‘Enough, Joe. Knowing more details can’t ever help you.’

The meadow was so utterly soundless that it might have been the ignition point of all Creation, from which God’s energies had long ago flowed toward the farthest ends of the universe, leaving only a mute vacuum.

A few fat bees, enervated by the August heat that was unable to penetrate Joe’s chill, forsook their usual darting urgency and travelled languidly across the meadow from wildflower to wildflower, as though flying in their sleep and acting out a shared dream about collecting nectar. He could hear no buzzing as the torpid gatherers went about their work.

‘And the cause,’ he asked, ‘was hydraulic-control failure — that stuff with the rudder, the yawing and then the roll?’

‘You really haven’t read about it, have you?’

‘Couldn’t.’

She said, ‘The possibility of a bomb, anomalous weather, the wake vortex from another aircraft, and various other factors were eliminated pretty early. And the structures group, twenty-nine specialists in that division of the investigation alone, studied the wreckage in the hangar in Pueblo for eight months without being able to pin down a probable cause. They suspected lots of different things at one time or another. Malfunctioning yaw dampers, for

one. Or an electronics-bay door failure. Engine mount failure looked good to them for a while. And malfunctioning thrust reversers. But they eliminated each suspicion, and no official probable cause was found.’

‘How unusual is that?’

‘Unusual. But sometimes we can’t pin it down. Like Hopewell in ninety-four. And, in fact, another 737 that went down on its approach to Colorado Springs in ninety-one, killing everyone aboard. So it happens, we get stumped.’

Joe realized there had been a disturbing qualifier in what she had said: no official probable cause.

Then a second realization struck him: ‘You took early retirement from the Safety Board about seven months ago. That’s what Mario Oliveri told me.’

‘Mario. Good man. He headed the human-performance group in this investigation. But it’s been almost nine months since I quit.’

‘If the structures group was still sifting the wreckage eight months after the crash . . . then you didn’t stay to oversee the entire inquiry, even though you were the original IIC on it.’

‘Bailed out,’ she acknowledged. ‘When it all turned sour, when evidence disappeared, when I started to make some noise about it… they put the squeeze on me. At first I tried to stay on, but I just couldn’t handle being part of a fraud. Couldn’t do the right thing and spill the beans, either, so I bailed. Not proud of it. But I’ve got a hostage to fortune, Joe.’

‘Hostage to fortune. A child?’

‘Denny. He’s twenty-three now, not a baby any more, but if I ever lost him…

Joe knew too well how she would have finished that sentence. ‘They threatened your son?’

Although Barbara stared into the crater before her, she was seeing a potential disaster rather than the aftermath of a real one, a personal catastrophe rather than one involving three hundred and twenty deaths.

‘It happened two weeks after the crash,’ she said. ‘I was in San Francisco, where Deiroy Blane — the Captain on Flight 353 — had lived, overseeing a pretty intense investigation into his personal history, trying to discover any signs of psychological problems.’

‘Finding anything?’

‘No. He seemed like a rock-solid guy. This was also at the time when I was pressing the hardest to go public with what had happened to certain evidence. I was staying in a hotel. I’m

a reasonably sound sleeper. At two-thirty in the morning, someone switched on my nightstand lamp and put a gun in my face.’

After years of waiting for Go-Team calls, Barbara had long ago overcome a tendency to shed sleep slowly. She woke to the click of the lamp switch and the flood of light as she would have awakened to the ringing telephone: instantly alert and clearheaded.

She might have cried out at the sight of the intruder, except that her shock pinched off her voice and her breath.

The gunman, about forty, had large sad eyes, hound-dog eyes,

a nose bashed red by the slow blows of two decades of drink, and

a sensuous mouth. His thick lips never quite closed, as though

waiting for the next treat that couldn’t be resisted — cigarette,

whiskey, pastry, or breast.

His voice was as soft and sympathetic as a mortician’s but with no unctuousness. He indicated that the pistol was fitted with a sound suppressor, and he assured her that if she tried to call for help, he would blow her brains out with no concern that anyone beyond the room would hear the shot.

She tried to ask who he was, what he wanted.

Hushing her, he sat on the edge of her bed.

