Night Fall

I recalled that a few careers and reputations had been ruined, damaged, or compromised by this case, and I didn’t want to add my or Kate’s career to that list.

I looked at Kate. We’d been married a year, and this case had never come up before, though I recalled now that she’d gone to the memorial service last July without me. I wondered why she’d waited until this a

This case had always been dangerous to anyone who came near it. It was a plasma death ray, an explosive gas bubble, a phantom missile, friendly fire, electromagnetic pulse, a volatile mixture of fuel and air, and an optical illusion.

All my instincts told me that for my own good, and for Kate’s as well, I needed to forget everything I had seen and heard tonight. But it wasn’t about Kate or me, or anyone else, in or out of the government.

It was aboutthem. Two hundred and thirty of them. And their families and loved ones, the people who had placed roses on the seats of the aircraft, and who had lit the candles and waded into the ocean, and thrown the flowers into the sea. And the people who hadn’t been at the service, who sat at home tonight and cried.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Home.I live in a two-salary high-rise on East 72ndStreet, between Second and Third Avenues. My apartment is on the 34thfloor, and from my balcony where I was now standing, Scotch whiskey in hand at two in the morning, I looked south down the length of Manhattan Island.

Between the skyscrapers of Midtown, I could see the Bowery and a piece of the Lower East Side, where I grew up on Henry Street, near the housing projects.

Beyond Chinatown, I could make out the courthouses and jails and One Police Plaza, where I once worked, and Federal Plaza, where I now worked.

In fact, most of my history was spread out down there-John Corey as a kid playing on the mean streets of the Lower East Side, John Corey as a rookie cop on the Bowery, John Corey the homicide detective, and last, John Corey contract agent for the Federal Anti-Terrorist Task Force.

And now, John Corey, a year into his second marriage, living in the apartment of his first wife, Robin, who was living with her boss, a total schmuck, making too much money defending financially successful scum.

At the lower tip of Manhattan, the skyscrapers of Wall Street rose like stalagmites in a cave pool. And to the right, soaring a quarter mile into the sky, were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

On February 26, 1993, at around noon, Mideast terrorists, with explosives packed in a Ryder rental van, drove into the underground garage of the North Tower, parked the van, and left. At 12:18P.M., the van exploded, killing six people and injuring another thousand. Had the tower actually collapsed, the dead would have numbered in the thousands. This was the first attack by foreign terrorists ever perpetrated on American soil. It was also a wake-up call, but no one was listening.

I went into the living room of my apartment.

The decor of this place is sort of Palm Beach hotel lobby, with too many pinks and greens and seashell motifs and scratchy rugs.

Kate says it’s all going, first chance she gets. What’s not going is the only thing I bought-my brown leather La-Z-Boy recliner. It’s a beautiful thing.

I poured another Scotch, and hit the Play button of my VCR.

I sat in my La-Z-Boy and stared at the TV screen.

A collage of images with inappropriate music filled the screen. This was a one-hour videotape made by a conspiracy theory group, according to Kate, which pushed the theory of a missile attack. It included, Kate said, the CIA animation.

In a film clip of a network news interview, a former head of the National Transportation Safety Board said that it was unprecedented for the FBI to conduct the investigation. Congress, he said, had given a clear mandate to the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate airline accidents.

The key word, which seemed to be missed by the dim-witted television news interviewer, was “accident.” Obviously, some people in the government thought it was a crime, which was precisely why the FBI and not the NTSB had taken over the investigation and the reconstruction of the aircraft.

Next, an expert of some sort said that the empty center fuel tank couldn’t have caused such a large explosion because it contained only a “thimbleful of fuel.”

But Mr. Siben had told me that there could be fifty gallons of fuel left that wasn’t sucked up by the scavenge pump. In any case, it was the volatile fumes, not the fuel itself, which had apparently caused the initial explosion.

So, right in the first few minutes of the tape, we had some mistakes, or perhaps skewed facts.

I paid closer attention as a number of people who were not well identified spoke darkly of the disappearance of aircraft parts from the Calverton hangar, missing seats that had been recovered from the ocean depths and never seen again, and structural aluminum pounded into place during the reconstruction, thereby altering the signature of the explosion.

There was talk of the El Al 747 right behind the TWA 747, and of lab reports about explosive warhead residue and rocket propellant residue, and of “mis-guided” naval missiles. Someone spoke about a vaguely worded threatening letter received from a Mideast terrorist group hours before the TWA flight went down, and there was a lot of speculation about other altered and/or ignored evidence.

The so-called documentary was making several points, but not all the points co

The tape went into some detail about the war games that had been conducted on the night of July 17, 1996, in the area off the coast of Long Island, designated W-105. I thought that the makers of this tape would then conclude that it was an American “mis-guided” missile that had brought down TWA 800. But an ex-Navy guy, very much like Captain Spruck, said, “There’s no way that an accident of that magnitude could be covered up by hundreds, thousands, of military people,” and I was left wondering why these war games played so important a part in the conspiracy theories. I guess government cover-ups are always more interesting than government stupidity.

The tape did make a provocative point, however, which was that radar sources had identified all the ships in the area of the crash, and that subsequent investigations had found and cleared all those ships-except one. A high-speed boat had immediately left the area after the explosion, and no one-not the Navy, not the FBI, not the Coast Guard, and not the CIA-had ever identified or found that missing boat. If that were true, then, ostensibly, this was the boat from which the missile-if there had been a missile-had been fired.

The tape was now showing three color photographs, all taken by people who were photographing other people that night, but who had inadvertently captured in the background what appeared to be a short streak of light in the night sky. The narrator speculated that this could be the afterburn of a rising rocket or missile.

The problem with still photography as evidence, especially when it was taken by accident, is that it proved nothing.

Moving pictures, however-videotape and film-were another matter, and I thought again of the couple on the beach.

The most compelling part of this presentation was original footage of six eyewitnesses.