Before the Fall Read online

  “Very clever. Listen. I’ve got divers in the water searching for the fuselage, but it’s slow going, and this is a high-profile case. Is there anything you can tell us, anything else you can remember about the crash, what happened before?”

  “It’s coming back,” Scott tells him. “Still just fragments, but—let me help with the search. Maybe being out there—maybe it’ll shake something loose.”

  Gus thinks about this.

  “Where are you?”

  “Well,” says Scott, “let me ask you this—how do you feel about chicken thighs?”

  Chapter 10

  Painting #1

  The first thing that catches your eye is the light, or rather two lights angled toward a single focal point, becoming a figure-eight flare at the center of the canvas. It is big, this painting, eight feet long and five feet high, the once white tarpaulin transformed into a smoky gray glitter. Or maybe what you see first is calamity, two dark rectangles slicing the frame, jackknifed, their metallic skeletons glowing in the moonlight. There are flames on the edge of the picture, as if the story doesn’t end just because the painting stops, and people who view the image have been known to walk to the far edges looking for more information, microscoping the framing wood for even a hint of added drama.

  The lights that flare out the center of the image are the headlights of an Amtrak passenger train, its caboose having come to rest almost perpendicular to the twisted iron track that bends and waves below it. The first passenger car has disconnected from the caboose and now makes the trunk of a T, having maintained its forward momentum and smashed the engine dead center, bending its bread-box contours into a vague V.

  As with any bright light, the headlight glare here obscures much of the image, but upon further examination a viewer might discover a single passenger—in this case a young woman—dressed in a black skirt and torn white blouse, her hair tousled across her face, matted by blood. She is wandering shoeless through the jagged wreckage, and if you squint past the illusion of light you can see that her eyes are wide and searching. She is the victim of disaster, a survivor of heat and impact, cantilevered from her resting position into an impossible parabola of unexpected torture, her once placid world—gently rocking, click clack, click clack—now a screeching twist of metal.

  What is she looking for, this woman? Is it merely a way out? A clear and sensible path to safety? Or has she lost something? Someone? In that moment, when gentle rocking turned into a cannonball ricochet, did she go from wife and mother, from sister or girlfriend, from daughter or paramour to refugee? A fulfilled and happy we to a stunned and grieving I?

  And so, even as other paintings call to you, you can’t help but stand there and help her look.

  Chapter 11

  Storm Clouds

  The life vest is so tight it’s hard to breathe, but Scott reaches up and pulls the straps again. It is an unconscious gesture. One he’s been doing every few moments since they got on the helicopter. Gus Franklin sits across from him, studying his face. Beside him is Petty Officer Berkman in an orange jumpsuit and glassy black helmet. They are in a Coast Guard MH-65C Dolphin racing over the wave caps of the Atlantic. In the distance Scott can just make out the cliffs of Martha’s Vineyard. Home. But this is not where they’re going. Not yet. Sneeze, the three-legged dog, will have to wait. Scott thinks of her now, a white mutt with one black eye. An eater of horse shit, a connoisseur of long grass, who lost her back right leg to cancer last year and was climbing stairs again within two days. Scott checked in with his neighbor after he got off the phone with Gus this morning. The dog was fine, his neighbor told him. She was lying on the porch panting at the sun. Scott thanked her again for watching the dog. He said he should be home in a couple of days.

  “Take your time,” his neighbor said. “You’ve been through a lot. And good for you. What you did for that boy. Good for you.”

  He thinks of the dog now, missing a limb. If she can bounce back, why can’t I?

  The helicopter bucks through chunky air, each drop like a hand slapping a jar, trying to dislodge the last peanut. Except in this case Scott is the peanut. He grips his seat with his right hand, his left arm still in a sling. The trip from the coast takes twenty minutes. Looking out the window at the miles of ocean, Scott can’t believe how far he swam.

  Scott was at the barbecue joint sipping water for an hour before Gus arrived. He drove up in a white sedan—company car, he told Scott—and entered the restaurant with a change of clothes in hand.

