Fly by Wire: A Novel Read Free Page B

Laura will pick you up," he called out. The door closed in his face and Jen gave a finger wave behind her back. She strutted by the Taylor kid like a runway model.
    If he looks at her butt , Davis thought, I'll break his skinny neck.

    Chapter TWO
    The Headquarters of the NTSB was centrally located, two blocks from the National Mall in L'Enfant Plaza. It was very nearly, and perhaps should have been, in the shadow of the FAA building, a far more imposing mountain of gray roughly a block away. The NTSB structure was demure by D. C. standards, a modernist undertaking rife with raw concrete and glass that blended to the point of invisibility among an ocean of the same. Unpretentious and anonymous. Which suited Davis just fine.
    He crossed the lobby, his soft soles having minimal impact on an overpolished marble floor. Davis approached the elevator just as the door slid open. A pair of men had been waiting -- perfectly Windsored ties, starch-stiffened collars, venti Starbucks lattes. They stepped inside and turned toward the opening, gave him an inquisitive look.
    Davis shook his head. "No thanks, guys."
    As soon as the door closed, Davis hit the adjacent stairwell and started out hard, taking three steps at a time. On the fifth floor he burst into the hallway and checked the numbers over the elevator. Just passing four. Davis grinned.
    He turned into the office labeled assistant director mccracken. Davis passed the vacant receptionist s desk and walked straight into his boss's office without knocking.
    It was a room Davis had never liked, the furniture more expensive and plush than a mid-level bureaucrat deserved. Rita McCracken, all five feet two of her, was standing behind her desk trimming perfectly green foliage from a leggy, anemic-looking indoor plant. Davis knew she fancied herself as something of a gardener, but he pictured her as one of those people whose time in the yard was all digging and cutting and pulling things up by the roots. More anger management than horticulture.
    She dumped her clippings in the trash, stashed the clippers, and then planted herself in an oversized leather chair. When McCracken looked up, she didn't bother with a greeting. "What have you heard about the crash?" she asked.
    "There was a short blurb on NPR as I drove in. Not much in the way of details."
    She held out a collection of faxes. Davis took them and began skimming as he sat down. He'd been working under McCracken for two years now, ever since retiring from the Air Force and hiring on with the NTSB. They had never gotten along. She was a baseline feminist, a red-headed locomotive who didn't think much of ex-fighter pilots. And Davis didn't think much of fifty-something bureaucrats who'd never had their hand on a control stick, but were sure you could find the cause to any crash by organizing the right ad hoc committee.
    "The lead page is a twenty-four-hour update," she said. "A C-500, near Lyon, France. It went straight down from thirty-eight thousand."
    Davis scanned the cover document. There wasn't much. The aircraft in question was brand new, a factory delivery for World Express, one of the three big overnight package delivery companies.
    She said, "The second page is a plot of the radar data. From the first sign of trouble to estimated impact, not much more than two minutes. This thing fell like a brick. The air traffic controllers heard one 'Mayday' on the way down, but that was it."
    He looked over the data. Radar stuff was okay, but incomplete. It was essentially a series of snapshots -- Davis had always likened it to those clay animation movies where the character movement was so awkward and choppy. The data flow had stopped abruptly as the aircraft dove through ten thousand feet. Which was odd. "Do you have any pictures?" he asked.
    McCracken pulled an eight-by-ten from her desk. "This just came in, commercial satellite imagery. It won't tell you much."
    Davis stared intently at the photograph. It was grainy, but right away