruising altitude of twenty-seven thousand feet. Everything’s looking good. We have no weather ahead of us and no traffic jams at LaGuardia, so we expect a very smooth flight arriving on time. We should have you in New York at the gate in about an hour and ten minutes.”

“There you go,” Logan said. “It’ll be over before you know it.”

Kayla nodded and sipped her drink.

As the flight cut across Upstate New York, she tried to relax by focusing on the opportunity awaiting her in Manhattan. She’d studied fashion at Buffalo State where a professor, impressed with her designs, had done all he could to help her get noticed.

But nothing had happened.

After graduating Kayla had found a full-time position selling women’s clothing at the mall in Cheektowaga, the Walden Galleria. While she was uncertain about her aspirations and her future, she was grateful to have a job so she could start paying off her student loans.

Then, three weeks ago, everything had changed when, through her professor’s help, Kayla was short-listed for a position with Maly Kriz-Janda in Manhattan. They’d loved Kayla’s designs and the position involved flying to Los Angeles, Miami and Toronto for major conferences with North American retailers. Kayla wanted the job with all of her heart and had begun working on overcoming her fear of flying. But her expected call for an interview never came. The other candidates had been stronger.

Heartbroken, Kayla had soldiered on at the mall. Then, last week, her professor had learned that the two candidates ahead of her had dropped out of the running. One had accepted a job at Versace, and the other had gone to Givenchy. Two days ago, Maly Kriz-Janda had called Kayla, requesting she be in Manhattan for an interview as soon as possible. They’d pay all expenses—flight, hotel, meals and cabs.

Logan was thrilled for her. She’d asked him to go with her because she’d never flown before, and was terrified. He’d agreed, using his sister’s points to cover his flight.

What if I get the job? Kayla had asked him. I’d have to move to New York City. What would happen to us?

Logan, who was still in law school, had told her not to worry.

I’ll look into applying and transferring to a school there, he’d said. But don’t think about that. We’ll cross that bridge later.

Logan was good to her and she knew it. She took comfort in having him beside her now on what was her first—and maybe the most important—flight of her life.

“Hey, smile,” he said, pointing his phone at her. “I’m making a documentary of your first flight.”

Kayla waved.

“I’m really doing it. I’m flying. I’m nervous but I’m doing it.”

Then she turned to her window to take in the view below.

“It’s so pretty down there. Where are we?”

“I think we’re over the Catskill Mountains,” Logan said.

“Oh, I’ve got to take a picture.”

Kayla held up her phone to the window but it flew from her hand and her seat belt cut deep into her as the plane suddenly rolled hard, the right wing tipping toward the ground as if the jet was flipping over.

Bodies bumped over seats as people not belted were tossed to the right wall, along with laptops, backpacks and purses amid shrieks and loud bangs as items thudded and hammered in the overhead bins. The service trolley crashed into passengers in the right rows, spilling hot coffee and raining down cans of soda and juice.

The jet froze with its wings in a twelve-and-six-o’clock position.

Kayla clawed at Logan, locking her arms around him as people screamed, cursed and prayed.

Then the plane lurched hard to the left with the left wing pointing directly to the earth. Again, bodies flew through the cabin, slamming against other passengers, the wall and the overhead luggage bins. The bin doors opened and luggage tumbled like boulders along the left row. Logan reached out to grab an older woman who’d fallen into them but she slipped from his grip as the jet suddenly rolled right until it was almost level.

Now it began dropping, banking downward, as if it would spiral out of control. Passengers yelled and screamed, some calling out to God before the crew regained control and finally leveled the plane.

“Please, please, let this be over,” Kayla whispered through her tears.

In the aftermath, the attendants, despite being hurt and bleeding, took charge. Even as the sounds of crying and moaning passengers filled the plane, people began helping each other. Kayla thrust her face into Logan’s chest, slid her arms around him and sobbed, feeling his heart beating rapidly against her face.

Logan held her tight as the jet resumed a smooth flight.

Kayla prayed for the plane to land.

Get us back on the ground! Please, God, get us back on the ground!

Her cheek twitched as something wet and warm splashed on her skin; one drop then another. As she pulled back, she saw blood dripping down on them from the little boy who’d been contorted into the open luggage bin above them.

Two

Manhattan, New York

“New York, EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety...declar—an emer—”

“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, transmission garbled, say again...”

Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead, detected something in the chatter crackling from the news agency’s emergency scanners. More than a dozen of them issued a constant stream of coded bursts across from where she sat in the newsroom. Kate stopped her current work, jotted down the name of the airline, the flight number and listened.

“...EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety...injur—request—medic—”

Sounds like “injuries” and a call for medical services.

She listened as the dispatches continued echoing in the news department.

It was Saturday and the newsroom was nearly empty.

Kate had a bad feeling about what she’d heard. She went online. EastCloud 4990 was a commercial flight that had originated in Buffalo and was bound for LaGuardia. It was a new Richlon-TitanRT-86 with a capacity for eighty-six passengers. She quickly checked social media feeds. No one was tweeting about the flight.

Not so far, anyway.

She glanced at the corner and the glass-walled cubicle known as the scanner room. Reporters called it “the torture chamber,” because if you were assigned to sit in it you had to endure and decipher the chaotic, simultaneous cross-talk flowing from metropolitan New York City’s police, fire department, paramedics and other responders.

But no one was there.

The cubicle door was open, which is how Kate had been able to hear the chatter from the scanner.

What’s going on? Why isn’t someone listening?

This broke Newslead’s cardinal rule: never, ever leave the scanners unattended. Emergency scanners were the lifeblood of any news operation, alerting the reporters to the first cries for help, pulling them into stories that would stop the heart of the city.

Or break it.

Kate’s years of listening to police radios while working on crime desks in newsrooms across the country had given her the ability to pluck a key piece of data from dozens of staccato exchanges all happening at the same time. She knew the alphanumeric code systems. She could pick out a trace of emotion in a dispatcher’s voice, the underlying tension in a transmission. This was a skill Newslead, the global wire service, demanded from every member of its reporting staff, especially here at its world headquarters in Manhattan, where the competition was fierce. But the incessant noise, the confusion and pressure not to miss anything was torturous for some reporters, making a shift on the scanners the most dreaded job in the newsroom.

Another transmission from air traffic control crackled.

“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, we can give you Teterboro or Newark.”

The jet’s response was overtaken by static.

Damn. There’s a jetliner in trouble with injuries aboard and we don’t know where it’s headed.

Kate glared at the empty scanner room.

This is how we miss stories. This is how we get beat.

She made a quick check of the bank of flat-screen TV monitors tilted down from the ceiling over rows of empty desks. The sets were tuned to news channels with the volume turned low. Most newsrooms in New York subscribed to professional scanner-listening services that sent out alerts. Newslead had cut its subscription years ago to save money.

Nothing was breaking on TV, either. Kate picked up more dispatches.

“EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, repeat—we can give you Teterboro or Newark.”

“Thank you, New York. We’ve got a visual on the Verrazano Bridge. We’ll keep LaGuardia.”

“Forty-nine Ninety, stand by.”

Kate did another online check. No one was tweeting anything.

This is all happening now.

Resentment bubbled in the pit of her stomach. She’d come in today on her own time to finish a feature about crime on the subways of the world’s largest cities. She was pulling together files from Newslead’s bureaus in Mexico City, Seoul and São Paulo. But she had to stop. The situation on the radios gnawed at her.

No way am I taking the blame for us missing a major breaking story because someone else failed to do their job.

Kate went to the scanner room, looking for the incident log, or at least a note from whoever was on duty. She found nothing. Again, she looked around the newsroom. One person was working in graphics. Other than that, no one was around. A portrait of an industry withering before the internet, she thought. When she’d started, one hundred and forty newspeople had worked here at headquarters.

That number was now seventy-one.

Kate went to the news assistant’s desk, just in time to see a girl barely out of her teens returning while drinking from a thermos.

“Who’re you?” Kate asked.

“Penny. I’m the new assistant. Todd was here but he went home sick.”

“Who’s on the scanners?”

“Sloane. I forget his last name.”

“Parkman. Where is he?”

“He told me he was stepping out to get scones and would be right back. Is everything okay?”

Kate rolled her eyes.

Sloane was the worst person you could put on scanner duty. All that crash-and-burn stuff is a bit too tabloid for me, but they say everybody has to do their time here, she’d overheard him tell a friend on the phone.

He’d joined Newslead a year ago between rounds of layoffs. His family was one of New England’s oldest. He had degrees from Harvard and Columbia, had worked at the Washington Post and Forbes, and had boasted about having political connections in Washington and corporate connections on Wall Street.

He always introduced himself as Sloane F. Parkman and assured you that he knew everyone and everything, right down to the best bars in Manhattan, the best shops and restaurants. He wore Brooks Brothers shirts, had a gleaming, white-toothed grin and never had a hair out of place.

How he’d gotten a job with Newslead in a time of cutbacks was no mystery. Kate knew that he’d been hired at the urging of her editor because of mutual family ties. There were no secrets in a newsroom. Sloane had half the news-reporting experience that Kate had yet he regarded her as he would an untested rookie, and as a latter-day-Dickensian working-class woman to be pitied.

I applaud you for what you’ve achieved in your life, he’d told her one day. It’s nothing short of heroic, putting yourself through that community college in Chicago the way you did—sorry I’d never heard of it. In any event, here you are. And raising a child alone. Bravo, Kate. Bravo.

That was Sloane F. Parkman.

Kate entered the scanner room with Penny in tow as new transmissions came through clearly.

“Forty-nine Ninety, this is LaGuardia tower. Are you declaring an emergency?”

Kate took notes, motioning for Penny to sit in the empty chair and use the computer at the desk.

“Penny, did they teach you how to listen to the scanners?”

“No, not yet.”

“Did Todd show you how to alert the photographers on duty and call freelancers?”

“Yes.”

“Okay—wait—listen!”

More transmissions were coming through. Kate cranked up the volume and took notes.

“Affirmative. We’re declaring an emergency. We have passenger and crew injuries aboard. Approximately thirty, some pretty bad. We’ll need a lot of ambulances.”

“Fatalities?”

“None to report.”

“Forty-nine Ninety, do you have damage to your aircraft?”

Kate was writing as fast as she could, trying to make sure her notes were clear.

“Damage to the cabin, ceiling, galley, storage bins.”

“Are you citing turbulence?”

“Negative. Negative on turbulence. We had a sys—” A burst of static drowned out part of the transmission, but the message ended clearly with “—malfunction.”

“Repeating. You’re reporting a—” more static “—malfunction?”

“Affirmative.”

“Forty-nine Ninety, you have priority clearance to land. Runway Four. Crash and Rescue will meet you at your gate.”

“Roger...visual approach for Runway Four...”

Penny turned to seek direction from Kate but the older woman had already grabbed her bag and was rushing toward the elevators.

“Penny, I’m heading to LaGuardia!” Kate shouted. “Alert every photographer and let them know we have a plane in trouble landing now!”

Three

Queens, New York

As the taxi raced through the skyscraper-lined streets, Kate searched for updates on her phone.

Nothing so far.

She set up an alert for anything that broke on EastCloud Flight 4990.

Crosstown traffic was good; there were few double-parkers and unloaders blocking the street, and within minutes they’d entered the Midtown Tunnel. It smelled of exhaust and gleamed gold from headlights reflecting on the walls. As it curved under the East River to Queens, Kate found herself taking stock of her job and her life.

Wasn’t she living her dream?