  “I took a guess at the size,” he said and threw the clothes to Scott.

  “I’m sure they’ll be great. Thanks,” said Scott and went into the bathroom to change. Cargo pants and a sweatshirt. The pants were too big in the waist and the sweatshirt too tight in the shoulders—the dislocated shoulder made changing clothes a challenge—but at least he felt like a normal person again. He washed his hands and pushed the scrubs deep into the garbage.

  On the helicopter, Gus points out the starboard side. Scott follows his finger to the Coast Guard Cutter Willow, a gleaming white ship anchored in the sea below.

  “You ever been on a helicopter before?” Gus yells.

  Scott shakes his head. He is a painter. Who would bring a painter on a helicopter? But then again, that’s what he thought about private planes, and look how that turned out.

  Looking down, Scott sees the cutter has company. Half a dozen ships are spread out on the ocean. The plane, they believe, has crashed into an especially deep part of the sea. The something trench. That means, Gus tells him, it may take weeks to locate the submerged wreckage.

  “This is a joint search-and-recovery operation,” Gus says. “We’ve got ships from the navy, the Coast Guard, and the NOAA.”

  “The what?”

  “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”

  Gus smiles.

  “Sea nerds,” he says, “with multibeam and side scan sonar. Also the air force lent us a couple of HC-130s, and we’ve got thirty navy divers and twenty from the Massachusetts State Police ready to go into the water if and when we find the wreckage.”

  Scott thinks about this.

  “Is that normal when a small plane goes down?” he asks.

  “No,” says Gus. “Definitely a VIP package. This is what happens when the president of the United States makes a phone call.”

  The helicopter banks right and circles the cutter. The only thing keeping Scott from falling out the open door and into the sea is his seat belt.

  “You said there was wreckage on the surface when you came up,” yells Gus.

  “What?”

  “Wreckage in the sea.”

  Scott nods. “There were flames on the water.”

  “Jet fuel,” says Gus. “Which means the fuel tanks ruptured. It’s lucky you weren’t burned.”

  Scott nods, remembering.

  “I saw,” he says, “I don’t know, part of a wing? Maybe some other debris. It was dark.”

  Gus nods. The helicopter drops with another quick jerk. Scott’s stomach is in his throat.

  “A fishing boat found pieces of wing near Philbin Beach yesterday morning,” Gus tells him. “A metal tray from the galley, a headrest, toilet seat. It’s clear we’re not looking for an intact aircraft. Sounds like the whole thing came apart. We may see more wash up in the next few days, depending on the current. The question is, did it break up on impact or in midair?”

  “Sorry. I wish I could say more. But, like I said, at a certain point I hit my head.”

  Scott looks out at the ocean, endless miles of open water as far as his eye can see. For the first time he thinks, Maybe it was good that it was dark. If he had been able to see the vastness around him, the epic emptiness, he may never have made it.

  Across from him, Gus eats almonds from a ziplock bag. Where the average person appreciates the beauty of surf and waves, Gus, an engineer, sees only practical design. Gravity, plus ocean current, plus wind. Poetry to the common man is a unicorn v
iewed from the corner of an eye—an unexpected glimpse of the intangible. To an engineer, only the ingenuity of pragmatic solutions is poetic. Function over form. It’s not a question of optimism or pessimism, a glass half full or half empty.

  To an engineer, the glass is simply too big.

  This was how the world looked to Gus Franklin as a young man. Raised in Stuyvesant Village by a trash collector father and a stay-at-home mom, Gus—the only black kid in his AP calculus class—graduated summa cum laude at Fordham. He saw beauty not in nature, but in the elegant design of Roman aqueducts and microchips. To his mind, every problem on earth could be fixed by repairing or replacing a part. Or—if the operational flaw was more insidious—then you tore the whole system apart and started again.

  Which is what he did to his marriage after his wife spit in his face and stormed out the door on a rainy night in 1999. Don’t you feel anything, she’d shouted moments earlier. And Gus frowned and thought about the question—not because the answer was no, but because he so clearly did have feelings. They just weren’t the feelings she wanted.

