Sole Survivor

Felicia, and I are going to be hanging by a thread as long as this cover-up continues. Our only hope is for someone else to blow it wide open, so then what little I know about it won't matter any more.”
        The storm clouds were not only in the east now. Like an armada of incoming starships in a film about futuristic warfare, ominous black thunderheads slowly resolved out of the white mists overhead.
        “Otherwise,” Barbara continued, “a year from now or two years from now, even though I've kept my mouth shut, they'll decide to tie up all the loose ends. Flight 353 will be such old news that no one will connect my death or Denny's or a handful of others to it. No suspicions will be raised if something happens to those of us with incriminating bits of information. These people, whoever the hell they are… they'll buy insurance with a car accident here, a fire there. A faked robbery to cover a murder. A suicide.”
        Through Joe's mind passed the waking-nightmare images of Lisa burning, Georgine dead on the kitchen floor, Charlie in the blood-tinted light.
        He couldn't argue with Barbara's assessment. She probably had it figured right.
        In a sky waiting to snarl and crackle, menacing faces formed in the clouds, blind and open-mouthed, choked with anger.
        Taking her first fateful step toward revelation, Barbara said, “The flight-data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder arrived in Washington on the Gulfstream and were in the labs by three o'clock Eastern time the day after the crash.”
        “You were still just getting into the investigation here.”
        “That's right. Minh Tran-he's an electronics engineer with the Safety Board-and a few colleagues opened the Fairchild recorder. it's almost as large as a shoe box, jacketed in three-eighths of an inch of stainless steel. They cut it carefully, with a special saw. This particular unit had endured such violent impact that it was compressed four inches end to end-the steel just crunched up like cardboard-and one corner had been crushed, resulting in a small breach.”
        “And it still functioned?”
        “No. The recorder was completely destroyed. But inside the larger box is the steel memory module. It contains the tape. It was also breached. A small amount of moisture had penetrated all the way into the memory module, but the tape wasn't entirely ruined. It had to be dried, processed, but that didn't take long, and then Minh and a few others gathered in a soundproof listening room to run it from the beginning. There were almost three hours of cockpit conversation leading up to the crash-”
        Joe said, “They don't just run it fast forward to the last few minutes?”
        “No. Something earlier in the flight, something that seemed to be of no importance to the pilots at the time, might provide clues that help us understand what we're hearing in the moments immediately before the plane went down.”
        Steadily rising, the warm wind was brisk enough now to foil the lethargic bees on their lazy quest from bloom to bloom. Surrendering the field to the oncoming storm, they departed for secret nests in the woods.
        “Sometimes we get a cockpit tape that's all but useless to us,” Barbara continued. “The recording quality's lousy for one reason or another. Maybe the tape's old and abraded. Maybe the microphone is the hand-held type or isn't functioning as well as it should, too much vibration. Maybe the recording head is worn and causing distortion.”
        “I would think there'd be daily maintenance, weekly replacement, when it's something as important as this.”
        “Remember, as a percentage of flights, planes rarely go down. There are costs and flight-time delays to be considered. Anyway, commercial aviation is a human enterprise, Joe. And what human enterprise ever operates to ideal standards?”
        “Point taken.”
        “This time there was good and bad,” she said. “Both Delroy Blane and Santorelli were wearing headsets with boom microphones, which is real damn good, much better than a hand-held. Those along with the overhead cockpit mike gave us three channels to study. On the bad side, the tape wasn't new. It had been recorded over a lot of times and was more deteriorated than we would have liked. Worse, whatever the nature of the moisture that reached the tape, it had caused some patchy corrosion to the recording surface.”
        From a back pocket of