For as long as she could remember, she’d wanted to be a reporter and to get her life on track. In spite of all that she’d endured, she’d managed to work her way up the journalistic ladder to a position at Newslead, one of the world’s top news organizations. The global newswire service had bureaus in every major city in the United States and in one hundred countries. Its reputation for excellence had been solidified by awards it had won throughout its history, including twenty-two Pulitzers. Newslead was respected and feared by its chief rivals, such as the Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters. Kate was proud to work for Newslead, but things were changing.

Fierce competition, the corrosive impact of the internet on the distribution of news and the melting number of subscribers continued to exact a toll.

Kate had to struggle not to pin her hopes on the rumor that Chuck Laneer, the editor who’d hired her at Newslead before he’d left to teach at Columbia after clashing with former management, was returning to help rebuild the news division. Chuck was gruff, wise and old-school. He could kick your butt and respect you at the same time.

But so far the news of Chuck’s return was only gossip.

The reality was that anxiety had gripped the newsroom. Management weighed every financial decision extensively. Staff faced constant evaluation. Performance on every news story was scrutinized. Newslead had instituted a “staff efficiency process,” linking story count and story pickup to individual performance assessments. It was championed by Kate’s editor, Reeka Beck, a twenty-eight-year-old Ivy League management zealot.

Reeka had a cover-girl face, an insatiable ambition and was convinced that her news judgment was superior to that of seasoned journalists. Reeka had been a junior copy editor at Newslead’s Boston bureau, whose collective work had been a finalist for a Pulitzer. In reality, she possessed little reporting experience. She’d never covered a homicide or asked an inconsolable parent for a picture of their dead child.

But her moneyed bloodline gave her an advantage. Reeka’s uncle sat on Newslead’s board of directors. However, most people strained to tolerate her—her dealings with reporters were often so curt and officious they bordered on rudeness. Conversations with her nearly became confrontations. Reeka had embraced the staff efficiency process even though it was killing morale.

Last month twenty people were let go from headquarters. Some were news veterans like Liz Cochrane, who’d covered wars, interviewed Mexican drug lords and escaped being kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq. Liz had sat near Kate and that day had been horrible.

She’d seen Liz falling apart at her desk while reading her severance letter then tenderly placing her belongings in a box for printing paper—A cardboard coffin for my career, she’d joked while saying goodbye.

Even though Kate had made it through the latest round of terminations, watching the funereal march of dismissed colleagues had been heart-wrenching. She’d been in their shoes; she was familiar with that soul-shattering feeling, for she’d struggled much of her life.

She was a thirty-two-year-old single mom with a nine-year-old daughter and she was living with her sister, Vanessa. There were days when Kate felt like she was hanging on by her fingertips but she was still here, doing the best that she could because she was a fighter who never gave up.

The cab left the tunnel and passed through the toll gates. As it accelerated on the Long Island Expressway, Kate’s phone rang.

It was Reeka. “What’re you doing, Kate?”

“Heading to LaGuardia. We’ve got a plane in trouble.”

“You’re not on today. Who assigned you to go to LaGuardia?”

“No one. I was in the newsroom working on my subway crime feat—”

“I just spoke with Sloane. He’s on duty and he assures me that this Buffalo jet thing is minor. He’s been listening to the scanners all day.”

“No, he wasn’t there when I was there, when things were popping!”

Sloane’s trying to cover his ass by hanging me out to dry—

“Kate, were you in today hoping to collect overtime?”

“No. Reeka, listen, I was there on my own time working on my feature when this broke on the scanners. Sloane was out buying scones.”

“I don’t think so. I know Sloane and if he says—”

Anger bubbled in Kate just as her phone chimed with a news alert. The Associated Press had issued a bulletin: “Commuter jet with multiple injuries on board declares emergency landing at LaGuardia.”

“Reeka, did you see what AP’s just put out?”

A moment passed before Reeka responded.

“I see it. Okay, get to the airport and file as soon as you can.”

Four

Queens, New York

Sirens wailed and emergency lights flashed as two ambulances sped by Kate’s cab on the Grand Central Parkway near the airport.

“We need Terminal C, arrivals pickup area.”

She directed the driver while keeping her phone to her ear. After four attempts, she’d finally reached Dwayne, somebody with EastCloud’s public affairs. He’d put her on hold.

She’d already left messages with the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration, LaGuardia Airport, the Port Authority and several other agencies. No responses. Her taxi was on the ramp to the airport when the line clicked and Dwayne returned.

“Sorry, who’ve I got here?”

“Kate Page with Newslead. What happened to Flight Forty-nine Ninety? Why did it declare an emergency?”

“We’re still assessing matters. We’ll put out a statement soon.”

“Are there fatalities? How many injur—?”

“I have to go.”

“Can you estimate the number of injuries?”

“We’ll put out a statement. I really have to go.”

The call ended as Kate’s cab slowed on the edge of havoc.

Red, white, orange and blue lights blinked from the police, fire and paramedic vehicles that were jammed outside the Terminal C arrivals area, backing up traffic. Kate paid her driver, who hastily scrawled a receipt.

Her phone was chiming with news alerts. She saw two news vans parked to the side. Up ahead, TV crews with shoulder-held cameras were shooting footage of people on stretchers being loaded into ambulances. Kate arrived to see one woman, her back raised on a gurney, her head bandaged and tears in her eyes. Microphones hovered near her and reporters hurled questions at her as paramedics placed her in an ambulance.

“Can you describe the flight?”

“It was horrible!” the woman said. “Just horrible!”

A cop inserted himself between the paramedics and cameras.

“Back off guys, back off!”

Kate’s phone continued chiming with alerts. Bloomberg and Reuters had issued bulletins on Flight 4990. Finally, she saw one from Newslead. Someone on the desk must have woken up, Kate thought. It sure as hell couldn’t have been Sloane.

Things were buzzing online, too.

Pictures were popping up everywhere. Twitter had images of the aftermath in the cabin. Luggage, clothes, books, laptops, food containers and other items were strewn about the interior. In one clear photo she was certain she’d seen streaks of blood.

Kate scanned the crowd for a Newslead photographer. Not finding one, she went inside to the busy baggage-claim area where more news cameras had encircled passengers who were recounting their ordeal for reporters. She joined one group and extended her recorder.

“Could you please take us through it again?” someone asked.

“It was right after they’d served us drinks,” a man with bloodied scrapes on his cheeks began. “Then bam, the plane tilts like we’re going to roll upside down. Like this.” He extended his arms, one hand pointed to the floor, the other to the ceiling as the woman beside him nodded.

“Everybody and everything not belted or bolted down flew,” the woman said, her eyes still wide with shock.

“People were hurled like rag dolls. The service trolley smashed around. We were hanging on with all we had,” the man said. “Then the plane rolled the opposite way, tossing people and things around like we were in a clothes drier. People were screaming and praying.”

“The luggage bins opened,” the woman said. “Suitcases and bags crashed on everyone. Then the jet just dropped and we were plunging, diving down. My stomach was in my mouth.”

“What went through your mind at this point?” a reporter asked.

“That we weren’t going to survive. That we were so helpless. That this was the end,” she said.

“How long did it last?” another reporter asked.

“I don’t know.” The man shook his head. “Five, maybe eight minutes.”

Kate glanced around and was relieved to see Stan Strobic, a Newslead photographer, had joined the group.

“When it was over,” the woman said, “and they got things under control, it got quiet, except for the moans and sobs. People were trying to comfort those who were hurt. I think one lady was a nurse. But the pilot never came on and said what happened. Nobody has told us anything.”

As the interview wound down, the couple—Connie and Carmine Delvecchio—spelled their names for the reporters. They ran a family towing business on Staten Island. Kate passed them her card.

Then she saw a woman across the baggage-claim area. She was near the baggage carousels, sitting alone on a bench, her back to the wall, her head raised with her eyes closed in anguish.

Kate nodded to Strobic to hang back as she approached her alone.

“Excuse me.”

The woman looked to be in her mid-thirties. She had a pretty, fresh-scrubbed face and was gripping her phone in her lap with both hands.

“Yes?”

“I’m Kate Page. I’m a reporter with Newslead. Were you on EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety?”

The woman nodded.

“Can I get your name?”

“Diane Wilson.”

“Would you talk to me for a story about what happened on the flight?”

The woman was trembling as she adjusted her hold on her phone. She swallowed hard.

“It was the worst thing you could imagine,” she said.

Kate sat next to her. “Tell me about it.”

“I was certain we were going to crash and I was going to die.”

Kate took notes. “And at that moment, what went through your mind?”

“All I could think about was my family, that I’d never see them again, so I said goodbye.”

Kate took a quick look around. “Your family was on the plane with you?”

“No. I was alone. I used my phone to make my last message to my children and my husband.”

Diane lifted the phone slightly and lovingly from her lap.

“You texted them?”

“I made a video.”

“Did you send it to them?”

“No.”

“Has anyone seen it?”

“No.”

“Would you let me see it?”

Diane considered Kate’s request.

“I’m not sure. It’s private and my family’s coming to get me.”

“I know, but it might help me to really understand what you and the other passengers went through. It would help readers appreciate your ordeal.”

Diane lowered her head to her phone, caught her bottom lip between her teeth and her face crumpled. She fought tears as she stared at her phone for a moment, then her fingers began working.

“You can look at it but I can’t give it to you.”

The screen came to life with Diane’s face, a mask of fear. Through her tears she struggled to smile as her voice quivered in the cabin.

“It doesn’t look good. The plane’s in trouble and I don’t think we’re going to make it. No matter what happens, you know that Mommy absolutely loves you. Brandon, honey, take care of Melissa. Melissa, you help your brother take care of Daddy. Del, sweetheart, you’re the love of my life. Be good to each other and remember how much I love you.”

Kate caught her breath.

For a second the footage exploded in chaos as the jet tilted at a ninety-degree angle, the image froze before the screen went black.

Five

Manhattan, New York

Passengers and crew were tossed “like rag dolls” in the cabin of the EastCloud Airlines flight when it encountered severe turbulence, sources told Newslead.

What the—? That’s not what I wrote and that’s not what happened!

Kate had just returned to the Newslead building from LaGuardia and was in the elevator when her phone alerted her to Newslead’s first full story on Flight 4990. She was incredulous as she read. Ninety percent of the item was her work but the story was topped with a single byline:

Sloane F. Parkman.

She was credited at the bottom in smaller font.

With files from Kate Page.

She cursed. And as the elevator rose, she seethed.

Calm down and think this through.

Biting back her anger she checked her phone for responses to the repeated calls she’d put in to the official agencies. Not much had come back to her, except a text from LaGuardia Operations, with a short general timeline from when Flight 4990 first reported a problem to its emergency landing.

The doors opened to Newslead’s fortieth-floor offices.

Kate swiped her ID at the security lock and swept through reception, with its wall of enlarged Newslead photos of pivotal points in history—immigrants gazing at the Statue of Liberty in 1901, a child in Africa comforted by an aid worker, a soldier weeping in Vietnam, and Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial.

In the newsroom she saw no sign of Penny, the news assistant. But when Kate passed by the glass walls of the editors’ offices, she noticed Reeka Beck’s jacket and bag on her desk.

Reeka was not in her office as Kate went by.

But Sloane F. Parkman was in the scanner room, on the phone, working at the computer with the door closed. He was hanging up as Kate pulled it open to the onslaught of the radios.

“Hi, Kate. I’ve just confirmed that they took the injured passengers to hospitals in the area—Sinai, NYP/Queens and Forest Hills. We’re pretty sure they’re all minor injuries, one little boy with a concussion and broken arm, so no big deal on this incident. By the way, thank you for your help on my story. It wasn’t necessary but nice work, much appreciated.”

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Sloane?”

