Total Control by David Baldacci Page A

backyard. She and Jason had planted flowers, bushes and trees over the last two years. Working together toward a common goal: They had conducted much of their married lives along that same theme. And despite all the uncertainty she was feeling right now, one truth remained sacred to her. Jason loved her and Amy.
    Whatever had compelled him to lie to her, to climb aboard a doomed plane instead of remaining safely at home doing nothing more daring than prepping the kitchen walls for painting, she would find out what it was. She knew Jason's reasons would have been completely innocent. The man she knew intimately and loved with all her heart would have been capable of nothing less. Since he had been senselessly ripped from her, she at least owed it to him to track down why he had been on that plane. As soon as she was mentally able, she would take up that pursuit with every bit of energy she could muster.
    CHAPTER TWELVE
    The airplane hangar at the regional airport was small. On the walls were rows of power tools; stacks of boxes lay all over the floor.
    The darkness outside was turned into daylight inside by a ceiling full of overhead lights. Wind rattled against the metal walls as the sleet intensified, clanging like buckshot against the structure. The interior of the hangar was filled with the thick, pungent smell of an assortment of petroleum products.
    On the concrete floor near the front of the hangar lay an enormous metal object. Bent and grossly distorted, it was the remains of the right wing of Flight 3223, with starboard engine and pylon intact. It had landed in the middle of a densely wooded area, directly on top of a ninety-foot-tall, hundred-year-old oak, which was split in half by the impact. Miraculously, the jet fuel had not ignited.
    Most of the payload had probably been lost when the tank and lines had been pierced, and the tree had cushioned some of the fall. The pieces had been removed by helicopter and brought to the hangar for examination.
    A small group of men gathered closely around the wreckage.
    Their exhalations formed clouds in the unheated air; thick jackets kept them warm. They used powerful flashlights to probe the jagged edge of the wing where it had been torn loose from the in-fated airliner. The nacelle housing the starboard engine was partially crushed and the right-side cowling was caved in. The flaps on the trailing edge of the wing had been ripped off on impact, but these had been recovered nearby. Examination of the engine had shown severe blade shingling, clear evidence of a major airflow disturbance while the engine was delivering power. The "disturbance" was easy to pinpoint. A great deal of debris had been ingested into the engine, essentially destroying its functionality even had it remained attached to the fuselage.
    However, the attention of the men gathered around the wing was centered on where it had detached from the plane. The jagged edges of the metal were burned and blackened and, most telling, the metal was bent outward, away from the surface of the wing, with clear signs of indentation and pitting on the metal's surface. There was a short list of events that could have caused that; a bomb was clearly on that list. When Lee Sawyer had examined the wing earlier, his eyes had riveted on that area.
    George Kaplan shook his head in disgust. "You're right, Lee. The changes in the metallurgy I'm seeing could only have been caused by a shock wave exerting immense but short-lived overpressure.
    Something exploded here, all right. It's the damnedest thing. We put detectors in airports so some crazy assholes with an agenda can't smuggle a gun or bomb on board, and now this. Jesus!"
    Lee Sawyer moved forward and knelt down next to the edge of the wing. Here he was, nearly fifty years old, half of those years spent with the bureau, and again he was sifting through the catastrophic results of human pollution.
    He had worked on the Lockerbie disaster, an investigation of mammoth proportion