He had nothing against her personally, he said, and it would depress him to have to kill her. Besides, if the IIC of the probe of Flight 353 were to be found murdered, inconvenient questions might be asked.

The sensualist’s bosses, whoever they might be, could not afford inconvenient questions at this time, on this issue.

Barbara realized that a second man was in the room. He had been standing in the corner near the bathroom door, on the other side of the bed from the gunman.

This one was ten years younger than the first. His smooth pink face and choirboy eyes gave him an innocent demeanour that was belied by a disquietingly eager smile that came and went like the flickering of a serpent’s tongue.

The older man pulled the covers off Barbara and politely asked her to get out of bed. They had a few things to explain to her, he said. And they wanted to be certain that she was alert and attentive throughout, because lives depended on her understanding and believing what they had come to tell her.

In her pyjamas, she stood obediently while the younger man,

with a flurry of brief smiles, went to the desk, withdrew the chair from the kneehole and stood it opposite the foot of the bed. She sat as instructed.

She had been wondering how they had gotten in, as she’d engaged both the deadbolt and the security chain on the door to the corridor. Now she saw that both of the doors between this hotel room and the next — which could be connected to form a suite for those guests who required more space — stood open. The mystery remained, however, for she was certain that the door on this side had been securely locked with a deadbolt when she had gone to bed.

At the direction of the older man, the younger produced a roll of strapping tape and a pair of scissors. He secured Barbara’s wrists tightly to the arms of the straight-back chair, wrapping the tape several times.

Frightened of being restrained and helpless, Barbara nonetheless submitted because she believed that the sad-eyed man would deliver on his threat to shoot her point-blank in the head if she resisted. With his sensuous mouth, as though sampling the contents of a bonbon box, he had savoured the words blow your brains out.

When the younger man cut a six-inch length of tape and pressed it firmly across Barbara’s mouth, then secured that piece by winding a continuous length of tape twice around her head, she panicked for a moment but then regained control of herself. They were not going to pinch her nose shut and smother her. If they had come here to kill her, she would be dead already.

As the younger man retreated with his tremulous smiles to a shadowy corner, the sensualist sat on the foot of the bed, opposite Barbara. Their knees were no more than a few inches apart.

Putting his pistol aside on the rumpled sheets, he took a knife from a jacket pocket. A switchblade. He flicked it open.

Her fear soaring again, Barbara could manage to draw only quick shallow breaths. The resultant whistling in her nose amused the man sitting with her.

From another jacket pocket, he withdrew a snack-size round of Gouda cheese. Using the knife, he removed the cellophane wrapper and then peeled off the red wax skin that prevented the Gouda from developing mould.

Carefully eating thin slivers of cheese off the wickedly sharp blade, he told Barbara that he knew where her son, Denny, lived and worked. He recited the addresses.

He also knew that Denny had been married to Rebekah for thir­teen months, nine days, and — he consulted his watch, calculated —fifteen hours. He knew that Rebekah was six months pregnant with their first child, a girl, whom they were going to name Felicia.

To prevent harm from befalling Denny and his bride, Barbara was expected to accept the official story about what had happened to the tape from the cockpit-voice recorder on Flight 353 — a story that she had rejected in discussions with her colleagues and that she had set out to disprove. She was also expected to forget what she had heard on the enhanced version of that tape.

If she continued to seek the truth of the situation or attempted to express her concerns to either the press or the public, Denny and Rebekah would disappear. In the deep basement of a private redoubt soundproofed and equipped for prolonged and difficult interrogations, the sensualist and his associates would shackle Denny, tape open his eyes, and force him to watch while they killed Rebekah and the unborn child.

Then they would surgically remove one of his fingers every day for ten days — taking elaborate measures to control bleeding, shock, and infection. They would keep him alive and alert, though steadily less whole. On the eleventh and twelfth days, they would remove his ears.

They had a full month of imaginative surgery planned.

Every day, as they took another piece of him, they would tell Denny that they would release him to his mother without further harm if she would only agree to cooperate with them in a conspiracy of silence that was, after all, in the national interest. Vitally important defence matters were involved here.