“Excuse me?”

“You know what I’m talking about. What’s your name doing on my story, and why did you cite turbulence? It wasn’t turbulence!”

“Sorry, but I’m on duty today, you’re not. Didn’t Reeka talk to you? She’s come in. I think she’s getting a coffee.”

“Sloane, you weren’t here when this story broke.”

“I was.”

“You weren’t. You’d left the scanner room unattended to get scones. Where’s the news assistant, where’s Penny?”

“Her shift ended.”

“Penny and I were both in this room when I caught the dispatches from Forty-nine Ninety. You weren’t here.”

“I was here, Kate, when I heard the dispatches—”

“What you heard—when you came back—was the aftermath!”

“I was here! Look, I’m trying to be diplomatic but the truth is you were trying to hijack my story.”

“Bullsh—”

“What’s going on?” Reeka stood behind Kate.

“I told you, Reeka, Sloane was not at the scanners when the story broke and he’s inserted incorrect information into the story I filed.”

“What’s incorrect?”

“His unnamed sources said turbulence was the problem. It was not turbulence. It was a malfunction.”

“What kind of malfunction?”

“I don’t know.”

Reeka looked at Sloane then at Kate.

“He has impeccable sources in the airline industry. Who’s your source that contradicts his?”

“The pilot.”

“You interviewed the pilot?” Reeka asked.

“No, it came over the scanner. There was static but I heard the crew say it was not turbulence, it was a malfunction.”

Reeka looked to Sloane.

“Did you hear anything like that?”

He shook his head.

“He wasn’t here!” Kate said.

“Kate, do you have an on-the-record source confirming it was a malfunction? The NTSB? EastCloud? Any official?”

“Not yet.”

“Kate,” Reeka said, “we all know that the information we hear on police radios can often be wrong, especially with first reports. When I arrived Sloane was at his post and he had everything in hand.”

“Oh my God.” Kate shook her head in disbelief.

“What?” Reeka asked.

“You actually believe him. He’s trying to downplay this story while taking credit for it and being wrong about it. He lied and you believe him. This could hurt Newslead.”

“Excuse me,” Sloane said. “I take umbrage at your accusation, particularly after you tried to secure overtime by hijacking a call I was handling.”

Fury burned through Kate and as she battled to restrain herself she glimpsed the plastic trash can holding a white crumpled take-out bag. She retrieved it and flattened it out. The bag was from Miss Muffet’s Café & Cakes and had “Sloane” scrawled on it in marker. A receipt was stapled to it. Kate circled the date and time of purchase.

Then she took a picture with her phone.

“What’re you doing?” Reeka asked, as if Kate had lost her mind.

Sloane shook his head.

“This looks like yours, right? You’re the only Sloane in the room,” Kate said, scrolling on her phone, holding it out for Sloane and Reeka to see a text concerning Flight 4990. “And this is the timeline from LaGuardia, proof that when the plane was in trouble, you were at Miss Muffet’s buying scones. Proof that you lied.”

Sloane glared at Kate, saying nothing.

“I think,” Reeka said, “given the circumstances, everybody needs to take a breath here.” A long, uneasy moment passed before she continued. “Kate, if you can stay to help update the story, I’ll authorize your overtime. Sloane, I’m assigning you to tie up loose ends and follow up the story tomorrow. We’ll get the night desk to monitor for developments and top off with any updates. Okay?”

Reeka looked to Kate then Sloane before concluding.

“As for what happened here—we’ll talk later and sort out what appears to be a misunderstanding. Is everybody clear?”

“Crystalline,” Sloane said.

Kate said nothing, and left the room.

* * *

Misunderstanding.

Kate fumed as she worked at her desk.

There’s no misunderstanding. I caught Sloane failing at his job and lying about it. And Reeka protects him. This is how the one percenters get ahead.

One thing had been hammered home: Sloane was not to be trusted. That guy was not a reporter—he was somebody’s favor. It was dangerous for Kate and for Newslead but she had to shove it all aside and get on with her work.

She went back to her subway feature and was nearly finished when she received a text from EastCloud. The airline had just issued a news release on Flight 4990.

The flight encountered an as-yet-undefined situation on its approach into New York and 28 passengers and 2 flight attendants received injuries ranging from fractures and concussions, to minor cuts and bruising, to nausea. All were evaluated by paramedics at the airport and were transported to area hospitals for observation as a precaution. None of the injuries are considered life-threatening or critical at this time. EastCloud will work closely with the National Transportation Safety Board to determine the nature of this incident. The aircraft will be taken out of service during the investigation.

As Kate digested EastCloud’s statement, she tapped her finger on her desk. “An as-yet-undefined situation.” What was that supposed to mean? Kate began flipping through her notes from the scanner, looking for the original comments the crew had made.

New York Center had clearly asked 4990 if it was citing turbulence.

The crew’s response: Negative on turbulence. We had a malfunction.

Kate’s phone rang.

“Paul Murther, spokesperson with the NTSB.”

“Paul, what happened on EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety? Why did it declare an emergency?”

“We can’t speculate on that. All we can say at this time is that we’re gathering all the details. We’re looking at the severity of the injuries and for any damage to the aircraft. We’ll analyze the flight data.”

“Was it turbulence or a malfunction?”

“We can’t speculate but I can confirm that we’re putting a team together to investigate.”

Kate alerted Reeka to the new information she’d received then began updating the story with a new lede.

Mystery surrounds the cause of mayhem aboard an EastCloud Airlines flight that tossed some thirty passengers and crew “like rag dolls,” injuring some seriously, officials indicated to Newslead.

More than once the Richlon-TitanRT-86 rolled to a ninety-degree angle, causing some passengers to prepare final messages to their loved ones.

“It doesn’t look good. The plane’s in trouble and I don’t think we’re going to make it,” Diane Wilson told her children and husband in a farewell video she’d recorded on the stricken flight...

After she’d sent her story to Reeka, she went to the washroom to freshen up. Upon returning, she was glad the updated story had been issued with a solitary byline on top: “Kate Page.”

She thought of Diane Wilson, the mother from Brooklyn, and her goodbye video. Then she looked at the faces of her daughter and sister smiling back at her from the framed photo next to her computer monitor. Grace and Vanessa.

What would I say to you in the final moments of my life?

Six

Washington, DC

Jake Hooper kept pace with the rhythmic jingling of the leash as he and his German shepherd, Pax, trotted alongside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool at the National Mall.

Pax panted happily. He loved running here. But Hooper was running with a heavy heart. His dog was getting on and his arthritic pain and bone spurs had taken a toll. The vet didn’t give Pax much time before the pain would be unbearable and he’d have to be put down.

Hooper and his wife, Gwen, couldn’t have children. For them, Pax was a cherished family member who gave them nothing but unconditional love. Hooper was thinking about what life would be like without him when his phone rang and he stopped cold.

It was from the National Transportation Safety Board duty officer.

“Jake, it’s Crawley at the comms center. We got one at LaGuardia, an EastCloud Richlon-TitanRT-86. More than two dozen injured. No fatalities. Landed without incident.”

“Thank God for that. Do we have a suspected cause?”

“Crew reports a flight control computer malfunction.”

“A computer malfunction?” Hooper considered it.

“The RT-86 is a new model. That’s why we’re traveling on this one. I’m sending you a ticket now.”

“Okay. I’ll get home, grab my bag and get to National.”

Hooper cupped Pax’s head in his hands, reading the question in his big eyes.

“That’s right. I gotta go, pal.”

They caught a cab home to their porch-front row house in Glover Park. Hooper took a quick shower, called a cab and set out bowls of fresh water and food for Pax, who whined a goodbye as Hooper shouldered his prepacked bag and locked the house.

In the cab to the airport, he texted Gwen, who was at her sister’s in Georgetown. Then he digested the information coming in about the aircraft and the occurrence.

EastCloud Flight 4990 had originated in Buffalo, bound for LaGuardia, with eighty passengers and five crew aboard. The plane had been twenty-seven thousand feet over the Catskills when it suddenly rolled ninety degrees right, then ninety degrees left, then dropped seven thousand feet before the crew regained control. Result: twenty-eight passengers and two attendants injured, some of them seriously. There was damage to the cabin.

The crew reported a flight-management systems problem. But there are safety features to guard against that.

Hooper’s years as an NTSB investigator had taught him that initial information on the circumstances of an incident was often incomplete. He always regarded preliminary data with caution. They had a long way to go yet and a lot to do, like analyze the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, and talk to the crew.

He considered the plane.

The RT-86 had come on stream about two years ago with few problems. The new model had a good safety record with no incidents with significant implications. Bottom line, Hooper thought the RT-86 was a very solid, state-of-the-art commercial jetliner.

So what could’ve caused the problem?

Don’t overthink this. Wait until all the facts are known, he thought. But it was impossible not to consider theories. He was a detective. Probing crashes and incidents was all he’d done since he’d got his degree in aeronautical science from Arizona State University.

Hooper had been among the top graduates of his class. Right out of school he’d been hired as a civilian at Naval Air Systems Command in Virginia, where he’d examined United States Navy and Marine Corps aircraft accidents.

Along the way, he’d become a licensed pilot, then a flight instructor, and he’d obtained an engineering degree. He’d left Virginia when he’d been hired by the MacCalleb Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas, as a flight test engineer. He’d taken part in dozens of accident investigations, providing technical help to Federal Aviation Administration safety inspectors and the NTSB. He’d frequently and successfully challenged their findings.

Hooper’s exceptional work led to a position as an NTSB regional investigator then, eventually, a job with Major Investigations Division at their headquarters in Washington. His insights impressed seasoned experts and he was not afraid to challenge supervisors. Hooper didn’t care because he adhered to the belief, as did all investigators, that safety was paramount; that with each tragedy, each incident, his job was to find information that would prevent other accidents and enhance the safety of air travel.

He was obsessed, almost pathologically so, with ensuring that nothing in an investigation was ruled out without being triple-checked and triple-checked again.

Today, he was anxious because this was his last time on a Go Team as a senior air safety investigator. After this investigation, he’d be promoted to investigator-in-charge, the IIC, and would lead his own team.

Hooper’s cab stopped at Departures and he headed for the American Airlines desk. The NTSB comms center had sent him an electronic ticket for the next flight to LaGuardia. Tapping his mobile boarding pass and showing his ID, Hooper made his way through security to the preboarding area of his gate, where he recognized members of the Go Team.

“Hey, Jake, you old tin-kicker.” Swanson, the expert on power plants, shook his hand.

They were joined by Willet from maintenance. From human performance, sitting off alone working on a laptop, was Irene Zimm. She was known as Good Night Irene, because if she found that a pilot had violated any aspect of safety procedures, it meant a world of pain.

The one man who didn’t greet Hooper was on the phone: Bill Cashill, a case-hardened veteran. He had no love for Hooper, who’d once corrected Cashill at an investigation, something Cashill had never forgotten and never forgiven. Cashill was set to retire after thirty years as a leading investigator on some of the board’s biggest crashes. He was the investigator-in-charge. He glanced at Hooper then resumed concentrating on his call before he finally stood and surveyed his team.

“What do you think about this EastCloud incident, Bill?” Willet asked.

“I think this is overkill, even with a partial team.”

“But it’s a new-generation aircraft,” Swanson said.

“I’m aware of that, but my gut’s telling me that this thing has all the indications of an overreaction by the crew to clear-air turbulence.”

“But the crew said—” Hooper started.

“I know what the crew said, Jacob.”

Hooper preferred to be called Jake, and Cashill knew it.

An uneasy moment passed before Irene Zimm broke it.

“Bill, would you come over for a second and look at this?”

