Night Fall

“I gave you one.”

“Right. But people see what they’re mentally conditioned to see. I’ll tell you what was happening in the summer of 1996. Three weeks before TWA 800, the U.S. military residence in Saudi Arabia, the Khobar Towers, had been bombed. The FBI was on high alert for the summer Olympics in Atlanta, and the news was full of potential attacks from Iran, and from a dozen different terrorist groups. So, when TWA 800 went down, what was the first thing you thought of? Probably the first thing I thought of-terrorist attack-and we didn’t even know each other.”

She replied, “What we thought is what over two hundred people say they actually saw. This was not a mass hallucination.”

“Right. But it could have been an optical illusion.”

“John, I interviewed a dozen eyewitnesses, and my colleagues interviewed another two hundred. The same optical illusion can’t be seen by that many people.”

I yawned and said, “Thank you for an interesting day. It’s late and I’m tired.”

She stood and ran her fingers through my hair. She said, “Keep me up a while longer.”

I found a sudden burst of energy and I launched myself out of the La-Z-Boy recliner, straight into the bedroom.

We got into bed and made love with a lot of frenzy, the way people do who are overwrought and trying to release the energy from a tough and frustrating day. This, at least, was something we had some control over, something we could make have a happy ending.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the morning-I in my ratty bathrobe, and Kate still in her sexy teddy-sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the papers. Bright sunlight came through the windows.

When Robin moved out, I canceled theTimes and subscribed to thePost, which is all the news I need, but since Kate moved in, theTimes is back.

I sipped my coffee and read a story in theTimes about the memorial service we’d attended yesterday. The article began, “Five years after Trans World Airlines Flight 800 fell from the sky in fiery bits that landed in the ocean near here, the relatives of some of the 230 people who died in the crash made their a

“They came to be close to the last place where their friends and loved ones were alive. They came to hear the green waves heaving on the sand. They came to see the red and white Coast Guard house down the road in East Moriches where victims’ bodies were brought ashore.”

I continued to read the tortured purple prose: “The atmosphere of the first memorial here, days after the shocking crash and amid confusion over whether it had been caused by a malfunction or by a bomb, was one of numbing silence… Many could only wade into the water to drop a flower, no more.”

Further down the article, I read, “They even have to deal with kooks, said Frank Lombardi, who assists the families. In recent days, he said, the families have been called by a man who said that he knows the identity of the terrorist who shot the plane down. ‘And if they give him $300,000, in cash, that he would tell them who it was,’ Mr. Lombardi said. ‘Is that sick or what? It is unbelievable that somebody would play on people’s emotions like that.’ (The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that an explosion in a fuel tank, possibly triggered by a short circuit, caused the crash.)”

I finished the article and gave the paper to Kate, who read it silently. She looked up and said, “Sometimes I think I’m one of the better-intentioned kooks.”

I asked her, “By the way, what was the name of the hotel where that couple may have stayed?”

She replied, “Everything you saw and heard yesterday was either public record, or, in the case of Captain Spruck’s testimony, available under the Freedom of Information Act. The name of that hotel does not officially exist.”

“But if it did, what would it be called?”

She replied, “It would be called the Bayview Hotel in Westhampton Beach.”

“And what did you discover at this hotel?”

“As I said, I never actually got to the hotel. This wasn’t my case.”

“Then how did you learn the name of the hotel?”

“I took it on myself to call local hotels and motels to inquire about a missing blanket. A lot of the people who I called said the FBI had already been there, showing them a blanket. One guy at the Bayview Hotel said he told the FBI that he was missing a blanket, and that the one they showed him could possibly be that blanket, but he couldn’t be sure.”

I nodded and asked, “And that’s the extent of the lead?”

“This guy at the Bayview did say that the FBI had gone through his guest registration cards, credit card slips, and his computer, and had questioned his employees.” She added, “He assured me that he wouldn’t mention any of this to a single soul, as instructed. Then he asked me if we’d found the guys who fired the missile.”

“Not yet. What was this guy’s name?”

“Leslie Rosenthal. Manager of the Bayview Hotel.”

“Why didn’t you follow up?”

“Well, when you get a bite, sometimes it bites back. Mr. Rosenthal, or maybe some other hotel person that I phoned, called their FBI contacts, or maybe the FBI was doing a follow-up or something, but whatever happened, the next day I get called into an office I’ve never been to on the twenty-eighth floor of 26 Fed. Two guys from the OPR who I’d never seen before or since told me I’d overstepped the scope of my duties on this case.”

I nodded. The OPR is the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility, which sounds really nice, but in fact, this is a pure Orwellian name. The OPR is like the NYPD Internal Affairs: snoops, snitches, and spies. I had no doubt, for instance, that Mr. Liam Griffith was an OPR guy. I said to Kate, “Did these guys offer you a transfer to North Dakota?”

“I’m sure that was a possibility. But they kept their cool and tried to make like it was a small error in judgment on my part. They even complimented me on my initiative.”

“You get a promotion?”

“I got a polite, but firm suggestion to be a team player. They told me that other agents were working on this lead, and that I should go on doing eyewitness interviews and confine myself to those duties.”

“You got off easy. One of my commanding officers once threw a paperweight at me.”

“We’re a bit more subtle. In any case, I got the message, and I also knew I’d hit on something.”

“So why didn’t you follow it up?”

“Because I was following orders not to. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“Ah, they were just testing you to see what you’re made of. They wanted you to tell them you weren’t going to drop it.”

“Yeah, right.” She thought a moment and said, “At that point, I just made the logical assumption that if anything came of this, it would come out in some internal memo followed by a news conference. I wasn’t thinking of conspiracy or cover-up five years ago.”

“But you are now.”

She didn’t reply to that, but said to me, “Everyone who was involved with this case was deeply affected by it, but I know that the witness interviewers were affected in a different way. We were the ones who spoke to people who saw this event, over two hundred of whom described what they believed was a missile or rocket, and none of us could reconcile what we’d heard from the witnesses with the Final Report or the CIA animation.” She added, “The ATTF bosses were having some problems with the interviewers, and I wasn’t the only one called into that office.”

“Interesting.” I asked, “How did the interviewing process work?”

Kate replied, “At first, it was just chaos. Hundreds of NYPD and FBI task force perso