Page 17 of Gryphon

The lead woman, Miranda, began speaking to the dog sitting at her feet. “Excluding hijackers, there have been twelve confirmed suicide-by-aircraft in the twenty-first century, totaling a hundred and ninety-four fatalities. The worst of those totaled a hundred and fifty passengers in a single flight—the Germanwings crash in 2015. Considering that against an average of twenty-nine-point-eight-million flights per year—that’s over the last decade and inclusive of the statistically anomalous Pandemic, approximately thirty-one-point-three without it—it makes it a very rare but not unheard of event.”

Rolm knew the general statistics of flights, but crashes by suicide? The cold of his wet shoes and wet butt seeped into his bones.

“We’ll continue the investigation,” she continued talking to the dog, “until we can prove that the downing of your aircraft was a deliberate action.”

Her manner left Rolm wondering if she thought the aircraft belonged to her dog.

“Jeremy, was the autopilot engaged?” She still didn’t look up.

A man young enough to be one of his grandkids swiped at his tablet computer through several photos before answering, “No, it was switched off. Along with the system that would have attempted to auto-recover from a catastrophic dive. You can see in this photo that both were manually disabled.” He turned the tablet toward Miranda and her dog and then toward Rolm himself.

A closeup shot of the top-center section of the cockpit console that contained the autopilot controls.

Rolm saw that the relevant switches were indeed set to the Off position. Just because he’d flown a desk these last twenty-five years didn’t mean he’d forgotten his roots. He wasn’t current on anything bigger than a Beech twin-prop, but he’d been through the full sim course and several training flights on each aircraft type before he’d certified it to be part of the fleet. He felt seriously old that he remembered the 737 from those long-ago days. It had been added to the fleet when he was still a junior mechanic.

Miranda continued speaking to her dog. “It is a reasonable addition to the hypothetical Conjectural Sphere of Causality that the aircraft was deliberately crashed. An intentional CFIT, controlled flight into terrain.”

“But…” Rolm ignored the sphere thing but understood the message, “…why would someone do that?”

“That,” she primly addressed her four-legged audience of one, “is outside the scope of our investigation. We’re only interested in why the aircraft physically came down.” She turned away and set the dog on its feet. “Jeremy, next we’ll recover the data recorders. We need to map the control inputs from the cockpit to verify the conjecture that it was an intentional controlled flight into terrain.”

“Take Tad for muscle instead,” the Australian waved at the big black man who’d been last to arrive. “I need Jeremy for a moment.”

“Least I’m good for something,” the black man muttered. “None of this makes any damn sense.”

Rolm wouldn’t have heard him if they hadn’t stood side-by-side.

Rolm wanted to strike out at the Miranda woman. Strike out for the dead plane, for the lovely Alva, for…himself. So that he wouldn’t have to face the pain.

All other releases denied, Rolm fell to his knees in the snow and screamed at the dark night. Then puked up the entire sausage sandwich he’d eaten on the drive up. Sick until any meals behind that one lay on the snow before him as well.

Rolm pitied his wife, Gertrude. Not for the affair. She was the one who’d announced herself done with sex.

But he pitied her nonetheless. Perhaps it was very Swedish of him; he didn’t know or care. After all her years of patience and support, from this moment on she would only have a hollow shell pretending to be a husband—all that remained of him.

His airline, his life’s work, instead of reaching its culmination in eight days, had been shredded by a suicide.

“By the way, mate,” the blonde Australian spoke softly.

The strange woman and her dog had moved on.

“He may have an Italian name, but look at his face. Looks more like a Russian prizefighter to me.” For some reason she knelt and unzipped the bag again to his waist. She slid up Marco’s sleeves, but he saw no markings on either of his forearms.

The young Asian man snapped several photos of Marco’s face. He also pulled out a small device that imaged Marco’s thumb and fingerprints. The blonde held out a blood-stained wallet. He photographed the contents.

Rolm stared at Marco’s bloody uniform and broken body. Too numb and sick at heart to look away.

“I’ll send these to a friend of mine and see what she thinks.” Then the Asian walked away while tapping on his phone.

The Australian tossed the wallet on Marco’s bloody chest and zipped up both bags, shed her blue gloves, and followed the others toward the plane.

She’d been right, he didn’t look very Italian. But Russian?

LuftSvenska might have been attacked by Russia?

11

Heidi Geller returned from her afternoon run ready to die.

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