Cashill went over to Zimm, who turned her computer so he could see the screen. They chatted quietly. A short time later, they boarded their jet for the one-hour flight to New York. As it leveled off, Hooper took stock, reflecting on Gwen. They’d been high school sweethearts and they had an anniversary coming up. He was going to surprise her with a pearl necklace and matching earrings.

The soft cry of a baby two rows ahead saddened him, not only because Hooper and Gwen would never have children, but because it pulled him back to the horrors of his job.

No matter how many investigations he’d done, it never got easier. He’d lost count of how many times he’d found charred remains, dead passengers holding each other at the moment of impact, victims entwined in metal debris, impaled in trees, buried in the ground.

He still had nightmares.

The baby in the seat ahead continued crying and pulled him back to last year, when a commuter jet had lost both engines on its approach to Memphis during a storm at night and plowed into a hillside. Forty-seven people had died. Walking alone in a wooded area among scattered pieces of twisted wreckage, Hooper had come upon a baby.

The only visible injury had been a tiny bloodied scrape on its head.

The child had been beautiful, a perfect angel, wearing pajamas with teddy bears and rabbits. Its eyes had been closed and it had appeared to be sleeping as a soft breeze lifted strands of its hair.

The baby had been dead.

Suddenly the wall Hooper had built to protect himself from the emotional toll of his work had crumbled and he’d been overcome. He’d dropped to his knees beside the baby and said a silent prayer, had removed his jacket and gently covered the child, then reached for his radio to call the medical examiner’s staff.

Now, as his plane jetted to New York, he looked at the sky, relieved this incident had had no fatalities.

Seven

Queens, New York

The next morning a vacuum cleaner hummed down the hall from a meeting room in LaGuardia’s central terminal.

Outside the room’s closed doors, Captain Raymond Matson waited alone to be interviewed by NTSB investigators. Nervous tension had dried his throat and he’d grown thirsty.

He hadn’t slept well.

He thought of his passengers and crew—they’d suffered fractures and concussions. Rosalita Ortiz, one of the flight attendants, had broken her back.

Matson clenched his eyes tight.

He’d already given a verbal report to an FAA inspector who’d met him and the first officer yesterday at the gate, and he’d provided a blood sample for analysis.

After several seconds, Matson opened his eyes. He resumed reviewing his notes when his phone vibrated with a text from his lawyer.

Papers are ready to sign whenever you can drop by. That’ll be it.

Matson stared at the message. With his signature, his sixteen-year marriage would be over. For a brief instant, he remembered a time when they’d been happy. He stared at a mural on the wall of Manhattan’s skyline and his wife’s accusations played through his thoughts:

You’re never home. You’ve become a ghost to us and I’m so tired of being a single parent to three children.

She’d already taken the kids and moved back to Portland. She’d let him take care of the house in Westfield; a for-sale sign was on the front lawn. She’d get 60 percent when it sold, according to the settlement. It was true. He’d missed birthdays, Little League games, recitals and graduations. He was married to his job and now it was hanging by a thread. The doors opened.

“Captain Matson, we’re ready to see you.”

A woman invited him inside to an empty chair at one end of a large boardroom table. The woman, dressed in a burgundy jacket, white top and matching pants, took her seat at the opposite end.

“Thank you for coming in so early this morning, Captain. I’m Irene Zimm with NTSB. I’ll be leading this session. To my right is Bill Cashill and Jake Hooper with the NTSB, then we have...”

She introduced the half dozen other officials who were seated at the table with notepads and pens poised. Small microphones rose from the table before each of them, as well as Matson himself. All eyes and a video camera were on him as Zimm proceeded.

“As we begin, you understand that this interview is being recorded, and anything you say will inform our investigation?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“And you understand the rules and policies of the board, your airline and union, about talking to the media or public?”

“Yes, I understand.”

“Very well, we’ll go over some preliminary matters. We have a summary of your verbal report. You’ve been in contact with Gus Vitalley from the pilots’ union, seated to your left.”

“Yes, we spoke yesterday.”

“And we have your blood sample.”

“Yes.”

Zimm tapped her pen on an open file folder she had before her and consulted a laptop next to it. “We’ll confirm your personal background with you. You’ve been with EastCloud for approximately thirteen years, and have been a captain for six of those years, correct?”

“That is correct.”

“You have over twelve thousand total flight hours, of which you were pilot-in-command for seven thousand flight hours.”

“Yes.”

“I see that you have no incidents and no failed check rides.”

“Correct.”

“As for the new Richlon-TitanRT-86, you have approximately eight hundred flight hours as the pilot-in-command.”

“Yes.”

“Prior to this trip, you and the first officer, Roger Anderson, had flown together twice before?”

“Yes. Chicago to San Diego and Phoenix to Atlanta, both in RTs.”

“Thank you. The aircraft has been taken out of service and moved to a maintenance hangar. The flight data recorder and the voice cockpit recorder have been removed and sent to our lab in Washington for analysis. We’ll also be examining air traffic control radar and weather. Now, leading up to the incident, you reported the trip as routine with no weather issues.”

“That’s correct.”

“Approximately twenty-five minutes into the flight, your course was one hundred fifteen degrees southeast, speed was four hundred ninety-one knots and your altitude was twenty-seven thousand feet, when you experienced a sudden, unintended series of roll oscillations, ninety degrees to the right then ninety degrees to the left, then a banked, unintended descent of seven thousand feet before you, Captain, regained control of the plane and alerted New York Center, then LaGuardia.”

“That’s correct.”

Zimm looked to the experts around the table as a cue to begin questioning Matson.

“The autopilot was engaged prior to the incident?” Bill Cashill asked.

“It was.”

“Did you at any time encounter turbulence?”

“No. And there was nothing of note on radar, and no reports of turbulence from earlier flights.”

“Clear-air turbulence doesn’t appear on radar, and the autopilot could make any needed adjustments for it,” Cashill said.

“I’m aware of the characteristics of clear-air turbulence. We didn’t encounter it.”

“Captain Matson,” Cashill said, “the Richlon-TitanRT-86 is a fly-by-wire model with an array of auto-detect safety systems to address any anomalies or problems that arise. The new design also has a provision that allows the pilot to disable those safety features so that in an emergency he or she can make control inputs that would not otherwise be permitted.”

“I am absolutely aware of the features of the RT-86.”

“Speaking strictly from a preliminary perspective, a strong theory would be that you encountered clear-air turbulence and did not feel the aircraft was responding to it, leading you to take the extreme step of disabling the safety features. In the process you overcontrolled the aircraft, causing the severe rolling, before you regained control.”

“I’m telling you there was no turbulence and I’m telling you that I did not disable the safety features. For a time the aircraft just went crazy and when I intervened, it refused to respond to our inputs. After we got tossed around, the plane inexplicably allowed me to take control again. This was a flight control computer malfunction, not pilot error.”

“No one said it was pilot error, Captain,” Cashill said.

“That’s what you’re implying, from a preliminary perspective.”

A few long, tense seconds passed before Jake Hooper spoke.

“Our analysis is not complete. We still need to download the data and conduct a full examination of the aircraft, along with other aspects.”

Another moment passed as Irene Zimm flipped through pages of a file folder then looked over her glasses at Matson.

“Captain, I’m looking at the results of your blood analysis.”

Matson met her gaze and braced himself.

“It shows traces of antidepressants.”

“Yes, I’m taking medication prescribed by my doctor.”

“Yes,” Zimm said. “I see that, and in keeping with airline policy you’ve reported the prescription and that it arises from therapy you’re undergoing as a result of divorce proceedings.”

Matson cleared his throat and swallowed hard at having his life exposed to the painful core.

“Yes,” he said.

“It’s my job to be familiar with the impact of substances,” Zimm said, “and I’m familiar with the adverse side effects of some antidepressants. Did your doctor tell you that the medication you’re taking can, and I’m not saying this happened in your case, but can, in some instances, cause you to become agitated, emotional, suffer insomnia and confusion?”

“Yes, she did. But she indicated—and it should be in the file—that in my case, the medicine and dosage put me at a very low risk of exposure to those adverse effects and she green-lighted me to fly.”

“Yes, I see that in your file.”

Zimm tapped her pen and went around the table for follow-up questions.

Half an hour later, Matson was free to leave.

Since he was pulled from EastCloud’s roster to fly for at least a week, he went to Manhattan and walked through Central Park until early afternoon. Amid the splendor of the trees, the ponds, the lawns and the gardens, he felt the walls of his world closing in on him.

He knew what was coming.

Matson went to Saddle River, ended his marriage and asked his divorce lawyer to recommend a criminal defense attorney.

Eight

Manhattan, New York

Kate woke up angry.

In the shower she scrubbed until her skin reddened, as if she could wash away yesterday’s indignation.

I can’t believe what Sloane and Reeka did. Are they setting me up to get rid of me?

Toweling off, she tried to calm down but it was futile.

Senior management knew about Reeka’s incompetence, her arrogance and her mean-spiritedness, but they were afraid to do anything about her because of her family connection to the board. And now here she was building her own fiefdom with minion jerks like Sloane.

Kate had had enough.

I could leave Newslead.

Sure, news jobs were scarce, but she had friends at Bloomberg and Reuters who could help her land something.

I could call them today.

Still, the thought of walking away from a news agency she revered, a job she loved, of leaving behind all that she’d strived for, everything she’d invested, not only saddened her—it sickened her.

I’m not going to give it all up because of Reeka. I bled to get here.

As she wiped the steam from the mirror Kate looked back on the tragedies and triumphs of her life. After her parents had died in a hotel fire when she was seven, she and her little sister, Vanessa, had lived with relatives for a while, and then in foster homes. One summer, they’d been on vacation in British Columbia with their foster parents, driving through the Canadian Rockies, when their car went off the road and crashed into a river. That moment still burned in Kate’s memory.

The car sinking...rolling...windows breaking...the icy water...grabbing Vanessa’s hand...pulling her free...to the surface...the frigid current numbing her...fingers loosening...Vanessa slipping away...disappearing...

Kate survived.

The bodies of her foster parents had washed up on the riverbank, but Vanessa’s body hadn’t been found. Searchers had reasoned that it had got wedged in the rocks downstream, but Kate had never given up believing that Vanessa had somehow gotten out of the river.

In the time following the tragedy, Kate had bounced through the foster system until she’d eventually run away, spending most of her teen years on the street or in youth homes, while keeping a journal and wondering about the little sister she’d lost. Kate had managed to get back into school, and eventually pursued her love of writing. She took any job she could get to put herself through community college where she’d studied journalism, then found work in newsrooms across the country.

In San Francisco, she’d become pregnant by a man who’d lied to her about being married. He’d offered to pay for an abortion before dumping her. That had been the end of that. Kate had kept her baby, a girl she’d named Grace. She’d moved to Ohio and worked at a newspaper in Canton for several good years before downsizing cost her that job. But she never gave up. She got a short-term reporting position in Dallas with Newslead and did outstanding work there, which impressed Chuck Laneer. He offered her a job as a national correspondent at Newslead’s world headquarters in Manhattan.

Kate knew how blessed she was to have the Newslead job, and to have her daughter and sister in her life.

We’ve all come a long way.

For some twenty years, Kate had never given up searching for Vanessa, even during her darkest moments. The day Vanessa was found after she’d been held captive, the day they were reunited, was a day that had changed them both forever.

Now it had been more than two years since her sister had been back in her life, living with her and Grace. Vanessa had proven to be unbreakable. Her therapy was helping her heal and she’d gotten her high school diploma. She was working as a waitress and taking business courses, determined to open her own restaurant one day.

