Free Fall

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.

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