Millennium

"Hi, Sarah," I said. "I'd like to find Louise Ball, if it's not too much trouble."

"No trouble," she said. "What does she do, and in what city?"

"She works right here," I said. "Or she did yesterday. She's a ticket agent."

Sarah was shaking her head and reaching for a book. She flipped through it.

"Not unless she was hired after five o'clock yesterday evening. I know all my people, Bill.

She might have been a temporary. Let me look."

She did, and came up with nothing. She put the name through her computer, and confirmed that no one named Louise Ball worked for United.

It was time to call in the FBI. A harmless kook with an obsession about a dead daughter was one thing; an unauthorized person hanging around an investigation pretending to be something she wasn't was another.

I actually got into a phone booth and had dialed the first couple digits of the number Freddie Powers had given me ... then I hung up. Louise had said she'd be back that evening.

I'd wait, and give her a chance to explain herself.

I remembered I did have something to talk to Frddie Powers about, so I went back into the booth. I found him at the temporary morgue.

"What about those watches?" I asked him. "Did you find anything new?"

"One thing," he said. "You remember the digitals that were ru

"Did you bring somebody in on it?"

"Yeah."

"What"d he say?"

"He said it couldn't have happened."

I thought about that.

"How many people actually saw them? I mean, while they were ru

There was a pause. "You and me, Stanley, and that doctor, Brindle. Maybe a couple people who were helping him take watches off the corpses ... but I don't think so. He's the one who noticed it."

"Did you get any films, videotapes ... anything like that?"

"No. Nothing. All we've got is the testimony of the three of us."

"Three?"

Another pause. "I'm not sure Brindle wants to swear to anything."

"Why don't we wait on this? We've still got the watches that are forty-five minutes off."

"Right."

With the digitals, all we've got is that you and I and Tom saw it."

There was a long pause. I assumed he was thinking over his position, how his career was going and how a story like this would affect his advancement in the Bureau -- which has always liked things neat.

"I saw it," he said, slowly, "but that doesn't mean I think it's important."

"Right. Sit on it for a while, okay? I'll decide if it's important."

"You've got it, Bill."

One anomaly dealt with.

The day went like that: pretty well, except I kept looking over my shoulder expecting Louise to drop into my lap.

She didn't.

We started off with Norman Tyson, from the company who built the air traffic control computers.

He took the position that the firm's equipment was not at fault, as it had been functioning at data-loads beyond what it had been designed to handle. I let Tom work on him, hoping to see a chink in his armor of certainty. They knew they were vulnerable, but that also knew the real story of this crash could be the FAA's failure to replace obsolete hardware.

And the agency would pass that ball along to Congress, who didn't provide the money. By then the guilt was already spread out enough, but you could go further, if you wanted to, and blame the electorate who put the Congress into office.

I knew the Board was in the clear. At least on paper. We had reports and recommendations by the carload. We'd been warning them about the old computers. We'd told them they had to be replaced.

But had we told them hard enough? Who could tell? These were budget-conscious times. Come to think of it, I couldn't remember any time when people weren't howling about cutting government spending, and everybody who ever got cut thought it was the worst case of bad judgement ever seen in Washington. And we never said the new computers would be cheap: we were talking about half a billion dollars.

Look on the brightside, I told myself. I'll bet we buy them now.

Just after lunch I got a call from Doctor Harlan Prentice, who was in charge of the autopsy team. He wanted me to come over, but there are things I'd just as soon skip after a meal, and that was one of them.

"It has to do with the contents of the stomachs," he said. "I guess you know the rate of identification in this crash is going to be low."

"I've been in the morgue, Doctor," I told him. "I've seen the big baggies."

"Yes. Well, with the 747, we've examined seventy-three body fragments containing stomachs. I have before me a menu from that flight, and it lists a choice of chicken crepes, beef a la bercy, and a diet plate in tourist. I haven't seen a menu for first-class: I swallowed queasily, tasting the steak I'd just eaten. I mean, I'm hardened to this sort of thing, but doctors are incredible.

"What's the significance, Doctor?"

"They all had the chicken," he said.

That stopped me for a moment.

"Rather unlikely, wouldn't you say?" He was still waiting for a comment.

I was suddenly angry. Not at him. But why wouldn't this case follow a decent, reasonable line? "Unlikely," I conceded. "Not impossible."

"It's stretching the laws of chance. I have about a hundred stomachs to look at yet "

" and the next one might be beef."

"Or the diet plate," he said, helpfully.

Then I had it.

"There must have been a mix-up in New York," I said. "They loaded too many of the chicken di

"What about first class?"

Screw first class. "I don't know. I do know there's always a reasonable explanation." I swallowed again, wondering what in hell I really knew. "I'll have somebody check it out with Pan Am catering in New York. They'll straighten it out."

I hung up on him.

Then I stood there, thinking it over, knowing I was going to need an Alka-Seltzer for dessert. I seemed to have this compulsion to throw dirt over the problems and pretend they weren't there. The thing was, they were such crazy problems. Seventy-three stomachs full of airline chicken. Watches that were fortyfive minutes fast. Watches that ran backwards when I was looking, and reversed when I turned my back. A beautiful imposter dressed up like an airline employee.

And a voice on a tape. They're all dead. They're all dead and burned.

It was about that time Gordy Petcher arrived. I sent him off with my team leaders so they could fill him in. At the moment, I had no use for him at all. The bastard couldn't come when the rest of us were walking around in the mud and gore; now here he was to take credit for the findings. At least he could handle the press conferences.

We had another, slightly more informative one, after the nightly meeting. Gordy wanted to give the media something to chew on, so Tom and Eli and I worked out the short list of the things we were pretty sure of, cautioning Gordy to preface them all with words like "There are indications that " or "We are now looking into " or "The possibility has arisen "

Hell, he was good at it, I'll give him that. He was a lot better than I was. He knew how to hedge his statements, how to avoid libel. The only thing that worried me was his tendency to grab for a headline, but he didn't this time. The press seemed satisfied with what it had, and gradually everyone began to file out.

Before long I was the only one left in the large conference room. It's amazing how empty a place like that can look.

She hadn't really said where she'd meet me.

The hotel, I thought. She'd be at the hotel, or leave a message.