The book that Kate and Vanessa had written together on their lost years had done well, providing Vanessa with some savings and Kate with a college fund for Grace.

We’re hanging in there.

Kate glanced at the time. She was running late.

Pulling on her robe, she went down the hall to Grace’s room, taking in the stuffed bears and bunnies, the posters of Harry Styles and Justin Bieber. The corkboard held Kate’s favorite item: a drawing of three stick people with enormous smiles entitled “Mommy, Aunt Vanessa and Me.” The newest was a picture of Grace in the planetarium at the Vanderbilt Museum. She’d written on the bottom: “I want to live on a star.” She’s growing up too fast, Kate thought, as she gazed upon her sleeping daughter. She bent over the bed, gently brushed Grace’s hair aside and kissed her cheek, causing her to stir.

“Time to get up and get ready for school, kid.”

Grace moaned and pulled the sheets over her head.

“You better get moving, kiddo, or you’re gonna be late. Okay?”

Kate patted her leg. Grace’s head nodded under the covers and Kate returned to her room to get dressed. But she paused. She needed to know how the competition had done on EastCloud Flight 4990. She checked the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Post, the Daily News and the other wires.

I’ve been pushed off this story. Why do I care?

Because deep down it was her story.

She had an emotional connection to it. The image of Diane Wilson’s farewell video to her family burned in Kate’s mind as she tried to imagine the horror of what the people on that flight had faced. One moment you’re living your life. The next moment you’re falling from the sky, expecting to die.

What happened to that plane?

No one had broken any new angles on the story. She put her phone down, finished dressing and went to the kitchen where Vanessa was working on her laptop, concentrating behind her glasses, hair curtained to one side. For a moment Kate acknowledged some facts of her sister’s tragedy. She had not just been found, she’d been a prisoner before she was rescued, and the man who’d held her all those years had allowed her to read. In fact, he’d given her all kinds of books—novels, text books, encyclopedias and dictionaries. Books had become her lifeline. Her reading and comprehension skills were remarkable, the therapists had said. Despite her nightmare, her lost years and everything that she’d endured, Vanessa had emerged a poised, self-assured, beautiful young woman, Kate thought.

“You’re up early,” Kate said.

“Got a test coming. I need to study.”

“Commerce?”

“Economics. I made some raspberry tea.”

“Thanks. I could use it.”

“You got back later than we expected. How’d things go for you yesterday?”

“Awful. I’m thinking of leaving Newslead. The place is falling apart.”

Vanessa looked up from her work, pushed her hair back.

“But you love it there. You’re devoted to that place.”

Hands cupped around her mug, Kate shook her head, sipped some tea and told Vanessa about her ordeal. When Kate finished, Vanessa considered the matter then said, “You don’t want to quit over this.”

“Why not?”

“You’re bigger than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just let it go.”

“But what happened is wrong on so many levels, and I don’t see it getting better.”

“It all comes down to bumper sticker clichés, Kate. ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.’ Suck it up, step back and look at where we’ve been and where we are now. You’re tougher than Sloane and Reeka and you know it.”

Absorbing Vanessa’s suggestion, Kate caressed the guardian angel necklace she always wore as she looked to the wall, at the framed cover of the book they’d written together: Echo In My Heart: A Relentless Story of Love, Loss and Survival. For years, Vanessa had been locked up by a madman, and Kate had helped rescue her. Through it all, neither of them had quit and neither of them had given up hope. Vanessa was Kate’s inspiration.

“You make a good point,” Kate said.

“Think it over. I’ve got to get dressed.”

Vanessa smiled before she left. Alone in the kitchen, Kate couldn’t suppress her need to know more about EastCloud Flight 4990. She got on her phone and again researched the plane. Again, as far as she could tell, the Richlon-TitanRT-86 was a new model, without any known history of major problems. The crew said it was a malfunction, not turbulence. And in its statement, EastCloud had said the flight had “encountered a situation on its approach into New York.”

Kate was mulling over what she knew when her phone vibrated with a text from Tara Lawson, a reporter at Newslead.

OMG the rumors were true! Chuck Laneer is back!

What? This a joke, Tara?

I’m looking at him in his office now! Maybe he can save us all?

Kate’s spirits soared. Chuck was back. This changed everything.

“Mom? Did you hear me?”

Kate looked from her phone to Grace.

“Can I get new shoes, pink ones like Amber got?”

“No, sweetie. The shoes you have are still new. Maybe in the fall.”

“But Mom! Did you see Amber’s shoes? They’re so amazing!”

“Did you remember to clean the sink when you finished?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want for breakfast, something quick?”

“Toast with honey.”

“Okay, remember your chore today—you water the plants while I fix your toast. Want orange juice or milk?”

“Milk.”

“Milk what?”

“Milk, please and thank you.”

As Kate prepared her daughter’s breakfast, her phone vibrated with another text. This one was from Chuck Laneer, and in typical Chuck fashion, he got straight to the point.

Hey Kate. As you no doubt heard, I’m back. Want to meet with you ASAP to discuss the Flight 4990 story.

I’ll be there within an hour.

Sooner would be better.

Welcome back, Chuck.

Nine

Manhattan, New York

Kate waited alone in Newslead’s corner meeting room.

Looking out at the majestic view of Midtown’s skyscrapers, the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, she reflected.

It had been three years since she’d started working at headquarters for Chuck and she thought about everything that she’d reported on in that time: all the crime, disasters, tragedies, investigations. And with most stories, especially those where she’d dealt face-to-face with victims and their anguished families—I’m so sorry but would you have a picture of your son-daughter-wife-husband-brother-sister-loved-one you could share with us?—she’d given a piece of her soul.

In her heart, she was honored to be part of Newslead because of its history of excellence in journalism, and it troubled her that its integrity was being eroded. But Chuck’s return gave her hope and reason to reconsider leaving, because if anyone could restore morale and rebuild the newsroom it was Chuck Laneer.

A shadow fell across the room.

“Good morning, Kate.”

She felt as if the air had suddenly been poisoned. Sloane flashed his brilliant grin, set his notebook and coffee down then took a seat across the table from her.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same question.”

He sipped his coffee casually. Reeka entered the room, wearing a navy power suit, her face focused on her phone, thumbs a blur. She completed a message, then looked at Kate.

“Did you send me your overtime sheet?”

“I’ll do that today.”

“Okay, everybody.”

Chuck arrived and shut the door, prompting Sloane to paste on a smile, stand and extend his hand.

“Mr. Laneer, welcome. Sloane F. Parkman. We haven’t met but I’m more than aware of your legendary status in the news craft.”

“It’s Chuck. Thanks.”

“Hi.” Kate smiled.

“Good to see you again, Kate.”

Chuck smiled but his eyes betrayed a tinge of concern. His tie was slightly loosened and his shirtsleeves were rolled up. He’d lost some weight, his hair was thinner and mussed, and the lines in his face had deepened.

“This won’t take long. I wanted to get to the jetliner story before Hersh and I officially address the newsroom this morning about my return.”

Chuck glanced at his watch.

“I’ve looked at our coverage of Flight Forty-nine Ninety, and we have an opportunity here to take command of this story and reassert Newslead’s prominence. By all accounts, something went haywire and a plane nearly fell from the sky. The Richlon-TitanRT-86 is a new model that came into service about two years ago. There are about three hundred in operation around the world and it seems to have a good safety record. We need to know if this is an isolated incident or if there’s a serious problem with that aircraft. Lives could be at risk and it’s our duty to inform the public.”

“My sources said it was not a technical problem but turbulence and pilot error,” Sloane said.

“I heard the crew on the scanner report that it was not turbulence,” Kate said. “That it was some sort of malfunction.”

Chuck leaned forward. “The NTSB and EastCloud haven’t confirmed a damn thing yet,” he said. “Until then, we’re going to own this story and follow it until it’s no longer a story. Now, I’ve spoken with Reeka and I’ve decided to put you both on this one.”

“Both of us?” Kate was stunned.

“That’s right. Both of you. Sloane, have you consulted FAA records on the airworthiness of this plane and the history of the model, or checked our legal databases for any civil action?”

“I was about to do just that, Chuck.”

Shaking her head, Kate turned to the window to avoid screaming while watching hope fade away.

“Kate?” Chuck said.

She turned back.

“Kate, I want you to work every angle you can to get us out front and keep us there.”

“Sure. I’m on it.”

“Good. We’re going to break news with solid, on-the-record reporting. Newslead will be the go-to source for this story and every story we cover. Is that understood?”

“Clearly,” Sloane said.

“Abundantly,” Kate said.

“Okay, that’s it.”

* * *

What’s going on? I don’t believe this.

Kate headed for her desk, reconsidered then went to Chuck’s office.

Through his open door, she could see that he was standing with his back to her, looking at the empty bookshelves and credenza. Three cardboard boxes sitting on his desk were jammed with items: his baseball autographed by the Yankees, his Pulitzer and his framed photos. One of Chuck with his wife was already on the desk.

Kate was overcome with sadness, seeing him standing there alone, his life in those boxes. How long had it been since they’d talked, a year? She was angry at him for leaving Newslead after his blowout with previous spineless management. The fact he was dealing with his wife’s illness at the same time had only complicated things. She rapped lightly on the door and he turned to her. This time his smile was from the heart.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said. “It’s been too long.”

“The time got away from us. Look, when I left I had a helluva lot going on and, well—”

“It’s all history now. It’s okay. How’s Audrey doing?”

“Still cancer-free. Thanks for asking.”

“Good, I’m glad.” Kate let a moment pass. She didn’t have much time. “We need to talk about what just happened back there.”

He ran a hand over his face.

“Shut the door.”

Kate closed it.

“Chuck, let me go first. I don’t want to scare you but this place is a mess. The cuts have taken a toll. The new management’s dysfunctional. Morale here sucks. The quality of our work is slipping. The place is fueled by nepotism and cronyism.”

“I know.”

“As for Sloane. Oh. My. God. Chuck, I can’t work with him. The guy’s a freaking liar. It’s a risk to have him in our newsroom and his name on Newslead stories.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“Nothing leaves this room.”

“Okay.”

“I need you to work with him.”

“What? Why? I don’t get this. The guy should be fired.”

“I can’t do much about him. Not yet. It’s complicated.”

“Do you know what he did on this story? Shirking his duty?”

Chuck nodded.

“Word got to me. Before I came back, I called some people, did some due diligence. Listen, he’s Reeka’s hire and Reeka has pull with senior management. You know that. I can’t touch Sloane. Not yet. She wanted him on this story alone. I pushed back to get you on it because I think it requires two people, even with our smaller stable of reporters. Truth is, I need you to watch over him, to keep him from hurting us.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Kate, I need you to do this, and break stories. We’re under tremendous pressure. You know the song. We’re losing subscribers. We’re getting beat on stories. We’re rushing down the river to irrelevance. From what I’ve learned, Sloane’s not a reporter, at least not the caliber we need to work here, and he’ll fail. Kate, I’m counting on you to prove your strength, like you did in Dallas, and like you did on your sister’s story. I need you to help me fix Newslead.”

Kate weighed the stakes as Chuck glanced at the time.

“Because it’s you, I’ll do it,” she said. “But tell me, if you knew things were bad here, why did you come back?”

“The same reason you’ve stayed.” Chuck glanced at the framed photo of his wife, then at Kate. “We’ve each given everything to this organization and we don’t give up on the things we love and believe in.”

Before Kate could react, a knock sounded at the door. Kate opened it to Sloane and Reeka, who thrust her phone at Chuck.

“The New York Times is now reporting that Flight Forty-nine Ninety encountered severe clear-air turbulence and the pilot disabled the plane’s safety features to deal with it and, in doing so, overreacted.”

