Sole Survivor

to the last exchanges between the pilots maybe ten or twelve times. Then I got out my notebook and made a handwritten transcript of it, because sometimes things appear different to you when you read them than when you listen. Occasionally the eye sees nuances that the ear misses.”
        Joe now knew what he held in his hand. He could tell by the thickness that there were three sheets of paper.
        Barbara said, “Minh had called me first. He intended to call Bruce Laceroth, then the Chairman and the Vice Chairman of the Board-if not all five board members-so each of them could hear the tape himself. It wasn't standard protocol, but this was a strange and unprecedented situation. I'm sure Minh got to at least one of those people-though they all deny hearing from him. We'll never know for sure, because Minh Tran died in a fire at the labs shortly before six o'clock that same morning, approximately two hours after he called me in Pueblo.”
        “Jesus.”
        “A very intense fire. An impossibly intense fire.”
        Surveying the trees that surrounded the meadow, Joe expected to see the pale faces of watchers in the deep shadows of the woods. When he and Barbara had first arrived, the site had struck him as remote, but now he felt as exposed and vulnerable as if he had been standing in the middle of any intersection in L.A.
        He said, “Let me guess-the original tape from the cockpit recorder was destroyed in the lab fire.”
        “Supposedly burned to powder, vanished, no trace, gone, goodbye,” Barbara said.
        “What about the computer that was processing the digitised version?”
        “Scorched garbage. Nothing in it salvageable.”
        “But you still have your copy.”
        She shook her head. “I left the cassette in my hotel room while I went to a breakfast meeting. The contents of the cockpit tape were so explosive, I didn't intend to share it right away with everyone on the team. Until we'd had time to think it through, we needed to be careful about when and how we released it.”
        “Why?”
        “The pilot was dead, but his reputation was at stake. His family would be devastated if he was blamed. We had to be absolutely sure. If the cause was laid in Captain Blanc's lap, then tens of millions-even hundreds of millions-of dollars worth of wrongful-death litigation would ensue. We had to act with due diligence. My plan was to bring Mario back to my room after breakfast to hear the tape, just the two of us.”
        “Mario Oliveri,” Joe said, referring to the man in Denver who had told him last night that Barbara had retired and moved back to Colorado Springs.
        “Yeah. As head of the human-performance group, Mario's thoughts were more important to me at that moment than anyone's. But just as we were finishing breakfast, we got word about the fire at the labs-about poor Minh. By the time I got back to my room with Mario, the copy of the tape I'd made over the phone was blank.”
        “Stolen and replaced.”
        “Or just erased on my own machine. I guess Minh told someone that I'd duped it long-distance.”
        “Right then you must have known.”
        She nodded. “Something was very wrong. Something stank.”
        Her mop of hair was as white as the feathers on the head of the eagle that had overflown them, but until this moment she had seemed younger than fifty. Now she suddenly seemed older.
        “Something wrong,” he said, “but you couldn't quite believe it.”
        “My life was the Safety Board. I was proud to be part of it. Still am Joe. They're damn good people.”
        “Did you tell Mario what was on the tape?”
        “Yeah.”
        “What was his reaction?”
        “Amazement. Disbelief, I think.”
        “Did you show him the transcript you'd made?” She was silent a moment. Then: “No.”
        “Why not?”
        “My hackles were up.”
        “You didn't trust anyone.”
        “A fire that intense… there must have been an accelerant.”
        “Arson,” Joe said.
        “But no one ever raised the possibility. Except me. I don't have faith in the integrity of their investigation of that lab fire at all. Not at all.”
        “What did the autopsy on Minh reveal? If he was murdered and the fire set to cover it-”
        “If he was, they couldn't prove it by what was left of the body. He was virtually cremated. The thing is… he was a really nice guy, Joe. He was