  So he shrugged. And she spit and stormed out.

  To say his wife was emotional would be an understatement. Belinda was the least engineering-minded person Gus had ever met—she once said the fact that flowers had Latin names robbed them of their mystery. This, he decided (spit running down his jaw), was the fatal error in his marriage that could not be fixed. They were incompatible, a square peg in a round hole. Instead, his life required a systemic redesign, in this case a divorce.

  He had tried in the lonely year of their marriage to apply practical solutions to irrational problems. She thought he worked too much—but in truth he worked less than most of his colleagues, so the term too much seemed misplaced. She wanted children right away, but he believed they should wait until his career was more established, meaning his pay had increased, resulting in an expanded living allowance, ergo a bigger apartment—in finite terms: one with room for children.

  So Gus sat with her one Saturday and walked her through a PowerPoint presentation on the topic—complete with bar graphs and spreadsheets—which concluded with an equation proving that their perfect moment of conception (assuming, of course, a set of givens—his hierarchical advancement, graduated income, et cetera) would be September 2002, three years in the future. Belinda called him an unfeeling robot. He told her that robots, by definition, were unfeeling (at least currently), but he was clearly not a robot. He had feelings. They just didn’t control him the way they controlled her.

  Their divorce proved much simpler than their marriage, mostly because she hired an attorney driven by a bottom-line desire for monetary gain—that is, someone with a clear and rational goal. And so Gus Franklin went back to being a solitary human being, who—as he had projected in his PowerPoint presentation—advanced quickly, rising up the ranks at Boeing, and then accepting a lead investigative role at the NTSB, where he had been for the last eleven years.

  And yet, over the years, Gus found his engineer’s brain evolving. His previously narrow view of the world—as a machine that operated with dynamic mechanical functionality—blossomed and grew. Much of the change had to do with his new job as an investigator of large-scale transportation disasters—which exposed him to death and the urgency of human grief on a regular basis. As he had told his ex-wife, he was not a robot. He felt love. He understood the pain of loss. It was just that as a young man those factors seemed controllable, as if grief were simply a failure of the intellect to manage the body’s subsystems.

  But then his father was diagnosed with leukemia in 2003. He passed away in 2009, and Gus’s mother died of an aneurysm a year later. The void their deaths created proved to be beyond the practical comprehension of an engineer. The machine he believed himself to be broke down, and Gus found himself immersed in an experience he had witnessed for years in his job with the NTSB, but never truly understood. Grief. Death was not an intellectual conceit. It was an existential black hole, an animal riddle, both problem and solution, and the grief it inspired could not be fixed or bypassed like a faulty relay, but only endured.

  And so now, at fifty-one, Gus Franklin finds himself leaving simple intelligence behind and approaching something that can only be described as wisdom, defined in this case by an ability to understand the factual and practical pieces of an event, but also appreciate its full human import. A plane crash is not simply the sum total of time line + mechanical elements + human elements. It is an incalculable tragedy, one that shows us the ultimate finiteness of human control over the universe, and the humbling power of collective death.

  So when the phone rang that night in late August, Gus did what he always did. He snapped to attention and put the engineer part of himself to work. But he also took the time to think about the victims—crew members and civilians, and worse: two small children with their whole lives ahead of them—and to reflect on the hardship and loss that would be endured by those they left behind.

  First though, came the facts. A private jet—make? model? year built? service history?—had gone missing—departing airport? destination airport? last radio transmission? radar data? weather conditions? Other planes in the area had been contacted—any sightings?—as had other airports—has the flight been diverted or contacted another tower? But no one had seen or heard from the flight since the precise second that ATC at Teterboro lost track of it.

  A daisy chain of phone calls were made, a Go Team assembled. In daylight, telephones rang in offices and cars. In the middle hours of the night, they rang in bedrooms, shattering sleep.