Adjusting his glasses, Chuck read the piece.

“See,” Sloane said. “It was turbulence, just as I’d first reported. Looks like pilot error, not mechanical, just like my story said.”

“They’re using unnamed sources,” Chuck said.

“It’s the Times, Chuck,” Reeka said. “I think everybody’s just been killed on this story.”

“We still don’t have officially sourced confirmation,” Chuck said. “Nobody does. Not yet. Sloane, did you check the FAA records and search court records?”

“Working on it.”

“Good. Now, excuse us, if you’d give Kate and me a minute.”

Reeka and Sloane left. Chuck loosened his tie more, then unknotted it and whipped it off.

“Dammit, Reeka’s right. The Times just kicked our asses. We’ve got to get on top of this story.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“We’re going to need more than that, Kate.”

Ten

Manhattan, New York

Kate grabbed a strong coffee and ensconced herself at her desk, still reeling from the New York Times piece while grappling with Chuck’s expectations.

It didn’t help that she could sense Sloane gloating.

Kate shoved it all aside and knuckled down. She started with the key official organizations—texting, emailing and calling for reaction to the Times story and a chance to advance it.

“We don’t comment on speculative press articles. We’ll release a preliminary report in the coming days,” Paul Murther, the spokesperson with the NTSB, told her.

EastCloud responded by sending Kate an updated news release which was light on actual news. The airline had noted what everyone already knew—that nearly all of Flight 4990’s passengers who had been taken to hospital had been released and that EastCloud continued to cooperate with investigators.

Kate called Richlon, the plane’s manufacturer.

“I can confirm that we are participating in the NTSB investigation. Other than that, we have no further comment,” Molly Raskin, Richlon’s deputy of public affairs, said from its Burbank, California, headquarters.

The FAA declined to comment, and so did most of the other agencies and groups she’d contacted. While waiting for responses Kate, in keeping with Chuck’s request to be watchful of Sloane’s work, reviewed news photos for the plane’s registration information, known as the N-Number, then used that number to access FAA records on the specific aircraft’s history.

No problems had emerged on that individual plane.

Kate then consulted federal records on the model, and found the Richlon-TitanRT-86 had experienced several incidents.

While taking off for Chicago from Omaha, an improperly secured front cabin door had come loose on an RT-86, forcing an emergency landing without incident. A flight from San Diego blew a tire on landing in Phoenix. No injuries were reported. A flight originating in Boston overshot the runway while landing in Atlanta during a storm. No injuries. There were several separate cases of various emergency-indicator lights automatically activating in the flight deck, for things such as landing gear, fuel supply, someone smoking in the restroom, a small fire in the galley. Emergency ground crews were alerted and in all instances the planes landed safely.

This is relatively standard.

Kate checked Newslead’s legal database for civil action against the airline, scouring the summaries from the list of lawsuits. They concerned lost luggage, job action, overbooked flights, missed flights, claims alleging civil rights abuses and racism. Again, all of it was relatively standard for an airline of EastCloud’s size.

After rereading the Times story, Kate felt stirrings of self-doubt.

Am I wrong about hearing the crew insist there was no turbulence?

She paged through her notes. But it was there. She’d jotted it down the moment it had crackled over the scanner. Sure, there was static, but she’d clearly heard the crew say the problem was “not turbulence” but rather some sort of malfunction.

Kate called the news library and requested they look into possibly purchasing transcripts from one of the professional scanner listening services, even though they were not subscribed.

It was odd. If other news outlets, like the Times or the Associated Press, had possibly consulted transcripts of Flight 4990’s transmissions before landing, wouldn’t they have reported malfunction as the issue? But there had been so much static, maybe they’d missed it.

Kate tapped her pen.

The only way to know what the crew said is to talk to the crew.

But there was no way that was going to happen, she thought. Pilots rarely, if ever, talk to press about an incident while it’s under investigation—way too many policies and too much at stake for them.

Did anyone reach out to the crew?

Kate tapped her pen faster.

She’d met a high-ranking official with the pilots’ union a couple of months back at a security conference at the Grand Hyatt. What was his name? Kate searched her contacts until it came up.

Nick Benko.

He was middle-aged, silver-haired, smart and kind of flirty, but at his core, all business and union tough. They’d had a quick coffee and he’d said to call him if ever she needed help on a story.

Kate sent him a text, reminding him of their meeting and his offer. She asked him to call her. Six minutes later, her cell phone rang.

“Thanks for calling, Nick.”

“No problem. Just stepped out of a meeting. What’s up?”

“You know that EastCloud flight from Buffalo to LaGuardia?”

“Yes, it’s in the news. I saw your name on one of the stories.”

“What can you tell me about the investigation?”

“I’m not involved in that. Besides, I couldn’t tell you, even if I was.”

“I figured. Nick, I need help reaching the captain.”

“No can do, Kate. There’re policies, security, privacy, all that stuff.”

“I understand, Nick, but if you were me, where would you look?”

Benko hesitated.

“You know I can’t give you that name, Kate.”

“Of course, but if you were looking, say for public sources, where would you look?”

Benko gave it some thought.

“Some airlines post milestone pages online,” he said. “It’s possible that if you looked deep into EastCloud’s site on the ten-year page, you might find something there.”

“Where?”

“Under the M’s.”

Kate jotted it down.

“What if there are other M’s?”

“I don’t think you’ll have a problem.”

Kate’s keyboard clicked and she’d found the site, went to the M’s and landed on a page with a photo and bio of Raymond Brian Matson. His was the only listing under M for ten years with EastCloud. The listing was about three years old.

“Nick, you know you have a friend here who owes you a favor.”

“No favor, Kate.” He chuckled. “Because I didn’t give you any information that wasn’t already public.”

“Understood. Thanks.”

Kate read the brief bio describing Matson’s experience and time with EastCloud. Of course it didn’t list his address or the city where he resided.

He could live anywhere in the country.

She tapped her pen again.

She had another source, Marsha Flood, a retired FBI agent she’d known since she’d been a reporter in California. Marsha ran a private-investigation firm and had quicker and better access to more databases than Kate, like the one containing driver’s licenses. Kate sent her a text requesting help locating an address for Raymond Brian Matson. Then she sent a link to Matson’s bio and pic to help her find the right Matson. Kate calculated the time zone difference, confident that Marsha would be up by now.

As she waited, she ran Raymond Matson’s name through several of Newslead’s archives and news information networks to see of he’d ever been the subject of a news story.

Nothing. She left a message on Marsha’s voice mail.

She checked his name with several popular social media sites.

Nothing.

As she downed her coffee her phone rang.

“Hi, Kate, it’s Marsha.”

“Hey, Marsha.”

“How’re Vanessa and Grace doing?”

“Vanessa’s doing great, and Grace—well, they grow up too fast, don’t they? How’s your son doing? Still posted overseas?”

“He comes home from South Korea next month.”

“Oh, that’s good. I’m happy for you.”

“Now about your subject, Raymond Brian Matson. He’s close to you. According to his valid state driver’s license he resides in Westfield, New Jersey, Lamberts Mill Road.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll send you the address. Oh, I also saw that he’s involved in divorce proceedings, so bear that in mind.”

“I appreciate this, Marsha.”

“Anytime.”

Eleven

Westfield, New Jersey

Lamberts Mill Road ran through a quiet, tree-lined section of Westfield.

The Matson house, a century-old two-story colonial with a screened side porch, sat back from the street. No vehicles were in the driveway when Kate pulled up.

It looked like no one was home.

She rang the bell but got no response.

Kate had been afraid this would happen—that no one would be home. The for-sale sign and the divorce were likely factors, she thought as she drove off and parked several doors down.

She adjusted the car’s mirror and settled in to watch the address. Showing up cold was always a risk whenever you were pursuing a sensitive interview. When you emailed, or called, people were quick to delete or hang up. When you appeared at their door and looked them in the eye, the odds sometimes worked in your favor.

Not always but sometimes.

The air was tranquil with sounds of birdsong, the wind through the trees and the distant laughter of children. Traffic had been good. It had taken her about forty-five minutes using one of Newslead’s leased cars to make the trip across the Hudson.

Kate worked on her phone, building a story based on the few updates she had from the people she’d reached earlier. Between sentences, she monitored her mirrors, noting that the for-sale sign could also mean that Matson no longer lived here.

She wasn’t happy with the story; she didn’t have much. The strongest stuff was the FAA records showing the incident history of the Richlon-TitanRT-86. She’d just finished folding the various reports into her piece when something blurred in her side mirror.

An SUV had rolled into the Matson driveway.

Kate gave it a moment. Then she collected her things, approached the house and rang the bell. A long moment passed before the door was opened by a man wearing a polo shirt and khaki pants. He was in his late forties with deep-set eyes that gave him a rugged look.

“Yes?”

“Raymond Matson?”

“Yes.”

“Captain Raymond Matson with EastCloud Airlines?”

“Yes, who’re you?”

“I’m Kate Page, a reporter with Newslead, the wire service.”

The air tensed.

“Sir, I need to talk to you about what happened on Flight Forty-nine Ninety.”

His jaw tightened then he moved to shut the door.

“I have no comment.”

“Wait, Captain Matson, please. Is the New York Times accurate? Was it pilot error?”

“I haven’t seen the New York Times.”

“Hold on, I have it right here.”

Kate displayed the story on her phone and passed it to him. As he read something flashed behind his eyes.

“No. That’s wrong.” He passed the phone back. “I don’t have anything to say to the press.”

“Are you going to let the Times story stand? Do you want to leave the impression that the crew overreacted and caused the plane to roll?”

“I’m bound to a process.”

“The NTSB can take a year to issue its official report. If you talk to me you can correct the record now, put the facts and the truth of what happened out there. Otherwise, this stands as human error for a year or longer. I understand that there may have been a malfunction?”

Matson arched an eyebrow as he absorbed Kate’s argument. She gave him another point to consider.

“Who better than you to explain what really happened.”

Matson considered for several moments. Worry clouded his eyes, and he adjusted his grip on the door. She sensed he was walking a mental tightrope before he came to a decision and pushed it open.

“Come in.”

He indicated the living room.

“Have a seat. Want a soda? I think I also have orange juice.”

“Water would be fine.”

He left and returned, handing her a bottled water.

“Let me make a few calls and I’ll be back,” he said.

The house was fragrant and beautiful, suggesting it had been professionally staged for showings. Fresh flowers bloomed from vases on the mantel and end tables. The hardwood floors gleamed under gorgeous area rugs. Kate looked for telltale signs of family life but nothing was out of place. Still, she’d discerned an air of sadness, of finality.

While waiting, she checked for any breaking news, then reviewed her messages, wincing at one from Sloane.

The FAA and legal records show next to nothing on the plane and the model. I’ll write it up for you.

What? Either Sloane never looked, or he’s lying again.

She was about to respond but thought maybe she should inform Chuck instead. Matson returned.

“I called my lawyer and my union. If I talk to you I’m putting my head on the chopping block.”

“But I think—”

“My head’s already on the chopping block.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You can’t use that. I’ll talk to you but this part you cannot use. You got that? This isn’t for any story. It’s completely off the record, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ve met with the NTSB, my union, EastCloud and all the others who’re investigating and I get the feeling they’re going to put this on me. I can feel a noose tightening. What happens is the airline will try to blame the manufacturer, saying it was a technical issue, to avoid a negative impact on its operations. ‘Hey, it’s not us, it’s the plane.’ And the manufacturer will try to blame the airline, ‘Hey, it’s not our plane, it’s your people, your pilots, your maintenance people,’ to avoid a negative impact on their aircraft and costly litigation. Both players have millions at stake, so the best thing they can do is to ultimately put it on the pilot. ‘Hey, it was this guy, he screwed up. He’s gone so let’s move on.’ This is the context that I feel is at play here. You got that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I want the truth out there, so I’ll tell you what I told the NTSB and everyone else. This is what you can use.”