This would not be entirely true. The part about the national interest was true, from their point of view, at least, even though they could not, of course, explain to Barbara how the knowledge she possessed was a threat to her country. The part about her being able to earn Denny’s release by cooperation would not be true, however, because once she failed to honour a pledge of silence, she would not be given a second chance, and her son would be forever lost to her.

They would deceive Denny solely to ensure that he would spend the last month of his life desperately wondering why his mother had so stubbornly condemned him to such excruciating pain and horrible disfigurement. By the end, half mad or worse, in deep spiritual misery, he would curse her vehemently and beg God to let her rot in Hell.

As he continued to carve the tiny wheel of Gouda and serve himself off the dangerous point of the blade, the sensualist assured Barbara that no one — not the police, not the admittedly clever FBI, not the mighty United States Army — could keep Denny and Rebekah safe forever. He claimed to be employed by an organ­ization with such bottomless resources and extensive connections that it was capable of compromising and subverting any institution or agency of the federal or state governments.

He asked her to nod if she believed him.

She did believe him. Implicitly. Without reservation. His seduc­tive voice, which seemed to lick each of his hideous threats to savour the texture and astringency of it, was filled with the quiet confidence and smug superiority of a megalomaniac who carries the badge of a secret authority, receives a comfortable salary with numerous fringe benefits, and knows that in his old age he will be able to rely upon the cushion of a generous civil-service pension.

He then asked her if she intended to cooperate.

With guilt and humiliation but also with utter sincerity, she nodded again. Yes. She would cooperate. Yes.

Studying a pale oval of cheese like a tiny filleted fish on the point of the blade, he said that he wanted her to be deeply impressed with his determination to ensure her cooperation, so impressed that she would be in no danger of forsaking the pledge she had just made to him. Therefore, on their way out of the hotel, he and his partner would select, at random, an employee or perhaps a guest — someone who just happened to cross their path — and would kill that person on the spot. Three shots: two in the chest, one in the head.

Stunned, Barbara protested from behind the gag, contorting her face in an effort to twist the tape and free her mouth. But it was pulled cruelly tight, and her lips were stuck firmly to the adhesive, and the only argument that she could get out was a pained, muffled, wordless pleading. She didn’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death. She was going to cooperate. There was no reason to impress her with their seriousness. No reason. She already believed in their seriousness.

Never taking his great sad eyes from her, without saying another word, he slowly finished his cheese.

His unwavering stare seemed to cause a power backflow, drain­ing her of energy. Yet she could not look away.

When he had consumed the final morsel, he wiped the blade of his knife on the sheets. Then he folded it into the handle and returned the weapon to his pocket.

Sucking on his teeth and rolling his tongue slowly around his mouth, he gathered up the shredded cellophane and the peels of red wax. He rose from the bed and deposited the trash in the waste basket beside the desk.

The younger man stepped out of the shadowy corner. His thin but eager smile no longer fluttered uncertainly; it was fixed.

From behind the strapping tape, Barbara was still attempting to protest the murder of an innocent person when the older man returned to her and, with the edge of his right hand, chopped hard at the side of her neck.

As a scintillant darkness sprayed across her field of vision, she started to slump forward. She felt the chair tipping sideways. She was unconscious before her head hit the carpet.

For perhaps twenty minutes she dreamed of severed fingers in preserving sheaths of red wax. In shrimp-pink faces, fragile smiles broke like strings of pearls, the bright teeth bouncing and rolling across the floor, but in the black crescent between the curved pink lips, new pearls formed, and a choirboy eye blinked blue. There were hound-dog eyes too, as black and shiny as leeches, in which she saw not her reflection but images of Denny’s screaming, earless face.

When she regained consciousness, she was slumped in the chair, which had been set upright again. Either the sensualist or his pearl-toothed companion had taken pity on her.

Her wrists were taped to the arms of the chair in such a fashion as to allow her to wrench loose if she applied herself diligently. She needed less than ten minutes to free her right hand, much less to slip the bonds on the left.

She used her own cuticle scissors to snip through the tape wound around her head. When she gingerly pulled it off her lips, it took far less skin than she expected.

Liberated and able to talk, she found herself at the telephone with the receiver in her hand. But she could think of no one whom she dared to call, and she put the phone down.