  By the time he was in the car, a passenger manifest had been assembled. Projections were made—this much fuel × maximum speed = our potential search radius. At his command the Coast Guard and navy were contacted, helicopters and frigates deployed. And so, by the time Gus reached Teterboro, a nautical search was already under way, everyone still hoping for a radio malfunction and a safe landing somewhere off the grid, but knowing better.

  It would be twenty-two hours before the first wreckage was found.

  Chapter 12

  For all the drama of its descent, the helicopter lands gently, like a toe testing the water. They jump out, rotors rotating overhead. Ahead, Scott can see dozens of seamen and technicians at their posts.

  “How long after we went missing—” he starts to say, but before he can finish, Gus is already answering.

  “I’ll be honest. ATC at Teterboro fucked up. For six minutes after your flight dropped off radar, nobody noticed. Now, that’s a dog’s age in flight control time. It opens up a huge search grid in every direction. Because maybe the plane crashed instantly, or maybe it just dropped below radar and flew on. Over water anything below eleven hundred feet is off radar, so a plane could easily drop below that and keep going. Then there’s what if the plane changed direction? Where should we look? So the controller realizes the plane is missing and first he tries to raise it on the radio. That’s ninety seconds. Then he starts calling other planes in the area to see—maybe they have a visual. Because maybe your plane just has an antenna problem or the radio’s broke. But he can’t find anyone who sees your plane. So he calls the Coast Guard and says, I’ve got a plane off radar for eight minutes. Last location was this, heading in so-and-so direction at such-and-such speed. And the Coast Guard scrambles a ship and launches a helicopter.”

  “And when did they call you?”

  “Your flight went into the water at approximately ten eighteen p.m. on Sunday. By eleven thirty I was on my way to Teterboro with the Go Team.”

  An air force HC-130 plane roars past above him. Scott ducks reflexively, covering his head. The plane is a lumbering beast with four propellers.

  “He’s listening for transponder signals,” says Gus, of the plane. “Basically, what we’re doing is using all these ships, helicopters, and planes to do a visual search in an ever-expanding grid. And we’re bouncing sonar off the seabed, looking for wreckage. We want to recover everything we can,
but especially the plane’s black box. Because that plus the cockpit voice recorder will tell us second by second what happened aboard the plane.”

  Scott watches the plane bank and maneuver into a new search approach.

  “And there wasn’t any radio contact?” he asks. “No mayday? Nothing.”

  Gus pockets his notebook.

  “The last thing the pilot said was GullWing Six Thirteen, thanks much, a couple of minutes after takeoff.”

  The ship rises on the back of a wave. Scott grabs the rail to steady himself. In the distance he can see the NOAA ship moving slowly.

  “So I landed at Teterboro at eleven forty-six,” says Gus, “and downloaded the facts from ATC. I’ve got a private plane with no flight plan and an unknown number of passengers missing over water for an hour and twenty minutes.”

  “They didn’t file a flight plan?”

  “It’s not mandatory for private flights within the US, and there was a passenger roster, but it was just for the family. So crew plus four. But then I hear from Martha’s Vineyard that they think at least seven were on board, so now I have to figure out who else was on the plane, and did that have anything to do with what happened—which at this point we still don’t know what that is—did you change course, fly to Jamaica? Or land at a different airport in New York or Massachusetts?”

  “I was swimming at that point, me and the boy.”

  “Yes, you were. And by now there are three Coast Guard helicopters in the air, and maybe even one from the navy, because five minutes before I walk into ATC I get a call from my boss who got a call from his boss saying David Bateman is a very important person—which I know—and the president is already monitoring the situation—which means no fuckups under any circumstances—and there’s an FBI team meeting me and potentially someone high up in Homeland Security.”

  “And when did you find out about Kipling?”

  “So the Office of Foreign Assets Control calls me while I’m in the air between Teterboro and Martha’s Vineyard and says they had a tap on Ben Kipling’s phone and they think he was on the flight. Which means, in addition to the FBI and Homeland Security, I’ve got two agents from the Treasury joining the team and now I’m gonna need a bigger helicopter.”