“Wait.” Kate switched on her recorder. “Okay, go ahead.”

“There was no clear-air turbulence and I did not disable the safety system. The aircraft suddenly rolled. For a critical time, the plane refused to respond to our commands. I don’t know what happened but I know something went wrong. This was a clear flight control computer malfunction.”

“But if it’s a malfunction, a safety issue, is the public at risk?”

“Until they find out the source of this system failure, I’d say yes.”

For the next half hour Matson helped Kate with the timeline of the Buffalo–New York flight and the technical background. Matson said he was in agony for the passengers and his crew members who’d been injured.

“If we didn’t fight for control of the plane the way we did, we would have lost it. And that’s God’s honest truth.”

After Kate got everything down she confirmed with Matson that he hadn’t spoken with any other reporters and that she would use his name and picture with her story.

“Agreed,” he said.

“I’ll be talking to other people for their response.”

“That’s expected, but remember, no matter who you talk to, I was on that flight deck. They weren’t.”

Kate thanked Matson, gave him her card and left.

Heading back to her car, she had to keep from running. She decided to go to a small park, where she sat at a picnic table in the shade of an oak tree and called Chuck Laneer.

“You got the captain?”

“Exclusively.”

“What’d he say?”

“That it was a malfunction and the public is at risk.”

“That’s a helluva story. Get it to us as soon as you can. I’ll alert subscribers telling them what’s coming. Good work.”

Kate stayed at the picnic table, made calls and sent messages requesting comment from EastCloud, the FAA, the NTSB and industry experts. Those who responded underscored that the NTSB had not yet issued a preliminary report and had so far found nothing that warranted grounding of the Richlon-TitanRT-86, or the issuance of safety alerts.

An industry expert in Seattle challenged Matson’s account of the incident.

“The scenario as described by the pilot cannot happen with the type of fly-by-wire system installed in the TitanRT-86. It’s that simple. For the plane to oscillate the way it did, according to the reports of passengers, the safety features would have to be manually switched off. This still sounds like a classic case of a bad response to clear-air turbulence.”

Within two hours of her interview with Captain Raymond Matson, Kate’s exclusive was released to Newslead’s subscribers across the country and around the world.

Twelve

Clear River, North Dakota

A few miles beyond town, a lone wooden hangar rose defiantly from the badlands.

A faint clink of metal against metal signaled life as Robert Cole halted his work on the radial engine of an aging crop duster and climbed down the stepladder.

He dragged his sweaty, greasy forearm across his brow, tossed his wrench on his cluttered workbench next to where he’d left the Minot Daily News. His face was creased with concern over the back-page article he’d read that morning.

Worry pushed down on him as he moved outside the hangar’s open doors to contemplate the earthen airstrip and search the eternal plain. But gazing at the horizon failed to ease his troubled mind about the news story and the direction of his life.

There was a time when he’d had everything. Now it was gone and he was alone with his sins, awash with guilt. A gust peppered him with dry dirt. In his mind, he heard his wife’s laughter, felt her touch and saw her face.

Elizabeth.

Help me. Please. Tell me what I should do.

He thought of her every moment of every day and now, standing alone in the crying, aching wind, he rubbed his dry lips. The bottle in his lunch bucket called to him. It would numb his pain.

That’s not the answer I need now.

He got into his pickup truck and drove through town, passed the strip malls, the municipal buildings, and the old storefronts that evoked the frontier days. Elizabeth had grown up here; her father was a doctor. This was her town and living here gave him some comfort.

He drove south over the rolling rangeland that stretched as far as he could see. Two miles later he turned onto a narrow, paved road that wound into a grove of trees overlooking a creek. A small sign identified the spot as the Riverbend Meadow Cemetery. He parked and made his way through the burial grounds, stopping at the headstone that read “Elizabeth Marie Cole, Beloved Wife and Mother. Died...”

He didn’t need to read further.

The truth hit him as hard as the granite that marked his wife’s grave.

I’m responsible for her death. I destroyed everything I had in this world.

He ran his fingers gently over her gravestone and a breeze rolled up from the river, carrying him through the moments of their lives.

They’d met at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where they’d bumped into each other at a bookstore, which had led to coffee and subsequent dates. She’d thought he was a looker, and he’d loved her smile. Her name was Elizabeth Hyde, and she’d had a scholarship to study medicine. He’d been in engineering. They’d both been reticent, nerdy bookworms.

After they’d graduated, Elizabeth had convinced him to take time off with a nonprofit international aid group. They’d spent a year helping people in poor parts of South America and Africa. When they’d returned, he’d taken her to a beach north of LA, and as the sun set, he’d given her an engagement ring. After they were married, they embarked on their careers. She became a doctor, and he became an engineer.

They got a house in Burbank and in the years that followed, they’d each put in long hours, dedicating themselves to their professions. They’d had trouble starting a family but after nearly a year of treatment, therapies and effort, Elizabeth had become pregnant with their only child, a daughter they’d named Veyda.

She was their miracle, their joy.

As busy professionals, the pressures of their jobs had been constant, but Elizabeth’s priority had been Veyda. He remembered when Elizabeth had stayed up all night when Veyda had had a fever; or when Elizabeth had rushed Veyda to the hospital when she’d fallen from her bicycle; or that time they’d driven through Glendale, at three in the morning, Elizabeth frantic and desperately trying to reach her daughter, who’d passed out drunk after lying about going to a party and missing her ride home.

Yes, Elizabeth and Veyda had had their battles. But Elizabeth had been devoted to Veyda and Veyda had adored Elizabeth. Her mother had been her hero and theirs had been an unbreakable bond.

Yes, and Veyda had loved him, too, coming to him for advice or help solving a problem. But he had tended to be away often, working on projects that demanded his attention 24/7. Even at an early age, Veyda had understood and respected his job. He’d smiled when he’d overheard her telling a friend, My dad’s an engineer. Not the kind who drives trains but the kind who builds planes and makes them fly, which is a lot harder.

Academically, Veyda had taken after her parents, excelling at school. She loved debating subjects, anything from veganism to eugenics, from politics to physics, from mathematics to rock-and-roll history. Her dream was to become a medical doctor, like her mother, and an aeronautical engineer, like her father.

First, I’ll follow Dad’s path and learn all about flight, Veyda had said.

They were so proud when she was accepted at Pepperdine then went on to UC Berkeley and then later to MIT.

But Elizabeth had missed her and lived for their visits, so she’d been ecstatic when Veyda surprised them with a call from Cambridge.

I’ve got a break. I’m coming home for a week!

Elizabeth had adjusted her schedule for the unexpected visit and had hoped he would do the same, but the timing couldn’t have been worse for him. He’d been overwhelmed by the deadlines for a major project, one of the most challenging he’d ever faced. But he’d also wanted to see Veyda as much as possible, so he’d made what adjustments he could to get away from work.

Veyda’s visit had been a happy time. It’d been months since they’d all been together. They’d decided to drive up the coast to a pretty restaurant they liked near Santa Barbara.

Before leaving, he’d checked with work. Serious problems with the project had arisen, but for the moment he’d believed they were manageable, although senior management had just launched a surprise in-depth review of a critical aspect.

Hang on to your hat, Bob, one of the other engineers had texted him just before they’d left.

During the drive, his phone had vibrated with texts, but he’d ignored them. When they got on the 101, his phone had begun to vibrate even more, which had concerned him.

Elizabeth and Veyda had been so deep in conversation that they’d never heard his phone, so he’d decided to do what Elizabeth had forbade: he checked it. He’d done it surreptitiously, taking it out of his left pocket and lowering it on his left side between his left leg and the door. He’d needed to know what management had been saying on the project. Carefully, he’d scrolled through the messages, and he remembered the moment Veyda had said, Oh my God, Mom, the winters in Cambridge are absolutely cruel... Then Elizabeth was shouting, Robert! They’d drifted across another lane and the rear of a slower-moving car had loomed instantly in their windshield, giving him less than a second to register it, twist the wheel violently and stomp on the brake... They’d missed the slower car, but suddenly theirs was lifting, rising and twisting in the air... The car had rolled. His seat belt had cut into him. He remembered Elizabeth and Veyda screaming then air bags exploding, and Elizabeth flying from the car amid glass shattering and metal crunching. The car had rolled and rolled, until it had finally come to a stop, and he’d heard a hissing and smelled gasoline. He’d crawled from the wreck, disoriented, unable to find Elizabeth or Veyda. The car had come to a stop on its roof, and he’d seen...Elizabeth’s shoe...her hand... She’d been pinned under the car. He’d tried lifting, but the car wouldn’t move... Elizabeth had been making gurgling sounds. He’d dropped to his knees, taking her hand the way he’d held it on their first dates...at their wedding...at their daughter’s birth... As he’d held her hand...she’d cried out.

Veyda!

Mom! Veyda had been crawling to them, the whites of her eyes piercing him from between the blood webbing her face.

Elizabeth had squeezed his hand.

Stay with me, Elizabeth! I love you! Stay with me! Please!

Mom!

Veyda had collapsed some ten feet from her mother as he’d felt his wife’s hand going limp... He’d heard sirens...shouting...a helicopter... His family was in pieces and everything was turning black...

* * *

Robert Cole was on his knees before his wife’s headstone.

Elizabeth had wanted to be buried here. She’d told him that, years before, when they’d made their wills. The aftermath of the accident and the funeral were a fog of agony. He remembered Veyda kissing her mother’s casket, casting a single rose. She was still scarred and bandaged, standing like an apparition at the grave.

Her glare burned into him, an accusation.

It was all in the police report. He’d been negligent and had committed vehicular manslaughter. Elizabeth’s seat belt had come undone as she’d turned from the passenger seat to talk to her daughter. The driver of the slower car ahead of them—a witness got the plate through dash cam video—had been driving without a license and with alcohol in his blood. Cole had been charged, but his lawyer had got the charge reduced to a misdemeanor and he’d received a light sentence. No jail time. The defendant has suffered a monumental loss by his own hand and will live with the consequences all the days of his life, your honor, his lawyer had said.

Cole never recovered from the tragedy. Elizabeth’s death was like an amputation. Veyda had undergone therapy before returning to school in Massachusetts, but the accident had irrevocably changed both of them.

He’d sold their home in California and moved to North Dakota.

Something had pulled him here, something calling him to be near his wife, to watch over her and to find a path to redemption.

Maybe today he’d found it, he thought, driving back to the hangar.

He picked up the Minot Daily News and reread the article with the interview of the captain of the troubled, New York–bound plane.

It was from one of the newswires.

Yes, this is it.

Cole mixed whiskey into his cold coffee.

The thing he’d feared, the secret thing that had tormented him in the seconds before the car wreck that destroyed his life had now become a reality.

Now he had his answer.

He knew what he had to do.

Thirteen

Manhattan, New York

The next afternoon Kate’s subway train rumbled south out of the 125th Street station.

As it cleared the platform, she took a subtle inventory of her car’s passengers, without staring, then focused on her reflection in the window.

As the drab tunnel walls raced by, her pulse quickened. Living here still excited her; the people, the smells—cologne to urine to grilled food from the street vendors. Even the traffic—she’d once seen a guy stomp right over a cab that was blocking a crosswalk—and the sirens. The power, the glory and the majesty that was New York—she loved it all.

