Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [7]
The sight had such a potent impact on him that he thought for a moment it might have been an apparition— hoped it was—a special effect from one of those damnable action-packed movies or video games popular with young people. The plane’s silver, sleek profile split apart. A vivid orange ball erupted where the left wing joined the fuselage, and the faint sound of an explosion reached Lester’s ears a second later. The fisherman watched as the wing separated from the aircraft and began a slow, topsy-turvy descent to earth, followed by the rest of the plane, silently twisting and turning against the blue sky, the only sound the breeze on Rye Lake and the beating of Lester’s heart. He saw other things falling, too, smaller things— bodies came to mind; he closed his eyes and lowered his head.
When he opened his eyes, it was over except for a lingering wisp of black smoke dissipating into the atmosphere. There was a second when he thought it hadn’t happened, that he’d had a fleeting daydream or a mini-stroke. He immediately knew neither had been the case. He may have had a pacemaker installed two years ago, and his right knee might ache from arthritis, but Al Lester’s eyesight was good, remarkably good for his age; he’d been told that only last week by his optometrist.
No, what he’d witnessed was only too real. It had happened. One of the planes he so often cursed for their noise had exploded in midair and fallen to the ground, gone silent, along with whoever was on board.
It was the other thing he’d seen that was so unreal.
Chapter 3
That Same Day
Pittsburgh
The cold front that had sent some advance clouds into Westchester County was already firmly established in the Pittsburgh area when Max Pauling arrived at a private airport west of the Steel City. Rain had come down in buckets earlier that morning, but things had improved by the time he’d filed an IFR—Instrument Flight Rules— flight plan with the crusty airport operator. Flying out of such a small airport could have been done under Visual Flight Rules, but Pauling was headed for Washington, where he’d have to negotiate that area’s sophisticated air traffic control system. Besides, he was proud to have earned his IFR license, and flew under instrument rules as often as possible to keep his skills sharp.
He left the flight operations center, as the shack with peeling yellow paint was known, and went to where he’d tied down his Cessna 182S two days earlier. He’d purchased the single-engine, fixed-gear plane a year ago from a Maryland flying club shortly after returning from a seven-year stint in Moscow. There he was ostensibly a member of the Trade and Commerce Division of the U.S. embassy, but in reality was on assignment for the Central Intelligence Agency. He’d been called back to Washington to join a special task force in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Division—Russian desk, a joint effort with the CIA. Officially, he was now an employee of State; unofficially, he reported to two masters, Army Colonel Walter Barton, State’s director for counterterrorism operations, and his boss and friend at the CIA, Tom Hoctor. It was, as far as Pauling was concerned, a clumsy, convoluted arrangement, but not at all unusual in the murky, often unfathomable, seemingly unintelligent world of intelligence, Washington style.
Pauling sat in the Cessna’s left-hand seat and checked that the magneto switches and mixture control were off and that the throttle was closed. After securing his overnight bag on the right seat with the seat belt, he got out and did a slow walk-around, visually inspecting the aircraft’s exterior for loose parts, dents in the prop, and for any signs of leaks on the ground. He manually manipulated the control surfaces on the wings and tail assembly to ensure they moved freely, then confirmed the fuel gauge readings with a dipstick and drained a small amount of fuel