Night Fall by Nelson DeMille Page B

out, uninformed-opinion to Ms. Mayfield, my wife and superior, which caused her some professional and personal concern, and thus my presence here tonight. And your presence as well. So, I thank you, Mr. Siben, for taking the time to brief me, which I’m sure must be tedious for you by now. It’s my opinion that you and everyone who worked on this case have done an outstanding job and reached the correct conclusion.”
    He eyed me for a moment, wondering, I’m sure, if I was pulling his chain. He glanced at Kate, who nodded reassuringly to him.
    I extended my hand to Mr. Siben, who took it and gave me a firm shake. He shook hands with Kate, who thanked him, then he turned, and walked into the darkness.
    He then did a Jimmy Durante, turned, and walked back into the light. I thought he was going to say, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.” But instead he called out to me, “Mr. Corey. Can you explain that streak of light?”
    I replied, “No, I can’t. Can you?”
    “Optical illusion.”
    “That’s it.”
    He turned and disappeared again into the shadows. As he reached the door, his voice carried over the quiet hangar, and he said, “No, that’s not it. Damn it.”

     
    CHAPTER TEN
     
    Kate and I stood in the quiet hangar with Mr. Siben’s parting words still echoing in my mind. I mean, the guy had me half convinced, then he has a brain fart on his way out, and I’m back where I started.
    Kate moved toward the aircraft and said, “Let’s see the interior.”
    The reconstructed 747 sat on a wooden trestle and at several points along the trestle were steps, which led to the open doors of the fuselage. I followed her up a set of steps into the rear passenger cabin.
    Kate said, “This interior cabin was reassembled in the fuselage as an investigative tool to match fuselage damage with cabin damage.”
    I looked down the length of the cabin toward where the forward section and cockpit should have been, but the cockpit sat separately in another part of the hangar, leaving a huge opening through which I could see the far wall of the hangar.
    I realized that at the moment of separation, the passengers saw the cockpit falling away, and the sky appearing in front of them, followed by a howling wind that must have ripped the cabin apart.
    And in the falling cockpit the captain, co-pilot, and flight engineer were at the controls of an aircraft that was no longer attached to their cockpit. What did they think? What did they do? I felt my heart racing.
    The main cabin of the huge 747 was a nightmarish semblance of the interior of an airliner-cracked ceilings and lights, hanging luggage bins, open portholes, pieced-together bulkheads, mangled lavatories and galleys, shredded and burned divider curtains, rows of tilted and ripped seats, and carpet patched together on the floor. Everything was held in place by a framework of wooden beams and wire netting. There was still the faint odor of something unpleasant in the air.
    Kate said, in a quiet voice, “As the pieces emerged from the ocean, people from Boeing and the NTSB directed the reconstruction. The people who volunteered to do the actual work included pilots, flight attendants, and machinists-airline people who had intimate knowledge of the interior of a Boeing 747.” She continued, “Every piece of the aircraft has a factory number, so, difficult as this was, it wasn’t impossible.”
    I commented, “This took a lot of patience.”
    “A lot of dedication, and a lot of love. About forty of the passengers were TWA employees.”
    I nodded.
    She continued, “From the TWA seating chart, we had a good idea where each passenger sat. Using that, the pathologists created a computer database and digitalized photographs, and matched the injuries sustained by each passenger to damage on their seats, trying to determine if those injuries and the seat damage was consistent with a bomb or missile.”
    “Amazing.”
    “It is. No one can fault any of the work done by