Kate checked her phone.

This was her day off but Chuck wanted her to come in. He’d promised more time off later and said it was okay to be in by 1:00 p.m., but he needed her in to produce a follow-up to her exclusive interview with the captain.

We have to keep hitting this one, Kate, Chuck had texted.

The train swayed and grated. Station after station flashed by as Kate ran through some ideas. She could contact a lawyer she knew who specialized in aviation litigation. Maybe he was hearing something on the grapevine about the Richlon-TitanRTs.

The brakes creaked and her car lurched as they came to Penn Station, her stop. She threaded through the vast, low-ceilinged warren under Madison Square Garden. When she surfaced, she headed to the Newslead building, picked up a coffee and an oatmeal muffin in the main-floor food court. That was lunch.

At her desk, she reviewed Newslead’s summary of the pickup of yesterday’s story. The suggested headline from the copy desk had been: “Pilot of Troubled EastCloud Buffalo-to-NYC Flight: Malfunction Puts Passengers at Risk.”

Pickup was rated “strong.”

Her exclusive interview with Captain Matson was used by 1,149 English-language newspapers and websites in the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, parts of Africa, Europe, South America and the Caribbean.

The Seattle Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Toronto Star, The Times of London, the New Zealand Herald, South Africa’s Daily Sun and Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post were among those who’d given it play.

This is pretty good, Kate thought.

She checked her public email box for the address tag at the end of her story. Readers could use the feature to contact a reporter directly. Most reporters loathed it because, while much of the spam was filtered, what they nearly always received were emails from political zealots, religious extremists, grammar experts, scam artists, nut jobs and idiots. It was rare that a story yielded a genuine lead.

But you gotta check. You never know what you can find there.

Usually, for Kate, an article would result in anywhere from a handful to more than a hundred emails, depending on the story. She was skilled at plowing through them quickly.

Like searching for buried treasure.

Her story had generated sixty emails so far and she’d sorted through about a third of them, flagging four to consider later.

“Why didn’t you use my work in the story, Kate?” Sloane F. Parkman stood over her desk, arms folded, tie knotted, every hair in place. He was not wearing the grin today.

“Because it was wrong, Sloane.”

“I wrote that according to litigation and FAA records. There was nothing of consequence regarding the actual plane for Flight Forty-nine Ninety, or the RT-86 in general.”

“You editorialized. I checked those very records and listed what the history was, what the facts are. Then I contacted an industry expert who put that history in context, saying all of the incidents and civil actions were in keeping with what was to be expected given the new model and EastCloud’s size as an airline. I put the facts on the record, Sloane. You chose not to report them. Why is that?”

“There was nothing of significance to report!”

“You’re not the expert to make that call! Why’re you downplaying the facts, Sloane?”

“We’re supposed to be working together on this story. Why did you remove my byline, Kate?”

“I didn’t. I put it on the story—”

“I took it off.” Chuck stared at them. “Let’s take this into my office. Now.”

They entered and Chuck closed the door.

“Nobody sits down. This will be quick,” Chuck said.

“Where’s Reeka?” Sloane asked.

“Got called to a meeting. Sloane, your effort was half-assed. Your contribution added nothing to the piece, so I removed your byline.”

“But I did what you requested, Chuck. I consulted the records.”

“What you submitted was akin to a street cop at a crime scene telling people there’s nothing to see here. You kept facts from the light. End of discussion.”

“But there was nothing—”

“End of discussion.” Chuck put his hands on his hips. “Senior management liked the story, liked that we challenged the New York Times, got it on the record and got serious pickup. It shows subscribers are paying attention. Now I’ve asked our business reporters to dig into EastCloud and Richlon, to look into their histories. And I’ve asked our Washington bureau to start pumping members of the House Transportation Committee and the House Aviation Subcommittee. Maybe they’re hearing something on the big players here. They’ll feed whatever they get to us. We need to keep digging on this.”

“Sounds good,” Kate said.

“Want me to keep checking with my aviation sources, too, Chuck?”

“Yes. But Sloane, we need to be sure we can put names on the record, like Kate did with the pilot. Kate, I want you to keep pushing all the angles. Work with everybody and keep us out front. You know the drill.”

Chuck let a few beats pass. His cell phone rang, but before answering it, he said, “Okay, that’s it. Get to work.”

* * *

Kate spent the next hour at her desk, putting out calls and messages to sources. Then she tried to reach Raymond Matson to see how he was doing in the wake of the story.

I hope he’s okay.

But she got no response. In fact, not much was coming back from anybody. Kate remembered that she hadn’t finished checking reader emails. The in-box showed there were now eighty. As expected, most were nothing.

That’s the way it goes, she thought, coming to the end, pausing at the last one.

The subject line read:

I know what happened to 4990.

She opened it.

Your story’s good, but it’s wrong. What happened to that jet will happen again. I know because I made it happen and unless you announce my triumph, we’ll make it happen again. This time it’ll be worse. Watch the skies. We are Zarathustra, Lord of the Heavens.

Fourteen

Manhattan, New York

This can’t be real.

Kate read the email again and a chill coiled slowly up her spine.

It’s got to be a prankster or some nut.

Kate had encountered all kinds of people trying to insert themselves into stories: conspiracy types, people with agendas, people who were unbalanced, hoaxers, you name it. Yet she couldn’t ignore the concern tightening around her. The phrase “I made it happen” gave Captain Matson’s words new meaning: I don’t know what happened, but I know something went wrong.

Kate bit her bottom lip as she continued rereading the message.

And they were threatening to do it again. Only God knows when.

“Hey, Mark, come over here and look at this.”

Mark Reston, a rumpled hard-news reporter who sat near her, moaned, pulled himself to his feet and stood next to Kate, who tapped her monitor with her pen.

“What do you think of this? It’s in response to my story.”

Reston scratched his stubbled chin and drew his face closer.

“What’s this Lord of the Heavens crap?”

“Mark, come on. What do you think?”

“Likely a lunatic is what I think.”

“What if it isn’t? We don’t know what really happened on that flight.”

“Likely someone with a tinfoil hat.”

“But what if it’s not a nutcase?”

“Did you respond, try to engage them in conversation?”

“Yes. I got the error message ‘Permanent failure, unknown user’ message.”

“If this is real, you got a helluva story. Whatever it is, you should alert Chuck.”

“That’s the plan.”

Kate printed the email and headed for Chuck Laneer’s office. He wasn’t there. She found him coming down the hall and handed him the email.

“Just got this.”

Chuck pushed his glasses to the top of his forehead and read. He removed them when he’d finished and tapped one finger to his teeth, something he always did.

“Do you have any idea who sent this, Kate?”

“None. It’s anonymous.”

“Did you respond?”

“Yes and I got nothing, a failed-delivery message.”

“Did you share it?”

“No.”

“Make several paper copies and stand by. I’m calling a meeting on how we’re going to handle this.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Kate, Chuck and several senior editors sat at the big polished table in the newsroom’s main boardroom.

They’d reviewed the email and Kate briefed them on all she knew. “So it boils down to this,” she said. “If we don’t write a story crediting this person for EastCloud Forty-nine Ninety, they’ll harm another flight.”

“Have we had our IT security people try to track the source, verify it?” Marisa McDougal, head of world features, asked.

“Yes, I’ve got them on it,” Chuck said, “but they’re indicating that it’ll likely be impossible, given our limited resources.”

“So do we publish this or not?” Kate asked.

“I say we publish it,” Reeka said. “It’s our exclusive.”

“Why come to us with this?” Dean Altman, chief of all domestic bureaus, asked. “Why not simply post it online?”

“If you get us to do it, it gives you credibility,” Chuck said. “It gives the claim and the threat currency, and the advantage of our global reach. Our story would get redistributed online with authority, so it’d be a win-win.”

“I say we run it,” Reeka said. “It’s our duty to report this.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” said Howard Kehoe, who headed all foreign bureaus. “Right now, we can’t verify the validity of this thing. We run this with the threat and we’ll cause havoc to air travel around the world.”

“But our job is to inform the public,” Marisa said. “There’s a public safety issue here.”

“That’s just it,” Kehoe said. “If we run this claim and this threat, will it make air travel any safer? If we don’t run it, are we truly risking lives? We have the fact the captain said something went wrong on the flight, and now this person is claiming that somehow they took over the plane. How? Does the technology to do this sort of thing even exist? They’re a bit short on details.”

“I’m wondering why video from passengers in the cabin hasn’t surfaced yet,” Bruce Dabney, the business editor, said. “These days it’s almost guaranteed somebody has shot something.”

“That’s right, and my point,” Kehoe said, “is that we don’t yet have any official, investigative confirmation from the NTSB, or the FAA, or anyone, on what happened. I think we need to be careful here.”

“Could it be a terrorist threat?” Marisa asked.

“There’s no indication in the note, no claim to affiliation, no demand or condemnation,” Kehoe said.

“What about the name Zarathustra?” Reeka asked.

“That’s the name of a Persian prophet from around seven or eight hundred BC,” Chuck said. “As I recall, he taught about humanity following one God and the priority of living a moral life.”

“You’re dating yourself by a few centuries, Chuck.” Marisa smiled.

“I took a few philosophy courses in school.”

“So what would you like me to do?” Kate asked, glimpsing something through the boardroom’s floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Sloane was talking with Mark Reston, who was nodding to the meeting. Sloane looked uneasy.

“We’re walking an ethical tightrope here,” Graham Lincoln, Newslead’s editor-in-chief, said. “If we run a story now and it turns out that the note is a practical joke, we open the floodgates to all sorts of crackpots and our credibility takes a hit. I think under the circumstances we’re not going to publish it.”

“Ever?” Kate asked.

“For now,” Lincoln said. “Of course, we have a moral responsibility to protect public safety, so we’ll alert the authorities, the FBI in this case. We’ll ask them if we’re the only news organization to receive this note, ask them not to share our note, and to keep us informed on their investigation of it. Above all, we’ll investigate journalistically. That is our responsibility and our duty. That’s what we’ll do.”

Lincoln let a moment pass for his direction to sink in around the table.

“I think we’re done here. Chuck, Kate, contact the people at Federal Plaza straightaway, get the ball rolling. And remember, folks, everything said in this room remains confidential.”

As the meeting broke and editors moved from the boardroom, Kate looked again at Sloane.

He was still talking with Reston and watching her.

Intensely.

Fifteen

Manhattan, New York

“What’s your information on EastCloud Flight Forty-nine Ninety?”

Special Agent Anne Bartell was unsmiling, as was her partner, Agent Phil Enroy, who’d clicked his pen and poised it over his pad. After Kate was cleared at security, they’d taken her to an interview room on the twenty-eighth floor of the FBI’s New York Field Office in Lower Manhattan.

It was late afternoon and people were leaving for the day.

Kate didn’t know Bartell and Enroy. She’d worked with agents at this office before; Nick Varner was one, but her call got bounced and had been assigned to agents who were new to her, so she was starting cold.

“You’re aware of what happened to the flight?” Kate asked.

“We’ve followed the press reports, including yours,” Enroy said.

“Is the FBI investigating in any way?”

“No cause has emerged for us to be involved. The NTSB leads the investigation. What’s the nature of your information?” Enroy said.

Kate started by relating background on Newslead’s public email for reader responses to stories, then reached into her bag and handed them printouts of the email. Upon reading it the agents made notes, and summoned Special Agent Ron Sanchez, a cyber analyst, who was also a senior member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“Have you received any other communication from the sender?” Sanchez asked.

“Nothing.”

“Would you be able to forward me the email to this address?” Sanchez took out a business card and jotted down an email address.

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